.NET From India

Free MS Press eBook Chapters

MS Press is offering a couple of chapters from some of their new books free for download.

 

You may be required to sign in and register before being allowed to download. Also note, these are not the complete ebooks, but rather selected chapters only.

Security Maxims

A list of Security Maxims, which a very true and very funny...:)

GPS Spoofing

GPS is such a important part of our everyday life in the US. It is also now becoming available in India and am sure in the next couple of years the usage will grow.

So it was interesting to find this article on how lax the security on consumer GPS really is. The military side does have security built in, but the consumer side was just an added feature. I assume they did not spend too much time thinking about security for that.

Free Virtualization Course

Microsoft Learning is offering a set of free courses on Windows 2008 Virtualization. If you work in IT, administrating servers, you know how important virtualization is becoming.

Win 2K8 adds a lot more to MS take on Virtualization with stuff like Hyper V etc. This is a good way for you to upgrade your knowledge.

Collection 6333: Exploring Microsoft Virtualization Technologies

Silverlight 2 Released

Silverlight 2 has been released.

ScottGu talks about some of the highlevel improvements.

I have held off from Silverlight due to the non-availability of .NET coding support. Now that SL 2 is here, I think it is time I started learning it..:)

SAAS vs travel

I found this interesting post at SQL Performance.

In some sense it does make sense comparing SAAS to a taxi. You want to get to a place, you don't care about the make, how it is run etc. You agree on certain response times, cost etc. and focus on getting to the place.

You also get some of the same disadvantages, you have limited control on how the car looks, how fast it can go, how fast it can respond to changes in your plans etc. You may also be left in the lurch once in a while when your taxi just does not turn up at the right time.

Also if you plan to take the taxi to work everyday, you are looking at a very costly proposition. You usually use the taxi when the travel is not core to your business. When your business depends on it, most probably it is cheaper and definitely safer to get your own car, even if it means a little bit extra up-front.

Visual Basic 2008 HowTo

I was a technical reviewer for this book. So this is not a completely objective review :). But I think if you are someone who is starting off with programming and need to get up to speed with VB 2008, then this will definitely be a very good book to start off on.

It is aimed at college students to be used as a part of a course. So you will find a number of exercises at the end of each chapter etc. But it also covers a lot of ground from a technical standpoint. It covers all differnt kinds of applications, ie. Console Applications, Winform Apps, ASP.NET Web apps and even some of the newer technologies like WPF and Silverlight.

The other thing is that it is based on the Express Suite of IDEs, so you can use this to learn VB on a budget, without the need for the full Visual Studio 2008 IDE.

VS 2010

MS has started talking about the next version of the .NET Framework, version 4.0 and Visual Studio, currently called VS 2010.

Information is spread across MSDN and Channel 9, but still sketchy. Most of the information seems to be related to VSTS, and I could not find too much on how the Framework itself is changing.

This gives a overview of the major features.

Soma also has more information on some of these features.

Telnet in Vista

Had some problems with my email box and I wanted to use telnet to do some initial checks.

But to my surprise I could not find Telnet on my box. It had been many many years since I have used telnet, but then I knew that it was part of XP.

So after some searching around I found that Vista actually does not install Telnet by default and that you need to enable it via Programs. Here are some steps to get it enabled:

1. Go to Control Panel->Programs.
2. Choose the option called "Windows features" or "Advanced ...."
3. Go inside these and look carefully you will find option to install telnet client

Then Vista will enable this and then once it completes you should have your command line telnet.

Getting Hibernate Back

Hibernate was perhaps the most important option on my old laptop as it had a very bad battery. So if I need to take it off power, I had to Hibernate.

After I got my new Laptop with Vista, I currently use Sleep, but I still missed Hibernate during some situations. Obviously I tried searching the first couple of days, then gave up as I never could find the option that was supposed to allow me to enable Hibernate.

I was working on some stuff on my blog redesign when I found a blog entry by Deepesh(why don't you enable trackbacks on your blog, Deepesh) that had a solution.

Open a Command Window with Admin Access (My preferred way, type cmd in Start->Search, right click the shortcut, then choose Run as Administrator)

Type

powercfg /hibernate on

That's it, you now have Hibernate on your shutdown options.