prem's blog on .net, C#, and cool new utilities

Stay @ Ocean Spray, Pondicherry

2012-01-09T17:05:00.002+05:30

Had a nice little break from regular tasks by taking a small vacation @ Ocean Spray, Pondicherry. Went there during the last week of december 2011, when the rates are exorbitantly priced. Gone are the days when my kids were small enough that I can beat the peak season and get good deals on rooms, now i have joined the rat race that plans the vacation surrounding the school vacations.

Quick info for anybody looking to stay @ Ocean Spray : It's about 2 hours drive from chennai on ECR road towards pondicherry. This is not a sea side resort, so please avoid this if you are looking for a sea side resort. The sea would probably be a good 1-2 kms from the hotel and there is no proper walk way to the sea. We stayed in "Heavens Room" and we enjoyed the stay very much. It's a small room with a queen size bed and a sit out with Jacuzzi. The resort is build in a huge area with a big artificial man made lake covering a good size in the center. We found the food to be pretty good but little expensive. There is a huge swimming pool in the center of the resort and a outdoor kids play area. It is a good place to spend a weekend. It would be good resort for travelling with small kids. This might not be the place if you are someone looking at a place with tons of activities.

Artificial Intelligence class by Stanford Univ

2011-08-04T10:42:00.002+05:30

I have always loved to read about Artificial Intelligence and I just heard an awesome news, Stanford University is offering Artificial Intelligence fall class online conducted by couple of eminent folks in this field Sebestian Thurn and Peter Norvig. The course runs from Sept 26, 2011 to Dec 16, 2011. All you need is high speed internet connection and you could be listening to this class, get access to identical materials(typically offered to folks attending the course directly) and take exams associated with it and get graded.

For more details visit/signup in the website http://www.ai-class.com/

Learning jQuery

2011-07-18T14:52:00.004+05:30

Many people recommend jQuery in Action as the best book for learning jQuery, but I didn't like the style that was laid down in that book. I am not saying anything about the content of the book, it's a very good reference book for jQuery and offers plenty of details for many frequently used APIs, but I feel the layout of the book certainly doesn't offer step by step introduction to somebody new to jQuery.

Folks interested in learning jQuery would benefit greatly by visiting this video tutorial by appendTo folks, it offers jQuery fundamentals in a way very easy for anyone to grasp and also the materials are laid down 4-5 mins each per topic(like khan academy tutorials).

I would also suggest using jQuery in Action book as a reference material which it fits pretty well.

Khan Academy - Awesome site that you want your kids to spend time on

2011-07-01T12:45:00.003+05:30

I am continuously amazed by the wealth of information available in khan academy. Having started my career long back as a trainer in a software training institute, I have always loved sharing knowledge with colleagues/friends. Like any other profession you need passion to teach someone and the key is knowing how to break down complex things so people can easily understand. Sal khan has taken his part time job of teaching his cousins into this amazing wealth of information across multiple areas, I thoroughly enjoy watching his videos whenever I get time.

I want to get my kids involved with this site so they can start understanding complex topics broken down to nice smaller pieces. Kudos to sal khan for putting up a great job and doing it as a non-profit which makes it even more awesome.

Watch sal khan talk about his work in this ted video.

Nice Idea by McDonald

2011-06-06T21:40:00.001+05:30

Pretty interesting marketing stuff from McDonald -- a new ad campaign that invites pedestrians to play a game of Pong on a giant Mickey D's billboard, using only their smartphones. Last thirty seconds, though, and you'll get a free treat of your choice.

Windows 8 is going to be cool

2011-06-02T10:22:00.002+05:30

Came across a cool video in msnbc website in which microsoft gave first look of windows 8, I should say I was amazed of what they have done so far. I have always thought microsoft did not do anything different from the UI perspective from Windows 95 all the way to Windows 7 the start menu remains the same just that the size of start menu and the graphic of start menu has changed, I got tired of not seeing any drastic/cool UI improvements coming out of Microsoft. I certainly hope windows 8 doesn't become another windows incarnation with a different button for start menu and I was really amazed to see the first look of windows 8, microsoft are at last looking @ UI differently (should I say the Apple way ;) Take a look at the video

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Cool tool of the day - SSMS Tools Pack

2011-05-23T18:07:00.003+05:30

When I am troubleshooting production issues, I always have problem with having multiple SQL Server windows open trying to do update/select across different regions (I am not saying that we do updates in production on a regular ad-hoc basis but there are times we have to do that).

Fortunately, I came across a cool tool today that would reduce the confusion of which sql window I am currently in, is it development/UAT/production. SSMS tools pack is an excellent set of tools and contains the windows connection coloring feature that you can use to set which color you want to display on top of the different sql windows, probably red for your production connections and green for your development environments.

Take a look at the tool for yourself, you will sure appreciate the value of it.

Tips and Advice for Students, Teachers, and Parents

2011-03-17T13:16:00.001+05:30

Really liked this post discussing about tips and advice for students, teachers and parents, posting it for future reference

Students

Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students. Pull everything out of yourself. Work hard. Then work harder.

Success isn’t how far you got, but the distance you traveled from where you started.

Learn by trial and error, and don’t avoid the errors. Consider everything an experiment.

Learning doesn’t happen in class, it happens when you get home and look at the wall. Don’t forget to make time for looking at walls.

Be self-disciplined.

Be a self-advocate.

Learn from your mistakes. There is no win and no fail, there’s only honest effort.

Assume that others are always doing their best.

Work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things. Worrying about work doesn’t get it done, it only makes getting started harder.

Get good at something other than school-related work (like skateboarding or cooking).

Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.Subscribe to many magazines, the more pictures the better. Don’t feel bad about not reading them cover to cover, just have them around and read what interests you, even if it’s just one article.

It’s the process, not the product that counts, because you can use it again and again and it transfers.

Don’t do school-related work under pressure. Allow lots of extra time for things that are hard, and for everything else, too.

Learning opportunities are everywhere, not just in academic settings. The more stuff you do, the more you learn. But, don’t overdo it and spread yourself too thin.

Read anything you can get your hands on. Comic books involve decoding just as great literature does.

Read billboards and road signs.

Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes.

Learn how to touch-type.

Write lots of letters.

Learn to read and use maps.

Learn to read and use indexes.

Learn to use a library.

Learn to cook and deal with food.

Watch movies, regularly.

Learn to ask questions without feeling stupid.

Travel whenever and wherever you can.

Save everything; it might come in handy later.

Give others some slack; it makes life easier.

Give yourself some slack; it makes life easier.

Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s your life.

Teachers

Pull everything out of your students.

Extend yourself.

Be creative.

Don’t assess a student’s capabilities based on his or her I.Q. test scores. There’s more to people than test scores.

Don’t be scared to make a mess (mistakes) in front of students. If learning takes place through modeling, you must model the process of working things out, from scratch, mistakes and all. Few teachers do this, more should.

Assume that others are always doing their best.

Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s your life.

Parents

Be there, but don’t smother kids. Don’t be a “helicopter parent.” Not enough interest is neglect; too much involvement can smother and enable.

Keep the pressure low.

Assume that others are always doing their best.

Learning how to read and write takes a lot of time and work. Make sure you give your kids enough time and space for them to learn.

Make sure kids practice reading and writing every day. Don’t let them miss a day for anything. Sit on them, but not too hard.

Make sure there’s a World Book Encyclopedia in the house. Any year is okay. Buy it used. Using an encyclopedia is very different from using the internet. Make sure you have both.

Learning takes place after the fact, while your kid is looking at the wall, not while he/she’s in a classroom at school. When they get home, give them the time and space to look at walls.

Don’t romanticize your past too much, kids resent it and it probably wasn’t as good as you think it was.

Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s your life.

Attended Martin fowler's event in Chennai

2010-12-17T11:00:00.002+05:30

Lucky to attend event organised by thoughtworks featuring Martin fowler in chennai. I never thought in my life I might get a chance to attend a event having Martin Fowler as a speaker. He gave a talk similar to suiteoftalks that he has been following of late. The areas he covered in his talks include Continuous Integration/Delivery, Strategic and Utility projects and Domain Specific languages, none of this is new if you have been following his blog closely. I was just happy to hear him talk probably this was the first time I am meeting someone in person who has made great contribution to the software community. After the talk I got a chance to have a personal chat with him and raised question about my dilema of whether to move forward to DVCS (git, mercurial) rather than the current source control (Borland StarTeam) that we have, his direct answer was "Depends on the maturity of the team, if the team is mature, DVCS is the way to go".

Hope I get a chance to meet more people like him in the future (Anders Hejlsberg ranks high on that list).

Explaining things effectively

2010-12-17T10:52:00.004+05:30

I have always been fascinated how people come up with good visual ways of explaining complex things, this video is one such appreciative work on explanation of quicksort algorithm (link got from blog of my friend Santhosh Ahuja). Being in the software field and involved heavily in recruitment of people at various levels, what I have learnt is it's easier to find people with sound knowledge but difficult to see them possess the art of explaining things effectively (which unfortunately is a key trait needed in a personnel not only in the software field but in other fields as well).

Quicksort Explanation Video

Attended Jean Paul Boodhoo's NBDN Remote program

2010-10-25T19:31:00.004+05:30

Couple of weeks (October 11th - October 15th) ago I had the opportunity to attend JP Boodhoo's Nothing But Dot Net remote course. I was very interested to learn more about TDD and getting myself comfortable with some of the advanced concepts in C#.

I wouldn't classify this course as advanced course in C#, rather it was advanced basics in C#. The first day JP gave us a simple task of filtering/sorting sample, JP had created test cases for each of the filtering/sorting scenario and we were writing code to make the test case pass. We went from creating a simple for loop to all the way of creating generic delegates to handle most of the collection related activities, we learnt how we could use delegates and generics effectively.

The next couple of days we created a the fictitious web application that has a shopping catalog and JP taught us about using FrontController architecture for building the application.

