.NET From India

WinFS Beta Debuts

WinFS Beta is now avbl for download for MSDN subscribers. Tom Rizzo also points to a new WinFS blog.

This version of the Beta will also run on XP SP2, so even if you dont have the Vista bits, you can still give it a go.

Panther in Longhorn

I thought Panther was to do only with Apple. But the new Vista Beta 1 too seems to want its own Panther!!!

If you look inside the Windows directory, you will find a directory named Panther, with around 12 files. I suppose Panther was the code name for some part of the Vista system, just not sure which. When I googled around, I could find only the innumorous posts on Longhorn vs Panther..

Gave up after 3-4 pages. So if you know what this is about, leave a comment. :-)

Halo, coming to a theatre near you...

Looks like Halo is going to make it from your computer screen to the big screen!!!

Microsoft goes Hollywood with 'Halo' film deal

Teredo in Longhorn

I was just checking out the Exceptions list in the Windows Firewall installed on my new Vista Setup. I was suprised to find a whole list of Exceptions titled Teredo.

I am always afraid of spyware/tojans/viruses getting on to the machine. So I first diabled those exceptions and googled Teredo. Turns out Teredo is the codename for the new IPv6 transition technology that ships with Vista (Also avbl in Win XP SP2).

Teredo is an address assignment and automatic tunneling technology that provides unicast IPv6 connectivity across the IPv4 Internet. 6to4 is another automatic tunneling technology that provides unicast IPv6 connectivity across the IPv4 Internet

You can read more about it at Teredo Overview

System Idle Process goes missing

Another one of those things that goes missing in the Beta 1 of Vista is the "System Idle Process" in Task Manager.

Where is Restart?

One of the things that kind of confused me when playing around with the new Vista bits was that there was only a log off and Shutdown Options in the start menu. Clicking on Shutdown did not bring up the usual shutdown window, but rather just went ahead and shutdown the machine.

So where has the Restart and other options dissapeared??

Then I saw a small arrow at the end of the Shutdown button. Clicking that bought up a menu with all the normal options.

Good Thing - A single click to shutdown
Bad Thing - Extra click(that too of a small arrow head) to do anything else. Being a developer, I usually find myself restarting more than shutting down

RSS in IE7

It created quite a bit of excitement online when it was announced that IE 7 would have support for RSS. So the question was, would IE 7 replace your Aggregator??

The support for RSS is represented by a toolbar button. If the current page has an auto-discoverable RSS feed, this button gets enabled and you can choose which feed you want to view. Once you choose the feed, then IE will serve out a formatted display of the feed.

So once it finds a feed, you just get an neatly formatted XSLTed page. It does allow you to add it to the Favourites, but will not ping the site for changes etc. It still will have to be a manual pull if you want to check for new posts.

Yes, it is a good feature to have, since you can read up RSS like any other web page, but it is not gonna replace the aggregator just yet.

Windows XP is a legacy OS!!

Vista adds a new boot manager that loads before the XP's boot manager. So now if I need to go to XP, I need to pass thru two boot menus.

The Vista Boot manager shows two Options. One is to load Longhorn and the other is to load a "Legacy Windows Operating System"!!!!

So if Windows XP is legacy, what is Win98 then????

Vista Up and Running

I got the Vista Beta 1 DVDs today and have it setup now. Blogging this post from Vista.

Setup was straight forward and very fast. Except for the first screen where you select the drive where to install, there is no other input required.

On my machine Vista loads faster than my older XP install and it also seems to be more responsive. The place where it seems to be slower is in searching and finding PnP devices. This seems to take a lot of time.

Also, it seems to take quite a long time when trying to delete a lot of files. I had this directory that is around 3 GB and it took a lot of time to delete that. But the new delete dialog is quite interesting though its estimation skills leave a lot to be desired.

The other thing that interests me is that good old MS paint now can save/edit jpgs, pngs, tiffs and gifs apart from the usual bmps.

Posts via Email

I have been using Bloglet to help people receive my posts via email. In the past few months, I have found that bloglet does not correct send out mails. So I am giving a new service called Blogflux a go.

