Comment Feed for Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Checking In: Eric Lippert - On Compiler Evolution, Designing C# and Blogging

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 15:37:01 GMT

I simply *love* Eric Lippert videos. He's such a brilliant chap, and extremely friendly, too. And I love C# very much. I find C# related videos extremely enjoyable to watch, and very educational, too.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: ASP.NET MVC 2: Basics, Introduction by Scott Hanselman

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:03:09 GMT

What's the text editor he used at the beginning of the talk. I'd like to get a copy.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Steve Lees and Alan Griver - Visiting India's User Groups

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 22:28:12 GMT

People here are very technically, ummm, deep. That was cute. Nice video. Thanks!

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Alan Griver and friends - Off to visit user groups in India

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Thu, 09 Dec 2004 21:26:09 GMT

I've just returend from the VB.NET Usergroup seminar that was held at the Park Royal Intercontinental hotel in Delhi today.

The VB.NET team has been on a world tour since April this year and this was their Delhi visit. There were two representatives from Microsoft, Redmond - Alan Griver who is the Group Manager of the Visual Studio Data Team, and Steven Lees who is the Group Program Manager of the Visual Basic .NET Team.

The resonse was overwhelming. There were about 400 seats, all occupied in the Royal Ball Room on the first floor. We were greeted with a sumptous meal, which was followed by presentations starting at 2:30 PM.

Alan innaugurated the seminar with his presentation on the data aspect of Visual Studio 2003. He demonstrated to the audiences, a few new controls that were a part of the VB Power Pack suite. The VB Power Pack is a set of seven custom controls created for .NET languages. The good thing about them is that they come with the source code, for free from the gotdotnet website. The goodness doesn't get over here. The other good thing is that they are extensible, which means you and I can modify the source code and make them do more things than they already do. And they're fully licensed. What that means is that you and I can include them in our commercial apps and ship them. The coolest thing about the VB Power Pack is that these controls are really cool. There are seven sexy controls in the power pack that will give every .NET programmer a hard-on, depending on how less prudish you are, of course:

· BlendPanel: This provides a background for a form where the color fades from one shade to another.

· UtilityToolbar: This is a toolbar whose look and feel is similar to the Internet Explorer toolbar.

· ImageButton: This is a button that displays a graphic over a transparent background.

· NotificationWindow: This displays text and graphics in a pop-up window (commonly known as “toast”).

· TaskPane: This is a container that provides collapsible frames for displaying additional information on a form.

· FolderViewer: This displays directories in a hierarchical format.
· FileViewer. This displays a list of the files in a specified directory.

Alan started by showing us how easy it was to use the Blend Panel control. This funky, pesky, nifty control gives you a layout that has a color-blend in it's background. If you have used Microsoft Power Point or Microsoft Word, you'd have noticed that you could fill in the background of your document with a color-blend that has two colors that blend together in four or more orientations. This control looks pretty much like a textured fill on an MS Office document.

Alan also showed us what the TaskPane, the Utlity Toolbar and the Notification Window did. The TaskPane, you'd have noticed in the search for files and folders window on Windows XP. The Notification Window is a control that pops up a message window that slides up at the right bottom corner of your screen for a preset interval of time to alert you with a notification. It looks just like the MSN Messenger notification window. The fun part is that you can create these notifications without even writing a single line of code. I'd once implemented an alert designer of the kind and it took me so much of thinking to come up with a window like that that had to manage a queue of messages to be notified to the user. There were a couple of objects in it - one of it read preset alerts to notify the user, another one evaluated the messages that were due for notification, another one popped the notifications out of a stack object, yet another one managed the screen real-estate to see there was already a notification window taking up the screen and so the new notification had either to wait or to place itself above the old one, yet another one was asynchornously reading the databse for new alerts, and another one was busy putting the notifications that had already been displayed back either to the stack if the user wanted a later notification of the same message in the future or to a bin to be trashed. Phew! And now I can do all of that with the notification window without a single line of code. Well, not literally but quite.

Then, out of his kitty, Alan dug out a cool thing called the TaskVision sample app.

TaskVision is a cool sample app available at the WindowsForms.NET website that has some cool databound controls for rapid application development. Once more, they are available for free. Alan told us that we were going to get a CD containing the Visual Basic.NET/ASP.NET Resource kit that has fully licensed controls worth over $1,000 for FREE.

