When will Tech Spending Revive?

John Hagel in his latest blog writes:

...technology companies that move now to reposition their sales and marketing efforts will reap the near-term benefit of increasing sales. ...They will be far more credible when they present their vision for the future direction of technology because they will already have demonstrated their understanding and commitment to addressing the needs of their customers today. Most importantly, these few early moving technology vendors may in fact help to catalyze a broader revival of technology spending.

Adding Balloon Windows to a .NET Application

Introduction to the BalloonWindow class which allows .NET applications to implement balloon windows similar to what is available in Windows XP. Complete customization allows both the appearence and shape to be configured as well as projecting an alpha-blended shadow.

HumBlog

HumBlog, that's "We Blog" in Hindi language. That's the name of the Indian Blog Portal that Nilesh and gang are coming out with. Here's the cool layout that Nilesh created for this portal. Now Vikas does his turn and comes out with this beautiful collage. Vikas already has a blog portal which is quite underused at this point of time but of late he has done few improvements to the same, like XML-RPC server called Remocon, Ping feature to this server which in turns pings Weblogs.com and the latest one being Reverse ping from Weblogs.com. This is all good stuff.

First Blog Anniversary

It's one year since we started Blogging. In this one year we blogged about a lot of things with a concentration on .Net/Web Services/mostly techie stuff. It has been a great experience. Not only did we get to read and learn from other blogs, we also made some really great online friends. A year ago Kottke, Glish, Keep Trying, Scripting News were our favourite blogs. Of these Scripting News remains today with many other added (See the blogroll). Kiruba Shankar's blog was the first Indian blog we remember coming across. He is still churning great blogs.

Year 2002 was the year of weblogs, the year when blogging caught the eyes of mainstream press and we are happy that we became a part of this revolution. Although we would have liked to blog every single day of the year but somehow we don't have Wineristic skills. We will continue blogging next year. Here's looking forward to the next several years of blogging and having you all here with us. Cheers !!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays !!

Monica and Deepak

Top Ten Trends in 2003

The Red Herring Magazine is out with the forecast of the top ten trends for the next year. The list includes Wireless, Hardware/Software, Venture Capital, Semiconductors, Nanotechnology, Financial Reporting, Telecommunications, Biotechnology, Broadcasting and Broadband. I think one of the trends missing from this list is Outsourcing. 2002 was a big year for Outsourcing and the need to cut operating costs and improve the bottom line will even be stronger in 2003. We should see a steady stream of big companies opting for Offshore Outsourcing.

On a lighter note, what Top ten list is complete without "Web Services"...:)

Time's Persons of the year 2002

Time's Persons of the year 2002 were announced today and they are the The Whistle-Blowers trio: Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom, Coleen Rowley of FBI and Sherron Watkins of Enron. Read the complete story. One question though, Is it not possible some year that Time does not declare Person(s) of the Year.

Dive into RSS

XML.com is rocking with good articles. Here's another one, What is RSS? by Mark Pilgrim.

XML.com: From XML-RPC to SOAP: A Migration Guide

Good article but am not sure about the following statement:

The time has come for the XML-RPC community to move forward; the time has come to migrate to SOAP, achieving interoperability across both systems.

VBTV, Episode 3—Building Web Applications with Visual Basic .NET

See how easy it is to develop Web applications in Visual Basic .NET as guests Susan Chory and Andres Sanabria, resident experts in Web application development, discuss key features in Web Forms targeted at VB developers.

User Agent Accessibility Guidelines

W3C released User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 as a W3C recommendation. The guidelines represent agreement among developers and the disability community on accessibility features needed in browsers and multimedia players used to access the Web.

At the Tomb of the IUnknown Interface [ via Sam Gentile's Weblog ]

Verity Stob says Bye-Bye to COM in this as usual great article. British Programing Humor at its best.

