Random Rants & Raves

WHY???!
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Well, the long wait is over – the full official trailer of the upcoming Star Trek movie by J.J. Abrams is now available to watch online. You can also get a glimpse of walking through the Enterprise over at StarTrekMovie. The trailer is unfortunately hosted at Apple for this week but other sites will pick them soon.

If you want to simply download the HD trailer rather than just seeing on the Web page you can head here. It’s about 20MB in size. If you want the super-duper hi-res one (1080p version) you get that here. This weighs in at about 159MB.

Live long and prosper.

Microsoft recently released a new set of chart controls for Windows and Web forms for .NET 3.5 SP1. However, to install and use them in Visual Studio you need to download and install a minimum of two different downloads and an optional third.

The first one is the main update for .NET 3.5SP1 available here. If you need Visual Studio 2008 SP1 support you need to install the add-on from here. If you need the full documentation, download and extract the file from here.

Once these are setup, you can add the Chart control from the Data group in the Toolbox. Add a data source, set the series data points in the properties and you are done. Quite easy to start creating dynamic charts on your site without any expensive 3rd party solution.

As is usual to a slightly long post, I start with a bit of historical context. In the days back when I was a student in school, computers were a fairly new thing. I was lucky to have started early on BBC Micros and having access to the Internet waaaay before most people had heard of it thanks to growing up in one of India’s premier universities. In school, our PCs, PC-XTs and PC-ATs were major drool points for us geeks.

However, software was another issue. A few of us loved programming – but access to software was fairly impossible. Getting Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ was quite difficult and it was usually from a (friend-of-a-friend)^n from where we would (ahem) make copies to try out our pieces of code. I remember writing (literally) entire programs on sheets of paper with dry run notations on the side for each variable for each pass and then go type it out in school to try out some new stuff that I had “created”.

These days however, access to software is much easier. Unfortunately, professional quality software is usually quite expensive and for a student in India, typically out of their budget. This is where Microsoft’s recently announced DreamSpark initiative comes to their rescue.

DreamSpark allows students in India to download or get a DVD of most of the Microsoft programming and designing stack for FREE! All a student needs to do is register at the site, get their student status verified and they can get access to the free download and go and simply pick up the free DVD from any of the over 200 locations in India and start using it.

And what is it that they get for free? The list includes:

• Windows Server 2003 Standard
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional
• SQL Server 2005 Developer
• Expression Studio
• XNA Game Studio 2.0

Remember that these are FULL versions of these products, without any restrictions (time or uses) for FREE.

This means that computer science students can now start working with professional level tools right from the start. Also, if anybody uses the “Open Source is best for learning programming” argument, this is no longer true. The Microsoft programming stack is so much more productive and now is accessible by any student in India and all for free to. I wish this was available to me when I was in school too.

Live mesh is a great service that lets you sync devices or store it online from where you can access them from anywhere. It’s currently available as a tech preview and if you’re signed up you can sync multiple devices across.

Finally, the team has released Live Mesh for mobiles as well. Currently it support Windows Mobile 6.x. However you will not be able to access this from the usual places – that is, by either going to http://m.mesh.com or by logging into your Mesh Desktop and trying to add a device. You need to go to https://www.mesh.com/Web/MobileDownload.aspx and follow the onscreen instructions to download the installer (.CAB). You can then connect your WM device and install the software through ActiveSync/WMDC.