Have you wished that you wanted to know what (Azure) cloud computing is all about but can’t find the information in simple layman’s language.

Look here for this article that explain in a clear precise way.

Do you love the 5GB (soon to be 25GB) of free online storage provided by SkyDrive, but wish you could access it browser-free? That’s the promise of a new application called Gladinet, a desktop software program that delivers web applications and online files to your desktop. With Gladinet installed, online storage sites like SkyDrive and others become available through Windows Explorer, where they exist as a virtual drive.

Gladinet provides an application on your desktop that enables you to map SkyDrive to your list of networked drives.

Well the silence for the past 1 week was due to the floods in Tamil Nadu. A cyclone brought its due of rains and filled up the reservoirs in the state but left a trail of destructions and havoc.

And worse to add to all this misery was the power shut down in the entire state to prevent electrocution. Low voltage coupled with high voltage was enough to destroy some of the electrical appliances in most of the houses.

Flooding of the roads and streets in the ground floor as well as water entering the houses made up the complete story and showed the inefficiency of the Corporation and Metro water.

Now that the rains have stopped completely but the wounds inflicted on the common man hasn’t gone away and the news papers are all carrying out news showing the ire of the common man against the government.

It was a great time to host the Community Tech Days 2008 on Saturday 22nd November. We had the event in 2 places on the same day (one for developers and another for IT pros). I managed the IT pro session in Anna university and we had some cool sessions.

In spite of raining on that day, the event had a good reasonable turn over. The sessions also had something new in store for the audience.

At the end of the day, we had a quiz contest and some of the attendees walked away with cool prizes. Also since I had to host the IT Pro event, I missed out being at the developer’s event.

Have you wished that you knew something about the internals of Silverlight but didn’t know where to look and what is good to know about.

Now there is a blog that is written exclusively for tips in Silverlight. Good one and I encourage you to read it. It even has a list of blogs to refer to in the Silverlight community.

Dear Friends,

The Community Tech Days 2008 has been updated as follows. Both events (IT Pro and Developers) will happen on a single day (22nd November 2008). All IT Pros are requested to note this and attend on Saturday 22nd November 2008.

Harish Ranganathan has compiled a list of all the informative blogs which are pretty active, precise and more importantly straight from the people of the ASP.NET Team in Microsoft.

You can get the list here and then subscribe to the blogs that are of interest to you.

Now the developer and technical evangelists from Microsoft India are blogging exclusively for you.

Here are the links for the 2 categories.

Tech Net (IT Pro)

MSDN (Developer)

The latest articles include all your questions asked in Virtual Tech Days 2008. If you had asked any questions there you can find the answers in these blogs.

Now that PDC 2008 is over and many are talking about a lot of new things coming up. For those of you who would like to learn or go through, can now visit the site www.microsoftpdc.com and view the sessions.

And don’t forget to sign up for Azure service and explore the new features here.

The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle. It adds new functionality quickly for designers and developers, and provides the community an efficient way to help shape product development by contributing ideas and bug reports. This first release includes full source code, unit tests, samples and documentation for 12 new controls covering charting, styling, layout, and user input.

For those of you who are looking for new readymade controls to work with, this is the one. Get it from http://www.codeplex.com/silverlight/

Today you can get your free copy of CodeRush Xpress for Visual Studio 2008. This tool has a good number of features which will help you to simplify and shape complex code.

Supported Features

CodeRush Xpress includes the following features.

• Duplicate Line
• Highlight All References
• Increase or Reduce Selection
• Smart Clipboard Operations
• Generate from Using (TDD)
• Quick Navigation Window
• Quick File Navigation

In addition, you receive the following refactorings.

Included Refactorings

Add Block Delimiters

Combine Conditionals

Compress to Lambda Expression

Compress to Ternary Expression

Convert to Auto-implemented Property

Convert to Initializer

Create Backing Store

Decompose Initializer

Decompose Parameter

Expand Lambda Expression

Expand Ternary Expression

Extract Method

Flatten Conditional

Inline Delegate

Inline Temp

Introduce Local

Make Explicit

Make Implicit

Move Type to File

Name Anonymous Method

Name Anonymous Type

Reverse Conditional

Split Conditional

Use String.Format

Use StringBuilder

Now that Microsoft PDC is in progress, we can expect a lot of new things to be unveiled over the next 4 days.

