As Vice-Chair of INFITT I am pleased to announce that the next Tamil Internet Conference TIC 2009 will be held in Europe, at the Institute of Indology and Tamil Studies of the University of Cologne in Germany during October 23-25, 2009. Tamil Internet Conferences of INFITT are major events for computer professionals and Tamil Diaspora working in the area of Tamil Computing and Tamil Internet. Tamil Internet Conference 2009 is the Eighth in the series, with earlier ones held in Singapore (1997, 2000, 2004) , Chennai (1999, 2003), Kuala Lumpur (2001), and San Francisco (2002). Interested participants are encouraged to register online at http://www.infitt.org/ti2009/

தமிழ் இணைய மாநாடு 2009 பத்திரிகையாளர் சந்திப்பு: இவ்வாண்டின் தமிழ் இணைய மாநாடு வரும் அக்டோபர் 23ம் தேதி முதல் 25ம் தேதி வரை ஜெர்மனியில் நடைபெறவுள்ளது. உத்தமம் அமைப்பும், கோலொன் பல்கலைக் கழகமும் இணைந்து நடத்தும் இந்த சர்வதேச மாநாட்டின் விவரங்களை பகிர்ந்து கொள்ள டாக்டர் மு.ஆனந்த கிருஷ்ணன் (அண்ணா பல்கலைக்கழக முன்னாள் துணைவேந்தர்) பத்திரிகையாளர்களை சந்தித்தார். மா.ஆண்டோ பீட்டர் மற்றும் நானும் உடனிருந்தோம்.

மாநாட்டில் அளிப்பதற்குரிய கட்டுரைகளை இந்த ஆண்டு ஆகஸ்டு 15க்குள்   http://www.infitt.org/ti2009/ என்ற  இணையதளத்தில் பதிவு செய்யலாம். வல்லுநர் குழுவால் தேர்ந்தெடுக்கப்படும் கட்டுரைகள் மாநாட்டில் விவாதத்திற்கு எடுத்துக் கொள்ளப்படும்

After a gap of few years, I am happy that Microsoft premier event "TechEd" is happening again in India. For many of the regular speakers in the event, TechEd India is an annual ritual that we enjoy and look forward to eagerly. It gives a rare opportunity to meet, interact and network with brilliant participants, to hear what they are working on currently and how they are using Microsoft technologies in real life.

When the organizers told me the venue is Hyderabad I was at a loss - why on earth anyone will hold an event in Hyderabad at the middle of peak summer?. After few minutes of reaching the venue "Hyderabad International Convention Centre" I understood why. The Convention Centre was great, with world class infrastructure and I guess the best in India for years to come. And commuting to and from the new Hyderabad Rajiv Gandhi International Airport was not bad either. Though it is far from city, the roads are not that crowded like in Bangalore. I reached from Airport to City in about an hour and while returning from Hi-Tec city to Airport through the new ring road it took less than 45 minutes. The ring road named after Rajiv Gandhi (like many other things in Congress  ruled AP) was good, they allow only four wheelers (cars and vans), trucks and two-wheelers are not allowed to ply in the road to prevent accidents. I couldn't say the same pleasant things about Paramount Airways - which delayed my return flight by some 4 hours (8:30PM flight took off at 12:30AM).

 

This year, I presented on Windows Azure - an overview session where I covered the need for Azure, Azure fundamentals and few demos on using Windows Azure.

In this PDC2008 talk, Chuck Lenzmeier - the Architect in Azure team explains how the Virtual Images of OS works in the Azure cloud data centers. His Bio in PDC2008 says that Chuck has been with Microsoft since 1989, and worked on all versions of Windows from NT 3.1 to Vista. The below video really helps to understand how the Virtual Images are being managed to achieve Windows Azure manage while retaining absolute compatibility with existing OS, Software and Applications.

His co-speaker Frederick Smith from Microsoft explained the other aspects of Windows Azure.

 

• Windows Azure provisions and monitors hardware elements (Compute nodes, L2 Switches, LBs, Routers), hardware lifecycle management (burn in tests, diagnostics and repair, failed hardware are replaced) and capacity planning
• Azure Fabric is highly available: Network has redundancy built in, services deployed across fault domains, load balancers route traffic to active nodes only, Fabric Controller state check-pointed periodically, FC state is stored on multiple replicas
• PDC 2008 CTP release of Azure has Automated Service deployment, Three Service templates, change number of instances, simple service upgrade/degrade, Automated service failure discovery and recovery, external VIP Address/DNS name per service, Service network isolation enforcement & automated hardware management
• For 2009 release will have ability to model more complex application, richer life-cycle management & richer network management

I was in the talk by Andrew Fitzhugh from HP's Magcloud.com. The site is HP's attempt to do on demand publishing of magazines and allow anyone to publish, sell and distribute magazines. An interesting statistics that was shown that in USA about 3.6Billion magazines were delivered to US News stands last year and out of which 2.3Billion was never read.

He talked about how Magcloud moved their front-end systems and portions of storage to Windows Azure.

Magcloud.com on-premises architecture	Magcloud.com utilizing Windows Azure

Seeing the title I had good expectations, but the session turned out to be disappointing. The speakers completed the talk in 30 minutes and didn't have anything more to talk or go into architecture or code details. The project seemed to me to a half-hearted attempt to test drive Windows Azure and was a simple project to showcase anything interesting. 

Today was the keynote by Rick Rashid, Sr. VP from Microsoft Research. Notes on the session:

• Why is fundamental research important to a company like Microsoft or country like USA. It is to survive tough times, about agility through your earlier investments and having smart people
• Talked about Terminator, liveness property. Basically if you create a lock in say "C" will the code release it and so on
• Talked about Dryad - Dryad is an infrastructure which allows a programmer to use the resources of a computer cluster or a data center for running data-parallel programs, without knowing anything about concurrent programming
• The study on computer "programs" help us to understand more on human "cells", similarly study on "cells" is helping us to understand "programs"
• Microsoft has been working with Washington university for Collaborative technologies - ConferenceXP
• Microsoft released today a new version of Microsoft Worldwide telescope Autumnal Equinox Beta

Feng Zhao (Principal Researcher) talked on the energy usage, how to sense and how we can reduce. He showed a small device made by Microsoft Research that uses a 16-bit CPU, 10K RAM, 40K ROM to collect humidity, temperature and  other parameters. It then transmits it using a low-power Radio as they are powered by batteries which need to last long.

He showed the below demo on how this data can be visualized:

These visualizations used in Data Center has helped them to map and plan on how cooling happens, where to place heavy computing loads, etc. He talked about Senseweb - a Wikipedia of Sensors  which is used by over 11 universities worldwide. This is used primarily in Swiss alps to collate data from different instruments on alps and study them for impact of humans on climate change.

David Heckerman in a video talked about how they are helping to find how HIV mutates in a person using technology from SPAM identification and statistical analysis.

Matthew Maclaurin talked about Project Boku - Lightweight programming for kids. Boku is a character/robot, he needs programming to succeed. Why for Kids - because it is a life skill, demystify and engage & make it easy for learning. All programming is done with XBOX Game Console, no keyboard use. See the demo below:

Finally they showed "SecondLight" an innovation based on Microsoft Surface. In SecondLight you can show over the regular display, which gets shown only when you move an ordinary paper above the display. There is an infrared sensor that follows you on the second display. This is exciting stuff, so don't miss seeing this video from Tech Flash showing this.

This session was done very well by Eric Schmidt (Director, Microsoft).

Some top-level highlights were:

1. 34 top level events sorted by icons
2. At the peak, 17 live separate events were happening
3. 2000 hours of live content and 2200 Highlight content that was created
   

The result was staggering: 1.3 Billion Pageviews, 50 Million Unique Visitors, 70 million videos watched, 5000 Unique clips viewed per day during the final week, 600 million minutes of video delivery, 27 minutes of viewing per session, 35 million mobile views (external), 130,000 peak streams, 3.4 petabytes of video delivered, were built for 2.5 times of what was delivered.

Four main types of contents:

1. Live Content were delivered with Windows Media Server, with commentary was coming from commentators typing in a CMS which got moved as XML to production
2. Rewind - Video on Demand play of live content
3. Highlight NBC pulled out 50 Interns from college put them in 30 ROCK and make them create these 3-5min highlights of individual events.
4. Encores – Broadcast replays
   

Other points mentioned:

• Planning of capacity was most important. When, Where and Size (each sport is of different length) was to be planned to determine the CPU, storage and ingress/egress needs.
  
• NBC was helped by Intel Penguin processor, NBC waited for it and the servers got shipped around in May and took 6 weeks to go to Beijing
• Bandwidth out of Beijing was limited to a 40 meg (DS3). 40 encoders were running live, so about 1MB per encoder (Digital Rapid). All this went into two windows media services box in Beijing, this got patched to window media services in 30 Rock, New York so that they can control if they had to. Which was then mapped to Limelight & Level 3 CDN's massive WMS boxes. More details of encoding process in the blog post here
  
• No full screen due to IOC Advertising requirements on the percentage of advertisements to video
• Many partners were involved: Deltatre (Italy) had the CMS the best in the world to do live score on web
• HTTPWatch Professional (and Fiddler) was useful to see what’s going on
  

Lessons Learned:

• Scrum and Scrumming builds better teams as the teams were distributed worldwide
• Meeting Face to Face was very important, especially to bring this up cost in RFP stage
• Everyone should know all roles and all architectural touch points
• Reduce complexity via common schema
• Long-tail delivery hides issues, when you are watching current items you needed to focus on the older contents that were being watched by the long-tail
• The industry needs better telemetry and monitoring solutions
• “Chunked” workflow (smaller sized thousand of files created) presented new challenges – Now IIS 7.0 Smooth Streaming in Media Pack announced yesterday does this better
• Over 250 people between Microsoft, NBC and all other partners
  
  

The announcements made in this keynote today was picked by every media around the world, so I will be brief. You can watch the full keynote from here.

Windows 7

1. The improvements were on decreasing Memory, Disk I/O, Power consumption and on Increasing Speed (Faster Boot, Device Ready), Responsiveness (Start Menu) and Scale up to 250 Processors
2. BitLock on USB Drives to protect your data
3. Native VHD support to mount and boot
4. Remote Desktops now support Multi-Monitor, cool
5. Multi-touch, Start Bar UI improvements and more...

On seeing this I was initially disappointed to see no new UI or major changes. However, after using Windows 7 in the labs and attending more sessions, I realized Microsoft was not throwing what was done in Windows Vista, but improving on it, which is good.

The UAC improvements made me think why not introduce "Roles" like in Windows Server for Windows 7 (Client) also. This way "Developers", "Power Users" and "Home Users" can have different settings and security prompts.

.NET 4.0

The idea to have the "Web" guy Scott Guthrie do the talk on Windows 7 developer improvements and on WPF was a "major coup" to promote it.

1. AutoCad was showing how they are using Windows 7 Multi-Touch, Ribbon APIs for their native C++ rendering
2. A new WPF Toolkit and Silverlight Toolkit were announced today
3. In .NET 4.0 you will have side by side hosting in the same process both .NET 4.0 and .NET 2.0 CLR
4. A new managed extension framework which was shown in VS2010 on how the Text Editor can be customized
5. VS 2010 is being rebuild on top of WPF, this I felt will certainly force Microsoft to improve the performance and invest more on WPF and make it better
6. Having JQuery (an Open source project) supported is another major coup within Microsoft
7. ASP.NET 4.0 will support multiple web.config, one each for Debug, Production and so on
8. Today Silverlight 1.0 is in over 25% of all machines in Internet and nearly in 100 million of them have Silverlight 2.0

Live Services

1. David Treadwell showed Live Services which consists of Search, Geospatial, Live ID, Communication & Presence and Directory services
2. Live ID will now support Open ID. This if works well, has the potential to make it come alive the dream of a single identity provider on the Internet
3. The demo of BBC Live Player using Live Mesh services to sync up was cool. The BBC Engineer talked that "Last Year Broadcaster decided what you saw, This Year you decide what you saw, Next Year will determine what you see". What they are watching, which segment is good will all be shared using Social networking tools and powered by Live Mesh

Office "14"

1. This was perhaps the most interesting demo of the day, with a lightweight of office (Word, Excel and OneNote) for the Web
2. The cool thing was how it synced up in real-time changes done in Client version and the Online version. All working behind the scene with "REST" protocols
3. Microsoft claimed this to be "Office without Limits"

Reviews on the Web: Windows 7, Office 14

After showing preview of Silverlight for Mobile two years back, Microsoft has been absolutely silent. Since there was no news for a long time I presumed they have killed this project. After seeing this session today I am glad the project is alive and getting closer to release. In this session by Amit Chopra and Giorgio Sardo, they talked more about this - both the speakers did a fabulous job of entertaining the audience and making the session fun. Notes on the session:

• The Mobile version of Silverlight will be Silverlight 2.0 with .NET Managed code support and not the SL v1 with JavaScript (Thank god)
• Public CTP will be released in Q1 '09
• Most of the Silverlight applications written for desktop today can run in SL for Mobile
• A new emulator for debugging Silverlight for Mobile is now integrated with Visual Studio
• By using the User-Agent and Platform class you can determine whether your application is running in Desktop, Windows Mobile or Nokia phones, etc.
• Lot of optimisation work is happening to play media well on SL for Mobile

You can see one of the demos in the video below that was shown running in a Windows Mobile:

You can read here an interview with Amit Chopra by Register, where talks about what's in and what's out.

I am right now in Microsoft Project “Velocity” talk in PDC2008 by Muralidhar Krishnaprasad. Microsoft has been promising a distributed (and in-memory) cache system for a long long time. If I remember right it was first talked about in COM/ASP days. After that in every Microsoft event a version of it was shown (by a different team each time) in pre-release stages, but none of them got released. The story from Microsoft on the need for one, how to solve it and roadmap kept changing all the time. As for me, having got tired of this I have been using SQL Server as the distributed cache for few years now.

Notes from the session:

• “Velocity” is Microsoft's Distributed Cache .
• Usage scenarios are: Reference Data, Vendor Catalogs, Activity Data, Resource Data (Flight Seat Inventory and like)
• It is an explicit, in-memory, distributed cache
• Any .NET Objects that can be serialized can be cached
• Scale very easily, add as much memory and add as much machines as you can
• Velocity is going to be free and released in MSDN
• Runs on standard Windows PC. If machines go down, the data is preserved and not lost. High Availability (HA) is ensured
• Velocity releases: CTP2 now in PDC, CTP3 in Mix ’09 and release at Mid ’09 timeframe
• In V1.0 simple Add queries can be done. In later versions LINQ queries will be available.

You can read more on the CTP2 that got released today from the Velocity blog post here .

With what we were shown today of Velocity, especially its high availability, monitoring tools, ease of use and scalability are pretty impressive. I just hope this time they ship this and not go the previous paths.

This was by far the best session for me in PDC2008. It was SQL Server: Database to Data Platform - Road from Server to Devices to the Cloud by David Campbell, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and SQL Server guru. David was brilliant, you could clearly see and appreciate his deep expertise on the subject. He gave an overall view of what's happening with Database in the last few decades, how you can write very complex huge data applications today easily. And then he talked about where this SQL on cloud fits in, where it doesn't and so on. You can see two brief demos shown in the talk below.

David Campbell talking about Sync in Action with Sync Framework in the talk

Zach Skyles Owens of Microsoft showing the Trey Research Demo application

If you want to catch up fully on what David talked about here, you can watch this video he did few weeks before PDC2008 covering the same topic - I highly recommend you watching this.

You can see the photos I took from here.

Ray Ozzie

• For the last few years, the scope of enterprise applications are increasing. IT departments have to manage more of outside users (their customers) than their internal users
• More of IT Pros and Developers have to work together and learn together in this new cloud world
• More than ever the web site of an enterprise is critical to the overall business health
• Hat's off to Jeff Bezos and his team at Amazon for the phenomenal work they are doing with EC2 and Windows hosting. In ways we collaborate with them and in other ways we compete with them
• Today this cloud is another tier. The first tier is your PC or Mobile, it is all about you. The second tier is the enterprise and its scope is the size of the enterprise. The third tier is this cloud. To do this we had a team headed by David Cutler, Amitabh Srivatsa and others in Microsoft
• Today's systems whether it is Windows, Java or others are all modelled for scale-up. We need for the next 50 years, we need something that can scale out & parallel computing
• We announce today "Windows Azure". It is our new Windows (new OS) that supports all the infrastructure to power this cloud design. It is not a software, but a service that is running on Microsoft Datacenters, initially in USA then to be rolled out worldwide
• It will be the most environmentally sensitive, scalable, reliable service for all Microsoft hosting over the years
• Windows Azure works with the same tools - VB.NET 2008, C#, C++, .NET, etc. including both managed and un-managed code. Initially managed will be supported and later support for un-managed will be introduced
• There was a demo of a new services, a Mobile Phone discovery in neighbourhood using Bluetooth - bluehoo.com and client can be downloaded from m.bluehoo.com

Note: For the first time I saw Microsoft keynote speakers (Ray Ozzie and Amitabh Srivatsa) in a developer conference not wearing T-Shirts but are in formal attire with a blazer.  

Ray Ozzie's closing notes video below:

Bob Muglia

• There was demo of using .NET Services and SQL Services by RedPrairie and also of System Management "Atlanta". Atlanta uses SQL Services for customers to compare their instrumentation data with others and best practices
• This week we are releasing "Oslo" a new modelling tool and a language "m"

Dave Thomson

• Vice President of Microsoft Online, he has headed the team that developed Active Directory and in Exchange Server
• One of the problems to solve is federated identity. This is done by using Microsoft Services Connector which sites on-premises and then syncs it to the online cloud. This is currently used by Microsoft online services and will be the same used by Windows Azure.

In the afternoon there was a lively session by TV fame (Cricket Commentator) Harsha Bhogle. He was representing his management consultancy firm Prosearch Consultants. The talk was on T20 Cricket game and the differences of the format with One-Day / Test cricket. The title was very apt as the Microsoft Event was also titled "Together To Outperform - T2O". Harsha drew brilliant parallels (in a extremely light manner) between T20 as a sport and situations in today's corporate world.

He was extremely hilarious, throwing many funny punch lines, few of them below:

- All Good Lines are Unfair (including whatever I just now said)

- He didn't have time (came that fast) to drop the ball

Amongst the points he covered:

- The T20 format demands that "Performance on the Day matters, not reputation", "Shape up or ship out", "Any team can win, no underdogs", "No time for course correction". In T20 you need Wartime leaders and not Peacetime managers.

- When you have right partnerships, the sum of 1 + 1 can be 3. Like Paes/Bupathi, West Indies Past bowler pack including Malcolm Marshall (they hunted like a pack, it was We over Me), Cycle champion Armstrong and his US Postal team colleagues who went before him uphill and he rode on their slipstream

-Unlike earlier formats in Cricket,  in T20 you had to go after audience and advertise. You have to excite people on their second identity (apart from an Indian) which was of their city/region. This was a litmus test, which IPL passed. 

- Players in IPL T20 were not needed to be trained, you paid (bought) for them - just like in business with 30% attrition rates today why will you want to train, you will only want to hire from others . You could source talent not locally but from around the world, so your incentive for training got reduced in IPL T20.

- Another thing that IPL T20 did was to put world champions and unknown local players in the same team. They had to get together and work as a team nearly overnight. They didn't have any bonding glues - no common heritage, no common geography, no common in experience; still had to perform as a team.

- Marketing was new to cricket with T20. You had owners from 3 diverse fields came together - Cricket, Film & Business houses.

In the evening today there was a Bollywood play "All the Best" directed by distinguished director "Feroz Khan". I was hoping it will be in English as my understanding of Hindi is extremely limited, and I will certainly not be able to appreciate a Comedy Play in Hindi. The play did turn out to be in Hindi, but since the play had a mute character there was lot of hand gestures and body language so I could understand it well and was able to have split laughs as well. The appreciation should go to the four excellent actors (Iqbal Azad, Kikoo Sharda, Kranti Redkar and Vikas Kadam) who performed brilliantly on the stage.

