Office Servers Available on MSDN
November 29th, 2006 // 3:11 pm @ Amar
I just heard that the Office Servers including SharePoint 2007 are available for download at MSDN now. Not sure if this is old news or not, but a heads up to anyone who has not been keeping track. Go to MSDN and download SharePoint 2007 now 
Category : SharePoint
Be careful of Domain Sharks
November 28th, 2006 // 4:11 pm @ Amar
I am recently dabbling more into live internet sites, and have been making some disturbing observances. Just want to warn you all to be very careful from where you search for the availability of a domain name. Certain observations have made me to believe that some of the sites which let you search for the availability of a domain, share this data with domain sharks. Why do I say so? Read on.
Since last 5 years I have been debating to register a domain or not. I wanted to turn it into a family site for our family members, and hence the name did not hold any value to any business or general site. It was very specific to our family and would have no value to people outside it. I recently after almost a year again thought that it would be a good idea to register it, and hence checked on the availability of the domain. As I expected, it was available. Hardly anyone would use such a name unless they are of my family. ( We have a very uncommon family name ). 2 days after, when I decide to go ahead and pay for it, I find that the domain has been taken. A similar thing happend to another domain which I had searched along with the previous one. Hence, it’s my gut feeling that some of the sites which allow you to check an availability of a domain ( including maybe some registrars, i am guessing here ) may be selling our search data, on what domains people are interested in, to domain sharks who will register these domains and see if they can make a profit out of it.
So the moral of the story is, if you like a domain and find it available, register it immediately. And be very careful from where you search for your domain. Always search from a site you trust will not leak your searches to anybody.
Category : General
GoDaddy Problems – stay away if you can
November 27th, 2006 // 5:11 pm @ Amar
I recently had a very very strange problem with godaddy for registering my domain. Never going to use them for anything and will never recommend them. Just want to share it with all of you so that you guys don’t face it.
I registered a domain name from godaddy after hearing about them from various recommendations and websites. Firstly the registration process if full of adverts, coaxing you to spend more on their special plans and trying to trick you into paying more at some places. So be very careful on what you click and review the order very carefully in case you ever purchase a domain from them. Anyways after all complexities I finally managed to register a domain name successfully from them and paid out of my paypal account. Pointed the domain to my hosting site, and after a few hours everything was up and working fine.
Two days passed without any problems. The site was absolutely fine, the domain was working as it should, and I was the registrar of the domain according to the whois records for the domain. Then suddenly, I receive 2 emails from godaddy. One, stating that my cancellation request has been processed and they are cancelling the registration of my domain. The second email status that the refund for my registration has been issued and I received the refund in my paypal account immediately. I had never asked for cancellation and as such, never wanted to cancel my domain.
I know when you cancel a domain or it expires, it will go into a 90 day freeze period. But strangely, when I checked the status of the domain, it was showing available. When browsing to the domain, it was working fine and taking me to my site. So the DNS servers had not been updated yet with this info. This was all so shocking. I suddenly find that I have lost control of my domain and it is again in the open market for anyone to register. It was as if the godaddy system just rolled back all my transactions.
An email to godaddy got me a response that due to the complex nature of this problem it has been submitted to their advanced technology group ( or something like that ) for investigation. After that it has been 2 days and I have not heard anything. Anyways, I did not wait that long for it. I quickly re-registered my domain from namecheap.com and thankfully am now again the owner of my domain. Namecheap is cheaper than godaddy, their registration process is simple, not riddled with advertising and additional packages, and does not try to trick you into paying more as godaddy does. Really impressed with them. The control panel is great and allows for all kinds of domain control. One limitation is to get the auth code or EPP code of the domain it will take 24/48 hours. Other companies provide it instantly, but I guess I can live with 24/48 hour wait as long as they are giving it. I can always request the auth code and save it beforehand so that in case I ever want to transfer away from them.
So that’s the story. After a lot of research, I think what might have happened is that godaddy initiated the clause for domain tasting which allows anyone to refund a domain within 5 days or registration. But I never asked for it, nor did I find any option which stated that, or to confirm my purchase and not have it refunded. So it was very strange and upsetting to see that they suddenly released my domain without my permission into the open market. Anyways, I guess their advanced technology group ( or whatever ) may still be investigating into the issue, but I don’t care. They can go on investigating, but have lost this customer for good and all my clients and friends will never get my recommendation for buying any of godaddy’s services.
I would recommend you all to stay away from them, but if you do decide to go ahead, do be careful and vigilant so that you can act the very instant you find you are no longer in control of your domain.
Category : General
Prefix ‘z’ is not defined error in SharePoint
November 24th, 2006 // 9:11 pm @ Amar
If you are trying to programmatically add items to a sharepoint list, using the web services, you might encounter this error while analysing the return value. I was adding entries to the site directory and on adding an entry, you get a XML result set back. Something similar to what is presented below: ( I have omitted bits which are not relevant )
<Results xmlns=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/soap/”>
<Result ID=”2,New”>
<ErrorCode>0×00000000 <ID />
<z:row ows_ID=”20″ … xmlns:z=”#RowsetSchema” />
</Result>
</Results>
Now, the problem is when you try to parse this, you will encounter the error “Prefix ‘z’ is not defined”. This happens because at this stage, the XML parser does not have any idea what the z in the z:row stands for. The solution I used, was to create a NamespaceManager and add the namespace of z to it manually. The following code will parse the resultset we have.