He also showed us some features of VS .NET 2005 concerning integration with MS Office. The coolest feature I liked about the talk was the InkOverlay object that braught ink awareness to controls, no matter who the vendor of the controls was. An InkOverlay control helps you write with a touch-pen on your tablet PC or any such compatible device and converts that to text or appropriate directions. It's sexy. He also showed us the CaveMan game and talked about .NET CE for sometime.

After Alan wrapped up, it was Steve's turn. Steve just blew everyone down with the cool features of VS.NET 2005. I surmise he was apparently dismayed at the lukewarmness of the audiences. The Indian audience is apparently impregnable and not easily overwhelmed, but that's only a cultural disparity. That is true especially when you see a Westerner play heavy metal to an Indian audience and wonder if they're on drugs, or something. But I can tell you there were enough whispers suggesting amazement.

Steve started his talk with the ClickOnce Test application that demonstrated the promises of ClickOnce deployment. He began by illustrating the symbol replacement feature of the IDE in VS 2005 of .NET that relied on the compiler to identify the symbol in case you needed to replace an already existing object in your code. That reminded me of Dan Ferdandes' video on Channel 9. [Dan Fernandez - Demo of C# Express (pull images from Google)] I'd asked just this very question on that thread. I really enjoyed the whole presentation thoroughly. I felt like I was at an advantage to the others who did not know about Channel 9, and did not read blogs and stuff.

Then, he talked to us about the My namespace and demonstrated with code examples how you could use the Applications, Settings, Computer, Deployment namespaces within the My namespace. You could also seperate a lot of the stuff from the EXE and make it configurable by putting it into an ApplicationConfig file. Things like ConnectionStrings etc. could be removed and put in there to make the app more portable.

Steve introduced generics by taking an example of a collection that could take only objects of the Product Type. Steve demod to us how the My namespace made life easier by calling the framework inside it so you could just do away with the framework for sometime and rely on this nify way to do things that you'd otherwise call the API for. True! When he demoed a file copy operation with the My.Computer.FileIO.CopyFile function, which had a Boolean param to show the UI for the copy operation, it aroused painful memories of SHFileOperation in my mind and of byte ordering/alignment. Because I am a little depraved, I also chuckled to myself thinking there should have been a namespace called * inside the My namespace so we could all say one day. My.*.Is.Great! Ok, bad joke.

Some of his presentation co-incided with the Robert Green videos.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=13079

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=12836

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=23763

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=22009

Everyone was just ooh'ed and aah'ed when he mentioned the Insert Snippet feature. Fortunately for me, I'd installed the Beta edition of VB Lite Express 2005 when it was out this June, so I really enjoyed the whole presentation. Thanks for Channel 9.

Steve then spoke of TableDataAdapters, if I remember that name correctly, and some new data features in the new edition. Alan came by and added to the discussion because it was about data. Steve said Alan used an app while he was driving in his car that hooked to a Web Service to get the traffic info in Seattle so Alan could know what route to take to avoid jams.

One more cool thing Steve informed us in his presentation about was the VS .NET Team System effort and showed us the Class Builder creating visualizations for the XSD of a dataset. That was cool.

Steve also talked about logging and trace logs and how simple it was to implement them in .NET because of the my namespace. Finally, he showed us that the Application object was extensible and you could really make a MyApplication class and add props there.

Towards the fag-end of the presentation, there was a round of Q&A. One of my questions, on a rather comic note was, "When's Microsoft going to come up with Intellisense for the whiteboard?" Another question I asked was, "Microsoft has been moving into so many directions. There's a whole new bunch of cool things being churned out every week. While everything is becoming task-oriented and easy to perform with .NET, the framework is itself behemoth sized. I've been dabbling with .NET for over an year and yet I am a _poor_piss_third_rate_dev, speaking of .NET. How do you think an average developer with a day job could handle the pressures of learning a new platform. I usually find myself lost because I open up the Object Browser and MSDN and I just don't know where to star. I mean...where do I begin? What's your generic advise to an average developer with a day job to catch up with this cool new thing? What is Microsoft doing to straighten the learning curve?" Alan said that that was a very good question and I felt like I was the king of pop at that.