The play deals with three friends, one blind, the other deaf and third mute, who all fall for the same girl.

If this comes to your town, don't miss it.

For last two days I am attending Microsoft India Partner Summit titled "T20" at Mumbai. Yesterday there was a written quiz on Microsoft Virtualization , I attempted just for fun. Generally I am not lucky to win any prizes, but today was my day.

In the morning they announced my name as one of the winners for XBOX 360, I was happy to collect it. On my way back to my room I was invited to a game show where they had questions on Windows Live/Vista/IE 8 and were giving prizes up to 10 Grams of Gold. I played and answered a simple question on Windows Live (being a Windows Live MVP does help) and won a 2GB USB Thumb-Drive.

Since I got my prize, I helped the gentleman next to me to answer the next question and he won the 10 Grams of Gold

Yesterday in JAX India 2008 event at Bangalore I presented the Keynote on behalf of Microsoft India. The topic I choosed was "Living with Heterogeneity: Bridging the Worlds", covering on need for Interoperability and what is new now on this in the Microsoft world. It will cover four main areas of interoperability with Microsoft technologies – MS Office Interoperability, Web Services Interoperability, Rich Internet Applications & Dynamic Language Runtime.

Download the PPT from here: keynote for Jax 2008 - April 2008.pdf (740.24 KB)

I have been asked by many of you for the URL to watch the recordings of all the Mix '08 keynotes. Here it is:

MIX08 Day 1 Keynote

MIX08 Day 2 Keynote

The page has an interesting video of MIX08 Keynotes in Hyperspeed, which is a timelape video to see the whole process from bare ballroom through setup, rehearsals, keynotes, and then final teardown after the show. 

Zumobi is a new free mobile widget application that's from a company spawned from Microsoft Research. They did the whole presentation in Expression and didn't use Powerpoint

• The Zumobi application was for organizing content in a easy to find, attractive format mostly in 4 x 4 grids.
• Zumboi uses XML & JS for building the widgets
• The SDK and Emulator are free to download and use along with Runtime
• They don't use a Windows Emulator but a Zumboi runtime which runs in the PC to give a full experience
• The differences between platforms (J2ME, Windows Mobile, Palm) on Scripting, Display, etc are all abstracted by Zumobi Runtime

I was in the talk by Eric Picard (Director, advertising technology strategy at Microsoft) on the future of advertising. It started with how much potential there is to optimize and automate the advertisement buying/selling process in the industry and just for online, but for TV, Print and other media. Eric talked about how the future systems will be more open, interconnected and automated. He touched upon the future where disposable surfaces for video, OLED and more will come, also with the Nano technology how battery life with be extended and revolutionized.

Eric pointed out to a video on the Internet showing Nokia's concept technology using Nano technology, cool video check it out below:

Scott Dickens of Microsoft presented on "Cross-Browser Layout with Internet Explorer 8".

• Main action item is to check and ensure your sites work on Internet Explorer 8.0 since it will be standards compliant by default
• It is a good decision Microsoft has taken now by making IE 8 default to strict standards mode, you need to over-ride it for IE 7 mode. This can be done by having in your pages a meta tag <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />. You can also do this at the entire site level by including in IIS Header tag which can be overwritten at page level as well
• IE 8 includes great Typographic foundation
• A new layout engine was built with CSS 2.1 spec in hand, Deprecation of hasLayout
• When there are ambiguities in the CSS spec, the idea is to check with working group, see what other browsers are doing

More features on readiness can be seen here and a complete coverage on IE 8 can be read from IE blog.

Members in the panel where: 

1. Don Dodge - Microsoft
2. Kimbal Musk - CEO, Me.dium
3. Robert Scoble - Fast Company
4. Dave McClure - 500 Hats
5. Kevin Rose - Founder, Digg
6. Ryan McIntyre - Foundry Group (Representing Venture Capital in the panel)

• Social networks today don't make much money, and that is very crucial for Myspace and Facebook on how to make money for themselves and help their ecosystem in making money
• Remora model (A small fish latching on to a big fish to swim) of revenue. An example was Photobucket depending on Myspace and then Myspace cutting them out
• Digg has a revenue deal with Microsoft's Advertising deal. Digg is making money from people who are submitting, how do they feel?. Digg feels it is not work that their users are doing, if it is work users will not come again. It is because users care to share. Digg is working on making it easy to share with friends by enabling submission on the homepage, all with a single-click no need to visit Digg pages at all
• Excite when started spent few million dollars for basic servers alone which were needed to crawl few million sites and the RAM alone was like $70,000
• The VC companies will find it difficult to find companies where they can invest less and make 5 to 10 times revenue. Most People are not doing the maths right, so ,if a VC is investing $25 Million then they are looking at exists at $100 to $200 Million levels. There are few acquiring possibilities at these levels
• Don't focus on the run of the mill CPM rates, instead go for the niche audience where you can charge premium like a magazine model
• There was a great question on "Why Web 2.0 revenue opportunities are being explored by startups only with USA market and not open to Europe. There is no recession in Europe, still why no monetization efforts outside USA"
• Me.dium had to launch the beta with $0.5 Million investments mainly on hardware alone. Me.dium's long term goal is to get the real nuggets out of the click thru' data to understand and identify important activities. Google has solved 1% of this problem of what you are intending to do and that itself is working out to several billion dollars
• Web 2.0 is a loss leader for something, nobody knows for what yet
• Me.dium when they launched were scared about privacy because they asked users to give all information that they can give about usage. Robert Scoble says "Privacy is dead"
• For every niche service that will cost $10 or less per month you can start to charge, there is good chances people will pay. Here again you will not get 100% conversion, but you need to give initial service free for users to taste the service and then look for some percentage conversion as paid users
• One of the research shows that 3% of your free audience will maximum convert to paid

I had a question to panel on how all this all affects "Mobile" but I didn't an answer for it

Ed Maia from Microsoft made this presentation on Silverlight 2.0 

• In Silverlight Media is a first class citizen
• In Silverlight 1, you needed to use Javascript in browser as the programming model, now in Silverlight 2 there is managed code as an additional programming model
• Silverlight 2 supports WMV 10 Pro Audio Codec in addition to other codecs supported in SL 1.0
• IIS 7 Media Pack allows bit rate throttle to save cost and also supports Web Playlists (so user cannot ask for the 4th file without watching 3,2,1) in ASX format
• Combining with markers from Expression Encoder you can set up markers. So that the first few seconds of video gets downloaded at full speed, then it only leads by few seconds as configured
• Playready for Silverlight 2 is a client and server side components for DRM. There is a client side additional downloaded that is needed for more DRM support
• Silverlight 2 supports only online DRM protected content, meaning everytime there is a DRM protected content then it goes online to License Server

Angus Logan, Sr. Technical Product Manager from Windows Live platform presented on:

• 400 million live ID users, 1bn authentications / day
• All services of Windows Live free upto 1 million users / month
• Today you have to go login.live.com to sign in, you can customize the page for select msn/microsoft sites only. Later 3rd party sites will be allowed to do this
• Windows Live tools for Visual Studio makes it super easy to implement Live Platform
• Windows Live you can associate with your local user/password store
• You can share your Windows Live Contacts Ids safely and under control to the sites you want to
• Increased Silverlight streaming hosting capacity for free
• ADO.NET Data Services (aka Astoria) which consumes AtomPub service end points for Application Base Storage, Photo API, LINQ to cloud capabilities
• Check out the new version of dev.live.com for new 7 Quick-Apps which are open source that are end to end scenarios.

 

Chris Wilson from IE talked about the new features.

• Beta1 is all about developer and web authors features, getting the platform ready. A later beta will have user experience improvements
• Predictable Experience for Users:
  • Domain Name is Highlighted in Address bar
  • Improved Manage Add-Ons Experience
  • Improved ActiveX: Per User ActiveX Install without admin, Per Site ActiveX Controls, DEP/NX code execution prevention
  • Users Sites & Applications must continue to work with a new browser
• Improved User Productivity
  • IE 8 is resilient after crashes - the frame continues to run, only the tabs gets reloaded
  • Support unlocking the web with W3C ARIA
  • Improved Zoom capability (Page layout is preserved)
  • Everyone uses lots of web services and it is manual.For this there is Activities now. It is implemented with OpenService. As a service provider you can check for your service being installed, if not prompt for install. (ie8.ebay.com has a sample)
  • Portions of a page is important, that's where Webslices comes. (ie8.ebay.com has a sample). It uses the Windows Feed infrastructure to keep it refreshed.
  • Complete CSS 2.1 Compliance
    • Generated Content and Counters
    • New 'display' values for tables
    • Outlines
    • CSS 3 Box-Sizing Property
    • CSS 3 Vertical Text
    • Unbiased CSS Test suites
• All IE8 CSS/JS have a debugger in the box.
• Most of the performance problems were Network Perf is frequently the problem
  • In Broadband the parallel connection limit increased to Six from two
  • JScript improvements
  • CSS Selector API
• HTML 5.0 Offline storage, offline/online events

Beta 1 is available from here | Complete coverage on IE 8 can be read from IE blog.

Ray Ozzie

There has been lot of releases in the last one year and then Yahoo!... There is a wide range of product + services that will come from Incubation to release from Microsoft including IE 8.0. Microsoft might seem to be doing random releases, so I will give a background on how they are all tied together - first is Advertisement as a revenue engine, second Internet reshaping Microsoft products and Services. Right from day one Internet has been about Content + Community + Commerce which are all innovative & greater user engagement models.

Three principles:

1. Web is the hub of social, device mash, networking. The concept of one PC is gone, the new world will be a collection of PCs connected by cloud. Your own device mash.
2. Enterprise, virtualization and commodity hardware (storage grid, computing grid). Utility computing model. All Microsoft software will be refactored for symmetry from enterprise to partner hosted models.
3. For Developers & Designers, we need to join small pieces to make big items. Loosely coupled composition and cooperated of pieces. Transparency and open standards are important.

Half a Million people worldwide are using Office Live & Dynamics CRMS Live. We also released last Monday, options to run Exchange, Sharepoint, OCS on the cloud. We are also announcing SQL Services Data Services today.

Internet Explorer 8.0

• CSS 2.1 will have the biggest impact so went for CSS certifications. We have contributed 702 test cases to W3C CSS Test working group in BSD license so that everyone can have the same test cases.
• Performance has been improved over 2.5 times
• HTML 5.0 support enables Ajax functions to understand browser back button, support Network Connection event, store data locally
• Rich Debugging and Developer tools integrated in the browser
• Activities are in place. They work on OpenService Specification
• WebSlice (which slices the page and allows me to monitor them and get alerted on changes) specifications under Creative Common License
• Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 1 released

Silverlight

• 1.5+ Million installations per day are installed now
• Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 available for download
• Adaptive Streaming for automatically choose speed of delivery based on network and your CPU. You can plugin any algorithm for this
• IIS 7.0 Media Pack can help you to serve only 10% (or any other figure) from the point user is watching now with bandwidth throttling
• John Harris from Expression team showed: Silverlight Advertisement Template makes it easy doing advertisements with Silverlight, Atlas AdManager was shown, IIS 7.0 Media Pack allows Media Playlists which allows you to control how something is skipped or not, Expression Encoder 2.0 allows you to overlay advertisements with text, XAML or Video
• Ari Paparo VP from DoubleClick talked about how they are supporting Silverlight Overlay ads.
• Perkins Miller from NBC Sports & Olympics showed for the first time the product. We have 150 days to go. We are going to be putting 2200 hours live.
• Beta 1 of Silverlight 2.0 is about 4MB download. Partnering with Novell to release this in Linux. And lot of new controls are released
• AOL showed their new mail client with Silverlight
• MS Announced Sharepoint webparts for embedding Silverpoint
• Demoed Silverlight for Windows Mobile 6.0 and promised to bring it out on mobile devices that have a SDK
• Nokia will deliver Silverlight on Symbian S60 (which is a big win for Silverlight against Adobe Flash in my opinion) first then with S40 phones & Internet tables. Demoed it working in Nokia N95 by WeatherBug

 

Just like last two years, this year too I will be going for Mix '08. Now in its third year, MIX is a good opportunity for hearing about cutting-edge web technology, creative and business strategists all in one place and in an informal style. That's why I think it is worth for me to spend few thousands grands and a travel that will take me half-way around the world to attend Mix in Las Vegas.

It was told earlier that Steve Ballmer alone will be doing the keynote this year, so I was left thinking so it will be only "English" & "Business" talk with no new technology announcements. In a way of addressing my concern, Microsoft yesterday announced that Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie will join Scott Guthrie on stage as a keynote speaker at MIX08. Ray is expected to outline Microsoft’s progress card on their investments on the web platform, Silverlight & IE. Stay Tuned!

The last programme of TiECon yesterday was Pitch to VCs, several budding entrepreneurs presented their case for seed capital. I was surprised when I was invited next on stage to present on Vishwak's story (my good friend and our GM - Manigandan Gopalakrishnan had listed my name without my consent ).

Doing an elevator pitch in 5 minutes for Vishwak which has 10 years of experience and achievements is difficult. Hence I decided to be precise, to the point and highlighted them in 6 buckets (headings).

1. About Vishwak: When was it founded, what we do, number of people and locations
2. Solutions: That we offer and the need they fulfill in the market
3. Current Customers
4. Current Structure and ownership
5. Future plans of expansion
6. Why we are bound to succeed?

I was happy on the way I pitched and the fact my message was received well by audience. Of course, it will be fool-hardy to expect a deal from any investor with just a 5 minute pitch

Yesterday was TiECon 2008, an event organized by TiE Chennai to celebrate and recognize Entrepreneurship in the City. The event had lot of stardom with the inauguration by Dr. M. Karunanidhi,Chief Minister, Tamilnadu & Smt. M K Kanimozhi, Member of Parliament, Tamilnadu. Initially I didn't get the connection between Hon'ble CM and an Entrepreneurship event, then it got clear when the awards recognizing Entrepreneurship were given to eminent personalities like Mrs Y. G. Parthasarathy, Director and Dean, PSBB schools (Social entrepreneur of the year), and Dr Pratap C. Reddy, Chairman, Apollo Group of hospitals (Lifetime achievement). Ms.Kanimozhi (MP) in her speech talked about the similarities between Chennai Sangamam and TiECon but many in the audience including myself didn't get the connection.

Other awardees were:

• R. Subramanian, Founder and Managing Director, Subhiksha (Extreme Entrepreneur of the year)
• R. Sarabeshwar, S. Sivaramakrishnan and V.G. Janarthanam, Founding Members, Consolidated Construction Consortium Ltd (Entrepreneur of the year)
• Hemu Ramaiah, CEO, Landmark (Woman entrepreneur of the year)
• S. Abhay kumar, Founder and vice-chairman, Lifecell (large start-up entrepreneur of the year)
• Vivek Anand, CEO, FitnessOne (small start-up entrepreneur of the year)
• Raju Venkataraman, President and Chief-Operating Officer &
• Firstsource (Serial entrepreneur of the year)

You can view short videos of the event including the CM Address and Award distribution from ChennaiOnline.

PANELS

There were 3 panel discussions during the day, I have just managed to cover below the first panel on Emerging Trends in the Retail Industry.

Vivek Anand of FitnessOne talked about their emphasis on excellent equipments, world class training to trainers, hygiene, etc. He talked new opportunities that are available for Aesthetic & thrill seeking industry. And with the competition from organized retail how existing stores are upgrading to new consumer experience and the big opportunity here. He quoted that Top 10% of income group in India consume 30% of retail. A company can compete on price, compete on service, compete on innovation - but you cannot compete on all three.

G.V.RaviShankar, VP of Sequoia Capital talked about speciality stores like Coffee Day, Printo (Digital On demand printing)

Hemu Ramaiah, CEO of Landmark Books talked about how when she started 30 years back no one heard about Outsourcing. She talked about a list of emerging outsource opportunities that budding Entrepreneurs can think of starting: 

1. Infrastructure (Property, Real Estate Broking, Project Management, Visual Merchandising)
2. HR (Outsourcing Recruitment, Outsource People)
3. Training (Even basic speaking is bad in India today, language, Skill Gaps)
4. Store services (Housekeeping, Security, Software, Retail Auditing)
5. Backoffice Operations / Logistics, Imports/Clearance, Buying (Sourcing Agents)
6. Marketing (Analytics, Data Mining, Shopping trends and shopping habits, CRM, PR, Media Design, Event Management, Web Design Outsourcing)
7. Quality (ISO Certified, Balanced Score Card, Customer Satisfaction Survey)
8. Banking & Finance (VC Funds, Business Plans)
9. Travel/Tickets.

I enjoyed the last panel discussion moderated by K.Pandia Rajan, Ma Foi and he did a wonderful job in that. I liked his quote of "Punarapi Jananam, Punarapi Maranam" while saying talking about Serial Entrepreneurship. Other panelists in that session were:

• Sharad Sharma, CEO, Yahoo! India R & D
• Srinivas Balasubramanian, Chairman & CEO, Photon Infotech
• Rajesh Jain, CEO Netcore
• Mahesh Murthy, Partner, SeedFund
• Satya Prabhakar, CEO, Sulekha

KEYNOTES

Captain Gopinath in his Keynote spoke about "Dare to Dream and Do It. Most important for an entrepreneurship is to live it more than anything else. To be Uncompromising & to listen to your inner voice. To Pursue that vision to the exclusion of everything else". He spoke about how he grow from being Army Officer to a Farmer of 40 Acres borrowed from his uncles in which he did Silk Farming, starting an Helicopter company with an ex-army colleague when India had only 20 Helicopters in civil sector and finally to his successful venture Air Deccan. He stressed on the need to Dream big and act fast. Air Deccan collects more than USD 1 to 2 Million every day. Talked about how Accenture was slow to respond when Air Deccan initially wanted them to build their e-ticketing software and then how they went with a small software company for developing in the early days.

There were other keynotes as well made by the following eminent personalities during the day.

It was educative to hear each Entrepreneurship's struggle to success story.  Mr.Thiagarajan's speech in Tamil (who was the exception to speak in Tamil, even CM spoke in English) was disappointing as it was nothing more than an inaugural address and was consumed in praising Tamilnadu CM.

Yesterday I attended a Balanced Scorecard session organized by SPIN Chennai and the speaker was Mr.SUDIPTO MARJIT (Practice Head of QAI Limited).  Before the session my exposure to Balanced Scorecard was limited (or lower), but Mr.Marjit did an excellent job in giving an overview within the 60-75 minutes he had that at the end I felt I know a lot on the topic. Though this is a theoretical topic he made it very lively with his engaging style, with every sentence he spoke we could easily sense his passion for the topic and experiences he has had on ground.

He introduced the need for having something like Balanced Scorecard before going into the actual topic. This approach helped in appreciating this concept better. "Balanced Scorecard, is a world-renowned management technique for implementing strategy and creating a performance management system. Designed by Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton, it has been recognized by the HBR as the leading management tool in the last 75 years"

Two key Areas that Mr.Marjit concentrated on the talk were

• Balanced Scorecard methodology and understanding of a Strategy Focused Organization
• Aligning Strategy through Strategy Maps

I really liked his example of SouthWest Airlines using a strategy map.

I was recorded on Day 1 of Digital Hollywood to say our pitch about Vishwak by Vator.TV and it was published now (click the above video). Vator.tv is a professional network and marketplace for ideas and businesses. Anyone, across all industries, at any stage, can share ideas, products, services and businesses with the rest of the world, mainly through video.

When they recorded with a small handycam I doubted on how well it will come. Not only it has come out well but they have published our About us and also enrolled us in SDForum Competition.

Today is the last day of DH and I have my panel discussion in another hour or so. I am sitting currently in The Next Generation in Mobile & Broadband Platform Personalization: Widgets, Search, Information & Commerce.

Joyce Schwarz, JCOM Emerging Entertainment Marketing, talked about her blog at Hollywood2020. You should give some content free, so that consumer will upsell, upgrade, etc. It is sickening everytime you have register when you want to see some content. She says she is an active believer that move toys will connect to Internet - Nicholas Negropante has said you will have more Barbies connected to Internet than PCs.

