.NET From India

Windows without services!!!

I was just reading this post from Mark at sysinternals. Super post and I am gonna try it out once I come back to India. I am really interested to see how much of a performance gain this can give to Windows and if .NET Apps will run with something like this...:-)

I am going Down Under

I am going to visit Melbourne and Sydney for business. But I should have a day or two free in each city. I will be meeting up with fellow blogger Tejas in Melbourne. If you live in one of those cities and would like to meet up just drop me a line.

Melbourne - 26th July to 28th July
Sydney - 28th July to 2nd Aug

Every Community needs it rules

A recent JDJ article highlights the need of rules and some kind of regulation mechanism to be sucessful. Though the article talks about the Java community, I am sure that this is true for all communities.

If you disagree with something, you need to be mature enough to put your point across politely and be able to substantiate your points. Flaming rarely helps...

Thoughts on the Java Community :
Where Has the Respect Gone in the Java Community?

Don't get me wrong, discussion, debate, opinion are all essential to a society. Likewise we must preserve the personal freedom to express a viewpoint, but it comes down to the old adage that with rights come responsibility. Is it reasonable to insult and mock those with differing viewpoints? To publicly denigrate a fellow community member or group because they use the wrong IDE, Framework or design pattern (in your opinion) shows ignorance and lack of respect.

Some bad UI

I have been using MS Antispyware for quite sometime now and I am quite satisfied with it. But I do hate
the interface they have when they have a new version on the server. The Autoupdater has a on-top window with a disabled Cancel button.

So once you click the OK button to start the download, you cannot cancel the download, nor can you continue working as this huge window is hiding most of the screen.

Reason to Upgrade to Longhorn - Speed

OK, now we have something that could maybe convince some to think about going out and getting a new version of Windows when it does come out.

Most of the cool developer stuff that was to be Longhorn only, will be available in XP too. So that did take out some of the sheen from the Longhorn bubble created by the last PDC. Now with Beta 1 near (Beta Tester Invites have been going out over the past two/three weeks), MS starts talking about other significant improvements that could convince people to move to LH.

VB.NET - Attracting the VB developer

When MS announce .NET and talked about two languages that was going to be part of it, C# and VB.NET, there was a lot of debate on why the two language approach as well as "VB is better than C#" and vice versa.

There has been hours of entertainment provided by the VB vs. C# debate. There was even one very recently on the internal Indian MVP lists too..:-)

But one of the most debated issues has been that of how many VB developers would prefer to move to C#, rather than VB.NET, as they were re-learning a new language anyway. I have mostly argued that it is not a question of learning a language, but rather a developers comfort with the structure of the language that is going to count. A VB developer would surely feel more comfortable working with VB.NET than all those curly braces in C#. So he will be more productive moving to VB.NET.

Now looks like that is happening. VB.NET seems to be picking up quite nicely compared to C# according to this new survey from SearchVB.

In our poll, VB.NET language use measured at 52.9 percent, while infant C# use is at about 30 percent [See Figure 2] From this, one might judge that VB6 to VB.NET migration is well underway.

Have you got SPIT?

I have not lost my manners, nor is this a rant.

SPIT is the newest on the irritating advertising tactic block. SPAM on emails and SPIM on IM. Now it is the turn of VOIP.

I find that nowadays most international calls out of office use VOIP. And as the use of VOIP increases I am sure spammers would love to get on to that. This article talks about SPIT (SPam over Internet Telephony) and how some of the VOIP providers are trying to protect their customers.

OPM in Longhorn

An interesting article that talks about certain protection systems in Longhorn, that may force you to change your monitor to watch HD content.

Well, since HD is not very prevelant in India yet and I don't see wide spread use for the next 5-7 year, I suppose this does not affect us.

Harry Potter - Half Blood Prince

I went out yesterday morning and bought the new Harry Potter from the nearest Odessey. Though there were reports of people having to queue up to buy the book, I did not find anyone in the store when I got there.

The book is quite interesting. It is a tight and not-put-downable read. No digression from the main story. Though the ending is widely seen to be very sad and dark, it just tries to make you look forward to final episode.

Extending My - Indepth Article

Simplify Common Tasks by Customizing the My Namespace, a new MSDN Mag article takes about extending the new My namespace. This is the most indepth article I have seen till now on extending My, which is one of the new VB 2005 feature that I like best.

(If you search this blog, you would come up with a number of posts I have written on extending the My namespace)

(via PaulV)

Major redesign of MS Certifications

A recent MCP mag article talks of some major redesign of the Microsoft certifications. This redesign is to coincide with the new versions of Visual Studio and SQL Server that are slated for release in November.

Looks like existing MCADs will have to take atleast 1 extra exam to re-qualify and MCSDs will have to take 2 exams to get the new equivalent certifications.

ASP.NET 2 Menu Control Gotcha

ASP.NET 2.0 boasts of a new Menu control. You can create multi-level menus using this. It is not the best, but is decent enough to satisfy most common needs.

One thing that I had a problem with recently, is that if you have a multi-level menu, clicking a parent will result in a postback to the server. This was not a problem, till we decided we would improve the performance by turning viewstate off for controls that did not need them. Now suddenly, when you click the top level item, certain controls in the current screen will lose state.

The way out is to set the selectable property of items that is not mapped to an action. This way not only do we avoid unwanted postback, but also get around a need to have unwanted viewstate.

Google's Ranking

Found this article which contains some information on the changes in Google's ranking algorithm. Am not sure if this is still valid as from what I hear, Google keeps changing their algorithm as they find some spamming happening. Still interesting reading.

(via Tejas)

ODBC Manager error during SQL 2005 setup

I am upgrading my laptop to VS Beta 2 over the weekend. So after a full clean up I started installing the April CTP of SQL Server 2005. And almost at the fag end of the database server install, I get this strange ODBC error: "[Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Data source name not found and no default driver specified".

Two install trys later a bit of googling landed me at Feb CTP fails during setup with "setup could not connect to the database for server configuration".

Well that solved it. But the strange thing is that the blog issue is fixed for the next release, but the April CTP still seems to have that problem!!

Sorting your SQL

Came across this wonderful article that documents a common gotcha when using computations and sorting in a query.

Uninstalling .NET 2.0 Beta1

If you are using the Beta 1 uninstall tool, note that it does not uninstall SQL Server 2005 install. So manually first uninstall SQL Server 2005 Beta/CTP before you use the uninstall tool.