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

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

If you're a Vista Sidebar gadget freak like me, then this one is for you. I ran across a gadget called System Monitor from BuildAGadget.com. This is one that can show you a whole bunch of information about your currently running system. This includes:

1. Date
2. Time
3. Single, Dual, Quad core usage stats
4. Memory usage stats
5. WiFi signal strength
6. Battery status and remaining time
7. IP Address - both internal (NAT) and external
8. Network tools - like WHOIS, Ping, Trace route, IP and Domain lookups

This basically lets you replace a bunch of other system Sidebar tools. The nice thing is that you can easily enable or disable any of these "monitors" and individually configure settings for them such as what to display (text or graphics), color of the display bar, and other specific information (number of cores/which IPs to show, etc.).

This is a great tool to be quickly informed about a number of system resources and a must if you use the Vista Sidebar.

Tags: sidebar, gadgets, vista, rave
Categories: Gadgets | Rave | Windows Vista

I finally got the nagging problem I had with my Dell notebook sorted out. I happened to notice that the Dell XPS M1730 is now available in India. Seeing this I thought it might be possible that they now also support my Dell XPS M1710 - the predecessor the one they sell here. And turns out they do.

I rang up Dell support last Thursday and on Friday 2 support guys show up my office. I told them that none of my video-out ports (VGA, DVI, S-Video) are functioning. At first they said that it might be a software setting problem or a driver issue and started doing their standard series of test. After I told them exactly what steps they would try next and that I had already tried them and failed, they didn't say anything further - just gave me a big grin and said "No problems sir, we'll replace your motherboard". 20 minutes later with a brand new motherboard, the notebook is happily chugging away and being able to project! Yay to Dell support again!!

Tags: gadgets, rave, notebook, dell
Categories: Gadgets | Rave

I recently happened to watch the new Hindi movie Bachna Ae Haseeno (loosely translated: “Watch Out Girls!”) with my famiy. I was pleasantly surprised to see massive Microsoft product placement in it! The movie stars some very well known names as both the male and female cast - Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, Bipasha Basu and Minissha Laamba.

While watching the movie, the hero suddenly states that he’s completed his college and joined MICROSOFT! Parts of the movie (seemingly) are shot in the MS office in Mumbai! There are tons of “Vista rocks” & Xbox posters all over the place.

Not only that, the Xbox 360 and Halo 3 are shown and talked about in detail. Even when Ranbir moves to the MS office in Sydney, he continues being in the Xbox team and talking about this - for instance, "Master Chief's flamethrower is the coolest video game weapon ever!".

His romantic interest played by Deepika, also happens to be a geek girl who not only knows that “Halo 3 is the most talked about video game ever” (actual quote from the movie) but also discusses Xbox live and multiplayer gaming on the Xbox in a party.

This is the first time that I’ve seen such detailed product placement – not just as props but as part of the story and dialogue – in an Indian movie! Kudos to Microsoft for getting this right. The props are not jarringly placed and the dialogue by two of India’s current heart throbs touting the Xbox and Halo 3 is great for a movie that’s gonna be watched by young moviegoers.

After seeing a ton of Mac ads as product placement - every other Hollywood movie has somebody typing away on a Macbook or something similar – it was great to see MS stuff so nicely placed and that too in a Hindi movie!

Tags: movies, microsoft, rave
Categories: Movies | Rave

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

On Friday morning my notebook's power adapter died suddenly, leaving with a heavy paperweight on my table. This also meant that I couldn't charge my machine with any other cable although we have many Dell laptops around - none were compatible with my particular model - the Dell XPS M1710. I called up a local repair guy to check whether he could do something about it. He called up after an hour to say that the adapter was completely shorted out and no way it could be repaired.

Since I had wisely taken a 3-year complete cover international warranty when purchasing the machine last year, I called up the local Dell toll free and was quickly redirected to the XPS exclusive line. This line happens to be serviced out of Malaysia (I think) and the tech support guy was very friendly. Once he heard my problem, he took almost no time in assigning me a a temporary reference number for the call in India (since the notebook is still registered in the US). He then said that the adapter would be delivered the next working day - meaning Monday.

I got a call from the local Dell office in an hour or so, confirming that I'd get the adapter on Monday. Which was quite ok. I did spend the weekend starting to get notebook withdrawal symptoms but survived.

Today, while sitting in office and working on a desktop - after ages (yuk!), I got a call from the delivery guy who had my packets. A quick jump back home and I picked up not one but three (!) boxes. I had to return the burned out adapter as replacement. Now imagine my surprise when I opened up the packets.

The first two contained a completely new set of power adapter and power cable - much smaller than the one I was originally using and with an Indian plug. The last one had a replacement for my original brick adapter. I first quickly plugged in the big brick to the original power cable and turned on my notebook. It worked fine. Curious about the new set, I connected them up and checked out my machine and it was working fine even then - except for a small popup that suddenly appeared on the screen. This informed me that I had plugged in a 90W adapter and to use all the features of my notebook I should be using the 130W adapter. The brick is the 130W one I guess. Well, now I have one that gives me the full power of my notebook as well as a spare that even if it doesn't let me play games or use the higher end features will at least let me check mail, browse and use my notebook for standard stuff.

As always, I've been very happy with Dell's service and their commitment. I sure hope they keep this up.

Tags: rave, gadgets
Categories: Gadgets | Rave

Thanks to Kevin, our RD Dad, we had a (literally) closed door meeting with none other than Scott Guthrie himself. This was the first time I was meeting him and I found Scott to be a warm, friendly, funny, down-to-earth, and really knowledgeable guy.

We had a great open discussion with Scott - praising and criticizing Microsoft technologies and policies, asking him his thoughts on a number of topics, getting the inside scoop on the future roadmap and more. Unfortunately, all our discussion comes under our NDA and I can't say anything about what we talked about.

I will however leave you with this one thing - if you're a developer or designer in the Web world this is a great time for you. The stuff that is already here and the stuff that is coming up - both soon and in the longer term - will let you expand the boundaries of the way that the Web works and give your users a whole new way of working with it. Be sure to keep an eye on what Microsoft is doing in this space.

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