when technology is a part of the whole!

An excellent picture the cold and jubliant mood at TechEd India 2005 Mumbai.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Created in Dedication to a particular event at TechEd India 2005. Thanks for the wake up call! The community has been initiated and it is live at: http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=2929700 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Blogger now let's you upload photos directly without the use of Picasa or any other tool.. One of the problems faced by me while using Picasa was whatever i entered into the rich interface was all that i could enter.. editing the post made the picture just disappear! For my first post using this feature, here is the panaromic view of Mumbai's Powai lake from the hotel I stayed at - The Reniassance.. The beauty of the area just bowled me over.. it was so beautiful that I was left comparing the view to any other hill station in the country. Be sure not to miss out the mountains in the background! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

An abstract on email communication rules that i find valuable: ｡ All non-critical e-mail titled "FYI: " ｡ Mandatory Action Items will be titled "Action Required" - No action required e-mail to be sent after Friday at 5pm EST that has action item due before Monday at 5pm (emergencies excluded) ｡ If you are sending a broad email requesting action but action is not mandatory, the email should be titled "Action Requested" ｡ Recognition, Promotions and Rewards emails titled "Congratulations: " ｡ No Reply All ｡ cc indicates no action required of you ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

From Somasegar's Blog: "I’m really excited to tell you that today we’re making available a beta of “ Acrylic ” - the codename for a new graphics product for professional designers. A little while ago, Microsoft acquired Creature House, makers of creative design toolset Creature House Expression. The “Acrylic” beta is a new version based on the Creature House Expression with added capabilities. It combines strong vector and raster painting and illustration capabilities, along with very cool effects. One of my personal favorite features is the amazingly fast & high quality automatic panoramic photo-stitching. I encourage you to download and experiment with it. You have been instrumental in helping shape the future of other Microsoft products like Visual Studio, and I would love to hear your feedback on this beta. Click here to download the beta and provide feedback." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is pr...

Ending all speculation, it has been announced that Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk 2006 will launch in the week of November 7 2005. This was announced at TechEd US. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Two new benchmarks for Web Services and XML parsing comparing the performance of .NET 2.0 Beta 2, .NET 1.1 , IBM Websphere 6.0 and Sun Java 1.5 platforms are now available at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/java/compare/default.aspx The benchmarks show some impressive performance gains with .NET 2.0 vs. .NET 1.1 for these scenarios. The benchmarks, WS Test and XML Mark, were originally created by Sun Microsystems to highlight the performance of Java vs. .NET. XML Mark tests the core XML parsing speeds in a series of both DOM build tests and streaming pull tests. Performance gains in .NET 2.0 are to the tune of 3x over .NET 1.1 and way above SUN JVM 1.5 WS Test is used to test the Web Services SOAP performance. Here, .NET 2.0 offers 3x better Web Service Performance than IBM WebSphere 6.0. .NET can support upto 3 times as many concurrent users for the operations. .NET 2.0 offers 20-40% better throughput performance than .NET 1.1. h benchmark you can see: A whitepaper describing the t...

you have heard about Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005) and Yukon (SQL Server 2005) and want to get trained on the same... Can't seem to find any books around on the same or don't want to buy them? OK.. so now it is available, the training on the cutting edge Microsoft Technologies: https://www.microsoftelearning.com/visualstudio2005/ https://www.microsoftelearning.com/sqlserver2005/ And if you are looking for FREE tools to develop on MS technology, check out the Express Editions of Visual Studio at: http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/ And if this is not enough, you have your own space to discuss the issues you faced while learning / playing with technology at: http://forums.microsoft.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

In brief, you'll need: Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 ActiveSync 4.0 Developer Preview Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK And all the links are available on: http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/windowsmobile/howto/windowsmobile5/install/default.aspx ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Patching has been and will be a significant part of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) equation for years to come. When these costs are distributed across the size of environment and evaluated on a per asset basis, Microsoft software is less expensive to patch than open source equivalents. On a per asset basis, the Microsoft platform is less expensive to patch than a similar OSS environment. Windows desktops cost 14% less to patch than Linux desktops Windows servers cost 13% less to patch than Linux servers Windows database servers cost 33% less to patch than Linux database servers OSS-based systems faced with high-level and critical vulnerabilities are at risk longer than comparable Windows-based systems (Days at Risk) Survey respondents consistently overestimated the number of Windows vulnerabilities while underestimated those for OSS Through the use of best practices, Windows patching costs can be reduced by up to 55% (44% for Linux) The entire study can be downloaded from: http://w...

Here’s a great piece of evidence that demonstrates that SQL Server is more secure than Oracle and MySQL. In fact, it shows that Oracle on Linux is the most "breakable" stack. Take a look at the facts in the study: Comparing software vulnerabilities of database server roles: SQL 2000 on Windows Server 2003 (including all components) database server with Oracle 10g on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and MySql on Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Oracle 10g on Linux has 3 times as many vulnerabilities as SQL 2000 on Windows Server 2003 MySql on Linux has nearly twice as many vulnerabilities as SQL 2000 on Windows Server 2003 Comparing software vulnerabilities of just the database software: SQL 2000; MySql and Oracle 10g SQL 2000 had the lowest number of vulnerabilities in the most recent 12 months, with zero, while Oracle had the high number of vulnerabilities with 30 Comparing vendor response of Microsoft with Red Hat and Oracle: Average days-of-risk was lower for the Microsoft stack than eit...

I have been a managed developer ever since i remember.. for me the promise of Connected Systems wasn't coming true as i couldn't program very effectively without delving into the esoteric art of Interoperability when it came to Office Suite of Products! I find myself using Outlook the most and love to integrate anything with Outlook (really!!).. so i did write an add-in for "MVP Alerts" that i successfully used to parse more than 2000 odd alerts till now... But that was painful.. I blogged about it in one of my earlier posts . So with the news of VSTO now being announced for Outlook, I am excited.. now i can do more stuff with Outlook.. One of the things i am planning to build is a dual-reply button i.e. instead of the normal reply button, I will have a button that will open two replies to a single mail - One with pre-formatted reply (think Acknowledgment of the mail received and the second as a mail that i need to send for action!).. I am off to watch the video on Ch...

TechEd in USA has begun yesterday and so has the free flow of information about various new initiatives that Microsoft is working at. If you are interested in following what is happening at TechEd, here is the aggregator site for all TechEd bloggers: http://techedbloggers.net/ 2 interesting posts that immidiately caught my attention: Live Feed from AMD stall at TechEd : http://208.46.89.230/ Swags at TechEd: http://www.gregcons.com/kateblog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=26ff2932-d031-4203-a614-c69dcb87be64 Let's wait for TechEd India to begin! There is a very interesting thing that we are going to do at TechEd related to community.. Anybody hazard a guess? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.