.NET From India

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??

I am still Alive

Well, travel and a sudden surge at work has kept me away from blogging for almost a month now. I have just returned from the MVP Summit at Redmond. So I hope to blog away some of the long pending thoughts over the next two weeks. Hopefully I force my self to do it..:)

Also, has anyone taken a look at the MSDN Wiki. Though currently it is still not a full fledged thing, from what I heard from the team they are working on making it better.

Ad Supported Applications

I have an idea for an application that is focused on some india specific needs for which I don't see an application out there that fits well. My current thought process is that I will create this application and then maybe offer it free, maybe with some kind of Ad support for the hosting and other costs. This is not a pure web app, but rather a smart client kind of application. For a web site, I know that Google Ads work out very well, but what about a smart client applications?

Before Google Ads, you had to be a very sucessful site with millions of hits to get some kind of Ad revenue. But now even sites like mine with a few hundreds of hits a day can make enough to cover my hosting costs. Is there an equivalent for the smart client/desktop space?

I know that the big games developers sell Ad space on their games, but what about smaller application developers. Also I want to be sure that this is not of the spyware type, but rather non-intrusive text or graphics based Ads that will not invade the users privacy and that will not scare users away. Has anyone tried something like this before?

Have I run foul of the Weather God

Cross post of the original post at my personal blog "Thoughts From India" (http://www.thougtsindia.org)

With all the news about the climatic change and environment, actually made me think about some of the recent brushes I have had with the weather gods recently. It seems to be too much of a coincidence, but I happen to have been in two different places, exactly when they experienced some very bad weather.

I was in Seattle in the second week of December. After around 4-5 days there, I was getting ready to leave, when one of the worst storms in the past few years hit Seattle. Power was out the night I was supposed to fly out. I reach the airport nice and early in the morning, after packing my stuff using a torchlight (as the electricity was out through the night). I see a big queue at the Delta counter. Reached there to hear them announcing that all flights were delayed by over 4 hours or so. The reason, there was no power, so no computers, so no ticketing. The planes were actually standing there at the gates, but they could not print out our boarding passes to get us on to those planes. Of course, with that kind of a delay, there was not chance of me catching my flight. And worst of all, Air France, which is what I was connecting to had no flights the next day. So had to spend two extra days in Seattle before returning to Chennai.

Next, on a weeks trip to London, another bad storm hits London, UK and coastal Europe. Luckily there is no power cut in London, just traffic snarls and most of the underground running delayed or canceled.

So looks like the Weather gods are not pleased with me and follow me with storms whenever I go abroad..:)

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...

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

Out of the Country

I will be travelling out to Dublin, CA for a few weeks. I am starting off from Chennai tonight and I take the Singapore route to SFO.

If you are somewhere in the Bay Area, regularly read this blog and are interested in meeting up (I know too many conditions..;)) just ping me.

Happy New Year

To all the readers of this blog....

Let 2006 bring a lot of happiness and prosperity to you and have a wonderful time in 2006

Strange Coincidence

As I mentioned in my previous post, I had gone to the IDC to meet one of my old friends and after some talk we just moved over to the coffee machine to get a coffee. There he introduced me to one of his collegues in the team called Venkat. So we were just chatting and he mentioned that he used to work in the SQL 2005 team before he moved to the this team and I mentioned that we had done some extensive work on it and that I had actually posted some problems with calling web services from managed stored procs.

And he said, he was the guy who had actually replied to that bug report and suggested the work around that we had to use to get it to work with Beta 1 of SQL 2005...

Think about it.. I visit the IDC for the first time and the first employee (besides my friend) I meet there is someone to whom I had talked to over mail before!!!!

Maybe I should sleep on my Laptop

I find that the 5-10 minutes just before going to sleep, is the time when I get the most interesting ideas to blog about. It is this time when sleep is not yet there, but the lights are off and you know you are going to have a good sleep coming. The mind seems to be in the best of shape at that time.

The problem of course is that, I rarely remember my brilliant ideas in the morning, when I get down to writing a post. Of course, sometime I do remember parts of stuff I thought of, but then the flow that I had the night before seems to be missing. The post that I start writing seems to be, not as wonderful as I visualized just before I fell asleep. I am sure that I must have missed some important point that I had in mind..

I have grown so used to typing that I now find it very very difficult to actually write anything other than my signature. So keeping a pad near the bed to write down my thoughts is not an option.

So that only option left, if I want to really get my wonderful ideas out into the world wide web, is to take my Laptop with me. Well, most prob, that would get my laptop broken, if not by my daughter, then surely by my wife..:-)

CAN Conquer CANcer

Got a mail from Murali on this new campaign/contest they are running called CAN Conquer CANcer.