The final day JP discussed about the Inversion of Control Container and showed us how to create a container from scratch. I always understood the concept of dependency injection but didn't have a good idea of containers, after this session I was not only able to clearly understand the need of containers but understand the inner workings of container since we created one from scratch.

JP's style of teaching is awesome, he starts by giving us a simple code piece and takes the code of the team that completes the task first and starts refactoring the code from there. His inspirational talks all along the course was an added bonus.

A cool added knowledge I got from the course was the knowledge of DVCS (usage of git and github) for coding purpose, I understand how effective DVCS is over the traditional source control repository and how to use it effectively in the current projects where we do quite a lot of branching.

I would seriously recommend this course to anybody who has been doing OOPS development (not necessarily c#) for atleast 5-6 years to take this course and understand what the real OOPS development is all about. I don't think anybody would walk out of the course and say that they are an TDD expert or anything of that sort (and JP doesn't expect you to say that as well), the course makes you understand where you stand and gives pointers on where to go from here and how to achieve your goals. I certainly think the course would have profound impact in my professional as well as personnel life. Since I was from India and JP has never been to India for taking NBDN courses, I had no choice but to take NBDN remote course, given a choice I would advice people to take NBDN direct course rather than remote course since you would be interacting with JP and your fellow developers directly which would be even more awesome. JP has promised to come down to India some time soon and I am looking forward to attending the NBDN direct course once again.

The only difficult part for me was I was attending the course from Chennai, India the course timing for my time zone was from 9 PM to 9 AM India time. I tried to get as much sleep possible during my day time, but it was not possible to get good amount of sleep and I was mentally exhausted by the end of the week.

Even though I paid for the course myself, it was money well spent. Now I am off to read through the books suggested by JP. I have successfully completed my first objective of reading through "Refactor with Wetware" by Andy Hunt. Now comes the difficult part, applying it in real life :)

Cool SQL tool - SQL Heartbeat

2010-02-19T19:10:00.003+05:30

I have lived many a days watching performance of SQL queries using SQL Profiler (Claims Inquiry??? - for people who knew about it) . Finding ways to improve the time taken and optimizing the same was a fun exercise; I always hate the idea of using SQL profiler, I always thought it was probably one of the worse Microsoft tools without good user interaction, I agreee that it was one of the powerful tools available to monitor SQL Server but not the best tool in terms of user interaction.

Anybody who feels the same way should try (free) tool SQL Heartbeat, it gives the information of your database in a visual way so it makes it easy to grasp the data.
Processes grow larger as they use more resources. Red balloons appear when locking occurs. Download it from: sqlsolutions

Interesting Video on "What stops population growth"

2010-01-21T03:39:00.003+05:30

While reading bill gates new website The Gates Notes stumbled upon a good link for a presentation by Hans Rosling on What stops Population Growth, it gives a totally different thinking on population growth in world. I liked the way Rosling uses very little time and excellent charts/graphs to convey the points effectively across to the audience.

While in the gapminder website, take a look at the various statistics they have to compare countries and how they stack up against the world. Excellent usage of charts and graphs to compare countries !!

Performance Issues

2009-12-15T11:39:00.002+05:30

I have been part of software projects where we constantly have to tune the code (C#/SQL) for performance improvements. The question you have to ask yourself before doing any code change for performance is "Does this code really warrant changes for performance issues"? Most of the time someone would say changing the code to use LINQ instead of for each loop would make it faster.. Most of the time such recommendations tend to be wrong. Write code that is readable/maintainable before thinking too much about the performance issues.

Always, Always measure your performance problems before and after making code changes to conclude that you have impacted code in a positive way. Even though this principal applies for both code that is in active development and production, it is critical in case of code that has already been deployed to production.

One of my favorite c# blogger John Skeet wrote an excellent article on this topic. He sums it up real nice in one line "Performance is important - too important to be guessed about instead of measured."

Funny Take on LinkedIn

2009-11-23T03:58:00.002+05:30

This was a real funny take on the Jod oriented social networking site LinkedIn.

Anybody who knows what a linked in is should see this :)

Cool new technology

2009-09-16T10:31:00.003+05:30

Wanted to blog about this new product/application/company that made waves in the techcrunch top 50 of 2009.. IMO is an application that would turn your iphone to a joystick kind of device for your PC games.. I think this is a nice idea, sure it's not going to beat wii in terms of gameplay, but I am impressed with the idea of controlling your PC games using your iphone or ipod touch.

I was really surprised to see that this company is run by bunch of guys from Gurgoen, India.. nice to see an indian company making waves in innovation rather than doing the mundane software development/maintenance

SQL Server Optimization tips

2009-06-15T15:25:00.003+05:30

Nice article on SQL Server Optimization tips and performance consideration for selecting SQL Server data types.

Most of the content of this article would have been greek and latin to me had I not been working in Lumenos.

I still remember those days when I used to write "Extravaganza Report" in one single stored procedure spanning 2000 lines. I have moved more toward ORM based architecture these days in my current company, but I still think a report as complex (it really was) as extravaganza needs stored procedure for the kind of SLA that was expected out it..

Scenarios when you can use struct

2009-06-11T22:03:00.002+05:30

Nice article by Chris Eargle on when we should use structs:

He mentions the following criteria for creating struct

1. Does it represent a single value?
2. Will the instance size be under 16 bytes?
3. Should it be immutable (modifications actually make a new copy in memory, forcing you to pass by ref to methods)?
4. Will this rarely need to be boxed (cast to an object)?
5. Will it usually be short-lived?
6. Will it mostly be embedded in other objects?

Click here to read the full article

Improving Process in Software Company

2009-03-30T11:52:00.004+05:30

I know I am not updating this blog as frequently as I would expect, but would like to put in extra effort to make it a place worth visiting/RSS(ing) !!! This is my 100th blog post, I am happy to reach a personal milestone.

It has been busy period for me trying to setup process in my current company. For those of you interested in knowing things that I have standardized

-> Usage of Cruisecontrol.Net for Continuous Integration
Initially i found configuring this tool really difficult but once I completed setting up couple of projects using it, I am very comfortable with it nowadays. I might not be a continuous integration guru but certainly I could fix any cc.net issue without hiring an external consultant.

We are currently using CruiseControl.Net for migration across to our QA environments as well. This has made the deployment of code a breeze.

-> NDepend for Static analysis
Ndepend is certainly one of the best tools you could purchase to have better control of the quality of code your team is putting out. The parameters I am currently auditing include number of lines in method, cyclometric complexity and comment percentage.

-> Schemaspy for generating automatic Entity Relationship Diagrams
This is a great tool for creating ER diagrams from your database automatically and provides web based output that your team could use as a reference.

I always prefer to automate as much as possible and monitor it periodically to ensure things work as smooth as possible. You would do yourself a great favour by setting up Continuous Integration, One click Code migration and report generation using a tool like nDepend on code quality.

Having worked on improving process in the current company, I want to evaluate where we stand now in "Joel Test"

1. Do you use source control? Yes, we use Borland StarTeam
2. Can you make a build in one step? Yes
3. Do you make daily builds? Yes, we use CruiseControl.Net
4. Do you have a bug database? No
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code? Yes
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule? No
7. Do you have a spec? No
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions? Yes
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy? Yes
10. Do you have testers? Yes
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview? No
12. Do you do hallway usability testing? No

Current score for my team is 7/12 on Joel Test, not good, but I certainly think we have come a long way from where we were... Hope to see this improve...

Difference between C# delegates vs Events

2009-02-20T11:12:00.002+05:30

Nice post by Julien Couvreur's on the difference between delegates vs events.

In a nutshell, the article summarizes the main differences between delegates vs events.

1. Events can be used inside an interface while a delegate cannot be.
2. Event can be invoked only from within the class in which it has been declared, while a delegate can be invoked even from the class that is creating the object.
3. Event has a pair of customizable accessors (add and remove)
4. Event signature can only be type foo(object source, EventArgs e)

Running SchemaSpy for database tables in SQL Server 2005

2008-11-25T18:15:00.001+05:30

I was looking for a tool to generate the schema diagram from my SQL Server 2005 development database. After some research I found the open source tool SchemaSpy which meet my needs, it also had decent reviews in few blogs. But I had problem running the tool to generate the Html documents for my schema.

After playing around with the option parameters, I was finally able to get it to generate the documentation needed. Couple of things to ensure before running schemaspy to generate documentation for SQL Server 2005 schema.

Download Microsoft JDBC driver for SQL Server 2005
Download Graphviz

Make sure the Graphviz installation is added to your system PATH variable. Run the following command

java -jar schemaSpy.jar -t mssql05 -db <name of the database> -host <Ip address/hostname> -s dbo -port 1433 -u <username of the database> -p <Password for the userId> -o library

Difference between Static and Singleton Pattern

2008-11-01T09:56:00.001+05:30

I wanted to blog about this for a while, b'cos I found many folks not being able to answer this question during the interview process. Few differences worth mentioning are

Singletons can implement interfaces and inherit from other classes (while static classes cannot).
Singletons can be extended (used as a subclass) while static classes cannot.
There is only one instance in case of Singletons but there is none in case of Static classes.
Singletons can be passed around as a parameter to function calls but you can't do that with a Static class.

Stella's Restaurant in Alexandria Closed?

2008-10-18T01:04:00.001+05:30

While chatting with my good friend Nick, I came to know that Stella's (a nice restaurant in Duke Street, Alexandria) has been closed for more than couple of years now. It is a nice, cosy restaurant that we used to go for lunch when we were working in Lumenos. I certainly have quite a lot of sweet memories there especially going for chipotle chicken on thursdays and happy hour(even though i don't drink.... just to have my root BEER/Diet Coke !!!).. The outdoor dining area in Stella's is a real nice place to have lunch/dinner.

It would have been a great trip down the memory lane if I could have had a chiptole chicken with some good old friends when I do go to USA for a business trip.. Probably have to be happy eating my foot long roasted chicken in Hearty Italian made fresh in the Subway across the Road !!

