.NET From India

Good Vista Tips

Ed Bott has 10 tips and tweaks for Vista experts. These are quite good and more advanced than the first set of tips he had.

Last month, I published 10 tweaks for Windows Vista RC1. It got a good response, but it also drew some complaints. "Too basic," said some critics. "And hey, those aren't all tweaks."

OK, fair enough. To satisfy the critics (you know who you are), I present 10 expert tweaks for Windows Vista RC2. No beginner-level stuff here, and I've clearly labeled which are tips and which are tweaks.

A few of these like the Snip and the Mobility Center Feature, I had not seen before. Very Cool...

Do note, these are based on Vista RC2, which is not publicly available. So if you have an older install, you may not have all the features working on your machine.

Run in Start Menu in Vista

Being a developer, one of the menu options I use the most is the Run menu under Start Menu. But in Vista (Both RC1 and RC2), there is no Run command under Start. The new search box does make it a lot easier to programs, but for things like env variable replacement, this is not enough (like using %windir% for the windows directory etc.).

So a little searching helped find the elusive Run menu. It is there, but is hidden by default when you install Vista. I suppose usage tests revealed that this was mostly never touched by lay users and so they choose to hide it by default.

 To get it back just right click the Taskbar, open Properties (will open up "Taskbar and Start Menu Properties" dialog), go to "Start Menu" Tab, Click the "Customize" button. If you go down the list displayed you will find an option to enable the Run Menu. Turn this on and you have the run menu back in your start menu like usual.

I am so used to using the Run command, that without it, I feel it impossible to work.This is one of the first things I do after I install Vista.

Mobile Device Center

I just installed Vista RC2 over the weekend. I read about the new Mobile Device Center that is going to be part of Vista and download the Beta from MS. Though the beta was aimed at RC1, it installed fine over RC2.

Then I connected my new 8125 to my machine. I did not install ActiveSync or any other software. As soon as I connected, it recognized that a mobile device was connected and the WMDC opened and I was ready to go. The new UI is also very nice and more user friendly than the older ActiveSync interface.

BlogStars - Part Deux

After my original post on the BlogStars contest, I got quite a bit of response from bloggers as well as Monish from Microsoft who runs the contest. In a comment on that post Monish responds to some of the points I had raised.

It is good that Microsoft is responding to this and is attempting to make this better.. Hats Off Monish.

I also got a response from Praveen Srivatsava, one of the judges, saying that he agrees on the points raised, but that this was the way to start off and that once the initial blogstars are identified, then they would go ahead and be on the panel in the next round and so on.

I am happy that things are getting better and also wanted to put in a few clarifications, just so that there is no confusion on this issues:

1. I believe that a good blog is one that has run for a minimum of 6 months or more with consistent good quality posts. This is because, the most difficult part of blogging is to keep a blog going in the long run. (I should know, this particular blog on Typepad, is more than 3 years old and I moved to this from my blogger one, which at a rough guess means I have been running Dotnet from india for near enough 5 years now)

>>A stray example – judges for the Miss World contest are not all ex-Miss Worlds, or associated with beauty. They are judges for their ability to identify the right talent. The personal and professional respect that Pravin, Venkat and Sanjay hold in the community and in the industry – I can confidently say – there couldn’t have been a better panel to judge this.

It is not a must to be  ex-Miss World to judge a Miss World contest, but they do not allow someone like me to be a judge too.;). So to judge blogs, it is always helpful of the judges too are bloggers..

Anyway Monish, good thing that the blogroll is up and I surely would offer you all the help you need to make it a good contest...

Vista - You can install it only once!!

So the latest anti-piracy move from Microsoft is to put a new licensing policy out for Vista. You buy Vista, install in your machine. Buy a new machine/upgrade hardware, twice and go back and buy a new copy. MS just announced that a retail copy of Vista can only be installed in another machine once and after that you will have to buy a new copy.

This does not affect people who change their computers once in 5 year or so anyway. Nor does it affect the corporate users, that use special volume licenses. It is really the tech enthusiast who gets hit the most.

I don't understand, are new anti-piracy decisions made by just the legal people and marketing folks sitting out there in their rooms or do they even try to get some feedback from other normal users (apart from the corporations)?? Who came up with the idea that people will be happy with buying something that will may not work when I upgrade my machine. Even if I do not plan to change my machine, it is still going to be at the back of my mind that if I change something big enough I will be out of an operation system.

You can read more at:

New Microsoft License Ties Vista To Hardware

Microsoft limits Vista transfers

IE7 Goes Gold

After three rounds of Beta, it is now time to go Gold.

You can now download the release version of IE7 from Microsoft site.

IT as Career - New Post

I just posted a entry on my series on taking up IT as a Career in my other blog.

IT as Career - 3

Blogstars contest - Is it good for Indian Tech Blogging?

Microsoft announced a couple of weeks back about a new contest that they were holding called Blogstars. This a India specific contest, aimed at improving/supporting technical blogging in India.

At first looks, I was quite interested. I believe that technical blogging in India is still very low. Though blogging as such has grown by leaps and bounds in India, there are few, indepth technology blogs by people living in India (Please note, I did not say Indians).

