One of the features of Windows 2008 I really wanted to try was HyperV. It's good, faster than Virtual Server, supports HyperVisor etc. etc. However, I have removed the Hyper V Role from my system. The reason being loss of sleep. I just can't live with it. I know the Hyper V team has given some explaination about the technical problems etc. but to me those are more like excuses. Why will a laptop with Hyper V not go in sleep mode when there are no VM's running? I can understand that they have kept the priorities of enterprise servers while designing this product, but one of the biggest users of Virtualization are developers, and they don't have servers which are on 24x7. I would like my laptop to sleep, save power when I put the lid down and myself go to sleep at night. Don't have the patience to wait for boot up and shutdown times everytime I leave my laptop. At least enable sleep on lid down, so that my hard disks don't keep spinning and heating up all thru the night.

I tried VMWare Server which was the free version out recently. However, found it a bit of mess with no help file for a first time VMWare user and I was really in no mood to dig up documents to find out how to connect to the VM. I may be tired and sleepy but definitely not very impressed by VMWare Server considering the amount of stuff I have heard about it.

Well, to cut the long story short, I have decided to stick to Virtual PC for a little while, and alternatively go navite. I do have a blazing fast laptop, and a blazing fast server OS, so will try and work without VM's. Will develop like old school before VM's came into picture. Will load WSS on my Windows 2008 install and start developing. For MOSS, I will bear the pain of VPC for now till I make up my mind for a nice virtualization software to use.

I recently installed Windows Server 2008 64 bit edition to my laptop. I agree getting all drivers were a little bit of effort, and I still have a driver missing for an unknown device which keeps prompting me, but I will say the effort and pain was well worth it. The installation process was really smooth. I did format my hard drive and make a clean install. It was nice to finally make a move to 64 bit and what better than Server 2008. It's a fantastic OS. Possibly one of the best Microsoft has produced till date.

I configured my system to use it as a workstation using many of the tutorials and guides available on the net. I may write up everything in one concise post if people want, but the information is pretty widely available. I can say one thing. It's fast. Oh did I mention that I now have 4 GB of RAM and being 64 bit, I can finally use all of it.

It was an interesting experience hunting for 64 bit applications. True that most of the 32 bit apps work fine, but being a perfectionist that I am, I will still keep looking for pure 64 bit version of every software I use. Goal is to be fully 64 bit in the near future.

Even Lord of the Rings Online works fine after updating my graphics driver and updating Windows. Next step was to setup the ultimate development rig over this base OS install. Will describe my experience in a seperate post. However I will recommend every developer to try it over Vista. It rocks.

I have been taking quite a bit of interest in Windows Server 2008 these days. Along with getting ready for the next server platform it also seems like the best platform to run natively on my development laptop. would make the perfect environment for MOSS development.

For those interested, Microsoft has released a bunch of Step by Step Guides which will help get up to speed with Windows Server 2008. Definitely worth a look if you ever get stuck trying to configure the server and can't find the required options.

The release version of the Open XML SDK is now out. The download page mentions April CTP under the Description, however, this is the June 08 version. The download details will show that it was published on 6/10/2008. So go ahead and start playing with it, if you have not done so in the past. Will see if I can write a few articles on using this soon.

Some companies may need to change some rules to match their coding standards. For people who don't have a particularly though out coding standard in place, and are using something from the ASP / VB / C days, it may be worth changing over the standard based on the Source Analysis rules, as it has been in use for quite a while at some parts of Microsoft, and from an overall look, it does look quite a decent one.

//-----------------------------------------------------------------------
// <copyright file="Program.cs" company="Your Company Name">
// Copyright (c) Your Company Name. All rights reserved.
// </copyright>
// <author>Your Name</author>
//-----------------------------------------------------------------------

// <auto-generated />

For more details about headers, you can check out the rules documentation on the Source Analysis Blog.

Lastly, now, you are sort of morally forced to document every method. I know it's a bit of an effort for all lazy developers like me. So GhostDoc come here to rescue us from our plight. For those of you, who don't know about Ghost Doc, shame on you. Just kidding ;) It is a cool VS Add-In by Roland Weigelt, which auto generates method descriptions by guessing it from the description. It is not perfect, but definitely a big leap from the Visual Studio way. Download it and I can assure you that you will seriously get addicted to it. Combine together Ghost Doc and Source Analysis, make coding much clearer, better documented and developer friendly.

Some of my old readers would have noticed that I've stopped blogging for quite a while now. Thing in my personal life, kept me busy and off blogging.

However, I am very much here, and dying to start blogging again. While I was in hibernation, the world has moved ahead leaps and bounds. MOSS is getting more and more popularity, and I am seeing people get excited about SharePoint more than I have ever seen before. I have been working with MOSS for a little while now, and it is HUGE. So while I begin another journey to learn, hack and understand the nitty gritty's of MOSS, I will try my best to keep discussing my findings with you. Had been busy with an architecture project in MOSS and currently working with a MOSS OpenXML based project. Have learnt a lot of things, but MOSS does amaze me daily.

For this so called first post, I will just list out some interesting pieces from fellow bloggers which I have been reading lately.

Andrew Connell posted a nice article on getting Silverlight working in SharePoint.

Spencer Harbar has posted a nice article on Internet Sites Licensing with SharePoint.

The Microsoft SharePoint Team has a nice article discussing the architecture for Building a News Workbench.

Paul Andrew has a short and effective task list on getting started with SharePoint development. Very practical advice here.

