Deep dive .NET 3.0 - Review

The deep dive session was held last friday, with Praveen Srivasta doing 2 sessions on Vista for developers and Office for developers , and i did a session on WF (Workflow Foundation).

My session on WF went ok, but i ran out of time and had to skip the demos on State Machine Workflows and XOML only authoring mode. I am very interested in Workflow technologies and i do feel WF is a technology that is as important and cool as WPF and WCF. If anyone have any questions or comments do post here or in the .NET forum.

Deep dive on .NET 3.0

Time for another deep dive and this time it will be on .NET 3.0 (Along with Vista). This will again be organized by the INETA and CDNUG. It's scheduled on the 8th of December at the Distance Learning Centre. More details coming soon ...

SQL Server woes on Vista

After i started running all my software on Vista , SQL Server 2005 is the only thing thats giving me a bit of trouble. Tried connecting to my database server using Windows Authentication but i keep getting an invalid login error. For some strange reason analysis server is connecting perfectly but not my database server.

When i disabled UAC and tried connecting again, the connection to my database server works. Not sure if i am missing out something but for the moment whenever i have to connect to my database server i have to disable UAC :( If anyone comes across any solution do post a comment.

PortableApps - Apps anywhere

I just saw the entry on Hanselman's blog on the PortableApps and decided to give it a try. I installed the standard suite on my 1 GB thumb drive with all the apps and its pretty useful. Configured Thunderbird with my mail settings, Miranda with my regular chat settings and Firefox with the necessary bookmarks of web sites and blogs i frequently visit. It's cool and now i can just connect my thumb drive on any machine and start PortableApps without any software installations or configurations. Definitely will come in handy ...

Boring few days

I was feeling so sick and down with flu the past few days. Didnt feel good at all with so much work on my plate and after installing Vista and office 2007 , i just had to keep my hands away from my laptop and just sleep. Feeling a bit better today so just decided to blog a bit and catch up on my work...

Realised one thing though, there is not much of life without the internet and my laptop. Sounds scary, but the past few days were just way too boring for me sleeping at home and doing nothing :(

Running on Vista

Finally migrated all my softwares and development tools i use on to Vista. The process was smooth except for the fact that IIS 7.0 was not recognized by my SQL Server 2005 reporting services. If you run into the same issue do check out this KB article. Other than that the rest of the softwares installed without giving me much trouble and oh yes Vista is pretty awesome.

(Unfortunately no Aero interface for me, since my VGA card in my laptop does not have enough memory to support Aero)

Windows Vista is RTM

Windows Vista is RTM today. Check out http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs for more details. What is next???

.NET Framework 3.0 released

Looks like the final version of .NET Framework 3.0 is released. Go check it out at :

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=10CC340B-F857-4A14-83F5-25634C3BF043&displaylang=en

Instructional skills and MCT

I was planning to get my MCT for a long time and finally decided to sink my feet in and spent the last weekend in Hyderabad on the instructional skills training program conducted by Equinox.

The training was conducted at ICRISAT in Pathancheru, and it was a very nice place with good accommodation and facilities for a moderate cost. The training itself was pretty good and very useful. Though earlier i planned to get MCT without attending the training session since i already train at a CTEC, It was a good thing at the end that i decided to attend. Wish i had put a few more days of leave and spent some more time in India, well maybe some other time ...

Tech-Ed was a blast

Lots of things happening lately and last week we had the tech-ed event at WatersEdge. I got to attend some awesome sessions from top notch speakers like Steve Riley, Chad Hower and Dr.Nitin Paranjape. There were a few hiccups with some sessions rescheduled, but overall it was well worth attending Tech-Ed Srilanka 2006.

MVP Award renewed

Just got the mail from Microsoft on the renewal of my MVP award for another year. This would be my 3rd year as a MVP and it sure is great being part of the community. So looking forward to another superb year ahead especially with the excitement of Vista, Office 2007 and .NET 3.0 :-)

.NET User group September meeting

We had the .NET user group meeting for september yesterday and i did a presentation on the Windows mobile 5.0 platform and how to do various tasks using it. I will post the slides soon and if anyone have any questions on the session post a message in the .NET forum

Test blog entry

This is a test blog entry from windows live writer.

