After many years, Microsoft had a ball this week - they had three main platform software going gold. First it was Office 2007 System going gold, then it was .NET Framework 3.0 (WinFX) and last was much awaited Windows Vista. I am sure everyone in Microsoft is super excited (as Microsofties would like to say) . As a partner, I am over-whelmed on the possibility this opens up for us in terms of developing Gadgets, WPF Applications, SharePoint Solutions and more.

For Microsoft India too the week was great - with Steve Ballmer visiting India and the successful run of IndiMix '06 event. In IndiMix I liked the inclusion on stage of celebrities like Anil Kumble & Yash Chopra and they sharing there experiences of how IT Solutions are helping them. Great work Microsoft India.

Some interesting numbers came up during the panel discussions:

• MSN India has 250 Advertisers this year against only 80 few years back - Market is turning to Online advertising seriously
• Online Advertising business in India is roughly Rs.110 Crores; while TV is 6000 crores & has 9000 top advertisers

In connection with IndiMix '06 Microsoft India announced a contest to select Top Bloggers from Indian Subcontient who will get special prizes. Microsoft nominated me as one of the Judges along with two of my good RD friends - Praveen Srivatsa and Sanjay Shetty. Going through hundred of blogs and select a few is a tough job and we thoroughly enjoyed it. My wishes to all the winners - in few of their blog sites I manage to write the wish in their comments. Good Luck!

One suggestion to all the Indian bloggers

1. Post more Original Content - it has to be your own experiences, rather than just collection of Hyperlinks in your posts
2. Keep your Writing Style & UI simple and clean - especially avoid Google Ads clutter and fancy graphics
3. Post often - which helps your writing and also builds readerships
4. Make few posts in your mother tongue - Spice your blog with few posts on Indian Language as well

Being an award from Microsoft I was hoping to find blogs with deep technical content, code/samples and architecture. I would have also loved to see blogs on Vista, Office 2007, Atlas/Web 2.0 & .NET 3.0 but personally I was a little dissappointed not to find any one blog worth mentioning on these topics.

For record, the parameters in the Judging Panel we worked on were:

• Frequency of updates - 20 %
• Originality - 40 %
• Writing Style and User Experience - 20%
• Content and Technical Relevance - 20%

Winners list is available here in PDF format (Source: Microsoft.com)

The other day I wanted to watch a movie and searched for theatres in Chennai, where I can book tickets online. After about 10-15 mins, all I could find was just two theatres offering tickets online. Satyam Theatre and MayaJaal. I am not sure where in Online world the others are hiding. If you know about any other Chennai Theatres for which you can book tickets online, please post in the comments below.

Continuing my story, I booked the tickets in MayaJaal and went for Sillunu Oru Kaadhal, starring Jyothika and Surya before marriage. The story of course was about a married couple and the emotions/bonding between them. A good to watch (though not great) movie, great photography and nice songs. When I was searching this movie in the Internet I was surprised to see a page for it in Wikipedia - these days everything is available in Wikipedia

Update: Prakash has suggested posted in comments links to do online booking for Abirami and Sangam, Ega & Casino.

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)

I always felt that Security Softwares (Antivirus, AntiSpyware, Firewall) available today have not evolved for a long time. They lack User Interface and the engineering perfection that many other software have achieved. These suites also take a lot of system resources unnecessarily as many of them are badly developed.

All along I thought I was the only one feeling this, but today I was glad to read an article in Washington Post echoing the same sentiments.

Recently Microsoft announced Mix '07 - the conference for web developers, designers and business professionals. It is around April end 2007 in Las Vegas and as of now I am planning to attend it.

I was there in last year event (Mix '06) and it was big fun. The event had good technologies talked like Atlas, AJAX, Mash-ups, WPF & MOSS 2007. For a relief, the event was not Microsoft only affair. It had good participation from other new age web companies like Yahoo & Amazon. This gave the event a good breadth of topics and speakers. I also liked the format and restriction to few hundred partipants.  

(Click on the photos to see more from the same album)

This week in Mumbai a version of the event (IndiMix '06) is being conducted on 9th Nov. You can watch the live webcast or register for the event free here. If you happen to be there, say a "hello" to me.

While in my last trip to USA, I saw these beautiful baby dolls in Fao Schwartz. The shop assistant was good enough to give me permission to shot these photos. These dolls were cute and almost like real ones.