Lookout crashes in Vista if Microsoft Outlook connector is Installed

2008-10-17T10:00:00.001+05:30

In my office desktop, I have lookout installed to speed up searches in Outlook 2003. Lookout started crashing frequently for the last couple of days, I was not sure what the reason was and I tried to find the solution online.

After trial and error, I found out that I have recently installed Outlook connector as part of Windows Live package (I wanted to install only Livewriter but mistakenly installed outlook live connector). Once I uninstalled Live connector everything is fine and lookout is able to index my mails without any issues.

I hope this post will be of help to someone who runs into the same issue.

Nissan Around View Monitor

2008-10-16T03:34:00.001+05:30

Check out the Nissan Around View Monitor mentioned in the top 10 most brilliant Gadgets of the Year. I think this revolutionizes the way we would park our car. It gives the bird's eye view on the navigation screen. Check out this video to see the technology in action.

Use DiffMerge for Compare/Merge in StarTeam

2008-10-10T16:11:00.003+05:30

In my current company we are using StarTeam as the source control choice, I wouldn't classify it as a great source control tool but certainly better then Visual Source Safe (VSS) and PVCS Version Control that I have been using in my previous companies.

One of the best thing StarTeam offers is the ability to integrate third party file comparison/merge tools to be used from within StarTeam. I have been using Winmerge for some time as the choice of tool for Merge/Difference comparison. Refer to Jon Galloway's blog for good reference on Integrating WinMerge with StarTeam.

I have recently started using DiffMerge as the tool of choice for doing Comparison/Merging from within StarTeam. Please follow the steps mentioned below to use DiffMerge for comparison/merge from within StarTeam.

1. GoTo "Tools" Menu -> "Personal Options" SubMenu
2. GoTo "File" Tab
3. Click on "Alternate Applications"
4. Setting DiffMerge as External Application for Merge
a. In Merge Utility -> Give the name of the path where DiffMerge.Exe is located.
b. Options -> /r=$resultfile $usertip $basefile $branchtip /t1="Local Version" /t2="Merged File" /t3="StarTeam Version"

5. Setting DiffMerge as External Application for Comparison
a. In Comparison Utility -> Give the name of the path where DiffMerge.Exe is located.
b. Options -> $file1 $file2 /t1="StarTeam Version" /t2="Local Version"

Now you can start using DiffMerge from within StarTeam

Got my own Next Generation Console

2008-10-07T13:47:00.004+05:30

yahooo !!! atlast I was able to get my hands on the next generation gaming console !!! It's a PS3.. After debating between a Xbox 360, Wii and PS3 I ended up getting a PS3.

When I decided to buy a next generation console, I started with Wii since I have been reading very good reviews about the controller, but I could not find it in stock in any of the shops (Best Buy, Circuit City), so I decided to go with PS3. Hope it would turn out to be a good choice over wii and xbox 360.

Upgraded my iphone firmware to v2.1

2008-10-07T13:34:00.003+05:30

I was able to successfully upgrade my phone to v2.1 using the pwanapple tool. It was a very simple process of getting your iphone unlocked and I would recommend anybody having the iphone 2G to use this method to upgrade their iphone to use v2.1.

I am very impressed with App Store and the list of applications users can currently download. Altast, I have been able to get my hands on Kai Pond, which is a well thought out application for iphone.

Upgraded iphone to 1.1.4 using Ziphone

2008-04-15T23:25:00.003+05:30

I have been using Jailbroken 1.1.2 firmware of iphone for some time now and was pretty much happy with it. Even though 1.1.4 came out some time back and there were some jailbreak solutions available online, I didn't want to take the risk of breaking my iphone by trying to upgrade it. I had quite a lot of issues trying to upgrade my firmware to 1.1.2 and I thought I bricked my iphone in the process, luckily I only had to erase my baseband and 1.1.2 upgrade went fine.

So that day i decided that I wont be jailbreaking my iphone for any future versions until I know that it will work for sure. So when my friend offered his iphone to be jailbroken to 1.1.4 ( I guess he believed more in my abilities to break his iphone safely more than I belived myself). To my surprise the ziphone hacking method (detailed in lifehacker) was so easy that I was done jailbreaking the1.1.4 version in less than a minute.

Assuming that it will be a smooth operation, I used the same method to upgrade my iphone as well, but I was unlucky power went off in the middle of the operation and my computer went down( Even though i have a laptop the battery has drained completely and now I cannot use it even for a minute without connecting it directly to power outlet). When the power came back I could not shutdown/start my iphone, it was giving wierd error message that the "BSD root error". Luckily I was able to restore my iphone after holding down the power and home buttons, running ziphone again did the trick for me. But I should say I was really fortunate not to have bricked my iphone in the process.

I would highly recommend anyone to use ziphone to jailbreak thier iphone.

Using Vista to show multiple time zones

2008-03-28T03:06:00.003+05:30

I always wanted to have multiple time zones displayed in my system since I regularly interact with US assocites/team members. In the past I run gadgets in my desktop to acheive this, I was pleasently surprised to learn about this in-built feature in Vista to show multiple time zone easily in the taskbar.

Nice ASP.Net tips

2008-03-16T23:35:00.003+05:30

Nice collection of tips for ASP.Net 2.0 applications. The details of "app_offline.htm" was very interesting

Enabled Odiogo on my blog

2007-12-02T23:43:00.000+05:30

I read about this cool new website Odiogo, which will enable the readers to listen to blog content as well by adding audio files for each blog entry. I am not sure how many people out there will be interested in listening to blog content as audio files, but neverthless i think the idea is pretty good and sounds interesting, they are offering this service free so I went ahead and signed up for my blog. So you should now see the icon "Listen Now" on top of all the blog post and by clicking that you could listen to the blog post in audio.

I am personally not happy with the quality of conversion to audio format, but i think they would improve on this aspect.

130 years to copy my data to external hard disk

2007-11-28T20:29:00.001+05:30

I just started backing up my music to my new Seagate External hard disk and was amused to see that Windows explorer copy dialog box show that it needs 48822 days to complete the copy operation for around 9 GB of data, 48822 days equates to approximately 130 years.. I hope to be around to see that the data is copied successfully. I really don't know how they calculate the information about time needed to complete the copy operation, b'cos after a while the dialog box said that it needs only 2 hours to complete the operation.

Vista - One of the terrible technical products in history ???

2007-11-27T19:07:00.000+05:30

I was very surprised/upset to see windows vista land up in the list of one of the terrible technical products in history. I have been using Vista for the last 6-8 months and dont have any bad experiences with it and I haven't had any issues with any hardware. But I do accept that there is nothing significant in it to migrate from Windows XP. I am not sure that one reason could make it qualify for one of the terrible tech products in history.

Got my Seagate FreeAgent External Hard disk in India

2007-11-27T18:50:00.000+05:30

I have been looking to buy an external hard disk for some time to backup my ever growing collection of videos, photos (especially of my new born baby), I have realised that it's time to get an external drive to make sure I don't lose anything if my hard drive crashes some day. I have been lucky with my laptop (Dell Inspiron 700m) so far, it hasn't crashed on me, but I certainly know that I wont be lucky for long. As usual I went to Ritchie Street (Bargain Best Buy in Chennai) and got the seagate freeagent, I wanted to get Western Digital MyBook, but unfortunately I couldn't find it anywhere so I ended up buying Seagate, it costed me 4750 rupees(roughly 115 $). The reviews in the best buy/circuit city looks pretty good, so I think I bought a decent drive.

The power adapter that comes with it is for australia, so if anyone in India is buying it make sure you buy a adapter that fits Indian power outlet. But fortunately the power cord works well according to indian power output. The setup has been breeze, now I am off to transfer those songs and photos I have kept for a long time..

iPhone only working in speaker

2007-11-17T21:37:00.000+05:30

Oops !!! I am relived.. for a minute I thought I have lost my valuable possession (bricked iPhone).. My iPhone started behaving strangely today, I could make phone calls, but could talk only in the speaker and I could not hear clearly what the other person was talking. I thought there should have been a technical problem with my iphone and started to look at possible solutions and came across an interesting post that solved my issue..

I am just copying the exact text from this URL.. It fixed my issue !! I just love the internet... I could just solve any problem if I just had a internet connection :)

"Everyday I listen to my iPod on the train and use the headphones as my conversation device too. For some reason, when my headphones were plugged in, it would play music, but when I took them out it wouldn't play through the iPhone. Therefore with this and the fact that the iPhone only worked on speaker (speaker works when headphones are plugged in normally) I determined that it had to have something to do with the iPod/earbuds/headphone jack.

To fix it, I opened the iPod application and plugged the buds in, started playing music, then paused it. I then removed the buds and pressed play and it played through the phone and also allowed me to hear a conversation the standard way (up to the ear). On the train today, I must have unplugged it while it was still playing and messed something up...not sure why that would mess things up, but it must be a small bug. I tried the same thing again that I did on the train and it is still working so I feel pretty safe..just a minor hiccup. I'm glad I got it working so quickly and didn't waste too much time!
:apple:*huge sigh of relief*:apple:"

Cool new interface idea - Bumptop

2007-11-04T21:18:00.001+05:30

It's been sometime since I saw a cool new idea, the video of Bumptop showed me where the next gen Windows/Mac OS should be going. The UI is simple and resembles more of your real desktop rather than a desktop made up in current OS versions.

The bumptop project is at a very early stage but i wish it would soon be incorporated as a skin/widget for windows/mac.

Watch this video of bumptop to truly appreciate it

What type of developer are you?

2007-10-25T22:55:00.000+05:30

I came across this interesting link in mads kristensen blog , it was about testing what type of developer you are. I took the test are here is the result..

Your programmer personality type is:

PHSB

You're a Planner.
You may be slow, but you'll usually find the best solution. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right.

You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There's no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

Take up the test here.

