.NET From India

Black Friday

Ok, now with Thanksgiving here, most people I talk to are thinking of the best BF deal they can get this week..:)

Each person I talked to were doing different things to find the best deals. So I thought I would put down what I do to search for deals.

First I try seeing what kind of deal appear in the major chains using www.bfads.net.

Then I also kind of find some ads as reported by major articles like this ZDnet article

I also found a number of great deals from Amazon. Amazon also has a special 10K USD raffle at 10K USD Shopping Giveaway.

Amazon also has special BF deals daily this week, where I did find some good ones. Do note these change daily. Amazon's Black Friday Deals

Also note, sometime you can get good deals just looking at normal deal sites, that is not part of BF deals. Actually I found a great Fry's deal for a 1TB external drive ($119 with Free Shipping), which is much better than any I found during Black Friday. So even if you see a good BF deal, do check around to see if there are better ones in other places..:)

Play a game with a virtual partner

GIVE (Generating Instructions in Virtual Environments) is a online 3D game where you partner with a computer to win the game. The idea is to use the interactions to improve the AI system, based on the feedback from gamers.

The game is available at http://www.give-challenge.org/.

The feedback from gamers will be analyzed by the game developers to compare how well each of the four AI systems did in the GIVE challenge, with the goal of making computers better partners in a variety of both virtual and real world tasks.

GIVE is the first online game in which your partner in the game is the AI software itself. The challenge adds to a growing movement among AI researchers that allows Internet users to participate in the development and assessment of intelligent software.

The game is open till Jan 2009.

The system seems to be built on top of Java and does not use the HTTP port to communicate with the server. So if you are behind a firewall, you are out of luck.

Internet Bog down

Nemertes Research , an IT research firm has published a report that predicts that there will be a major problem with the availability of Internet bandwidth by 2012. They had initially predicted this will happen by 2010, but taking the current economic meltdown, they have modified the date to 2012.

Press Release: User Demand for the Internet Could Outpace Network Capacity by 2010

Nemertes emphasized it is not projecting that the Internet will crash or shut down altogether. Rather, the typical user probably will experience Internet "brownouts," where such high-bandwidth applications as high-definition video-streaming and peer-to-peer file-sharing will stop performing up to users' expectations, the firm says.

Another fallout mentioned in the report is in the area of innovation around the Internet. This includes a number of areas that are proving to be the hotbed of new innovations like around mash-ups, SaaS, service oriented applications etc.

Looking forward, Nemertes says that if this capacity issue is not addressed, the Internet will fracture into a tiered system where companies with the most money will pay for specialized network infrastructure that will ensure their content is delivered at higher speeds than non-favored content.

This fractured system -- where certain entities can pay extra money to give their content favored treatment -- is what advocates of network neutrality have been working to avoid by preventing ISPs from discriminating against certain types of content. The Nemertes report gloomily concludes that although the Internet will not shut down entirely, it will experience a dramatic slowdown in innovation because "new content and application providers will be handicapped by the relatively poorer performance of their offerings vis-à-vis those created by the established players."

We are already seeing quite a bit of capacity problem starting with ISPs like Comcast putting in place the so called "Network Management Systems" and putting in place bandwidth caps. There is also talk of different ISPs trying out bandwidth based pricing schemes.

PDC 2008 Vide Viewer and Downloader - Version 1.0.0.2 Available

Over the weekend I fixed up a couple of bugs in the PDC 2008 Video Viewer and Downloader( My WPF based Viewer and Downloader for PDC 2008 Videos). This version is not available for download in CodePlex. All releases in Codeplex also contain the Source code. Do not download the source from the Source tab. The Source tab is a older version of the source and not the latest.

PC vs Mac or Microsoft vs Apple??

Well this has nothing to do with the Ads..:)

I was doing some googling to see how my PDC 2008 Video Viewer and Downloader is positioned and came across this interesting post by Peter Schneider.

http://channel9.msdn.com – Watch all PDC sessions for free. http://developer.apple.com/products/video/wwdc08/index.html – Pay $999 for all session videos.

This does give you a feel for how the respective companies feel about their developer communities. I think Apple wants to be more in the consumer space rather than the technology space. The more you build your developer communities the more support you gain from them and more support your products get. The more supported your product is, the higher the chance an enterprise will want to run its business on that technology.

Revisit Ancient Rome

Another example of how technology is being used to generate interest in something that we (meaning public at large) normally will not spend time researching. :)

You can now visit Ancient Rome without travel both in air or time via a new simulation that is available on Google Earth.

Ancient Rome 3D, as the new feature is known, is a digital elaboration of some 7,000 buildings recreating Rome circa A.D. 320, at the height of Constantine’s empire, when more than a million inhabitants lived within the city’s Aurelian walls.

It consists of about 7,000 buildings reconstructed through the efforts of Bernard Frischer, director of the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. The project involved the collaboration of Google Earth, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and Past Perfect Productions, a company whose specialty is 3D cultural heritage models.

The above video is of some of the fly-thru of this model.

NY Times Article (may require registration) : Exploring Old Rome Without Air (or Time) Travel

PDC 2008 Video Downloader and Viewer - v 1.0.0.1

I have already fixed a couple of bugs in the application. To make it easier to download and manage versions I have created a CodePlex project to manager this applications.

I am not using the source code part of Codeplex. Instead, I will use the releases system to upload zips with both the source and the executables.

PDC 2008 Viewer and Downloaded on Codeplex

Version 1.0.0.1 is already uploaded.

PDC 2008 Video Downloader and Viewer

I couple of years back I wrote a .NET tool the just download the whole set of PDC videos for offline viewing. So when the PDC 2008 videos became available I thought I would update the tool. But then I thought that this gives me a chance to kind of mess around with some newer technologies and so wrote a PDC video downloader and viewer using WPF, VS 2008 and SQL CE 3.5.

The whole source and executable are available for download below. I also added the session and speaker information that is available online at the PDC site, so it is a true Offline PDC viewing experience. I have also added a few extras like try and find out the blog of the speakers (this is based on an automated live search and so I expect that there are quite a bit of wrong links. If you can update the database and send it back to me, I would update the application).

Note that the application currently only downloads WMV-HD, so make sure you have enough free space on your HDD and bandwidth to download (from what I found searching online the videos will be 50+ GBs).

I don't have too much of error handling code, so expect crashes when things go wrong. If you find a bug, let me know, I will fix it when I get time.

Download pdc_2008_video_downloader_and_viewer_v1.0.0.zip

VS 2010 CTP 1 Series - Home Screen

This post is about the home page.

The home page has changed quite a bit from a visual perspective. But if you look at the data and options available, they are pretty much the ones that are available in VS 2008.

It kind of looks Vistaish. Three Options are available on the left, Welcome, Projects and Visual Studio.

Previous Posts in this Series
VS 2010 CTP 1 Series - Installation

Height or Width in WPF

In XAML, when you want your controls to resize based on the Container, you set the Height or Width property to "Auto". Yesterday, I wanted to set this from code and I could not find a way to do this. Height/Width is a Double and setting 0 actually makes the control invisible (or almost so).

A little bit of searching pointed me to MSDN. The answer is documented in MSDN, but not very easy to find unless you are the type who reads every line that appears in the related pages. I usually just read the main parts and skip to the examples. :)

"In addition to acceptable Double values, this property can also be Double..::.NaN. This is how you specify auto sizing behavior in code. In XAML you set the value to the string "Auto" (case insensitive) to enable the auto sizing behavior. Auto sizing behavior implies that the element will fill the height available to it."

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.frameworkelement.height.aspx