October 28, 2007

Kashi Congratulating Jigar Mehta

Picture taken during BDOTNET new website opening. BDOTNET is bangalore developers user group. They recognized few technical blog writers on http://bdotnet.in/blog.. Luckily, I was one of them :)

Stay tuned..

October 27, 2007

MS Bangalore Reception..

Today, while coming back home, I was waiting for elevator.. and thought let me use the camera in my cellphone (which I hardly use Smile)

So, here is the Embassy Building, Microsoft, Bangalore reception view from outside!

Stay tuned.. Wave

Keeping up with comments section of any blog!

It was just yesterday, that I was thinking to create a new "How would it be.." post on my blog with an idea of having feedback notification for blog comments. Because, the problem was when I leave a comment on anybody's blog, and after some time somebody comes to that blog and looks at it, replies to it, I never know that my comment has been replied (this is a barrier in blog multi-party communication idea!). I have to manually keep track of all pages that I have added comment or subscribe to comment RSS (if its available!)..

And as usual I was leaving a comment on a blogspot blog, and found as always Google has just released this feature!! Take a look,

So, now, when you want to leave comment, dont worry about future replies on that comment, Just make sure you check the checkbox "EMail follow-up comments to ...." so, everytime some new comment is added, you will get formatted subject email from Google (for which you can even create a filter as I have done and labelled it as "Comment Followups")

PS: Though other blogging platform has not added this yet, but I hope they will also do the same very soon (to make life simpler! Happy)

Stay tuned.. Wave

I am for BDOTNET.. Are you??

We had opening of BDOTNET (India's Largest and Most Active Microsoft User Group!!) new website (http://bdotnet.in) and had a meeting for that this weekend.

I wrote few blog articles for BDOTNET,

I will also continue writing technical articles for BDOTNET, that way I can share content with community (with the feeling of giving something back to community!)

So, The BDOTNET committee recognized few contributor and gave them a TShirt.. Happy. Here I am posting design of TShirt, take a look..

Update: Pictures for event are @,


Stay tuned.. Wave

October 16, 2007

Getting addicted to RSS.. Help me..

Anybody has solution for this habituation? I am thinking, I am getting addicted to RSS reading.. When I get some time (be it 10 free minutes or some stretching time in my day, I open my RSS reader and start reading things there!!)

Here is what my Trendline shows..

There are pros and cons of this thing as well (if you think deeply)..

Pros:
You can get up to date with what's latest with the industry.Sitting on chair in your office, you can travel entire world.. You can increase your network in the industry. And most importantly knowledge. You never know which bit of knowledge will become useful in what situation. Ultimately, we all are knowledge workers.. Happy

Cons:
Time.. time.. time.. The only cons I could think of is, TIME.. Sometimes we need to set proper priorities to tasks, and if this habituation comes in front of real task it creates the problem.

I am still finding my way between these pros and cons.. but I think its going good.. (except next few weeks, I know I am going to have hectic schedule having both of my team members on vacation..)

Stay tuned.. Wave

GMail increasing the mailbox limit..

Yes, I was little bit worried about my primary gmail account, I was thinking if I had to take premium services from gmail so that I can get some more space because today, after deleting all spams my usage was 49%(there were around 3254 spams in my mailbox!!! I dont know when will Google get rid of this spams.. Look at live.com they dont have these much spam!! I get literally 1 spam on my live.com account everyday and where as on gmail, I get everyday almost 140-200 spams Happy)

So, when I logged into my account today, I got to know that gmail is increasing their limit.. Right now, its 3428MB but I have read it somewhere that they are going to increase it till 4 GB in near future.

So, Enjoy!!

Stay tuned.. Wave

October 15, 2007

How would it be if "Online Calendars integrates with IM"..

After a long time, posting an article in How would it be.. series. Does not mean I have stopped getting ideas, it means, I have become somewhat lazy or not getting enough time to fire a post on the idea.

So, today's idea is, if Online PIM systems like Yahoo, Google, Windows Live which has IM support as well as Online Calendar. I heavily use calendar (corporate calendar for customer meetings and google calendar for my personal tasks) for managing things. Now, when an event occurs in calendar, these online calendars have already integrated with their respective email services, and some of them have even integrated with SMS systems so they send you SMS (like Google Calendar). But wouldn't it be great if they integrate with their IM system? The end result of it would be, whenever event is about to occur, it would send you a short instant message with all event detail to your IM (for people like me who are online almost all time, it will be really great and too fast!!)

What do you think?? Share your thoughts in comments section..