SiteDirectoryWS.Lists sd = new SiteDirectoryWS.Lists;
…
// form the xml to add an entry in the Sites list.
XmlNode returnNode = sd.UpdateListItems(“Sites”, insertListElement);
XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument;
xmlDoc.LoadXml(returnNode.OuterXml);
XmlNamespaceManager nsmgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(xmlDoc.NameTable);
nsmgr.AddNamespace(“z”, “#RowsetSchema”);
nsmgr.AddNamespace(“rs”, “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:rowset”);
XmlNode elem = returnNode.SelectSingleNode(“.//z:row”, nsmgr);
If (elem != null)
retID = elem.Attributes(“ows_ID”).Value;
Category : SharePoint
Fun Thing
November 24th, 2006 // 1:11 am @ Amar
I got this forward today, and it was real cool. I was surprised to see how human mind read things. Try to read the paragraph below and see for yourself.
“i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.”
Category : General
Server Move
November 23rd, 2006 // 6:11 pm @ Amar
I will mostly be shifting this blog to its new home next week. So there will a bit of downtime while the actual domain transfer and a server shift happens. If this blog disappears for a bit, don’t worry, I am very much around, and will be back online as soon as the domain names gets transfers from yahoo and gets setup on the new hosting server.
Category : General
Vista RTM: First Impressions
November 23rd, 2006 // 5:11 pm @ Amar
Just installed Windows Vists RTM on my laptop and I am impressed by the ease of setup. The setup experience was much better, faster than any previous Windows version.
One good thing I liked is the ability to install without a key and then add it later on within the grace period. Really fantastic if you ask me. Now I can enjoy Vista for a week before we get our VLK keys, and then pop in the VLK keys as soon as available and activate my installation.
Another thing I noticed, was the driver support. I have a Dell Latitude D800 with 2 GB ram. It is quite an old Laptop, but still it did not detect two devices. 1. Base System Device ( I have absolutely no idea what this is referring to ). and 2. Texas Instruments UltraMedia Smart Card Adapter. I would have assumed that it would have auto detected and installed drivers for this old laptop, but now I have to dig up Vista compatible drivers for these two just for the peace of mind that all components are running in peak shape. Not that I will be using that Smart Card slot anyways. Never needed to use it.
I do miss the up folder button on the file explorer. I was very much used to it. Guess will have to get used to this new way.
It automatically installed and started Windows Defender for me, which is nice, but I am not very confident on how efficient it is now. I did not have a very satisfied experience last time using Windows Defender on XP. So will give it a try and see.
Anyways will hunt for all my favourite utilities which I can run on Vista and get this system up to date. Will update on my progress in a seperate post.
Category : Windows
.NET Code Performance
November 22nd, 2006 // 8:11 pm @ Amar
I recently had been busy performance tuning .NET code, and I was very surprised at some of the findings as I timed and profiled various code modules. I had done a lot of performance tuning with C++ before I migrated to .NET. Had not done any serious performance tuning till now with .NET. While I was profiling a SharePoint WebPart, these findings would be equally applicable to any .NET code.
I was surprised to see that accessing a property off an object had a surprising big hit. e.g.
MyObject is an object which has a property say, ID.
I have a loop of code which uses the MyObject and tried to compare the ID with something…
for (int i =0; i < 100; i ++)
{
if ( MyObject.ID == something)
do something…
}
I observed that there were a few milliseconds being spend whenever I tried to access MyObject.ID.
Alternatively the following code ran much faster.
int id = MyObject.ID
for (int i =0; i < 100; i ++)
{
if ( id == something)
do something…
}
I guess the overhead of accessing the object and getting the property value does have a hit and can take up time if say you have a recursive function or an iterative function. Will be careful of such cases in the future.
I guess I will spend a bit more time exploring the internals of .NET to profile and find out such cases which can make a difference in our code.
P.S. I know I have not been posting to this blog for a bit. I am trying to move my blog to a better host and with better control over it. Yahoo Hosting is not adequate for it, as I cannot do a lot of things I plan to do with my Wordpress installation. Hence will mostly be moving this site to a new server which does not have restrictions. So busy evaluating offers and packaged from hundreds of hosting companies to find one which is just right for a geek developer like me, who would like to have enough control when needed from time to time.
Category : SharePoint & dotNet
A new milestone for the Web
November 2nd, 2006 // 1:11 pm @ Amar
Just started the day with Techmeme and was plesantly surprised and nostalgic with this article over at CNN. The Web reached 100 million domain name sites. I built my first website in 1995 when the internet first came to India in a mass scale. Have gone thru various websites and projects during this time and it is really nice to see that the web has grown to 100 million. But sadly, most of them are registered by link popularity and domain name sellers. There seems to be 50% active sites out of them, and the rest are all owned by people who either want to get rich quick by selling good domain names at a premium, or fool google into making their active site popular. Somehow all these have made the web experience a bit painful. Has anyone tried to register a domain name and found that it is near to impossible to get a decent domain name free. And most of the names do not have active websites under them. It takes me less time to ready a small website than to find a good active domain name for my website. It took me over a month to find www.reviewlibrary.com and i can tell you that the experience is not at all very pleasant.
Anyways, congrats to each and everyone who participated in making the web a phenomenal success, and bring it from 1200 bauds to super fast broadbands.
Category : General