This is an interesting factoid that Microsoft added as part of Windows XP Service Pack 2 that lets users prevent data from being written to USB devices (via a registry key). But this is just the start, Longhorn is supposed to add more comprehensive “features”. Much has been made of the security risks posed by portable storage devices such as USB keys, or flash drives, music players like the iPod, and other small gadgets that can store vast amounts of data. Some fear that such tiny devices can be used to quickly copy sensitive data off business PC hard drives, or to introduce malicious software onto corporate networks. In the next version of Windows, Microsoft will give big companies an easy way to block use of such devices, while making it easier for consumers to connect their home systems to them. ...

I want to put up my 1998 Honda Accord EX on the market and if any of you are interested in buying an excellent vehicle then please leave me a comment here. I have brand new tires and brakes on the car. I also have all service records (Major, Minor and Oil Changes) and have kept the car in brand new condition both from the outside and inside with regular and timely servicing. The car looks great and is in excellent mechanical condition and needs no reconditioning. The engine is good with no leaks, etc. and the paint is glossy with the interior in a excellent condition too. This car has a clean title. ...

If you installed .NET Service Pack 1 you might notice that certain RSS feeds are broken and might return an HTTP Protocol Error. As Dare suggests , this is due to the fact that the HttpWebRequest class has been modified to make it more compliant to the HTTP spec. E.g. on the MS research feeds, this errors because the server returns the Content-Location header as “Content Location” (notice the space as opposed to the hyphen). You can check out the list of fixes in .NET SP1. ...

There are by some estimates more than a million weblogs. But most of them get no visibility in search engines. Only a few “A-List” blogs get into the top search engine results for a given topic, while the majority of blogs just don’t get noticed. The reason is that the smaller blogs don’t have enough links pointing to them. But this posting could solve that. Let’s help the smaller blogs get more visibility! ...

I first heard of KeyHole during one of Microsoft’s presentation of Avalon (which is Longhorn’s presentation subsystem). Keyhole is the 3D digital earth pioneer—the only company to deliver a 3D digital model of the entire earth via the Internet. Keyhole’s groundbreaking EarthStream™ technology combines advanced 3D graphics and network streaming innovations to produce a high performance system that runs on standard PC’s and commodity servers. Both high performance and intuitive to use, Keyhole’s solutions enable anyone to manipulate a rich map of the earth composed of imagery and feature information. Check them out at http://www.keyhole.com/ . ...

Well I have been out of the country travelling for the last three weeks and hence have not had the opportunity to blog - partly due to the fact that I was quite busy and partly due to the fact that could not find decent connectivity. Well I am headed back home tonight and should be back up and blogging sometime next week, though I would have a lot of catching up on work including loads of emails. ...

I did download the latest service pack for Windows XP, SP2 yesterday. First of all its pretty big, the ISO image was 475 mb so this is something you don’t want to download at a slow connection. Microsoft has said that you should be able to order the CD and get it shipped to you (its free). I was able to install the service pack on one of my test machines without any problems and am now in the process of installing it on a few other XP machines I have running. ...

Microsoft is Beta testing the Web version of MSN Messenger and about time I think since Yahoo has had the web version of their messenger service for a while now. This is of course useful if you are one a shared computer or not on your own computer and cannot (or do not) want to install the MSN Messenger. ...

This is my second part of the SQL Server 2005 posts; you can read the first part on Hosting the .NET runtime in SQL Server. In the CLR certain conditions such as out of memory, stack overflow, etc can bring down an app domain (or process), this cannot be allowed in SQL Server 2005 when latter is acting has a host (for the CLR) as it will affect reliability and performance - couple of the key goals for SQL Server. Similarly unconditionally stopping a thread (e.g. via Thread.Abort) can potentially leave some resources in a “hung” state. ...

Those who are unfortunate enough to know me, know I keep saying Common Sense is not very Common (and how true it is). VS Mag has an article that list out some best practises for ASP.NET though they do it from a performance perspective, I feel everyone should do these irrespective what their perf. requirements are: Use Page.IsPostback - There is a lot of stuff one does when the page loads the first-time, no need to keep doing it again and again. ...

My dear friend Mario pointed me to this and it is hilarious! Make sure your speakers are on and enjoy!

If you live (or ever lived) in the San Francisco Bay Area (also know as the Silicon Valley), you would know that boosterism has a long part of the valley’s culture as much as Technology and Money is. This Sunday in the paper there was an excellent perspective on with the upcoming Google’s IPO, Silicon Valley’s hype machine is in overdrive, raising sales for potential investors. Below is the article written by Jonathan Weber for Mercury News, hopefully you would also enjoy the read and let me know what you think on the issue. ...

