Microsoft DreamSpark :chase your dreams

Microsoft have its own way of selling his product as a freebies to various kinds of customers. They used to give the software product eval license etc during any Microsoft events. This is a kind of a good marketing strategy and some people named it as "Free Products from Microsoft". Now, if i say, that if you just need to prove yourself as a student by showing your IDs and you are eligible for getting various Microsoft professional-level developer and design tools like Visual Studio 2008 professional edition, Expression studio, windows Server 2003 and many more and at no charge. if you are one of those computer geeks that fall in this category then yes, Microsoft have came up with something called "Microsoft DreamSpark".
Unfortunately, it is presently running in 11 countries but soon more and more countries will chip in to this. for more information click here

Silverlight and Sharepoint

Microsoft is focusing on Silverlight to be the roadmap of all the presentation layer across Microsoft technologies. Now this is the time for a due collaboration of silverlight with Sharepoint. Yes, you can be incorporating silverlight in building web parts of sharepoint. Microsoft have recently released a blueprint of silverlight blueprint for sharepoint. Attach is the image that shows how the picture library of sharepoint will look like. There are many such samples available. Ofcourse, this integration of silverlight is very much possible with WSS 3.0 and MOSS. You can also download the source code of the same. for more information visit http://www.ssblueprints.net/sharepoint/

IE 8 Beta released

IE 8 beta is been announced and can be downloaded by clicking Download here. There are some new features like Activities and WebSlices will put the power of online services in the hands of users and allow developers to reach beyond the page and keep a persistent connection with their users. Currently available only in English, the IE 8 Beta is especially for developers who can download, test and give their valuable feedback. Do visit www.microsoft.com/ie/ie8 for getting the latest update on the same.

MSDN Technet sessions DVDs

Have you ever experienced of downloading Microsoft webcasts from Microsoft site for viewing it offline ? Isn’t it a very complex process? Back in September 2007, Microsoft,India has taken a very unique opportunity to record webcasts that will be presented to various large organizations in India. The sessions have been conducted on various upcoming technologies by few MVPs and members of DPE team in Microsoft,India. The idea is great, you do not need to download the webcast from MSDN which I do feel is one of the cumbersome work . These all sessions are been packed in two DVDs and are getting shared with various Microsoft partnered companies in India All you need to do is to put the DVD and go through your favorite topic. I had also taken a session of “WCF and .NET 3.5” where in I discussed about new features of .NET 3.5 especially for WCF. For those of you who have attended the session, please drop me your reviews /comments /suggestion. In case, if any body is interested in getting this DVD, please drop me a mail and I will facilitate the same.

Visual Studio Extensions for WSS 3.0

Microsoft has released version 1.1 of the Visual Studio Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0! These are the tools that you use to build web parts, site definitions, etc. It can be downloaded from Here. This is a must install for all those developers working on building custom application on and over wss 3.0

2008 Wave Launch

well the month has came and the countdown has begun. Feb 27th is the global launch date. Lot and lot of activities were going behind the scene and there are certain previews coming up and are available as public. If you would like a sneak peek of what the experience will look like, Microsoft have came up with some videos – this is a screen capture of the alpha code,To view click here on youtube. Built on Silverlight 1.0 it provides a virtual event experience based on the LA Launch event

Free Visual Studio 2008 book

Please download this free e-book offer, created to promote the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2008. This includes sample chapters from Introducing Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX and Introducing Silverlight 1.0, as well as the entire contents of new publication Introducing Microsoft LINQ.

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.