At the end, everyone dispersed and there were a few inquisitive kinds who circled themselves around both Alan and Steve. I joined the congregation of devouts. I got to speak to Alan on a one-to-one basis. I also spoke to Steve. Both Alan and Steve are very down-to-earth and approachable. Alan told me he read about 1100 blogs and was a workaholic and that he loved his work and had a great team who he left alone so they could do their work. That reminded me of Joel Spolsky's article where he said the same thing about managers at Microsoft; how the managers at Microsoft were busy moving furniture so the coders could do their work in peace. Alan also mentioned he's authored a book on Design Patterns with VB6. I reckon I have that book in my collection. He also said that Zoe and Gretchen were like the superstars in limelight at the recent MVP summit. Steve was a pleasure to look at; a very handsome, fair, slender,intelligent and tall guy. He had all the chicks surrounding him with questions, and I guess requests for his email address too. I thanked Steve and Allan and then walked out of the conference hall. It was 5:30 PM then.

On exit, we did get a cool white t-shirt with VB.NET printed on it, and a FREE CD containig the ASP.NET Resource Kit that features controls from Infragistics (formerly Sheriddan), Component One (formerly Videosoft), SAX et al. There was also chocolate cake with walnut, vanilla ice cream with hot chocolate fudge, fish fingers, white-butter sandwiches, sweetmeats, veggie-pastries and cups of steaming coffee.

Thank you Alan and Steve. Today was one of the best days of my life.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Alan Griver and friends - Off to visit user groups in India

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 15:49:06 GMT

Hurrah! Only 3 more days to go. I'm so anxious. Just printed my admission ticket for the third time.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Alan Griver and friends - Off to visit user groups in India

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 02:54:26 GMT

Now, that is a bonanza. Me too, yag. Thank you.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Alan Griver and friends - Off to visit user groups in India

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 19:26:11 GMT

Abhi, the link you posted was a bit cryptic.

Yag, I followed your link and registered myself. I booked a seat for the 9th December seminar at the Park Royal Intercontinental. But your video says you're visiting on 29th November. So you'd be touring Delhi around the 9th of December then?

Thanks for the links.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Mythreyee Ganapathy - The challenge for Microsoft India: getting good talent

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 19:06:41 GMT

Microsoft Hyderabad Needs Only MCAs, BTechs, and BEs

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=22075

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Sheila Gulati - Winning hearts and minds of developers in India

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 19:03:13 GMT

Unfortunately, Sriram, I do not know any PMs at Microsoft. I do know one guy who worked as a subordinate in my team. He's at Hyderabad. I wouldn't say he was the brightest guy I ever came accross.

I do have participation in online forums to flaunt off, if that should impress them. I do not know.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Sheila Gulati - Winning hearts and minds of developers in India

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 05:43:45 GMT

Cool! The MSDN India idea is excellent. I eagerly await it, and I also want to write for the MSDN India magazine.

You said, we must come up with ideas and feedback as to what we want, and any problems we are facing. I am facing a problem getting myself noticed and getting my resume to the Microsoft folks.

I am interested in a job with Microsoft and I have been preparing hard since the last 1 year.

(1) http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=116513 (scroll down to my post in that thread)

(2) http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=149366

(3) http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?off.9.30372.24

(4) http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=155414

I have tried the careers website. I also have a Job Agent at the careers website, one at Monster and also Google Alerts for Microsoft Jobs.

I am talking about in-person interviews that Microsoft is to be conducting this weekend in Delhi. The problem I have is that intermediate hiring agencies or consultants that Microsoft Hyderabad hires do not forward the resumes of those candidates (like myself) who are not either an MCA or a BTech or a BE.

My problem is detailed in these two threads:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?off.9.30372.24

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=22075

I'd be happy if you read it and provided me a solution.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Alan Griver and friends - Off to visit user groups in India

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 05:07:43 GMT

So, the tour starts November 29th in India. From where can we get to know when these folks visit Delhi and what the venue and exact time of the meeting would be in Delhi?

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Constanze Roman - Writing documentation for mobile devices

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 01:33:39 GMT

Nice video. It's nice to see videos featuring exclusive interview with the regular developers and the people who are into Getting Things Done. We've seen managers, now we want to see developers as well. This video was refreshing.

