MVP Summit 2007

What a cool week it was at the Microsoft Campus in Seattle. Got to see some awesome people in person like Bill Gates, Somasegar, Anders Hejlsberg and fellow MVPs like Scott Hanselman whom i have met only in blogs. Got to catch up with some old friends as well. The trip wasn't totally geek talk and this time i got to visit some places in Seattle like the Museum of Flights and the Space Needle. All in all it was a great event with the right mix of technology and fun :)

.NET User group meeting-March

We had the .NET user group meeting yesterday at the NDB auditorium. I did a session on UI customization in Office 2007 using VSTO add-ins, focusing on custom task panes and ribbon customization. Microsoft Office 2007 has a lot of extensibility points where you can create your own custom logic and provided added features. Hope the session was informative for anyone attended

ISV training on WF

I did a training program for ISVs on Windows Workflow Foundation yesterday. The more i use WF the more hooked i am to this technology. The training program was pretty interesting with a lot of questions fired by the participants. Hope it was informative for everyone and if there are any comments or questions just post a comment here or a message in the DotNet Forum. Do check the .NET 3.0 community site at http://www.netfx3.com

New updates for software on Vista

For a couple of weeks i haven't been reading the regular blogs i go and read including the MSDN blogs. So yesterday got some time to go through and saw that three Vista related softwares i was looking forward to was released:
The first one is the service pack 2 for SQL Server. This sorts out some issues you get when you run SQL Server 2005 on Vista. This includes the issue i faced where i couldn't connect to the database server without disabling UAC.
The second one is the powershell for Vista is released. I was looking forward to this to try out some functionalities of powershell. There is an issue in the installer so do read through the comments on the link above and follow the steps when you install powershell on vista.
The third one is Virtual PC 2007, which supports Vista as the host and the guest operating system.

LOVE is in the air - 15th Feb

The Launch of Office Vista and Exchange (LOVE) will be held tomorrow at BMICH. Drop in to see three new very exciting technologies released by Microsoft. You can find more information at http://www.newday.lk/

MVP Global Summit - I will be there

I will definitely be attending the MVP global summit and finalized the visa procedures. This would be my 3rd trip to the Microsoft campus and it's always exciting being there. I would be staying at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel & Towers. Looking forward to meet all fellow MVPs out there.

Using Google domains

Last weekend migrated my personal e-mail accounts and two of the domains i had under my name to be hosted at google domains. The experience was ok but had some issues when i tried to set up blogger to use my custom domain. Seems like people having .info domains have some issues setting up blogger to use their custom domain and i am having the same issue with my .ws domain. The e-mail hosting works perfectly, but had some issues with the google page creator in doing tasks such as setting home page and so on.

New look for my Blog

I have been using the same template for my blog for the past 2 and a half years. I wanted to change it but never got the time. So this weekend upgraded my blog to a new blogger template. Had quite a hard time setting up my comments since i was using comments from HaloScan. Other than that the rest of the stuff were ok and didn't require a major work when i moved to the newer template.

One issue i am having is setting up Windows live writer to use blogger labels for posts. Have been trying to set it up without luck. So now after i publish a post from Windows live writer i have to login to blogger to set the labels. Not very smart, but until i figure it out i have to stick with this.

Windows developer tools day

It was windows developers tools day yesterday, to draw some attention to the free and open source software (FOSS) tools that helps us in doing development.

If i were to pick one single FOSS tool that made quite a difference in my development experience it definitely has to be NUnit. NUnit is the ultimate tool that brought test driven development (TDD) to the .NET world. As most starting out on test driven development, i was also hesitant when i started out test driven development using NUnit. But the more i used it the more addicted i became to this tool. Though now i use VS.NET 2005 for doing TDD most of the times, still there are occasions i jump back to using NUnit because of its simplicity.

So even now for anyone who wants to start out on TDD, just go to www.nunit.org and download the bits and start using it. You will never do programming the same way again.

PS: And for anyone interested in more useful tools do check out the book "Windows developers power tools" for a whole lot of goodies similar to NUnit

Got my MCT credentials

Finally i got the notification that i got my MCT. Personally for me it means i can do training sessions with that added confidence that i am a MCT and at the same time pushes me to perform more. I love training and public speaking on Microsoft technologies and wanted to do more of it this year. Hence getting the MCT status is a good boost to my plans for this year

Looking back at 2006 ...

What a rollercoaster year 2006 was. Worked on some very interesting projects and on a whole bunch of technologies and had to switch a lot between technolgies which i dont mind doing at this stage. One of the best things for this year was my MVP award getting renewed and had a job switch as well. Overall 2006 was a very happening year, and i am happy the way it turned out ... , Now waiting to see how 2007 would be

Deep dive .NET 3.0 - Review

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

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

Deep dive on .NET 3.0

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

SQL Server woes on Vista

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

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

PortableApps - Apps anywhere

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

Boring few days

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

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

Running on Vista

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

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

Windows Vista is RTM

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

.NET Framework 3.0 released

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

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

Instructional skills and MCT

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

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