The contest is aimed at creating some excitement in the blogosphere on this topic and so get more information out there.

I have had near and dear who have been through the grips of Cancer and so I really support this good attempt. Though I am not a contestant, the best I can do is to get the information out there..:-)

Bill Gates and Bangalore Roads

It has been a wonderful week. I had gone down to Bangalore to attend the VS 2005 and SQL 2005 launch there by Bill G. It was an enjoyable event as My company(Polaris) was on the top of the list of Indian ISVs Bill mentioned during the event. It was very nice to see all the hard work over the last 1 year, actually being appreciated on stage, but none other than Bill G.

I actually was planning to then go over to the Developer Launch too and meet up with the local DPE team and other MVPs. But the state of Banglaore roads and the traffic made sure that I lost out on that. I always thought we in Chennai had bad road, but now I see that our roads are wonderful compared to the experience in Bangalore.

Also got to spend some time with my friend Madhu, who took me out for dinner and spent quite sometime catching up on old times..:-)

Microsoft Case Study

One of the stuff that I have been working on in Polaris in the past one year has now become a case study on the Microsoft site. You can find it here.

Rain, Rain Everywhere

It is pouring out here in Chennai. Heard on the news that we had 20 cms in the last 24 hours (Can you beleive that) and almost 5 cms during 1 hour early today morning...

Most of the roads are overflowing, but no casualties as yet.....

Update - Latest reports tell that it was 20cms in a matter of 5 hours yesterday night. The low pressure has become a cyclonic system and looks like it is going to be another night of heavy rains

I lost my Wisdom

Well, I seem to be getting the skill of coming up with attractive Titles for my posts. :)

Well I don't mean the one connected to the brain, but rather to the teeth. After postponing it for a long time, I could not do it any further. So I had all removed over the last two weeks.

Travelling in the US

I am now in Redmond for the Annual MVP Global Summit. I flew in from Copenhagen to Washington DC, spent the weekend with one of my friends who lives there and then flew over to Seattle Tacoma.

It seems to be becoming more and more tiresome to travel in the US. The day I was to fly to Seattle, I arrived at the airport around 2 hrs before the departure of my flight. There was a complete confusion at the United ticket desk, with no pointers to where people had to check in there was long queues where none were necessary. When I finally had checked in, there before me was a huge set of queue for security. There was actually 4 jampacked, worm like queues.

It took me almost 50 mins to 1 hour to actually get through security and then after taking one of those shuttles to reach my gate to be told that my flight had just left..:-(

Then I had to take another flight later in the night to Chicago and then from there to Seattle. Landed in Seattle at 12:30 in the night. Luckily, one of MS evangelists in Washinton DC, Andrews had also missed that Seattle flight and took the same detour as me. He gave me a lift till my hotel, DoubleTree in Bellevue.

The Summit gets going from tomm. Expect a few technical posts from Redmond, based on what happens in the Summit.

Photos from Sweden

I went to Malmo in Sweden over the last weekend. I have posted some of the photos to a new album.

More Travels

I am off again. I am headed towards Copenhagen in Denmark. I am going to be there for the next two weeks helping a client architect thier new .NET application. If you are in Copenhagen and would like to meet up over dinner, just mail me...

Then I am going to travel to Redmond to attend the 2005 edition of the Global MVP Summit. This is the annual get together of MVPs at the Microsoft Campus. If you are in Seattle or plan on attending the Summit, let me know. Maybe we can meet up.

Btw, I am blogging this from the newly setup free (during the trial period according to the welcome page. Hope they would keep it free so that I have something to do while I wait for my flight!!!) Wifi network at the Chennai Airport. Signal is good, but speed is low. Well broadband access does spoil you quite a bit. :-)

Photos from Australia

I have uploaded some of the photos I took during my trip to Melbourne and Sydney in a new photo album

These are of course low resolutions compressed images. If you need a the orginals just mail me and ask for the one that you want.

Back Home

I am back in Chennai now. The Australia trip was hectic and I still feel sleeply all the time. I am not sure why, but I seem be very tired after this trip than some of the US ones. Maybe moving between the hemispheres has something to do with this..:-)

Had a wonderful dinner with Tejas in Melbourne. One of the things that suprised both of us was that, it was our first meeting, but we were talking like close friends in two minutes. I am usually quite a reserved person and do not go out an talk to people that easily. But here I was talking to Tejas and his wife Komal without a second thought.

I suggested that getting into blogging has allowed me to create this virtual world of blogger friends (something orkut did not do too well) and was quite suprised when Tejas said, he was also thinking of the same thing..:-D

Now that I back, hope to start my normal tech blogging again...

