.NET From India

Charge for Office Beta?

A recent news.com article talks of MS starting to charge for the download of the new Office 2007 Beta.

According to the article the reason is that due to the high download rates, it is costing MS a lot of money in bandwidth. This I think is a very bad move. The whole idea of public beta is to have public at large test the software and so help Microsoft build a better product. The main beneficiary here is Microsoft and the people who download actually get a time constrained eval copy of the new software for use. They spend a lot of thier paid internet connection to download this software and do free testing for MS. So I would assume it is a small thing that MS can do to allow them to use the software for the evaluation time for free.

Looks like someone inside Microsoft just got thier facts wrong. Yes, a lot of people want to look at the new Office, but they are actually helping you, not the other way around.

Hopefully, they recognize this and not take such idiotic mesures. If they do not want a lot of download they can always keep it as a private Beta (Office has been in private Beta for quite sometime now).

HP Takes over Mercury

The news of HP taking over Mercury is all over the web now. In an article in SDtimes, Alan Zeichick talks about how the press statement does not mention the testing and QA tools that made Mercury so famous in the first place. I agree and knowing that so many people use these tools am not sure how it is going to affect the software testing market.

One of my recent projects included looking at tools to perform LoadTesting on .NET web applications. We had LoadRunner, but were also looking for cheaper alternatives. We spent around two weeks looking around, but still could not find an comprehensive tool to replace LR. There seems to be a recent explosion in load testing tools market with a lot of entrants. Though most of these are good and cheap, none of them have the feature coverage that LR has. Ofcourse, if HP does not continue improving LR, these tools will slowly, but surely, move up to fill the gap.

The current customers and partners of Mercury, who have invested a lot of money into the testing and QA tools will surely be worried about this.

Webcasts by MVPs

There are going to be a series of webcasts by my fellow MVPs on Vista based upcoming technologies. You can register for the sessions at Webcasts by Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs). The schedule and topics are also available in the same page.

This is a good way to take a peek into this upcoming technologies from your desk.

Vista Beta 2 - Atlast!!

I just installed Vista Beta 2 now. Since I got back from the US, which had been on my list of TODOs, but the download always was having some problems. I just got the whole thing downloaded correctly the day before yesterday. So I spent yesterday installing it. As usual, one of the drivers did not work, that of my network card. Looks like any unsgined driver is going to be a problem. Anyway searching the Internet from my XP got me an alternate XP driver that did work.

The big difference this time was that once I was online, Vista went onto the net and found the drivers for my sound card (SoundMax, drivers for which did not work last time) etc, which was a big problem last time I installed Vista. So now I kind of have everything working ok and can really use Vista as my main home OS.

First impressions - It seems to be very slow compared to XP (as well as a memory hog, though I kind of expected that). I don’t know if it is just my imagination, but Internet access also seems to slow down. Also some of my normal programs do not work:

AVG - My home Anti-virus, does not install since it has a compatibility issue. According to Grisoft, Microsoft has fixed this issue, but I am still without an AV on my Vista

Azureus - The Bittorrent client I use. The older version seems to run OK, but the latest build just hangs.

These two and the performance are the two major factors that are stopping me from jumping whole-heartedly into using my Vista install as the default OS at home.

MapStats Analysis

I use the services of BlogFlux for email subscriptions to this blog for quite some time now. They also have service called Mapstats that allow you to look at your visitors with geographical information.

Ahmed had recently posted an analysis of the browser and other stats that they track with Mapstats for Blogs reader.

You can see the actual stats here.

I am actually suprised at the number of IE7, considering it is still in Beta.

Here is the browser type details for my blog

(This post was penned a few days back, but was not correctly posted as Typepad went down when I hit publish. So it remained as a draft till I found it today)

Indian Government’s new anti-terrorist strategy

The Indian government just came up with a new idea for fighting terrorism. Ban the Blogs!!!

If you are in India, there is a high chance that you will not be able to read this post, unless you are using a proxy. That is the special gift to you from the Indian government.

There has been a big reaction from bloggers and extensive media coverage, but nothing from the IT companies. Not even a whimper of protest. So if it does not affect their revenues, they do not mind?? Well it does affect their revenues, since it gives a very negative view of India internationally and in the long run it does affect their revenues.

Just waiting for the government to ban the internet , as the next anti-terror measure.

Update 20-July: It looks like they are going to remove the blanket ban, but my blog does not still seem to be accessible

Virtual PC goes Free

Another shot into the Virtualization areana. Looks like Microsoft is giving away VPC 2004 SP1 for free.

You can download this at Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 Service Pack 1 page.

RSS Engines

Microsoft has this wonderful ability of having multiple teams develop similar features, but completely without any interaction, or so it seems.

The one that is bugging me now it the RSS syndication abilities. The new IE7, has the ability to read RSS/Atom feed and also act as a syndication system. When I talked to the IE team, they said that this whole engine was available as a COM library so that it can easily be used by third party applications.

Outlook 2007 also has the ability to be a syndication engine for RSS (Listed as one of the top 10 reasons to upgrade to Outlook 2007). As I was trying out the software I found that it does not have auto discovery capabilities and raised it as a feature request. Response - That is not part of Outlook's RSS functionalities. If it is using IE7's RSS engines, then this feature should be already in there as IE does auto discovery. My guess is that the Outlook team went ahead and wrote their own...:(

Why do two teams have to develop completely separate RSS engines, when both products are slated for release at around the same time? I currently think the IE7 engine is a lot more functional and since the IE team says it is designed to be used by third parties, shouldn’t they have at least tried to get the Outlook team to use it?

I for one will surely not use a RSS syndicator that does not support auto discovery.