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....
IMHO, it was bound to happen and about time it did. The BBC is <strong>reporting</strong> that Google bans Gmail sales. Google updated the program policy for Gmail on Monday adding clauses that ban the sale, trading, reselling or exploiting of Gmail accounts for commercial purposes. Despite the policy change Google still seems happy for invitations for accounts to be swapped and traded.
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....
Subramanian pointed me to this article. Researchers at Microsoft have devised a technique to assimilate the human body as a conduit for consumer electronics. Electrodes attached to body use the skin as a system bus to transmit data and as a conductive medium to distribute power between devices. The human body is used as a conductive medium, e.g., a bus, over which power and/or data is distributed. Power is distributed by coupling a power source to the human body via a first set of electrodes....
Though this is technically called, OneNote 2003 SP1, why I don’t know. It really is a whole new product with even more features - many excellent features which further improved this amazing product. If you are in a lot of meetings and need to track different things for different clients (which sometimes I have to at the same time), this is an invaluable product to use and worth every penny (IMHO)....
SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is a lightweight, redistributable version of SQL Server 2005 that is optimized to provide a data store for small-scale data-driven applications. Per Microsoft, “It is designed for building simple, dynamic applications. SQL Server Express helps developers build robust and reliable applications by providing a powerful database that is also free and easy to use. Too often database systems are overly complex for building simple applications. SQL Server Express and the other Express products reduce this complexity by providing a simple but powerful development environment for building data-driven applications....
Found this off /. so if you have seen it there, you can stop reading. Interesting project where one can submit a md5 hash and in a few days (I presume) you get the plain text value of them. Currently the character set a-z;0-9 [8] is supported which means that hashes created from lowercase plain text with letters and/or digits upto a maximum length of 8 characters are supported. They user RainbowCrack for cracking which essentially is a hash cracker....
I found an interesting behaviour in the Page rank feature of the google toolbar in IE. For example when I view this blog with the fully qualified URL i.e. http://www.desigeek.com/weblog/amit my page rank shows up as 7/10 and when I view it using the abbreviated URL http://desigeek.com/weblog/amit (no www.) then it shows up as 3/7. You can see both the screen shots <strong>here</strong> and <strong>here</strong> showing this behaviour. My question is, has anyone else also noticed this?...
Microsoft today released a <strong>patch</strong> for Download.Jet (32 bit edition) which I would highly recommend everyone to install - make sure you select your OS’s language before downloading it. If you don’t want to install the patch and prefer doing it manually then keep reading. I had another <strong>post</strong> a few days ago which talked a little more on this virus, if you care to read. The issue at heart really is the ADO stream in IE....
Dino writes an interesting <strong>article</strong> on how to write shell extensions in managed code. He also provides a brief overview of COM Interop covering both CCW (COM Callable Wrappers) and RCW (Runtime Callable Wrappers), which those of you who have had any experience with COM know has a fair amount of overheard and though is quite seamless to use, it is not to be taken lightly especially if you have custom data types in COM....
There has been a number of interesting things I have started noticing lately. With the whole recent <strong>virus fiasco</strong> I changed my IE security setting to High - which lead to almost every site I visited on any regular basis to crap out (which sucks and is a big failure on people like me who help design and implement some of these systems, but that is another story for another day)....
Hopefully you have heard of the new Download.Ject virus that is also known as JS.Scob.Trojan, Scob, JS.Toofeer and have taken the corrective steps to fix it. Like most other users, I primarily use IE ( about 85% of the time and FireFox the rest of the time) and need to be careful of this threat - especially on what it does. If you have not done anything to prevent this I seriously recommend that you do ASAP....
Interesting discussion going on MS and Opensource. Is it MS bashing? Is it more “meaningful”. <strong>Check it out</strong> and state your own opinion.
Found this on Scott’s <strong>blog</strong> , but Borland is now <strong>blogging</strong> (W00T) and using the same open source code as me. You can get their feed <strong>here</strong> . I quickly eyeballed it and seems like lotsa interesting stuff.
This is part 3 of the testing-series of posts where I cover White-Box testing (inspired by Microsoft’s upcoming Testing Series of good advise from PAG). You can check out the earlier post <strong>here</strong> . White-Box testing (Glass Box/Clear Box/Open Box testing) White box testing assumes that the tester can take a look at the code for the application and create test cases which look for any potential failure scenarios. You need to determine the suitable input data for testing of various APIs and the special code paths that need testeing by analyzing the source code for the application....
