December is over and when I looked back into my history, I observed that...

2006 has been a year with mixed reactions. So many of resolutions gone unnoticed. 2007 peeps at me with bright look and loads of old and new commitments and resolutions.

The theme of 2007 (overall) for me would be health and family. So, hopefully you can find me in the gym. And I'll try to emphasise *more* on my work-life balance.

I hope (too much of optimism flowing here) i'll be successful in those :)

Wish you all a pleasant and marvelous new year. Please do visit my blog in this new year as well :p

Microsoft and innovation... YES says the PC world. The most innovative products for the year 2006 by PC world list some of the new technologies related to computing.

I'm happy to see a product that I use day in and day out in that list. But one of them certainly I missed is Zune. I know... I know... its based on iPod, but still its a wonderful product. All I can say now is wait for v2 of this product.

Check out the list here. And a printable version here

 

{WeeklyPoll}

Most popular new articles 18 Dec 2006 - 25 Dec 2006

• Falling Snow on Your Desktop! - Igor Tolmachev
• Object Mapping Part I - The Row Cursor - Marc Clifton, J. Dunlap
• Riding the Vista UAC elevator, up and down - Andrei Belogortseff
• Understanding Namespaces in C# 2.0 - Sidhartha Gundavarapu
• A Bridge Design Game - fdachille

Please read the article and provide me with your sincere feedback to make my new articles more useful. And ofcourse, dont forget to vote for it.

TIA

Shocked???

Apple has been working on this product for quite sometime and created so much of hype in the gadget freaks. They publicise this so much so that media already gave this the title to be the next big thing after iPod.

Now some company called Linksys release a product called iPhone and pour a ocean full of water on the burning Apple product. I almost died laughing when I first saw this news. But my sincere condolences to Apple Inc. Now... they have to re brand their product.

Check this news item

Microsoft launched new corporate site for Microsoft India. This is the singular comprehensice information repository on Microsoft India.

Check this site to see what is Microsoft India up to.

If you are a web developer and you don't know what I was mentioning about... you need to update yourself with the new developments. ASP.Net AJAX is THE happening thing.

The news is that Microsoft has released ASP.Net AJAX 1.0 RC and you can download it here.

In a different news...

"The interest in ASP.NET AJAX is growing.    Customers downloaded 61K copies of Beta 1 and the download volume for Beta 2 was nearly double at 114K!   RTM will be a monster!"

My experience says... "The possibilities are infinite with ASP.Net AJAX"

I've done a quick check on how somebody can write such a silly bug. The first thing I've identified is that when I use WLW to write blogs with images and directly use the clipboard image (not saved to disk) to paste it, it generates an image name Image{0}.png and Image{0}_thumb.png files.

After having this template, {0} should be filled by a unique value. In .Net you can use

long uniqueId = GetSomeRandomNumber(); //dude...you need to implement this method
String.Format("Image{0}.png", uniqueId.ToString());
to fill the value.

Somehow, this statement is either missing or (even worse) commented out. Hence the bug. So the roots of this bug is not within Live Spaces, but within Windows Live Writer.

Now, I know how not to repeat this. Hope you do too. :)

If you are an Indian, I'm sure you know who Swami Vivekananda is... No need for any introduction.
The following is supposedly the live speech delivered by him.

Part 1
Part 2

I don't have the original link from where I'm copying this blog post. Just the links were bookmarked sometime back.

I'm authenticating the originality of the speech nor the speaker. Just listen and enjoy (It is in English).

Just today was I talking to my colleague about the bugs we have in blogspot against that of Live Spaces, I found one. This one is really wierd. How can they even code such a stupid one.

I was browsing through the previous posts and in one of my blog where I was mentioning about the database security, I posted two images with graphs in it. Now, the graphs are replaced with some of the  newer images in another blog :p

Very very wierd stuff.

So many blogs.. so little time... this all shows my excitement.

I'm excited from top to bottom. Jeff was special in terms of his influence on me. Now, i want to develop ASP.Net web applications. I know this is certainly a googly for some of my friends, but I was never an ASP.Net developer and never would be (probably), but after going through all the stuff this ASP.Net thing has... i'm now very much interested in the technology than the other aspects.

I'm planning (again with due permission from Jeff) to write articles on some of the topics (including the internals) of ASP.Net and will certainly take time over the weekend to rollout the first one. So, watch out... this time it will be absolutely hard-core ASP.Net article (never thought this day will come) about something that will be really exciting.

And NO... i'm not going to develop/design UI. If anybody feels so... just go...wash your face.. probably you're dreaming :D

As I wrote in my previous post... Jeff Prosise was at Microsoft Hyderabad for training us on Advanced ASP.Net and AJAX.

