I am moving to a new blog - http://geekswithblogs.net/suniljagadish/ after bearing with comment spam for quite sometime and also suggesting to the admins to include CAPTCHA to prevent comment spam. No response so far. Its irritating when you find an email saying - “XYZ has posted a comment on your blog” and then you find out that its only a list of sites where you can play online casino.
I know its really annoying to ask someone to open their blog roll or their RSS agregator to update the feed link to my blog/feed. Please take the trouble of updating your links. I thought it would be a good idea to use feedburner to manage my RSS feeds. So here is the new RSS feed url - http://feeds.feedburner.com/geekswithblogs/suniljagadish
With me moving to a new blog, you will definitely find me posting good amount of code apart from the tech bytes. Thanks to dotnetjunkies for hosting my blog all these days.
Cya!
Moral of the story: User experience is very important.
Sorry if you mistook this to be a Microsoft VB6 event which was coming up. :)
If you are a VB6 fan and feel that you have been over-shadowed or drowned in the world of the “uncivilized semi-colon” languages (as Raj calls it), check this out - Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Run.
This reminds me of the VB6 projects that I had done. It was about 3.5 years back when I thought of learning Visual Basic 6. I purchased the Visual Basic 6 Bible which is no way a recommended book for beginers. I tried to follow the samples given in the book but was not completely successful with it. After a short term course, I set out writing small applications including an Astrology software, IVRS Voicemail retrival system and stuff like that.
I had a very good time working on iCafe' Manager - an exhaustive Internet Cafe' management appllication which Sharath and I had done as a part of our academic project, for which we ended-up with an ultra-cool UI (3D bars, shadows, animated menus, etc.) . Thanks to Photoshop and the Visual Basic timer control. We had used almost 10 timer controls to animate the scrolling of menus and other parts of the UI which could be hidden/minimized. It was more of fun doing this though we didnt get much time to optimize the code we wrote.
I did some serious development using VB6 for my final semester project (BCA) which was a ready-to-market 'Email Management over SMS' suite. It was targetted at corporates who wanted to give their employees Email access on the move (when GPRS wasnt as affordable as they are now). This was the first time did some serious development with Winsock (in contrast to winsock chat applications where one usually starts off). Socket based communication with POP and SMTP servers are not always straight-forward. Thanks to Kurian and JK of Xtend Technologies, Cochin, I used their XSMS platform to communicate with the GSM world. I very badly needed to use multi-threading when I was developing this but a VB6 developer would know what that means. Thanks to .NET. Life has changed.
Offlate I have been trying to experiment with the Microsoft Windows Embedded Shared Source Tools - Bluetooth library. I have been facing some referencing problems with it, but will be out of it soon.
I installed the .NET Passport 2.5 SDK, to enable SSI on one of the portals I am developing. One good thing about version 2.5 of the SDK is that it has support for managed development in C#. I wanted to host this portal on my ASPXConnection webspace. Unfortunately ASPXConnection doesnt give access to some resources which may be required in special cases such as this. To install the Symmetric Key given by the Passport Services Manager, I needed command line accees to install the key. :-(
I had installed the .NET Passport 2.5 SDK on my system and uninstalled the same after realizing that I would not be able to do this with my webspace. The next time hit F5 in VS.NET 2003 to run my web application, it said:
“Unable to start debugging on webserver”
I run the web application without debugging and it was ok. Conclusion was that my Web.config was ok. I didnt want to research for a very long time on this issue, so went ahead with the good old “KB306160”. I reinstalled the .NET Framework and everything was back to normal.
Update: Article 306172 seems to be a better place to start off, if you have ASP.NET & IIS issues
NASA WorldWind is worth a check.
“World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there.”
WorldWind uses Managed DirectX (MDX) to acheive this. But what caught my attention was /cfWorldWind, when I was reading Mike Hall's weblog. Managed DirectX 3D Mobile (MD3DM) can do wonders and this is a proof of it.
One of the screen shots of /cfWorldWind:
Microsoft always has this tradition of code-naming their products in a unique way. “Hawaii“ is the code name of the Visual Studio IDE to be launched after Oracus. It definitely grabs the attention of developers. Sometimes it does scare developers when they begin to think - “Ok, so what about Whidbey? Is is already out-dated? Do I need to re-learn Hawaii“, “What about Oracus? Whats the difference in it?“. Hawaii is supposed to be a completely re-designed toolset.
So far I havent come across any resource on the Microsoft website which shows a complete product release and platform support diagram which talks about the upcoming releases. A consolidated view of the release strategy of Microsoft would be interesting to see.
[eWeek]
Update:
In continutation to the subject of our (Team: BlueCQ - Sabarish, Sharath and myself) team's participation in the Imagine Cup 2005, yesterday we had the South Zone finals in Chennai. We were geared up with our idea to dissolve boundaries using technology, calling it “BlueCQ” (as in ICQ). It is a bluetooth based people networking platform with lots of innovative; fun and business oriented features incorporated in it.
No twists, straight to the point...
Our team didnt make it to the next round (National Finals) because of the following reasons sighted by the judges and the concerned people.
- Bluetooth is going to die / Its already dead and 802.11b has already taken over
- Bluetooth is unreliable
- Bluetooth has a very short range (we had come up with an innovate solution for this but judges weren technically sound to understand and appreciate it... it was disgusting to note this)
When I first heard about Bluetooth I only knew 2 things about it - its a cool new wireless technology, its a substitute for Infra-red. The latter isnt obviously completely correct, which I realised after getting myself involved with Bluetooth programming for the Imagine Cup. Anil Dhawan's video on Channel9 is what motivated us to pick-up Bluetooth as the medium for communication. I started off by doing some initial research about what the technology is and how it works (the Bluetooth stack, the Bluetooth radio etc.). I didnt want to do a crappy job by starting off right away with some code.
According to the modules that we divided, I was the SDK for our platform which has been a very exciting experience for me. Wouldnt be explicit but, our project has a feature which the Bluetooth SIG (the body governing the Bluetooth standard) wants to incorporate into the Bluetooth stack after 2 years !!
We went ahead with this idea and landed up in Chennai on 13th May 2005 for the South Zone finals. We did have a few last moment preparations and sat coding in the hotel where we were staying. We were told that the judges would be from the “industry”. So, we were expecting a good technical interaction. However, expectations always do not turn in to reality. There was a tie with another team after the scoring and we didnt get through because we committed the crime of using Bluetooth (which according to them is dead).
Its really frustrating to note that people are not well informed of the technology and just speak what they “hear“ from others. Its the general notion that, when you ask someone about Bluetooth, his immediate reaction would be - “Naah, its dead.” (even without really knowing whats happening out there).
Even one of the Microsoft (India) folks said that Bluetooth has been replaced by 802.11b already !! Its unfortunate that probably the Microsoft guy hadnt seen this podcast from Microsoft MEDC 2005. To add to my arguments, Microsoft is also funding the Software GreenHouse initiative, which is currently working on a Bluetooth based social networking application which is hardly 50% of what our idea is. It called - “BlueJab”.
The war between different technologies will continue.
Hoping to see a better IC 2006.