.NET From India

Uninstalling and cleaning up a .NET 2.0 beta/CTP Install

Browsing around I just found this post which contains a consolidated list of posts on how you can uninstall a .NET 2.0 beta/CTP installation. Now with Beta 2 available, I am sure quite a few of you would want to remove the older Beta 1 or CTPs to install the new Beta 2..:-)

Batching in ADO.NET 2.0 Beta 2

A wonderful post from Pablo on how batching works with SQL Server in ADO.NET 2.0 Beta 2. Even though SQL Profiler seems to say that there is no batching, looks like it is happening at a network level.

Consumer Blog

I have started a new non technical blog which focuses on Indian consumer issues and consumer activism called Indian Consumer.

A Managed OS!!

A Channel 9 video on a MS Research project called Singularity, a managed OS!!!

Note: The comments are very interesting..

A lot of travel

May seems to be the month of travel for me. After the Singapore and Malaysia trip, I am currently on a European journey. I am currently in Frankfurt,Germany. I travlled to Copenhagen, Denmark for two days and will be back in Chennai weekend.

The most difficult part was to fly Air India, which in traditional Indian fashion was late, which ment I had to run to catch connecting flights.

The other problem area is weather. I start from 40 deg C and land up here, which is at 10 deg C. Then go to Denmark with is around 7-10 Deg C and just when I getting used to the colder climate, I travel back to 40 deg C...:-)

And this being spring or start of summer here, there is daylight till 10-11 pm, which kind of poses problems getting to sleep and the sun again raise at 5 am. This has resulted in me being sleep deprived. Hopefully I can catch up with my sleep over the weekend once I get back to Chennai.

KHRONOS PROJECTOR

Quite an interesting concept and does create wierd outputs..:-)

The Khronos Projector is an interactive-art installation allowing people to explore pre-recorded movie content in an entirely new way. A classic video-tape allows a simple control of the reproducing process (stop, backward, forward, and elementary control on the reproduction speed). Modern digital players add little more than the possibility to perform random temporal jumps between image frames. The goal of the Khronos Projector is to go beyond these forms of exclusive temporal control, by giving the user an entirely new dimension to play with: by touching the projection screen, the user is able to send parts of the image forward or backwards in time. By actually touching a deformable projection screen, shaking it or curling it, separate "islands of time" as well as "temporal waves" are created within the visible frame. This is done by interactively reshaping a two-dimensional spatio-temporal surface that "cuts" the spatio-temporal volume of data generated by a movie.

Read about it at The KHRONOS PROJECTOR interactive-art installation

(via surrealization)

Pictures from Singapore and Malaysia

I have created an album to hold the photos from my recent Singapore and Malaysia trip.

Orchids form the major part of the album as they continue to draw me even though I have visited the orchid gardens twice before. Also quite a bit of the other action is in my handycam, while I find flowers are usually best photographed.

(These images have been resized and compressed for web viewing. If you want the original for wallpaper purposes, just mail me)

Refactoring in VB 2005

After cutting Refactoring from the core VB 2005, MS announced last week that they will ship Refactor! for Visual Basic from Dev Express free. This is a add in that will provide refactoring support for VB 2005.

You can download the free copy here. Note, that this works with VS 2005 Beta 2.

Winforms Calendar and Globalization

I have been doing some winform development using .NET 2.0. With all the talk about globalization and having seen it work with ASP.NET I assumed that winforms will also support localization fully. But I was in for a surprise. Looks like the Calendar control (and date time picker) in winforms talks only the control panel regional setting and completely ignores the .NET Culture setting.

How much more idiotic can it get.. I have a fully localized UI, with calender control alone being out of sync with the UI...

Some googling around and with Deepak's help found this blog post by Mike Kaplan on this problem. So win 32 has a problem so winforms too has a problem. If the ASP.NET guys can do it right, why can't the winforms team??

I found that someone had posted this as a bug in the product feedback center and it was closed as by design..huh!!
Go and vote for this, if you too have a problem with the idiotic behavior of the Calendar control and we can see if that forces the winforms team to fix it up.

Web URL Mistypes

Web URL mistypes usually resulted in you landing at sites loaded with Ads. But now it looks like criminals have found a way of stealing money using this.

This techworld article talks about a site that takes advantage of mistyping google to install trojans and malware on your machine.

(Thanks to fellow MVP Naveen for the link)