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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. ...

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. One or more devise to be powered, e.g., peripheral devices, are also coupled to the human body via additional sets of electrodes. The devices may be, e.g., a speaker, display, watch, keyboard, etc. A pulsed DC signal or AC signal may be used as the power source. By using multiple power supply signals of differing frequencies, different devices can be selectively powered. Digital data and/or other information signals, e.g., audio signals, can be modulated on the power signal using frequency and/or amplitude modulation techniques. ...

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). Chris Pratley, Program Manager for OneNote has more details in this post . ...

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. You can design schemas, add data, and query local databases, all inside the Visual Studio 2005 environment. If you need more advanced database features, then SQL Server Express can be seamlessly upgraded to more sophisticated versions of SQL Server.“ ...

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. While a traditional brute force cracker try all possible plain texts one by one in cracking time, RainbowCrack works by precomputing all possible plain text - cipher text pairs in advance and store them in the file so called “rainbow table“. It may take a long time to precompute the tables, but once the one time precomputation is finished, you are able to crack the cipher text pretty fast. ...

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 here and here showing this behaviour. ...

Microsoft today released a patch 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 post a few days ago which talked a little more on this virus, if you care to read. ...

Dino writes an interesting article 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 virus fiasco 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). To my surprise I got an error saying that gmail used and ActiveX control and would not work without that. Very Interesting, because for those who come from the good old world of COM, would know that an ActiveX control is really nothing but a lightweight COM control, and why would Google, which to the best of my knowledge does not use any MS technologies need that? Check out a screen shot if you want. ...

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. I have a brief description on how to fix this and what it does. ...

Interesting discussion going on MS and Opensource. Is it MS bashing? Is it more “meaningful”. Check it out and state your own opinion.

Found this on Scott’s blog , but Borland is now blogging (W00T) and using the same open source code as me. You can get their feed here . 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 here . 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. One needs to ensure that the test plans need to be updated before starting with White–Box testing. ...

This is really part II of my testing series (as I have become to call it) - I had an earlier post on Unit Testing . I recently had the opportunity to review some of the new stuff coming out of the Prescriptive Architecture Group at Microsoft and here is some of the interesting things proposed by them. ...

Scott (the author of dotText - the open source bits running this blog), has an interesting question 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? Sure the QA/Test team is there, but their job is to ensure your code meets the functional requirements, but the basic building blocks only a developer knows best and it is their responsibility to ensure that they test it. Sadly, a lot of developers and designers have the attitude of “That is the QA’s job” - unfortunately they could not be further from the truth. I also find developers who do a unit test tend to have less bugs in their code (Note: this is my personal experience and recording, there is no experiment or sampling conducted). Since I am one of the advisor’s for PAG (representing the company I am employed with), I recently got the opportunity to review some of the new testing best practises they have coming out - lots of good common sense stuff - keep a look out for that in the near future. I will be posting some stuff from there here in the next few days too. Anyways, I would love to hear your viewpoint on the whole issue? ...

BBC is reporting 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. Then it is dependent on someone having Bluetooth turned on within that range. And as a final blow to its progress, any unsuspecting phone user in the vicinity would have to accept the virus which would be preceded by a warning that the source of the file is unknown. ...

Microsoft has a common sense article that is aimed for most non-technical users on how to help them stop spam. If you already get lots of spam they discuss here 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. Follow these tips whenever you can: ...

Nearly three years ago TechDirt wrote about breakthroughs in atomic entanglement 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 successfully teleport the quantum state of an atom . As the article points out, the fact that two separate research groups came up with similar results (using slightly different methods) is particularly promising. It is amusing, though, to note that just about every article discussing atomic teleportation feels the need to explain that this is nothing like Star Trek style teleportation. ...

If you want to see how heave your site is then browse over 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. Here is a subset of the stuff that is broken: ...

Karan has a very interesting discussion 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! How pathetic can that be? ...

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. Drooool! What is the fastest you have used? Till now I have worked on an OC12 - once this is up this would be my fastest! ...

On a different note than most of my entries here, last weekend I went to an Indian classical music concert by Zakir Hussain and Master Pandit Jasraj and was organized by the Bay Area Performing Arts . 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 Bhajans . Though I personally don’t care about the Bhajans but the rags he sang were quite amazing too - especially the ones showing his control over this voice where we went all the way from a very high note to a very flat and dull one (like from a bass). And the special treat were the Jugalbandi’s - one has to attend a Zakir concert just for that - oh what fun! If you find out Zakir is playing in your area I would highly recommend checking it out. If it happens to be the first time you zee Zakir hussain then you are going to be blown away by the whole experience. ...

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. But each one of them would be contested in one or more non-American cultures. ...

I don’t get it. Anatoly discusses how he (along with other people he quotes) don’t use the debugger in C# or any other managed code and letting the runtime find the exception and let it “deal” with it. Now I don’t know these people and they could probably be correct in the context of the applications they write, but I don’t agree with their viewpoint. Sure there are applications that would not warrant the use of a debugger (like HelloWolrd *grin*), but most of the applications I design and work on are fairly complex and the debugger is a very invaluable tool! Exceptions are very expensive (as discussed here ) and should be used wisely! Of all the features of Whidbey, the one I am most excited about is the huge improvements in the debugger and also how you an extend the debugger with GUI to inspect your complex data types. The point also holds for any managed language and not just .NET. What do you think? ...

Pocket C# is port of C# compiler from DotGNU project to Windows CE. DotGNU contains open-source runtime, compiler, tools and many other things to make free cross-platform .NET environment. I took only compiler and several required tools and ported them with some modifications to WinCE platform. This would allow you to develop and build applications using standard .NET CF and C# right on your pocket device. It’s quite easy, you almost don’t need to do anything manually - just write your code and project file and then build it with one tap. ...