Indigo is now out in the open and you should see a lot of flurry about it soon. This is cool. I have had a chance to look at bits and pieces of it in the past and could not talk much about it due to NDA, but that hopefully can change soon. [Listening to: Track 03 - New Artist (38) - New Title (38) (05:05)] ...
Got this via Megha. This actually is not new, I remember many years ago in India some inventor-dude doing the same thing and driving around to Nirulas (slurp, smack, drool).
Interestingly, there is a story highlighting the fact that all your $$$’s (or £££’s as I am in UK now), are NOT tax deductible - which came as a bit of a surprise to me. For example, the American Red Cross has received close to $152 million in donations for tsunami survivors. If you gave to them, your contribution is tax deductible. But if you donated to the International Red Cross it’s not. That’s because most international groups are not authorized by the IRS to accept tax deductible donations. To simplify things the IRS says go to the websites of US AID and the USA Freedom Corps . All the charities listed on those websites are qualified to give you a tax break. You can also check the IRS website. On the home page click on charities, then click on the “New Search Features” and enter the charities name. If it comes back with a listing you know you’re okay with the IRS. Also keep in mind that if you have donated to an eligible charity for tsunami victims this month you can still take the deduction on last years taxes. ...
If you recall my previous post on VSTS installation blues , I got an answer from MS on that. It seems like installing Yukon Beta 2 did it. Per Microsoft, uninstalling Yukon won’t also help and it is better to rebuild the OS and then go from there. You can read it on the discussion thread here . I guess, there goes another evening in rebuilding a machine. ...
Sweet, now that Vonage has launched in the UK , I am thinking of getting it. My US one worked out pretty good for me and have been using it more than a year and a half. But, since I am still very new in the UK, for the old timers here, what do you think of their rates ? For £9.99 per month I can make unlimited local and national calls anywhere in the UK and Ireland and the rates for mobile are 15p (day), 10p (evening) and 5p (weekend). Plus the international calling rates are pretty cheap (or so I think). Thoughts? ...
As of December 2004, the Mac share as measured by online activity is 2.7 percent (Linux is 3.1), with all the rest going to various flavors of Windows, is it truely the death of Macs? John Dvorak disccuses the Grim Macintosh Market Share Forebodes Crisis . The crux of the matter he says is, the ease-of-use and simplicity of the platform is killing it, because people cannot perceive that simplicity is ever worth MORE than complexity. Simpler should be cheaper. An example that John takes, say you have two identical products on the market—word processors, for example. For the sake of argument, let’s make these two, X and Y, almost exactly the same. But product X is written in tight assembly language, fits on a floppy disk, and takes up 30K of memory. Product Y is written in some high-level language, comes on a CD-ROM, and takes up 500 megabytes on your hard drive. Which will outsell the other? I argue that the packed CD-ROM always will, because the public will perceive it as a greater value. You’re getting more for your money. ...
With over 23,000 people dead, and so many more suffering the Magnitude 9.0 off the west coast of Northern Sumatra was a 9.0 magnitude Earthquake on Sunday, December 26, 2004 at 00:58:49 UTC. Having live for almost 7 years in the Bay Area, which as most people know is a very earthquake active area I have made it a hobby (of sorts) to go read up more on such events. Here are the details as reported by the USGS: ...
Well, I stumbled upon this link showing the photos of Google’s spanking new campus and celebrating their 6th birthday. But not long ago, when I was stomping around in Mountain View and Palo Alto, the same building use to be Silicon Graphic’s , very funky, very cool and very geeky kick-ass campus . Its a shame, Google did not keep the funky colours, IMHO it would fit right in with their personality! ...
I have been using Feedreader for a bit, and though it is decent, lately it takes an awful long time to load including 100% CPU usage and the load time is measured in minutes and not seconds - its that bad. So, the question is, what readers do you use and recommend? I do have the online ones like Bloglines , but I prefer the ones where I can download and read it offline - as opposed to being online. Any hidden gems you can recommend? ...
