.NET From India

Free Teleconference!!

The guy who gave you free email is now planning to give you free teleconference facility. Sabeer Bhatia, the brain behind Hotmail, has a new offering called Sabse Bolo (Hindi for Talk to Everyone), which gives you a free teleconference bridge.

You register and get a Conf id and Pin similar to what any of the commercial teleconference providers will give you. The free service allows you to conference with up to 10 people (from what I can gather). How will this help you?? Well think about a conf with multiple friends or family members. This is as yet a untouched area as far as India is concerned. I know of quite a few friends who use services like Skype to do this, but then this can be a good alternative for getting people who do not have a computer/internet or who do not know how to use one.

Will this change your life like Hotmail did?? Well I doubt it. Though a new area that has a lot of potential, I do not see this as something that will have such a big impact.

A few clinks as of now that I noticed. They have only a Banglaore based not (+22), which means there is quite a bit of STD charges involved, if you live anywhere else. I assume going forward, they will create local numbers, but could not find too much of information on that. Also, they do not seem to have any number for people outside India, so if you wish to conf with friends who may be abroad, then you are out of luck too.

From some bits of info on the web, looks like they also will have a paid service aimed at corporate users. That space is quite crowded as of now with the like of Reliance etc offering international conferencing facilities. They may be able to make a impact there only if they are a lot cheaper or they offer something exceptional that they have not announced as yet.

MS CRM ListView Webpart Bug??

If you are using Microsoft CRM 3.0, it ships with a set of webparts that allow you to integrate CRM data with SharePoint called the CRM ListView webparts. You can put a set of these webparts in a MOSS page and then link them via a producer-consumer setting to filter data.

A colleague of mine was working with these and suddenly the filtering part started working and the webpart stopped posting back when choosing a row. The webparts are supposed to postback so that the other webparts will filter if it is setup as a provider. It was not clear, when this problem occurs and it seems to be very randon and seems to go away when he plays around with the page.

After some debugging of the scripts and the page itself, I found that the webparts generate dynamic js to handle the clicks and postback to initiate the filtering. When you click on a webpart it calls a javascript function called CRMHandleSingleClick and that in turn bubbles down to a javascript that seems to have been dynamically generated to handle the row's single click. This function seems to have a variable ProducerOrConsumer, the setting of which decides if the postback occurs.

What I found after a initial poking around I found that if the last webpart in the page is not filtered, then it sets this variable to false and this seems to affect all the other webparts above. So if the last webpart (rendering wise) is not filtered, then none of the webparts seem to acknowledge the filter setting as this variable seems to be false and they do not post back.

If all webparts in a page are either a producer/consumer or the last webpart in the page is one, then this problem seems to disappear.

Ok, this variable may not be the exact problem, as I just sent an hour or so with this. But setting all controls to be a part of a filter or making sure that the last control has this setting, seem to solve this problem.

Helpful to know this, if you are also having similar problems.

Bill Gates - Last Day Video

This is a video that they ran during CES 2008.. Very entertaining!!

Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip

Interesting..

Found this in Manoj Agarwal's blog....

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Free Ebooks on New technology

Here are a few free ebooks on the latest MS technology avbl for download...

Courtesy Microsoft Press

(Thanks to Manok Agarwal for the info)

Vista Restore

Happy New Year 2008 to all the readers of my blog (or at least the few of you who have continued to visit/subscribe to my blog, given that I have not been a regular blogger the past couple of months)

Apart from my being kind of overwhelmed at office, one of the reasons for the silence is that my home machine conked out due to defective memory. After the memory was replaced, I found that during that time my Vista install has been corrupted and quite a few services were refusing to start up (including the Network Location service, which means I could not connect to any network). After a day spent searching the internet, I decided, it would be easier to just reinstall the OS. Since I did not want to reinstall all the other software, I decided I would do some kind of a repair install, thus just updating the OS file only.

The problem is, I could not find a way to do a repair install. The Vista Installation DVD just allows me to do a completely new install and the recovery console, just has options to check memory, repair a damaged boot record, do a system/backup restore or go to the command prompt. No OS repair option. I was stumped for quite some time. Then after some research, I found that there was an option on the Vista Installer to Upgrade to Vista and this can be used even if you are launching it from Vista. This option, when you use it from Vista, actually works like an OS Repair. Once that was done, my machine was back to normal like before.

Though it is not easy to find and I could not find too many documentation of this particular use of this feature, it sure worked fine for me. If you get into a similar situation, this post maybe of help. Do note, that after this reinstall, your Vista becomes deactivated and you will have to activate it as soon as you boot up first time. You do not get any grace time to activate. All other software (including Office) already installed seem to retain their activated state.