Martin Taylor, lead marketing efforts for Windows Live quits MS

Martin Taylor the 13-year company veteran was appointed in March to lead marketing efforts for Windows Live, left Microsoft. The news is interesting because its only last week Bill Gates announced that he would moved out of the day-to-day role of the organization

Microsoft takes on Skype with the launch of Windows Live Messenger

Microsoft is upping the ante on VoIP tie-ins with the launch of its new Windows Live Messenger.Essentially an revamp of MSN Messenger, the IM service now offers VoIP calling as well as full-screen video chat thanks to Microsoft's new LifeCams that were launched last week.MSN Messenger is one of the most popular services world-wide, with over 200 millions users in April.The popularity of the service and high numbers of registered users gives Microsoft an edge over VoIP competitors like . Users may find it easier to plug straight into Microsoft's voice system rather than register with another company's service.

Walk-in Interview during the weekend

I never wanted to talk about this, but I was just going through some links for the basics of CLR and thought I should talk-base on this topic.

The crowd was not very great in numbers considering the fact that this was a walk-in. My impression after taking interview was that the programmers now-a-days are not interested in knowing why a piece of code works and what is the behind-the-scenes functioning. I strongly believe that any body can write codes but the best code can be written only if they know the basics and internals of how the code works.

MS Tech Ed events, Chennai 15 & 16 Jun 2006

I had been to the TechEd 2006 in Chennai with lot of expectations.
Unfortunately the event was not very fulfilling for the simple reason that some of the speakers were not up to the mark.
For instance in the architecture track, Arvind Agarwal from the Skelta Softwares was talking more on the requirements phase rather than the case study. And also in the developers track Arun Prakash who handled the Office 2007 was very pathetic with his presentation.
Well, said that, the others sessions had been good, but I guess the time for each session was not sufficient to fulfill the technology thirst of the audience. I am not sure if every one would appreciate this thought, but I felt so. The sessions from Gaurav Khanna, Deepak Gulati, Vineet Gupta, SS Ramakant, and Tejasvi Kumar had been really inspiring and useful.

I have already started admiring the WPF and VSTS and dying to explore. Will blog my experience with WPF soon.

Just noticed that Gaurav has already uploaded the presentations and the source code in his blog - http://www.wintoolzone.com/Presentations.aspx

Not sure if others have done it, but will have a look and update my blog.

Host Designers in .Net 2.0

Version 1.0 of the Microsoft .NET Framework provided a very flexible design-time architecture, but offered virtually no implemented code to actually create and host designers. All of the hosting logic was implemented in Visual Studio .NET, requiring third parties to rewrite all of this complex logic. This has now changed; the .NET Framework 2.0 introduces a set of classes that can be used to host designers right out of the box.

GXS and Covast supports BizTalk 2006

GXS and Covast today announced a partnership to enable and support the global delivery of the Microsoft BizTalk Server solution. As leading providers of global business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce solutions, Covast and GXS will package the GXS Trading GridSM, Covast’s EDI Accelerator and Microsoft’s BizTalk Server software platform into a single advanced B2B integration solution that enhances visibility and control at all levels of the supply chain community. The combined solution, available through both GXS and Covast, takes the comprehensive integration capabilities of BizTalk Server and extends it further to external trading partners, enabling businesses to integrate their B2B infrastructures with internal applications and those of their Internet-based trading partners.

LINQ Project for C# 3.0

Find out about the general-purpose query facilities added to the .NET Framework that apply to all sources of information, not just relational or XML data. This facility is called .NET Language Integrated Query (LINQ).

Download at : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1E902C21-340C-4D13-9F04-70EB5E3DCEEA&displaylang=en

Learn at : http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/ref/linq/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/linqprojectovw.asp