when technology is a part of the whole!

  Having trouble reading this email? View it in your browser . Stay Ahead! Keeping with the changing needs and dynamics of the IT landscape, Delhi Technology Forum presents TechCon 2011 , a premier event for technology professionals in Delhi NCR. Blended with dedicated content for developers and IT pros, this event promises opportunities for learning all about the upcoming Microsoft technologies and networking with industry stalwarts. To know more about the Delhi Technology Forum, click here What will you learn   Developer Day (Dec 17) Highlights   IT Pro Day (Dec 18) Highlights       Sessions on: Windows Phone 7 App Development Developing with HTML5 Developing on Windows Azure ASP.NET 4.5 SQL Server 2012 SharePoint Development   Sessions on: Implementing Public Cloud with Office 365 Setting up Private Cloud with System Center & Hyper V Public Cloud with Windows Azure SQL Ser...

MSDN forums has been the go to place for .NET developer queries forever. Every .NET developer has used the extensive documentation available on MSDN and posted queries the forums to receive community support. Taking the support to the new age, Microsoft has now enabled developers with a gadget that makes access to MSDN forums easier from their desktop. Christened as “MSDN Forum Assistant”, the feature allows users to access MSDN Forums and receive updates directly to their desktops. The Forum Assistant is delivered as a desktop gadget that resides on your desktop. You start by defining your favourite forums via the settings of the gadget. The features of the gadget include: Ask a Question: The gadget bookmarks the links to your favourite forums so that you can reach them quickly. Clicking on the forum link takes you to the forum page, where you can post your query. Forum Search: You can search using keywords right from the gadget and the results open up in a new Window. T...

In one of the startup groups, there was a question on the commercials of doing a startup with Microsoft Technologies. Specifically, the question was: “ I would like to know the commercial implications on developing a solution on dotnet. Is there a license one needs to purchase from Microsoft for developing a software on dotnet platform? When the software is sold then does each commercial license of  software requires dotnet license to be purchased from Microsoft ?” While many folks would already know about the above, I am reproducing my answer in order to help any startup out there looking for information on using Microsoft technologies. So here it goes: Upfront, one thing should be clear as water - .NET framework is completely FREE of cost to install. The tools to develop on .NET is a IDE called Visual Studio may be needed to be bought. However, MS has come out with various programs that give out .NET Development tools for free. These options includes FREE Vis...

Microsoft Technology Developers constitute one of the largest technical communities in the world. A significant number of these communities are hosted by external parties other than Microsoft. In addition, Microsoft itself hosts a number of these communities. Recently, I was invited to deliver a session on community tools that Microsoft developers can benefit from at Delhi User Group . I took sometime looking up these communities and was astounded by the sheer numbers of these Microsoft hosted communities. While I made all efforts to include the ones i could find, I am sure that i may have left quite a bit of them as well. If you know of something that i may have left, please leave a comment here for everyone’s benefit. I haven’t covered the 3rd party communities in the presentation below. Also, the most obvious resource for technical info on MS technologies – MSDN & Technet have been left out. If you are someone working with Microsoft technologies, spend a minute looking a...

“Microsoft community drives Microsoft products” – a statement that would make you roll with laughter, isn’t it? it did for me too till i attended the User Group Leads meet organised by Microsoft. it is here that i witnessed the seriousness with which the user group community goes about its job (i had earlier tweeted about this). User Groups is the life blood of the Microsoft communities (other community avenues include blogs, forums, webcasts and events) in India…  there are more than 40,000 known users spread across India in numerous professional user groups in various cities (there are another equal nos. in student user groups)… the bangalore user group can alone boast of more than 10,000 users (truly amazing)..  with more than 71 user group sessions in the last year alone, u can’t be far away from one happening in any large city of the country. The user group leads were a very attentive and enthusiastic bunch who met the MS folks with great deal of passion and feedb...

In this era, the importance of social media can’t be undermined. Forums are community avenues where people converge and discuss issues of relevance to them. Forums were preceded by BB software and newsgroups. India, however, jumped this technical cycle and moved directly to forums. The main advantage that forums presented to users was access using browser over internet and searchability. however, the drawback was that you have to be connected to internet to read the forums. Google acquired DejaNews that used to make newsgroup posts available over internet. There are a lot of forums in existence today and most likely you have been to one of them already. Microsoft for the first time has released a preview (CTP) of Offline Forum Reader for its MSDN/ TechNet Forums. This software is dependent on the APIs exposed by the forum and hence only works with the same. This combines the benefit that newsgroups provided of offline access with the traditional forum. Currently the beta s...