Martin Russ, Chief Architect, Real Time Content talked about documentary where you can give consumer a small teaser and then that keeps expanding as you go into it. There should be able to have an open API for exchanging profile from one social site to another. It is not possible to automatically move the profile content from facebook to linkedin. Future always has the habit of being what is least expected. 3

Jonathon Wolfe, CEO, Maxiem talked about his company having a framework around MPEG21. And content producers in future are going to let go of the content to be distributed over all places, but have embedded transaction points and revenue shares.

Collin Bruce, Director of Marketing, Embedded Business Group, Hitachi America Ltd. talked about their investments on embedded database for search. We will accept adverts when we want to do something/buy something. If we force advertisement with content, people will move to free options.

Scott Fedewa, Executive VP & Executive Producer, LiveNation.com talked about how they are building technology that shows text and picture sent from SMS go through moderator and appear on the screen in the front during a concert. A spam is a spam only if you are not interested. If you target correctly then you will want it, even rich people will want it, done correctly advertisement becomes programming.

Jim Benz, BDM, CSG Interactive talked that they are 1.2 Billion USD company there customers are most of the cable companies. DRM seems to be come and go depending on which seminar you are in.

Dan Nguyen, Director of Product Management, OpenWave provides the client and server software for mobile browsing and location based services. On Google OpenSocial API - if you can't buy them, neutralize it and this is a best way to do it.

Digital Music & Its Transformation

Artistnation has been recently launched which brings under one umbrella the pandora of revenue sources for artists including Music Rights, Mobile Rights, Merchandising, Product branding, touring, etc. It has recently signed up with Madonna for 150 Million over 10 years. Artists are now being realized as the center of universe and they never had distribution going better for them than now. Another speaker says he wants to dispel this vision of artist quitting their day job, over the weekend distribute music and make millions. Traditionally there has been an adversary relationship between label and artists - now they will move into more collaborative relationship just like artist and managers. Labels were controlling 90% of video distribution, now you have MSN, Google & Yahoo! doing it. There was mention about Ruckus which is legal music free for college students.

Alby Galuten from Sony says it is a myth that labels makes artists. Music sales in their heydays had users immersed in music when they buy a CD put up their headphone and hear it, do nothing. Now they do many things. It is going to be very difficult to get subscribers to keep paying $15 per month.

Jessica Stoner of Pandora (Radio) talked about how users will get more ways to get music easily - as easy as get getting terrestrial music, now they are getting broadband music in PC, later it is going to broadband in their cars. People want to discover/get introduced to music in their radio and then hear it till they drop from their iPod. 

John Jones talked about how music will be mixed / consolidated in everything that MSN, Yahoo! does.

Charlie Moore of Ruckus feels that students feel comfortable paying money per semester terms, they are comfortable for charging through mobile/landline numbers than through credit cards. They will feel better to pay $50 per year one time, rather than $5 per month.

There was a question of where Microsoft is with Zune with all their monies and where is there $50 million campaign equivalent of iPods. Microsoft historically leads in 3rd round, they have patience and perseverance to lead. They did with software, now they are likely to get it in entertainment with XBOX leading. 

Reinventing Advertising: Broadcast vs the New Platforms

Dean Scheu from Charter Media says That the 30 seconds spot is not really dead, it is evolving into interactive spots. The thought process that went into creating it is changing. Charter is in 300,000 houses in LA. Lot of people want to know more if the product advertisement is targeted and appropriate for them.

Mitch Oscar from CaratDigital says The ads are now made to work wherever they are, whether it is time shifting, place shifting and all that. When technology people come to the advertising agencies like his, they say they have done a new technology before but they don't add value like what worked what is the ideal time how users are behaving to this, etc. Agencies need this information to understand this and are not getting help, also the manpower shortage in agencies is also not helping.

Charles "Chip" Meehan from Comcast spotlight talked about their Telescopic spots that helps to cross promote their 110 other channels to people who normally watch only 16 of them and are not aware of the others.

Kenneth Papagan from Rentrak Corporation talked about how their company measures user behaviors in theatre and DVD just like in Internet. When advertisers have tried to make their 30 seconds into 21, 11, 5 seconds consumers are moving out of it lesser.

Jeff Schultz from CONCERT who were the first on demand TV channel in US. There is no inherent thing fixed about 30 seconds spot.

Most of the talks were about Mobile content, everyone seems to be obsessed with that single idea, the next idea is social networking in online space. Some of what I heard in the day:

The biggest challenge is the variety and difference of off-deck sites and the way you work with careers, the consumer experience is so different that you have to teach them to get each site working. The other challenge is I watch two videos, do a call my battery dies. You have now plenty of content now available, the real need is how to discover the. The reason why YouTube is successful it makes the finding of content like what people are watching made very easy.  2% (or 6 Million or so) of the 240 Million subscribers in USA have downloaded ever a video in their mobile. The offdeck world is important because you can do sharing of content between subscribers of different careers. The careers have no big interest in scaling video downloads in their network.

Bernard Gershon Sr.VP of ABC News says it is 2 years away where people are going to be very comfortable watching videos on Mobile. Tammy Franklin VP of Turner broadcasting said Phone is still a Hardware business, the phone needs to have the capability to play videos and people are stuck in 2.5G and their present plans before you can move them. There was a mention on how OEM and Device manufacturer would like to get into the service revenue, they feel left out and now with iPhone they are tempted again.

In another track there was a demo of Titan TV that helps local Television stations to go broadband, titan does the encoding, geographic based advertisements, etc.

I was interviewed today about Vishwak twice in Digital Hollywood at Vator.tv and Nowlive.com

DH Fall 2007 just started. The first session "Media, Entertainment and Social Change" talked about how Digital Film Making Tools helped the campaigners behind the "Darfur Now" movie to produce it. "Ted Braun" said how they are using the Community tools to spread the message through viral marketing (embed the original videos produced during the movie). Participant.net company's "Adrian Sexton" says their goal is to be make entertainment meets social action meets social media. For them using the community/social networking technology tools means not only making profit but action social awareness. Most of the Social causes sites and places are not engaging and compelling, they are largely inert communities and no entertainment proposition. People want to be in active communities and have entertainment as well. Good Philanthropy should also give good entertainment and they call "Social Action Network". There tenets are to "Connect, Collaborate, Engage, Activate" basically take part!.

I was pleased to know that the technology we feel is only for the urban elites are helping greatly in effecting a social change.

Few other points - YouTube has a new initiative "Broadcast your cause" where they give free cameras to community journalism, Al Gore has launched Current.com (2.0) Digg Like System for social causes sites, Kiva.com is about loans that change lives (based on Micro finance) and Clinton plugged it in Oprah on Sep 4, 2007 and they got more money they can give, MSN Messenger works with the IM donations model, Development of original multimedia content based upon community engagement in a subject area.

"We Make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give" - Winston Churchill

Mobile TV & Video: Content & Commerce: A movie clip was demoed by Motorola using Mobiclip player from Actimagine corp. Transpera demoed their solutions to connect multiple devices, multiple gateways, etc and also social community sharing features. MediaFlo (Nalco) shows their TV Experience in Mobile and channel surfing as fast as in tv and not battery draining, uses Qualcomm's nationwide 700Mhz spectrum. Actimagine says they expect the Nokia, Motorola & Windows Mobile Smartphone will be 400Million+ by next year. Choicestream talked about their personalized recommendation software. Verisign talked about their DNS Services, SSL, Mobile Messages (60% of world wide messages are routed through them) and they have more TELCO integration than anyone else. Fun Little movies demoed their family/kids/international friendly comedy in Sprint Mobile channel.

• How do you make people watch the content they have already paid for, say by $100 per month for their cable connection
• Internet has taught us that Media houses will have significant share, but the hockey stick long tail approach/inflexion point is user generated content
• Discussions on whether content programming (like what they cable networks do) is important or not. Or is only the content producers (professional or user) important
• In the question hour I talked about how in India people wait for 5-10 minutes to download a paid content; it is about empowering people who don't have access to content (connecting the unconnected)
• There was another question - In TV advertisements happen because it was free; why will we watch advertisements while we pay for Mobile. It was answered as the same scenario that happened 10 years back - why see advertisements while we pay for ISP for internet, why we watch advertisements in TV while we pay for cable.

As I wrote yesterday - On 16th October I presented in Sri Lanka DevDay 2007. The audience were more than 500 in number and were enthusiastic bunch, who were very eager to learn new things in technology. This was different from the programs in India, where Audiences are not that excited even when you show them new stuffs. This may be because in India you have lost the charm of big events as too many of them happen that too throughout the year.

Anyways, coming back I presented on two topics I like a lot nowadays - WPF and Silverlight.

WPF, a new way of looking @ your Windows Applications
Overview of Windows Presentation Foundation, the goals behind WPF and the power of XAML language. See for yourself how the UI world around you is changing forever. The session will cover the design and implementation of UI using Microsoft Expression Blend and Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 “Orcas”. It will get into discussing about the popular controls in WPF including Layout, Data Binding, Audio/Video, Flow Control and composition techniques. We will wrap up the session by looking into the new features introduced with WPF 3.5.

Silverlight: The web just got richer
See Microsoft’s new arsenal for the web, the cross browser cross platform Silverlight.  In a world where designers had more say in Web Applications this session will show you how developers can get back into the driving seat. The Session will go into details of case studies of applications built with Silverlight 1.0. You will see demos working across browsers seamlessly. We will wrap up the session by discussing the new capabilities that .NET integration is bringing to upcoming Silverlight 1.1 version.

References:
1. The presentations I made (Thanks to Tim Sneath of Microsoft) are available here
2. Most of the demos (other than the demos we built for our customers in Vishwak) are taken from Silverlight and WindowsClient.net sites.

சுமார் இரு வாரங்களுக்கு முன்பு மக்கள் தொலைக்காட்சியில் என்னை பேட்டி எடுத்தார்கள். ஒரு இருபது நிமிடங்கள் ஒடிய இந்த பேட்டியில் என்னால் முடிந்த அளவுக்கு பிறமொழி கலக்காமல் தமிழியில் பேசினேன். எனக்கு தாய்மொழித் தமிழ் என்பதால் தமிழில் பேசுவது கடினமே அல்ல. ஆனால் அலுவலுக்குக்காக தொழில்நுட்பங்களை ஆங்கிலத்திலேயே பேசிப்பழகியதால், தமிழில் கணினி மற்றும் செல்பேசி முன்னேற்றங்களைப் பேசுவதில் சிறு தயக்கம் அவ்வளவு தான் .

இந்த நிகழ்ச்சி நாளைக் காலை 8 மணிக்கும், மாலை 11 மணிக்கும் ஒளிப்பரப்பாகிறது. மறக்காமல் பாருங்கள்!

Video: TNCV Interview in Makkal

Microsoft demonstrated their Multipoint technology where two people can use one computer at the same time.

Craig Mundie: "5 Years back during my early trips to India, I saw it was primarily about People being shipped outside or rented out. We need a few people who are thinking outside the system. It is important to nurture these people. Capital availability, Intellectual nurturing and Infrastructure are all needed to do innovation.If you look at the problems we have now whether it is basic literacy, healthcare, energy problem there is no other way other than to invent our way out. And IT has the ability to influence and help all forms of engineering. The task on hand that is an opportunity for India is the analogy to cellphones. Both India and China leapfrogged from copper fixedlines where they lagged developed countries to mobile phones penetration. I have been thinking about this for few years, as life has become more comfortable the country doesn't celebrate their engineers, they are more driven by the media and sports. In India it seems to be Bollywood and Cricket. In USA you ask the kids you do you want to do be when you grow up they say Tiger woods/Britney spears and not Bill Gates. In China the same question gets answered as Bill Gates. You want to do things for the long term, for example what I do as Chief Research Officer sees light not less than 3 years"

Dr R A Mashelkar (Ex-Director General of CSIR): "India has 3 advantages - Democracy, Diversity, Demography. India has 3 freedom, in 1947 the first freedom political freedom; Second was with Liberalization has brought down the cost of capital and freedom to do things in 1991; The third is technology freedom in 2007 with Nuclear deal. India also has been uneven innovator as only 3% work in organized Private sector/97% work for unorganized sector and India is a hesitant innovator especially because we are reluctant to face IP rights, etc. The big challenge for India is including those that are excluded those at the bottom of pyramid. IT among other things, especially when you have to deal with large number of people and huge distance. Solutions like TCS illiterate learning program that can make them read in 6 weeks and they have demonstrated that successfully in South Africa as well. Innovator sees what everyone sees but thinks what no one is thinking. Innovator doesn't know that it cannot be done. When you want to achieve something that was not achieved before you got to use methods that has been not used before. Engineering of the word Engineer will be done by Engineers themselves. I am delighted to be an engineer"

I am in Microsoft India's i3 2007 event in Leela, Bangalore. Many eminent speakers are talking today about how India is innovating.

Mr.Ravi Venkatesan talked about "How a World Bank report that says India's GDP can become 5 times of what it is today. As a country we have learned to innovate around constraints. Look in the Mobile phone industry where we have the lowest ARPU but still some of the highest urban teledensity. Take say Tata ACE or other innovative products built on Shoe string budgets when compared with rest of the world. Take for instance a gentleman from Chennai is able to produce solar power heated water. The challenge is to accelerate these sparse and spread innovations. Only 16% of Manufacturing industry in India have forward planning for human resources, in China it is 92%. We have done a bad job of applying IT within the country. Investments in IT in India is only 3.5% GDP same as Bangladesh & Sri Lanka. Today we are talking about Innovation from India, Innovation for India, Innovation with India. India has over 8 Million SMEs and they are the primary employment drivers and only 2 Million of them use computers other than Mobile. In Tirupur we have a model for Software plus Service model for garment industry by paying Rs.5000/2500 per user. Our DPE team is going to work with Startups in enabling them with technology, opening doors, connecting to venture capitalists"

Ramgopal Subramaniam from Aztecsoft did the demo of their Tirupur Garment cluster for SME.

Prof.Sadagopan talked about "I will talk about Innovation East of Bangalore, West of Bangalore and lastly in Bangalore.

1. For example nearly a decade back In Tirupathi, we developed a system where by each pilgrim got a barcode tag which replaced physical queue with a logical queue. It costs 10paise and over 26 Million people have used it so far. Later we found that the pilgrims took bath in the template tank, so we moved to water proof tag. Now we have extended the system to Internet. Initially critics said illiterates will oppose it, but they support it b'cos they don't have the bribing opportunities that literates have. To make it India it got to be Absolutely low cost, reliable  and easy to use.
2. Moving West, in Udipi we have a company called Robosoft serving Marquee Top 5 Japan companies for Device driving with over 2000 people and he calls his place Silicon Beach, this proves innovation can happen anywhere
3. In Bangalore - From JP Nagar few years a 30 people company managed to make USD 6 Million for a gadget that unwired iPod. They are closed now, but the point that innovation can happen from anywhere.

Most of the innovation can happen from most unusual place. So India innovating should be India innovating from anywhere in the country.

There is a social dilemma, because in India everyone wants to be developing software, but the bigger opportunity/large number of jobs are in maintenance of software/business. The message should somehow reach the youngsters and that Maintenance is cool. Even in Microsoft, people will like to first go to MS Research, then to MS Labs finally to Sales or Support. But most of the challenging work happens in Support.

Automotive and Retail are the next booming industry and both are IT intensive"

Srikanth Rao of Affordable Business Solutions says the "biggest gap of man power exists for SME players. They can't train people because if they train the trained resources will quit. If you can do a solution at less than 10% of the overall cost to company and produce 20 to 30% cost saving, you got it"

How SilverLight was build by Gaurav Khanna (Microsoft Corp):

• SilverLight is Microsoft's paradigm of developing rich internet application (RIA) that runs in Browser Sandbox and are cross-browser in nature
• Gaurav started with a nice white page (Ink Application), wrote on it, rather than do slides
• One file core.dll contains both the CLR and JITing part
• Browsers due to W3C standard downloads only 2 threads (images, CSS whatever), what happens in SilverLight. He didn't answer to my satisfaction, as I suppose everything should be bound by the WinInet limitation.

Building Cool Virtual Earth Mashups by Janakiram MSV (Microsoft India)

• Jani is brilliant and his demos on the mashups with theatres in Mumbai, tab popups, integration with Sulekha Yellow Pages Feed and BharatMatrimony RSS feed was cool
• I am waiting for him to post the samples, code in his blog
• His humour on "You can do anything and everything - server side, client side, JavaScript, XML, Web Services anything, because at the end it is all mash-ups"
• He talked about Map Cruncher (Custom tile generator), MapPoint Web Service (Enterprise Service) & Virtual Earth (Enterprise Service)

Astoria - Data on the Cloud by Janakiram MSV (Microsoft India)

• Accessing data stored in the cloud and access it using HTTP REST
• Astoria is Data Access Pattern, Online Service, .NET Library
• It is about Web Data Access and not Database Web Access - the difference being accessing Data from a URI using REST and not SOAP or anything else
• Explained the difference between Astoria which is an online service and ADO.NET Entity Model and Web Data Extensions
• (References: MSDN Data Access Incubation projects including Astoria and Jasper)

Microsoft Performance Point Server (PPS) by Abhishek Srivatsa (Microsoft India):

I had little understanding on this product, so decided to start with this. The session gave me some overview on the product and on how it helps to collect and model data with its built-in tools. It uses SQL Server 2005 Enterprise for its own Meta-Data and Cubes, but the actual data can come from any source (RDBMS). End users can enter data easily through Excel and don't need InfoPath (it is not supported now). PPS needs WSS or Sharepoint to run. Currently the workflow it uses is different but will be merged with WWF in coming releases. There is a RAD environment for doing Scorecards easily. The UI is Office 2007 like so better than the BSM UI. The presentor choosed not to show any demos and it all PPTs and I lived through it . I was told to go the afternoon session by one of the PMs of the product "Rohit"  which I did.

REST with WCF by my good friend Janakiram MSV (Microsoft India):

• He showed a demo of Weather.com XML and he commented on their URL having XOAP which he said could be for XML Object Access Protocol  
• COAP (Complex Object Access Protocal) which Jani has coined which is for SOAP with all complexities of WSDL, etc.
• He brought in good humour by calling all the assumed tenants of Web 2.0 - have a multi colour logo with reflection, rounded-edges, always is in Beta, register your domain with 'r' as suffix - flickr, twitter,etc.
• He talked about how bollywood is reinventing old movies like DON. Similarly how industry is reinventing CSV. He was drawing a parallen on JSON which was plain old CSV with some simple meta-data.
• He joked on how Microsoft has embraced extensively XML so that people may call it "eXtremely Microsoft Language"
• Wired Format Protocols:
• POX - Plain Old XML has no meta-data; SOAP has meta-data. POX comes with a catch, there is no contract, you get something from a server and you figure out the schema and hard-codes them.
• JSCON - Javascript Object Notation
• WCF in .NET 3.5 (Orcas)
• JSON/AJAX Support (WebHttpBinding, JSON Message Encoding)
• Syndication Support (RSS 2.0, ATOM 2.0)
• HTTP Programming Support (REST, POX)
• Data Contracts are object contracts that we can send over wires.
• He showed a good demo on Maps with Theatre mash-ups
• There is a good blog post by James Clarke on JSON vs XML
  

Extending Browser Object with Silverlight by Pandurang Nayak (Microsoft India)

• Though I have been to the same session on Silverlight in Mix '07, I decided to be here because I haven't been any of Pandurang's session before.

