Random Rants & Raves

Tags: star trek
Categories: Star Trek | Movies

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.

Tags: rave, asp.net, charts
Categories: ASP.NET | Development | Rave

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.

Tags: rave, microsoft
Categories: Development | Internet | Microsoft | Rave | SQL Server

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.

Tags: live mesh, windows mobile
Categories: Gadgets | Internet | Microsoft | Windows Live

Watch out Google Apps, Office “14” is coming to the Web – and unlike the Google version, it works with the offline rich client as well as mobile devices to give a whole new set of features.

Some salient points:

• Office 14 is going to be available in the normal rich client version
• The Web version will be included into the applications
• Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote are the apps that will be available in the “cloud” :)
• Seamless syncing of content between the desktop, Web and mobile will be possible
• Multiple people can work on the same document in different media at the same time and see changes in real-time
• The Web version works on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari
• If you have the Silverlight 2 plugin installed (in any of the above browsers) you get an even richer experience than the Ajax based one which mimics the rich desktop client almost exactly
• The rendering engines in each application is the same as the one in the desktop version and hence the document you view in your desktop will be exactly the same as the one the Web!
• You get all the rich features – charts, tables, WordArt, SmartArt etc. on both the Desktop and Web version – YAY!

Check out the video over at Channel9 for a quick cool demo.

Tags: pdc, office, beta
Categories: Office | Internet | SilverLight

Vista has a number of new features that optimize the way that your computer functions – especially in the area of power consumption. The new power plans, sleep mode and more intelligent management of hardware resources are some of these. However, there is one small problem that comes with this – if you leave your computer to perform a download, in many cases it just doesn’t complete since Vista automatically puts the computer to sleep after a period of inactivity. This is especially true if you’re downloading on a laptop and on battery.

More...
Tags: tips, vista
Categories: Tips | Windows Vista

This post actually started out as a comment on a Slashdot story about how the economic downturn is going to (negatively) impact free and open source software. As expected, the comments had a ton of ayes and nays – both sides having their merits. My thoughts about this are like this:

1. The economic downturn is going to affect everyone – including people who are passionate about writing free software. Are you single or do you have dependents (wife, kids, parents, etc.) who depend on your livelihood? In this case, would you as a developer rather work for a commercial vendor (who pays you something) or an OSS project where you are a contributor and the possible future fame (no fortune) is the only incentive? (Unless of course, you were born with a silver spoon and write code only as a passion.)
2. If you were the owner/major stockholder of a company would you depend on a software project that’s been written in the garage of the developers or with a company which has fairly good stocks as well as a few billion dollars in liquid funds? Think about which one is more likely to close shop and disappear. Would you want to be stuck with a product running your critical LoB application which has no future?
3. The argument that since you do have the source you can modify it is fallacious. What if you’re not a technical company? You will need to hire programmers to modify the application which can turn more expensive very quickly.
4. What if the main argument was that it would be cheaper to get the free software than a commercial one during an economic downturn? Again, see point 2 as well as that commercial OSS projects have the same or more TCO of offerings from commercial vendors. Most commercial OSS projects are in the same price range (they call it “charging for services”) as commercial closed source ones.
5. Commercial vendors also give a pay as you need and monthly/yearly model of software purchase. All you need to do is talk to the sales/marketing team of the vendor to avail of this – with guarantees on the software (and company – very important during this economic phase). This means that you can spread out the cost of the software over many years and still get the benefits of a solid company backing and software.
6. People who claim that developers can continue to write code for OSS only see part of the picture. What about all those people who are not technical but yet have a whole bunch of stuff to contribute to software – QA, designers, technical writers, software packagers,etc. Will all of them also be willing to work for free/peanuts?

Although I do not foresee the end of OSS or even want it to happen, these are hard questions that not only contributors to OSS but also companies who rely upon them must think about seriously. What do you think?

Tags: oss, economy
Categories: Development

Recently a fellow MVP, Omi, created a Firefox 3.0 extension called Paste-&-Go which allows users to copy a URL and paste it into the browser and have it open up automatically. You can download this excellent extension for Firefox here.

