Saturday, September 18, 2004

Good News

About a fornight back I got really really fed up of Smoking and my consistent giving it up and starting all over again. So this time I decided to give up forever (Normally when I used to give up, I used to put it like - till the next time). Anyways I am almost back to normal now. And I have realised that if I do not smoke, my Attention Deficit Disorder calms down a bit. I actually did not know I had ADD untill i gave a psychometric test last year. The results came out excellent but suggested that I have a check for ADD.. lol.

Well not smoking it has its side effects too... But have been there too many times before I always warm people to stay on my good side atleast for the first few months. Wish me luck cause I have been going on about this for a long time.

Off late I have been working on my site again dotnet911.com. You might be surprised with the choice of domain name as one of my friends put it... I am restricting my site to american psyche. The reason being 911 as you are no doubt aware is a emergency number. Its funny when i give my email address out to people.. its hermit at dot net 911.com and they say 9 11.com ? Really winds me up cause i have to go about explaining what 911 & 9 11 mean to me and the population on whole (unforunately i am in london and not many people share my opinion on using 911 instead of 999).

Anyways.. I payed for a SQL server database to my host and once i finish a few bits & bobs I shall upload it. Hopefully every few days I will add an article on to it. Depending on the usage and feedback i will either keep it going or I will remove it in a year's time and save myself some money %>)

BTW don't ask about 70-320... i will come back to it in a few days.

Saturday, September 11, 2004

My Perspective on India and the People

Every once in a while i get on to a newsgroup and i see some really really lame posts... some of them are from indians who do not know who to ask or where to look... which can be really really annoying at times... things like.. i want to do MCAD my email id is blah blah blah.. please email me the details.. this things can be found at Microsoft Certification Site.

And there are people from around the globe... some comment saying that its worrying how people dont know a thing about English or Technology and that a whole lot of work is being outsourced to them... I think it always better to educate people (even the one indians so love to call Foreigners) and i looked up some facts and put them down saying actually its not too bad...

What do i get back ? a reply from a self proclaimed Patriotic Twat... calling me an @sshole and asking me to not belittle my country of birth in front of foreigners... i couldnt believe this... somethings never change... mate... learn to appreciate facts.... do you really know what India is and even being an Indian is all about ?

i have been across most of India.. from Gujarat in the West to Delhi in the North to Assam in (Northeast) to Tamilnadu in the South.. i have seen a lot of india in those 24 years... The only difference between me and a whole lot of Indians is that I think from a different prepecitve.... and that was one of the reasons why i was termed a UBI (Unfortunatly Born in India). Most people who dont like the fact would rather dish out and i got called that a lot because i prefer to live with the facts than boast on false pride.

At the end of the day i am a programmer... i go by "Show me the Money" attitude. And yes i do have Indian morals but hey this isn't a war and I am here to make a living.

And finally you can still dish this as well and say whatever you wish to... yes even if you think a real indian in one who stays in india and makes it big... Only accepting the fact can get you a step closer to making a difference.. in India and everywhere in the world.

Friday, September 10, 2004

70-320 and .net Remoting

over the last 2 weeks i have been studying for 320 and hell... its bloody extensive... i was told be prepared to think hard for the exams... i am having to think hard well before the exams....

though its been fun most of the times... Amit's Kalani's book gets a very good feedback from me.... Remoting is so much fun... though it sort of reminds me COM programming not even close to it in complexity... we used to have ClassFactory out there... there was even a ClassFactory2... though i only used it to the extent of object creation and returning the object. In remoting we can use it to expose Remotable object as a client activated object by using Class Factory as a bait and making the host think its the Class Factory (usually set as Server Activated) we are after...

Tried all sort of stuff.. the best part about remoting is that its not complex... and you can set most of the stuff in config file. Had a look at IIS hosted Remoting and just a piece of advice. If you are connecting to SQL Server (with Remotable object) and are using Trusted Connection..
a. Disable Anonymous Access (Keeping it in Windows Authentication mode)
b. set impersonate identity = true in the applications (web application's) web.config

if you want to debug a IIS... start the client and attach to the aspnet worker process...

went nuts trying to figure out what was wrong... then found out it was authentication failure on sql server for NT Authority/Network Service

oh well...

Wednesday, September 01, 2004

Yukon Developer session

Went down to Yukon developer session organised by microsoft uk. couple of nice presentations... it so good to be at a developers session rather than one of those sales pitches.

It was interesting to see actually managed code within inproc hosted CLR with yukon. A sort of mix and match of managed code with TSQL. TSQL is still the fastest thing when it comes to relational data. Managed code within Yukon is more for computational intensive task.. conditional.. loops.. string manipulation etc. Saw a brief overview of data.sqlserver namespace overview.. the classes and how they can be used. Use of partial classes and user defined functions. More on it here.

We can even have managed UDTs. the only requirements are that they should take a string as contructor and should implement a method called Parse.

TSQL has a good set of enhancements... stuff like DDL triggers (oh yes on create, alter, delete etc).. use of common data expressions... reminded me of subqueries and how we used to name a resultset... similar in broad terms but CTEs can be used throughout the context of the current query.. not just current TSQL query within a block. they have added things like Try and Catch blocks.. though as the program manager put it.. they keep changing their minds on the exact syntax :)... and absolutely thrilled by Rank and Rownum etc.

The day ended with Analysis server enhancements and DTS.. Me and a friend Leon were talking about what the heck ETL was... i reckoned it was more like eXtensible Transformation Language... not even close... rather it stands for Extract, Transform and Load. More on ETL here

some links refer to beta 1 documentation.. unfortunately.. you will need to check the books online for that. That not all... the next version of MSDE.. its called SQL Express now and its still free is available for download ... you can also get you hands on books online.. check this page