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Mozilla in their upcoming Firefox 3.1 release is introducing an experimental feature
"Geode".
Geode is about browser (and server) automatically deducing your location and provide
appropriate location based information. Though Location-aware applications are present
in Mobile Phones using Cell-Tower Triangulation or GPS, this is the first major effort
to do something similar on the PCs.
Geode provides an early implementation of the W3C
Geolocation specification and location information will be provided by one or
more user selectable service providers and methods - GPS-based, WiFi-based, manual
entry, etc. What I was curious is how they deduct location information using Wi-Fi.
It seems they use a technology from a company called SkyHook, whose hybrid positioning
system (XPS) is a software-only location solution that allows any mobile device with
Wi-Fi, GPS or a cellular radio (GSM/CDMA) to determine its position with an accuracy
of 10 to 20 meters. Click on the video below to see how it works - basically they
are building huge database of Wi-Fi access points and correlating them with Latitude/Longitude
information from other sources like GPS for each access point profiled.
All these are transparent to developers and users, for developers it is just a Javascript
call like the one shown below:
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(pos) {
alert( pos.latitude + ", " + pos.longitude );
})
Before these initiatives web applications were limited to deducing user's location
based on your IP. Technology is not standing still with IP
based deduction, earlier they were limited to US cities, now database are more
complete and are able to identify cities world over including India.
Related links: ZoneInfo
database, GeoNames
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If you have tried to do a decent chart or graph or any line drawings in HTML/CSS you
would have felt extremely frustrated, more so you want it to be cross-browser compatible.
Though SVG and VML have been around for years, the support for them is not uniform
between browsers. Recently in a newsletter from Sitepoint I came across Raphaël -
a small JavaScript library (less than 19Kb in filesize) written by Dmitry Baranovskiy
of Atlassian, that allows you to create and manipulate vector graphics in your web
pages. It's simple to use and supports Internet Explorer 6.0+, Safari 3.0+, Firefox
3.0+, and Opera 9.5+. Internally Raphaël uses VML in IE and SVG in the
other browsers.
Raphaël is published under MIT
License which basically allows you to use the code in both commercial and non-commercials
applications and even redistribute freely (as in free beer).
To do the above graph, you need to write only 30
lines of Javascript. Check it out.
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Few weeks back I was with a developer doing a code-review for one of his application.
The application was a Windows Forms Application written in C# that monitors several
running jobs and reports on any event/failure found in the log file.
Many gaps came up in the review which made me thinking (me thinking is surprising
isn't it), hence this post. The abstractions in the form of frameworks and IDEs that
are available today make programming definitely accessible but at what cost. Do they
make a formal (structured) learning of programming unnecessary?. Are today's engineers
getting away by not following any coding disciplines like the one's enforced by my
mentor(s) and teachers when I learned programming. Before I continue this rattle and
list the items let me clarify, I am not intending this post to be a comprehensive
check list - it just happens to be the issues I noticed in this particular incident.
I have grouped few of my findings in sections.
Reading a configuration file
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When reading a configuration file (like .config/xml) to load values, validate whether
the file exists. If file is not present either load default values and proceed
(or) exit gracefully. Having a simple try/catch block doesn't mean you have
handled all exceptions and you no further work
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Try not to read the entire file to memory. In .NET this will be for example using
StreamReader.ReadToEnd method. Think about what will happen if you the file has been
corrupted or wrongly replaced with a 10GB video file. You will crash the machine by
running out of memory. In typical configuration files especially for your applications
you can identify the maximum likely size which will be say few MBs. So in .NET try
to use StreamReader.ReadLine for as many lines as you will need
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Similarly don't load the entire XML into
XMLDOM (like by using XmlDocument) where it is not necessary. Instead try to use XmlReader
which is a stream based XML processor and doesn't take up memory (many times of the
full XML filesize)
UI Related items
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While designing design the work flow and the steps with the user of the application
in mind. Think about the likely steps the user will follow. Do not design with your
code flow as the steps. In this application this meant not having to select a configuration
file and global settings screen as first step in the Tab order. Instead have the first
screen after application launch as the one the user will use repeatedly
In an earlier project I gave the complete UI design specification in Visio format
to a developer that avoided all the iterations and confusions. You can read about
that in this earlier
post.