Building Business Insights using Performance Point 2007 by Rohit Rahi (Microsoft Corp)

• May be b'cos he was from the product team, but this session was fabulous on its own and especially after the morning one I attended on PPS. The speaker had only 1 hour (Organizers: You need at least 75-90 minutes for a decent tech talk with demos) and he did a fantastic job of it - skipping all PPTs, showing only demos and took taking plenty of questions patiently even on licensing which he had no control on
• You can download the current CTP2 as a complete VPC with Server and Client preinstalled and ready to play with. Lot more features are coming in CTP3 in few weeks. The final release is getting shipped by end of this year.
• When you buy PPS v1.0 you will also get Proclarity 6.3 free - so you can both servers. In next version of PPS lot more features of Proclarity will be introduced, currently almost all Proclarity web features are in PPS v1.0
• What is ScoreCard - it is a sweet spot between Reporting and Analytics
• In PPS now you can easily create dashboard using an Office 2007 like UI client, and publish the entire dashboard in one click to MOSS without the cumbersome process of creating each webpart in MOSS. This client - Dashboard Designer is a huge improvement in PPS from BSM. You also have bulk editing capabilities, Analytic view designer,  Time Intelligence. New data sources including SAP BW 3.5, Sharepoint Lists, Excel Services are introduced
• BSM 2005 and Proclarity 6.3 users and applications can easily move to PPS v1.0 straight away.
• He demoed a cool Strategy Map which is a visual representation of Balanced Scorecard. Helps you to see how KPIs are related. You can also have your reports to linked to each KPIs. KPIs can be imported easily from your SQL Server Cubes or from Excel as well.
• Strategy Maps are actually Visio 2007 web part, so it can be easily a Plant Map or any other diagram in Visio 2007. Even Organization charts can be connected and shown how each is performing to their KPIs
• People confuse between Dashboard and Scorecard. There is no clear definition, but Microsoft likes to call Dashboard as an entire page which has one or more Scorecards and reports.
• PPS v1.0 supports parameterized Scorecards which can be used to see your scorecard for a selected value (Country, Price, etc.)
• Unlike in BSM where it was difficult to create scorecards since first you have to create KPIs; in PPS it is other way - create scorecard first and then KPIs
• PPS v1.0 is introduced some new web parts like OLAP Grids and OLAP Charts - these can be thought of as next version of Office Web Components
• Answering questions:
• Sharepoint and PPS - How do you compare them for dashboard functionality, since both provides dashboard capabilities and how do you rationalize the choice. Some you can do even with Excel Service. Rohit acknowledged it was a tough question and the overlap between products, which over versions will get ironed out
• Why should I buy CALs, when I already Sharepoint CALs and that too only to see the data?. Again Rohit acknowledged the problem, but highlighted how Microsoft PPS is still cheaper at $200 per CAL compared to Cognis and other competition at $4000 or so.  
• Does it support versioning and archiving in scorecard. It seems "No" for right now, but BSM has it today.

Device Independent UI for Windows Mobile by Mel Sampat (Microsoft Corp)

• There are tons of devices with different form factors with more coming in the months and so the UI should work well across these. They are working on wide device like Nokia Communicator
• In Windows XP/Vista we can have fixed size Window dialog, but not in the Windows in Mobile where they are always are full-screen and to the size of the hardware.
• He demoed how say Windows Live Search Application works very well in all different form factors
• ScreenLib is a free library from Microsoft to achieve device resolution independence in native code. It is a C++ Class that works with Win32 and MFC, lightweight and works with all versions of Windows Mobile Devices. And it is open source and has been included in Windows Mobile 6 SDK
• Suggestions:
• Set the Anchor Property to Top, Left, Right for textboxes and Anchor Property to Top, Left, Right, Bottom for the list control
• Use ScreenLib for Native Code

Choosing the best technology for Integration and Workflow by Janikiram MSV and Vineet Gupta (Microsoft India):

• This is a topic of huge interest to me and any architect for that matter, so my expecations were high because both are excellent speakers. It turned out to be a Q & A, which by itself it good, but I am not impressed
• Though both of them have tons of experience and tons of things to say, the session turned out to be just talk without any breaks or organization. I got lost after first few minutes. It turned out to be kind of a private conversation between both of them. Sorry guys! 

Day Zero of Tech Mela yesterday was Invite Only and for Enterprise and CIO audience. My expectation for the event was low and I was looking forward to hours of neck deep PPT Gyan. Though there were enough PPTs presented, overall the day was good. I enjoyed the profound speech by Mr.Sam Pitroda.

Mr.Ravi Venkatesan (Chairman Microsoft India):

As usual Ravi's Talk was brief (10 minutes) but was precise and thought-provoking - I admire this person for this everytime, he manages to make a boring Biz talk so interesting and that too without exciting with new product announcements, etc. He talked on how Microsoft came to solving a problem for an Association of Tirupur Garment (export) Houses. The problem was that the goods in production travels 15 Kms over 90 days at various stages (Colouring done by a vendor, etc.), and these are small houses who don't have the awareness and the money for in-house IT Solutions. So Microsoft came out with a Hosted solution which the small houses can connect with the now cheap Broadband connections and they pay for it as they Go - No CAPEX. It also solves Piracy!. The solution reduced the production time by 20 days (25% saving). The Top 20 Million (Earning) Households in India only 40% have PCs, but Indian households overall spend over Rs.7000 Crores for competitive exams, so Education is a big driver. Addressing this market, Microsoft India is planning to introduce a Family PC which will have in-build latest updated content for Education & Competitive Exams - some exclusive deals.

Mr.Steven Guggenheimer (General Manager, App. Platform and Developer Marketing, Microsoft):

He talked about the vision of Ray Ozzie of Software + Service and not of Software / Service. He highlighted the point that worldwide enterprises spend 70% of the money on running existing systems and only 30% gets spent on new initiatives.

Microsoft breaks Service into three:
 

He showed a video of a business application that uses Building Block Services like Live Local for BP where they can see the location of all employees worldwide (including in remote oil riggs) visually on a map interface which was build by a partner IDV Solutions. Steven was joined by MS Dev Evangelist to demo: WPF (Seattle Post Intelligence, NY Times), Silverlight (for upcmoming Jhoom Bharabar Jhoom movie), Microsoft Live Labs Relay Service (Queue). I was interested on the  Dynamic CRM Live demo by Mark Linton and the service is expected to ship by Dec '07. Currently it supports only Windows Live ID (Passport) but by release they will support Active Directory Federated Service so that corporate wide single sign-on will work.  

Mr.Sam Pitroda (Chairman - National Knowledge Commission):

• The NKC he heads is about Knowledged as opposed to Education, which other government departments are focussing. Knowledge is key because India today is a power house in Knowledge economy. They have industry stalwards like Mr.Nandan Nilekani and others who meet every other month.
• Idea is to function as a think-tank (I remembered Singapore Government equivalent once, wish ours could deliver impact like theirs)
• They are working on some 10-30 ideas over all, but at any time not more than few. They have submitted like 9 or 10 to Prime Minister (as a final few page recommendation) but the entire report is available in their website.
• Key is how do you have information and knowledge accessible to our masses. We have 54,000 libraries - how do you improve them using technology, public private partnership for a sustainable model and build a community around libraries.
• Sam was very critical of current e-governance iniatives, where each state doing the same thing, reinventing the wheel but in their own way and wasting money. He wants to see a unified federal standard and system which are web based; and states fill in data. They look and function the same but in different languages. So birth/death certificate, land records look the same across the country. Basically we need to have standards for the major processes across country
• Demography in India has 550 Million People who are less than 25 years. What future are we leaving for them, the type of jobs. We need to invest and plant the seeds now so that we can harvest them over next 20-30 years. It is like what happened in Telecom where we plannted during Rajiv Gandhi times' that we are harvesting now.
• The best of brains in the world work for the riches - who really have no problems. To solve it you have to think from the heart and not from the mind. So the question is how do we create more best brains.
• Broadband is not about fast video downloads etc, it is about how we can have the best professor in IIT, Mumbai speak to a remote college in India
• Answering questions:
• On telecom, Sam: "I care little about Telecom now, it is on its own and can take care of it"
• On mobile, Sam: "I consider all the cellphones initiatives today as Gimmicks. They don't have any real world real value applications, applications should have an utility"
• On a Single Data Repository for India, Sam: "Don't expect a Single Data Repository for a country like India. We have vast amount of knowledge in India that are diverse and does't fit into one repository. This could include age old wisdoms like Ayurveda, etc. So don't expect any quick fixes"
•  Finally Sam closed by saying a thought-provoking issue - Why do we still follow the old processes British left us 60 years back, why is that something done someway by some british officer is being followed till date and which got perfected over the years by our babus. For example: Why are we still filling 5 copies of an admission form in schools. So unless we use IT as a chance to think through and come up with new processes, there is no point in doing e-governancen, waste of money. We need to use e-governance as an oppoprtunity for change.

The only boring session was the Connected Experience - Windows Mobile/Embedded session. The speaker had tons of TV ads and that's about it.

Management Technologies in Windows Server 2008 - by Ranjana Jain (IT Pro Evangelist, MS India)

• Session talked briefly on Power-Shell, Server Manager, Windows Server 2008 Core, Windows Remote Management (WinRMI)
• Server Manager allows you to manage everything in one Window:
  • Event Viewer has a collector service to get events from other servers and bring them in one place. Also tasks can be activated when an event happens.
  • Task manager with more features is integrated with server manager
  • Reliability Manager is integrated with service manager, which tells what happened / how reliable was the server on a time scale.
• Windows Server core - only a Command Prompt (The WOW stops here). Four core services - DNS/DHCP/Active Directory/File Services and I suppose she missed to mention the recently added IIS.  
  • Just Starts the Command Line
  • To Set an IP adddress
    • See the Interfaces: NetSh Interface ipv4 show interfaces
    • netsh interfaces ipv4 set address name=4 address ...
    • To add to a domain: NetDom Join /domain:contoso /user:Administrator *
• WinRMI - how to do things remotely including remote machines' IP address.
• Power Shell
  • Create and access process like Notepad as a .NET Variable
  • Access Registry store as a drive like HKLM:
  • Winrm command to execute remote commands
  • WinRS command to create a remote shell
• Instead of asking all the questions before installing, it takes a different approach, it takes default and then after reboot presents with a list of activities where it asks questions
• Once setup, then the only window opens up - Server Manager. it presents everything including PerfMon.
• Now Active Directory service can be stopped and started 

What's new in Windows Mobile 6.0 by Loke Uei

• .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP2 installed in ROM
  • 20% Performance improvement
  • Easy to send and receive SMS
• SQL Compact Edition installed in ROM
• Support for AJAX in Pocket IE
• New native APIs - allow you to play WMA/MP3, Ink Platform
  • WISP Lite ported from Tablet PC
• New Windows Mobile 6 SDK, One tool for developing native and managed code - VS 2008
• A good session to check from MEDC DVD - ILL303: Data Replication Session on how to repliace between thousands of clients with SQL CE with SQL Server
• Windows Mobile 6.0 has 3 editions - Standard (Smartphone with no touch screen), Professional (Pocket PC with touch Screen) & Classic. Also in Pro, all applications run in priveleged mode (One-tier), Standard has multiple tiers
• You can use Security Configuration Manager to setup security and install parameters
• You have a FakeGPS, Cellular Emulator (Fake Voice Calls), FakeServer (If you need to call a Web Service but right now not connected to the server), Hopper in the SDK Tools
• Cellular Emulator allows you to do calls to the emulator, fake reject calls, send SMS etc from PC to emulator
• An interesting point was of his boss doing Elbow testing, where by he asks you to be away and pushes his elbow on the keyboards. Similarly Hopper is a great random testing tool
• He demoed an application where by his device will send the current GPS coordinates by SMS to his wife. His wife can see where in the world he is, in a map
• You can get GPS Position, Check whether device is currently in Roaming (or not, then decide to make a call/data connection)
• You can monitor SMS and take actions based on the SMS contents

 Windows Cardspace by Vineet Gupta (Microosft India)

• Talked about the basics of cryptography, WS Trust (Implemented by WCF), WS-MetadataExchange, WS Security Policy (Implemented by WCF), Security Token Service (AD and ADFS) and Consistent user experience (Implemented by Windows CardSpace)

IIS 7.0 Overview by Vinod Kumar (Microsoft India)

• Vinod started as usual brilliantly but the title came up as an Overview session - he too emphasized on that, so I got out. Sorry Vinod

High Availability in MS Exchange Server 2007 & SP1 by Rajat Choudhary (Microsoft India)

• Server roles other than Mailbox:
  • Deploy multiple Hub Transport Server in each site
  • Deploy multiple Edge Transport Server and use round robin DNS to load balancing
  • Client Access Server - NLB or 3rd Party Load balancing
  • Unified Messaging Server
• High Availability for Mailbox Server
  • Local Continous Replication - Secondary copy of the mailbox on the same device. Works on Log Shipping Mechanism, async with a bit of time lag
  • Cluster Continuous Replication: Stretch your subnet over VLAN. Doesn't require Shared Storage (Reduced Cost), Automatic Recovery, Witness on Hub Transport. Can be replicated between two storage on the same machine or between two different machines
  • Single copy Cluster - Shared Storage Model. Up to 8-node Active/Passive, Active/Active Cut. Only Mailbox role can be clustered, other roles can be clustered using previously technologies
• Something on Transport Dumpster being 1.5 times the size of maximum mail store, I didn't understand it

 Strategies for Disaster recovery for Exchange Server 2007 by my good friend Venkatesh Ramakrishnan (Microsoft India)

• Strategy should be Effective, Efficient, Granular
• A well defined step by step procedure for backup and restore of Exchange Server 2007 when server damaged by a disaster
• Dependent Tasks: Which data is backed up depends on which Exchange Server 2007 role you have installed; The data you decide to backup as a part of the disaster recovery strategy determines the recovery process
• Cricitical Inputs: Knowing what you may have to recover from, Consider your SLA, Understanding the way Exchange Database works and the dependency on Active Directory. For example: Exchange Server 2007 is purely a 64bit subsystem
• Backup of Exchange in your organization is a necessary operational tasks. Verify the backup and restore process in a test environment. Once in production, you should periodically check restoring the backups to the test environment 
• Depending on the resources, your test environment can be a Virtual Hardware
• When do you "Repair" and when do you "Restore". Simple rule of thumb - any component which you will like to bring it to previous state without brining back the offline copy, use "Repair". Else "Restore"
• Planning the scenario's : Recover a permanently deleted mail item, recover a mailbox, recover an information store, receover a server with a specific role, recover a mailbox server & finally recover from total site failure
• For brick level backup (each item level) - leverage Recovery Storage Groups, allows you to keep a second copy of the mounted exchange store
• Go for a Streaming Backup or VSS (Shadow) backup so that you have backups at a point in time
• Even if you are doing Online backup, do an Offline backup as well

Finally, the whole day kept going, even at 7PM they had last but one session in Track 1 going on and on. I decided to call it a day. Then I got stuck in Mumbai traffic for 90 minutes for the 10 mins journey from Renaissance Powai to Hotal Rodas in Powai, with rains pouring.

Tech Ed India is one of the biggest annual events by Microsoft. I have been speaking in Tech Ed from 1999 and this year Tech Ed 2007 will be my nineth. This time around I am sitting down as an invitee and relaxing, as almost all the sessions are being presented by Microsoft Full Time Employees. Anyways, this is an event I will never miss as it allows me to catch up on technology and to meet some great brains. This year around it is called "Tech Mela", I will be here - and remember to say "Hello" to me if you see me.  

Yesterday I felt very happy, special and humbled all at once by my well-wisher Mr.J.Kesavardhanan, CEO of K7 Computing - the makers of World Class Anti-Virus Solutions for nearly two decades.

The reason I was happy was the occassion of K7 Computing moving to a new sprawling 25,000 square feet new office in OMR (Old Mahabalipuram Road) about a kilometre from Tidel Park - in between MARG and HCL buildings on the left hand side when coming from Madhya Kailash Temple. I have great admiration for Mr.K7 (as he likes to be called), learned from him over the years on both technology and on running a business. As a matter of history, K7 Computing is the only employer for whom I worked for (for about 3 months), before I started Vishwak and I greatly cherish the experiences I went through in that short duration.

I was feeling special, because K7 after honouring his guru Mr.Pulikesi, gifted me with a "Gold Coin" for being their first customer of Vx2000 15 years or so back. In 1991 or 92, when I bought the copy of Vx2000 for Rs.190 for our publishing company LIFCO, I was in my school and honestly didn't know I was their first customer nor realized it will become history one-day. I remember seeing the below issue (November 1990 or an early issue of 1991) of SysReader, going to a small lane in Saidapet, Chennai and meeting a smart, bearded person Mr.Balu in a tiny room with a PC. Balu acted normally, sold me the product and that I time I didn't get to meet K7. In the next few years from then, I met K7 many times in SysReader office and events. It was in 1996-97 when I worked briefly (thanks to my other long time well-wisher Mr.Asokan P) in K7 Computing I got to meet K7 closer and the Balu I met in 1991-92 was my line manager (he was a tough manager to satisfy on delivery schedules). 

 
(Vx2000 Floppy placed on top of a November 1990 issue of SysReader)

See here Vx2000 earliest advertisement copy that appeared in the above SysReader issue.

Finally, I was humbled to see the simplicity of K7 - even with all these successes behind him, K7 hasn't changed a bit, he is the same person I met 15 years or so back.

Instead of gifting people items which never gets used, they kept a selection of books in the exit. People were requested to pick their choice. A very thoughtful act, considering that K7 Computing is a Knowledge (IP) Company and even on these Google days - what is more apt to symbolise knowledge than books. Earlier someone gifted me a book was in an event at TCS - read that post here.

Yesterday was a big day for me and for the entire team at Vishwak. We had completed 10 Years in Business as on 1st April 2007. We had a big dinner to celebrate this on 10 May 2007 at Courtyard Marriott, Chennai. We were joined by many of our customers on this happy occassion - including Microsoft India, Hindustan Times, Hutchinson Essar, Bharat Matrimony, ChennaiOnline, K7 Computing, Wipro and others. Mr.Jaspreet Bindra (Country Manager India, MSN & Windows Live) was the Chief Guest.

We had many enjoyable programs in the dinner, but the one I treasured most was when we had the 10th Anniversary cake cut by Vishwakians (shown in the photo below) who had been with us for more than 5 years. In this time of great volatility in Indian IT job market - we are lucky to have these dedicated individuals powering "Vishwak" for 5 years+.

Since it was celebration time, few of us spoke and that too briefly. In my speech, I touched on How did I decide to start Vishwak, what does the name mean and what I enjoy in running Vishwak?. 

See the entire photo album here | Video of the event here.

The first session I was in a SilverLight with .NET framework session that was interesting. The ability to use Scriptable attribute in .net to expose a function from .NET and have it called in JavaScript or respond to a JavaScript event in browser was cool and opens great possibilities in client side coding. They have also exposed HTML DOM inside the .NET code.  

Next I went to a  Session by Don Box - pretty much everything went over my head, partly due to the reason I went in after 15 minutes of the talk starting.

For the last session of Mix '07 I decided to go MS Dynamic CRM Live Platform, since this was a new area for me. Ben Riga (Tech Evangelist, Microsoft) and Jason Hunt (CTO InvokeSystems) talked about using this to build a Pet Insurance site. They talked on:

• CRM in its whole sense means the complete Sales, Service & Marketing.
• Dynamics CRM has ability to customize data models or extend the existing data models and building relationships between entities
• It is entirely role based model. You can change the meta-data of an entity it can be published and live immediately, no need to restart
• The underlying CRM systems existing forms can be easily customized - both client and server side

In end of Day 2 of Mix '07 there was this keynote by Robbie Bach - President, Entertainment & Mobile Division Microsoft. He highlighted on the following:

• Connected Entertainment is all about Personal, Interactive & Social
• He talked about how to Attract, Engage and Excite to do a sale with your customer
• XBox has over 10 Million Boxes sold, XBox Live has over 6 million users - primarily because they want to socialize.
• Windows Media PCs are over 30 Million out there
• He showed some cool demos like
• On how Burger King decided to build 3 specific branded games on XBox and sold it for $3.99 over 3 Million copies. This helped their brand to available for a longer immersive fashion for the young target audience
• With Microsoft aquiring "Massive In-Game Ads" they now have over 100 titles with over 60 Advertisers
• DisneyLand HongKong which wanted to target the Main land online users make them aware of Disney as a brand, went to partenr with OEMs in China to pre-install Vista Gadgets (which saves download over broad-band) that provides various options - trailers, games, etc.
• 
• Microsoft themselves say the power of community in a TV Advertisement on "Gears on War" game they posted in XBox Live. It was a violent action video with a melody as background music. Immediately they saw about 700 different (mash-up) versions of it in YouTube and other video sites, downloaded over 5 Million times and the game got sold 4 Million copies or so.
• BBC Radio One talked about their Windows Live Messenger Activity for listening Radio together and social network website. 