However, quite a few people asked for something like this in Internet Explorer. and I was surprised that many people are not really aware of the cool extensibility features of Internet Explorer called IE Browser Extensions. I had written an article for PCQuest quite a while back and also give a few “extensions” for IE for download at its forums. You can download a small set from here.

Sadly this above set does not really support pasting URLs from an external source – such as Notepad. Also, the Firefox extension only allows a single URL, while I wanted to do it for multiple URLs and open all of them up instantly. I posted on the MVP alias that I’d probably get around to writing the code during the upcoming Dussera holidays.

But I did manage getting 5 minutes free (while my son watched Disney’s Chip-‘n’-Dale) and that’s basically how much time it took to go ahead and create a browser extension for Internet Explorer that does the above. You can set this up yourself too on Internet Explorer 5 or above (including the IE8 Beta 2).

• Open Notepad and paste the following code into it.Save the file as as HTML file, say, c:\Windows\Web\Paste-n-Go.htm

<HTML>
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" defer>
clip = window.clipboardData.getData("Text"); 
UrlArray = clip.split("\n");
for(i=0; i<=UrlArray.length; i++)
    window.open(UrlArray[i], "paste"+i);
</SCRIPT>
</HTML>

• Open Regedit and browse over to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MenuExt
• Right-click the MenuExt key and select New > Key
• Rename the newly created key to Paste && Go
• Double click the (Default) entry on the right pane for this new key and set the value to the location where you saved the file you created in step 1, say, c:\windows\web\Paste-n-Go.htm
• Right-click the right pane and create a new DWORD (32-bit) value
• Rename the new key to Contexts and set its value to 1. Your registry should look something like this now.

• Copy a bunch of URLs from Notepad or another browser window

• Open a new Internet Explorer window and right-click anywhere in the content area and pick Paste & Go from the context menu

• This will open the URLs you copied in a window each – quite handy when trying copy a bunch of URLs someone has linked to in a forum post or a list that you have

Currently this doesn’t open the URLs in different tabs – haven’t figured that one out yet. If you know how, do leave me a note and I’ll make the required change.

Tags: internet explorer, javascript, extension
Categories: Development | Tips

One of the new things that happens in SQL Server 2008 is that it prevents saving table structure changes that require the table to be dropped and re-created. While this is a great feature to prevent accidents from occurring, on a developer machine it can be quite frustrating. This is the dialog you get when trying to make changes in a table design.

Unfortunately, this dialog doesn’t tell you where to turn this feature off! Clicking on the small “?” on the title bar does get you to a help page that tells you how to do it.

Anyway, the place to do it is Tools > Options > Designers > Table and Database Designers > Prevent saving changes that require table re-creation. Turn this option off and you will be able to save the tables again.

Tags: sql server, development, tips
Categories: SQL Server | Tips | Development

I always found the Apple "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads funny when I saw them - but not for the reasons that Apple thought. Their claims were fairly weird considering > 95% of the world uses PCs with Windows. and not only that, the PCs come in a gazillion different combinations with another gazillion types of hardware and software setups. Whereas Apple has complete control over the hardware and the software that gets installed on their machines - so making their systems work is the least they can do.

 The PC (and by this I mean the generic PC combination whether it be desktops or notebooks + Windows) is a much, much more versatile device and can do so much more. And finally Microsoft is showing people the true story with their new ads. The video ads show people from normal walks of life and some celebrities - all who use PCs for a huge number of varied tasks - showing the true power of the PC. And combined with the Windows Mobile platform (for PDA/SmartPhones) and Windows Live (for services on the 'Net), the PC is at a much more powerful stage than it ever was.

The best part is that you can upload your own videos as well to say how you have been using your PC and how it has affected your life, work and personal way of working. Think of this as a way to show your appreciation for this system.

Tags: microsoft, internet, rave
Categories: Internet | Microsoft | Rave | Windows Live