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In the last two to three quarters we are seeing a huge surge in SharePoint projects
and as a result the demand of SharePoint developers is sky rocketing. Initially we
were thinking this to be a local (India) phenomena but when I talk to many of my contacts
in the industry worldwide and check
out articles in the Internet, it turns out to be a worldwide phenomena.
Below are some random resources on SharePoint that might be useful for developers:
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I have come across Developers and System Engineers who have trouble with networking
time and again. The principle reason I have observed is a lack of thorough understanding
of the underlying TCP/IP layer. Most engineers assume that if they know what is an
IP Address, Subnet and DHCP they know networking. How wrong can they be?. This gets
more complicated with the introduction of IPv6, Security and Performance features
newly introduced in Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.
Till now the hurdle in solving this was availability of easily accessible and digestible
materials on the subject. Today thanks to one of my fellow MVPs who pointed me to
this resource from Microsoft - a free book on "TCP/IP
Fundamentals for Windows". It is available both for online
viewing and downloadable as a PDF
file. Don't let the 559 page count scare you, the book is easily readable with
some effort. I highly recommend downloading the PDF file and saving - it will be a
worthy reference.
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Last few days I had a firewall issue in my desktop that made web browsing irregular.
It was a peculiar problem, I was able to browse few sites like Google, Vishwak.COM
but not others. I had to keep running the same diagnostic commands many times to take
values to be sent to my support team. Finally I ended up writing this handy tool that
copies to clipboard diagnostic informations from IPConfig, Tracert, Ping & WebGet
commands. This information can be used for further investigation or email to support.
I also added features to FlushDNS, Renew IP & Turn Auto Tuning (Vista and Windows
Server 2008) OFF/ON.
While developing the tool over two half-a-days I learnt quite a few APIs and a bit
of C# coding. This included how to call a console command like IPCONFIG /ALL and
capture the output to a string from a C# application, get the Internet Explorer Proxy
settings, Call Network Properties applet, create an install with VS 2008 & how
to paste
a code snippet in WLW.
1:
private
string DoConsoleAndCapture(string sInput)
2: {
3:
4:
string sOutput
= "";
5: ProcessStartInfo
pi = new ProcessStartInfo("cmd.exe", "/c
" + sInput );
6: pi.WindowStyle
= ProcessWindowStyle.Minimized;
7: pi.RedirectStandardOutput
= true;
8: pi.UseShellExecute
= false;
9: Process
p = Process.Start(pi);
10: p.WaitForExit();
11:
//p.Start();
12: TextReader
t = p.StandardOutput;
13: sOutput
= t.ReadToEnd();
14: t.Close();
15: p.Close();
16:
17:
return sOutput;
18: }
The experience of using Visual Studio 2008 was interesting as it has been few years
since I coded something end to end. I wish the coding surface to become more intelligent
in terms of offering help on discovering commands and APIs that the developer is looking
for. When VB6 came a decade or so back the help feature that it had was revolutionary
and the wealth of information MSDN provided was without par in the industry. Now with
Web & Internet Search prevalent the present IDE calls for a complete rethinking
and revamp - unfortunately I don't feel the tools have come there yet. What I am talking
here is not about wizards, smart tags or even intellisense but about how the tool
helps a developer to learn/discover necessary APIs/solve the problem at hand.
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MVP Award for the year 2008 |
MVP Award for the year 2007 |
I have been a Microsoft Regional
Director (RD) from 1999 and I am happy to write here that Microsoft has renewed
me as an RD for another two years. The RD program is a honorary title conferred
to select professionals around the world who are passionate on Microsoft technologies.
Over 140 software architects, developers, trainers and other professionals are selected
by Microsoft as Regional Directors. The first thing to know is that, while we’re officially
recognized by Microsoft and often receive inside information about forthcoming technologies,
we are completely independent. We are not Microsoft employees.
Apart from being a RD, last
year (2007) I was named as a Microsoft
Most Valuable Professional (MVP) as well. I was given MVP
in the category of Visual Developer - Solutions Architect. Recently,
I was renewed as a MVP for this year as well. This entitles apart from other benefits,
membership to a very lively exclusive email alias participated by all MVPs.
You can check out my MVP
Profile here.
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Microsoft recently announced their new virtualization technology "Hyper-V" (codename
Viridian) as part of Windows Server 2008 that will replace Microsoft Virtual Server
2005. I wanted to understand the differences between the two virtualization products
and how to use Hyper-V. In my search, I came up with the following list of references
and understandings.
