.NET From India

Leopard Security...

ZDNet has a article on how some of the independent security reviewers are not very happy with the new security enhancements in MacOS X Leopard.

I am not too suprised. As a platform becomes more prevalant, more will be the attention it will get from a security perspective. Not having had too much attention till recently, I would say, MacOS most probably is not in a position to be too secure. :)

WPF or Silverlight??

Now that the stock quotes component is kind of usable (still have a few ideas, maybe another week or so, expect a new release), I thought I can use it to build a good portfolio tracker. I know there are a lot of those, some free, some paid, but none that is good and also free..:)

Anyway this is something I had in my mind for a long time, but never got around to doing it. Now I am kind of trying to decide on whether I go with WPF and a smart client approach or a Silverlight and a hosted approach.

I kind of like the hosted approach in that I can update the code etc and people can use it directly off the site etc. But then I am kind of disapointed with the kind of controls that are avbl and the early stages of the runtime itself. (obviously I will use only 1.1, as I am horrible at scripting, I can only write .NET code)

WPF seems more stable, but then people will have to download and install it locally. Apart from also having to have the runtime etc..

Any experiences? suggestions??

India Stock Quote Component version 1.2.0 Released

Ok, finally finished the basic things I wanted in place for the 1.2.0 release. Checked in the code today morning and have also created a release for this version.

New Features

1. Create a Interface that will allow you to just switch websites from where you want to get the quote. Out of the box, this release supports, Yahoo India and NSE India sites.
2. Added the NSE India provider. This only supports quotes as of now as the NSE charts are based on java applets.
3. So reorganization of code to make it more maintainable and some additional comments to help you, if you are looking at the code.

Busy Days..

I have not posted anything new for the past few days. I had a few busy days at office and I have also been working on getting new version of the India Stock Quote Component done.

I am adding the facility to also query the NSE India site and also restructuring the code. I hope to upload a new version of the component and maybe a new release out sometime this week.

.NET BCL Source Avbl

Scott Gu posted on his blog, that the source for the .NET Framework (BCL) will be available later with VS 2008.

Though a lot of people will be excited by being able to see how the framework is written etc and get look at the internals, I think most developers will get a real practical benefit too. The one mentioned in the blog, of being able to debug your code into the framework itself can be a big benefit.

Good work Microsoft....

India Stock Quotes Component

I had written a small component as a part of my Vista Gadget attempt sometime back to get the stock quote for Indian Shares from the Yahoo Finance Site. I kind of left that out in my blog for a long time and then this week I wanted a similar component for something else.

So I just took the old component and then cleaned it up and created a CodePlex project for it. I will be updating this component based on what I need and then updates will depend on feature request.

India Stock Quotes (from Yahoo Finance)

Update: I updated the component over the weekend to also send the Chart images. This feature is not available in version 1.1

Yahoo Search Assistant

Yahoo was the first major Search player and then kind of lost its way. Google came, it conquered and remains king.

Yahoo has been improving a lot over the last year or so and results have been felt in a lot of areas, including it becoming the top portal site that people visit. But for search, most of us still go to Google.

The first major search improvement from Yahoo that made its appearance today is what they call the "Search Assistant", which is similar to Google suggest. I find the Yahoo Search Assistant UI experience better, though it does take a second or so to get up and running.