MCTS - .NET Framework 2.0 : Windows Applications

Well, finally I got my new set of certifications done. 070-536, 070-526 and 070-528 which lead me to acheive MCTS - .NET Framework 2.0 : Windows Applications and Web Applications.

Honestly I found only the 070-536 (Core .NET 2.0) exam worth the efforts. Windows and web specific exams were simply boring!!!

Tinkering with Vista - Part 1

I fondly recall those good old days of the early 90's when I used to be a teenage geek! That was much before the age of CD/DVD or internet. I used to walk around with a 350 mb hard disk in my pocket exchanging games and applications. It was my luck that I got to work with almost all Intel processors right from 8088, 286, 386, 486DX2 / DX4, Pentium, Pentium III, P4, Celeron and now a C2D.
During those old days it was our job (SNAP Group) to install each and every OS / tools / apps / games that were available to us and tinker with it. I still remember the time when we installed OS/2 Warp 3.0 on a 486 PC with just 4 mb ram and be able to multi task so smoothly - running a full 3D chess game, connecting to BBS and copying a bunch of files off a hard disk! Back then, Windows was still in v3.1 and was so crappy.

World has changed since then and I am no exception - put on loads of weight, few grey hairs, life has become a "rat race". Ahem, let's not get in to it. The point now is that Vista RTM has been released and here I am, busy raising up a kid, taking care of my family and working as a corporate slave, still trying to keep the Geek in me alive...

Hmm, Windows Vista - finally Microsoft has released the much awaited new OS from it's stable. Much has been said about it, some hate it and some swear by it. No matter which side you are, you just can't ignore it.

11/11/2006
I assembled a new Intel Core 2 Duo e6600 based system and decided it's time to check Vista on this rig. So here I am bloggin on IE7 running on Vista RC 2 build 5800!

Installation
Took about 25 minutes vs the XP that takes 7 flat minutes on my system. However, unlike XP installation is smooth and hardly requires any inputs from the user. All the hardware was detected without any issues.

Casual Activities
Very smooth!!! Vista takes about 500 mb but on a dual core PC with 1 Gig RAM it's smooth as butter with all "eye candy" features turned on!!!
Here is a screen shot...
















Performance Index

4.4 Score!!!














Don't know what this is all about, but a score of 4.4 on my brand new funky Core 2 Duo? What the heck? Come on Microsoft, I have world's 4th best desktop processor, innit?

More to follow...

Delphi Picnic

There will be a Delpi picnic held at Ramanashree California resort on Yelahanka road. This event is initated by Venkatesh VT, an independent software consultant and Delphi fanatic. Deepak Shenoy, co-founder of INDUG would be sponsoring the event partly. I look forward to attend it on 16th of September 2006. Will post photos and events details in a later blog.

Microsoft Tech Ed 2006, Bangalore

I was there at Microsoft Tech Ed 2006 along with few colleagues from FLOvate. Thanks to Deepak Shenoy for taking us down to the event.

Microsoft Evangelists showcasing the latest Microsoft's upcoming technology's. WinFX which is now called as .NET 3.0 so that people don't wonder what happened to the MS .NET indivisible basically comprises of different frameworks which are

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) - powerful unified framework for building great user experience
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) - a single unified approach to communicating Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) - a workflow framework
Windows File System (WinFS) - A new relational file system that will be part of Windows Vista

All in all a good show overall, however there was no free T-Shirts / bags which usually is given at Borland Seminars :)

Well, folks, today I am bit free from the regular bug fixing work that we do at FLOvate. I needed to do some thing creative work, so started to explore VS 2005 features.

Getting Started

Class Diagrams is a new feature in VS 2005. It seem to be very intuitive to use at the first glance. I started off by creating an interface called IDog, which had few methods declared such as - Feed, Unleash, Walk etc. that need to be implemented in the class which derives from this interface. You can see my effort in the above picture.

Goal of the class diagram is to enable developers to easily document the design of the application and keep it in sync with the code. And it succeeds by using features like refactoring.

I can see that chaps and chappesses from Microsoft VS 2005 team have been successful at covering all features that is generally needed to create such class diagrams by developers.

In case you’re documenting a general-purpose API that is meant for external users, you can filter out the members visible on the diagram to those of public and protected visibility and hide all private/internal details of implementation!

Finally, you can make great use of comment shapes to annotate your diagram to explain design decisions and to clarify the purpose of different elements.

Exporting Diagram as Images

When the diagram(s) are ready for export, just right-click empty design surface area of the diagram and choose menu item “Export Diagram as Image…”. You can export the image to some of the most common image types like png, bmp, gif, jpg, tif etc.

A very nice feature that I will be using in all my future pet projects while coding in VS 2005.

MCP

Got Certified in MS exam 70-316