Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Is Google really worried about Bing?

This is something I still cannot believe. I believe Microsoft is a great company which has some solid products. I know that because I work with many of those products. But will you ever believe that one of Microsoft’s recent product releases made Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page think twice. Microsoft released their new decision engine which is more than a typical search engine. Sergey Brin is concerned enough losing their market share to Bing. He has put together a team of top engineers [Yes, TOP ENGINEERS… cool…], to begin making vast improvements to the web service starting immediately. Brin is heading the team, and the project they will be working on is trying to determine how Bing's search algorithm is different from Google. Wow what will be the end result?

I know new search engines have come and gone in the past 10 years, but did Sergey or Larry ever concerned about those, I don’t think so. But Bing, Microsoft you really did something to keep Google open their eyes. That begins the competition.


Bing is powered with a 100 million budget just for advertising. Also it is said to be rare that the Google founders join on the daily operations of the company, so having one of them back leading a team there must be quite significant. The real search engine war has started!!

[Image courtesy of the NY Times]

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

VSTS 2010 First Look

I’m amazed to see the UI of the next version of Visual Studio, VSTS 2010. It looks sooo cool as it’s developed on WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). According to the Program Manager responsible for the Start Page in the Visual Studio Adrian Collier, we can create custom start pages. Below I’ve uploaded screen shots of the default start page.

WPF has been criticised for being resource-hungry, lacking some standard control elements and inadequate designer support in Visual Studio. Come on… can a newborn run? WPF celebrated its 1st Birthday sometime back. Now it can talk, laugh and walk. I guess VSTS 2010 is the first enterprise application running on WPF “tasting my own dog food”. I’m really proud of you WPF.

If interested creating your own start page, check out this URL.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Design Patterns in .NET Framework

First of all I would like to thank all who participated for Sri Lanka .NET Forum June 4th Session and to make it a success. Also my special thanks go to Wellinton and Jinath who gave me this opportunity.

Time to apologies, I’m extremely sorry for getting delayed [3 days] to upload the presentation. Presentation is uploaded here in PDF format [PDF reader required].

http://cid-ffdefd872b33a2df.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public

Please do not think twice in putting your comments about the session… all kinds of comments are welcome.