Get ready for Tech.Ed 2006 Srilanka

Get ready for the biggest technology training and conference for Microsoft technolgies. Be there for learning and networking and be a part of the wave. Check out http://www.teched.lk/ for more details

Triple booting my laptop

I was planning to format my laptop and get it ready for the next few projects and technolgies i am interested on and need to work on. I needed Ubuntu linux, Windows xp and Windows vista and finally got them installed all.
So right now the GRUB boot loader loads and can choose between ubuntu or the windows boot loader. If windows boot loader is chosen then i get the choice to boot either vista or xp.
Had some problems setting up my thunderbird email client to work with my mails. I want to be able to access my emails and share the same thunderbird profile while i am in ubuntu or one of the windows OS. Finally got that setup as well (Thanks Charith), and now need to install all the development tools and set things up.

Sun developers summit 2006

Last friday i was at Watersedge at the Sun developer summit 2006. The organizing of the event was not that good and was not properly planned at all. I primaily went for the session on JME development using netbeans ide session but it was cancelled.There were a few silly comparisons made with microsoft technologies, such as saying swing has a data model for componenets and it was better than using the add method to add the data to the components as used in MS technolgies. MS developers do not use add method to add data to components. They use data source and data binding and have been using that to seperate data model from the component(view) for a long time.
A session of interest was the one on project tango on the work done on interoperability between java web services (JWS) and windows communication foundation (WCF).

Gadgets galore

I wanted to buy a good mp3 player for a long time. After reading some reviews on ipod, though it had the coolness felt it wasn’t what i was looking for. The problems with ipod seemed like poor battery life, gets scratched very easily and the file formats supported by ipod with video was very limited. So finally decided to for the Sansa mp3 player from SanDisk. After using it for a week it seems good enough for me and got to see how it behaves in the long run.
Was looking for a digital camera as well and didnt have any second thoughts in going for the Canon S2 powershot camera. It is pretty awesome and worth for the money.

Working for someone or working for me

I have been toying with the idea of completely giving off my full time job and getting totally into contracts and working on my own for a long time. I was a bit worried about not having a steady income if i go into contracts leaving my full time job but then again i had to turn down a few opportunities that came by because of the fact i had a full time job. I am right now managing both but spending less time on my contracts. But so far the best exposure and money does come through the contract jobs compared to a full time job.
So when i came across this flash movie "Declaration of Independence", i kept asking myself whether i should take the plunge into being my own boss and working for me.

Long layovers and flight schedules

I have been ignoring my blog lately the past few days due to some heavy workload. I am still in california and i am supposed to return from here on the 12th of this month. Looks like i will be having a long layover of 18 hours at the tokyo airport and airline agents just confirmed that they cannot provide hotels during that time.
So if anyone knows any good places inside the narita aiport to sleep for 18 hours do let me know.

At the Microsoft campus - Redmond

I came to redmond yesterday on a work assignment with Lionbridge and will be spending this week at the Microsoft campus. This is my second visit here to the campus and last time had a wonderful time when i came down for some work on the MCPD exams. So hoping for good time this visit too and the weather is much much pleasent than the previous time.

Swinging with Java and Unix

After a quite a long time got to work again on Java and Unix. The last time i worked on Unix was around 3 years back on a SCO Unix platform when we implemented banking systems along with a company in India. This time my work is mainly on the development area on java swing user interfaces but my work involves using Solaris and Linux platforms. I am a bit behind on my commands in Unix and using the VI editor effectively but catching up very fast.
But my preferred platform and development tools would be the Microsoft platform and the .NET development tools in the coming years, though i wouldnt mind having a taste of the other technologies as well.

Down in California

I am down in california these days on some work assignments and probably will be here for a month or so. After some time i am working on some none MS technologies these days and that helps me in knowing which areas MS is far ahead and which areas MS is yet to catch on. But uptill now i think the former is a lot than the latter.

Hi .NET 3.0 ... Bye WinFx

The WinFx is renamed to .NET Framework 3.0. You can find more details on Somasegar’s blog. So according to this i think Orcas is not going to be .NET 3.0 at least the way i see it, and i guess based on this, .NET 3.0 will be using  the .NET 2.0 compilers and the new compilers will probably ship in with Orcas(.NET ?.?)
And with that you have the new community sites for WCF, WPF, WF and WCS are available at http://www.netfx3.com/

Vista lab in Singapore

I was down in Singapore the past week on Vista lab sessions held by Microsoft. It's an exciting time with the launch of Vista beta 2 and Office beta 2. I am still not sure on what i can blog on it so i guess i will have to wait. It was fun and got to interact with a lot of fellow MVPs from India, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philipines and a few other countries. We also had a dinner outing one of the days and a couple of pics during that:

Too busy to blog :-(

Past few weeks a lot of things have been happening around with some changes in my career and along with that some good and some not so good decisions. So it was kind of a roller coaster ride and was too occupied to do any postings on my blog. So things are kinda getting settled now so thats a good sign and allows me to catch up on my blogging too.