Low Volume problem in iPhone

2007-10-02T23:42:00.000+05:30

I have having volume problem with my iPhone from the moment i bought it. I tried googling around for a firmware to fix it but couldn't find any answer even though many people have reported this problem. Atlast, I found the solution, don't laugh over this :)

I wanted to keep my iPhone clean so I haven't removed the sticker that comes on top of it and the sticker covers the receiver as well. So I made a small cut/hole on the sticker where the reciever is and boom I have the iPhone working in all its beauty and I can hear my friends on the other end clearly... I think there might be few folks out there who didn't realize so I am posting this so they could benefit from it ;)

iPhone SMS problems

2007-10-02T23:17:00.000+05:30

I have been having problems with the SMS application in iPhone, it displayed 1 message but whenever i try to view my inbox it simply crashes and springboard gets displayed. After much googling, I found the answer here.

I found the problem is with ZYB... yup. the same cool service I blogged a while ago, which can get all the phone numbers from your cellphone stored in a central repository. Apparently a message they send has few alphanumeric characters which iphone can't open ;) cool hack.. So the simple solution is to use iBrickr to delete the /var/root/Library/SMS/sms.db file. Caution : This will delete all your messages that are stored in your inbox. You can also take the approach of installing SQLite and browsing thru the records and then deleting the malicious sms alone.

Battery that will last for 30 years

2007-10-02T21:45:00.000+05:30

Next time when you buy your laptop make sure you ask for betavoltaic batteries ;) yeah... these batteries are currently under research and will soon be replacing the lithium-ion batteries. We have all been tired of having to charge our laptops every 2-3 hours, imagine if we could have a battery that could last for 30 years (that's the coolest thing I could imagine next only to iPhone)

Read here for more information.

Got my iPhone

2007-09-30T19:48:00.000+05:30

Wow !!! I just got my iPhone (thanks to Arun who brought it for me from US). I have been waiting to get my hands on this cool device from the moment Steve Jobs unveiled it. Atlast I have it in my hands, it feels so good to touch and play with it. The screen is just awesome and I love the way the product has been designed..

The guys in nokia and motorola should feel really bad about themselves, having been in the market for such a long time none of them could make a phone as cool as iPhone. I would like to meet the team who designed the User Interface for iPhone, they have done a real awesome job. When was the last time you saw a device and it worked the way you wanted it to work.. it just feels like magic to work with this device.

It took some time to unlock the iPhone in India to work with Airtel network, since it's not officially available here yet. This article with clear step by step instructions helped me unlock the iPhone, except the final step using anySIM application to unlock didn't work for me. So I have to revert to the command line unlock for this. I should personally thank Mac Kalvin who helped me figure out the final step of unlocking my iPhone. Mac Kalvin has been doing a great job for the community in india, considering that there are folks in india who charge 5000 Rupees (100 $) to unlock an iPhone, I am totally surprised that he could offer his guidance over phone/email free of charge !! Good job mate !! Keep up the good work :)

Successfully softmodded my Xbox

2007-09-22T23:06:00.000+05:30

It has been a really long week for me since I wanted to have my xbox softmodded after reading this excellent article in Lifehacker by Gina Tripani. I want to blog about my experiences from the past week trying to mod my xbox based on the post.

Note : Most of the steps mentioned in this post are already available in the web, I am trying to blog about my experience/problems faced during the softmod process.

The article mentioned that I needed the following :

1. XBox (obvious)
2. Splinter Cell (I was lucky to have the Platinum Hits version of this game in my collection)
3. Action Replay Kit
4. Home Network

Day 1:
I didn't have the Action Replay kit to start the work, so I set off to buy one from the famous Ritchie Street in Chennai (for those of you who don't know this place.. it's the combo of Circuit City/Best Buy/Gamestop for us). Unfortuntely none of them knew anything about Action replay kit, so I knew I couldn't get it from anywhere else in india ;). So I decided to look out for other options to softmod without using Action Replay.

Day 2:
I had 2 xbox controllers so I decided to use one to build my own Xbox to USB adapter it was very easy than I had expected. There are many articles in the web giving clear instructions on how to go about doing it. I didn't have soldering iron so I just taped the wires between my USB adapter and Xbox controller cable. I began testing my homemade action replay using my JOGR USB flash drive, it was nice to see that my Xbox recognized the Memory device. But my enthusiasm short lived as I was not able to copy any games from my Xbox to the flash drive. It kept saying "Copy failed". I tried to read the USB drive from my PC using Action replay software (refer to this article how to make Action Replay recognize your USB drive) but I was not able to copy any games using AR to the USB drive since it kept saying "Not enough disk space", I was confused since the 1 GB USB drive didn't have anything in it. I googled to see what could be the problem and stumbled across this page which lists out the USB drives that are compatible to use with AR software. Check out this link as well for the complete set of USB drives. I decided to get USB drive from my friends to see whether I would have any luck.

Day 3:
I got 512 MB Transcend USB drive and started testing to see whether it would work. I was happy to see the drive being recognized immediately by Xbox and was able to successfully copy my saved games from Xbox to the flash drive. Now it was time for the second test to see whether I could copy the necessary files from my PC to the flash drive using AR software. But AR showed the message "Unable to enumerate USB drive", I tried to google to see if there was any help, even though quite a lot of people have raised this question, there was no answer even from the AR software support... (pathetic). this article provided some hope but even after following the steps provided in the article I couldn't get past the error. I thought probably there was something wrong with Vista and I tried installing AR software in XP but that didn't help.

Day 4:
I got a 1 GB Transcend USB drive from one other friend and started to test my luck again. I connected it to my PC and started AR software and to my surprise it was recognized by AR software. So the reason behind "Unable to enumerate USB drive" was thrown by AR software was the usage of incompatiable USB drive, if you do get this message in your system please try with different USB drives. I copied the necessary files to the USB drive thru AR software and copied them onto my XBox hard drive.

I fired up my Xbox and loaded Splinter Cell game and loaded the "Linux" profile and clicked on "Checkpoints", I was expecting to see the X-evolution screen but my system was frozen.. I was totally baffled, i had followed all the instructions but I was not sure what went wrong now.. I googled to see if anyone has mentioned about this but noone has reported such error, so I thought I should have done something wrong.. so I started the copy process all over again and I immediately realised that by mistake I copied the NTSC version instead of PAL version.

After copying the correct version I loaded splinter cell over again and this time I was presented with the lovely x-evolution dashboard.. YUPPY !!! I was really happy to see this screen after having spent a long time working on this.. I followed the instructions mentioned in the article and successfully installed XBMC (Xbox Media Center). I was happy to rekindle my passion for hacking stuffs after a long time. Do drop me a comment if you found any part of my post useful for your xbox softmod process.

Addition to the family

2007-09-04T11:18:00.001+05:30

I have really great news to share!! I was blessed with a baby girl on 27th August :) It was one of the precious moments in my life, seeing my daughter for the first time. The last 10 months seemed a really long time for me and my wife, waiting for the little one. My daughter weighed 3 kgs and many people said she looked like me. It was funny to hear that since I didn't see anything in my daughter's face that resembled me..

Which is more cool ? working for Google or Apple

2007-06-30T20:27:00.000+05:30

Which is more cool ?? working as a software engineer in Google's reasearch team or working as a design engineer in Apple ? I thought of this question after seeing the way Google and Apple have been doing business. I initially thought of adding Microsoft into this question, but I think Microsoft lost the "cool" part few years ago (don't get me wrong.. I am still a Microsoft geek working on thier products .Net/SQL server for my bread & butter).

I am given such an opportunity I think I would take design engineer job in Apple. It would be so cool to design something which other competitors could be thinking 5 years down the lane. To add to that, I am just amazed by the way Steve has turned them around with his vision. I am pretty sure he is going to knock away the competition from giants including Motorola and Nokia by the way his company has designed iPhone.

Which one would you choose given an oppurtunity ?

Does iPhone work in India ?

2007-06-30T20:13:00.001+05:30

Atlast the apple iPhone is available for general public at last (only in US of A)!! For the first time I feel really bad about moving back to India, had I been in the US, I would have grabbed an iPhone the first day of its release.

The internet has been loaded with information about how cool the phone is and the innovative touch screen. Check out these videos from cnet website about iPhone.

> First look at iPhone
> Out of the Box : iPhone

It will be so cool when the day comes when I will be the first one to carry it into my office (i sure hope this does happen soon). Now I have to start sending emails to figure out which of my friend in US will make a trip to india soon. I couldn't find any information about whether an iPhone bought from US will work in India ?? Can anyone post a comment if they know answer this question ?

My birthday

2007-06-24T19:50:00.000+05:30

It's my b'day.. and after a span of 7 years I am spending it in India. Isn't that amazing !! I haven't been thinking about spending my b'day in India since I left to US 6 years ago.. but how quickly things change. I am back in india and spent the most part of the day with relatives. It's kinda different b'day celebration for me. I have been searching the net for interesting blogs, I saw this nice little writeup

To hate all Roses becoz you got scratched by one Thorn...
To give up on ur Dreams becoz one didn't come True...
To lose faith on Prayers becoz one wasn't answered...
To give up on your Efforts becoz one of them Failed...
To Condemn on your Friends becoz one Betrayed you...
Not to believe in Love, Becoz someone was unfaithful...

Remember that another chance will come up,
A New Friend, A New Love, A New Life...
Never Give Up !
Becoz Life is Indeed Beautiful !!!