Nice pendant.

She knows precisely how many words, how many topics, the process and stuff. She's very focussed you can tell. This is interesting for us, people outside Microsoft, to see because this is information for us. All relevant questions asked and very well answered by Constanze. More videos of this kind from people who actually do the work.

She looked like she was engrossed, in the zone, and was a very hard worker. She's nice looking too.

Thanks.

PS: One question comes to mind. Does one person write all the 32,000 pages?

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Gary Daniels and Evan Goldring - Mock whiteboard problem

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 00:14:23 GMT

I am not even debating that the Visual Basic solution would be slower than the C code.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Gary Daniels and Evan Goldring - Mock whiteboard problem

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 22:38:43 GMT

Maurits wrote:

The more I think about it, the more I think that zero-length strings ARE palindromes. This is especially important in recursive algorithms applied to even-length strings.

Could you please elaborate?

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Gary Daniels and Evan Goldring - Mock whiteboard problem

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 21:30:25 GMT

I'd do it in C in any of the three ways I did it here:

First Way

#include
#include

int IsPallindrome(char*);

int main()
{
    int bRetVal =0;

    char str[100];
    printf("Enter a word: ");
    scanf("%s", &str);
    bRetVal= IsPallindrome(str);
    if (bRetVal==1)
    {
        printf("%s is a pallindrome.\n", str);
    }
    else
    {
        printf("%s is not a pallindrome. \n", str);
    }

    return 0;
}

int IsPallindrome(char* str)
{

    int i, j, len;
    i=j=len=0;

    //the string is not null
    if (str==NULL) return 0;

    //It might just have a null-terminator and no contents. Zero length string.
    if ((len=strlen(str))==0) return 0;

    for(i=0, j=len-1; i<=j; i++, j--)
        if(*(str+i) != *(str+j))
            return 0;

    return 1;
}

Second Way

I'd copy the string in place to another memory location and simply reverse it, and check if they are identical.

Third Way

Design Goals

No checking for spaces, because a space thing opens up two different options:

Under this scheme, the text, "Mal Ayal Am" would be a pallindrome because if you prun the spaces, it reads the same forwards and backwards. In such a case it would be correct to first trim the spaces inside the string and outside it (leading and trailing) and then use the IsPallindrome function above on the resultant string.
However, if you do not ignore the spaces, it is not a pallindrome because the spaces encountered in a forward traversal do not coincide with the spaces encountered backward. In such a case, the above mentioned IsPallindrome should yeild the correct results.

Notes:

(1) I've used scanf which should stop reading after a white space. I might have used getline as well, and that'd have been better.
(2) The comparison done here is Binary and not Text based, so "Pop" won't be a pallindrome but "PoP" will be, The alternative TextBased solution would have either used LCase or Ucase functions or just a transpose of the ASCII values by adding or subtracting 32 for the alphanumeric keys.

A Visual Basic solution is even simpler:

Public Function IsPallindrome(ByVal StrWord As String) As Boolean
IsPallindrome = (StrComp(Trim(StrWord), Trim(StrReverse(StrWord)), vbBinaryCompare) = 0)
End Function

Private Sub Command1_Click()
MsgBox Text1.Text & IIf(IsPallindrome(Text1.Text), " is", " is not") & " a pallindrome."
End Sub

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Don Box - Tour of Indigo Team

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 06:02:44 GMT

FlorinLazar replied,

During those days I was dealing with a serious eye fatigue that was causing me pain and made my eyes very sensitive to light. That was the main reason for having the lights dimmed in my office. Also, as you notice in the video, my office door was open, which at Microsoft means that "intrusions" are allowed.

Last but not least, I'm not a Hollywood actor used to be filmed every day, so having Don Box and Robert suddenly entering my office with the camera on was certainly a surprise.

It might look Dostoevskian from the outside, but it isn't actually.