I am going Down Under

I am going to visit Melbourne and Sydney for business. But I should have a day or two free in each city. I will be meeting up with fellow blogger Tejas in Melbourne. If you live in one of those cities and would like to meet up just drop me a line.

Melbourne - 26th July to 28th July
Sydney - 28th July to 2nd Aug

Consumer Blog

I have started a new non technical blog which focuses on Indian consumer issues and consumer activism called Indian Consumer.

A lot of travel

May seems to be the month of travel for me. After the Singapore and Malaysia trip, I am currently on a European journey. I am currently in Frankfurt,Germany. I travlled to Copenhagen, Denmark for two days and will be back in Chennai weekend.

The most difficult part was to fly Air India, which in traditional Indian fashion was late, which ment I had to run to catch connecting flights.

The other problem area is weather. I start from 40 deg C and land up here, which is at 10 deg C. Then go to Denmark with is around 7-10 Deg C and just when I getting used to the colder climate, I travel back to 40 deg C...:-)

And this being spring or start of summer here, there is daylight till 10-11 pm, which kind of poses problems getting to sleep and the sun again raise at 5 am. This has resulted in me being sleep deprived. Hopefully I can catch up with my sleep over the weekend once I get back to Chennai.

Pictures from Singapore and Malaysia

I have created an album to hold the photos from my recent Singapore and Malaysia trip.

Orchids form the major part of the album as they continue to draw me even though I have visited the orchid gardens twice before. Also quite a bit of the other action is in my handycam, while I find flowers are usually best photographed.

(These images have been resized and compressed for web viewing. If you want the original for wallpaper purposes, just mail me)

I have hit the 800 Mark

Yesterday's post happens to be the 800th post on this blog...:-)

More Advice to Students

Sriram wrote a post on some points of disagreement with Joels Advice to CS Students.

Welll Sriram, GPA's or equivalent do make a difference. Yes, it is always not the right way, but look at it from a recruiters point of view. I get 20,000 resumes from freshers, you dont expect me to interview each of them do you.. The first thing people look at when they get a fresher's resume, is his score at college. Yes there are people who get bad marks, but are good programmers. They usually get picked up via friends or someone who knew them etc. For the general student population GPA or Total Percent does matter.

About the Language issue, my advice would be, Learn any language, but understand how things work. I am a VB Zealot, but that does not mean that I have no idea what pointers are. The language does not matter, it is after all a syntatical representation of your intent. Understanding how a computer works is what matters.

Free SMS to Tsunami Affected Areas Offer

IPIPI.com is offering free SMS to/from all tsunami affected countries until Jan 5th, 2005. More information is avbl in their blog post.

Note: I have not used this service and have no idea if it works in India. Also, looks like you will have to give your credit card information, even if you are only using the free service as that is part of thier normal registration, according to the post at their site.

Finding People

I have been getting some comments from people trying to find information about friends in Chennai or India. I have started a new Blog called Tsunami India to help such people. If you want to know information about a friend, just mail me or post a comment in one of the blogs. If you know about someone being searched for, leave a comment in the appropriate post.

Do spread the news around, so that we can help people get in touch with friends and relatives.

New Tsunami Alerts

An alert for a new Tsunami hit in Chennai has been given. Hopefully with the alert given, I think this time around there will not be any lives lost.

Tsunami Relief

If you are working with any organization for Tsunami relief and would like to share information on the web, do mail me(Use the Email Me link on the left panel) and I would post it on the blog for you.

Tsunami Releif in Chennai

There are a lot of organizations collecting items and money for relief work in India. A friend of mine Mahalaxmi is working with some NGOs to help people in need. You can read her blog for more information or call her up at 9840851982.

Excerpt from a mail she sent out:

Also we are working for providing the victims with the following things:

1. Cooking materials - Rice/Dal, Vessels, Stoves etc. these would help them
establish their home with the basic needs
2. Bedsheets/Mats
3. Other items that would be instrumental in surviving

I would also request you to help financially to obtain the above things
since providing food alone will not help them in their living or survival in
the future.

Earthquake and Tsunami in Chennai

I had taken a break and gone to visit my parents over the Christmas long weekend. So I escaped the fury of the earthquake and the following tsunami that hit Chennai on Sunday. It is estimated that Chennai alone lost around 250 people and the state of TamilNadu took the major brunt with more than 2500 people losing thier lives.

Reading about the over all toll of this incident (around 1600 people lost their lives all across Asia), one of the questions that come to mind is that Indonesia nearest to the epicenter lost around 2000 people, while a single state in India lost more. That gives you an idea of the people density on India. This is far higher in coastal areas as fishermen prefer to live along the costs so that they can go to sea early in the morning.

