.NET From India

Cloud Service Providers Comparison

Nasuni came out with Cloud Storage Report in Feb and it has a number of very interesting information/performance numbers on the current set of cloud service providers. You can download the full report from their site (requires basic data to be provided though)

I got the following info graphics from their blog and it does provide a number of very interesting details..

Wait for an Asynchronous Method

The async and await pattern is a great way to ease asynchronous programming in .NET 4.5. When using await and the whole calling stack is not async (maybe it has no need to be), you will have to sometime forced to wait for a async method to finish before proceeding and not want to use await, because the current method is not async.

It is not very easy to find how to do this as most examples around async/await only. So how do you work with an async method without using await.

I am waiting a example using the Live SDK, which is full of async APIs like most libraries now a days

   1:   Dim LoginTask As Task(Of LiveLoginResult) = _AuthContext.LoginAsync(scope)

   2:   LoginTask.Wait(100)

All async methods return a Task or Task<> type. Instead of using await, you can use the above syntax to wait for the async method to finish. The parameter to the Wait call is the timeout value. If that is not used, then the application will wait indefinitely for the task to end.

Some Free Ebooks on New Technologies

Here are some free ebooks on new technologies. Most of these links are spread all over and so I wanted to create a blog post with all the links. This has been on my to-do for quite sometime and just got around to doing this.

Live SDK and Windows Store Apps (Metro Style)

Windows Live integration helps you provide cool features like Single Sign On (SSO) and integration with other services like Hotmail, Skydrive etc. from your app.

Microsoft has a Windows Live SDK that provides wrappers around the core REST APIs used by windows live. Downloading the SDK is the easy part. To actually use it you need to configure your client to use the SDK and this means getting a key that gets exchanged between your app and the Live services. The process to do this is different for different kinds of apps.

For the Metro Style Applications this means the configurations need to be done in the Windows Store Dashboard (looks like you cannot get around this as the SDK does the checking. I assume you can get around this if you start using the REST APIs directly, but then you have the do all the low level plumbing yourself). The configuring part for Windows Store Apps are documented here.

Ok, the process seems simple enough, but then what about Windows Store Style apps that are not going into the store. Basically all those enterprise LOB apps that you may want to develop on WinRT, but obviously are not going to put into the public Windows store.

Well for the SDK to work, you need to configure the package in Windows Store. But the thing that is not well explained in the documentation is that your app need not be published in the store. i.e., it needs to be registered in the Windows Store, then the appropriate configurations done for Live to work, but it never needs to be published into the store. So for all those Enterprise, non-store apps, you still need to register them in the store, but the apps can be purely internal, without actually being published to the store. This means you will need to get a Windows Store account and pay up for that (if you have a MSDN subscription, you get this for free).

Also I wrote a wrapper over the Live SDK for some simple operations, once I get it to some kind of shape I may publish it. As of now it is too early.

Search Innovations – Bing vs. Google

Search engines have been adding newer features to ensure survival in a highly competitive environment.

Yesterday came across a Bing feature. The whole thing started when my colleague Arun wanted to check the status of the Australian open match yesterday. First he went to Google and searched for “Federer vs Murray” which was the match he was interested in. Google gave him the following results.

As you can see this is the usual result of a list of links and some of these site were updated quite some time ago and so he was not sure if he will get the latest update.

He ran the same against Bing

So Bing actually is able to understand that this is about a specific tennis match and give the exact score of the match..

Great feature…

Technorati Tags: Bing,Google,Australian Open,Federer

Either C# or Objective C is the #1 programming language of 2012

Based on which methodology you prefer PYPL or TIOBE, the #1 programming language that people are learning in 2012 is C# or Objective C.

 

Both methodogies depend on analysing search results, to see which is the language for which more search results are generated and the rank languages accordingly. Obviously the difference is on what search terms they look for.

