BYOD

As the usage of mobile devices becomes more and more prevalent...companies are facing an unprecendented challenge to manage employee personal devices from a security and privacy standpoint...On one hand, there are the obvious benefits of increased employee productivity due to his device choice as well as reduced costs due to not having to buy these devices, there is the risk of corporate data sensitivity as well as application governance to cover these...Interesting times..

ASP.NET MVC 4 Ideas

Since I heard about the advent of ASP.NET MVC 4..started reading a little bit about it..Initial thoughts are around runtime libraries (MS assemblies) as well as  JavaScript libraries are available as NuGet packages..Greater mobility support is another added feature..
In the latest BUILD conference, MS discussed a little about it...

Anna - IAC

With the whole country waking up against Corruption - for the Lok Pal bill..it became necessary to blog about it..While there are a lot of debates about its authenticity and whether it is going to sustain the whole nation is clear about one thing, corruption leave India!!
Long live Anna!

VLDB

Currently working on a project for very large data processing with these kind of scenarios bringing its own challenges. Performance, Data freshness, spool sizes and data volume storage options are some unique issues and fun working on it.

Memory Mapped file

While investigating a quick and efficient way to store data locally on the machine in cache, was reading about Memory Mapped file. Another interesting article on this concept is at:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/salvapatuel/archive/2009/06/08/working-with-memory-mapped-files-in-net-4.aspx

Some emerging areas being tracked

1.       ASP.NET MVC 3 + HTML5

2.       RIA (Silverlight 5.0/WPF/ HTML5) 

3.       SharePoint 360

a.       Composites

b.      Insights

c.       Content

d.      Sites

e.      Communities

f.        Search

4.       MS BI 

5.       MS SOA 

6.       BizTalk Server 2010 / WCF 4.0 

7.       Dynamics (On-Premise or Cloud) 

8.       ASP.NET MVC Portal(Orchard CMS) 

9.       Azure 

10.   MS Lync Services 

11.   MS commerce Server 2011

Latest trends of 2011

In a recent post, I read about the 5 latest trends in the technology world. Some of interest to us..
1. Cloud computing
2. Smart Apps
3. Analytics
4. Social apps

Germany and Sweden

Work has taken me to Germany and Sweden for some project work discussions.
This is a very nice project to help the customer with their CRM needs. Both these countries are unique in their own ways..More on my experiences in later blogs..

Kids vacations

With the advent of summer several things to enjoy - kid's vacations, the mangoes, the IPL matches and lots more..Ofcourse training and other office activities are goin on in full swing as well..Hope to see some new members added to the team in the coming weeks..

Task Parallel Library

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd460717.aspx

Silverlight and PRISM 4.0

While researching about ways to improve RIA experiences for large dataset applications, read through the architecture for PRISM 4.0.
http://www.evansvillednug.com/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=iPJAbrewBBc%3D&tabid=76&mid=399

The stocktrader application seems to be a nice sample app for demo. This is next generation SCSF ..

New Year with a gush...

First of all wishing everybody a very Happy and a prosperous New Year ahead.
Some thoughts/ideas about what areas should we be focussing on ..are doing rounds..
Planning for the activities of the new year and targets to achieve in the quarter have become priority.
Will write in detail once something concrete.

Back from Goa

As a part of our annual outings had gone to Goa and my native place near the coastal city of Karwar...Truly God's own country I would say...Refreshing air, rejuvenating environment and loads of simplicity...You end up thinking ..whether how we(urban) people end up with all these complications in front of the simple life people lead in villages..Fully Geo friendly and optimized for the basic needs of man, resources are used only to the extent absolutely needed and rest of the nature thrives ..
Now back to the city and the madness around Mumbai..Start work soon..

Telerik RADTabStrip's weird behavior

Recently I have come across a very strange behavior in the Telerik RADTabStrip. A perfectly fine working code base suddenly started having a "Freeze" behavior in 2 out of the 4 environments we have. What I mean is, the TabStrip just locks up on the first load. Once there is a postback on the page, it starts working perfectly fine as if nothing had happened.
We tried resorting to all the typical tricks that Telerik has recommended and some of the settings that the Forum visitors asked us to use but to no avail. Some ideas were around validation, others around naming the user control and some around checking the JS/CSS issues...NOTHING! as yet..
Wonder if anyone can help me..

Meanwhile India whitewashed the NZ series and now head to SA. Lets see what kinda duel we have in store there...Hmmm!