 

 

 

Panel Discussion - Marketing is Dead, Long Live Marketing

Andrew Rashbass (Publisher and MD of The Economist, a magazine I love) said: 92% of Internet users find context sensitive adverising today is intrusive and if they can they will turn them off. The thumb rule is to sell to 8% of users, you are turning off 92% of users. Market Forces will make many of the traditional media companies to die due to drying up of Advertising money for them, the advertising money is there but not enough for everyone, it is good because it is due to Market forces. Though 30 seconds pre-roll is bad, but since all marketing forces are piling on so it is not available enough. Robbie who talked before now on Marketing was attended by 2000 people, but is losing 300 Million Dollars last year . There is always a lean-forward media (Internet), lean-back media (TV) dilemma. I am not sure whether you will get full convergence or whether there will be room for both - may be yes.

In a question on whether they are worried on monopoly in Internet - Andrew said certainly not, google is an example of a good product and market forces, and despite their market penetration there is still tons of choices. The Host in turn added that one new startup gets founded in Silicon Valley every 48 hours now.

In a question on whether the new Portable Reader Devices will replace paper. Andrew said it will not happen in short-term, not in mid-term and definitely not in long-term. Andrew said nothing kills a bad product than over advertising. We can keep of wishing, but nobody is taking. We have the perfect central park, in the bed, in the toilet, in the bath - that is paper. The host added that Bill Gates believes that in the long-term when Devices are portable and foldable it will replace. Andrew countered that BillG can use it, but no one else will use it.

In a question on Bad Ads appearing all the time, Andrew said The best way to reach wide is to interupt and be disruptive and web has made it more interruptive.

Carol Kruse (Group Director, Coca-Cola) said we have killed email due to SPAM, Online is now happening but everyone is promising Mobile will be big. But no one has figured out how to do advertising non-intrusive in your mobile phones - who wants to see Ads in your personal phones?. 30 Seconds Pre-Roll before online videos is bad for consumers.

Winston Binch (Executive Producer, Crispin Porter) said magazine reading is increasing, brochures in-take have increased because you can flip through it and we grew with it. We will have lot of overlaps and interesting campaigns using together.

Jonathan Hsia (Associate Marketing Director, Starcom) in a reply to a question said that Bad Ads like in mySpace appear all the time, SPAM works somehow, but when our customers see a bad ads, they come back.

I have seen ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit in its beta builds. After its release, I haven't checked it recently. Today in Mix '07 I got a chance to sit in a demo session on that. They have added pretty impressive list of reusable controls like the SlideShow, Animation, etc. They all work using JavaScript and on a wide range of browsers. Microsoft have also open-sourced it for community development in CodePlex.

In the Web Services Buy or build Panel - discussions where on how Smugmug.com uses Amazon's S3 Storage instead of building their data center for redundant storage. How Redfin.com uses Live Virtual Earth instead of their own map implementation.

There was a cool session on WPF by my fellow RD - Scott Stanfield demoing on Seeing Dead People, check it out. Scott was fantastic, don't miss the recordings. He demoed Charles Petzold's XAML Cruncher tool from Petzold's book which is the best reference book on WPF apart from Nathan's book. He showed how you can import an Adobe Illustrator vector into Expression Designer and do fancy stuffs with that. They spent like 2500 hours totally on this & 3 Designers full time. Lessons learned: In the initial version they stored all data in code then they moved it to all resource files, all the family tree data was in a binary serialization then they moved to XML Serialization so that hierarchies and nestings can be handled better, initally they did XAML by hand then moved to Expression Blend. Scott also demoed a cool Game build as a XAML Browser App (XBAP)

The session on Silverlight media integration by Mike Harsh covered the following:

• Everything about WIndows Media Tools continue to work
• Showed how easy it is to build a simple Media Player with Silverlight
• Demoed a fantastic player showing 6 to 8 live broadcast playing from Internet, switching, full-screen, etc.  
• Silverlight supports WMV 7,8, 9 / VC-1, WMA, MP3 and the runtime has everything that is needed to play including decoders, etc.
• Showed how Expression Media Encoder can convert media files and output cool media player experience without coding

In Day 2 of Mix '07 Brian Arbogast announced new Windows Live API which are now easy to use, simpler licensing and ready to go. Microsoft is certainly late to the game, but can they pull it off from behind this time, let us wait and see.

(My photo with Brian Arbogast here has nothing to do
with Mix '07 - it was taken on 22/Oct/2004 in Gurgaon)

• Videos Support - SilverLight Streaming
• Spaces Photos - Currently Read-only, soon to be Write-Read
• Windows Live Contacts - Access to Hotmail
• Virtual Earth Maps
• Add Live Search to your site

They are introducing a new concept - User Controlled Privacy Model. By this Users can limit access of their data to a particular domain. I think this is good from a business and long-term sustainability stand-point.

All the services are free up to a limit and then a predictable annual charge.

There were demos about a mashup by Microsoft on blog and Virtual Earth and by Match.com using Windows Live APIs. I was surprised to learn about the scale of Match.com is responsible for 10% of all marriages that happen in USA, 60K customers every day, 55 Million emails every month. It was interesting they are also an 100% Microsoft Shop (IIS/SQL Server/.NET) and push a giga-bit of traffic every second. Their mash-up with Live Search especially the anonymous Messenger Chat using Live Alerts was cool (see the second image below).

The keynote today in Mix '07 at Las Vegas was fantastic. Microsoft unravelled a ton of new technologies around their SilverLight runtime in the keynote by Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie. There are tons of information about these in Visitmix.com website, so I will just cover the bullet points and what impressed me personally.

1. SilverLight 1.0 Beta is released, this is around a 1MB download that renders XAML files, can be programmed with JavaScript and you have a "Go-Live" license for this. This plugin works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Apple Safari. I missed the Linux desktop support and so did few others who participated in a Panel Discussion on Open Source Interop session - but there is no word from Microsoft on whether Linux support is happening or not.
2. This is the most awesome announcement. SilverLight 1.1 (currently in Alpha) Plugin will include an almost full .NET Framework runtime including support for dynamic languages like Ruby and Python.
3. SilverLight Streaming - An oneline video sharing service from Microsoft. And the Expression Media Encoder to go with it.
4. Simpler licensing and opening up of API of Windows Live Services

My personal take on SilverLight is this. I am super excited on the .NET Framework support. And at Vishwak we have been playing with it in its previous name "WPF/E" and I think this is a very promising technology, but the success for it against competition like Adobe Flash/Apollo depends on how large can Microsoft get its installed base quickly. It is a chicken and egg problem, but unless there is sufficient installed base, it will be difficult to get customers on board quickly.

There has been also announcements about IIS 7.0 Beta Go-Live recently.

References

Tim Sneath in his blog has listed great Silverlight webcasts that are great to quick start learning. He has also listed a great WPF Demo.

Scott Hanselman (my fellow RD) has posted this great entry on today's annoucement on Silverlight and .NET Support.

Silverlight FAQ | Quickstarts | Learning Video | Scott Guthrie talking on Silverlight | Videos running parallel in a puzzle

Update 21/June/2007: Came across thisgood posting from Scott Guthrie on various demos with SilverLightt

I am excited to be here. Just now completed my registration for Mix '07 in Venetian Convention Center, here in Las Vegas. Collected my free copies of Vista Ultimate and Expression Studio. The atmosphere here seems to be more fun and informative than last year. If you at home you can watch the keynotes live from Visitmix.com. I will keep you posted on things I found interesting. Stay tuned. And if you are attending Mix, remember to say "hello" to me.

Today I was invited to present on "A Case Study - on my experiences as being an Entrepreneur". The event was Computer Society of India's National Symposium on PREPARING IT PROFESSIONALS FOR 2010- A ROAD MAP. The event was featured in "The Hindu" Education Plus supplement dated 26, March 2007 (Hi-Res).

I enjoyed presenting in this, especially to see the enthuism and the energy with students.

You can read the references notes I used for the talk here - PPTX Format, PDF Format. It is not very detailed as I didn't project it as a slideshow.

In this connection, I remembered an Interview of me done around 2003 by Pallavi Aravind Narasimhan from Friendsofsvce (One of Alumni Associations of my college). Most of it is relevant, but remember it was four years back!

I loved Mix '06 and I was eagerly looking for Mix '07. It is now open for registration, it is worth event to travel if you are in Web Development/Design Area.

Here is a latest release from MS on Mix '07:
A general manager within Microsoft’s developer division, Scott Guthrie chats about his upcoming keynote at MIX07 with Rory Blyth from Channel 9. Scott talks about why MIX is such a unique Microsoft conference, what his team is up to on the web technologies front including WPF/E, what’s so special about IIS 7.0, why you should care about the next version of Visual Studio that is code named Orcas, and what it’s like to go into meetings with big wig executives like Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Ray Ozzie (another person who will keynote MIX07). And yes, even though Scott is an exec himself, he still spends lots of time coding; he’s a developer’s developer. And he’ll be on the floor at MIX for you to mingle with. Enjoy!

About a month back, Microsoft came up with a challenge to all its MSDN Regional Directors (which includes me). It was to come up with the best Quote and Photo of the RD in their City landmark. Selecting the landmark for Chennai was tough - how can I manage to take a photo of Marina Beach without professional equipments from air (or) how do I get a photo of LIC / Central Station without Police suspecting me of terrorism . I wanted to go to Mamalapuram - but that whole week was hectic to get out of my desk and when I thought I can, it started raining.  

The rider was that the RD's face, Landmark in the background and the computer screen showing Vista, Office 2007, SharePoint all has to be visible. Most landmarks are outdoor, in that how do I get the screen to show - the natural sunlight's luminosity is hundreds of time higher than your computer screen. I had to hire a professional photographer who gave up after few tries out door. He got permission to do a shot inside the Santhome Church - I felt it embarrassing to hold a PC in front of the sanctum sanctorum and staring for a camera, while in front there were few people doing silent prayers. After 1 hour of waiting for the photographer, 2 hours of posing, I got tired and came home.

The next day I went with my office graphics designer Sukumaran to Valluvar Kottam who got a good shot of me. Thanks Suku and E.Ravi for helping in the photo shot. Incidentally Valluvar Kottam is about a kilometer from my office and the whole thing got over in less than 30 minutes.

Chennai Santhome Church

Chennai Valluvar Kottam

After submitting my entries, I waited. To my surprise, this week Microsoft announced me as one of the Top 10 Photo Entries. I will be getting as gift a Zune Player (WOW). The best quote and photo award goes to RD from Norway - Jonas Folleso, who got as Gifts a Xbox 360 & a new Zune player.

If you are interested the quote I submitted (which didn't win it) is: "With Vista's WPF and Office 2007 Task Oriented UI, a disruptive change is happening in applications usability. The question for every customer now has moved from number of features to how much each of those features will be effectively used. This brings interesting days ahead for everyone"

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending two high profile events in New Delhi.

Number 1, was Microsoft and Hutch press conference announcing the signing of Letter of Intent between the two companies to offer soon Windows Live Services in Hutch Mobile. This will be the first mobile search deal in the country. The service will offer Windows Live Services like Search through WAP & SMS, Live Messenger & Live Mail in Mobile in a phased rollout plan. The event was attended by Senior Leaders from both Microsoft (SteveB, Ravi Venkatesan, Jaspreet Bindra) and Hutch (Azim Ghose, Sandip Das, Naveen Gupta). Felt great to be near these industry stalwarts.

Number 2, was a panel discussion of Industry Stalwarts moderated by Dr.Pranoy Roy of NDTV with the keynote being delivered by President Abdul Kalam. This was the first talk of President Kalam that I listened - his energy and sincerity for the betterment of India is fantastic.

(Courtesy: www.presidentofindia.nic.in)

For two minutes once he reminded, that you can refer more on this in his website including the PowerPoint Slides, if you differ on his views you can please email him and he will respond by 24 hours. I was proud that Indians have such a enthusiastic technology savvy president. SteveB who came next on stage had to say I feel embrassed coming after your president  because I neither have a PowerPoint slide for todays talk or a website for myself.

Some interesting points came up during the event:

• India has One-Third of World's Software Engineers and it has the same number of children suffering from malnutrition (Shame on every Indian)
• President recommended his plan for Bandwidth to be setup and given free - just like how government today does other basic infrastructures like Roads free
• The more someone is educated they will use lesser the bandwidth - Computer Experts People will do Text/Email (lowest B/W), Computer Savvy will use VoIP (Medium B/W), Illetrates will use Video Phone (Highest B/W)

 

 
(Spot me in Extreme Right in front of the Lady in Cream Dress)

Today in New Delhi, Microsoft India is conducting a showcase of Innovative solutions build by partners using Microsoft Office Platform for Public Sector Enterprises and E-Governance space. My team is showcasing our Multilingual Content Management solution developed for Microsoft's BhashaIndia.com Community Portal.  Chris Capossela (Corporate VP, Microsoft Business Division) is expected in the evening to visit the showcase and get a first hand feel of India Innovating.  

Update: The next day we demoed our Lotus Notes to SharePoint forms solution for Banking Industry.

I have received a Invite to attend "Intel Developer Forum" happening next week in Bangalore.

I am (and Vishwak) not into much on system level software that get impacted the most from new Chipset/CPU designs and API from Intel. Like any other ISV and SI the new generation of chips from Intel and AMD open up a new possibility and better ROI for our customers. That's my interest in attending the event. Also wanted to attend a Non Microsoft for a change and a chance to sit and relax as an attendee - no pressure of being a speaker.

The objective of this post is that I liked the way Intel India is organizing the pre-event. I got email and phone follow-ups, then I registered online which took less than few minutes. Upto this is normal for any major event of this scale. What pleasantly surprised me is that I received by courier today, the Badge with an RFID Tag that should hopefully allow me to walk to the event straight, without the need to stand in a queue for registration on the day.

Kudos to the organizers. Hoping the event itself will impress me equally.

Last Wednesday (20/Sep/2006) I delivered a Keynote address for "National Conference On Advanced Computing & Technology" - a technical conference organized by MCA department of Jayaram College of Engineering & Technology, Pagalavadi, Trichy. As the Chief Guest of the event, I had the privilege of sharing the dais with Dr.R.Krishnamoorthy, Deen Bharathidasan Institute of Technology, Trichy (BIT).

When I agreed to attend the event, my expectations were not great - Students are not going to be interested in hearing one more industry talk. I was mistaken, the participated students were attentive and even had some interesting questions for me. I spoke about the reasons why I believe that Indian IT Exports are poised to grow further and tips for fresh graduates. I thoroughly enjoyed doing the event and the trouble of spending one-and-half days (Chennai to Trichy by Road takes about 5 to 6 hours each way) was worth it.  

The Hospitality of the organizers was awesome and their College Chairman Er.M.Subramaniam & other dignitaries spoke great about me - I am not sure I deserve it and I had to accept them in all humbleness.

Following the Inauguration function, there was a brief press meet for me organized with the reporters from media (TV, News Agencies & Print). Press meets are always interesting and they are a tight rope to walk - you want to tell them as much as you can so that you get good coverage and at the same time you don't want to imply anything that you didn't intend to. You got to be as clear and as explicit as possible, to the extend you don't sound boring/legal. My position also makes it difficult, I want to talk about my company "Vishwak Solutions Pvt. Ltd." and the great work we are doing there; but press wants (as expected) to focus on my honourary title as "Microsoft MSDN Regional Director" -  I don't want to be mis-interpreted as a "Microsoft" Official. This meet was useful for me, as I got good oppurtunity to talk about Vishwak's investments in mobile web technology, hiring challenges, problems of taxation for Indian Small Software exporters and more. I am happy to see good coverage resulting out of it, coming in various media (On DD Poodhigai TV - 27/Sep, The Hindu - 24/Sep, Dina Malar - 21/Sep and others).

After the event, I had a spontaneous invitation by Dr.R.Krishnamoorthy to deliver a similar talk in his college. Accepting the invitation I travelled down to BIT (in Pudukotai highroad near Trichy Airport) and talked to the students there for about 15-20 minutes. It was lunch time so I didn't risk standing in front of their food

Watch video of my speech: From Google Video (or) From Myspace.com (or) From MSN Soapbox Beta

Attachments:

• My keynote presentation at NCACT '06 (205 KB)
• My Letter to the event Souvenir Booklet (58.61 KB)

Media Coverage:

• The Hindu Trichy Edition Coverage - 24 Sep 06 (390.8 KB)

I am posting this from Connect 2006 event which was inaugurated by Hon'ble Chief Minister for Tamilnadu Mr.Karunanidhi along with Hon'ble Central Cabinet Minister Mr.Dayanidhi Maran. Connect is happening in the city for several years and though it is not a spectacular extravaganza event; it does generate good industry interest. Today's event was attended by industry stalwarts from TCS, Wipro, Cognizant and others. At Vishwak we had exhibited in Connect 2004, but this year they don't have any exhibition floor and it is only a confence and networking setup.

CM inaugurated by a e-switch HP’s new outsourcing facility in Olympia Park, Guindy and he also proposed for a new upcoming IT Park “Tidel” in Coimbatore (Kovai). Kovai was also named a mode Tier-II for IT in the state and the CM assured the audience that all support including IT parks will be done to other Tier-II cities including Trichy, Madurai, Salem and Tirunelveli.

I personally see no reasons why Outsourcing can’t be done from Tier-II cities; It definitely is going to succeed and is going to be the trend. When IT Outsourcing can work across continents and thousands of miles why the work can’t move from Bangalore, Chennai to Kovai and Madurai?. All you need is availability of good people, power & connectivity. Out of this People are mobile (if you can give them good offers they can be made available now anywhere), Power & Infrastructure is where you need the local governments to help and have a vision, Connectivity will automatically follow where there is demand.

Being my home state, I wish the event all success

As a side note, Tamil Virtual University (TVU) Chairman Dr.V.C.Kuzhaindaiswamy today presented the strategic paper on alternate 16-bit Tamil Encoding to Hon’ble CM, which was discussed last week. 

Today is the last day of the final city in the India Tech Ed 2006 tour. Tech Ed traveled to Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore this year. I didn’t do Delhi – I went to all other Cities and except in Pune, Hyderabad – I did two presentations in each city. One on “SharePoint 2007 for Developers” and one on “SharePoint 2007 for IT Pros”. It was an interesting experience doing for two different audience profiles.

Installing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) was an ordeal by itself. I setup a Virtual PC Image with Windows Server 2003 R2, SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2005 SP1, Visual Studio 2005, WWF (Workflow) Beta 2 RunTime, Windows SDK with WinFX, WorkFlow Integration with Visual Studio (Orcas), Office 2007 Professional then finally MOSS 2007. After configuring the product I realized on a Virtual PC in my laptop this was slow even after giving 1GB RAM to the VPC. So from the second city, I moved to Virtual Server 2005 R2 and the Virtual Server Add-Ons that it provided. Performance is much better – only downside is that I have to go a WebBrowser to start and stop the VPC; then connect using the Virtual Server Remote Client to connect to the VPC. With Virtual PC it was lot easier. So far I am unable to find the Shared Folder options in Virtual Server – searching for it!

Virtual Server 2005 R2 (VSR) works well on Windows XP & Windows Server 2003; it doesn't get installed correctly in Windows Vista. So you are stuck with Virtual PC if you are using Vista.

It is time of the year for another Tech Ed India - this time Tech Ed India 2006 is happening through out the month of June '06 across SIX cities - I am sure Microsoft organizers of the event who read this will feel happy for my mention . So if you miss it in one Indian city, you can catch it up on another - New Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad & Bangalore.

