The dot before the Net : MS News

Wanna learn .Net? Enroll today in the .Net University

Sanket Bakshi — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 06:09:11 GMT

Yes, its there now. Learning .Net just as a curriculum. The .Net Univerisity provides online courses, labs to try some hands on & presentations.

Feel free to download and study at your own pace. Or you can even become a student by enrolling for trainings. Each lecture is 75 mins and each lab is 30 mins. So it is quite possible to complete all the courses in a day. For course not very in-depth content, but gives a real good overview of the .Net 3.0 technology stack -

- Windows Presentation Foundation

- Windows Communication Foundation

- Windows Workflow

- Windows CardSpace

The content is of course available online, but you can also schedule an instructor based training and become an University aluminus!

Enjoy it on the campus now!

XBox 360 to be launched in India in Sept 06

Sanket Bakshi — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 21:30:24 GMT

For all you gaming freaks, Microsoft has announced that the XBOX 360 will be available in India from 23rd of Setp 06.

Cant wait to lay my hands on one :)

Enjoy.

Vista Release Candidate is done

Sanket Bakshi — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 06:39:10 GMT

The Vista Release Candidate is finally there. If you are a TechBeta or a TAP participant, you can hook on to the cool new OS. MSDN and Technet subscribers gotta wait a bit.

Keep a watch on the Vista blog here for the updates.

Wanna know more about Vista? Just hook on to - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista

Enjoy!

Microsoft to speak the language of the Ancient Sun Worshippers

Sanket Bakshi — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:32:31 GMT

In a recent update, Microsoft announced that it will have it's version of windows in the Incan language.

To give it a background, as the wikipedia puts it -

The Incan empire was the largest empire in the Pre-Columbian America and one of the largest empires at the time of its collapse. It rose in the highlands of Peru around 1200. The official language of the empire was Quechua.

The Quechua being a very old language, some of the words need to be translated to the nearest equivalents. Like for eg. the File is called kipu (KEE-poo) which is the ancient practice of recording information in a system of knotted strings and the Internet is called Llika - which is the word for Spider Web. :)

NotforNoobs.com = Microsoft Habu

Sanket Bakshi — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 17:33:32 GMT

There was this lot of curiosity and speculations going around the notfornoobs website.

The site just gave a flash teaser where they showed Microsoft logo on some old TV box that was not even getting good transmission. Once the teaser was done, it just redirected to a page to say that they will let us know shortly what it was.

Well the curtains are raised and if you go to the website now, just after the teaser, you will reach the Microsoft Habu page.

Well, what exactly is Microsoft Habu?

As the site says it -

Microsoft has joined forces with gaming peripherals innovator Razer(TM). The result is a 2000 DPI Microsoft Habu Gaming Mouse, powered by Razor Precision (TM). The Microsoft Habu is jam-packed with technologies that will give gamers a performance edge in a comfortable shape.

And whats definitely interesting for all those gamers out there is that Habu will be available in just a couple of months - October 2006 to be precise.

So enjoy. And experience PC Gaming like never before.

Expirience the images with Photosynth!

Sanket Bakshi — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 18:08:04 GMT

Its been quite a lot of times that I've been to a certain place, really liked it and tried to photograph it or capture it as much as I can. Objective - obviously to retrieve an image that would represent its complete view whenever I think of looking at it again. Well, I am sure everybody has attempted that and needlessly to say, the efforts are too futile for generating a complete picture.

Many a times, I am on a move for a project, exploring some splendid places in different countries on my way. A lot of these times, I really want to caputre all these so that I can get back a real to life picture of my expiriences for my wife to take a look.

Well, enough of generating the curiosity. Getting to the point, I just came to know about a great new stuff from the MS labs. The PhotoSynth. These MS Labs guys are a bunch of crazy scientists and engineers who argue you to actually revamp your entire internet expirience and obviously provide you the power to do that.

The PhotoSynth takes a large collection of photographs for a particular place or objects and analyzes them for similarities. In effect, what you really get out of it is a completely re-constructed 3-Dimenstional space. So you want to see the Roman Colloseum? All of it at once? The PhotoSynth would provide you a view to walk through a Colloseum, look at it from any angles, zoom in and out to detail out some aspects of the photograph and the best of it, send over this collection to a friend so that he gets the same expirience - as if he is standing right in the Colloseum.

Isnt that fantastic? Yeah, I am really waiting to get my hands on one of these for trying it out. This is the first major technology preview from the MS Labs and I am quite a lot excited about it.

For all you guys who are interested, get on to the MS Labs blog @ http://labs.live.com/photosynth/blogs/, Or watch the videos @ http://labs.live.com/photosynth/video.html.

Unfortunately, there is a small wait until we really get to lay our hands on this. But it just builds up the excitement right?

--Sanket

MSDN Mag Subscriptions for free

Sanket Bakshi — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 02:19:00 GMT

For all those guys have a premium access to the MSDN content, here is something more to cheer up for. You can now get the MSDN Magazines subscriptions - not for a discounted rate but for FREE :). All you need to do is simply sign up for it @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions

Goto "My MSDN Subscription", click on the Subscriber Downloads and Product Keys and on the page, you will see information about the MSDN Magazinr offer for MSDN Premium Subscribers." Click and register... and lo behold! You get your free MSDN Mag.

Well, on the downside, this offer is ONLY for the guys in US. Others might probably need to wait for such offers in other countries.

--Sanket

Virtual PC goes free!

Sanket Bakshi — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 09:48:07 GMT

Since its inception, the Virtualization has definitely been a fantastic stuff for the Dev Community.
Nothing better than the fact that it allows you to separate out your environments without any extra hardware cost :).