PYPL PopularitY of Programming Language index - C# is no. 1

TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2012 - Objective C is on its way to no.1 (C# is no. 5)

Windows 8 API – Types and TypeInfo

I am working on moving some pre-Windows 8 code to Windows 8
(i.e. making it windows 8 store compliant). There is a major change in the APIs
and the documentation sucks a lot. So I am going to write a series of posts on
equivalent APIs I have found so that people doing the same can find and use.

Assembly.GetTypes – This is not available and the equivalent
is Assembly.DefinedTypes. Note, this API now returns a collection of TypeInfo
and not Types.

 So if you are looping thru types and working
on each type, you will have to now look thru TypeInfo and then do a
TypeInfo.GetType() to get access to the Type object. You can do the reverse by
Type.GetTypeInfo().

Type.IsSubclass – Now becomes TypeInfo.IsSubclass

Type.IsInterface – Now becomes TypeInfo.IsInterface

Type.GetInterfaces – Now becomes TypeInfo.ImplementedInterfaces

Type.GetProperty - Now becomes Type.GetRuntimeProperty

Type.GetMethod - Now becomes Type.GetRuntimeMethod

Type.GetConstructor - Now becomes TypeInfo.DeclaredConstructors

New Keyboard and Mouse Optimized for Win8 from Microsoft

MS Hardware just announced a new Keyboard optimized for Windows 8 called Sculpt Comfort Keyboard. You can read more about the announcement at the Microsoft site. This keyboard apart from special keys to access Windows 8 features like Charms and Action bars also has a split Spacebar that has both Spacebar and backspace keys.

This keyboard is listed in the MS Store at $59.95 currently and so of today is marked "Coming Soon". MS Store also seems to have related Sculpt Touch Mouse that is also marked "Coming Soon" listed for $49.95.

The new Office 365 with Office 2013

Microsoft has announced the pricing details of the new version of Office 365 updated with Office 2013. The details of the announced pricing and various editions is available at The new Office 365 subscriptions for consumers and small businesses.

The package that got me interested is the new consumer package. Officially called the Office 365 Home Premium, it is aimed at the end consumer and packages the use of Office 365 in 5 PCs simultaneously. This is great for households with multiple computer and multiple family members using Office. So instead of buying 5 licenses, you can just buy one Home Premium license and your whole family can use the use Office on up to 5 PCs/tablets (or Macs).

The currently announced pricing is approx. $100 per year (yearly plan), which means, it should cost approx. ₹5000/year (even if MS does not give a discounted pricing for India) or so when it does get released in India. This seems to be a good pricing for 5 instances of Office and one that can be used by all members of the family.

Features of Office Home Premium

• A personalized Office experience on up to 5 PCs or tablets.
• Powerful new versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access.
• Streaming full versions of Office applications with Office on Demand (PC running Windows 7 or 8 and Internet connection required). (This can be a problem for Indian scenarios as this means a 600MB+ download on each machine)
• Coming soon, with the full release of Office 365 Home Premium:
  • Talk to anyone using Skype, including 60 minutes of free international calls every month to landlines in over 40 countries and to cell phones in 7 countries. (Skype account required. Excludes special, premium and non-geographic numbers.)
  • Get an additional 20 GB of SkyDrive online storage for easy access and sharing of your documents.
  • Office for Mac

Windows 8 App Roundup – Disk Falcon

Came across this app when browsing the App Store today. This is an app that allows you to visualize your disk drive/directory and see how space is being used. This app has some interesting visualizations built into it and is built like a game UI. It does not follow any of the Metro UI guidelines, but still looks quite cool.

It has a kind of gamey look and feel and also the app store listing says it is built by a games designer using tools used for building games.

Is it useful for your day to day tasks?

Well not really. It looks cool, but just allows you to view how your disk is bieng used in a more visual manner. It support a couple of diffferent graph types like pies and bars. It allows you to drill down into directories and see the usage by directory and by file types. But you do this kind of work rarely and there are better tools that allow you to find those large space grabbing files that you want to delete. Though this app too allows you to look at files based on a usage timeline, it does not allow you to actully get to the file level and that basically negates its usage to find large files when you want to free up some disk space.

Still a visually cool app.