This happens to be my Eighth Tech Ed India in a row.

This year I am speaking on a beta product "Office SharePoint Server 2007" which is already creating ripples of excitement and the topic "Content Management" and "Portals" is something very close to my heart.

The session covers technical fundamentals of the next generation of Microsoft's Web workspace technology-what's new, what's changed, how it works, and why you should deploy it and develop on it. Office SharePoint Server 2007 is much more than an upgrade to SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and Content Management Server 2002. This session covers technical fundamentals, feature overviews, new sets of server functionality, and implications for developers and IT professionals alike.

This Tech Ed is full of new upcoming technologies that you don't want to miss - Vista, 2007 Office System - Client and Server Products, WinFX, LINQ and more...

My earlier blogs on Tech Ed India:

• Tech Ed 2005 India: Avalon - The Future of UI
• Tech Ed India - Looking Back

Microsoft Executive Summit is an Annual event organized by Microsoft India - in this key enterprise and government customers (CTOs) of MS are invited for a 2 day intensive business conference. Speakers include Microsoft Employees, Partners and Customers worldwide. Attendees and Exhibitors are only by Invite from Microsoft India.

This year the event happened yesterday and today at Mumbai's Renaissance Convention centre. Microsoft invited this year my company "Vishwak" to show case our Mobility story. In our booth we demonstrated our solution "MCDS" (Mobile Content Delivery System), MSN Hutch WAP Portal which we are running for last 3 years+ and our technology that makes content from "Sharepoint Server" and "Commerce Server" available in Mobile Devices. We support close to over 300 devices that are sold in India/Asia.  It was exciting to be part of the event.

We had many visitors to our booth including Microsoft India's MD Neelam Dhawan (Thanks Neelam for this photo).

IT and Computer Science Students doing their Engineering/Arts/Science Graduation courses can participate in a competition organized by KTS (Kani Thamizh Sangam) and Tamil Virtual University. It can be their final semester project but it should be in Tamil computing. The three best projects in 2006-07 will get cash prizes worth Rs.50,000. For details and application form, click here.

I feel the timing for this is very apt, as the commercial viability of Tamil Software projects is showing signs of finally picking up. OS vendors like Microsoft and Redhat are now supporting Tamil in many ways in their offerings. This week saw Tally (India's Leading Package Software) announcing availability of vernacular editions of its accounting software. For Tamil computing enthusiasts like me and others in INFITT and KTS this is great news - many have been working hard for last two decades for things like this to start happening and take computers to the masses in Tamilnadu. Though other commercial company’s will follow suit, in order to accelerate this trend and innovate in this it is very important to get the young minds excited and I believe this competition will certainly do that. My wishes to the organizers and the students.

In this connection KTS and TVU have organized a one day workshop – Tamil Computing Technology on February 25 at Meenakshi Sundararajan Engineering College. Topics include Tamil fonts and encoding, government initiatives in e-governance, tools and technologies, Microsoft's language applications, open source and job opportunities. Details can be had from http://www.kanithamizh.in/ or www.tamilvu.org. I have been invited to speak in the workshop panel on “Microsoft’s Language Applications” from 3:30PM to 4:15PM. See you there.

Today I was a member in a panel discussion on “IT World – India’s Lead Sustainable”. The programme was part of Synapse ’05 organized by Department of Management Studies - School of Management, Pondicherry University in partnership with CII. I had the opportunity to share the dais with:

- Dr. Kuppu Swamy S, Dean- Ramanujam School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Pondicherry University
- Mr. Punit Dhandhania, VP - Strategy & Business Development, SPI Publisher services
- Mr. Subramanyan N K, Head - Banking & Financial Services, BirlaSoft
- Mr. Shankar Krishnamoorthy, VP - Aspire Systems

Though I had to spend a day (Started the day before from Chennai and stayed overnight for the next day morning programme) on travel for a 15 minute presentation, it was quite motivating to participate in the programme. I could get to listen to others from Industry and to the students.

I am normally very curious and interested in hearing from students (the Potential managers) as they come with a new perspective, a fresh approach and not clouded by industry experience. Even here the students had interesting questions on the Resource Utilization that is reported by IT Companies in their Quarterly results (For Example: INFY Recently reported 78%, will it become 100% ever?).  Then there was the usual question on India improving on the product space - I answered what I believe to be one of the reasons that is Indian’s are normally risk averse especially the urban Indian middle class (who presently dominate the IT Services Industry). Dr.T.Nambirajan from the faculty raised a relevant issue of depleting health condition of individuals working in IT due to work pressure and night shifts.

Nowadays as an audience I avoid attending these panel discussions as I believe you get very little useful information – because of the fact the time given to a speaker to express his views are very limited (< 15 mins). On top of it the organizers get many speakers, the moderator taking most of the time in re explaining what was already told, the first few speakers overshooting there time multifold, each speaker speaking the same point or rehashing what is known to everyone – like you don’t need a speaker to say that India’s Export Turnover in IT last year was $XY Billion the audience have assess to the same Nasscom/STPI report on the Internet. Hopefully today was different and the audience got some tiny bit useful information.  I suggested to the organizers the next time to improve things in their invite letters to panelists they can give a list of things that need not be covered – list of things/figures/backgrounds the audience already know. Also a template of the presentation format they are expecting from the speakers for 15 minutes.

I wish good luck to the students of the batch and thank the organizers for inviting me.

Download the Presentation I used it world - india's lead sustainable.ppt (172.5 KB)

In this year Chennai Book Fair Mr.Anto Peter of Softview technologies, released a book on Graphic design in Tamil. I was invited as a speaker on the event.

T-Mug (Trivandrum Microsoft User Group) had conducted the community launch of VS2005 today. In the full day event, I presented for about an hour on ASP.NET v2.0 overview.

The T-Mug Volunteers did a great job organizing that I had the following to complement them: "Everything was great about the program - The Hospitality shown, arrangements, audience quality and quantity and the venue. Good Luck for all future programs"

After my first day with this Music season, next two days I went to Sri.T.N.Seshagopalan and Sri.Unnikrishnan vocal performances. I don't understand Carnatic Music, but still the 2 hours each day was very peaceful - no work, can sit and silently think and once in a while enjoy music as well

The only distrubance is caused by some inconsiderate people talking all the while during performance. During a Vocal show when the whole hall is very silent (other than the artist), you can clearly listen to even the minute murmurs. During Sri.Unnikrishnan's performance I faced this problem the couple in front of me, kept talking all through the program - may be they don't get a chance to do that in their house. After so much hesitation, finally when I left I told the "Gentle"man; surprisingly he didn't apologize, but gave me a defying look.

Have you faced similar inconsiderate poeple especially in public places?. Please post your comments below.

If it is December (மார்கழி மாதம்) it is Music (கச்சேரி) Season in Chennai. Almost all the famous Carnatic Music Artists - Vocal and Instrumental, Tamil Drama (Play) artists perform in various halls (சபாக்கள்) during the month-and-half festival. Music lovers from around the world, Non-Resident Indians, Locals enjoy the performances. Not only the famous gets the stage, it is also the upcoming artists who get a chance during the morning hours for which the entry is free. December/January is an ideal time for this, as the climate in Chennai is little less warmer and pleasantly cold during the evenings. This year it has been super cold (anything less than 25 Degrees for Chennaites) due to the heavy rains.

Though I am an illetrate in Music, I love to hear it; every year I will want to attend as many programs as possible, but due to work commitments end up attending one carnatic performance and the weekend dramas. This year I hope I have started on a better note.

Yesterday with my mother (who is a trained vocalist) I attended Mrs.S.Sowmya vocal performance in Karnataka Sangam organized by Nungambakkam Cultural Academy (NCA). Though the songs were old classics (and hence I didn't know them ) I enjoyed the 135mins programme thoroughly. NCA has been organizing music festival for over 3 decades and is managed by its emminent Secretary Lion Dr.Natarajan, who is also one of my good well-wishers.

For complete schedule and details about Chennai Music Season 2005, click here.

Today I got to present on a "Career Guidance" event organized by Rotary Club of Central Madras and Vidya Mandir Senior Secondary School. Audience were parents and students of Class X and XII students of Vidya Mandir School in Chennai. Vidya Mandir is one of the prestigious education institutions in the country and I was happy to be invited for the event.

I didn't want to take the usual approach of listing all possible jobs in IT and the education needs to achieve them. Instead I went to dispell the various myths associated with a career in IT (especially in India) and then elaborated on the "not so obvious" needs of the IT industry.

You can download the presentation Career Opportunities in Indian IT Industry.ppt (250.5 KB) I used today.

Couple of days back I was nominated as a member in the board of studies for Computer Science Department - Govt. of Pondicherry, Bharathidasan Government College for Women. Indeed this is an honour for me - I was pleasantly surprised when I received the nomination letter from their Principal S.Kumuda.

BGCW is an Arts and Science college conducting UG and PG degree courses. The college is run by Govt. of Pondicherry with a social inclination of providing quality education to girls from not only urban area but from rural and most-rural background as well - in fact, for a good percentage of students who graduate every year from this college, they are the very first in their village to study beyond higher secondary school eduation. Recently BGCW became a Deemed college, but continuing to award degree of the well recognized "Pondicherry University".

As per UGC (University Grants Commission of India) guidelines all Deemed institutions are required to constitue a Board of Studies for each department which will be chartered to design and approve all the course curriculum and syllabus. The consituents of the board are to be picked from various background - from the college faculty, university, academia, industry and past students. I was nominated as a representative of the "IT Industry".

Today was the first meeting of the board. Before this I had little academia exposure (other than as a student), so I was not sure on what to expect. But at the end of the day as I write this, I am pleased with our output. The computer science board was fortunate to have experienced academician - Mr.Subramanian from Pondy University and Mr.Arumugam from Madura Kamaraj University. Since they had done similar work several times in their career, the others in the board like me found it on easy ground.

Wearing my developer hat, I am super excited today on the launch (finally) of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 & BizTalk Server 2006. I have been talking about the great features that .NET 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0, VS 2005 is bringing for last 2 years+. In fact, the first time I saw ASP.NET 2.0 nearly 3 years back during one of Microsoft's selective early preview in Reading, UK. From that time I know that this platform is going to be huge jump for web developers worldwide.

• .NET Framework - 1.0, 1.1 & 2.0
• Visual Studio (After .NET) - 2002, 2003 & 2005
• SQL Server (100% of MS own codebase) - 7.0, 2000 & 2005
• BizTalk Server - 2000, 2002, 2004 & 2006

It is festival season in India. Navarathri (Dasara in Hindi) is one of India's important festival period, the word Navarathri means "9 Nights". 9 Nights of celebrations in which people in their houses show casing idols of gods and godesses in beautiful settings, dolls depecting stories, parks, kolams (Floor Paintings with Colour Rice Powders). Relatives and Friends visit each others houses to see the decorations, chat, eat "Sundals" and leave.

We had lots of visitors this time to our house. So overall Navathri is a good chance for you to visit friends and relatives who you haven't met for years.

Read here my posting of last year Navarathri. 

• Today there are two portal stories from Microsoft - Sharepoint is for Intranet and MCMS was for Internet. With Office 12, it will be an integrated story. You can create Internet Facing Sites and Intranet (as always) using Sharepoint technologies. Remove forced choice "CMS02" vs Sharepoint Portal Server. Roadmap towards an integrated Enterprise Content Management (ECM) story.
• To achieve the last point all WCM services found in MCMS02 have been developed into the new Sharepoint server. This meant adding Internet readiness to Office "12" Servers.
• New WCM features introduced
   ○ Consistent and Pixel Perfect Branding - which was extremely difficult today with Sharepoint 
   ○ Page Authoring - Web based or Smart Client (Word)
   ○ Dynamic Site Navigation controls/webparts
   ○ Governance - Publishing Schedules, Approval workflow, Formatting restrictions
   ○ Site Management Tools
   ○ Performance - Internet Scale & powerful Caching to handle high traffic rather going to DB for every piece of content. Also cache buckets are based on user rights.
   ○ Content Deployment methods
   ○ Security - Forms Authentication, Anonymous
   ○ Multi-Lingual Sites (Basic site in English and then other sites depend on this)
   ○ Search
• Customers will be provided powerful tools to migrate all content from existing MCMS02 sites to Office "12" server. 
  • Make creation of dynamic, produced websites dramatically faster and easier. 
  • Provide great Out Of Box (OOB) Experience
  • Lower amount of costly custom code
  • Incremental migration is like a job that can move incremental content from CMS02 every night to the new site
• In the new system:
  • Portals are a collection of webs
  • The webs are arranged in a hierarchy
  • Hierarchy controls navigation and security
  • SPSv2 Area, CMS02 Channel are now all based on the WSS webs construct for containership
  • Each web has a document library for pages. Pages are special document library items. So they inherit all WSS functions like versioning, Check-in/Check-out, workflow free
  • Each web can have its own ASP.NET v2.0 master page. Then there is page layout that actually lays out the page
  • WSS ships with standard field controls. There are additional CMS field controls like rich HTML
  • Portal Navigation 
    • Includes Webs, Pages and Authored links
    • Dynamic Navigation based on site hierarchy
    • Navigation links trimmed based on security, workflow state and publishing schedule
  • Security
    • A new WSS authentication provider implemented on top ASP.NET Role provider
      • Viewer role: Viewers can use the site, can view pages, documents, images. But they can't use the Sharepoint application - Can't call Remote APIs: SOAP, DAV & RPC. Can't view application UI
      • Policy: Can constrain maximum access per web application. Deny all write access via http://site:80
  • Topology
    • Farms: Scale up and down as needed
    • Multi-farm: Staging environments in different networks. Authoring in Intranet with AD Authentication. Production in live networks with forms authentication
    • Site collections can be deployed between environments
  • Paths and Job
    • QuickDeploy job role allows news authors to deploy content immediately
    • Normally there is path which is channel connecting authoring to the live environment
    • Jobs control what content is copied when
    • It doesn't deploy security setting

• Microsoft Windows Server Cluster Beta 1 - www.microsoft.com/hpc. Today Linux dominates the high performance computing (HPC) market through ad-hoc custom clustering. Windows Server 2003 Cluster Edition hopes to bring a common platform to do this.
• Microsoft is introducing Infocard – a federated identity verification system. You remember .NET Hailstorm?. This time it is supposed to be different, let us wait and see
• Microsoft is introducing XPS (code named Metro) document delivery system as part of Avalon (WinFX WPC). XPS will be the default that applications speak to Printer for Printing, Printer are expected to have native XPS compilers in them around Windows Vista timeframe. XPS is based on Windows Presentation Framework XAML.
• Windows Server Longhorn to be released in 2007. Today first CTP with IIS 7.0 was handed out to all PDC attendees.
• Microsoft is introducing Transaction based file sytem (TxF) for NTFS. It will be an enhancement to NTFS released as part of Longhorn server, which makes every file operation as a transaction. Just like in Database you open Begin Trans, do file copy/move/delete/write/modify and commit trans. If you aren't using it no overhead; usage also will add very little overhead. I think this is very cool.
• New Event Log model to be introduced in Longhorn server
• IIS 7.0 to be made Modular – modeled like Apache web server. (More details in a separate post). Will also have Windows Activation Service (WAS), ASP.NET Integration, Integrated Diagnostics and Tracing.
• Windows System Center Management, Windows Hypervisor, Virtualization and new enhanced VHD format to be introduced post longhorn server
• Today every piece of MS Server System is available in 64bit. MS Internal IT has seen huge performance benefits on running web servers in 64bit

Windows Workflow Foundation (which was announced today) is an extensible programming model and runtime components for building solutions on the Windows platform. Major highlights:

1. Bundled part of WinFX runtime, should get released around Windows Vista timeframe
2. First likely to get released as part of powers Office "12" Server workflow. Windows Sharepoint Server “12” uses WWF workflow internally
3. It is important to understand WWF is not a server product, but BizTalk is a server product. WWF can do both Human Workflow and EAI/B2B. There is no server or service component for WWF. It gets kicked off from your main function. You call a start function of WWF and the WWF runtime runs inside your application. User has to develop the host application that hosts the runtime and also has to develop failure (Restart) and multiserver setup. Persistence can be stored to a File or a SQL Database through appropriate connection string to any machine.
4. Workflow models and definitions can be stored as a .CS (.VB) File or as .XOML file
5. Dynamic changes can be made to the workflow  of a running instance

For more details, refer to MSDN WWF Site or Windows Workflow Site

Eric Rudder did the the keynote on Wednesday. The highlights of the keynote were:

• Announcement of Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), though a workflow engine from Microsoft has been rumored for several years, it finally was out of the bags today. A powerful Workflow framework as part of WinFX is a very compelling value proposition for .NET developers. Almost all business applications (Web or Windows) has some kind of Workflow custom build into them. Moving this to the underlying platform will certainly speed-up development and make it easier to debug, develop and maintain.
• Microsoft announced MS Expression, a suite of designer tool. Traditionally developers and designers used different tool sets to do their work, Expression aims to bridge the gap. Three SKUs were announced part of Expression family
  • Microsoft Acrylic Graphics Designer – aimed at pure designers who can use it do powerful bitmap and vector graphics in the same design surface. Ability to generate XAML files.
  • Microsoft Sparkle Interactive Designer – aimed at designers and developers to design Windows Forms Application using XAML.
  • Microsoft Quartz Web Designer – aimed at designer and developers to design standards based Web Application. Everything the tool does XML, XSLT, CSS, HTML all conforms to standards. By default the tool generates XHTML 1.0 transitional – can be configured to generate based on any W3C Schema. Provides pretty cool two-way (Design and Coding) CSS and XSLT Design surface.
  • The best part of both Sparkle and Quartz is that it uses the same project files as Visual Studio 2005 and preserves formatting of all source files. Thanks Microsoft for listening to us on preserving formatting and adopting standards!
  • The folks from North Face adventure wares demoed an application that allowed sharing a 3D model designed in Autocad with people who had only Avalon was very compelling.
• So far applications to be customized by end-users with a scripting language, had to use only Visual Basic for Application (VBA). This is commonly used by apps like MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc. Now Microsoft is introducing Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) which provides the entire set of .NET Runtime and Languages available for developers to customize apps. An early version of Autocad was demonstrated using VSTA as Proof of Concept.
• All PDC attendees to be given free copies of SQL Server 2005 once the product gets released. The final CTP of SQL Server ’05 was given to us on that day.
• Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2005 was also given to all attendees. Finally Whidbey seems to get out of the door.

With so many things that was announced today, I am lost on where to start. I will save myself much of laundry list reporting of features announced which I am sure press has done a great job - instead I will give links to these press coverages.

First Bill Gates and Jim Allchin Keynote (Read a quick detail here) - It was fabuluous stuff that were being presented, what were showcased today is sure to have an impact on the PC Users and Developers for next 10 years. You can read EWeek's complete coverage here on Windows Vista & Office 12 with screenshots.

In the keynote while BillG or Jim were speaking they had Text rendered on real time (Closed Captions) on the side screens. I am sure this definitely helped non-native english speakers to follow on the speech.

BillG's keynote (Official Speech Transcript is here) demo included all the great things that are coming in Windows Vista and IE 7.0. The Windows Vista SideBar and SideShow (This allows you to access Inbox/Calendar/Notes from a small screen in your Laptop Cover when your PC is switched off) were impressive work. The Sideshow is a real innovation coming in the laptop space after a long time.  The other cool thing in Windows Vista with Avalon was true support for Open Fonts that allows amazing font displays like the picture below. Notice how a character changes its previous character appearance. This is real delight to watch when you are typing and watching in real time the changes.

BillG for the very first time showed the new Office "12" interface and features. One of the little things in that I really liked was the ability for Outlook to take documents from Sharepoint Document lists offline with you.

Apart from this, BillG's Keynote had a recruiting video featuring Bill Gates and a young lad, the story was about all that BillG had to undergo to get this guy work for him. Very funny!. You normally perceive BillG to be a geek, lacking fun but this proved that completely wrong.

