.NET From India

Will we see a response for the PC vs Mac Ads??

The keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference just ended here in Houston now. One of the keynotes was on Vista and showed how concered MS is about all the info out there on people being not very comfortable moving to Vista and maybe waiting for Windows 7 etc. Also the whole negative publicity about Vista' stability and customers liking for XP seems to have started to have an impact on MS' marketing efforts. There was a lot of talk on Vista SP1 and also how almost 80%+ devices now have Vista drivers etc.

The other thing was also a mention of how MS wants to push back a lot more and not be just at the receiving end of all that talk. So is there gonna be a rebuttal Ad?? Who knows, lets wait and see!!!

Trojans in Mac

Found this article on new Apple Mac security exploits that are being used to create Trojans. As I have mentioned previously in this blog, as Mac increases in popularity, the more attractive it is for hackers. Mac did not have viruses/trojans, not because it was in some way secure, but rather because it did not have enough installs out there to be of interest to hackers. So it is Trojans now and if Mac does grow its market share, viruses and worms will come for sure.

Also Apple, with don't talk about security holes approach is not really helping its customers. More they know about what not to do, the better it is for them and better they can protect themselves.

Is this why I am not seeing the Mac vs PC Ad on viruses recently?? :)

Is Echoes something new?

Microsoft has announced a new set of technologies aimed at integrating phones and the computer, code named Echoes.

This is still a couple of years away, but looks like they plan to more closely integrate Live and the mobile phone etc.

There is already a service called GrandCentral, which was taken over by Google around 10 months back. GC actually provides you with 1 phone number that can be mapped to your other phone numbers and it will forward calls accordingly. Also it would record voicemails and then send a link to you via email so that you can check your voicemail from your computer.

Though Echoes does seems to integrate this and the IM and other stuff, I dont see it as something revolutionary, atleast based on the information available.

Blackberry as a Modem in Vista 64

I have had a BB for quite sometime now, but though I tried using it as a modem once, I never got around to configuring all the stuff needed for that.

I came across this page and found the intructions to be simple and so thought I would give it a try. It took me around 10 minutes to set it up, including downloading and installing the BB Desktop app.

Ad Funded MS Works

There has been some info on the web on a new version of Ad-funded MS Works that would basicall be free to the end user. Works has a stuff like a low end version of Word, address book etc. I have never used it as I have always had access to Office Professional.

Though most people in the US do not seem to like the idea, I think this is something that would be of great value in a country like India. I think something like Office Home funded by ads would be a great sucess in India or other countries where buying a license of Office is very expensive and there is a growing number of home users. For such non-technical users, like my parents, this would make a perfect way to use Office software legally. Most of these set of users currently use illegal copies of Office (most probably provided by their vendor or friends). I have rarely come across this user set using OpenOffice (I mostly find OpenOffice being used by techies rather than end customers) or other free tools. So it would make perfect sense for MS to have a Ad-funded version of home office for these customers. Though MS Works is not Office Home, I think this is a good first step and maybe it would lead to a ad-funded Office suite at sometime in the future.

Learning SQL 2008

If you want to learn what is new in SQL 2008, MS learning has a couple of free trainings that could help you.

What's New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Note: You need an understanding of either SQL 2000/2005 for this to be useful

What should you be learning this year?

I do get asked a lot of questions on what is the best technology to learn. Obviously, depending on what a person currently knows, this question also has options added. So it is usually, .NET or Java, VB or C#, SQL Server or Oracle etc..

And in most cases my answer depends on what I know of the person asking the question. Obviously, a generic answer is mostly useless. But then I do have some advice for you this year if you are a web application developer working on ASP.NET or related technologies.

Learn MOSS 2007.

Continue reading "What should you be learning this year?"

Windows 7 - Is Vista's end near?

With all the latest excitement on whether we would get a new version of Windows in a year or so, Supersite for Windows, has a few screenshots of what may end up as Windows 7.

Currently as mentioned in the page, it seems to be Vista with a few things added. It is still in design stage and it will take quite a while before they clear up on what new features will go in and what will go out.

But the problem with a new version coming out in a years time, is more to do with applications. For example, Lotus Notes just added support for Vista and they still do not support 64-bit (Personal Experience :( ). There are quite a lot of applications that need to start supporting stuff like 64-bit and UAC. With a possible new OS in a year or so, how many of these applications would be able to keep up??

DSG!!

Came across a interesting article titled Do You Have a DSG (Dumb SOA Guy) Issue? in the SOA World Magazine. This is something that I come up against regularly, in multiple places.

This is always a problem when there is what I call the in-thing technology. SOA is currently one of them and is reaping the hype created mis-information...:(

An Eclipse Runtime?

Looks like Eclipse wants to take the jump from being a IDE to being a full runtime platform.

At EclipseCon 2008 in Santa Clara, Calif on Monday, the project leaders announced the Eclipse Runtime project (Eclipse RT) an initiative to build an open source run-time technology based on its own Equinox, a lightweight OSGi compliant run-time. Equinox, the core run-time platform for Eclipse, is not new. The run-time is used by Actuate, BEA, Code 9, Iona, IBM and Oracle and is reportedly deployed on millions of developers’ desktops

Will this be a competitor for Java or .NET. I am sure a lot of people hope so. My take, it is going to be very difficult due to the large following these runtimes currently have and the amount of corporate muscle (MS or Sun is not going to let someone else take over that easily) that are behind these platforms. It is going to be a long shot, but sometime long shots do turn out sucessful..

Eclipse launches super run-time project as alternative to Java and .NET