I finally got around to trying out SQL Server 2005 (a.k.a. Yukon) and reading up a little on how it operates under the covers. I had earlier discussed SQL Server Express. This is my first of series of posts where I will be highlighting some of the new things a developer can do in SQL Server 2005 from a .NET perspective, since there are many DBA’s who live and breathe SQL Server I will leave all the database and T-SQL specific stuff to them. ...

MSDN Mag has an interesting article on tools that convert code from c# to vb.net and vice-versa. I have come across a number of clients and developers both in the company I work for and also at clients who are interested in this. I find this whole topic quite intriguing, especially since in .NET there are minimal differences between c# and vb.net, at least if you stick to only managed code. Also it is quite easy to reuse functionality between the various objects (especially in these days of SOA - more on that some other day). This of course is easier if your are not trying to reuse WinForm apps. Irrespective, there is a lot of demand and some of the options listed here allows you to download the code and play with that too. ...

Well as you might have heard that Office 2003 SP1 is out. You can read here all the juicy details on what is fixed. As with all Service Packs it is highly recommended to install this, more-so if you use OneNote. I am surprised that Microsoft is actually calling this a OneNote 2003 SP1 - it is worth being a whole new version of the product! Those who have met me in person (unfortunately *grin*), know I cannot stop singing praises of OneNote and this service packs adds so many more features which makes is even better. I’ll probably be posting here details on what is new one of these days. If you wanna know before that drop me get in touch with me. You can also download Service Pack, but remember to keep your original disc’s handy. ...

Well, this was long overdue. I had promised to upload my article that won a contest by osnews.com. I finally found a little time to upload it here, though the formatting is still a bit screwed especially on the code snippets. You can read the article . If you would like a pdf version of the same let me know and I can either put it up here or email it to you. Here is my blurb from the article: ...

Thanks to Chris who accidentally pointed me to this. This is an update to my earlier post on Lookout. Seems like Lookout is now part of the MSN Sandbox and you can download it from there which is pretty cool of Microsoft to offer it soon after acquiring that company. If you use Outlook 2000 or later (not Outlook Express) then this is a highly recommended add-on. ...

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. ...

I guess it had to happen one day, but as of this morning Google’s search engine is not working - atleast not here in Bay Area, USA which is also where Google is Headquatered. CNN has also picked up on this story and mention that in addition to the US, France and UK are also having issues. When I try and search on something I get the error an Error -27 as shown below. You can click on the image to see the full size. ...

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). ...

Well as you can see I uploaded a new build of the blog that incorporates a new skin called LuxInterior by Gosatango. I have made some minor tweaks to this and there is still one bug that I need to resolve, though there is a workaround uploaded for it, so hopefully you would not see any issues. I would like to know if you want me to change anything in this e.g. personally I don’t like the headings of the posting in ALL CAPS; I would rather keep them in the same case as I entered them. But do let me know what you think, and also if there are any problems/issues, etc then I surely want to hear those. ...

Microsoft has the RC now available for download (its free) their new Virtual Server 2005. Virtual Server 2005 guest virtual machine environments are optimised for Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 Server, and Windows NT 4.0 Server, yet enables users to run a broad range of x86-based operating systems. Although this Virtual Server 2005 download is in the release candidate phase of its development, it includes all the features of the final version, such as SCSI support, 2-node clustering, and an enhanced COM API for improved control. The product will be available in two flavours with the Standard Edition supporting 4 CPU’s and the Enterprise Edition supporting upto 32 CPUs. Note that the per the licence, the RC is an evaluation copy only and cannot be used in a production environment. ...

I don’t know how this happened, but one of my old posts now shows up in the top 10 when you google on “ Bangalored ”. This has generated not only a lot of traffic to the weblog but also some people just not getting my original intent of the post - which was a Joke. Oh Well, you can brood over it and let me know your feelings too. ...

As Ramesh writes in an old post , the Class Designer is not a UML tool but uses the notation. He goes on to say the prime audience for this tool is the Developer then what do the Architects use? Is there a different version? I personally am a bit cheesed off by this. I love UML and have used it extensively and know the value (and pains) it can bring, like with everything else there are pros and cons. Like I said in mu comment, what is Microsoft’s issue in supporting UML? Is it more politics since Rational was bought by IBM or is there some other “real” reason? ...

Anatoly has a pretty funny post to which I can totally relate. I login to my MSN account because of the various passport accounts and also messenger. If it was not for those service I would totally ditch Hotmail. Yahoo and GMail have so much user experience, though I gotta admit I love Outlook 2003 if you have not seen the new interface its worth a spin. ...