Completed Halo2

2007-06-22T07:57:00.000+05:30

Hurray !! atlast I have completed Halo2 in my Xbox !!! I know this sounds silly to many people out there, since this game was release more than 2 years ago.. But I just got my focus on this game to complete it.. However, sports games are more of my type and I love playing Winning Eleven & Topspin :)

I should appreciate myself for completing Halo2 before Halo3 comes in september

Good pdf on Enterprise Architect

2007-06-17T00:06:00.001+05:30

My professional goal has always been to be an Enterprise Architect. I have been a mainly playing the roles of a developer, team leader across various domains but I had the privilege to be part of the Architecture team in my previous company (a fortune 500 company involved in healthcare). The organization was totally focussed on Zachman framework. But I would find it hard when there were frequent discussions between associates across organizations about the use of technology (Microsoft vs Sun vs Oracle), I think it's really bad when the CTO team gets in to details of implementation. This article in objectwatch provides a nice overview about enterprise architecture and points out of the failure of existing frameworks. I found most of them to be true. I hope you agree with my point :)

Zyb - save your phone contacts online

2007-06-05T07:58:00.000+05:30

I stumbled across this cool service offered by Zyb, it offers to store contacts, events and messages from your phone for free. This is one of the service I have been waiting for some time since I lost my cellphone with contact information that I never had backed up anywhere. I wasted quite a lot of time trying to get all the contact information again. I tried to sync my Nokia N70m and it was done in a jiffy.

I hope i could have found this service before losing my cellphone.

Top 50 gadgets

2007-05-24T07:20:00.000+05:30

PC world has compiled a list of top 50 gadgets in the last 50 years. I really had fun going through the list and looking at few things I haven't even heard about. Take a look at it and see for yourself.

Airtel 2 MBPS Plan - Stay away from it

2007-05-17T18:44:00.000+05:30

I have been using Airtel 256 Kbps Unlimited plan for the last 6 months, the speed was okie and I should say I was happy with the service. Last week I decided to make a move to 2 MBPS connection plan (limited to 4 GB download). The change was done pretty soon but unfortunately I haven't noticed significant change in my download speed.

The customer personnel keeps asking me to check the speed in their website which keeps reporting download speeds around 1.5 MBPS - 1.7 MBPS. But if I try a different site like InternetFrog it keeps reporting a download speed of 400 - 500 kbps. They have sent a technician ?? to my house who looked and accepted that there was something wrong but went back and reported that everything was right???

I am not certainly not happy with the way Airtel is working to get this resolved.. but someday I hope to see Youtube videos without any pause :)

Update : It's been a month and my issue is still not resolved and I am frustrated after talking to Airtel Customer service for hours. So atlast I have decided to go back to my 256K unlimited plan. I am seriously looking elsewhere to change my ISP.

Keyboard shortcuts for Google search Results

2007-05-17T12:26:00.000+05:30

As part of their experimentation effort Google has developed search page that can be navigated easily using keyboard shortcuts. I was expecting this from google for some time now since all the google applications like google reader, calendar and gmail have been heavily using keyboard shortcuts and they have been hugely popular among users.

Try it out and see for yourself.

Have invite for Joost

2007-05-08T19:58:00.000+05:30

I managed to be a part of the hype going around the web atlast.. I got an invite to try Joost thru the weblog of Brajeshwar. I have been waiting for sometime to try this service. I should say I am very satisfied with the quality of videos that has been streamed using thier software.

I am sure you saw folks around the net talking about how slow thier service is and how much time it takes to download thier video. I think folks at joost have not done a good job in giving out so many invites at the same time and not considering the scalability of thier system. But I think they will scale up thier servers soon and we should be able to see the channels without waiting for a long time.

I have quite a lot of Joost invites to give away, so Please leave a comment with your email address in non-spam format(ie. hello at yahoo dot com) and i can send it across to you so you can enjoy the fun.

Invalid Product Key for MSDN download of OneNote 2007

2007-05-08T19:07:00.000+05:30

I recently downloaded and installed OneNote 2007 from the MSDN subscriber downloads. To activate the product, I requested the product keys from the MSDN subscriber website but I was not able to activate the product using the product key. This is the first time I am having weird experience with a software that has been downloaded from the MSDN subscriber website.

I tried to call the MSDN support line, thier solution was to install the software from the MSDN CD that has been sent to the subscribers rather than downloading it from the MSDN subscribers online. It seems microsoft has uploaded an incorrect .iso image of OneNote 2007 and they are in the process of fixing it. Since we are using a volume user license and not everyone gets a copy of MSDN cd's I need to run around trying to hunt down the person having the OneNote 2007 Cd !!

If any one knows a solution for this problem, please leave a note :)

Update : This is a known Microsoft issue and you can activate your OneNote 2007 software by using the key you request for "Office 2007 Applications". Good for me now I don't have to run around to hunt the person having that CD ;)

How you shouldn't write a book

2007-05-07T18:19:00.000+05:30

I wanted to read about Windows Workflow foundation since I have to prototype an upcoming project using it. Initially, I picked up this book "Foundations of WF: an Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation (Expert's Voice in .Net)". I was shocked to see such a poorly written book from aPress. I could easily say it was one of the worst books I have read in terms of quality and presentation. To add to the misery the author keeps jumping between VB and copying the code to C#.. I have decided to drop the book and want to warn others who might want to pick a copy of this book..

I am going to pickup "Programming Windows Workflow Foundation Techniques" based on the reviews from Amazon it should certainly be a better book than "apress" book. Will keep you posted on my experience :)

Improving the performance of Windows Vista

2007-04-24T18:59:00.000+05:30

I came across this nice post about improving the performance of Windows Vista system across various areas (Desktop, File System tweaks, Security Center). I could see a visible difference in the speed of my laptop after making these tweaks. I am sure whoever made this comprehensive guide has put in quite a lot of effort to come up the thorough explanation.

Free Online course offered by MIT

2007-02-24T01:15:00.000+05:30

Wow !! this is the coolest thing I have heard for some time. Massachusetts Insitute of Technology (MIT) is offering FREE opencourseware is varied topics from Aeronautics all the way to Women's studies.. anyway I am interested only in "Electrical Engg & Computer Science". It has numerous topics ranging from Graphics to Compilers. They have good online course material, which is of great value. I am really enjoying reading the course on "Computer Graphics".

Choose a topic and get rocking !! My weekends are going to be busy for some time.. Don't we sometimes hope that we could have got access to such amazing sites a bit earlier in our career.
Better late than Never !!

I have an OpenID Account

2007-02-24T01:02:00.000+05:30

I have been thinking about creating a OpenId account for myself and start using it for sometime now. Today I finally ended up creating a OpenId through MyOpenId.

BTW "What is OpenID anyway?", It is a new way to authenticate yourself in the web. You can use it in any of the website using OpenId as the login mechanism. The common problem users face is there are 100 different website they access and every website has some kind of username/password, after some time it becomes tedious to maintain this info. So OpenId is a protocol developed by diverse community to address this issue. Using OpenID you could go ahead and login to a OpenId enabled site as if you have already created a username/password. Hope everyone remember Microsoft's similar effort few years ago by trying use Hotmail passport as the centralized place for hosting user info. But users quickly rejected the idea of Microsoft having all the users data in a centralized place which could be a problem down the line. OpenID is trying to achieve the same but it's by a group of people from diversified community coming together to achieve this. At this point I am not sure how far it will be successful but I like the solution it offers to the end user.

There is a good screencast if you want to learn about OpenId.

Enforcing coding standard

2007-02-20T10:22:00.000+05:30

As a team leader, I have always faced problems enforcing coding standard among my team members. You could always come up with a 20 page document which goes for a toss when the team codes crazy to meet the deadlines. To some extent you could use fxcop to enforce some rules that should be strictly followed before an assembly is deployed in the development server. But you cannot enforce some of the rules like, you want the variables in your project to follow a particular convention (camel casing/pascal casing). In this scenario a Dxcore plugin comes to the rescue, Code Style Enforcer is a tool created by Joel to enforce these constraints in the IDE itself when the developer is coding. It checks for the conditions on a line by line basis and underlines the appropriate lines that are not compliant with your coding standards.

This is the first time I am hearing about DxCore library for creating plugin(s) for Visual studio, but after googling I am finding quite a lot of good plugins that have been created using this.

I am going to install this plugin in all my team members system to enforce the standards rathar than throwing a document at them to enforce standards :)

You can create your own plugin by reading about it in this blogpost from Jason.

Down the memory lane - Trip to Maldives

2007-02-14T14:22:00.000+05:30

I went down my memory lane for a while thinking about the list of events that happened in my life an year ago.. I had been to Maldives for my honeymoon in Sun Island(feb 14 - feb 17th, 2006). I could claim that I have travelled quite a bit across the globe, but the trip to maldives could certainly be rated as one of the best destinations I had been to.

We took the air-taxi from the airport to the resort and we were able to see the corels and the different colors of the water. We were put up in a water bungalow ( where you can walk down the steps and be in water..) Isn't it amazing ??? I certainly don't have words to explain the beauty of the resort we stayed in. Water in all imaginable Blue shades, crystal clear water for miles !!!

I hope to go back to Maldives again for a short vacation sometime soon.. I would suggest maldives as one of the best vacation spot for anyone in India. Let me know if anyone is looking for further information regarding Maldives.

SQL Server 2005 Installation problem in Vista

2007-02-13T22:57:00.000+05:30

I have been trying to install SQL Server 2005 in my vista ultimate edition, but it fails with the following error. "This program has known compatibility issues" and it's failing to install core server components.

It's really wierd if I can't install sql server 2005 properly in my system how do they expect it to be fixed by Service Pack2 ?

.Net 3.0 WPF Crash Course

2007-02-12T19:45:00.000+05:30

Folks looking to learn .net 3.0 (especially WPF) can use this link to get themselves updated pretty quickly. This blog has a series of good/short posts written about WPF. It's worth the time to get a quick start on WPF.

Role of Business Analyst, Developer and QA in a project

2007-02-04T03:02:00.000+05:30

What is the role of the following resources for implementing a successful IT project? I know that thousand other roles like project manager, technical architect, development manager.. etc. exist in big companies but in a start-up company you will see that all these roles will be performed by the following key people.

Business Analyst
Typically the first person to get to know the change in business requirement, gather them and document it completely and they will be the point of contact of any questions/clarifications in the requirements document.
Developer
This person will take the business requirement and create a high level technical design document and will start coding using his favourite tool (.net) :). They should be responsible for ensuring that all the aspects of the service like scalability/reliability/extensibility of the code has been taken care of.
QA
QA is a person who should create the test cases based on "Requirements Document" and should never interact with the developer for any questions/clarifications. They are in charge of making sure the final code that gets released is error free (typically through black box testing).