Stay tuned.. Wave

My blog posted on B.NET Community website..

We have India's largest and most active Microsoft User Group in bangalore named B.NET (http://bdotnet.in). Recently I have got my blog posted on the community website.

Its about AppID (what is AppID.. its topic related to DCOM, COM+). Access it here,
http://bdotnet.in/blogs/web/archive/2007/10/15/what-is-appid.aspx

Feel free to leave comment if you have any question..

Stay tuned.. Wave

Indiatimes.com gets AJAX based mail interface..

I was reading IT magazine (October issue) and found that Indiatimes has got AJAX based interface for their email. I have an account at indiatimes but had just forgot it (I never check emails because of that world's oldest interface!!) But I opened it now and its cool now. You can drag and drop mails to folders, there are right click menus (GUI is not very good still but hope they will improve it!!)

If you have indiatimes account, go ahead and check it out.. (http://in.indiatimes.com)

Stay tuned.. Wave

October 12, 2007

Microsoft Windows Release History..

Product Name

Internal Version Number

Release Date

Windows NT 3.1

3.1

July 1993

Windows NT 3.5

3.5

September 1994

Windows NT 3.51

3.51

May 1995

Windows NT 4.0

4.0

July 1996

Windows 2000

5.0

December 1999

Windows XP

5.1

August 2001

Windows Server 2003

5.2

March 2003

Hmm.. Interesting..

Stay tuned.. Wave

Google Desktop - Secret downloader

I have been using Google desktop from its initial beta days. And have loved this product. Due to some other debugging, I have network statistics logging driver installed on my machine and what I am seeing is something strange-unexplained.

Google Desktop downloads 1.99 MB of data every now and then. I think at least 2 times in an hour. It connects to google servers and starts downloading these data, every time the number of bytes being downloaded are almost the same (around 1.99 - 2 MB). Can anybody from google explain why do you need to download those 2 MB data? Is this the reason you are creating 3 GB of index file?? (to store these downloaded data??) And "Do no evil" company doesnt document anything about this!! Why?

PS: I even dont have option enabled to search my gmail account, in which case I understand it has to download the email data and create index for that, but I just want my local machine to participate in index, I dont want any updates and any such unsolicited bytes coming from the web.

Anybody else, have observed this behavior???

Stay tuned.. Wave

October 9, 2007

Play file of any format on your Media player with windows essential codec pack

Intersting post!!

 
 

Sent to you by Jigar Mehta via Google Reader:

 
 


Stop installing every other media player you see for playing different file types and make your favourite media player a standalone all in one media box with windows essential codec pack.This is a freeware and a 8mb download worth it.It handles Audio CDs, DVDs, (S)VCDs and XCDs on the fly, and it adds support for 3GP, AAC, AC3, APE, AVI, DivX, 3ivx, DAT, h.264, x264, AVC, Nero Digital, DTS, FLV, FLAC, HD-MOV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, M4A, MPC, MP3, MP4, MO3, MOD, MKV/MKA, MTM, OFR, TTA, OGG/OGM, S3M, Vorbis, VOB, WavPack, ATRAC3, XviD, XM, WV, and UMX.

You can download windows essential codec pack from here.

 
 

Things you can do from here:

 
 

Silverlight Weekend..

Yeah, last weekend was a silverlight weekend.

Got to meet author of this book. Yes, I attended a seminar on Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 by Jason Beres (Product Manager, Infragistics). Microsoft held this seminar in our corporate campus and was fun getting real hands on experience on silverlight. Whats more, I won a TShirt in the Question-Answer session Happy.

And yes, we have Principal Development Lead for Silverlight team from Redmond here @ bangalore right now. So, going to attend few of his seminars as well to really clear my concepts and doubts about silverlight. One thing, I am pretty sure about though, is SILVERLIGHT rocks! Its going to be the mainstream of all our web applications. AJAX is nothing when it comes to silverlight according to development plans, more I can not disclose because of NDA.

Stay tuned.. Wave

Distributed Technologies..

Yes, I have got tremendous interest in distributed technologies and thinking to expand my role here at MS to take on other technologies like MTS, COM+, Distributed Transaction Coordinator. Right now, learning about them and when time comes, will jump into those technologies.. Yes, its time for me to expand skills from COM, DCOM, .NET Interop to distributed technologies as well. As a part of preparation, right now I am going with COM-DCOM-MTS relationship and concepts behind design of Distributed Transaction Coordinator-MSDTC. (though MTS is no longer supported by Microsoft but its the mother of COM+)

Lets see how it goes.

Stay tuned.. Wave