Merry Christmas…The programmer’s way..

The guys @ Channel 9 (Developer Community site managed by MSDN) had found an ultra cool way to wish people a great Christmas season. Chris Anderson, Don Box and Amanda Silver presenting a special song for you to enjoy the Christmas with a spirit of Programmer.

Listen to the Song here

Song Lyrics are as follows…

‘VS-indenting
Module VB
Dim myvar As Integer?() = {3 * 3}
Sub Main()
For Each i In myvar
      Console.Write("Hello VB")
With i
       Console.Write(.Value)
End With REM a language so true
If i IsNot Nothing Then
               Console.WriteLine()
End If REM
            Console.Write(<some>xml</some>)
Next
End Sub
End Module

You got to need more icons iPhone !

Shameless Skype Software Horror (SSSH….)

16th August : Skype is down…and everyone are panic. The world of communication is not fallen or AT & T, Virgin did not lost their satellites..but skype has got crashed data servers and the world is panic.

16th August : As a usual routine, the major OS vendor, Microsoft has issued critical security patches to their operating systems Windows XP and Windows Vista worldwide. These patches are available as part of Windows Update (which can be configured not to download updates automatically by any user) worldwide. The criticality of these patches also demands a safe restart of the operating system to make sure it is secured from any malicious attacks. Every machine in this world which has been updated using windows update was restarted….

What happend to skype?

Now the funniest thing that could ever happened to a software which was made with no idea of disaster scenarios comes in to picture. The massive restart of windows machines all over the world has apparently brought down skype servers and caused a big disaster. To my understanding , Skype does closes the connections and commits the calls in shutdown process. Massive start of windows machines (skype is not sure how many ….), it has got massive log-in  requests which are enough to give their servers a sleeping pill.

Who is the culprit ?

My vote goes to Skype. Hats-off to their product engineering which has never taken such a scenario of disaster. I am wondering what the hell their testing team doing with load testing? Do they test skype servers with a 500 simultaneous login transactions? How could anyone blame someone with so much of irresponsibility at their own house? This is funnier than fun.

Windows update restarted many machines and all the other IM networks survived including AIM, MSN, Yahoo and Google and why not skype? Does skype is going to disable the auto sign-in feature in future? 🙂 are the questions now…

Read more on this..

Microsoft unveiled so called "The Flash Killer"

Today, Microsoft has unveiled the much awaited, so called “The Flash Killer”. It was named as “Microsoft Silverlight”. Sliverlight was famous for it’s old name “WPF/E” which means Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere. WPF is one of the key elements in Microsoft’s new initiatives around managed API for Windows. It is a part of .NET 3.0 (formerly WinFX) now. Silverlight is Cross platform, Cross browser compatible system. That means one can develop applications using Silverlight independent of any OS or browser.

 

 

Silverlight uses .NET 3.0 runtime and works with major browsers just like any flash based applications. The big deal with Silverlight would be the powerful environment support from various languages that are supporting .NET and WPF. Using WPF’s powerful graphics and video features, developers can now develop high end media rich internet applications like this…Album Browser

 

Read the The Top 10 features of Microsoft’s Silverlight (infact only 9 :-))

01. With a couple of lines of code,it supports wmv playback both on windows and mac seamlessly. Supports glitch-less transition between full-screen (720p) and window mode for any video.

02. Separation of mark-up (XAML) from code. This enables both web developers and designers work in a familiar web metaphor.

03. Silverlight mark-up (XAML) is HTML integrate seamlessly. Developers can treat XAML just like any HTML tag using JavaScript.

04. XAML can be used directly with in HTML with out having to add any opaque binary content.

05. Full runtime support for Silverlight XAML.

06. Just a 1 MB download for any PC.

07. It is fast. You can view multiple videos simultaneously with out having dropped frames from videos.

08. It is server or client agnostic. You don’t need any special microsoft software needs to be installed on server. This means one can deliver Silverlight experience right from a linux server.

09. Though Silverlight uses a light-weight WPF, it is almost 100% upward compatible with WPF. This means developers can use Silverlight code right away in WPF with out any modifications at all.

10. This was not revealed yet :-)…Watch it in Mix’07

 

Future : Microsoft is planning to introduce these technologies as part of IIS 7 media pack plug-in future upcoming server technologies according to PCWorld. There will be releases of lot of integration and developer support for Microsoft Silverlight for web application developers such as IDEs and 3rd party integration software.

Former Microsoftie is in the Space now !

Charles Simonyi, a former Architect and Pioneer of Microsoft Office Suite, lifted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 17:31 GMT, Saturday (7th April, 2007).

A human spaceflight misson named Soyuz TMA-10, a successor of Soyuz TMA-9 is carried the billionaire Charles Simonyi to Space. Charles will be back to earth after 11 days with Soyuz TMA-9 in it’s return journey to Earth.