Alrite... I hope all of us are in the same page with regards to the functionality of these resources. Now let's take the scenario after this code has been rolled into production. I am sure any code that gets released will have bugs in them who takes the responsibility for the bugs. This is my idea on who should be responsible for the bug.

Functionality missing
Has this been documented in Business Requirements ? If so, where there test cases created by QA to cover this ? In case the functionality has not been documented the blame should go to the business analyst and in case there were no test case the blame should go to the QA.
Scalability/Reliability Issue
The Developer should be solely responsible for such issues. These things are difficult to test by QA and the design should have addressed these issues.
Functionality not working as per requirements document
When a clearly documented functionality is not working, the blame should go entirely on the QA for not testing it appropriately.

But I don't see this process happening in many places, the developer is the first and only person to be caught for any bugs being reported and he is instructed to fix those issues within the next business day. Being a developer and hearing the same from friends working in startup companies, I am tired of working in such environment. I hope this trend will change in future and the appropriate resources will be pointed for their mistakes.

Time to reduce my weight - Part 1

2007-01-28T22:14:00.000+05:30

I have been putting on some extra too much weight since I moved back to India from US, thanks to the food provided by the company and the frequent visits made by visitors with Sweets(pure ghee). My weight is around 83 Kgs now...I know that's a lot.. So I am going to make concrete efforts to bring it down below 80kg (that will be my first target, once I am able to achieve it I want to take it down further).

I came across a nice post on reducing your weight. It suggests good workable tips to reduce weight and to keep it away. Let's see if I can implement it and get some real results. Will keep you posted about my results in this blog.

E-Mail from Paramount airways going to Yahoo junk folder

2007-01-17T00:08:00.000+05:30

I have been trying to book an e-ticket for my friend who is going to fly from Chennai to Coimbatore in Paramount airways. I used my yahoo account to get the confirmation email about the reservation process, but even after hours I didn't get any mail from the reservation process. First I thought that their mail server is playing catch-up with thousands of emails generated throughout the day. I checked again after few hours but still didn't see it my inbox.

Now I knew that there is something I might be missing, I started looking for culprit like "Did I enter my email address correctly"... yeah ..It's rite.. so now looking for the second option I started searching through my spam folder in yahoo.. and I was happy to see the mail from paramount sitting happy inside that.. I hope this post will be helpful for someone using yahoo and trying to book their tickets through paramount airways.

Getting started on WCF

2007-01-16T23:54:00.000+05:30

If you are looking for article to get started on WCF on .Net 3.0, Microsoft has a decent e-learning course
Clinic 5137: Introduction to Developing with Windows® Communication Foundation and Visual Studio® 2005. I wouldn't say it's one of the best ways to get started on WCF, but if you have been looking for something on WCF to get started, this might be a good place to start with.

I tried to read blogs related to WCF, listen to podcasts, etc.. but personally I have been waiting for the book by Juwal Lowy on Programming WCF. He is the guy who can explain you WCF inside and out. Make sure you pre-order yours with Amazon.

Microsoft .net Interview Questions

2007-01-15T22:04:00.000+05:30

Shivprasad Koirala has written/composed an excellent pdf file of interview questions on .Net, anyone attending interview on Microsoft technologies will benefit a lot from reading this. It's a pretty big .pdf file having around 528 pages. Even though I have not read through from end-to-end it covers many areas of Microsoft Technologies upto .Net 3.0.

But even others not looking from interview perspective has lots to learn from this .pdf file and brush up their knowledge on various subjects. It's a pretty nice gesture by the author to publish this well compiled .pdf file free for users.

Good wallpaper Collections

2007-01-15T21:58:00.000+05:30

Check out this site for getting good wallpaper collections. They have collections in various areas like XP theme, sports, flowers etc.. But I really loved the collection of wallpapers they have on Apple. I have been looking to give my Vista an Apple laptop look and the wallpaper available in the site helped me achieve that.

IASA Launch of Chennai Chapter

2007-01-11T12:57:00.000+05:30

10th January was an interesting day for IT Architects(includes both categories aspiring and folks who have already attained that designation) in Chennai. It was the launch of IASA - (Internation Association of Software Architects) chennai chapter. The event was sponsored by Microsoft and was held at Taj connemara. Around 400 associates attended the event and it had interesting sessions by Paul Priess (president of IASA) and Vivek Bhatnagar (Microsoft India). From what I can gather from the meeting was IASA is focussing on

Developing more IT architects in India
Providing guidance for existing architects to go to the next level
Creating a good networking forum which will bring all IT architects working in different companies

To summarize, it was nice to meet fellow architects working in other companies and gather some good ideas. Looking forward to have more such sessions in future.

Cool feature in Google Reader

2007-01-04T16:28:00.000+05:30

I simply love this new feature in google reader. The new feature provides "trends" which is very useful in visually analysing our reading trends and subscription trends.

Reading trends gives you data like how many posts you have read/starred/shared in the last 30 days. I currently have 18 subscriptions in my Google reader and I have read 840 posts in the last 30 days (I feel good about it).

Subscription trends gives you data about the feeds (how often they are updated). This is a nice way to identify whether you have some dead feeds that have not been updated which you are better off removing from your list.
It also provides interesting graphs about what time of the day do we ready our blogs and what day of the week we read them as well.. (pretty interesting to see my midnight bar soaring above the rest).

You can read more about it here.

Is google going downhill

2007-01-01T21:52:00.000+05:30

I read a good article by Nathan Weinberg about how "Google ends year on sour note". It was an interesting article about how Google has lost credibility in some of its core areas including deleting all mails from 60 gmail accounts (even worse they don't have any backup).
Even though I have an email account, I primarily use my yahoo account but have been thinking for some time now to permanently to switch over to Google. But this will make me think a while before making the decision.

It's bad that even orkut was down for around 22 hours over friday and saturday. To add to the misery Blake Ross of firefox came out against google for promoting its own products for tips as part of search result.

I personally don't think that the quote by Nathan "By the end of next year, no one will like Google as much as they do today" is going to be a reality in a year from now. I believe google is a company with good vision and they will take a quick steps to regain the trust of end users.

2007 is going be an interesting year with some of new enterprenaurs like Powerset entering the search market. We have to wait and see who the next google is going to be...

Resolutions for the new year

2006-12-31T10:24:00.000+05:30

I generally hate the idea of taking resolutions for the new year. I am certainly not one among those who think about setting resolutions just for the sake of a new year. I personally feel that you can make a new resolution and stick to it starting any day of the year.

But I have few resolutions I have been following for some time now and I want to continue to stay focused on them in the new year.

Blog good developer content - I want to make sure my blog is updated with useful .Net 2.0/3.0 content.
Be proactive - I have been using rememberthemilk website for sometime now for managing my to-do list and I should say it is going okie. But I could certainly improve my multi-tasking ability.
Financial Planning - My father has always my financial advisor all through my life. Personally I am really bad in financial planning, however I think I am getting better in this area. But still has to go a long way to be in a position to do financial planning without my dad (aka financial advisor).
.Net Certification - To obtain MCTS (Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist) certification. I don't believe in getting certification for landing a better job offer or being offered a better position in a company, but I certainly think it's the best way of keeping yourself updated with the latest technology.
Reduce my weight - I think this is always going to be on my list.. I personally think this is one resolution that is tough to keep. My recent relocation from Virginia, USA to Chennai, India is making the matter worse. I am getting pampered by my friends and families with sweets that I find really hard to resist.

I hope to stay focused on these resolutions. Will keep my blog updated about how things are going..

Wishes for a Happy New Year 2007 !!!

Want to be a hacker

2006-12-29T00:04:00.000+05:30

I have always been fascinated by what hackers are capable of doing. I have always wanted to be an ethical hacker some time in the future, but the problem is there is not much courses available on "Hacker" nor there is books available on "How to become a hacker in 21 days?".

Last night I got some free time to browse about hackers and came across this hackthissite. It is a pretty good site with nice challenges on hacking. It was very interesting to solve those questions. I wanted to try solving some more puzzles from that site to keep my brain working/thinking in different ways. Hackers normally tend to think way too out of the box. I would suggest any developer looking for something challenging to take up the basic challenge mentioned in their site.

Some other sites worth mentioning are

ngsec - http://www.ngsec.com
Try2Hack - http://www.try2hack.nl
HackMe @ Elderson - http://hackme.elderson.net
Mindlock Security Challene - http://mindlock.bestweb.net/join.php
Zebulun Challenge - http://www.cyberarmy.com/zebulun/
Root Hack - http://www.roothack.org/
DataFort - http://hack.datafort.net/
HackNull - http://hacknull.com/
Digital Evolution - http://wargames.unix.se/

Happy Hacking :)

Working on Google API's

2006-12-17T21:18:00.000+05:30

I have been thinking to add a search functionality to my web site for a long time. Atlast I got time to sit and code last night. I was impressed after checking the Google AJAX API , it is well supported with good samples. After digging through some samples I started to work on integrating the search inside Blogger Beta, I thought it's going to be a piece of cake since both of them are from the same companies... but it turned out to be a tough nut to crack, till I was able to find some help through Hoctro and thephotofool. So atlast I have added search in my website. It felt real nice to spend some time working on improving my blog. Check it out when you have some time and let me know if you like it.

How to keep yourself updated?

2006-12-14T10:32:00.000+05:30

"How do you keep yourself updated with latest tech-news/technology? " is one of the common questions among software developers. Considering that there are new tools/websites introduced every day, we need to spend atleast 1-2 hours everyday just to be informed about them.

