I have decided to make this a personal blog and from now on I will publish technical posts on my new blog.

Welcome One .Net Way

I hope that readers of this blog will subscribe to my new feed and I will be able to interact with you wonderful people. All content on this blog will remain as is. It has taken me sometime to build up Google Juice and I am in no mood of throwing it away.

So these are my departing words for my techie readers. I’ll see you at One .Net Way

I am sure that by now you have subscribed to One .Net Way

OfType operator can be used to return objects of a certain type. For example if we have an array of objects which contains both strings and numbers, we can use OfType operator to extract only strings or numbers. In this example I have an array of objects which is initialised like this:

object[] goop = { “string1″, 2, 5, “string2″, “string3″ };

If I want to extract just string items out of this array I can use a query like this:

var onlyStrings =
  from g in goop.OfType<string>()
  select g;

This will give me only string items from my goop array

foreach (var item in onlyStrings)
{
  Console.WriteLine(item);
}

I can modify the query to extract only integers which will look like this:

var onlyStrings =
  from g in goop.OfType<int>()
  select g;

While it is not a good practice to have an array which contains strings and integers, we could be working with some legacy code. OfType operator will come in handy in such situations.

Microsoft has released a CTP of Windows Live Tools for Visual Studio. These tools are a set of controls and add-ins created to simplify development for Windows Live platform using Visual Studio. At present there are six controls bundled with this CTP release.

1. Map Control
2. Contacts Control
3. IDLoginStatus Control
4. IDLoginView Control
5. MessengerChat Control
6. SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer control

This CTP will work with Visual Studio 2008. You can download it here.

This is according to Google who have reported that they have successfully crawled one trillion web pages. Google started crawling web in 1998 and since then both Google and Web have grown exponentially. Here are numbers according to Google:

1998 Google Starts crawling. There are 26 million unique pages

2000 Google crawls One billion pages

2008 One trillion mark is hit

Of course authenticity of these one trillion pages being unique is questionable and Google makes it more clear in this post.

I take this opportunity to thank Sir Tim Berners-Lee for inventing World Wide Web and changing the way humans communicate.

Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Initiatives are taking shape. I expect a big bang launch somewhere around PDC 2008. Earlier I blogged about the whiff I got about Microsoft’s offering for developers in the cloud by looking at the list of PDC 2008 sessions. Today I will look at what it takes to get started with Microsoft Online Services.

At present you can access Microsoft Online Services beta by using your Live ID. The home page for MOS (Microsoft Online Services) says that there are three services available:

1. Microsoft Exchange Online
2. Microsoft Office SharePoint Online
3. Microsoft Office Live Meeting

Clicking on the registration link takes you to Microsoft Online Customer Portal where you can user your Live ID to sign in for a trial. The customer portal is a place where you can track your subscriptions to different services offered by Microsoft Online Services or sign up for trials and most likely sign up for new services.

After signing in you are presented with a wizard where you are asked for some personal information like name, address, phone number etc. The second screen collects your company information. The third screen is just a confirmation screen.

Now you are signed in and you are taken to your portal which looks like this

This is where you can view/modify your subscriptions and trials. You will notice a link at bottom left which says "Buy Now". Clicking this does not do anything because there isn’t anything to buy at present. Remember the service is still in beta.

Signing up for trials is straight forward. Just click on the Try Now button and you are taken to a screen where you can enter a promotional code if you have one and a domain name. Microsoft creates a web address based on the domain name you enter here. At present you can enter any domain name you like. But the service is not provisioned  until there are some verification checks done. Microsoft will send an email confirming the status of trial.

Note that I have entered a bogus domain name for my company. I wonder what my confirmation mail will say. This is what my Manage Subscription page shows. You can see that my service status is In Queue.

These services are currently only available in US. I used a fake US address just to look at the portal screen. I assume that my trial application will be rejected. But that’s cool. The service is still in beta and I was just testing it.

I think that overall design and workflow of the signup process is simple and intuitive. There are minor quirks which I am sure will be taken care of in coming days. I am looking forward to these services being available in Australia. I am quite keen on hosted SharePoint and how we will get around the evils of Active Directory.

As a developer I spend a lot of time with cool Firefox add-ons like Web Developer and Firebug. Today I found another great add-on which lets you create mock screens. It is called Pencil brought to you by The Pencil Project. Like all other add-ons it is freely available. Once you have installed it you are ready to go. Currently it comes with some common Window XP like widgets which are most commonly used in mock screens.

Mock screens produced by Pencil can be exported to png format. Quality of mocks produced is also superior than some other programs I have worked with. This is a great little tool for developers.

While browsing Amazon today I found that MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-502): Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 Windows® Presentation Foundation has been released. This could be the much needed resource for those pursuing WPF certification. I wish such a book was available when I wrote my exam. I have not read this study guide so I cannot really comment on it. If you have read it or are reading it then feel free to leave a comment.

Is Twitter good or bad? I don’t know. I have heard different sides. Just to clarify, I have not gone out and Googled or <cough>Live searched<cough><cough> for hours researching Twitter pros and cons. I have gathered these opinions mainly from the blogs I regularly read. Here are two examples:

1. Twitter: A waste of time
2. Twitter: is NOT a waste of time

My own personal opinion is that Twitter is ummm just alright. I mean I’m not a huge fan and neither am I a big critic of Twitter.

Update: The video link I was displaying in this post is no longer available at YouTube. Thus I have removed the link. 

P.S. Are you following me on Twitter?

While working with SharePoint VPC Image I got an error when I imported an Excel file for a custom list. The error says

"This workbook has lost its VBA project, ActiveX controls and any other programmability-related features."

The reason this error occurs is because VBA is not installed. To fix this go to Add/Remove programs and click change for Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007. Office setup dialog will popup. Click on Add or Remove Features radio button and expand Office Shared Features and make Visual Basic for Applications to Run from My Computer. This should fix the problem.

Technorati Tags: SharePoint

Microsoft has realease a bunch of important updates for SharePoint. These updates are highly recommended by SharePoint team. Of course they should be installed into production after thorough testing on non-production environments.

You can find more details here.