Smart client and VSTO deep dive: Review

We had a great Smart client and VSTO deep dive event with a good number of participants considering it was the elections the day before that.One thing that was disappointing was a lot of people who registered didnt make it and they blocked out others possibly attending the event.
Dr.Nitin's presentation was awesome and the highlight of the day and i learnt quite a lot from it. It was very inspirational as well and thoroughly enjoyed it.
My presentation on "DataBinding in Smart clients" went okay and anyone interested can download the presentation here and the demos here.

Smart client and VSTO deep dive

If you live in Srilanka and if you are a developer then make sure you don’t miss out on attending the smart client and VSTO deep dive sessions held at the NDB auditorium in Colombo.
Go to http://dotnetforum.lk/register/deepdive to register

I will be presenting on "DataBinding in Smart Clients" and will be focusing on .NET 2.0 data binding capabilities.
You can also check out www.dotnetforum.lk for more details

TFS is released today

The TFS is released today. For more details check
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2006/03/16/553413.aspx

Object Test Bench in VS.NET 2005

I am not sure how many of you are aware of the object test bench in VS.NET 2005. This allows you to graphically create an instance from a class(object) in your class diagram and execute its methods visually.
Invoking it is as simple as creating a class diagram and dropping your classes there. Then you can right click on a class and go to create instance and invoke a constructor. This will create an instance object and place it in the object test bench. You can right click on this object and invoke instance methods.This is really useful if you need to create, invoke and test objects in isolation.

VSLaunch at Colombo University

There was a VSLaunch event held yesterday organized by the university of Colombo. I did a session on Language enhancements in .NET 2.0 introducing some new concepts in both VB.NET 8.0 and C# 2.0 for the students at the university. There was quite a good crowd and hopefully the session was useful for all who attended.

LINQ presentation at Students Champ Day

I did a presentation at the Students Champ day at the region Microsoft office last friday. It was slightly different from the one i did at the user group since i was putting more emphasis on the ORM part with DLINQ. Hope it was informative for anyone who attended the session.

February .NET User Group Meeting

We had our February .NET user group meeting yesterday and i did a presentation introducing LINQ and its counterparts. I hope anyone attended got a good idea on what to expect in the coming versions of C# and VB.NET
I am planning to do the same session with some different focus at the Students Champ day at the Microsoft regional office. 
Meanwhile here are some of the links to get more idea on LINQ
 http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/future/linq/
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbasic/Future/default.aspx
Also check out the video done by Anders on LINQ
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114680
Do post your comments and suggestions on the session

VSLaunch event in Srilanka

We had the VSLaunch event yesterday in Srilanka and it was quite a blast. Had a King Arthur theme throughout the day and there were some good presentations that got lined up as well. The high capacity crowd showed there were a lot of participants enthusiastic about the VS2005, SQL2005 and BizTalk2005 range of products.

Very funny Blonde Joke

Had to refer this. This is the best ever blonde joke. Check it out

WCF and WWF Go Live Licenses announced

WCF and WWF go live licenses are available. Check out the following URLs for more details:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/getthebeta/golive/default.aspx
http://windowscommunication.net
http://windowsworkflow.net
I can smell the RTMs getting closer.

Book: Programming WPF

Just got my copy of Programming Windows Presentation Foundation by Chris Sells and Ian Griffiths. I still didn't get to read all the chapters but a quick run through the book really impressed me.
When Avalon CTPs were released i installed it and wanted to try it out. But it was difficult getting the resources to try out some programming using XAML and WPF.
Finally i think i can use this book as a guide in trying out some sample programs with WPF and i will post more on this book and things i try out in WPF in the future.

Looking back at 2005

Thats another year gone in a wink and a dawn of a new year. Personally 2005 was a very happening year. I managed to do a lot of things this year and am pretty satisfied with it. A few being my MVP award was renewed, started doing technical writing and travelled around a lot this year.
Now with 2006 just starting out I need to work out what i want to achieve. I haven’t yet made any plans or anything as such but would be interesting to see what 2006 has in store.

New year wishes

Wishing everyone a very happy and prosperous new year. Hope 2006 makes all your dreams and wishes come true