You can track Simonyi on his website live…

Charles is also famous for his invention in coding practices called “Hungarian Notation“, a standard way to name the variables.

Screen Zoomer for Presentations

Many times, presenters encounter typical problems with audience sitting in the back seats. In many cases those audience cannot see what’s up there on the bottom of the slide or demo. They will have to literally stand up and read those portions of the presentation screen. This causes a disturbance to the flow of the presentation.

Presenters use many screen zooming tools in such cases. Windows XP comes with a Screen magnifier which was intended for Accessibility purposes. So it doesn’t serve the right purpose of a screen zoom tool for presenters at all.

Zoomit is a nifty utility written by Mark Russinovich (Winternals Software fame). It’s just 60 KB in size but has got fantastic user experience in terms of zooming the right portion with out causing confusion to presenter or audience.

As you can see in the above image, you can configure zoomit for hot keys, drawing pen and break mode as well.

Thanks to Mark for making our life easy 🙂

Technorati tags: zoomit, zoom, microsoft

Start ++ .. Enhanced Start Menu for Windows Vista

This is a cool extension for the famous Windows Vista start menu. Windows Vista has got an improved start menu in contrast with the classic start menu in Windows XP. It has got search in-built and user doesn’t have to go places to search for any thing.

Start++ is an enhancement over the enhanced Start menu in Windows Vista, which is bringing the power of macros and interactivity in to that tiny Start menu.

Start++ is trying to make your nearest search box, much more powerful and useful. You can customize Start++ for any kind of macro you want.

Download Start++ (for Vista)

Technorati tags: start++, start menu, windows vista

Microsoft’s Atlas and Google joins Open Ajax Alliance…So?

This could be a little news for most of the net savvys, but must be a great news for millions of web developers who work on cross platform applications and SOA.

Microsoft and Google formally joined the Open Ajax Alliance, which consists a group of vendors, OS projects and companies (around 75) using Ajax as standard application interface. This list also includes the pioneers like google, Dojo, Sun and Oracle along with Microsoft.

Read more about the formal announcement here…and here

So, the question is, how does it can help the developer community ?, which stands out the core & heart for Ajax adoption worldwide.

According to Open Ajax forum’s statement, the future looks awesome for Ajax developers…I have highlighted some of the notable things down here…

— Seamless integration of multiple Ajax products and technologies within the same Web application, particularly with applications that use mashup techniques

— Greater certainty about product choices and reliability

— Lower training costs, lower development costs, and faster delivery of Web 2.0 innovations due to industry adoption of common approaches that build from OpenAjax standards

— Interchangeability of Open Ajax Conformant products, such that customers can choose among multiple vendors (and change vendors in the future)

That means, now the developers will be able to use a standard set of declarative and protocol based language to talk to any web server technology. This also makes the web services interoperability much more robust and meaningful.

 

Technorati tags: microsoft, google, open ajax, ajax

Tracking multiple Time Zones from System Tray

Many times we struggle to track multiple timezones across globe, especially when there are lot of other side effects attached to that tracking such as Day Light Savings adjustments etc. But tracking multiple time zones has become an important part in almost all the people who work with business across globe.

First thing you need to learn is the jargon of time zones…

EST, EDT	US Eastern Time	New York
CST, CDT	US Central Time	Chicago
MST, MDT	US Mountain Time	Denver
PST, PDT	US Pacific Time	Los Angeles
BST	British Summer Time	London
CET, CEST	Central Europe Time	Paris
EET, EEST	Eastern Europe Time	Athens
IST	Indian Standard Time	Hyderabad

Now….There are multiple ways you can track time across globe…

01. The Web Way..

There are many cool web sites, where you can choose and track your time effectively. These web sites will take care of syncing with world time accurately for you including day light savings.

 can show you a list of all important cities and time at that particular instance of your visit. Alternatively you can a cool meeting planner too.

World Time Zone Map shows you a map of important places around globe along with current time.

GChart (what a weird name…) provides you a fantastic way to check the time of any location on earth using a mash-up built on google maps.

02. The Desktop Way..

If you are traveling with out Internet facility, you would want a cool, nifty desktop utility to track the time across globe..Isn’t it?

Microsoft Time Zone utility provides you a way to track 5 time zones at a time right from your desktop’s system tray as shown below. This download is only available for Genuine Windows Owners. The size of the download is below 800 kb and installs smoothly. It allows you to track up to 5 cities at any time. I will update this post if I find a better tool to track time zones.

Note : Windows Vista comes with a gadget which you can use to track multiple time zones. You don’t have to install any additional software.

The chat can now make a difference

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today Windows Live Messenger has launched a new way to help charity through IM Chats. Every time you start an IM chat with anyone, Microsoft will shares a portion of revenue from advertisements to a selected charity organization pre-selected by you. Read more

So now the time for You & Me to make difference using Our chat 🙂