5th Anniversary of the .Net Forum Sri Lanka

I know I’m late on the below post and the one to come next. But it’s better to be late than never.

24th July 2009 was a remarkable day for the Sri Lankan .net forum community. It was the fifth anniversary of the .Net forum. It started with a nice “a look back” video from Wellington. First session on “What’s new in Visual Studio 2010” was carried by Joy. “What’s new in .Net Framework 4.0”, the second session was conducted by me. Third session “MVC” was hosted by Fikri.

It was nice to see the auditorium on 3rd floor was filled with the members of the forum. This wasn’t an end of a journey but another promising step towards a long way ahead and a look back of the successful journey we have come.

Thanks Wela for the beautiful pic.

SharePoint Workspace 2010

I wanted to start a blog series about the next version of SharePoint, SharePoint 2010. But with the superb new features of this awesome product, I was quite lost where to start from. So I thought of starting with the new features and the major changes.

SharePoint Workspace 2010

SharePoint Workspace 2010 is the offline, desktop client for SharePoint enabling people to collaborate and contribute to SharePoint sites even with they're not connected. Actually it’s the next version of Microsoft Groove.
As Microsoft claims, Groove to SharePoint is like Outlook to Exchange. So basically it’s an offline client. Users will be able to work offline with the SharePoint contents and when online SharePoint Workspace will reflect any changes made within the client immediately in the SharePoint site. If SharePoint Workspace detects the user is offline and thus disconnected from the SharePoint site, it will cache any changes and automatically synchronize the changes once the user is online and can connect to the SharePoint site again. Even though it’s the next version of Groove, it’s not the same product with a new name.

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]

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.

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.

Silverlight 3 on 10th July

Another cool product from Microsoft I like to work is Silverlight. Microsoft is planning to launch Silverlight 3 and its Expression Studio 3 designer tools on 10th July 2009.


Silverlight 3 introduces more than 50 new features, including 3D support, GPU acceleration, H.264 video support and out-of-the-browser capabilities to Silverlight. The out-of-browser support will enable developers to build applications that work like Adobe's AIR plugin. Dramatic video performance and quality improvements are also expected.

Bing a potential Google Killer

I’ve seen few Google killers recently. Among them are live, cuil, wolframalpha [though they say it’s not]. Microsoft Bing seems to be the next Google killer actually a potential Google killer (still I didn’t get a chance to check it out). Microsoft position itself as “decision engine”. Users can easily filter the results with simple clicks. Microsoft decided to “kill” Live Search and start a new brand: Bing.

“I bing the web” sounds cuil [cool] than “I live the web” :D
Check out the full video demo here.

Source: winandmac