My suggestions for keeping yourself updated will be

Read good blogs - This is the best way to keep yourself abreast about what is happening in the industry, since most of the blogs are written by end users after using a particular tool/website it gives a better idea than the manual found in the particular website.
Read websites aggregating latest tech news and nice tips - To begin with you might not know which is the best blog so go to site like techmeme, digg to get informed about the latest tech news. Also, make sure you read Lifehacker.com, it will improve your day to day life with computer much easier with tricks you have never heard before.
Use a Blog Reader - Make sure you have a good blog reader to automatically fetch posts from your favourite blogs/tech-news sites. Even though there are hundreds of blog readers, I recently started using Google Reader and I am loving it every minute. Since it is web based you can easily use it across multiple systems and it's from GOOGLE :).
Listen to Podcast - Most of us dont have enought time to spend browsing online. we spend valuable time in commute but podcasts make sure we use that time usefully. There are many sites like scotthanslemann minutes, dotnetrocks offering good podcasts on weekly basis. Download them to your i-pod and you will notice that your commute became more productive.
Learn with tutorial videos - Sometimes I hate reading books to learn something new. Try to see if there is any free tutorial videos available for the particular technology. Tutorial videos reduce your learning curve for a new technology. The other day I was looking for some tutorials for Asp.net Ajax . It was really nice to see so many videos on that subject which made it real easy on me to start learning something new.

Let me know if you have any other tips up your sleeves to keep yourself updated..

Conversion to Blogger Beta

2006-12-10T23:41:00.000+05:30

I noticed the link to blogger beta site couple of months back. Just for the fun of trying it out I created a new blogsite and started trying out new things in the beta version. I didn't find anything cool at that time and there was no option to migrate an existing blogger site to the beta version of blogger. When I was about to sign-in to blogger, I noticed a link to migrate the existing blogger site to blogger beta. Migrating the blog was a painless process which would have taken only about 2-3 mins. I hope they didn't loose any of my prior posts in the process. But from the beta dashboard I am still not able to view my previous posts (a note says it will be available soon). I haven't found anything exiting to write about the new blogger site so far but will write a new post if I do come across anything interesting.

As a part of migrating, I have played a little bit around the color/font of this blog and minor stuffs. Hope you like it better. I am no graphical designer but I hope I have done a decent job. Drop a comment if you don't like the way it looks

Cool tool for automating repetitive tasks

2006-12-07T01:47:00.000+05:30

I am sure most of you have to do repititive tasks @ work like writing the same SQL query for debugging a certain issue, creating a particular email template, etc. There are few ways to automate things in individual application like creating a new template in outlook. But if you are looking for a utility which can work across all applications in windows take a look at AutoHotKey.

It is more than text replacement/macro recorder, it includes a nice scripting language which can be used to do almost anything which needs to get done using few shortcut keys. I just downloaded and installed it and started playing around with the .ahk file. I was having so much fun and now I have automated almost all my tasks which I used to type over and over again. I wish I knew about this tool sometime ago. I would certainly say this is one tool any developer should have in his system.

Happy autokeying :)

Improvements in Scheduled Tasks in Windows Vista

2006-12-05T23:08:00.000+05:30

I am sure most of you would have used Windows Scheduler to some extent in earlier version of Windows. After installing Vista I wanted to automate the processes like Defrag, diagnostic tools, etc in a scheduled manner. So I started to search for scheduled tasks. (In vista it is under All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Task Scheduler).

I thought it will have empty list of tasks but was rather surprised to see a total of 16 tasks. There are pre-scheduled tasks for doing defragmentation (which is really good) but I was not sure about the other 15 tasks. So I started doing some analysis and stumbled upon this article explaining about the Task Scheduler in Vista. Features of Task scheduler has improved tremendously from previous version of windows. A task in vista now resumbles more closely to a Job in SQL Server. A SQL Server job can have a series of tasks and you can configure that second task can fire only when the first task completes successfully. I was always thinking some day Microsoft will make scheduled task more close to the SQL counterpart. They have done that exactly in Vista. The coolest thing is now we can have tasks triggered based on actions like Scheduled time(defacto standard in previous versions), On Startup, On Logon, When system is idle, when a specific event occurs (some error is written to Event Viewer). I am sure all the administrators are going to have fun time scheduling new tasks.

Happy Scheduling :)

Neat tricks for Google Search

2006-12-05T08:02:00.000+05:30

Everyone knows that searching the web using Google (the de-facto standard search engine for most developers out there.) is an art. Sometimes we spend hours together trying to find the website/information we are trying to look at but get frustrated to see everything else show up other than what we exactly want. I have been in this situation some times and you just feel like you are searching for a needle in a haystack. Remember that you trying to search thru Millions and Millions of web pages that are indexed by Google.

I think I have improved by search query tremendously after reading good article on tips for searching Google. I was totally surprised with the use of "~keyword" by Google.

Happy Searching ~~

Tools to be more proactive

2006-12-01T20:21:00.000+05:30

I have been procrastinating a lot of my tasks for the last few weeks. I am not sure whether it is due to the nature of tasks I have been getting both at work and home. But i finally decided that I have to do something about this and start being more proactive about my tasks before people start complaining about my laid back nature. I needed a new way to start managing things and not forget about my tasks. So I thought of getting back to my old fashioned way of using yellow sticky notes all over my desk once again. But I wanted to change my habit and wanted to do a better job with one of the online to-do lists (not to mention free) available in the market.

So after googling for some time i came across a nice article written by Brian Benzinger. Anyone who wants to try different online to-do list apps before finalizing one should go thru the list of all applications he has mentioned. I am sure he has spent atleast a whole day on research before coming up this article. I spent couple of hours trying out the different applications he has mentioned before finalizing on RemembertheMilk. The name is kinda funny that I thought of staying away from this application. But after starting to use it for some time I found it so cool and I think I am going to stick with this for a long time. The best thing I like about any web application is the keyboard options they would support. I have started to expect this from every web application after using Google reader for the last one month. RTM supports cool keyboard shortcuts and I am having a blast using them. At this point I am not sure whether continuous usage of this tool will help be more proactive. But I think atleast I have made a start somewhere and hope this continues for a while. Will keep this blog entry updated about how my efforts to be more proactive is working out.

Got Vista & Office 2007 Installed

2006-11-26T12:06:00.000+05:30

After patiently waiting for nearly 24 hours to get my MSDN Windows Vista downloaded to my PC, I was able to install it in my PC last night. I should say it was worth the wait. If I remember correctly this is the first time that I had a troublefree installation of Windows OS. I have Windows XP in my system and I installed Vista so I could dual boot into both the systems. Other than the interface and the graphics I dont find any major change in the OS. Microsoft has put in quite a lot of effort for the graphics. For a minute I was thinking that I was looking at a Macintosh system and not windows.

But so far I haven't seen anything worth in Vista which will force a user to go out and upgrade the current version. I tried out Media Center and it looks really cool. I also installed Office 2007 after reading quite a few blogs mentioning the ribbon interface. It looks very and feels very different. As an occassional user I found it really nice visually. But we have to wait and see what the end user who is going to use it for the whole day. I didn't like the gadgets on the desktop I feel it's just waste of precious desktop area but some will like it. I am sure there is a new market for developers to create new widgets.

I will keep blogging about the other cool things which I find in Vista.

Xbox 360 for only 100 $

2006-11-23T19:40:00.000+05:30

Can you believe it ??? Amazon is giving out 1000 units of xbox for only 100 $. I saw a Amazon poll last week presenting a list of items they want to offer at really low prices and they had Xbox 360 for 100 $ instead of the standard 299 $. I was pretty sure people will vote for xbox 360 and the results came y'day that they are going to offer Xbox 360 for that price.. Wow !! I am really excited. It is going to be available in sale starting at 11:00
AM PST(thanks brian for correcting that). I am sure it is going to available for not more than 10 seconds.

Wish me luck !!! I hope I end up getting one of those !!!

Test Driven Development in .Net

2006-11-23T10:13:00.000+05:30

I am sure every curious developer will be interested in learning about the test driven development (TDD) methodology. While developing a new software a software developer takes the approach of design and then coding. But TDD emphazies the opposite, stressing the need to prepare test cases even before writing the code. Take a look at this excellent article on how to learn the TDD for a sample C#.net project.

The author explains the advantage of using TDD and how to buildreusable test cases for a project. I have always been interested in implementing it for my previous project but the domain of the project (healthcare) and unrealistic deadlines for some of the projects made it really tough to implement the same. Creating the automated test cases in most cases will take more time than the actual coding itself. But I am sure I could have done a better job in some of the areas had I used TDD. Nunit is a great open source tool available for doing automated unit testing. So go ahead and try implementing TDD for your projects and let me know what you think about it.

Do you want Free Software ??

2006-11-17T19:56:00.000+05:30

Lifehacker has posted a post about a cool new site for downloading free software giveawayoftheday. Read "Free software" it is not shareware, not freeware but commercial software which you should normally pay a fee to use is available to download freely. I am not sure how this business model is going to work. The website claims that it will pay the company money to make the software available for free download. The site is in beta now and I think it has been functioning only for few weeks now, but I haven't seen any sensational softwares available free over there.. But I certainly dont hope to see Vista or Age of Empires over there anytime soon. But would be nice to get some really nice free softwares.. so keep watching !!

Cool tool for Remote Logging - LogMeIn

2006-11-16T20:47:00.000+05:30

This is the coolest tool I have found in a long time. Check it out in Logmein. This is very useful if you want to remote login to one computer using a browser. I just tried it out by installing it in my home laptop and logging in remotely from my office laptop. Now I can take a look at any file/code in my home by using this tool and all I need is an internet connection to access them. I am not sure about the security of this application. But I am sure the developers who thought about this kind of an application would have put in decent thought about the Security aspects of it. You have pay if you want to sync files between the computers. But you can always use foldershare which is a better tool to sync up files between different computers.

I would strongly recommend this to be installed in your parents PC and you can troubleshoot any issues easily from anywhere as long as they are connected to the internet. WOW !!

The last few days have been really fun trying to check out the interesting tools that I have missed out for some time.

Portable Applications - How far will they go?