Jim Alchin started his keynote with showing an original IBM PC/XT running Windows 1.0, which was cool to watch.

Windows 1.0 running MS-DOS Explorer

Windows 1.0 running Riviera game

In Jim Alchin's keynote there were many Vista's stuff demoed including:

• Windows Vista's SuperFetch and its ability to use USB Memory stick as additional RAM for optimization. Using USB Memory this way was certainly a good idea
• Windows Presentation Framework Everywhere (WPF/F) that allows you run Avalon lite apps in Mobile devices

Then Jim invited the 4 Senior Platform Architects in Microsoft to show code of upcoming technologies. These were legends like Anders and Don, the way they typed the code flawlessly, the co-ordination and sync-up between them were awesome. All upcoming technical presenters had tons to learn from this act. When Anders presented on upcoming LinQ's technology, Don typed the code in perfect timing; similarly when Don talked about Indigo (WCF) Chris typed the code. Awesome stuff!

The query language included new XLinQ technology, as you can see in the code below, it makes generating XML very easy. Good Stuff.

Finally Scott Guthrie (I love this guy, especially his works and more so his blog) showed the new Atlas ASP.NET Technology. Read here about what Scott's got to say about the demo he made today. 

Bill Staples, the IIS 7.0 PUM (Product Unit Manager) presented a very enjoyable session on Day 1 on what he aptly called “Roller Coaster Ride on IIS 7.0”.

These are the major points of his presentation:

• IIS 7.0 primary design goal was to maintain and exceed the rock-solid reliability, ease of management, secure design of IIS 6.0. As a matter of fact, Microsoft has released No Critical Security Patches for IIS 6.0 since its release two years back. No other web server in the same period has the same credibility story.
• IIS MMC console is dead. The present MMC  interface has outlived. For example it has stretched the limits of number of rows of tabs you can have in one dialog. On its place, a brand new sleek console has been introduced. It features user interface elements like property windows that people are familiar from Visual Studio.
• ISAPI is deprecated for management. In present and previous versions IIS team used a private API to manage the core server components, but developers had to use ISAPI. Also ISAPI is nearly than 10 years old and the webserver scenario has changed from then. In its place, a brand new Win32 API is introduced for management. In fact, IIS 7.0 team also uses this same new API to manage. The new API is used by the graphical, console and scripting interfaces of IIS 7.0
• The IIS Metabase is dead – Both in Binary and in XML format. You can store for each web site and/or web application its configuration in the same Web.Config file as in ASP.NET. In fact, you can even have a web.config for each folder inside a web application. This will allow you to give the complete application and IIS configuration to operations for deployment through XCOPY. No separate instructions to be performed by operations is required
• Because of the last point, you don’t need to be a machine administrator to manage your individual web site. There are new roles called Site Administrator. New roles  model is introduced, this is modeled on ASP.NET Roles engine
• The entire IIS architecture is being compartmentalized. Instead of being one monolithic block of all functionalities in one DLL file like today, IIS 7.0 has it has individual modules. This allows for convenient upgrade and patch story
• You can now write IIS extensions using the same ASP.NET httpmodule interface. In fact, you can mix and match native and managed httpmodules.
  Since IIS uses HTTPModules, you can use ASP.NET Forms Authentication module to be effective even for non ASP.NET Pages like Perl/Phthon/CGI/ASP.
• Excellent trace and log features not only for ASP.NET but for the entire callstack
• IIS 7.0 will first ship with Windows Vista Client and then with Windows Longhorn server.

I have been using IIS from its 4.0 release, these new features no doubt, will go a long way in managing high traffic websites and web farms. The trace feature by itself is sure to save tons of time for all IIS 7.0 administrators and developers. I am dying to start deploying this. It is now being released with Longhorn Server CTP.

If you thought power outages are common in developing world, think again. Over the last few years power position has been extremely good in Chennai (South India) where I live and power outage have been almost history - other than scheduled maintenance works which too are very few and very far in between.

Unfortunately Power Outages are becoming more common in USA. Today while I am in Microsoft PDC '05 happening in LA Convention Center, power was not available for almost half-an-hour from 1:10PM to 1:45PM (PST). Only after few minutes from the outage, did even the emergency lamps came live. Our sessions have to be stopped because of no AirConditioners and Audio Visual. And to think of it, a state of art Convention Center not having backup power was strange for me.

Read the full story here.

 

Your favourite is writting this post from Los Angeles, USA. Just arrived few hours back from Chennai by Malaysia Airlines, via Kuala Lumpur and Taipei. Had a 11 hour break in KL and got a stay at Pan Pacific KLIA Hotel. The Airport - KLIA never ceases to impress me with its Infrastructure and Greenery; But somehow I find the atmosphere and the shops to be exciting in Singapore Changi Airport.

I am here for Microsoft PDC '05 that starts from tomorrow (local time) and I will be writing on what I find interesting here.

As of now, I am super excited about PDC '05 - waiting to hear, see, learn more about IE 7, VISTA & Office 12.

View from the Pan Pacific KLIA Hotel Room I stayed

Unlike me if you didn’t get a chance to attend to Tech-Ed 2005 at Orlando - USA, nothing is lost. You can view almost all the sessions as web casts and even download the Powerpoints from here. Best of all, there is no 24 hour air travel, jet lags or even the registration fees .

Unfortunately just after I wrote this blog, I realised that the site requires your Tech Ed 2005 Attendee username and password :-(

I am here in Mumbai for the 3rd leg of Tech Ed 2005 India. Earlier this month we have done it in Bangalore and Chennai. In this time Tech Ed, I am taking it easy, just doing one session and that too a light content one – on “Avalon”.

Following are useful links for my session on Avalon.

• MSDN Mini Magazine on Longhorn (including on Avalon by Charles Petzold). Though this is outdated, it is a good introduction to Avalon.
• To know about the good looking Playing Cards demo, read the blog entry by Adam Nathan. Download the binaries of this for WinFX Beta1RC here.
• Designer for XAML - MobiForm Aurora
• Version of SVG to XAML converter from this GotDotnet project

How to install Avalon:
1) Download and install Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 from MSDN Labs.
2) Download and install WinFX SDK Beta1RC from here.
3) Download and install WinFX Runtime Beta1 RC from here.

XAML Examples:

<StackPanel xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/avalon/2005" > 
   <Label FontFamily="times new roman">  Hello World  </Label>
   <TextBox FontFamily ="verdana" AcceptsReturn ="True">  Hello World </TextBox>
</StackPanel>
Code 1 - Simple hello world example with XAML (WinFX Beta1RC version)

<Grid     xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/avalon/2005">
  <Button Width="200" Height="200" >
  <TextBlock><Image Width="100" Height="100" Source="C:\Samples\Venkat.Gif" /> <LineBreak /> HelloWorld</TextBlock>
  </Button>
</Grid>
Code 2 - Hello world example and an image inside a button with XAML (WinFX Beta1RC version)

Yesterday (June 9th) evening all of us at Tech Ed 2005, had a blast. The park was open only for Tech Ed Attendees from 7PM to 11PM (infact as the photo below shows we were inside even at 11:15PM). We didn't have to pay for anything, everything was free - entry to the park, entry to all the rides, foods at all restaurants, special buffetts at many places of the park and more. The wait time at each ride was less than 10-15 minutes.

 

This was by far the best session in Tech Ed 2005

Myself at the entrace of Universal Studios, Florida

 

Overall We all had a VIP treatment.

From Vishwak, we had exhibited in this year Tech Ed 2005 at Orlando, FL. This is our third big Microsoft US Event participation after Tech Ed 2002 in New Orleans and PDC 2001 in LA.

At Tech Ed 2005, we launched our new focus area of vortals as well.

View of Vishwak - Booth #925, Tech Ed 2005, Orlando, FL

Finally after 5 days of hectic schedule, Teched 2005 in USA is getting over this hour. It has been an exciting week with in-depth technical presentations, larger than ever Expo Hall, labs and more.

Orange County Convention Center (South/North), Orlando, FL

Since the event is covered in detail all over the Internet Media, I have instead listed below the top few items that I can remember after 5 days.

1. Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 is getting released in the week of Nov 4th 2005
2. BillG and SteveB have come up with a new slogan “a new way of work” that is aimed at making information more accessible
3. Almost the majority ASP.NET 2.0 cool features like Master Pages and Themes are finally seeing the light of the day
4. Windows server 2003 R2 is around the corner and it has features that will help in Branch offices setup or with File Replication scenerios
5. BizTalk Server 2006 is coming up with enhanced Workflow and BAM features
6. SQL Server Reporting Services is now available with all SKUs of SQL Server 2005
7. Longhorn has some cool Imaging (Windows Imaging and Ximage.exe) functionalities. It also has Registry and File Redirection facility to run legacy apps that require admin rights to run as low priveleged users. I guess this is taking a leaf from the books of Antivirus that do port redirection and Virtual Machines technology. Anyways, this is a much neded feature in OS and I look forward to it eagerly.

You can view many of the popular presentation online as a webcast from this site. You can also watch a video on Behind the Scenes at the TechEd 2005 Ballmer Keynote from here or Mikehalls blog 

Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

Media is not new to me , I have spoken in All India Radio Chennai a few back on “இணையத்தில் வணிகம்”, during my school 12th standard participated and came second in a popular Chennai Doordharshan (TV) Quiz programme conducted by Prof. வா.வே.சு. But today was different, my first full 30 minute long TV Interview was live today in Sun News Channel from 5:30PM to 6PM. The Interview was hosted by Mr.Maalan of Sun News Channel. I was invited for the programme on Tuesday and I was informed the recording will be on the next day 3PM.

Images Copyright Sun TV Network

Anxious about my first Television Interview, I rehearsed on my demos, went to a Beauty Saloon and even had my laptop cleaned (the demos were to be shot from my Laptop Screen). But the actual recording was smooth, got over in less than 1 hour, first shoot itself got Okayed and above all Mr.Maalan made me feel at home during the whole interview. The interview was about the features of Microsoft Office Tamil – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook in Tamil.

Watch it this time!. A repeat of the same programme will be live this Thursday (5th May 2005).

Myself seen doing the demo in தமிழ் of Microsoft Office 2003 Tamil LIP

Last Friday was a very special day for me, I did a demonstration on a stage that seated the "Who's Who?". The special event was one in which Microsoft India launched their Tamil Inteface Pack for Microsoft Office 2003. C-DAC with association with Government of India also released a free Fonts and Software Tools for Tamil CD. The event was hosted by Mr.Dayanidhi Maran - Cabinet Minister for IT & Communication and was attended by Dr.Kalaingar Karunanidhi - Former Chief Minister Tamilnadu, Mr.G.K.Vasan - TN Congress President & other distinguished attendees. From Microsoft side Mr.Ravi Venkatesan, Chairman, Microsoft India spoke about the virtues of Microsoft Office Indic Editions. He also said briefed about Microsoft's localization efforts through Microsoft Bhashaindia.com portal, which is aimed at taking IT to the Indian grassroots. I followed Mr.Ravi Venkatesan to the demo of Microsoft Office 2003 Tamil LIP in தமிழ். Giving presentations is not new to me, that too presentations on technology or in my mother tongue தமிழ் (Tamil). But doing the combination - a technical demo in தமிழ் needs good preperation. The time given was also too short (10 minutes), so I prepared for almost half-a-day to do this correctly. At the end, the presentation went so well, that I received applause for couple of times from the gathering and I was told that the minister also complimented my demo . You can download from here, the demos I showed on that day. The demos are in WinRAR format, as the file names are also in Tamil (Unicode) and RAR format preserves it. You can request from C-DAC's ILDC Website or email CDAC a free delivery of their CD or you can also download it.

Mr.Ravi Venkatesan presenting the Gold CD of MS Office Tamil to Chief Guest Dr.Kalaingar Karunanidhi

A view of the distinguished speakers on the stage, during the launch of Office Tamil and CDAC Tamil Software tools CD

1. Listen to great speakers: Attend as many programs of great speakers as possible. Subject spoken is immaterial here, what you are learning is the “Master's” way of doing it.
2. Read about doing presentations: There are now plenty of books on doing effective presentations and Internet has numerous pages on this. Read them.
3. Keep Doing it: Get on stage as many times as you can and just do it. As they say, your mistakes teach you more than anyone. So as you keep doing more and more presentations, you will learn on your mistakes and improve.

1. Know your audience well – try to get before-hand, the profile and the number of audiences. It is also a good idea to ask the event organizers, what they consider as the success of the event. 
2. Prepare on the subject - a time honoured tip!
3. Before the start of the presentation, try to get into the hall and spend few minutes looking around it. This is to make yourself comfortable with the place and ease your anxiety.
4. Before your presentation, if you get a chance to sit on the stage with other speakers, use the opportunity. Try to sweep the hall with your eyes and make few eye-contacts with the audiences. Don’t take the eye-contact to extreme and stare at one person for long time, they will get nervous. Just do it for a second with one person and then keep moving. This will boost your confidence.
5. Start with a “Joke” or “Tidbit” or “Exciting News” relevant which is related to the day’s topic but not part of the topic directly.
6. Introduce yourself – You have worked for it, you have put in effort, you deserve your limelight. Speak your name, loud & clear in a way you will like to hear it to being pronounced by others. Tell about your background especially relevant experiences to today’s topic. Having said that, If the host already has introduced you, don’t repeat your “Profile” all again. Always keep the introduction short.
7. Learn to study the body language of your audience. Most of the time, when they are bored or if they think you are lying, you can read that from their body language.
8. Deliver your presentation in clear voice, don’t use any accents.
9. During your presentation, don’t keep looking at your laptop or the screen all the time. Stand Straight, make frequent eye contacts with the audience. Sweep the hall (across all the four corners) with your eye.
10. If you can walk during the presentation walk but don’t run on stage. Make small and firm strides. If you keep walking left-and-right across the stage too fast, audiences will get a stiff neck. Remember, they are not watching a tennis-match!
11. Never overshoot your time. Always keep a tab on time. Rehearsing your timing beforehand really helps here. {I normally keep my wrist watch in a comfortable viewing position for me to check the timing}.
12. More than overshooting the time, it is very embarrassing if you finish well in advance. If you do it, you will appear to your audience as someone who doesn’t know enough on the topic.
13. Finally once the presentation is over, speak to your friends (if they were present) or to the hosts and ask them for a honest/frank feedback. This is super critical for you to improve in future. Also speak to few of the audience, and casually ask them questions with an objective to understand how much of your topic has reached them.
14. If the event was recorded (Video or Audio) asks your hosts to give you a copy of it. It is a good idea to carry a blank CD or Mini-DV cassette and give it to them along with your business card. This way they will remember to do the favour for you. 
15. If there was a feedback form, take time after the event, talk to event organizers and go through atleast few tens of completed feedback forms in person. This is important, even if they promise to send an excellent report with all statistics and chart after the event. Reason being, by the time the well-prepared report comes, it will be couple of days/weeks and you would have gone to a different job/forgotten about the specifics of the presentation. So when the event is fresh in your mind, try to gather first-hand opinion.
16. Presentations and Speaking are good oppurtunities to network. So carry good number of your business cards and give it to people whoever asks for it. If it is a product selling presentation you are doing, then it is a good idea to even keep some of the cards on the podium/dias for people to self-service. Also remember to talk to walk around with people if there is a lunch/dinner happening after the dinner.
17. How irritating it is to hear a mobile phone ring during a presentation. Before you asking the audience, please remember to switch off your mobile and put it in away (say in your laptop bag). At times it will be a good idea to do it on stage while you start talking, this way you will set an example and reminder to others' to do it, rather than asking them to do it.
18. Finally, don't leave your mobile or wallet or other valuables on podium/dias. There is every likelyhood, that after the presentation you will be preoccupied with questions from audience and you will forget to collect your items back.  

1. Try to get a good-night sleep. For the audience, your eyes are the window to you, so a well-rested body has relaxed good-looking eyes. {Having said it, most of the times, I prepare my slide-decks the day before, but everytime when I practiced this, I felt my presentations to be much better}.
2. Be in Rome as “Romans” do. So check with your host/event organizers on the dress code they are expect you. I normally stick to formals (no-tie or suit) for technical presentations, Suits for Business Presentations and Relaxed-formals for other presentations.
3. Keep a bottle of water handy in the podium. When you are speaking, especially in an Air-Conditioned halls, your mouth gets dry very quickly.
4. After a long presentation (60 - 90 minutes) when you are back home, a good mouth-gargle (with water/glycerin or salt-water) has a soothing effect.

1. Learn the subject you are going to be presenting thoroughly. Today audiences have access to nearly all the information (or at times more) on the subject through Internet and if it is Microsoft Technologies through MSDN Online and various blogs.
2. If you are stepping-in last minute for a different speaker, and you don’t have time to prepare fully on the subject, at-least take the effort of preparing a map of land-mines. These are list of topics/areas on the subject that you are not fully-aware, this way you can stay clear off (or atleast step on as gently as possible) of the land-mines.
3. On an average for every slide you should budget 3 to 5 minutes, depending on the complexity. So a 90 minutes presentation, maximum you should have is 30 Slides. If you have demos, this number should come down.
4. If you are talking about a particular product Never Criticize or Attack competition directly. If you have to do it, do it only after presenting strong data and statistics supporting your product. If you do it without data, it will result in a blood bath in the hall (needless to say most of the blood, would have come from your body). Always, try to remain factual in the presentation. At the same time, don’t hesitate to point out errors/omissions/defects in competition’s argument.
5. During the presentation or especially during the demos, if you forget a particular step or point that you rehearsed don't try yourself hard to remember it. Simply ignore it and move on.
6. Don't pause for undue duration in between, even if you are waiting for something else to happen (like application to load, compilation, etc). Continue talking during that time. This gap is useful for throwing some jokes & interesting points. In a way this will shake-up the audience and wake those you are sleeping.

1. Slides should be brief: Typically a single Power Point Slide shouldn’t contain more than 1 or 2 images and not more than 5 to 6 points. Remember MS Word is a better tool to write pages and essays and Power Point is a bad tool to write long paragraphs.
2. Slides are only pointers: Continuing on the previous point, remember that the slides are only pointers for you to recollect and speak. The slides shouldn’t communicate the entirety to audience – if that is the case, you have no role to play in the hall, the audience can read it for themselves.
3. Generally keep your slide background to a solid, light colour. Remember that projectors don’t show colour as great as your monitor and from a distance dark colour fonts appear on a light background appear clearer. {This is the reason why Cars around the world have their Numberplates in White or Yellow background and with Black colour lettering}.
4. Avoid cliparts or cartoons unless they are absolutely necessary. Even if you use them, use sparingly. Remember, everyone in the audience would have for sure, seen the MS Office cliparts hundreds of time. I have seen in many PPTs, where the presenter has used almost all the Cliparts that Microsoft manages to ship with MS Office CD.
5. Spend the time to learn Power Points powerful (less-used) feature of Master Slides (View-Master-Slide Master Menu).
6. Reduce the number of times, you do changes to fonts and colours on individual slides. Continuing on previous point, try to make tweaking only to your Slide Master and let it run across your slide-deck.
7. Reduce the usage of Serif Fonts. Try to use only Sans-Serif fonts for everything in your slides. Typefaces generally fall into two broad categories: serif and sans serif. Serif fonts, such as Times New Roman have little “tails” at the ends of each character stroke that lead a reader’s eye from character to character, increasing reading speed. Sans serif fonts, such as Arial and Verdana, don’t have these tails; as a result, reading is difficult for long passages of text because the eye isn’t moved from character to character.
8. Don’t create Power Point templates from scratch. Use the templates that ship out-of-box with Power Point and then start tweaking them. For example if the background image you want use across all your slides is White-based, start with one of the standard templates that have white background, replace your background image and go from there. This way you will get best practices on fonts, colours and alignments for free and you only need to change things you don’t like.
9. Most of the projectors are capable of doing only 1024x768 resolution, so make your slides/demos look good at that resolution.