(Click on the photo to see more photos)

Microsoft today announced the public availability of pre-configured VHD (Virtual Machine Images) files for common server scenerios. These contain trial editions of Microsoft Server softwares like Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2005, Exchange Server 2007 and more, setup as VPC images and ready to run in few minutes after download.

Microsoft Partners and ISVs can use these to create new images with their solutions pre-installed. This makes businesses' experience of trying out new softwares (especially complex setups like Active Directory or Exchange Server) that much more easier.

This completes the cycle of Microsoft making everything available for trying Virtual environments - first they made Virtual Server free, then VPC 2004/2007 and now pre-configured images. (Read my earlier post on this)

It is only once in a while, Microsoft comes out with such goodies especially those concerning Licensing (doing something like this earlier would have been possible but complicated due to legal licensing issues involved). Thank you Microsoft  and don't stop with this, please come out early with VHDs for all common scenerios.

Download from Technet VHD site here

For a recent question on whether there is a published Schema for XAML, Microsoft's Clemens Vasters (who was earlier one of the RDs before crossing to Mother ship, we miss you Clemens) had this good explanation to say (Reproduced verbatim with permission below):

"XAML doesn’t really have schema, since it’s a direct representation of .NET object tree that (of course) allows user extension to appear practically everywhere. So even if you’d have a base schema for all the classes that WPF brings along with it, you could not have a schema that also includes all the derived classes, new controls and other extensions you and everyone else will ever write. Strictly speaking, XAML is really mostly a serialization convention that allows building and reshaping complex object trees declaratively and using tools whose builders don’t want to deal with the intricacies of tackling a full programming language when generating object-trees into and parsing object-trees out of a file (as the Windows Forms designer effectively has to today)"

If you are adventurous and want to dive down on what  I am talking about, you might want to check out the XSD files installed by .NET FX 3.0 at this path "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas\Xaml*.xsd"

This tip is useful if you are using any of the Microsoft Desktop Search Technologies including Windows Vista/Office 2007/Windows Desktop Search/MSN Toolbar Search. Many times you will find yourself scratching on how to do a power search that the UI doesn't expose.

Recently I came across this help file on Advanced Query Syntax (ADS)) in Windows SDK (Unexpected place to find it). Check it out.

There are some jewels there like:

• size:>50<70 - Search for a file with in this limit
• kind:im - Search only IM conversations
• kind:email - Search only email communications
• store:outlook - Limit search to Outlook Store alone

One tip which is not in the document:

• folderpath:Microsoft - Limit search to what is in "Microsoft" folder (Outlook folders)

The much awaited Microsoft Office 2007 System got "Released to manufacturing" today. Today, Microsoft also confirmed that corporate customers will be able to get the product before Nov 30th.

I am using Office 2007 Beta2TR for several weeks now. I love the new functionalities like the "Task Oriented UI and Ribbon" in Word/Excel/PowerPoint and the RSS reader in Outlook 2007. I am eagerly looking forward for the product to show up in MSDN Downloads to download and install.

As per this betanews article Office 2007 is supposed to have a SMS Text Messaging application - this I haven't tried out yet, will check out and post my experience soon.

About two years back in this IEEE Spectrum Article ("Lighting Up the Andes") I read about how a Canadian couple is lighting up remote villages in Bolivia (South America) using white LEDs & solar panels. Mission was simple, to free remote communities from reliance on costly kerosene lighting. Solution was to have LEDs - Light Emitting Diodes, the tiny bulb like thing that you see in your electronic devices and Traffic Signals. The LEDs were powered through simple Solar Cell Panels. The beauty about their scheme is that they devised a small volunteer operation that blends tourism and charity.

(Courtesy: IEEE Spectrum)

I was touched for their thought for their technology innovation as well (read the full article here). The operation, called Luxtreks, has now installed lighting systems in Bolivia, Guatemala, Peru, and Pakistan without taking a dime of government money.

I missed to blog about it then, but was reminded this week when my uncle gave me a book "How to Change the World". 

I got this touching greeting from Udavum Karangal (An Old Age, Child, AIDS Orphanage in Chennai) for my humble gift to them towards Diwali 2006.     

I request each one of you to donate a small sum to any good cause of your choice during one day in a year, it could be - your birthday, spouse birthday, marriage day, Diwali, Pongal or New Year.