I am very sorry to hear about the eye fatique. I hope you've healed now. If not, I wish you a quick recovery. I beg your pardon if my comments have unintentionally caused you concern. I certainly didn't mean any ridicule, not even the least. I meant that the part of the video had a literary savour and it braught out the uber-geek quality of voluntary, solitary confinement of the geeks within their work-cells, which is actually quite appealing. I would probably have a more pensive look if I was in the middle of my work and was required to pop out of the zone. The intrusion I refer to was not meant to be intrusion in a literal sense.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Don Box - Tour of Indigo Team

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 01:10:09 GMT

Thanks! Hey, I hope you weren't put off by the joke in my previous post.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Don Box - Tour of Indigo Team

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 00:56:25 GMT

Robert, you voyeur! You surely don't want us to upload amateur videos showing what we do, with the windows around our places now, do you?

Indian version you say? I didn't get that. Yeah, I think I heard something posted here a while back about this. So, an Indian version means videos from Hyderabad, Delhi and Bangalore you mean? Or videos with translation in Hindi?

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Don Box - Tour of Indigo Team

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 00:31:25 GMT

Robert Scoble said,

By the way, I'm working on getting downloads of all the videos working, so the video of Gretchen and Zoe will need to wait until tomorrow or so -- I have to get all the downloads working before I can upload more videos. Sorry about that.

You're better known by your surname, but I'd like to address you as Robert.

Tomorrow is fine, Robert. Thanks for the great effort you guys have put in. I am sure you wouldn't have premeditated the popularity of this website when you set out for it. This is turning out to be a lot more than just 5 guys from Redmond, no?

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Don Box - Tour of Indigo Team

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 21:05:55 GMT

Wow! Can't wait to watch them.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Don Box - Tour of Indigo Team

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 20:51:06 GMT

Yeah! I read from Zoe and Gretchen's blog that Robert interviewed them too. That's supposed to be coming out early next week, right?

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Don Box - Tour of Indigo Team

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 19:39:24 GMT

Two things that stand out in the clippage:

Don Box is an extremely affable person. He keeps a very low-profile, demured disposition even inspite of the fact that he is rightly considered a larger-than-life icon for programmers around the world. He's not only a truly great programmer but is an even better human being. Oh! did I forget to say, an excellent guitarist too?
What is amazing is the familiarity amoung the members in the team. It is remarkable that Don Box not only knows each one of those he's introduced in the building, but also knows the minute details of the work they are doing.

Other highlights of the video, the ones that we are already used to, are:

Oh! The long lobbyish corridoor. Every guy has a closed-door office. Remember, Chris Sell's tour of the MSDN Longhorn center?
At Microsoft, you always have help at an arm's length. You want help? Go ask the guy who's creating the technology you're stuck with - the ultimate source.
Robert Scoble's cute outbursts of laughter. He's got a child-like laughter. I like it. It sounds so juvenile, and I like it very much.

It's interesting that most of the geeks like sitting without the lights on. The test lead on transactions in the white t-shirt towards the begining of the clip (at somewhere around 6:25, the engineer introduced just before Saji), I forget his name, had that peculiar squeamish, geeky look of an introvert who wouldn't tolerate any kind of an intrusion. His gaze was transfixed in alarm when they barged in on him; it was as if they'd caught him red-handed committing a sin. Truly Dosteovskian. And another guy, who Robert called a marketing guy, he was looking for the wall to lean on.

Excellent video! More of Don Box, please. Microsoft, please! Pretty please, hire me.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Peter Wengert - Inside Microsoft Automotive

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 19:07:48 GMT

My memory fails me, and in that I have a terrible one. I am not sure which company that was, but I clearly remember reading it. It was a short story of less than 500 words.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Peter Wengert - Inside Microsoft Automotive

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 18:38:39 GMT

Reminds me of a newspaper report a few months back saying Microsoft delivered its embedded operating system technology to a car manufacturer that enabled the car to render traffic and location information to its driver. This was in Bangalore I guess. I may be wrong about the place, but that report really had me overwhelmed.

The coolest video ever on Channel 9. Thanks, Channel 9!

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy

Re: Dan Fernandez - Demo of C# Express (pull images from Google)

Sathyaish Chakravarthy — Wed, 28 Jul 2004 13:44:06 GMT

rasx said:

Another wish: to be able to sort any block of lines of code alphanumerically.

That almost cracked me up until I read it again and noticed the word block, and I understood it must mean the ability to sort Region directives alphanumerically.

I thought somene was asking the IDE to be able to sort source code lines alphanumerically.

posted by Sathyaish Chakravarthy