Doug Mahugh has some fantastic resources for those interested in getting started with Open XML. One of the best compilations I have seen.

And last but not least, Todd Baginski has a nice article on programmatically customising Site Navigation in WSS and MOSS.

As Windows 2008 is now officially released ( and people suspect that the release of Vista SP1 is similar to the codebase of Windows Server 2008 ), it would be nice recap the top new features which are making its way to us. I found this nice article which introduces to some of the fantastic changes coming with Windows Server 2008. I am really looking forward to a GUI less set of servers running on a dual core machine and providing multiple services. Oh, and the self healing NTFS sounds cool. Check out all the other features and I am sure you would be dying to get your hands on the new system.

Now I am off to find out more about Server Core. It is a really fantastic concept if it lives up to it's promise. It will definitely ease the burden on existing servers, boost performance, and decrease power consumption and cooling needs. One Quad - Eight core servers, lots of ram and server core to replace 2-3 existing servers, would be fantastic. From a developers point of view, if I can get AD, SQL Server, DNS and Mail working from a GUI Less Server Core VM installation, using under 512 MB of Ram, that would be just fantastic. All I need is to connect via a admin GUI to the Server Core machine and configure the services. Would be even fantastic if all servers ( SharePoint, Office Servers, Biztalk etc ), are enabled to run via a GUI less server in the future. This would make it phenomenal. It would take away the pain of developing on a laptop.

SearchEngineLand has a nice write up about this proposed acquisition. It discusses the event in detail and portrays a nice picture of what is going on and why. Definitely worth a read.

There are also live blogged notes from the Microsoft conference call for the Yahoo! bid at 8:30.

Steve Ballmer's letter to the board of Yahoo! is available for us to read at the Microsoft Presspass site. Definitely worth a read. I skipped the financial figures, and tried to find out what is Microsoft looking after with this acquisition. Search dominance, online advertising market share, or just an increase in long term profits by bringing Yahoo! financial figures in it's Balance Sheet.

We keep hearing things about Microsoft and Yahoo acquiring various firms related to Search, Advertising and Social Networking fields. Had never gussed that Microsoft will make a bid to get one competitor completely out of the way by acquiring it.

Definitely one of the biggest news I have seen in my career. Microsoft today proposed to acquire Yahoo! for $31 per share. That puts the value of Yahoo! at approximately $44.6 billion.

Financials apart, this will have a BIG effect on the search and online advertising landscape. Combined together, it will become a bigger and meaner rival to Google, and we can definitely see exciting things happening in the search and online advertising space. One thing is for sure. Exciting things ahead in the online advertising front. I guess it is time I try out some ad's myself and see for myself if they are worth $44.6 billion.

Also two of the biggest email platforms Hotmail and Yahoo Mail will be combining if this acquisition goes ahead. Flickr will also fall into Microsoft's lap. I am sure there are going to be lots of rampifications to this. More than I can think of. Do let us know if you can think of any significant change this will bring to the industry.

Shawn Burke has a nice article which explains how to enable Visual Studio to download the symbol files and enable debugging for the .NET Source Code in your project. This is definitely a big help, as we no longer have to treat internal .NET assemblies as a black box, but gives us a the power to find out why an error happened and what kind of data the runtime expects?

Have a look at this excellent article and start configuring your development environment to support it.

One of the biggest new announcements I have heard in a while. Newsgator which is the leader for RSS Clients, has recently announced that it is making it's clients FREE. Yes, you heard it. They are free to download and use. Yipeeeee. This includes FeedDemon, NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Go ( most exciting ), and also allows free sync with NewsGator online. NewsGator Go and my Windows mobile is the perfect combination. Head over to NewsGator and download the Free Clients today.

Wishing all my readers a very Happy New Year. May this year bring lots of joys and happiness into your lives, cause after all, those are the things which matter most. I am not a person who religiously makes resolutions and tried to keep them, but this year, I will definitely keep one promise. That is to all of you. I will write more often and write stuff of better quality. As you all know, my blog migration story is over. This blog is up and running. Spent most part of the last year in getting all my things in order. Still have some organising to do ( I organise everything a lot ), before I can focus on newer things. Have set a target to organise and put in order most of my things ( pending projects, active projects, clothes, books, various mailers, photos, files etc... you get the picture ) and get ready for new tasks by 15th Jan. Hope to see you all more often in this new year.

I have finally managed to port my blog from Wordpress to Community Server 2007. It was not at all a pleasant affair, but a very rough one. However, I am quite pleased with the result. I lost quite a bit of links as it was difficult to retain old links, and hence will loose my google rating, but don't care. It will rebuilt again in course of time as I write more content. The one thing I managed to get it right was to retain all comments. Hence, as far as I am concerned, this migration is a success. Over the coming few weeks, I will work on the design and a few tweaks here and there, but will now concentrate on writing more.

Don't expect the Wordpress to Community Server migration to be a simple one. I have to manually edit and correct every single one of my posts. Still have to figure out a way to set redirects from my old post URL's to this new one. I don't want to use Community Server functionality to create redirect URL's as I want to create a permanent redirects hence, allowing blog aggregators and search engines to update the URL's.

Hello,

I have been thinking about shifting to Community Server for quite a while, but due to lack of migration tools decided to hold back. Finally I have taken the dip and decided to migrate to Community Server. It has been quite a painful process and am currently migrating my posts over to this system. I hope to have all the old posts migrated very soon to this new system.