Tech-Ed was a blast

Lots of things happening lately and last week we had the tech-ed event at WatersEdge. I got to attend some awesome sessions from top notch speakers like Steve Riley, Chad Hower and Dr.Nitin Paranjape. There were a few hiccups with some sessions rescheduled, but overall it was well worth attending Tech-Ed Srilanka 2006.

MVP Award renewed

Just got the mail from Microsoft on the renewal of my MVP award for another year. This would be my 3rd year as a MVP and it sure is great being part of the community. So looking forward to another superb year ahead especially with the excitement of Vista, Office 2007 and .NET 3.0 :-)

.NET User group September meeting

We had the .NET user group meeting for september yesterday and i did a presentation on the Windows mobile 5.0 platform and how to do various tasks using it. I will post the slides soon and if anyone have any questions on the session post a message in the .NET forum

Test blog entry

This is a test blog entry from windows live writer.

Get ready for Tech.Ed 2006 Srilanka

Get ready for the biggest technology training and conference for Microsoft technolgies. Be there for learning and networking and be a part of the wave. Check out http://www.teched.lk/ for more details

Triple booting my laptop

I was planning to format my laptop and get it ready for the next few projects and technolgies i am interested on and need to work on. I needed Ubuntu linux, Windows xp and Windows vista and finally got them installed all.
So right now the GRUB boot loader loads and can choose between ubuntu or the windows boot loader. If windows boot loader is chosen then i get the choice to boot either vista or xp.
Had some problems setting up my thunderbird email client to work with my mails. I want to be able to access my emails and share the same thunderbird profile while i am in ubuntu or one of the windows OS. Finally got that setup as well (Thanks Charith), and now need to install all the development tools and set things up.

Sun developers summit 2006

Last friday i was at Watersedge at the Sun developer summit 2006. The organizing of the event was not that good and was not properly planned at all. I primaily went for the session on JME development using netbeans ide session but it was cancelled.There were a few silly comparisons made with microsoft technologies, such as saying swing has a data model for componenets and it was better than using the add method to add the data to the components as used in MS technolgies. MS developers do not use add method to add data to components. They use data source and data binding and have been using that to seperate data model from the component(view) for a long time.
A session of interest was the one on project tango on the work done on interoperability between java web services (JWS) and windows communication foundation (WCF).

Gadgets galore

I wanted to buy a good mp3 player for a long time. After reading some reviews on ipod, though it had the coolness felt it wasn’t what i was looking for. The problems with ipod seemed like poor battery life, gets scratched very easily and the file formats supported by ipod with video was very limited. So finally decided to for the Sansa mp3 player from SanDisk. After using it for a week it seems good enough for me and got to see how it behaves in the long run.
Was looking for a digital camera as well and didnt have any second thoughts in going for the Canon S2 powershot camera. It is pretty awesome and worth for the money.

Working for someone or working for me

I have been toying with the idea of completely giving off my full time job and getting totally into contracts and working on my own for a long time. I was a bit worried about not having a steady income if i go into contracts leaving my full time job but then again i had to turn down a few opportunities that came by because of the fact i had a full time job. I am right now managing both but spending less time on my contracts. But so far the best exposure and money does come through the contract jobs compared to a full time job.
So when i came across this flash movie "Declaration of Independence", i kept asking myself whether i should take the plunge into being my own boss and working for me.

Long layovers and flight schedules

I have been ignoring my blog lately the past few days due to some heavy workload. I am still in california and i am supposed to return from here on the 12th of this month. Looks like i will be having a long layover of 18 hours at the tokyo airport and airline agents just confirmed that they cannot provide hotels during that time.
So if anyone knows any good places inside the narita aiport to sleep for 18 hours do let me know.

At the Microsoft campus - Redmond

I came to redmond yesterday on a work assignment with Lionbridge and will be spending this week at the Microsoft campus. This is my second visit here to the campus and last time had a wonderful time when i came down for some work on the MCPD exams. So hoping for good time this visit too and the weather is much much pleasent than the previous time.

Swinging with Java and Unix

After a quite a long time got to work again on Java and Unix. The last time i worked on Unix was around 3 years back on a SCO Unix platform when we implemented banking systems along with a company in India. This time my work is mainly on the development area on java swing user interfaces but my work involves using Solaris and Linux platforms. I am a bit behind on my commands in Unix and using the VI editor effectively but catching up very fast.
But my preferred platform and development tools would be the Microsoft platform and the .NET development tools in the coming years, though i wouldnt mind having a taste of the other technologies as well.

Down in California

I am down in california these days on some work assignments and probably will be here for a month or so. After some time i am working on some none MS technologies these days and that helps me in knowing which areas MS is far ahead and which areas MS is yet to catch on. But uptill now i think the former is a lot than the latter.

Hi .NET 3.0 ... Bye WinFx

The WinFx is renamed to .NET Framework 3.0. You can find more details on Somasegar’s blog. So according to this i think Orcas is not going to be .NET 3.0 at least the way i see it, and i guess based on this, .NET 3.0 will be using  the .NET 2.0 compilers and the new compilers will probably ship in with Orcas(.NET ?.?)
And with that you have the new community sites for WCF, WPF, WF and WCS are available at http://www.netfx3.com/

Vista lab in Singapore

I was down in Singapore the past week on Vista lab sessions held by Microsoft. It's an exciting time with the launch of Vista beta 2 and Office beta 2. I am still not sure on what i can blog on it so i guess i will have to wait. It was fun and got to interact with a lot of fellow MVPs from India, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philipines and a few other countries. We also had a dinner outing one of the days and a couple of pics during that:

Too busy to blog :-(

Past few weeks a lot of things have been happening around with some changes in my career and along with that some good and some not so good decisions. So it was kind of a roller coaster ride and was too occupied to do any postings on my blog. So things are kinda getting settled now so thats a good sign and allows me to catch up on my blogging too.

Smart client and VSTO deep dive: Review

We had a great Smart client and VSTO deep dive event with a good number of participants considering it was the elections the day before that.One thing that was disappointing was a lot of people who registered didnt make it and they blocked out others possibly attending the event.
Dr.Nitin's presentation was awesome and the highlight of the day and i learnt quite a lot from it. It was very inspirational as well and thoroughly enjoyed it.
My presentation on "DataBinding in Smart clients" went okay and anyone interested can download the presentation here and the demos here.

Smart client and VSTO deep dive

If you live in Srilanka and if you are a developer then make sure you don’t miss out on attending the smart client and VSTO deep dive sessions held at the NDB auditorium in Colombo.
Go to http://dotnetforum.lk/register/deepdive to register

I will be presenting on "DataBinding in Smart Clients" and will be focusing on .NET 2.0 data binding capabilities.
You can also check out www.dotnetforum.lk for more details

TFS is released today

The TFS is released today. For more details check
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2006/03/16/553413.aspx

Object Test Bench in VS.NET 2005

I am not sure how many of you are aware of the object test bench in VS.NET 2005. This allows you to graphically create an instance from a class(object) in your class diagram and execute its methods visually.
Invoking it is as simple as creating a class diagram and dropping your classes there. Then you can right click on a class and go to create instance and invoke a constructor. This will create an instance object and place it in the object test bench. You can right click on this object and invoke instance methods.This is really useful if you need to create, invoke and test objects in isolation.