Brilliant isn't it? I myself use quite a lot of virtual PCs for all the technologies that I work on.

So I can mess up however with my Biztalk 2006 Server and still my host OS - Win XP remains cool.

The best part thats now unveiled - MS Virtual PC is FREE

So just run to the Microsoft's virtual pc site and download your copy there.

--Sanket

Commerce Server 2007 shipped

Sanket Bakshi — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 08:30:00 GMT

The Commerce Server 2007 has shipped last week and is available.

The web site is updated and all the latest content is now available publicly.
All those interested folks can download the evaluation copy from - http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/default.mspx

--Sanket

Winfx now becomes .Net 3.0

Sanket Bakshi — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 14:06:00 GMT

The most talked about platform - the Winfx that encompassed the major breakthroughs including the Communication Foundation, Presentation Foundation and the Workflow Foundation has now been renamed to .Net 3.0.

Much unlike the Vista story, this remains a change ONLY in the name. So Winfx buddies can obviously be relaxed as it does not change the features as well as the product ship date.

Well, then why the change? Basically to answer the much asked question - "Winfx is cool, but what about .Net?". Interestingly, the CLR will be the same as that of the .Net 2.0.

The news broke out with Somasager disclosing it on his blog -
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2006/06/09/624300.aspx

--Sanket

Vista Webcasts in June 06

Sanket Bakshi — Wed, 31 May 2006 08:42:00 GMT

We have a cool webcast series coming in June 06 - “Windows Vista: Improve Your Desktop Security and Deployment Strategy”

Not only is there a great line-up of topics, there are also some incredible speakers that are presenting. You can find more information on this series on the Windows Vista landing page (http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/msdnvista.mspx).

You can find the schedule and additional information below.

And Whats more... if you attend any webcast in this series, you qualify to win a 40 gigabyte Creative Zen MP3 player (official rules).

Schedules
========

The Lifetime of a Message in Windows Communication Foundation
Justin Smith, Wintellect
6/1/2006 8:00 AM PST
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299306&Culture=en-US

Taking Advantage of TCP/IP Reliability in SOAP
William “Softwaremaker” Tay
6/6/2006 8:00 AM PST
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299329&Culture=en-US

Extending Windows Communication Foundation
Aaron Skonnard, Pluralsight
6/7/2006 8:00 AM PST
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299313&Culture=en-US

Introducing Web Services Enhancements for Microsoft .NET (WSE) 3.0
Julie Lerman, The Data Farm
6/8/2006 8:00 AM PST
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299315&Culture=en-US

What’s New for ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX) in .NET 2.0
Kirk Allen Evans, Microsoft Corporation
6/13/2006 8:00 AM PST
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299322&Culture=en-US

Dissecting Contract-First Web Services
Christian Weyer, thinktecture
6/14/2006 8:00 AM PST
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299331&Culture=en-US

Transactions in Distributed Solutions with Windows Communication Foundation
Christian Weyer, thinktecture
6/15/2006 8:00 AM PST
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299342&Culture=en-US

Building Powerful AJAX-Style Solutions with ASP.NET "Atlas" and Windows Communication Foundation
Kirk Allen Evans, Microsoft Corporation
6/20/2006 8:00 AM PST
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299344&Culture=en-US

Exposing Your Content as a Service Using Windows Communication Foundation
Clemens Vasters, Microsoft Corporation
6/21/2006 8:00 AM PST
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299346&Culture=en-US

Web Services Interoperability with Java and J2EE Using Windows Communication Foundation ("Indigo")
Kirill Gavrylyuk, Microsoft Corporation
6/22/2006 8:00 AM PST
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299348&Culture=en-US

Understanding Windows Communication Foundation Contracts
Michele Leroux Bustamante, IDesign
6/28/2006 8:00 AM PST
http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?eventID=1032299360&Culture=en-US

Commerce Server 2006 (Oops 2007) RC0 Released

Sanket Bakshi — Mon, 29 May 2006 20:38:00 GMT

The Commerce Server 2007 RC 0 has released last week. The product has been enhanced a lot from its predecessor - 2002.

Yeah, I can see those raised eyebrows. Well the original name of the product has been changed from 2006 to 2007 not because it is going to be delayed. The product is definitely on track for the June RTM release. But Microsoft starts with its 2007 fiscal year when the product is out, hence the change in name.

The CS 2007 sports a lot of enhancements. The code is completely based in the de-facto .net 2.0. It now has some better integration with BizTalk 2006 with its set of adapters for the Orders, Catalog, Inventory & Profiles. Its integration with BTS also helps easily connect to LOB apps or trading partners.

Its packed with loads of other features apart from this.
You can check it out for yourself. Download an evaluation at -

http://www.microsoft.com/commerceserver/evaluation/2006/beta.mspx

--Sanket Bakshi

Biztalk 2000 Mainstream support ending in July 06

Sanket Bakshi — Tue, 09 May 2006 20:53:00 GMT

The mainstream support for BizTalk 2000 is scheduled to end in July this year –

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=1442

BizTalk 2006 is already out with its RCs. With it all new super cool features, definitely makes the best bet to upgrade !

Biztalk 2006 eLearning Courses are out

Sanket Bakshi — Tue, 09 May 2006 20:49:00 GMT

Microsoft has released its eLearning courses for Biztalk 2006 Developers and IT Professionals.

From the face of it, looks cool for somebody who is starting with Biztalk!

For Developers:

https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerDetail.aspx?offerPriceId=78008

For IT Pros:

https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerDetail.aspx?offerPriceId=77178

Enjoy !