Coming back home today morning, I was quite releived to find that my house, which is 15 minutes walk form the beach, was safe with the sea water nowhere near it..:-)

My trip from the railway station to my house, went by the beach road, which gave me a look at yeasterdays area of diaster - Marina, the second longest beach in the world. Except for a few boats and vehicles scattered around, it looked very calm and normal. Around 50 policemen walking around, being the only signs of what was a major tragedy that happened 24 hours ago.

Update - Aftershock quakes have been reported from Andamans. More aftershocks are expected over the next two to three days.

Update - I have setup a blog Tsunami India to help people get information on friends and relatives in India.

Do you want to work on .NET 2.0?

Polaris, the company I work for, is hiring .NET programmers. This is your chance to work on the latest .NET related technologies like C# 2.0, VB.NET 2.0, VS 2005 and Yukon.

We are looking for people with 2-4 years of IT experience, 1 year in .NET and good communication skills. If you are a very good VB 6 (COM/COM+ knowledge a must) or Java programmer, you can still apply. If we think you have the right aptitude we will still take you and train you in .NET. SQL Server knowledge is mandatory. This position is based out of Chennai, India.

Do send in your resumes to anand.m at polaris.co.in. We do have a very demanding interview and selection process, so if you do not match the above requirements, do not apply.

MSDN Today

I am speaking at the Chennai MSDN event today. The topic is "Inside the guts of the CLR".

In Geek Heaven

This week is proving to be one in Geek Heaven for me..

What does a geek want more than anything? The latest and coolest devices of course ;-)

Well. I have just bought a Pocket PC Phone Edition. Not one of those top of the line XDA things, but still a good model from a taiwan company called AnexTek. This particular model is called SP230. Does not have Wi-fi/blutooth etc, but does have all the basic features and comes with a pouch and extra stylus (the most important part of your PDA if you plan to use handwriting recognition). A decent review of this model is available here. Maybe I will write a review too after a few weeks of usage.

The second geeky toy I got was this. A Fossil Wrist Net SPOT watch. Since India does not yet have the MSN direct service(Will it ever, I doubt it though), I can't take full advantage of this one. I am forced to use it as a normal watch with a cool, UI changing feature. ;-)

Atleast now I can say, I am almost fully .NET enabled. What with .NET running on my PDA/Phone and on my watch.

All I need now is .NET enabled clothing and pen..;-)

Off to SAF

I am off to attend the Software Architects Forum at Bangalore tomm. Will be there for two days.

If you are coming over, do look out for me at the community booth there.

Mridulaa

Last Friday we named my daughter Mridulaa.

Here are a few snaps

Photos from Beijing Trip

The photos from my trip to TechEd, Beijing is available at Beijing Trip

Back in Chennai

Just landed up in Chennai today morning after a long delayed flight(Supposed to reach here at 10pm, but reached here at 4:30am). Just got up after catching up with some sleep.

Had a wonderful time in Beijing with some of the other MVPs(Colt, Sanguan, Brandon) who had come in from different Asian countries.

Photos and more information will be up in the site, later in the day.

Off to Beijing

I am travelling tonight to Beijing to be a part of TechEd China and represent the India MVPs there. Will be back home on the 20th. I would be spending quite a lot of time at the MVP Stall there. If you going to come to TechEd Beijing, do look me up.

Stork has visited us

A new member joined our family on Saturday. We were blessed with a wonderful and cute looking baby girl early Saturday morning. :-D

Sessions, Session and More Sessions

The next three to four weeks promise to be quite stressfull, with a series of sessions that I am handling.

Starts with the MSDN session on 22nd, on What,s new in VS 2005

Then comes TechEd India at Chennai. I am handling two sessions there.

With all the sessions being on new and upcoming technologies, this means that I have a lot of reading to do.

MCSD Atlast

I have been very near MCSD.NET for more than an year now. I had to take an elective, but kept postponing it.

I took the security exam beta in April and did not get any info about the whether I was thru even after the exam went live.

So called the certification helpline and they took a week to trace my results. Today I got a call to confirm that I had indeed passed and that my profile has been updated....:-)

Elections on Monday

Elections are happening in my part of India on Monday, so I am off to do my duty for my country..:-)

I am registered to vote at Coimbatore(where I was born) and so have made the trip over the weekend and am staying over the extra day to vote. Will be back in action from Tuesday...

New Profile Photo

During the MVP Summit, they offered to have a profile photo taken. I agreed and two days back a copy of that photo arrived via email. So I thought I will use it in my blog and have uploaded it to Typepad. So you should be able to see a professionally taken photo of mine in the about page..:-)

Some Photos

Uploaded a few of the photos I took during the trip to Munnar last month.

If you want the high res pictures(I am using one of the Evening Views as my wallpaper now), mail me...