Rough Technology differences between Hyper-V and earlier products:
One way to think about these new chip technologies is that they introduce
a “-1” ring essentially to the usual four rings in the x86 CPU architecture. With
the VPC and Virtual Server offerings, they use a trick called ring compression where
the kernel of the VM is placed into Ring 1, instead of the expected Ring 0. This is
so that the host can absolutely ensure that VMs are running in their own sandbox and
can’t gain access to any resources of the host or other VMs. There is something like
14-17 CPU instructions in the x86 instruction set that can’t be executed directly
because of sandbox violation. Hence, the need to place the child VM’s kernel into
Ring 1 so that the host can place itself in Ring 0 to intercept those calls to protect
them directly or to emulate them. By introducing a “-1” ring, the hypervisor lives
here and controls the access to the various virtual machines. So, with the introduction
of a hypervisor living in ring -1, the need for ring compression of child VMs is essentially
removed. At least, this is one way to think about.
They hypervisor itself
is not a complete OS, per se. The hypervisor is a VERY thin and small, trusted computing
base.
Technical
References:
VM Additions for Linux
Earlier Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 didn't have VM Additions
for Linux, recently Microsoft released
fully supported VM Additions for Linux (Download
from here).
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I was in lookout today for a small footprint / compact / embedded database engines
suitable for .NET applications (mainly web) and found the following candidates. This
is just a list compiled from the Internet.
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Microsoft
Access (JET Engine) - Very Popular from Windows 3.1 days due to the fact it is
out-of-box in most versions of Windows OS.
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Microsoft
SQL Server 2005 Express - The plus here is that it is easy to upgrade to full-fledged
SQL Server as Express edition uses the same file format and is binary compatible.
Also ships with a free management tool "SQL Server Management Studio"
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Microsoft
SQL Server 3.5 Compact - Can be embedded easily with less than 2MB in distribution
size. Works with Windows Mobile as well.
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SQLite - A free / no license extremely
lightweight Database engine which is less than 250KB in distribution size. There is
no server process that needs to be started, stopped, or configured here. A detailed
article here.
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VistaDB
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Quite popular, 3rd party, commercial Database Engine that can be easily embedded.
Written in NET Managed Code.
In the above list, other than VistaDB all the other are free (as in free beer) to
deploy/distribute.
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My everyday work laptop is a lightweight Sony
Vaio TX57GN around 1.25Kg, having a Core Solo CPU, 1.5GB RAM, 4200RPM HDD, Vista
its speed is sub-optimal and I can only use it for email and browsing. Even then I
am not complaining and actually I love it especially on my travels. This changes when
I have to do demos (customer presentations or Microsoft events) I got to run multiple
virtual machines and at that time CPU muscle, RAM and Speed are crucial. So few months
back I decided to buy a second laptop for demos alone and eventually settled down
on Dell
Vostro 1400. That was the time (August '07) Dell had introduced Vostro series
in USA, the price of USD 1740 (with taxes) for the configuration was attractive so
I immediately purchased it and got it through one of my colleagues coming to India.
Dell Vostro 1400 configuration
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Vostro 1400, Intel Core 2 Duo T5470, 1.6GHz, 800Mhz FSB 2M L2 Cache
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14.1 inch Wide Screen XGA LCD
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4GB, DDR2, 667MHz
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Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
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160GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive
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Windows Vista Business
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24X COMBO CD-RW/DVD for Vostro
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Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g
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Warranty Support, 2 Year Extended
The laptop scores good on Vista Benchmarks and performs well with multiple VPCs and
Vista Aero interface. Dell shipped the laptop (strangely) with Vista 32Bit OS, so
it showed only 3.5GB of RAM. This week I decided to upgrade the machine to Vista x64,
so I got it formatted and installed Vista Ultimate x64. Now the laptop shows 4GB RAM,
but most of the devices (as expected) were not installed with drivers. Luckily Wi-Fi
worked and after running Windows Update which download 150MB of 42+ updates and a
reboot, most of the devices including Graphics card got installed. The Ethernet card
proved tricky with no drivers available either from Microsoft's Windows Update or
from Dell support site. Dell doesn't provide drivers for Windows x64 OS for any of
the devices in their Vostro series Laptop. After some searching I found the driver
from Broadcom's
support site for the LAN card and now everything is working fine.
