Indigo out in the open

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)]

February 9, 2005 · Amit Bahree

Grease my Ride

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).

February 8, 2005 · Amit Bahree

Not All Tsunami Donations Deductible

Interestingly, there is a story highlighting the fact that all your $$$’s (or £££’s as I am in UK now), are <strong>NOT</strong> 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....

January 13, 2005 · Amit Bahree

Update on Problems installing VSTS 2005 Dec. 2004 Refresh

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.

January 12, 2005 · Amit Bahree

Vonage launched in UK

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)....

January 4, 2005 · Amit Bahree

The death of Mac?

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....

December 31, 2004 · Amit Bahree

The big shaker

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:...

December 28, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Ah the old days...

Well, I stumbled upon this link showing the photos of Google&rsquo;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&rsquo;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!...

December 23, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Good RSS Reader?

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....

December 23, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Are XBOX games protected by region?

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?

November 28, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Halo2 - bests the original?

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?...

November 28, 2004 · Amit Bahree

New Skin - any better?

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…....

November 21, 2004 · Amit Bahree

VS.NET 2005 ClickOnce Review

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....

October 20, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Pocket PC Emulator Issue in VS 2005 Beta (Refresh 1)

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....

October 13, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Need a new job... check out a blog. How about one for Microsoft?

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....

October 6, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Why are T, K, V such a hot topic in Generics?

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....

September 29, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Paris Catacombs - You have no idea what's down there

<strong>Karan</strong> has a very <strong>interesting post</strong> on the Paris Catacombs which was inspired by a <strong>story</strong> 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....

September 12, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Forms, threading and Frustration

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....

July 27, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Developer's Perspective on WinFS

If you don’t know what Wings is, then read the <strong>earlier part</strong> 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....

July 25, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Visual Source Safe 8.0 any better?

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....

July 21, 2004 · Amit Bahree

What is SecureString?

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....

July 21, 2004 · Amit Bahree

What are Distributed System Designers?

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....

July 15, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Data Access overview (with Screenshots) in ASP.NET 2.0 using Visual Studio 2005

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....

July 12, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 (code named Whidbey) Screenshots

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....

July 7, 2004 · Amit Bahree

Overview of MSBuild

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....

July 6, 2004 · Amit Bahree