LavanyaDeepak 2.0

Microsoft India BlogStar Contest

deepak — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 08:53:00 GMT

Microsoft India BlogStar Contest

Yet another great writing and technical skill contest for developers in India who are also technical bloggers. Microsoft India has recently launched Microsoft India BlogStars contest, the details of which can be had of from the following URL in Microsoft India website.

One more instance where developers are really encouraged to share thier knowledge with others plus getting rewarded by having thier blogs enlisted on Microsoft Blogstars website.

Check out the URL for details.

Windows Reboot Query

deepak — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 04:16:00 GMT

Windows Reboot Query

Most of the times we confront a situation when a simple instant message like Yahoo Messenger or a download helper like GetRight also forces us to make a system reboot. The following are the interesting queries that haunt every Windows user?

Why does a system reboot necessary?
What does this application has to do with rebooting my Windows?

I came across this interesting tool called WhyReboot.exe which is a freeware and seems to be really helpful. It enlists all the files that are pending updation on reboot. I think this should be an essential tool for any Windows desktop and I would rather call it a valuable diagnostic tool against a lot of spyware and malaware from playing pranks with our Windows desktops.

Check out WhyReboot.

I would like to mention a couple of Microsoft Support KB URLs that explain about the internals. The following are them:

Check out the indepth and comprehensive analysis of the situation at Exodus website.

Indic IME Editors

deepak — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 16:54:00 GMT

Indic IME Editors

This is in followup of blog post in my personal weblog over here. While the essential deliverable in that situation was to have my horoscope mailed to the astrologer sitting in Bangalore, out of my own interest and curiosity, I researched a bit into the topic and I would like to share the same with the readers.

Check out this URL from IBM too. Also, I strongly feel that after preparing the document, if we can save it as Web Page, Microsoft Word automatically saves it as Unicode. This will greatly help in developing localized webpages.

Community Development Environments

deepak — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 08:09:00 GMT

Community Development Environments

Internet is just not an information media. With its widespread length and breadth and reach, it can be best harnessed as a feature-rich development platform for colloborative efforts on various community projects. SourceForge, SlashDot are not salient proofs of open source community project hosting websites that are known to any developer, engaged in web development applications.

If you are looking for a Microsoft .NET epicentered solution, you would already come across GotDotNet Workspaces. I recently came across another excellent colloborative community development website, powered by Microsoft called CodePlex.

This is for sure the best way for robust open source applications and for seamless knowledge sharing on information technology across the international boundaries, without limits of timezone and other mundane restrictions.

Spry -- AJAX Framework from Adobe Labs

deepak — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 06:34:00 GMT

Spry -- AJAX Framework from Adobe Labs

Check out Spry, yet another AJAX framework from Adobe Labs. AJAX has been a buzzword and a definitive JavaScript library that seems to be the essence of current trend web applications. AJAX brings in a lot of benefits for the web applications. A few of them are:

Extremely User-friendly Applications.
Highly Responsive Applications.
Friendlier on Internet Pipelines since the entire webpages need not be retransmitted back and forth between the web server and the web clients.
Friendlier for Servers since the servers do not need to regenerate the entire page.
Greatly helps the web browsers since they do not need to repaint the entire application. This is of tremendous significance in cas of lower end machines.

AJAX Frameworks

Check out the following AJAX frameworks:

If you still want to code the direct XmlHttpRequest API, here is a simple JavaScript wrapper against XmlHttp component from Andrew Gregory's homepage.

Virtual PC as a Free Download

deepak — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 06:28:00 GMT

Virtual PC as a Free Download

Virtual PC is a powerful software virtualization. It enables the users to run multiple operating systems seamlessly and concurrently on a single desktop. It provides extreme comfort in saving time in getting migrated to a newer operating systems.

Software developers find it a very excellent utility since they can test thier applications under different operating systems with enormous flexibility and ease.

Virtual PC seems to be currently being released as a free software, without any time or feature restrictions. Check out Virtual PC free download from here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/downloads/sp1.mspx

Documentation Tools

deepak — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 08:03:00 GMT

Documentation Tools

The essence of documentation can never be under-estimated in software. Be it a simple standalone application catering to a single user or an enterprise application, the benefits of a good documentation are really plethora. One can understand the benefits of a good documentation on a bird's eye view in the following scenarios:

Unknown application problem. A good documentation would help us expedite our troubleshooting efforts.
New Features or Newer versions. Developing of newer versions of the product or software is a breeze for a software which has good documentation accompanying it.
Process-centric. A good documentation ensures that the software is more process-centric and targets its goals rather than having a dependency on the developer or the coder who has actually implemented the function. This is greatly helpful in software organizations where a new developer needs to take charge of maintaining a software once the old guy is shifted from the project or goes of on a new career.

Now, in this post, we would some of the good documentation tools that help us towards getting a good documentation for our programming languages.

JavaDoc -- A premiere tool for documentation that comes embedded with Java SDK and helps to generate friendly documentation for our API based on comments in the code.
NDOC -- A friendly documentation generation tool for .NET applications. It supports a wide variety of documentation formats like Compiled HTM (CHM), JavaDoc and Plain vanilla HTML or XML.
Comment Web Pages option -- Our desktop IDE, Visual Studio .NET has an excellent document generator option called 'Build Comment Web Pages', that greatly support documentation of the code.
JsDoc -- A premiere tool for documentation of JavaScript pages.

So, I think, we should take an initiative to start commenting our code and a best combination of the tools above to make our programs self-reliant and well-documented.

Microsoft Office Visio 2003 Software Development Kit (SDK)

deepak — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 13:30:00 GMT

Visio 2003 Software Development Kit (SDK)

Visio 2003 SDK is available as a free download from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=557120BD-B0BB-46E7-936A-B8539898D44D&displaylang=en

Check it out.

New .NET Tutorial Site

deepak — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 12:50:00 GMT

.NET Tutorial Site

Check out this new .NET/C# Tutorial Site:

http://www.dotnetspider.com/Technology/

It has a lot of step-by-step tutorials for people from beginners to advanced level

ASP.NET Applications with different versions of .NET Framework

deepak — Sun, 28 Dec 2003 14:14:00 GMT

ASP.NET Version Switcher

Of late, we had to deploy our application with the previous version of .NET Framework 1.0 and the current version and we were manually using the aspnet regiis tool, to configure the application to run against a particular framework ASP.NET.

Just last week, I came across this nice GUI, which is really helpful in managing the applications and have them run against a particular .NET framework in just a couple of clicks.

I thought I would share with the URL with others, so that it would be useful for many others also. It is also a freeware download.

Here is the download URL: http://www.denisbauer.com/NETTools/ASPNETVersionSwitcher.aspx

Welcome to my ASP.NET World!

deepak — Wed, 08 Oct 2003 08:50:00 GMT

Welcome to my ASP.NET World

Just started to blog in my ASP.NET world and wanted to say hi and extend a welcome to the visitors of my blog. Do keep visiting...

Deepak Kumar Vasudevan
91 98400 26014