Download
Vista x64 Ethernet Driver for Dell Vostro 1400 laptop from here.
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I came across these two references today.
One was Web Browser
Standards Summary that summarizes the level of support for web standards and maturing
technologies in popular web browsers. It covers the Internet Explorer, Firefox, and
Opera web browsers, with focus on the HTML, CSS, DOM, and ECMAScript technologies.
Second
one is the Audio
interview with Chris Wilson, the Platform Architect for Internet Explorer at Microsoft.
"Chris has been building web browsers for as long as there have been web
browsers, and it was a pleasure to sit down with him at the end of the final day of
the conference. In his talk at the conference, Moving the Web Forward, Chris gave
the audience a glimpse into the realities of developing the most popular web browser
in the world. With over 500,000,000 users to answer to, the words Don’t break the
Web have become an overriding mantra for the company in its work to develop the next
version of Internet Explorer (currently known as IE.Next)".
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Microsoft announced
recently a new Sync Framework. This is a CTP release that is targeted for release
in Q2 2008 and it supports P2P and Online/Offline synchronization of data. Currently
though customers require Outlook like Offline/Online Sync scenario, it means developers
doing custom coding. The Sync
Framework is claimed to support P2P sync of any type of file including contacts,
music, videos, images and settings. And has built-in support for synchronizing relational
databases, NTFS/FAT file systems, Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS/ATOM, devices
and web services.
I welcome having a standard framework for doing this repetitive job, it also removes
the complexity of handling multiple connection types, scenarios, fail over, retry,
etc. Download
CTP from here.
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If you are a web developer you might be familiar with the great free tool - Firebug.
Firebug is an add-on for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to easily inspect the HTML
DOM/CSS for a page, edit them inplace and many other useful tricks. Recently
I came across another useful tool YSlow -which
is an addon to Firebug. YSlow is from Yahoo! which analyzes web pages and tells you
why they're slow based on the rules for high performance web sites. Check them out!
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Thanks to Scott Hanselman (my fellow RD)
for this
post where he had pointed to a four part series by Microsoft's Michael Kaplan
on this topic. MichKa's post talks in detail with sample code on how you can embed
fonts in a Windows Forms Application and have it run in any target machine where that
font is not available & doesn't get installed permanently. Please note that I
am talking about Windows Client Applications here and not a Web Application where
you can use WEFT (Microsoft's
IE only option for embedded font) or sIFR (Flash
based technique) to embed fonts.
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Part
1 - Basics of Font Embedding
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Part
2 - Getting the Font you're going to embed
-
Part
3 - Loading the Embedded Font
-
Part
4 - Embedded Font Licensing and DPI
I found the part of creating a font from a file, loading and using dynamically very
interesting. It opens interesting possibilities especially for Indic Language applications.
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While development and testing many times we need to change the IP addresses manually
to a given IP and then switch back to Dynamic IP (DHCP). Doing it everytime through
GUI especially in Vista (finding the Network Option from Start, Right Click, Selecting
Network Connections, then Right Click on the Interface, Choose IPV4, ...) is tiresome
and waste of time.
For doing it easily Windows exposes a great command called NETSH. NETSH exposes
too many options, the help (/?) and online documentation runs for several pages. Because
of this, everytime I tried I was put off. Today I spent last 5 minutes and cracked
this. For changing IP address, we need to use the NETSH
INTERFACE IP command.
To display current IP settings (equivalent to your ipconfig command):
C:\>netsh interface ip show addresses
Configuration for interface "Local Area Connection"
DHCP enabled:
No
IP Address:
10.10.99.222
Subnet Prefix: 10.10.0.0/16
(mask 255.255.0.0)
Default Gateway: 10.10.10.11
Gateway Metric: 256
InterfaceMetric: 20
To change your IP Settings to DHCP:
C:\>netsh interface ip set address name="Local Area Connection" source=dhcp
To set IP to a manual config (replace with your own values):
C:\> netsh interface ip set address "Local Area connection" static 10.10.9.22 255.0.0.0 10.10.10.111
1
Here after static command, the first value is your IP Address, second is NetMask,
third is Gateway and fourth is metric.
Similar to set address command in netsh interface ip there
is set DNS command that can set the DNS values as well. If you put
the above in a batch (.bat) file then you can just double-click on it everytime you
want the IP config to be changed.
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