2006-11-15T20:43:00.000+05:30

Have you heard of this term "Portable Apps" ?? When I heard of this term for the first time I thought it was some kind of application which is written in Java which can be easily ported to other platforms.. ;) But that's not the case.. The definition goes something like this

"portable - carried or moved with ease
app - a computer program like a web browser or word processor
A portable app is a computer program that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any Windows computer. When your USB flash drive, portable hard drive, iPod or other portable device is plugged in, you have access to your software and personal data just as you would on your own PC. And when you unplug, none of your personal data is left behind."

from the site PortableApps.

It's funny that oneside world is moving towards bigger machines with GBs of RAM for hosting faster/bigger applications and on the other side we have started looking for applications with small footprints that can be carried in a USB drive mainly to minimize the security theft of our data. I think employers should start forcing employees carrying sensitive data to start working with PortableApps thereby reducing the chance of data theft that has been happening recently with the reports of lost laptops with sensitive customer data.

I am surprised to see so many utilities/audio/video/games available for portable apps. I think one good outcome of this will be the shift in the developer mindset to develop applications with smaller footprint which has been lost in the past decade b'cos of the availability of huge storage spaces.

History of Computer Programming Languages

2006-11-15T20:32:00.000+05:30

I came across this cool web page showing the history of computer programming languages in this diagram. Someone must have spent quite a lot of time to comeup with this pictorial representation. It's a common saying that "A picture is worth thousand words" and that's exactly true when you see this picture you get the whole idea of the history of Computer Programming languages

Site of the Day - BetaMarker

2006-11-14T20:03:00.000+05:30

I came across this cool site - BetaMarker it has an extensive collection of shareware/freeware tools/utilities for various areas like System Utilities, Audio/Video..etc.

I was looking to download a password manager for a long time to use in my system, since it was becoming real difficult to remember/cut & paste passwords from the text file I used to maintain. So I downloaded "Roboform" from BetaMarker will write another blog entry to say how roboform has been helping me maintain my passwords. So far I am happy with it.

Cool New Site - Zamzar

2006-11-03T18:50:00.000+05:30

I came across a cool new site probably it has been around for a long time, but I came across it today. Zamzar is a site which provides you the functionality to convert your files to different formats without downloading any utility in your computer. They have multiple options for converting doc, video and audio files. I will use it going forward when I am having tough time especially for converting between various video file formats.

Removing Special Characters from a column in SQL Server

2006-10-17T12:12:00.000+05:30

Recently I got an interesting SQL Server puzzle from one of my collegues. The question goes like this. There is an existing table containing UserId and password and we need write a query to remove any special characters from the UserId columnin the table. My first instinct was to write a cursor to acheive the same. But obviosuly cursors are always associated with performance issues so we need come up with someother solution. So I started writing some code and googled for some ideas. Then I cameacross a neat trick in a website (I forgot the link but I would like to appreciate whoover wrote this piece of code)

Declare @TmpTable table (UserId Varchar(30))
Insert Into @TmpTable values ('pr_()em%')
Insert Into @TmpTable values ('r*^#am)')
Select 1
While @@Rowcount > 0
Update @TmpTable Set UserId = Replace(UserId, Substring(UserId, Patindex('%[^a-zA-Z0-9]%', UserId), 1), '') Where Patindex('%[^a-zA-Z0-9]%', UserId) <> 0
Select * from @TmpTable

I am sure anyone who has been working in SQL server for some time would this piece of code :). Check out how cleverly @@rowcount has been used to run the update statement recursively in a loop.

Move to a new company

2006-10-06T17:32:00.000+05:30

Having worked in healthcare domain for the last 3 years I decided couple of months back to move into a different area. After some serious thinking I landed in a company providing financial solutions. I just attended thier 3-day induction program and the line of products they offer is pretty interesting. I was always interested in knowing more about how electronic transactions happen from the time a member swipes his card in the ATM/Point of Sale (POS) device. I think I am in the right place to know the answer.

Still trying to get adjusted to the new place/collegues :) after seeing the same familiar friendly faces for the last 3 years. I sure miss my old collegues a lot but that's the way life goes...

Cool Expensive Headphones

2006-09-14T08:43:00.000+05:30

I came across this website when I was reading a blog. Ultimateears is supposed to be one of the best headphones out in the market. Their custom fit ear phones looks completely wierd and the price is expensive.. a cool 900 $ ( yup I meant Nine Hundred dollars). I hope to try these headphones one day just to see is it really worth the money :)

Web 2.0

2005-12-29T17:20:00.000+05:30

Here's a nice collection of all the best 2.0 web software that are currently available on the net.

http://web2.wsj2.com/the_best_web_20_software_of_2005.htm

I was really happy to see one of my favourite sites del.icio.us noted as one of the best social bookmarking sites. I am going to try all the other cool sites (mainly voo2do and calendarhub) will present my thoughts on them as a blog entry soon.

Different Architecture Roles

2005-11-21T21:17:00.000+05:30

I was always confused to hear people mixing the following terminologies
System Architect, Enterprise Architect, Solution Architect and Application Architect.

In many small companies, all these positions will handled by one person with the tag "Technical Architect". In bigger companies since a single person can not have expertise in all these fields, they have seggergated into more specfic chunks.

Enterprise Architect : One who takes care of the systems integration at the enterprise level. They are very superficial and do not have any techinical know how. They are just interested in the integration of the products at the department level and adherence of all projects to the corporate system standards.
Application Architect : One who knows the product in and out. He may not be strong in technical details but understands the concept.
Solution Architect : The guy who designs and makes the descions and presents the solution with low level technical details.
Systems Architect : The guy who basically knows how to configure machines and servers and have indepth knowledge of opertating systems and all other hardware realted stuff.

Manning does it at last

2005-11-09T09:22:00.000+05:30

Boy !! Did he do it in style :) I am talking about Peyton Manning's Monday night performance against New England Patriots. The colts thrashed patriots all night, right from the word go I think it was clear that Colts are a far superior team than Patriots this year. Personally, having supported Indianapolis for the last two years, I have got increasingly frustrated with the way they always lose to Patriots in Foxborough year after year. At last it feels good to see the bad karma (beating Patriots in New England) being taken out of Manning's career which has otherwise being absolutely amazing.

The Patriots have always been a good team under Bill Belichek and Tom Brady as their QB. But after some time it gets real boring to see the same team win the super bowl over and over again. For a change it was nice to see a frustrated Tom Brady and coach Belichek throwing the red flag to challenge a clear Touchdown pass.

Installing Windows 2003 on Inspiron 700m

2005-11-04T04:38:00.000+05:30

I have been having a tough time installing Windows 2003 on my Dell Inspiron 700m. The installation will proceed for some time and will freeze exactly at the 34 minute mark and I couldnt find help anywhere. Till I came across this article that explains clearly the steps need to be taken for installing windows 2003..

Now let me get back on track to install the Team Foundation Server (beta) on my laptop. I have been trying to play around with Team Foundation for a long time after reading the cool features it contains. Will keep posting about anything cool I come across.

Linq (Languange INtegrated Query)

2005-11-02T04:11:00.000+05:30

I had been looking at some resources to start my quest in C# 3.0(especially LINQ). I came across this channel9 video on Linq by Anders Hejlsberg.

It was a nice video with samples that will help you get upto speed on Linq. I am surprised that guys in Microsoft keep coming up with some cool ideas for every new release.

Everyone will agree that there is a big gap between the relational world and object world. I think Microsoft is trying to reduce that Gap with LinQ. I can already see many ways of implementing Linq in many areas in my project.

VS.Net Tip(s) of the Day

2005-10-26T01:57:00.000+05:30

I came across some cool tips for use inside VS.Net.

1. A Cool feature of VS.NET is its ability to launch multiple projects and have a debugger attached to them. If I have an application which is using .NET Remoting, so I have a remoting host, which is an exe, I have a client who’s is going to launch remote objects. Also I’m going to have them in separate exes. I can normally run only 1 Exe at a time within the same solution. And so typically what I have to do is after I launch the client I have to go to the host and explicitly start the host to get the second exe I need to work with and then the two are actually going to be talking with each other.
Now this is kind of tedious. What I can do instead is I could go to the solution properties, select multiple startup projects and select the projects I want to start, in which case I want to start the host and I want to start the client. I can even change the order in which the client or the host are going to be started. Now when I click okay if I click the go button VS.NET is going to launch the two exes and it’s going to attach itself to them so I’m going to have the same debug session for both exes. Very handy and useful when dealing with multiple exes.

2. If I try to compile a new project and deliberately add some compilation errors to i. After trying to build, If I look at the task list I'm going to see that the errors of compilation is being added as a task for me to fix. I can also explicitly go and add a task in my task list. Now you can also do // and type to do. And it turns out that to do is a recognized token by VS.NET and the moment you say to do it would add that line to the task list. And you can actually your own constants and your own token to the task list. If you go to tools, options, task list you can add your own custom Task List. Having your own custom task list will be helpful when you’re looking for other things to do in your project you don’t have to literally do a search in all files and look for to dos. Just look at the task list, it will show you all the things you need to do.

3. In C# only there’s something called pre and post build action. This allows you to run a command line before and after a build. I want to do some pre and post-build action in that class library. So if I go to the project properties I have build Events. This command line, the pre-build defense is going to be executed before the build starts. A typical thing to do in the prebuild is to do a clean build, meaning remove all bin folders. A post-build allows you to run something after the build. A typical thing you want to do is you’re going to maybe install this class library in the GAC on every build.

I read these tips from an MSDN article by Jual Lowy the Great(yup ... a Software Legend too). I found it very useful.

Tip of the Day

2005-10-18T20:23:00.000+05:30

I found this really cool tip for keyboard users in Visual Studio .Net.

If you go to the find combobox (Ctrl+D with the default keyboard mapping) and you type "> open" (without quotes). The ">" flips the find combobox into a mini Command window. The "open" part is the aliased command to the "file open" action. The super part is when you press space and the first character of the file you want to open anywhere in your solution, a dropdown window pops up with the files and folders that start with that letter. (thanks to Peter Provost)