This service currently only sends out the title of the posts, but I have been talking to them and they do have plans to send out whole posts once they have stabilized a bit.

How the Brain Sees??

An Optical Illusion where a series of colored dots become a single colored dot due to how the human brain sees. There are quite a few interesting illusions on the site. Check it out...

(Via Galatic Patrol)

.NET and Java Security Model Comparison

The Serverside.NET points to a comparison of the .NET and Java Security models made by two students from the University of Virginia.

Photos from Australia

I have uploaded some of the photos I took during my trip to Melbourne and Sydney in a new photo album

These are of course low resolutions compressed images. If you need a the orginals just mail me and ask for the one that you want.

XBOX 360

If you are interested in the new XBox 360 that is gonna come out sometime end of this year, then you now know how much you are gonna budget for it. The pricing for the new XBox has just been announced at the Leipzig Games Convention 2005.

You are gonna be poorer by around 400 USD (around 18K INR)..:-)

A new Guinnes World Record!!

Question: What can you do with an Unisys ES7000 32 CPU / 32 GB RAM Server with Microsoft Windows 2003 Datacenter Edition running on it?
Answer: The coolest Guinness World Record ever :) namely 1073 people playing Counter-Strike 1.1 simultaneously!

Read more at Michael Anderberg's blog post on this event.

CharUnicodeInfo

Before we get into CharUnicodeInfo itself, what is the easy way to type out some data in a different language? Well I usually use the Charmap utility that ships with Windows. If you use the Group by Unicode Subrange option, it is quite easy to choose a particular language and work with it.

All the functions in the CharUnicodeInfo class are static. The three main ones of interest are GetDecimalDigitValue, GetDigitValue and GetNumericValue. The DecimalDigit and the Digit functions as similar except that the decimaldigit function as the name suggests is restricted to the decimal number system, ie, numbers between 0-9. Both these functions return the digit value of the specified character or -1 if the character is not a digit.

The GetNumericValue function returns the numeric value of the character even if it is not a digit.

What is the difference??

Let us take the Tamil number set that I mentioned in my last post. In the classical Tamil case, due to the absense of a 0 character, there are numerical symbols to denote 10s, 100s and 1000s(௰, ௱, ௲ respectively). Thus ௰ has a numeric value of 10, but is not a digit. So GetDigitValue will return -1, while GetNumericValue will return 10.

Similar is the case with ¼(U+00BC). GetDigitValue can make no sense of this, but GetNumericValue will give you 0.25. Same is the Case for the Roman Numeral “Ⅽ” (U+216D, Roman Represenation for 100).

Numbers and Globalization

Most of the work I currently do involves some form or other of Globalization. So it is quite important that all applications I design/work on have to be localizable.

With the newer .NET features it becomes easy to create localizable applications as long as you keep it in mind. Resource files and the CultureInfo class makes it child’s play.

Recently I turned my attention to numbers. The actual formatting of stuff like the decimal point and the thousands separator etc are already taken care by the framework. What really got me thinking was when the language had a different numerical script. The one that started me thinking was really the local Indic scripts, where you have different numerical symbols for 0-9. For example, in Tamil, ௧ is used to represent 1, ௨ for two etc. That led me to the new .NET 2.0 CharUnicodeInfo class.

As I experiment with this, I would be posting more on this. For now, I would advice you to take a look at this wonderful post from Michael Kaplan (To tell the truth, I was not aware of the classical number system that was used in Tamil and the post was an eye-opener).

Back Home

I am back in Chennai now. The Australia trip was hectic and I still feel sleeply all the time. I am not sure why, but I seem be very tired after this trip than some of the US ones. Maybe moving between the hemispheres has something to do with this..:-)

Had a wonderful dinner with Tejas in Melbourne. One of the things that suprised both of us was that, it was our first meeting, but we were talking like close friends in two minutes. I am usually quite a reserved person and do not go out an talk to people that easily. But here I was talking to Tejas and his wife Komal without a second thought.

I suggested that getting into blogging has allowed me to create this virtual world of blogger friends (something orkut did not do too well) and was quite suprised when Tejas said, he was also thinking of the same thing..:-D

Now that I back, hope to start my normal tech blogging again...