A second look and I felt something was just not right. So this post is about the positives and negatives, I could see. It would be interesting to see other peoples views on this too..

Pros

1. Indian Tech blogging scene could do with help this could be it.
2. Provide recognition to good tech bloggers, who are currently not well known
3. This can be something that provides the needed initial momentum to get some good people to start blogging.
4. Create a new generation of Microsoft technology blogging out of India.
5. Spur people to blog on their use of Microsoft technology, that helps create more information on the web, thus helping the developer community.

Cons

1. Blogging is all about sustenance. Since this contest make no difference between a new and long running blog, it actually favour new blogs. So you can start a new blog, register for the contest, produce good posts for 8-10 weeks, win the contest and then stop blogging for the rest of your life. Since a blog that is there for a long time will have technical and personal posts, it is easier for a new blog to be considered more focused and so win.
2. It is more than a week since it was announced, but I don't see any blogs listed in the blogroll yet. That is indeed very worrying for me.
3. The panel of judges named are well known speakers and very knowledgeable (I actually know all the three very well and have great respect for them personally and know that they have tremendous passion for technology). But except for Venkat, none of the others (Sanjay, Praveen) seem to have updated their blogs recently (Also the updates to their blogs seem to be quite infrequent). And the worst part being their bios on the site does not even mention their blogs except for Venkat's.

So that leads me to ask the question, is this a about tech blogging or just technical writing? If it was about technical writing alone, wouldn't it be easier to have an competition for technical articles?

Final Thoughts

This is a good move Microsoft. But if you really want to help technology blogging,

• Get this going and get the people who are competing listed on the blogroll.
• Get a few good bloggers also into the panel  or get some kind of voting (by bloggers??/technorati??) mechanism to choose the winner. 
• Add some way to look at awarding sustenance too, as according to statistics, over 80% of blogs started do not last for more than 3 months.

And am I in the fray? As of now NO. Why? Because, I think I would rather let new talent be recognized instead. [But I will not say no to a link from any other blog or the Microsoft site ;)]

(Posted using Windows Live Writer Beta on Windows Vista RC1)

Indian Stock Quote - Vista Gadget

Over the weekend I wrote a Vista gadget that will display the last traded price and the change in price of three Indian stocks based on Yahoo India.

Currently, this does screen scraping of Yahoo site based on the symbols you provide. I have used some pictures from the default Stock Gadget from Microsoft to make this gadget. But it is nowhere near as good as the Microsoft one, but then you have the source code of this one and you can change it or improve it for your needs. Also currently the Symbols.xml need to be on the current user desktop for this to work, which is a temporary workaround.

Structure:
1. Normal Gadget stuff in the .gadget directory zip
2. Source code of COM object that does the actual screen scraping in the other zip. You either need to build this of register the object for the gadget to work.
3. You will need Vista RC1 for this to work.

TODO:
1. Make the UI look better. Since my skills with HTML and CSS are very limited, any help in this area is highly appreciated.
2. Make some way of handling the Stocks via Gadget Settings, instead of Symbols.xml
3. Handle more than 3 stocks. This is currently a UI restriction than a code restriction. So again would need HTML/CSS/Jscript help.
4. Look at hosting code out of Codeplex or SF.net. But for first version, this is hosted out of my blog.

Download Source Code Zip

Vista Gadgets

I was playing around trying to write gadgets for Vista. Got the basic gadget written and then I started setting it up to run as a Gadget. Could not get it to work??

After a few hours, I found out that the problem, is that the gadget.xml manifest file format has changed from Beta 2 to RC1. So if you are using the older format then it will not appear in the available gadgets window. And most of the articles out there have the old format.

As of now the best resource for this is Gadget Development Overview. Once the change has been made, everything loaded ok.

Vista - Flip3D and Aero

Flip3D is the new program switching application that shows live preview of the applications, instead of the usual tab switch icons.

This interface is very cool and can be quite useful if you are waiting for some action on an application and just want to check if it is completed before you switch to the application.

When I installed RC1, I could not find this. Start-Tab (the default shortcut for Flip3D) did not do anything, while it was working with the older Beta2 install. A little searching around and I found that this feature is enable only when you have Aero enabled. I guess, since I was short on RAM, the install had by default disabled Aero, instead giving me the Vista-Basic appearance.

Going into Appearance and switching to Aero, bought back Flip3D, but also increased memory consumption quite a bit (by almost 3-5%).

AVG Free does run on Vista RC1

AVG is a free anti-virus that I use at home. In Vista Beta 2 there were some problems with AVG and even though there were some workarounds listed I could not get it to run.

On RC1, the latest version of AVG, 7.1 available for download from the Grisoft site installed without any problems and for the firstime I have AV protection on Vista.

Vista on 512MB

Just installed RC1 of Vista.. Well with my constrained 512MB of RAM, performance seems to be very decent compared to the previous builds.

This is almost as fast as Win XP and I am seriously considering using this as my base OS now..

The drivers (Silan PCI Fast Ethernet Card) that I was having problems with seem to install this time with WinXP compatibility enabled.

If things improve even further for release, then I should expect, Vista should run quite decently in most of the current PCs and the "Vista require new hardware" myth will be easily broken.