Girish Raja's Dynamic(s) Thoughts : Microsoft

Action Packed Business Applications Coming to US

girishr — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 04:06:35 GMT

In a series of world-wide events called Business Action World Tour, we’re showcasing how Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) can build serious line of business applications without a lot of effort. To add to that, if you could create a rich & compelling UI (with WPF & Silverlight), make it familiar to your users (with Office system), and give a choice of on-site or cloud deployment to the customer (with Azure Services), wouldn’t that be a wonderful opportunity for more business.

If you think so, all you need to do is spend half a day at one of our free “discover” events. The next upcoming one in the US is on May 4th at Chicago and we have another one coming up in Silicon Valley on May 6th.

For more information about the event and links to register, check out John O'Donnell blog article below.

http://blogs.msdn.com/jodonnell/archive/2009/04/01/discover-a-new-way-to-build-line-of-business-applications-at-chicago-may-4th-and-mountain-view-ca-may-6th.aspx

Regsvr32.exe PDC2008

girishr — Fri, 30 May 2008 04:47:25 GMT

No, you can’t do it from command line. You have to use the GUI available at http://www.microsoftpdc.com/ to register for PDC 2008. I know, we’re working on it!

To be or not to be

If you’re sort of the developer looking out of for the next gen. stuff and an early adopter of technologies, PDC is the right place to be. On the other hand, if you’d prefer technologies that have only been released and out in the market, maybe TechEd is right place for you. FYI, there is a TechEd happening next week, so watch out for lots of pure refined content.

$2195 USD, yeah right

Undoubtedly many will feel that it is slightly higher. But consider this, Microsoft is not making even a single cent of profit out of this. In fact, we’re losing some which is compensated by the event sponsors. I’m volunteering for one of the event activities for PDC and I’m told that my budget is near to $0. It takes a lot to run a conference for 4 days and host around 8,000 geeks. So $2195 (includes $200 early bird discount) should be totally worth it. If you’re an early adopter anyways, why wait and pay an extra 200 bucks.

Personally, if I were to attend only one conference a year (or couple of years!), that would undoubtedly be PDC. Being a developer wouldn’t you want to goto the coolest conference and jell with all the other geeks!

What can one expect

Lots of good things around the Cloud. Many new “stuff” will be there. Of course, CRM will definitely be there. So I hope to see you there.

BTW, many bloggers have posted the “Brain in a can” picture for PDC. I kind of find that disturbing. Do you?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,PDC

Sarcasm

girishr — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:58:57 GMT

I love Onenote and evangelize it’s use equally as I evangelize CRM.

This sarcasm from Office Offline blog by David Salaguinto is the best blog humor I’ve seen in a while.

His blog is one of the reasons why I don’t effectively use my time at work :)

BTW, shouldn’t he call it Office Dead (Live) instead of Office Offline. Hey, I’m just following the rules of our marketing here.

WWT- It is all in the UX

girishr — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:48:32 GMT

One of the great things about working at Microsoft is that you get to meet and talk to some of the greatest minds in the world.

Soon after I blogged about WWT, Microsoft Research showcased it's work to all employees at an event called Techfest. Techfest is all the next and future generation stuff from Microsoft under one roof and is an amazing event.

One of my favorite moment at Techfest was at the booth for WWT. Curtis Wong, the leader of WWT project was manning the booth himself. I stood right next to him and he walked me through the product like I'm his most important customer. To add to it, they gave me a preview of the application soon afterwards.

Even though I don't know anything about astronomy, the start and the galaxies, it was still a very interesting application. More than anything else, the User eXperience (UX) of the application amazes me. Since it is not a public beta yet, I'll refrain from posting any screenshots. But I can't wait to for astronomers and professionals to post tours and let me learn a lot more about Astronomy and realize how insignificant I am in the world beyond ourselves!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Astronomy,Technology

It is about realizing dreams - World Wide Telescope

girishr — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:43:42 GMT

Like everyone else, I'm always amazed at the wide open sky ever since I was a little kid. Growing up in India, where sky is clear on almost every day, it was my favorite past time to gaze at the open sky and try to find neat little patterns of stars. Well, today that I live in the Seattle area, it could only be a dream. For those who don't know about Seattle, see Jim Glass's post on Seattle's weather to get a taste of life in this area and what I terribly miss out.

Well getting to the point, watching the video of the World Wide Telescope, I felt like a little kid all over again. It is truly a magic carpet to travel through the Universe and I can't wait to check it out.

Though people point to several other projects that are similar such as the Celestia, KStars or even Google Sky, the World Wide Telescope seems to be something that has grabbed everyone's attention and the clarity and usability of it seems to definitely win over others.

Oh BTW, WWT was the reason behind me looking into Google Sky and as I was playing with it, I discovered something really funny. I marked a few places in Chennai that I visited during my India trip last month within the Earth view. I then switched to the Sky view and saw this!

I am sure these places aren't separated by several light years or have several stars in between them!

Technorati Tags: Microsoft,Technology,Astronomy