Internet Explorer 7.0 introduces a convenient Search Box to the Right Hand side of the address bar. By default the search is done against Windows Live Search, but if you click on the drop down next, it will allow you to install other Search providers. My favourites are Wikipedia and Amazon. If you are browsing this option from India - you will see two Indian providers - IndiaTimes & Naukri.

IE 7.0 allows you to install your own Search provider as well - useful for Website publishers for custom searches. Earlier doing this meant reading a (though a simple) XML format, now the new page makes it as simple as filling two text boxes. Some cool thought from someone in Microsoft, way to go.

This week (Post Deepavali) has been good to Chennai City for couple of things.

After a month of frustrating traffic and hour long traffic jams in T.Nagar Shopping District, driving on Monday & Tuesday (23,24 Oct) felt relaxed. On Monday at peek hour (7PM) I was able to drive from my office (Habibullah Road) to Srinagar Colony (Behind Saidapet Magistrate Court) for a meeting in 15 minutes. I just wish everyday is like this . The reasoning (do you need one?) for roads being empty - one after Deepavali people have to return at last to work, second they are left with no money after all the Deepavali shopping.

In one move - Chennai City Police went to NYPD range. I was driving to my house and was surprised to see a stunning white color Police Car fitted with Hollywood Police like Lights parked in a tea-stall in Thambiah Road (West Mambalam). For a minute I thought it was for a Hollywood Movie - Why in a Tamil Movie would they want this car, for Tamil Movies it is always a Colonial day Jeep which itself would have acted in over 10,000 movies. Reading the next day newspaper I realized that Hyundai India has donated 100 of these beauties (Hyundai Diesel Accent) to Chennai City Police Free. Critics might say it is a marketing move by Hyundai to make the Police trial run this, get hooked to it and then make them more. I just hope after 12 months, parts of these cars are not sold in platform in front of commissioner's office.

Last two-three days we have been having good down-pours here. Thanks to weather gods, all the reservoirs aroud the city are getting filled. Hopefully this should help the city ride through the coming summer comfortably.  

I was asked by someone on what are new Native Windows APIs introduced in Vista; when I searched I came across these two useful resources.

- Video on "Tips and Tricks on Vista" presented in Tech Ed '06 covering new File Dialog API, Search API, UAC Issues and API.

- PDF file of a Slidedeck on "Tips and Tricks on Vista" - Covers the same topics as in the video above.

The online video sites are seeing action like never before. Last week Google bought the market leader in this Youtube.com for over $1.6 Billion dollars. The Social networking site Myspace.com has a popular video section as well. MSN is launching soon its Soapbox service.

Though I have been to these sites a few times and seen few of the videos, I was not that captivated with them - as the media expects everyone who visits video sites to do. I guess I am not the target audience - which predominantly is Teenagers. I am also not sure on the business model - presently I find no advertisements in Google Video and the advertisements on other services are also very minimal, if not absent.

Anyways, today I decided to give these sites a try by uploading a video. The video I selected was the speech I gave last month in Jayaram College of Engineering on "Can India Sustain its IT Growth and what I look for in freshers?"  (Hyperlinked to the other post which has the links to various sites)

The first disappointment for me was all these sites, expects you be with a video - edited, fine-tuned and ready to upload. None of these sites provide you either an offline or an online tool to do typical video editing jobs, which if you are not a professional can take hours.

Though almost all of them worked the same, these are the differences I found:

1. Google Videos: Two good things about the service - This service allows files more than 100MB; It gives you a small (240KB) downloadable Application that makes uploading files more than 100MB a breeze.
2. Myspace Video: Though easiest to use also has the minimal features. Limits to 100MB of filesize
3. MSN Soapbox  (Beta): Currently Invite only site; Uses extensive AJAX to give a multi-task interface and file upload - you can upload and watch videos at the same time; Limits to 100MB of filesize. The post upload processing here took hours. Good think, it gives readily the Hyperlink, Code for Embedding Player, etc. Scores high on UI.
   
4. YouTube.com: Simplest interface; ability to group videos into playlists; Limits filesize to 100MB.

Wish you all a very happy diwali.  தீபாவளி நல்வாழ்த்துக்கள்.

 

Let this Diwali - the festival of light, bring peace and prosperity for everyone.