Win 8

Had the opportunity to try out Windows 8 Release preview along with the Mobile development process. I like the initial look and feel and the ease with which Metro style apps can be built using Visual Studio Release preview 2012..Will be posting screenshots of the development soon..

Comparison between Appcelerator and PhoneGap

Was trying to look at different platforms for Code once target multiple scenarios in the mobile space.
Here's an in depth look at Appcelerator and PhoneGap if you are interested: http://savagelook.com/blog/portfolio/a-deeper-look-at-appcelerator-and-phonegap
And here's more detail about how they differ programmatically:
http://savagelook.com/blog/portfolio/phonegap-is-web-based-appcelerator-is-pure-javascript

Microsoft Gallery

Microsoft's gallery for CMS, Blogs, Forums, Galleries and other tools have some interesting additions since the last time i visited them. They can be found at :
http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/categories.aspx?category=Wiki&sorting=mostpopular

Some nice plug ins I saw were :

• Incentive - Social collaboration for your company
• Composite C1 - MVC CMS
• nService - Help desk and support Software

Best Practices for MOSS

http://spg.codeplex.com/

SharePoint Online Virtual Lab

Found some interesting virtual lab for SharePoint Online at
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/hh699847

Microsoft's Big Data strategy

While trying to understand what Microsoft's strategy for Big Data was, stumbled upon the following link
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsofts-hadoop-roadmap-reveals-new-big-data-deliverables/12037

Microsoft has already released the Hadoop version of its Azure release. Need to check on its integration with Hadoop tools like Sqoop and Flume.

New role...different work...same chaos

Have moved into a different group within the same company..New interesting work and getting hands into a lot of Strategic/ partnership initiatives but the chaos remains...A different perspective..
Will be blogging more about offerings creations in enterprises and what the learned have to say about making a company "customer-centric" while keeping an eye on recent trends..More to follow..

New yr...new beginnings

Coming out fresh from some outings and rejuvenating experiences, starting the new yr on a high...
Working with some colleagues to identify business opportunities and trying to identify technology trends.Should post soon on what I find...

Happy New Year

As the new yr comes to a close, wishing everyone a very happy and healthy New Year!!
Have fun..

Technology Trends in 2011/ 2012

Technology trends for 2011 were :

http://www.deloitte.com/us/2011techtrends

http://www.ctoedge.com/content/top-10-emerging-technology-trends-2011?slide=1

What we found in the market, following were the items that took precedence over others:

1. Unified communications
2. Mobile Applications
3. HTML5
4. Analytics
5. Social Media

Interestingly, while most theoretical folks talked about cloud, not many companies wanted to proceed with practical applications. Lot of discussions happened about the current state and future of Cloud and Azure in particular but not much materialized.

Technology Trends for 2012 are:

1. Social business
2. Tablets as personal computers
3. Dynamic ERP

Yr drawing to a close

As yet another yr draws to a close, time to ponder things that went right, things that did not go as planned...What could have been done better and what needs more thoughts..In the next 10 odd days would like to create lists that outline, at least from a technology standpoint, items / trends that were anticipated in the beginning of the yr and were given / not given their dues as well as outline similar steps for the new yr..

Lets see how fruitful this discussion goes...

Social media and Enterprise Social business

I have been following up on the nature, size and the business involved in the Social enterprise business and found some interesting facts...
First off is Forrester’s new estimate of the size of the social business industry, which they’ve put at $6.4 billion by 2016, an order of magnitude larger than the (by comparison) paltry $600 million it was just last year. Although the size of the entire worldwide investment in social business has recently been estimated to be as high at $100 billion, Forrester is specifically tracking the investment in the enabling software itself. This includes enterprise social networks, social collaboration suites, and other social business solutions, and not the entire project investment that organizations make as they roll out social software. This does not seem to be a either lowering or raising of previous projections, such as their 2008 forecast that the industry would be $4.6 billion in size by 2013. For a useful cross check, we can see that ABI Research’s new figures, which were released today, has lower figures yet shows a very similar 57% yearly growth (compared to Forrester 60%.)..
Looks like time to start looking more closely at some of the enterprise platforms that promote this...

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..