when technology is a part of the whole!

What it the first programming language you learnt? If you are my age, chances are your first programming language was GW BASIC that you learnt in class 5. But I soon learnt that to do anything serious I had to learn Pascal or Cobol. Microsoft is now reviving the old magic with new technology fuelling the programming paradigm. They have announced – “Small Basic”. This programming language that comes with its own development studio is placed as the first programming language that is easy to learn and uses only only 15 keywords. However, the technology behind it is state of the art .NET framework 3.5. The development environment is simple but has friendly features like Intellisense and context sensitive help. The language and development tools are available for FREE: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx The tools are supported by forums and a team blog . To get the kids started you have a “ Get Started Guide ” too that can simply be printed and shared with stud...

After being a blogger for a long time, I have additionally decided to venture out in the podcasting field. I am happy to announce that I am launching a new podcast series called “IndiMMS Kand”.. the podcast is proposed to be weekly and should be around 10 mins long.. If you wanted to bookmark the site where the podcast will be available, it is: http://www.indimms.com/ The preferred mode of listening to podcasts is through podcast catchers. And they need to be fed the RSS URL: http://feeds.indimms.com/indimms You can find the inaugural podcast right here. Take a shot at listening to the inaugural episode (only ~3 mins)…   In this podcast, we cover: The things we plan to be covering in the podcast The naming of the podcast & The inspiration for doing this podcast Since this is just the beginning, I know that i may fall short of the quality that i wish to achieve. I promise to get better with time. Your feedback and comments on what u would like to see in the podca...

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...

Live Maps from Microsoft is a good product.. and till now it was only good in US.. Microsoft has finally made Live Maps available for India (news via LiveSide.net ).. it is still not comprehensive for small cities in India and only has Street Maps for 9 major Indian cities - Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur. I took the maps for a spin asking for directions from MG Road in Gurgaon to India Gate in Delhi. The result (seen below) are exactly the route that i would take. Amongst other features are Local Search, driving directions and business listings. The Live Maps seem good as a start but i need more time to verify the comprehensiveness and accuracy of the map data.. hope it meets my criteria :) Check out your city on Live Maps: http://mapindia.live.com and let us know what you feel about the search..

Zune , the iPod rival, has released its version 3.0 .. the release further enhances the utility of the hardware available on the device.. Zune distinguishes itself from iPod by including FM tuner and WiFi ability at the same price as iPod.. the v3 release includes additional functionality for FM tuner and WiFi.. “Buy from FM” This feature lets you download the song that u hear on the radio of your Zune.. this download will happen the next time you sync your device.. i am not sure if this will work for Indian FM stations.. wud check this feature soon.. “Browse Zune Marketplace wirelessly” You can download music directly to your Zune from any wireless hotspot at home, at a café or wherever else.. earlier u cud only stream wireless music within ur home network.. if ur in US, you can wirelessly sync ur Zune at any McDonald's restaurants.. Games Zune 3.0 come preloaded with Texas hold 'em and Hexic. you can now play games on your Zune.. in addition, if u want to create new games fo...

You’ve seen numerous Windows Mobiles in the market from makers like Motorola, HTC, imate, Samsung (in fact only Nokia doesn’t have a Windows Mobile phone!!).. what you have NOT seen is the Windows Mobile displaying local Indian languages like Hindi.. watch these screenshots from my HP Windows Mobile phone:      Watch the day of the week in Hindi alongwith the name of the month. Even the appointments have the days mentioned in Hindi. So why hasn’t Windows Mobile been able to show Hindi fonts? While Windows Mobile supported Unicode, the core issue was the font engine in WM did not know (was not built) how to render complex characters. The reason why it was not done for WM, was that made the font engine heavy and OEMs didn’t want to increase memory footprint for that. Also, there were no fonts natively for Hindi on WM. All that changes with this application install that enables the following features. An inscript Hindi keyboard: Any WM application that suppor...

“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...