Today’s news is about Cloud Computing and the name of this is Azure (meaning clouds). Only the attendees have access to the private beta program and it opens a new wave of computing where you host your applications, database and other media on Microsoft’s web servers. You can also sign up for the services and start working with Azure.

Also a lot of things have been said about Windows 7 (the next version of Windows after Windows Vista). But let us not get too excited because all of us knows what happened to Vista after all the hype over the last few years when Vista was in development.

You can catch all the news about PDC here.

Wishing you all a very happy Diwali and prosperous New Year.

May this new year bring you all joy and may all your wishes be fulfilled and wishing you all a safe and happy Diwali.

For developers who would like to create reports for SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services but don’t have Visual Studio 2008, will be glad to know that there is now a stand alone builder available for those to create and publish reports.

Report Builder 2.0 provides an intuitive report authoring environment for business and power users. It supports the full capabilities of SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services.  Compared to Business Intelligence Development Studio 2008, Report Builder 2.0 includes a number of additional features:

• Easy to use wizards for creating table, matrix and chart data regions
• Support for directly opening and editing reports stored on the report server
• Support for using server resources such as shared data sources

Get it here.

Last week Microsoft released the final version of Silverlight version 2. There has been a lot of changes in the final version and those of you who have been developing on beta 2 all these days should download the final version.

You will have to install the Silverlight_Tools.exe and this setup is smart enough to remove the beta 2 tools as well as remains left by the beta tool. Just relax and let this tool get the work done.

You will also need to install SP1 of Expression Blend 2 if you are using Expression Blend 2 – June 2008 preview.

Instructions are available on http://www.silverlight.net/.

The Web Application Installer Beta is designed to help get you up and running with the most widely used Web Applications freely available for your Windows Server. Web AI provides support for popular ASP.Net and PHP Web applications including Graffiti, DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, OSCommerce and more. With just a few simple clicks, Web AI will check your machine for the necessary pre-requisites, download these applications from their source location in the community, walk you through basic configuration items and then install them on your computer.

For those of you who are clueless or wondering if you were doing the right way in configuring your server for hosting a website, this tool comes in handy and asks what you want to install/configure on the server. Just select the components including SQL Server Express if you want so and then leave it to the experts. The installer does all that for you.

This should be helpful for those who are not quite technical in depth to configure a web server.

Get it from here.

For those of you who are eager to know what has changed in IE 8 B2 for developers and how to make changes to your website to render properly in IE 8 B2, here is a document that explains the new features as well as the changes to be done for your code.

Download it here.

Now that the ASP.NET MVC Framework has been released here is a good article that explains the features, pros and cons of using this MVC Framework versus the regular ASP.NET Forms that we have been using since 1.0.

You can catch the article at the below mentioned link.

http://blogs.msdn.com/usisvde/archive/2008/10/06/net-3-5-sp1-best-practices-when-to-use-the-asp-net-mvc-framework.aspx

Just heard about this tool from Pandurang (when going through his slides from Virtual Tech Ed)

Similar to Reflector for .NET Applications there is a tool to dessicate the Silverlight applications. You can download this from http://silverlightspy.com/

Note that this is a Clickonce application and you will have to ensure that your computer has the minimum requisities before installing this tool.

Minimum softwares needed

Internet Explorer 6 or higher
Silverlight 2 (Beta 2 or Release Candidate 0) runtime
Windows Installer 3.1
.NET Framework 3.5 runtime

Will let you know how this measures up after testing this with few silverlight applications.

Been using IE 8 Beta 2 since the day it was announced. Here are some of my interesting points that i like about IE 8 B2.

1. Colored tabs to identify if they are from the same link. when you right click on a link on a page and it opens in a new tab then both of them will have the same color. This helps you to  identify the related pages so that you don’t close them by mistake.

2. In Private Browsing. this helps to view email and other pages that you don't want to leave cookies around. I wish that there could be a mode where you select In Private Browsing by default.

3. Web Slices. That is a cool feature where you can subscribe and then view without having to check back with the website daily.