O2 to create Europe’s largest free WiFi zone
February 10th, 2012 // 6:23 am @ Amar
O2 has been selected from amongst the six shortlisted providers including BT, Sky and Virgin to create the largest free wireless hub in Europe. This would cover two of the London boroughs ( Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea). The rollouts start this month and will be available as soon as the installation completes. This ensures that visitors to London will be able to make the most out of London’s offerings, particularly in a year in which both the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics take place.
The next time I am in London I hope I can get free WiFi. My 3G has always been a bit unreliable in certain parts of the centre.
For more information check out the press release on O2’s website.
Category : General
Visual Studio 2010 code formatting bug
February 25th, 2011 // 2:01 pm @ Amar
There is a bit of an issue with VS 2010 code formatting for HTML. Be default you will see HTML code formatted as :
<h3>
General</h3>
To fix this, go to Tools –> Options
Select Text Editor-> HTML –> Formatting from the left panel.
Click on the Tag Specific Options.
Select Default Settings –> Client tag supports contents
On the right panel, under Line breaks, select Before and after.
This will give you a code formatting as :
<h3>General</h3>
Category : General
Happy New Year
January 4th, 2011 // 8:48 am @ Amar
Wishing everyone a very happy 2011. Every year I make a resolution to start blogging more but have failed since last few years. 2010 was an eventful year as my son was born. Hence took most of my time and energy to support my wife and enjoy the joys of Fatherhood. Another big milestone hit in 2010 was the formation of my offshore development company. We are very close to starting operations and hence pretty excited about it.
Hopefully now that life has settled back a bit and work and life look more organised, I will get more and more time to blog and write more about my experiences of entrepreneurship and working with technology. Hoping for a great 2011 and wish all of you all a great year ahead.
Category : General
HTML 5 with Visual Studio 2010
July 1st, 2010 // 12:55 pm @ Amar
If you have tried to create / edit an HTML 5 document in Visual Studio, you must have got a lot of validation errors. The current validator in Visual Studio 2010 supports HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.1 Transitional as the highest standards.
To enable Intellisense to work with HTML 5, perform the following steps:
- Download the HTML5 support package for Visual Studio 2008 from the Visual Web Developer team here.
- Copy the html_5.xsd in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\Packages\schemas\html
- Edit the correct registry file and replace 9.0 with 10.0
The file will look like this ( 64 bit VS 2010 Ultimate for me ):
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Packages\{1B437D20-F8FE-11D2-A6AE-00104BCC7269}\Schemas\Schema 23]
“File”=”html\\html_5.xsd”
“Friendly Name”=”HTML 5″
“URI”=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/intellisense/html-5″
- Run the registry file to merge it with your registry.
- Open Visual Studio 2010
- Go to Tools->Options->Text Editor->HTML->Validation
- Select target as HTML 5
This would allow you to get Intellisense for your HTML 5 based projects.
Edit: Nitin Mohan has an updated blog post with a lot more info : http://www.nitrix-reloaded.com/2012/01/03/starting-html5-development-with-visual-studio-2010/ .
Happy New Year
January 10th, 2010 // 5:48 pm @ Amar
Wishing everyone a happy 2010. It has been a long time since I blogged. After around 5+ years of blogging, I guess I was a bit burnt out. Personal and professional life was also demanding more time, and I somehow felt less and less inclined to blog. Without any kind of plans, I suddenly felt like checking my blog today. Upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. Will fix the theme a bit so that it does not look broken. Let’s see how it goes. No promises if I will be blogging regularly. Hopefully I will get a lot of exciting things to write about, as I am playing with SharePoint 2010, Office 2010, Windows and SQL Azure and a lot of fantastic new technologies. If I feel like, I will start blogging again. If not, I guess I need a longer vacation from blogging.
Thanks to everyone who read my blogs in the past. I has been a very exciting experience. Apologies for drifting away from blogging without telling. I did not have any plans for leaving, however personal and professional life took their toll and I just did not have any time to blog. For those who don’t know, I got married in 2007. I started my own company Toolagen Limited in 2008. 2009 had been a very hectic year for work, as a small startup we were struggling to stay alive and grow in the midst of recession. It was a very challenging time, but we grew from strength to strength and now have exciting plans for times ahead. Let’s see where 2010 take us.
Anyways, if you read so far, many thanks. Hope I get time and the motivation to start writing again, and again get a chance to know you all. Till then, wishing everyone a very happy 2010.
Category : General &SharePoint
Microsoft Bing goes live
June 4th, 2009 // 3:56 pm @ Amar
I suddenly noticed that Bing.com, Microsoft’s new revolutionary search engine, was now up. It is showing a beta logo, but the search engine is up and running. Have heard lots of good things about it, so going to give it a try for a few days.
Do we have a Google killer here? What do you think?
Category : General
Happy New Year
December 31st, 2008 // 6:10 pm @ Amar
Finally 2008 is over. What a year it has been. Hoping that 2009 brings lots of hope, prosperity, happiness and joy to everyone. Wishing everyone a very happy 2009 
Category : General
Blog Changes
November 27th, 2008 // 2:07 pm @ Amar
While recently migrating hosting servers, I got an opportunity to re-examine my choice of a blogging engine. I had stopped blogging for a while, and hence was tempted to start anew, however had some good past content which I wanted to preserve for myself.
I initially started blogging with WordPress, and went thru a painful process to migrate all content to Community Server a few years ago. It was a good system. It still is, but it is meant for very large blogging networks, and not very suitable for a single blog. They do have a new product called Grafitti, however, both suffer from one major problem. A lack of free plugins, themes and tools available from the community. WordPress on the other has is a fantastic blogging platform, very easy to use and has an abundance of free support to a small blogger like me.
One more major turning point towards WordPress was the launch of Windows 2008 and IIS7. It now supports URL Rewriting, and hence via Fast CGI it can use mod rewrite to create pretty URL’s Have a look at this post URL. Am a .NET developer and hence I always host on Windows servers. This was one of the reasons why I had left WordPress in the first place. So it’s great to be back with WordPress.
Lookout for more regular posts soon.
Free CodeRush Xpress
November 10th, 2008 // 3:29 pm @ Amar
Just came across this page from Microsoft about an announcement for the availability of a free version of CodeRush called CodeRush Xpress. Might be worth looking into for faster development and refactoring. Definitely worth having a look if you have never used CodeRush before. Good news for those who have been in the sidelines due to the cost involved. Now you get a chance to use some functionality of CodeRush for free.
Category : General
A new beginning
October 2nd, 2008 // 1:51 pm @ Amar
It’s been a while since I posted. I have been involved in bringing my dream to reality. For a quick update, I have left my job to start my own company Toolagen Limited. Currently keeping very busy in giving shape to this organisation while working on several consulting projects on SharePoint / MOSS. Working for myself will enable me to work on even more engaging and complex SharePoint / MOSS projects while creating a service delivery team to develop and deploy complex MOSS solutions.
We are also working on some SharePoint tools which will soon be released to everyone. Hopefully we will be making it to Beta before Christmas.
Category : General &SharePoint