Does anyone know if Xbox games are protected by region just as DVD’s are? E.g. I bought my XBox in USA, and if I buy a game here in London, would that work in the XBOX or it won’t? I forget, but someone was mentioning to me the other day that it wont. Any ideas?
I am not a big gamer - I hardly ever play a game, the only one I have finished (without any cheat codes) is Halo and I loved it! After, reading the CNN review on Halo2, I cannot wait for all my stuff to reach here from California and then go and buy this. Have any of you played this? What do you think? Is there someone in London who I can come and meet and see what this looks like? ...
Well as you can tell, I thought of trying out the new skin called Luxinterior Light , earlier I had Luxinterior Dark running. It seems with the days quite dark (and grey) here in London and with darkness coming around 4:30ish in the afternoon, it was perfect time to add some “cheer”. This one though now seems too cheerful to me *grin*. Do you prefer anyone or even care? Does anyone even come here and sit and read all my gibberish…. ? ...
I was playing with ClickOnce which is new in Visual Studio 2005 and thought it was pretty cool. Basically, ClickOnce is a deployment technology that enables self-updating Windows applications that can be installed and run with minimal user interaction. ClickOnce applications can be self-updating; they can check for newer versions as they become available and automatically replace any updated files. You can specify the update behaviour; an administrator can also control update strategies, (e.g. making an update mandatory). Updates can also be rolled back to a previous version by the end user or administrator. ...
I was recently playing with the new compact framework part of Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 (which is released with the VSTS Edition) and am having a tough time getting to the emulator to wok when I try and debug the application. This is a simple hello world application and I tried using all of the following emulators with no luck: Pocket PC 2003 SE Emulator Pocket PC 2003 SE Emulator (Legacy) Pocket PC 2003 SE VGA Emulator Every time I try and “Deploy” to that the emulator comes up fine and I can connect to it, etc. but it cannot install the application for it and always get the Deploy error message (see the screen shots below). Also every time I try and “Power Off” the emulator, it comes right back up and does not really quit - it does not matter, if I save the state or do a soft or hard reset. All this time VS.NET is waiting for the emulator to exit. Ultimately I have to kill the process (DeviceEmulator.exe). ...
NY Times is running a story that highlights on how more companies are using Blogging for hiring employees. Five years ago, few people had heard of blogs, now, more than two million Americans are blogging, according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and blogging is spreading in the job market, said hiring managers and experts who study blogging. Job seekers use blogs to establish a strong online presence, display their skills and advertise their availability. For many just out of college, the blog is an essential networking tool because it is common for bloggers to link back and forth to others with recent posts. Corporate recruiters, in turn, use blogs to draw in qualified candidates, and they search for potential hires by reading bloggers who write about topics relevant to a particular industry. A driving factor behind job market blogging is the search engine Google, said Elizabeth Lawley, associate professor of information technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “If you are thinking of interviewing someone, it’s almost standard now to Google them online and see what you find,” Ms. Lawley said. “If that person has a blog, it’s usually the first thing that comes up.” ...
Is something as simple as do the T, K and V parameterised types make sense versus mnemonics in Generics a hot item to talk about? You bet, people cannot seem to get enough of it .The crux of the issue here is do T, K, V, etc in examples like List, IDictionary<K,V> make sense versus something like List, IDictionary<Key, Value>. Apparently both sides make seemingly valid arguments and from what I gather, its also a hot discussion topic within Microsoft. There have been examples that point out that c# is supposed to be easy to understand and not messy as shown in this example . But in the long discussion here are the main points in favour of descriptive names: ...
Karan has a very interesting post on the Paris Catacombs which was inspired by a story in the Guardian which stated the French police finding a real underground full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. “There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous” the police said. The whole thing was running off professionally installed electric and phone systems. Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor saying : “Do not try to find us.” ...