It has been three informative days. So much of information flow and so little time. The stuff I learned these three days made substiatial influence on me. The way I look at things, the way I approach solutions to problems, and the more importantly the deep down understanding of the technology is really exciting.

The most fascinating thing about learning from the master is that, you get to know about some of the undocumented secrets (and the less known facts) that can turn the world upside down. I'm bursting with information now.

Never been this excited before (that too about ASP.Net and AJAX... never)

How'd it be to meet a person who wrote the book that taught you about something that got you a job, that enabled you to progress in your career and to get attached to the technology?

This week has been at its best so far. I got to meet one of my favorite thechnical authors. If you don't recognize the person (s) in the picture below it is me with Jeff Prosise. (Right to left)

  (With due permissions from Jeff)

This has been certainly one of the benefits of working with Microsoft. You get to meet exciting people and share your ideas. But this time the flow of information is one-way. I had high expectations on this and Jeff lived up to my expectations (and infact much more than that).

I did not give him any breather all these days. Followed him literally where he went shooting my silly questions and knowing more about him.

Now, I'm left with meeting fewer people in my list than before and the list now looks like:

1. Jeffrey Richter
2. Juval Lowy
3. Tom Archer
4. Dino Esposito

 

Hello Sidhartha,
    Congratulations. You won 5th Prize in the November 2006 Contest. As you may know, a lot of people competed, but only a few won. Nicely done! Please also keep in mind that your prize is not just a stupid, geeky gift, but it's also a symbol to represent your contributions to the development community. When folks ask you how you won, you can tell them that it was by helping out other geeks. Be proud and brag.
Below you will find the details of your prize.

Star Trek Tek Classic Phaser

Original 2 in 1 design with detachable mini hand phaser! This is the best authentically licensed original series phaser pistol ever produced! It features authentic action lights and sounds and adjustable power settings. Remember, always treat Phasers as if they were fully loaded with nadions — It's fun until someone puts an eye out.

Must remove plastic display tab and turn hand phaser on (click far right dial forward towards front of pistol) to activate sound. To activate lights, rotate the front dial forward.

 I got this mail on 1st of December and took me 10 days to brag about it :p

I'm sure you've heard that before. If not... then this is still gonna be interesting.

Mouse Gestures is a feature (mostly for lazy Jacks.. sorry jack) who cannot handle so many shortcut keys and would love their mouse do everything for them. With the combination of a key and movement of the mouse, an action can be triggered.

This feature was available in Opera (since v3) and Firefox (as a plugin) and may be in couple of other (not so famous.. but still existing) browsers. Now, this guy has developed a plugin for IE to do exactly the same stuff (probably more... you can even configure this for your Explorer) and giving even the source code for free (but you cannot re-distribute... i think so).

I've installed it. It is good but not very good... needs some better mouse handling, but if you are lazy you can still use this...

Here goes the snapshots...

and here goes the link

Yahoo feels that in order to compete with its rivals in a better way, they have to re-organize them selves into three groups.

I got some confidential information on what the groups will be called. First group will be called Y (pronounced Why? ), second group will be called ah (pronounced aahhhh!) and the third one will be oo (pronounced Oohh...)

Here goes the original news

Yet another catch me if you can thingy...

This is what they say:
Windows Live Book Search is Microsoft’s forthcoming online search service for books. The service will give information seekers a distinctive, powerful set of tools that helps them find answers to their search questions by discovering authoritative book content—and provide publishers with a new way to connect with potential customers.

As publishers, you add your content to Windows Live Book Search through the Windows Live Book Search Publisher Program. Participation in the program is free, and it takes just a few simple steps to sign up. Once you've submitted your titles, we’ll handle the rest: if needed, we’ll scan your books and then index them. Once the service launches, millions of Live Book Search users will be able to discover your books and either purchase them from your site or from participating retailers.

This is what I Say:
Windows Live Book Search Publisher Program... heard of this before??? you may want to look at it as Google Book Search... Whatever

Check it out here

Though this is new, this has to be one of my favorites. I'm sure you'll like it too.
This flash is in Hindi, but even if you don't understand, you can look at the the developers care for minute details in this flash.

Check it out

I'm not the kind of person who like to have jokes in my personal blog. But this one is too good to be left out.

Best Blonde Joke

Post back about the joke...

The multiplayer beta signup for Halo 3 will be asking for your details on monday (4th December 2006). So, if you want to get a chance to play Halo3 before anyone else... then mark your calendars. Click here for more news

And now... some pics from the game