.NET From India

VS 2005 and SQL 2005 RTMed

Ok, I suppose this is already all over the blogosphere.. But I don't want my readers to be left out :-)

So VS and SQL 2005 RTM are now available to MSDN subscribers for download.

And with this MSDN gets into having more options and you also get spend more money if you want it all..:)

To get information on the new MSDN Subscription check out MSDN Subscriptions for Visual Studio 2005

New Version of VistaDB

If you think MSDE is too big and want a alternative database, then you can think of VistaDB or Firebird. Looks like VistaDB now has a new version out there, with full support for C#, VB.NET, Delphi,NET, Delphi/C++Builder and COM.

They also have started off a new campaign with the support of blogs to get the news out.

More about VistaDB
Offer for Bloggers

Rain, Rain Everywhere

It is pouring out here in Chennai. Heard on the news that we had 20 cms in the last 24 hours (Can you beleive that) and almost 5 cms during 1 hour early today morning...

Most of the roads are overflowing, but no casualties as yet.....

Update - Latest reports tell that it was 20cms in a matter of 5 hours yesterday night. The low pressure has become a cyclonic system and looks like it is going to be another night of heavy rains

I lost my Wisdom

Well, I seem to be getting the skill of coming up with attractive Titles for my posts. :)

Well I don't mean the one connected to the brain, but rather to the teeth. After postponing it for a long time, I could not do it any further. So I had all removed over the last two weeks.

New OpenOffice

I have and continue to use OpenOffice as an alternative on my machine, but find the interface different/slow enough from MS Office to be a chore to use it. Now a new version is out. I am yet to use it, but the reviews do not see too impressive though....

OpenOffice.org 2.0 is here, but is it a pig?
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is finally out with much fanfare, but is it a memory and resource hog? This is what I was wondering when I did this shootout last month between Microsoft Excel 2003 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 Calc. The backers of OpenOffice.org immediately complained that I didn't test their new OpenOffice.org Beta2.

I would love to vote online!!!

Well, saves a lot of time and travel for me if I could vote online for local elections. But I suppose concerns about security and the level e-enablement in India does not look promising enough that I would get that option in the foreseable future.

But Estonia has sucessfully conducted an national election with online voting option.

A tiny Baltic nation last week became what appears to be the first country to open its local elections to Internet voting on a nationwide level--although only about 1 percent of the votes were cast online.

Read more at Estonia pulls off nationwide Net voting

More on Outsourcing

Some interesting articles on outsourcing, how to go about and problems you may face and solutions.

Gartner: Stop outsourcing now

Gartner analyst Linda Cohen started off her presentation at Symposium ITxpo with a command for the audience of 6,000 attendees: "You have to stop outsourcing now." She said that the chaos created by compulsive outsourcing is making it harder to produce results. Her point is that too many companies have taken outsourcing to an extreme, heading offshore because it's faddish, juggling

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Giving The Devil His Due Diligence

Enterprises and software developers under pressure to cut costs are increasingly outsourcing projects to other countries where labor is less costly and subject matter expertise is abundant.

Price per man-hour is only one consideration, however. Poor contract drafting, insufficient due diligence and a lack of project management can cause projects to exceed budgets. Worse, companies may lose control of their intellectual property assets. To minimize such problems, software developers should do more critical thinking up front with the help of legal experts who understand the ramifications of agreements and the language within them. In addition, projects should be managed carefully so that small issues do not balloon into major issues.

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North American Developers Must Innovate to Keep Jobs

If you were going to buy a new truck, and you went to your local dealer, received a price quote and then went to a dealer 50 miles away from your home and found another dealer that would offer you the exact same truck for $5,000 less, which would you buy? Surely you should support your local dealer. But you also want to get the best price you can. Most of us would choose to buy the truck from the dealer farther away and save $5,000.

Would you name your son Google??

Well, Walid Elias Kai did.

This just in: Walid Elias Kai, a Ph.D. in search engine marketing, is, it must be said, an avid fan of our company. Dr. Kai, who is Lebanese, and his Swedish wife Carol live in Kalmar, Sweden, where their son was born on September 12. His name? Oliver Google Kai.

Read the full post.

Indian IT - Will it fail??

An interesting article on Indian IT industry and the outsourcing debate.

Windows Mobile Display

So the question in my previous post got 1 attempted answer, which is almost correct..:-)

It is actually a display for Windows Mobile created by putting together quite a few(could be hudred or so, but I did not count) individual Pocket PCs to create an integrated Dispaly.. Very Cool..

Here is a close up shot of the same..

Guess what this is!!

I took these photos at the Microsoft Museum when I was in Redmond recently. Carefull scrutiny will surely reveal what these are, else you get your answers tomorrow.. :)

One of the photos is a little blurred, but I suppose you can still make out what it is quite easily.

LINQ Preview

If you want to try out the LINQ Preview, I mentioned in my previous post then make sure that you have VS 2005 RC1 installed. It will install even if Beta 2 is available but will screw up VS and the only solution currently seems a format.

Google & Sun - Just Noise??

An interesting article on the last press conference about the collaboration between Google and Sun.

GOOGLE PR MACHINE MARCHES ON

When it comes to the press, Google has it made in the shade. While our last two presidents, George and Bill, had to scrap for a single bit of good press (Fox News and Al Franken notably excepted), Google just rakes in the raves. And with every tiny step it takes, the mindless press declares that Eric Schmidt has Bill Gates in the ropes and is pummeling wildly.

This week Google announced a deal to distribute Sun's Java Virtual Machine and to help distribute OpenOffice, the open source productivity suite. Somehow this is a revolution, and Windows and Office are suddenly toast.

Get real, people. Sun will give a Java contract to anyone with a ballpoint pen, and OpenOffice, is, well, open source. Where is the breakthrough in making it available, or even building on top of it? Google didn't write it -- all it's doing is glomming on to something built long ago.

The deal was big on fuzz and small on details, but Sun did agree to offer the Google toolbar as part of the Java runtime. For this you call a press conference?

Info from the Summit

I am back in India after visiting the MVP Summit at Redmond. I spent two days with the VB team looking at Whidbey and Orcas.

Some of the latest Whidbey features are very good. I am especially amazed with the kind of work they have done on the Data Form interface and Refactoring. Ofcourse, they added refactoring via an external Addin, freely downloadable from the web, after a huge hue and cry from the VB community.

I think the refactoring support integrated into VB is way ahead of the refactoring in C#. I dont mean the number of refactorings supported etc, but rather the intutiveness and ease of use of the refactoring.

I am also quite impressed with the LINQ support in VB (LINQ is slated to be part of VB 3.0/Orcas). There is a downloadable public preview available, if you want to play around. Warning: Install at your own risk. It totally screwed up my VS 2005 install, forcing me to format my machine.