In Visual Studio 2005, if you have a windows form and have a fair amount of threading going then that things can get pretty frustrating. As you know, because of the way that Windows handles its user interface, you should only be updating the user interface from the main thread. If you try to do it on other threads, bad things happen, and they can be pretty hard to track down. Windows forms includes some code to detect when that is happening, but it can’t do it in all cases. When you get in this situation, you need to call Invoke() on the form, and pass it a delegate to the function that you want to be called on the main thread. Eric discusses this in detail which is a recommended read if you play with a lot of threads on your Win Forms. ...
If you don’t know what Wings is, then read the earlier part of this series. There have been a number of changes since Part 1 and this part, namely the release of a new Longhorn build. For the Assemblies you will usually need the System.Storage.WinFS.dll assembly in most of your projects. It represents the basic interfaces and classes (for example, Item and ItemContext). In addition, System.Storage.Core.dll is required for most Wings work. Once you have both of those assemblies, most of the functional groups are separated into separate assemblies. For example, if you are working with Contacts, you will need the System.Storage.Contacts.dll assembly; if you are working with Files, you will need the System.Storage.Files.dll assembly. On some rare occasions, you will also need the WindowBase.dll assembly. This assembly contains much of the core Longhorn-specific content. All the Longhorn assemblies are now located in one place: \Microsoft.NET\Windows\v6.0.4030 (depending on the current version of the Longhorn assemblies). ...
Unfortunately it is not. The UI is better - but that is just the new resource files used with cooler icons (compared to the previous version), but VSS itself is as limiting a product as it has been till now. I remember asking one of the product managers of VSTS on VSS when I was in Redmond, and they had said that it will be a completely revamped product - something which Microsoft internally will (or can - I forget now) use in the product development teams and should be able to compete with ClearCase, CVS, etc. But I guess, Beta1 ships with the same old useless source control. ...
Since a String class, is immutable and when it is not needed, it cannot be programmatically scheduled for GC or in other words, it is not possible to predict when it will be deleted from the memory that can be a security risk especially if the string contains sensitive information such has credit card numbers, passwords, etc. This is where a new class in .NET 2.0 which ships with Visual Studio 2005 called SecureString comes in. It represents text that should be kept confidential and is encrypted for privacy when being used, and deleted from computer memory when no longer needed. ...
Distributed System Designers (DSD’s) are an integrated set of graphical designers which are part of the new Visual Studio 2005. With these designers which you can use to visualise and define applications, compose systems, design classes, model logical representations of datacenters, and bind systems to logical servers in the logical layout of the target datacenter. Their high-level goals are: Support designing and implementing applications Composing applications into deployable systems Modelling logical representations of the target datacenter Defining and validating deployments of the systems you compose against the logical datacenter models. The designers help software architects and designers, developers, and operations analysts resolve the following high-level goals: ...
I wanted to walk you through a quick demo on some of the enhancements for data access in Visual Studio 2005. Please note that though I have a bunch of screen shots, the application here is pretty simple. My goal is not to show you the power of the new stuff that makes the developer more productive and a lot of it is the small stuff - which all adds up to a fair amount of FTE’s. So, lets start. ...
Last night I got some time to start playing with the Beta 1 of Visual Studio 2005 which was code named Whidbey. I got some requests for screen shots and I have uploaded a few. To me these are of not too much value because I have shots of the installation process itself and some initial screen shots of VS.NET 2005 but I don’t cover the real improvements - trust me the “meat” of it will follow soon. The main purpose I am uploaded these here are because a lot of you do get excited seeing this. Let me know if you want to see something specific and keep a lookout here for my take on all the new stuff. ...
Microsoft has a three series article showing the details of MSBuild. It is a recommended read if you care on what the new build system would be. What is MSBuild you ask? MSBuild is a long overdue IMHO technology installed with the CLR in Visual Studio 2005 and “Longhorn”. Its goal is to replace makefiles by project files written in XML that let you build large-scale systems. In a project file, targets are used to organise and define high-level construction sets with explicit dependencies. Within a target, tasks are executed to modify inputs and generate outputs that can be passed to the next task or target in a loosely coupled way. ...