1. Even if you are carrying your own laptop with the presentation loaded, have backups. Always have a copy of your PPT in a USB Thumb drive (and remember to carry it) or email it beforehand to the host of the event and request them to have it loaded on an alternate system.
2. Check/Double-check all your hardware, cables, power-supply and software.
3. Always run your laptop from Power-Supply. Even if your laptop can run for more time without power, than the length of the presentation, don't use battery. Modern day laptops, reduce the speed of CPU if you are running with battery.
4. Keep all the applications that you are demo’ing open before the start of the presentations. Most of the times applications tend to take more time when you are on stage.
5. Increase your font size to say “20” in Notepad/VS.NET/IDE if you are showing Code.
6. Stick to simpler font-faces like Courier or Tahoma, I believe source code looks good with these fonts.
7. If this is the first time, you are doing a demo with this laptop – then connect your laptop to an external monitor and check the day(s) before.
8. If you are going to be using a laptop for the first time during the presentation, then practice using a laptop before the presentation. The usage of touch-pad/pointer is completely a different feel from a mouse. Better still, request/carry a mouse and connect it before the presentation.
9. Go 20-30 minutes early to hall/stage before the audiences comes in, then wire your laptop and check with the projectors. Try to build a “Rapo” with the A/V assistant there, remember he is your best friend in the entire hall during the presentation.
10. If you need Internet connection, inform the Event Organizers well in advance (A week really helps). I have learned the hard-way that the grander the hall (the more stars if it is a Hotel) greater the difficulty for them to give you Internet Connection or Phone Connections. This pain is now relatively eased due to Internet connection through Mobile phones and WI-FI. Here again, on most halls for some reason (because they tend to be below ground) have poorest signal strength near the stages. So test it before hand.
11. Remember that the Murphy’s law works at its best during technical presentations and especially during beta demos.

1. If you are doing the presentation with another speaker, remember to get the story-board discussed well in advance. Apart from doing this, you need to definitely rehearse once or twice. Because the chemistry on stage between you two is very important – and it doesn’t come that easily unless you know the other person very well and have worked/spoken with him before.
2. If story board is not discussed before hand, then do “Divide and Conquer”. {If I am sharing a stage with a speaker who I haven’t met before – I normally do “divide and conquer”, meaning I clearly divide the portions between us. For example, it will be first “10” slides by me and the next “10” by the other speaker or it will be that I do all the Slides and the other person does all the demos. This way I avoid stepping on his/her shoes}.
3. In the introduction slide, the hierarchy of names is important. Generally have the first name on the slide to be of the person who is going to do the major portion. If you are doing the presentation along with your superior/boss/client then it is etiquette to have their name first, even though you may be doing the major talking.
4. If you are presenting along with your colleague, remember to give him/her adequate time to introduce and talk.
5. If you finished a portion, the other speaker is starting, it is OK to say “Thank you” to you for the first time, but it shouldn’t be repeated at every switch.
6. Divide the total time between you and have a pre-agreement on who is going to reduce their portion when time becomes short.
7. When the other speaker is speaking, please don’t keep typing on your laptop or keep gesturing at your friend in the first row. Focus your attention, just like the audience on the speaker. If you do otherwise, it shows your disrespect for the speaker.
8. Similarly, when the other speaker is doing a demo and forgets a step, don’t go bullish and help immediately. Give some time and after that try to convey the idea as discreetly as possible.
9. Finally there can be only one captain to the ship, so agree between you that for the duration of the presentation, who is that captain. This basically means who can call the shots, when an emergency like demos not working, embarrassing question comes in, short of time, etc. Having a captain makes it easy and avoids conflicting fire-fighting decisions on stage. Remember, in situation like this, you have to think on your feet (sometimes it may not be logical/correct) and two people can never think the same quick-fix.

1. If you are new to doing presentations, don’t encourage taking questions during the talk. Announce to audience at the start, that you will take all questions at the end. Taking questions in-between, normally interrupts your flow and regaining your position is very difficult – you can very easily drift from your main message. Change this rule, once you have become an “Ace” in presentations. This is because, taking questions in-between creates a good ambience – somekind of positive interaction.
2. Never get into an argument or a lengthy discussion – cut them after 60 seconds and take it offline.
3. There are sections of people in the audience who ask questions – simply to say something they know or advertise about their company or announce to everyone that the food was bad or to say that they know the subject more than you do. If you suspect the question to be on these lines, interrupt the person immediately and request them to ask the “Actual” question they have in mind.
4. Never let a question be answered by a member of audience. If you do it, then you will completely loose the audience and it will become a discussion session. You are the boss during your presentation, so ascertain your rights.
5. If you get a question for which you are unsure of, politely say that you need to check on the facts before answering. Ask them to speak to you after session or tell them that you will check and email them back.

Happy First Anniversary to venkatarangan.com/blog

This blog entry marks the beginning of second year of my blogging. Last year, on the same day, around the same time (during pongal festival) I started this blog. At that time, I thought it to be my recent fad and that it will last only for next few weeks.

I see this blog only as recordings of my events, readings & happenings - but as I kept writing, I started to feel a sense of satisfaction. Also interesting for me was to look back few months, read a blog entry and recollect how I felt about something and compare it how I feel about it now. Though I never expected anyone else to read my blog, the handful of comments that I got during the year is certainly encouraging. Thank you. 

Today I presented in Tamil Internet 2004 conference held at Singapore, on counting the number of letters/alphabets in an Unicode String. The problem is that if we use the string length functions included in major programming platforms we get only number of characters based on storage sizes. They don't understand the language and so don’t return letter (எழுத்து) count, instead they return only count based on character storage. You can read my earlier post for more on this.

To come up with a reusable solution to this problem, I presented today a paper in TI2004 with implementations in major programming platforms like Microsoft .NET, JavaScript and PERL.  My full paper (PDF) can be downloaded from here, the presentation (PPT) from here and the generic implementation with full source code for all the 3 platforms here (ZIP) .

Tamil Unicode has always been a issue of heavy discussion, today Badri Seshadri chaired the session well; gave oppurtunities to everyone to express their views without allowing the core focus to be lost or the time to exceed. Thanks Badri. If you want to read more about TI 2004, don't forget to visit Badri's Blog and the TI 2004 Photo Gallery.

Most of the time I am in front of my Laptop with little physical exercise or relaxation, so I decided to try Yoga. That was 4 years back, when I first met Mr.Shyam. Since then I am learning/practising Yoga under the guidance of Shyam Master, who also trains many of my colleagues at Vishwak in the weekly twice programs we have in the office.

Yoga (if you do it regularly) certainly helps you to feel more enegetic and healthy.

This month Mr.Shyam's NewYogaLife had organized a 10-day 'Introduction course on Ayurveda and Yoga' for a batch of students from Singapore. Last Friday (26th) I was invited as one of Chief Guests for the Awards function where certificates where distributed to all the students who completed the course. I was joined on stage by well-known businessman Mr.Aboo Bucker A., Managing Director of Hotel President-Chennai and President Group.

That's where I received this beautiful metal horse as a gift from Mr.Shyam. I am happy to receive it for two reasons, one it was an honour to be getting a gift from my 'Master', second the “white horse” symbolises my family deity Lord Sri Lakshmi Hayagreeva.

The function also had other notable things. It was scheduled at 5PM and started exactly at 5PM (unlike many such programs in India). The guests on stage (Mr. Bucker, Mr.Raman, Mr.Shyam and myself) spoke briefly and to the point; The whole event got over at 5:25PM - short and sweet.

"Diwali" is celebrated by Indians all over the world today. It is an important Indian festival celebrated with pomp and gaiety across linguistic boundaries. In the Hindu calendar, which is a lunar one, it falls on amavasya, or the new moon, about twenty days after the festival of Dussehra, in the month of Kartik.

Diwali/Deepavali symbolizes the victory of light over darkness. In the South, Deepavali is celebrated to mark the triumph of Lord Krishna over the demon king Narakasura. In North India, Diwali is celebrated as Rama's homecoming to Ayodhya after the defeat of Ravana and his coronation as king.

More about Deepavali here

எல்லோருக்கும் என் இனிய தீபாவளி நல்வாழ்த்துக்கள்

Last month , we had Connect 2004 - an annual Enterprise ICT conferencen & exhibition in Chennai. The event is organized by CII with support of Government of Tamilnadu aimed at promoting IT companies of Tamilnadu. From Vishwak, we had exhibited in the event.

Mr.Jayakumar (Minister of Law & IT - Govt. Of Tamilnadu) inagurated the event. In our stall we were giving free mugs with our corporate branding for visitors. While Mr.Jayakumar visited our Stall along with IT Ministers of Govt. of Nepal and Govt. of Thailand, looking at the mugs he remarked that we should be giving “Mugs filled with Tea, instead of empty mugs” . I was surprised to find sense of humour present with a busy minister that too just after a hectic event.

During the four day event, adjacent to the exhibition hall was the conference centre. Many latest IT industry and business topics by eminent speakers were presented.

On Day 1, there was discussion on 3G Wireless trends, presented by Prof.Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IIT Chennai.

On Day 2, Mr.Azim Premji of Wipro talked about the importance of taking computers to village childrens. Here computers are more for CBT (Computer Based/Aided Training) instruments, making the learning experience richer on basic subjects like Physics, Bilogy, Geography; rather than for teaching computer programming. Mr.Premji also talked about giving Food Stamps to Village housewifes to buy food grains instead of public distribution system.

On Day 3, Mr.Noshir Khory of Motorola USA, talked on the reason of emergence of Six Sigma. The forces/factors within Motorola that led to implementation of Six Sigma. He mentioned on how Japanese Fusion, Innovative Manufacturing techniques helps in manufacturing. He presented his belief that “IT” is a support industry for “Manufacturing” industry and “Manufacturing” is the key for a country's economic growth. Couple of his quotes that I enjoyed was “Good Data with Critical Thinking leads to knowledge”, “To improve customer satisfaction is based on how do you turn a mundane activity into a pleasurable experience”. To my surprise he was the only speaker who used OverHead Projector (OHP) and not a PowerPoint  

From the time I migrated from FoxPro/Clipper^*1 in MS-DOS world to Windows (over a decade back), I have been a strong Visual Basic supporter. From time to time, in between I did some coding in C, C++ and to an extend in JAVA when it first came, but pretty much I have been a VB guy. (Just to prove that I did program in C++ check my Delete ’97 – a console application that sends files deleted from command line to recycle bin). When Web came, I sticked to VB, as most of my web programming was with ASP and VBScript. In fact, I did as little as little possible in JavaScript - which too was mostly limited to client side (browser) scripting.

In between, whenever I did program in C++, I felt it to be a waste of keystrokes to add semicolon in each line and I didn’t like the look of curly brackets every where. On a more serious note, coming from Basic/dBase world I felt comfortable with Visual Basic especially its support for UI, Database tasks and the availability of more high-level data types like currency, strings and more.

So when C# came, though I liked its power of expressions, my old dislike for C family of languages continued and kept me away from doing anything serious with it. And VB.NET gave me pretty much of what I wanted and also at the end of the day it was all ending up as MSIL (Intermediate Language) whether you did the initial writing in VB.NET or in C# or in PERL.NET.

But something happened yesterday that might change this. I listened to Anders Hejlsberg (Microsoft Chief Inventor of C#) talking about new features they are introducing in C# 2.0. The new features include Generics, Anonymous Methods, Nullable types, Partial Types and more. Especially I was very impressed with using Anonymous Methods in place of delegates; this can give great expressiveness with a simple syntax.

So now, I am left to thinking about switching to C#. Even if I don't move completely, one thing is sure, I am going to give this C# 2.0 a serious try.

---

^*1 Though C++ was the first Object Oriented Language I learned, the one I used a lot, loved and appreciated was Clipper 5.x. The code-blocks (this is the successor to Macros in dBase) in Clipper gave you great power by allowing you to have code snippets in convenient places (even in a DB) and execute them whenever you wanted it. The support the language gave you to do common DB tasks (more so it was a language integrated with a DB Engine) like Input Masks  ..., I can go on and on about Clipper 5.x, but let me stop my saying I still look forward to some of its power coming to new languages. Language Purists might disagree with me on the above lines, but then it is a free world

 

This week, I am here in Bellevue (near Redmond) , USA for a 3-day Microsoft Evangelism conference. Apart from many Microsoft employees, many of my fellow Regional Directors across the world are also here. It is turning out to be a great event, especially giving a chance to meet many of the other RDs; An opportunity to associate faces to each of the email IDs. The amount of innovations and development that is being done by Microsoft in terms of Windows Platform and in Indigo SOA is amazing. Over a period these features are going to be seen by customers as a clear platform differentiating factor. Anyway, I am seriously impressed on what I am seeing on Visual Studio 2005 especially with ASP.NET 2.0, C# 2.0 & Team System. Read about some of these technologies for yourself here.

The above photo has nothing to do with this entry, other than it is the view outside my hotel room. One more useless piece of information; it was shot with a Nokia 6600 camera phone and digitally touched with Irfanview tool.

Earlier this month, all five of us - Microsoft Regional Directors in India met up. The event was a dinner before Tech Ed 2004 in Bangalore. The dinner was hosted by Eileen Crian; Eileen manages the Microsoft Regional Director programme worldwide.

(From Left to Right, myself, Praveen Srivatsa, Satya VVV,
Sanjay Shetty & Vinod Unny)

The next photo (below) was taken in the Speakers Lounge during Tech Ed 2004 in Bangalore. To read more about how I feel about Tech Ed, read this entry.

(From Left to Right, Myself, Sanjay Shetty, Sheila Gulati and Praveen Srivatsa)

Sheila Gulati manages the Developer Evangelism group in Microsoft India.  You can read about Indian RDs here and about the Microsoft Regional Director Programme itself here.

Microsoft Tech Ed 2004 is happening this month across four cities – Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai & Delhi. The first two cities are completed, there is only Mumbai for me to go. After which I am traveling to Redmond, USA so I will be missing Delhi this time. The topics I present this time were “Secure Coding Strategies” & “Developing Secure Web Services using WSE 2.0”.

For speakers like me, Tech Ed is a tiring event that happens every year  - Sleepless nights spent  on preparations, struggle with Beta Code and of course Murphy's Law when it comes to doing demos on stages. Though these being the case, I keep looking forward to presenting in every Tech Ed. Tech Ed gives the satisfaction of sharing technical ideas with some of the most “Intelligent” people working in Microsoft Technologies in India and from various Microsoft Development Teams.  It is also the largest technical gathering of these smart people in one place.  Apart from this, we have extremely “Fun” moments in the speakers lounge. In general there is a heavy exchange of latest Technical ideas in the air and frank criticism on things we dislike and things that are broken badly as well.

In Chennai, one of the speakers started a discussion thread on Open Source and on Patents. My god, this went for like hours. Though, I won't be able to publish what was discussed there, it brought out how different people understand and feel about Open Source and on Patents. Though, this discussion stole time out of my preparation for my next session, I thoroughly enjoyed the healthy discussion.

In Bangalore, one of my fellow speakers asked me on long I have been presenting in Tech Ed?. Wait a minute, it seems to me like I am presenting in Tech Ed for years. After a “LookOut” search in my PST files, Eudora Search in Pre-2000 emails and a hard-disk search, I realized my first Tech Ed India was on 1999. That makes the present Tech Ed my “Sixth” year in succession. (Do I hear a big applause here?, Thanks ).  In Tech Ed 1999, I had presented on Top 20 UI Mistakes in Windows Apps' (surprisingly they are prevalent even today. Download PPT here - 1MB), MS Agent Technology, Windows Installer & WebDAV.

Some photos from Tech Ed '99:

Myself, Daniel Ingitaraj & Sanjay Vyas

Lighter moments of Tech Ed '99 - Speakers & Logistics folks unwinding

Though not dancing during this photo, myself in a Dance floor!!

Finally, you can read more about Tech Ed 2004 – Agenda, Speakers and once the event is over the presentations & code from here.

	In one of my earlier posts “Google Image Search“, I have written about an image I found of myself in Tamil Internet 2001 conference held in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia 3 years back. Last week, when I happened to go through my old photo albums, I found more photos of the event. In the first photo, I am seen with the group of core team of TI 2001. Seated from Right to Left, is Chair of the Malaysian Organising Committee Dato Seri S Samy Vellu & next to him is then Malaysian Prime Minister Dato Seri Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad who inaugurated the event.
	In the second photo, I am with Dr. K. Kalyanasundaram (Lausanne, Switzerland), Dr.Satheesh Ramamurthy, Mr.Narayanan from INFITT Secretariat, Mr.Mani Manivannan & Prof. Anandakrishnan.
	In the third photo, I am with Dr.Satheesh Ramamurthy and Dr.N.Kannan (Germany).

Yesterday (21st June 2004) was an important day for me for two reasons. First it being the first birthday of my son “Vaageesh”. Last year same day, I spend several anxious hours waiting to see the baby and to find the well being of my wife.

The second reason for yesterday being special was the inauguration of my company's (Vishwak) new facility. The pooja was performed on 4th of Februrary 2004 and then the interior work started. Lots of work was involved in getting it ready, because most of the interior work was made for us at the site. The ceiling was made with Gypsum on site and Armstrong tiles, tables and furnitures (custom design) were made by local carpenters, flooring was with Marble that were polished for several times after laying and so on.  I had many people known to me already working in the project: the Architect for the project was Mr.Sridhar of Viraat Associates, Bangalore and the contractor was Mr.T.N.C.Venkatesan, Chennai.

Facility being opened by
Mr.Shriram Adukoorie, Director, MSN South Asia

You can view more photographs of the event at Vishwak.com

After the bad days of dot-com burst, the interest and more so implementation of e-commerce is now growing. During the last 3 years, the number of B2B implementations using Web services increased, but it is only in the last 6 months that many innovative B2C implementations have started to happen.

This week Mr.Anto Peter  of Softview invited me to present for an hour in their website design workshop, which happened today. My topic was on “E-Commerce” where I covered on various Internet/E-Commerce Myths and Realities, payment mechanisms with respect to India.

It is interesting to note about one of India's successful ecommerce sites. It is none other than Indian Railways' ticket booking service at www.irctc.co.in which sells over One Hundred Thousand Tickets every day, totalling a turnover of Rs.102 crores per year.

When it comes to usage online there is a marked difference between the west and India. In India, the Credit Card penetration is very low, Debit Cards are growing slowly in popularity only now. Many online shopping sites in the country have adopted successfully COD (Cash On Delivery) as a payment mechanism. Though we expect COD to have high failure rates (people declining the purchase), the experience so far has been good with many of the merchants, with failure rate in the order 1% and less.

Download here the PPT of the presentation

 

Developer Days is Microsoft's premier developer event. An annual event happening throughtout US, Europe, Asia and other parts of the words. Following the worldwide tradition, DevDays in India is also eagerly looked forward by Microsoft Developers across the country. It is a one-day event, with neck-deep technology, code and visual studio insights.

After a gap of 2 years (last DevDays in India was in 2001) DevDays 2004 is happening now - May 3rd in Mumbai and May 5th in Bangalore. In Mumbai I presented on ASP.NET 2.0 along with Deepak Gulati of Microsoft India and on .NET 2.0 CLR Security enhancements with my fellow Microsoft Regional Director Sanjay Shetty from Mumbai. We had several hundred interested people and majority of them were programming in .NET on various Business Solutions.

As always I enjoy sharing the stage with Deepak, who is a good friend of mine. We first met up when he was working with me for the Microsoft NDTV Project, which I was leading way in 1999, during the last Indian Parliament elections. Happened to be an ACE “web” developer who develops at ease with both PERL and ASP.NET. After working in NDTV for couple of years after our project, he joined Microsoft where he has several successful projects to his credit. He is now in the Developer Evangelism group of MS India.

Sanjay Shetty needs no further introduction, other than saying he is the Mobility Expert in the country. Check out his blog for some photos of this event in Mumbai.

Last hour, I delivered the Keynote in the Bangalore event and managed to sneak back to my Room, to do this entry, before going down to do my ASP.NET Session.

Security Session Demos(179.61 KB)