Reading in TOI online today that Priyanka Chopra wants to blog but doesn’t know when or where or how to blog. So Priyanka, get in touch with numerous blogging groups in the country and ask them to help you.. i am pretty sure that they would be willing to help.. well i can recommend delhibloggers.in to you..  This is an interesting thought that i believe many other celebrities would also be having (after many celebrities took to blogging). Some of the Indian celebrity bloggers i know of (for your reading pleasure): Aamir Khan: http://www.aamirkhan.com/blog.htm Amitabh Bachhan: http://bigb.bigadda.com http://blogs.bigadda.com/ab/ Ram Gopal Varma: http://rgvarma.spaces.live.com/ Karan Johar: http://mynameiskaran.com/ Rajdeep Sardesai: http://www.ibnlive.com/blogs/author/1/rajdeepsardesai.html Now, if you know of more, please add to the list by leaving a comment here. Technorati tags: celebrity , bloggers , delhibloggers

Microsoft has been running newsgroups and forums to provide community support for its products.. incidentally, many MVPs come from forums where they are TOP contributors to the forums.. but this isn't about MVPs today :) i t is about MS forums... to begin with Microsoft used Community Server from Telligent to host its forums. And now they are revamping the same on to its own code.. in the background, there seems to be an entire Community Platform emerging with blogs, tags, forums & wikis within Microsoft.. (very much in line with MSs focus on community).. The new forums are available at: http://forums.msdn.microsoft.com/ http://forums.technet.microsoft.com/ http://forums.community.microsoft.com/ However, the older forums are also around and the migration will be done in a phased manner. there are plenty of exciting features in this release: · Dynamic Posting, Quoting and Paging: Now posting, quoting posts and paging in a thread are now all client site events. Users can post re...

Delhi Bloggers group is an aggregation of people who blog and share interest in blogging. the group consists of some very known bloggers and some newbies. What is distinguishing here is the fact that the group intends to ascend to greater heights by virtue of collaboration and shared leadership.. this is a community of bloggers.. The Delhi Bloggers Event is being conducted as per the following schedule: Date: Saturday, January 12, 2008 Time: 12:30 pm - 6:00 pm Location: Westend Greens Farmhouse, (Near shiv murti NH-8), New Delhi (More details on the location are located here ). The agenda of the event is as follows: 12:30 PM - Registration Starts 1:00 PM : Welcome and group Announcements 1:30 PM : Marketing your Blog 2:00 PM : Blog Monetisation 2:30 PM - 3:00 PM : TEA BREAK 3:00 PM : Webcast with prominent blogger 3:30 PM : Beginning with Blogging and Allied Services (Digg/ Del.icio.us) 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM : Open Forums Discussions 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM : Structured Networking We will be fin...

India is truly a developer haven and Bangalore the developer capital. Microsoft User Group communities have existed in this garden city for around 5 years now! And here's the BIG achievement - The Microsoft Bangalore User group is now more than 10,000 members ... what is commendable is that the group is entirely managed by volunteers and speakers from amongst themselves. the group has conducted many events - big and small, authored collaborative booklet, celebrated their success and even dabbled in developing shared applications.. the community doesn't get more DYNAMIC than this! Hats off to the volunteers who have worked hard to get to this and have an unending passion and enthusiasm for sharing their knowledge and the community! i know that this has been a long and ardous journey for the volunteers that is still on. i have seen the problems the group has faced from lack of venue to meet, to lack of speakers, to lack of laptops and projectors and even sometimes lack of atte...

We have iterated the numerous benefits of participating in the technical communities many times. Today morning I received a mail from one of the community members who recently discovered the benefits of the community. It is those words that truly capture the value of community:   How contributing to the community has helped me: Understanding real life problems. Using Microsoft Style guide extensively to explain the procedure. Thinking out of the box, which was initially limited. It has sharpened by brain a lot. Making me think thing globally rather than locally. Interacting with other renowned MVP around the globe. Makes me appreciate the applications capability and good people to grow with. Above all it has helped me a lot, lot, lot.   Technorati tags: newsgroups , community

Here is a great effort to award the Top Indian Blogs: http://www.indibloggies.org This comes close on the heels of the reports that there are around 13.5 million blogs in India. The shortlist has 175 blogs in various categories from 750 nominations received. That's a awful lot lesser than the "supposed" no of blogs we have in India. Just hope that the participation grows in this blogging contest. There was a developer blog contest done by MS India some time ago as well at: http://www.microsoft.com/india/blogstars/ I am totally impressed with the way of nominating the blog for the award - through del.icio.us and that makes it ultra community oriented. Now, I am a techie at heart. So i quickly jumped in the Science/ Technology area. Some very interesting blogs have made it to the category. I was however disappointed to see certain blogs with no tech content featured in the category. I point to: http://www.mixedbag.in/ http://shallowthgts.blogspot.com/ http://balancinglife...

Any community builder (and i have been for past 3 years in emerging market like India) comes to a point when he thinks, let's take stock. The no. of influencers he has been able to connect with is one of the main areas. This is the set of people who will stand with you and you will for them. The success of community IMHO depends on these friends! For a professional, it is important to measure everytime.. so when do you know you have achieved with the community what you set out to achieve i.e. get your influencers. is there a way to quantify the right amount of influencers whom you have connected with and recognised? Having more no. of influencers are always desirable, there are following pitfalls to consider as well: Having "too many" recognised influencers lowers the value of recognition. Then recognising someone has no value. Having a lot of influencers might mean that one has lowered the bar of quality for influencers. Having too less of them would mean that you are l...