Random Rants & Raves

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

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've just enabled a WebSlice on this blog. You can now view the latest post on this blog by subscribing to the "Vinod's Latest Post" WebSlice if you have Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. This can be done in two ways.

1. Hover your mouse over the first blog post till you see a green rectangle and an icon. Click on the icon to add the WebSlice to your favorites bar.
2. Click on the icon on the toolbar to add it.

Now whenever the blog is updated with a new post, you will see the subscription turn bold. Click on it to see a small preview window with the entire post. You can also click to view the entire page in a normal window - say to read the rest of a long post or to comment on it.

To create a new WebSlice for your site, you can follow these tutorials: Shekhar's Blog Post, Subscribing to WebSlices (MSDN).

Tags: internet explorer, webslice
Categories: Development | Internet | Tips

Microsoft's development team has been quite busy lately. Last week we saw the release of SQL Server 2008 and this week we have the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 released as well. There are a whole bunch of things in this release:

• Bunch of bug fixes
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• ASP.NET MVC
• SQL Server 2008 RTM support
• Entity Framework
• IIS 7.0 managed module templates
• Tons of more stuff...

You can read about the new features of VS2008SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 for more details. You might also want to install and run the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack Preparation Tool to ensure that any old SP betas and hotfixes are removed correctly before attempting to install the RTM version of the service pack.

Tags: visual studio, .net, rave, service pack
Categories: ASP.NET | Development | Microsoft | Rave

I just downloaded and started installing VS 2008 SP1 as mentioned in my last post. However, taking a look at the installer screen suddenly made my nostalgic. The installer has a fancy set of progress bars and text information - but snucked away at the right bottom below the second progress bar was a small 1-character label that displayed action happening in a completely different way. It cycles between the characters /-\| in a loop to make it look like a simple rotating line.

This was the same stuff that used to appear when one turned on the old IBM PCs in front of which I've spent a whole lot of time experimenting, playing, coding years back. At that time, there was no real GUI and everything was done from the DOS prompt. It was nice to suddenly see the old friend that showed the progress in a simple way despite having a ton of other graphical ways of showing it.

As an aside, on the old PCs, the progress rotation used to be slow due to the slow processing power of then's CPUs. But with today's power machines, this should have whizzed through so fast as to have been unnoticeable. This basically means that someone actually added in a small delay between each character in the loop to get this effect. Must be someone from my generation, I guess, who wanted to also have this effect for old times sake.

Tags: visual studio, rave
Categories: Development | Microsoft | Rave

During the Mix earlier this month, fellow Indian RD Venkat and I were walking down together for a grabbing some snacks to eat and attending the next session when we ran into Scott Hanselman. Venkat had met Scott before and I had corresponded a few times on email as well as our RD alias with him. We got talking about outsourcing and cultures in India and the US when one of the bystanders suggested that the discussion we were having was good material for an informal podcast in Hanselminutes. Next thing we knew, Scott had unboxed an entire audio recording set, took us to an empty corner of the Venetian conference area where the Mix sessions were happening and got us on recording. We talked about a bunch of stuff from outsourcing models, difference in Indian and US cultures, education and more.

You can listen to the full podcast (in various formats and download options) from here. The opinions expressed in it are completely my own and made in an informal manner. :)
Tags: internet, development
Categories: Development | Internet

Many people consider Microsoft to be an extremely "closed" company - especially in dealing with the information being given out about their products. This is due to their reasoning that Microsoft does not release the source code of their programs.

I, however, have a slightly different take on this. Yes, Microsoft generally doesn't release its source code. But they do release a well documented API/SDK with each of their products along with a ton of sample code to get you up and running. And by my experience in the PCQLinux team, I can tell that this sometimes can be much more useful to end developers. The mess of code that I've seen in the so called "open source" world - no API, no documentation/comments, no architecture - just a bunch of lines of code hacked together to create what is needed at a particular point of time.

However, coming back to the line of the title, Microsoft has recently become very conscious about the need to not just be open - but also to be interoperable with other open products or technologies. Some of the things they have done (and starting about 2 years or so back) are:

• Working closely with open source projects. SugarCRM, XEN and JBoss are the most well known of these collaborations.
• Supporting Linux with Virtual Machine Additions on VirtualPC and Virtual Server
• Working with Linux developers to make their distributions work perfectly with Hyper-V
• Jointly developing FastCGI with Zend to give PHP (and possibly other OSS platforms, such as Perl) a much needed boost on IIS7. In fact, I would go so far as to say that PHP now works much better and has more abilities possible on IIS7 than on the LAMP stack
• Getting two Microsoft open source licenses (MPL and MRL) approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI)
• Release of the Microsoft .NET Framework source code

Now MS has also gone and announced the Open Source Interoperability Initiative. This broadly allows open source developers to work closely with Microsoft products in the following broad areas:

1. Open connections: including protocols, APIs, documentation access. Low cost royalty for patented items as well as a covenant not to sue any oss developers for non-commercial distribution of stuff using these
2. Standards: Support and compatibility with open standards. Any extensions to the standards will be open and documented
3. Data Portability: Opening up of data formats and also providing MS applications the ability to interact with open formats directly
4. Engagement: Executive and customer level engagements

Overall, I think this is a great step forward. There will be of course many who crib. For instance, certain commercial Linux companies who have refused to have an amicable agreement with Microsoft will probably be the first to criticize this. While other ones who are agreeable to working together for the better interest of the end customer will probably see a lot of innovation coming their way since they will be able to now integrate well into the Microsoft world and vice-versa.

UPDATE

More...
Tags: open source, rave
Categories: Development | Microsoft | Rave