This is really part II of my testing series (as I have become to call it) - I had an earlier post on <strong>Unit Testing</strong> . I recently had the opportunity to review some of the new stuff coming out of the <strong>Prescriptive Architecture Group</strong> at Microsoft and here is some of the interesting things proposed by them. When you are doing Functional Testing of your application or code, it can be of two kinds - Black Box and White Box....
Scott (the author of dotText - the open source bits running this blog), has an interesting <strong>question</strong> to ask, is Unit Testing important for all to include it in all the edition of Whidbey of only Visual Studio Team Systems. I think this should be a moot point. In my opinion no developer can say he/she is feature complete if they have not done a “unit test”. How can one know if their code does what it is supposed to do?...
BBC is <strong>reporting</strong> that the first ever computer virus spread by mobile phones has been sent to anti-virus firms. No infections have been reported and the worm is harmless but it is proof that mobiles are at risk from virus writers. The worm, known as Cabir, infects phones and devices running the Symbian operating system. Anti-virus firms are divided on whether it will open the floodgate to similar viruses. Because the worm requires Bluetooth technology to travel, it is geographically constrained to a radius of about 30 metres....
Microsoft has a <strong>common sense article</strong> that is aimed for most non-technical users on how to help them stop spam. If you already get lots of spam they discuss <strong>here</strong> how to fight it. The crux of the matter is disclosing your email address. Some spammers get address lists from Web sites where you may have signed up for free offers, ordered something online, or entered a contest. They can also get your address from Internet white pages listings, newsgroups, resumé postings, and chat rooms....
Nearly three years ago TechDirt wrote about <strong>breakthroughs in atomic entanglement</strong> that could lead to advancements in quantum computing and teleportation. It seems that much of that research has continued as two separate groups of researchers have now used entanglement to <strong>successfully teleport the quantum state of an atom</strong> . As the article points out, the fact that two separate research groups came up with similar results (using slightly different methods) is particularly promising....
If you want to see how heave your site is then <strong>browse over</strong> and plug in your url and check it out. Here is how the numbers for this blog came up to: Load Time by Connection SpeedConnection SpeedDownload Time14.4Kbps85.93 seconds28.8Kbps44.96 seconds56Kbps24.84 secondsISDN (128Kbps)13.22 secondsCable (512 Kbps)6.30 secondsT1 (1.44 Mbps)4.82 secondsSDSL (1.544 Mbps)4.76 secondsADSL (2.0 Mbps)4.59 seconds Page ObjectsSizeObject TypeURL137443HTMLhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/amit/4672CSShttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/skins/bahree/style.css2990IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/Images/login_icon.jpg1052IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/Images/atom.gif953IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/images/Comments.gif138IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/images/link.gif130IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/Skins/bahree/images/xml.gif88IMGhttp://www.desigeek.com/weblog/Skins/bahree/images/arrow_on.gif4CSShttp://desigeek.com/weblog/amit/customcss.aspx It also told me what was broken - which means I should take out the time to fix it....
Karan has a very interesting <strong>discussion</strong> going on Orkut and India. Here is essentially my view on the whole topic: In my personal experience, most Indians that I have met here in USA are full of crap when it comes to India! They have viewpoint hearing that one goes “whaaaat?????” and left scratching their heads. When I dig a little more, it turns out that they have lived all their live in one small town (or a big metro) before they stepped on a plane to come here and that makes up their Indian experience and viewpoint!...
I was in meetings today with Microsoft and going over some client stuff that I cannot really talk about here. But at this client the “hot backup” is done on a remote NAS over a OC192 line and I was like what the heck is that? Turns out that has a bandwidth of almost 10 gigabytes/sec (9.6 gb/s to be exact) - wow! Imagine all the things one can do with that pipe....
On a different note than most of my entries here, last weekend I went to an Indian classical music concert by <strong>Zakir Hussain</strong> and <strong>Master Pandit Jasraj</strong> and was organized by the <strong>Bay Area Performing Arts</strong> . The concert was amazing, I have seen Zakir a number of times earlier and as always be was mind blowing. This was the first time though I saw Jasraj and did not know he sang Krishan <strong><em>Bhajans</em></strong> ....
Not long ago, one of those earnest-freshman puppydogs on the Net declared that there was “no such thing as American culture.” Right. Fish have also been known to doubt the existence of water. The following is a first crack at an ostensive definition of ‘American culture’– things shared by the vast majority (let’s say 90%) of native-born Americans. Many of these won’t sound ‘cultural’ at all to Americans; they’ll sound like just descriptions of the way things are....