MVP for 2nd Consecutive year

Today i received the much awaited mail informing me that I got rewarded as an Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for this year 2008 as well. This is for the 2nd Consecutive Year. MVPs is the award that is given to technical community leaders from around the world who foster the free and objective exchange of knowledge by actively sharing real world expertise with users and Microsoft. My MVP Profile can be accessed in Microsoft site by click MVP Profile.

Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition - Released

Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition ( aka Software factory ) is one of the new releases from the Patterns and practises group of Microsoft. The software factory helps developers and architects to built WCF and ASMX service with the best patterns and practices in the consistent manner. The Service Factory contains automation and guidance integrated into Visual Studio 2005 for building services. The core of the automation components is a Web services domain model. This domain model contains elements specific to WCF like Service contracts, operations, messages, and data contracts.

More info can be available on following resources

MSDN : http://msdn.microsoft.com/servicefactory

Community site: http://www.codeplex.com/servicefactory

Roadmap of Silverlight and .NET

Microsoft have been in the news since its inception. This time, they are in the news for the series of releases of their product. October timeframe , Microsoft have released the source code of .NET Framework libraries. This was mainly help developer to understand how the libraries have been written and also to debug the code within the libraries which was not possible earlier. Apart from this, Microsoft is eyeing on Feb, 2008 to release some of its major products called SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 etc .. However, side by side, another exciting product that is gaining a lot of discussion is Silverlight. In a one line, i could say, Silverlight is compiled and must more robust product of Microsoft against Flash. Series of .NET Products are going to get released this year as well. The very famous, scott guthie has blogged on upcoming releases and can be accessed from here

VS 2008 Beta 2 WCF SVCUtil error

Svcutil.exe is used to generate the WCF proxies. In VS 2008 Beta 2, if you create simple WCF application and try to generate proxy of your service, you may encounter the error that states

"
Unhandled Exception: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembl
y 'svcutil, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' o
r one of its dependencies. Strong name validation failed. (Exception from HRESUL
T: 0x8013141A)
File name: 'svcutil, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11
d50a3a' ---> System.Security.SecurityException: Strong name validation failed. (
Exception from HRESULT: 0x8013141A)
The Zone of the assembly that failed was:
MyComputer
"
Solution

The problem is that SVCutil.exe is not been verified as a strong Name and one needs to do this in order to rectify the issues
1. Open Command Prompt
2. Go to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\V6.0A\Bin folder
This is the folder where by default, all the utilities provided by .NET 3.5 is placed.
3. run sn -Vr svcutil.exe

it will respond as verification entry has been added for the assembly svcutil.

This is a generic problem and might can occur to other utilities. All you need to do is to put your utility name in place of svcutil.exe in the above and You are Done !!! I am sure this will be resolve in the next beta of VS 2008

Seminar on Distributed Computing

Last week on September 1, 2007, I was honoured to be one of the speaker for Faculty Development Programme (FDP) organised by T-John College,Bangalore. T-John has invited faculties from almost all the colleges of bangalore and it was a very nice experience to share my views and spent time with all the college eminient teachers and professors.Along with me, there were three other speakers , 2 are scientist from DRDO and one person was from Cisco. I had given my seminar on "Distributed Computing" where in i spoke on the

1. current scenarios of distributed computing
2. challenges faced by today's distribuited computing
3. How to overcome those challenges with the latest Distributed computing

Visual Studio 2008 targets Multiple Frameworks

Way back in Year 2005, i had blogged on why Visual Studio 2005 doesn't target .NET 1.x(if you missed it to read, click here). The problem is overcomed by Visual Studio 2008 aka ORCAS. Expected to be released in feb , 2008, Orcas is having an ample set of features to talk about apart from LINQ , which is one of the most awaited feature. So we have new things line up in areas of WF, WCF and many more and i would be blogging more on these areas as and when time permits. One of the most exciting feature that i came about is multi-targetting feature of Visual Studio 2008. what it means is that by Default, Visual Studio 2008 target .NET framework 3.5 but you can also get an opportunity to create projects targeting .NET 1.x, 2.0 and .NET 3.0 as well which was never been supported by any Visual Studio IDE. well now below are the ways by which you can change the target framework for the specific projects in Visual Studio 2008

1. when you create a Visual studio 2008 project, the option is available on the top right corner to select the version

2. You can also go on Project Properties --- > Application tab --- > set the target framework

Isn't this awsome feature.

Port Sharing Features in WCF

HTTP with Port 80 allows to share Port 80 with multiple web applications. If you want other TCP ports to be shared by multiple applications, there is not an easy way to achieve the same. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) allows multiple application to share the same TCP port. I had written an article on the same as how WCF enable a TCP port to be shared by multiple applications

Please have a look on Port sharing feature of WCF

Now comes MSCD

Recently Microsoft havce recently launched its new product called Microsoft Secure Content Downloader (MSCD)which is based on Bittorrent and is used to download the Microsoft content securely. one of the limitation of the MCSD is that it cannot cross firewalls so presently , though it is in testing phase, this might be for only end users who are not behind firewalls. Also MCSD downloads limited Microsoft products like Visual Studio 2008, soon we might be able to see it for large downloads if this is been a success :) .. cool, so now if you are like me and wants to play with the new MCSD, Click Here to download the New MCSD

Global Launch wave date : Feb 27,2008

Having releases of three global products to be launched on the same day .. isn't it some thing different that Microsoft hasn't done in his history .. But yes, things are coming true. Feb, 27,2008 is suppose to be the global launch date of

1. Windows Server 2008 (aka Longhorn)
2. Viusal Studio 2008 (aka ORCAS)
3. SQL Server 2008(aka Katamai)

check out this article http://redmondmag.com/news/article.asp?EditorialsID=8800


wherein Microsoft COO Kevin Turner announced the same at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver. I am waiting for D-Launch Date.

No More OEM Microsoft Office 2003 after June 30th

After June 30, 2007, OEM Microsoft Office 2003 will no longer be available from Microsoft. I do feel that this is really a nice decision on behalf of Microsoft. It has been some time that developers and end users have started working on Office 2k7 , they have given various comments but have appreciated the Office 2k7. This decision will not only give a decent path to say Good Bye to Ok but also invite a lot of professionals to use Office 2k7 who are still sticked with Office 2k3. More information about the same is available by clicking Here

Windows Server 2008 Beta .. Great stability

From one of the blogs post from MS employee about Windows Server 2008 Beta3:
"microsoft.com site is running 100% on Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 "


It shows how stable Windows Server 2008 beta3, already is

To get more updates on Windows Server 2008 , click Here

Have a look on the Microsoft new computing Device called "Surface" aka Project code "Milan". The surface is more kind of PC that runs Vista in the back but rather than working with keyboard and mouse, it works on a touch-sensitive display. image to your right is Bill Gates talks with TODAY tech editor Paul Hochman while demonstrating his company's new computing device, Surface. I am sure that few years down the line, this news inventions gonna change the way people perceive the PC. Its just a wait and watch situation for us

Read more on http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18928656/#storyContinued

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2138251,00.asp

Microsoft also came up with a separate site

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Virtual Tech Ed

Greats News !!!
You can attend Tech Ed “virtually” though J. You can easily access Tech·Ed content that include webcasts, virtual labs, podcasts – when you want, where you want.
http://www.virtualteched.com/Pages/default.aspx