Latest Status on Oslo...Oslo, Quadrant and the Repository is dead, long live “M”?

In October 2007, Microsoft introduced “Oslo” as the codename for a set of technical investments to apply model-driven principles to building applications and services. Since that announcement, many of those investments have shipped in products such as the .NET Framework, Windows Server AppFabric and Windows Azure AppFabric. This note is an update on the three “Oslo” investments that have yet to ship: the “Oslo” repository, “Quadrant”, and “M.”


Microsoft created the “Oslo” repository to make the model of a system or application easily accessible without relying on application-specific machinery to consume or query those models. The “Oslo” repository achieved this by storing the models for applications and systems in a shared SQL Server relational database.
Over the past year, customer feedback prefering a more loosely-coupled approach; specifically, an approach based on a common protocol and data model  rather than a common store has forced MSFT to shut down Quadrant and the Repository.  The momentum behind the Open Data Protocol (OData) and its underlying data model, Entity Data Model (EDM), shows that customers are acting on this preference.

With OData, Microsoft has enabled access to information across a growing number of technologies, data sources, and tools, including .NET Framework, Visual Studio, Microsoft Excel Power Pivot, SQL Server Reporting Services, SharePoint 2010, Windows Azure storage, and Codename “Dallas.”
With EDM, they have created a common abstract model for data that can be represented in multiple forms (XML-based EDMX/CSDL, C# or Visual Basic classes, visual designers, OData metadata) to simplify the creation and sharing of models.

Microsoft created a language codenamed “M” for defining schema, constraints, queries, and transformations. While they used “M” to build the “Oslo” repository and “Quadrant,” there has been significant interest both inside and outside of Microsoft in using “M” for other applications. Microsoft is continuing their investment in this technology and will share our plans for productization once they are concrete.

MS Tech breakup

As I continue to look into areas that will be growth islands in the MS domain, following topic come to mind:

• MS Cloud services (Azure)
• MS Web Platform
• MS SOA based technologies
• SQL BI

Wondering if there are any other ones at a high level..

WCF 4.0

As we encounter more and more weird issues in WCF, plan to get into what .NET 4.0 offers in this space to check if some of those features can be addressed to resolve the problems we are getting..

Happy Diwali

Wishing everybody a very Happy and Prosperous Diwali..May the festival of lights bring cheer in everyone's life and destroy all bad things..

Out with kids

While most of my posts have been about work, technology and experiences took a break today to report an evening with the kids on the beach. T'was a lot of fun..

VS 2010 and .NET 4.0

While looking for new features in VS 2010 and .NET 4.0, we came across the following set that helps us  in Project execution:
Managed Extensibility Framework
The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a new library in the .NET Framework 4 that helps you build extensible and composable applications. MEF enables you to specify points where an application can be extended, to expose services to offer to other extensible applications and to create parts for consumption by extensible applications. It also enables easy discoverability of available parts based on metadata, without the need to load the assemblies for the parts. Check Managed Extensibility Framework Overview and Managed Extensibility Framework. For a list of the MEF types, see the System.ComponentModel.Composition namespace.
Parallel Computing

The .NET Framework 4 introduces a new programming model for writing multithreaded and asynchronous code that greatly simplifies the work of application and library developers. The new model enables developers to write efficient, fine-grained, and scalable parallel code in a natural idiom without having to work directly with threads or the thread pool. The new System.Threading.Tasks namespace and other related types support this new model. Parallel LINQ (PLINQ), which is a parallel implementation of LINQ to Objects, enables similar functionality through declarative syntax. See Parallel Programming in the .NET Framework.

ASP.NET

• Core services, including a new API that lets you extend caching, support for compression for session-state data, and a new application preload manager (autostart feature).
• Web Forms, including more integrated support for ASP.NET routing, enhanced support for Web standards, updated browser support, new features for data controls, and new features for view state management.
• Web Forms controls, including a new Chart control.
• MVC, including new helper methods for views, support for partitioned MVC applications, and asynchronous controllers.
• Dynamic Data, including support for existing Web applications, support for many-to-many relationships and inheritance, new field templates and attributes, and enhanced data filtering.
• Microsoft Ajax, including additional support for client-based Ajax applications in the Microsoft Ajax Library.
• Visual Web Developer, including improved IntelliSense for JScript, new auto-complete snippets for HTML and ASP.NET markup, and enhanced CSS compatibility.
• Deployment, including new tools for automating typical deployment tasks.
• Multi-targeting, including better filtering for features that are not available in the target version of the .NET Framework.