Sam is singing "Bye Bye Miss American Pie". Well, I am not sure if I can sing that song or not. I am still coding ASP based applications and most of the times COM/COM+ is what constitutes the middleware. There's some more time for me to evolve doing VB.Net/ASP.Net. But yes, I've started humming the chorus part:

So, bye-bye, Miss American Pie

     drove my chevy to the levee

but the levee was dry,

     and them good old boys were 

drinkin' whiskey and rye

     singin' this'll be the day that I die,

this'll be the day that I die.

High-Tech Hieroglyphics

Ever wondered what those icons and signs means at the back of your electronics gadgetry. To find out, read this Business 2.0 article.

Froogle Google [ via marketingfix]

Froogle, another cool service from Google.

Froogle is a new service from Google that makes it easy to find information about products for sale online. By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google's search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase.

Features I liked: You can search by price, by price range and the results show images of the products along with the the $ values(most of the times). And if you wonder what kind of name Froogle is, here's the answer.

Google Labs has some more new experiments [ via Kiruba.com - Weblog of Kiruba Shankar]

The Google Labs has two new experiments, Google Viewer and Google WebQuotes. While I don't quite understand the relevance and usefulness of the WebQuotes, Google Viewer can be useful if you have lots of time to watch slideshow and don't want to use keyboard. Google Viewer does not use the stylesheets of the original site, so the results may not be exactly what you will see when you go to that site by clicking the link. Not quite for me, nice toys for some.

Lots of Good Stuff at MSDN

Web Services Enhancements 1.0 for Microsoft .NET (WSE) is released. This provides advanced Web services functionality for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Microsoft .NET Framework developers to support the latest Web services capabilities. Previously known as Web Services Development Kit Technology Preview (WSDK), this version allows Enterprise ready applications to be developed quickly with the support of security features such as digital signature and encryption, message routing capabilities, and the ability to include message attachments that are not serialized into XML. Functionality is based on the WS-Security, WS-Routing, WS-Attachments and DIME specifications.

Also a new article on What's New for "Office 11" Developers?, Some salient features: XML as Native File Format, Support for XML Schemas, and the biggest one, Visual Studios Tools. Visual Studio.Net 2003 will allow developers to write code for Office 11. See this animation preview to understand what I am writing.

Last, a guide on debugging .Net Applications in guess what, Production Environment. One good thing about these Patterns and Practices documents is that they are also available in PDF form to be downloaded.

Jakob Nielsen: In the Future, We'll All Be Harry Potter

In his latest Alertbox article, Jakob writes:

Much of the Harry Potter books' charm comes from the quirky magic objects that surround Harry and his friends. Rather than being solid and static, these objects embody initiative and activity. This is precisely the shift we'll experience as computational power moves beyond the desktop into everyday objects.

Then he is quick to point out the wicked wizards....:)

Every page that doesn't conform to expected behavior and design conventions undermines users' ability to build a conceptual model of the Web, and thus reduces their ability to use other sites with ease, confidence, and pleasure. Designers who inflict poor usability on the world and its Muggles are wicked wizards indeed.

COM Interop

Sam Gentile has a very good COM Interop presentation at his website. One thing I noticed, Sam mentions three ways to create the RCW, but I could not find any example of using the System.Runtime.InteropServices.TypeLibConverter class to do the same. I understand that the VS.NET and TlbImp.exe use this class internally but are there any examples. So, Sam this could be one area where we will like to see an article coming from you...:)

Evolving Languages

Really good stuff on the few choices for Language evolutions. The languages being discussed are VB.Net, MC++ and C#. Read the threads here, here and here.

IBM to buy Rational Software

Reuter reports:

International Business Machines Corp. on Friday said it would buy Rational Software Corp. for about $2.1 billion, expanding IBM's role in the market for tools companies use to make customized software.

Interesting.

Couldn't help Linking to it [ via Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog ]

Three Related Links...:)

News.com Vision Series

In this five-day report, 20 top entrepreneurs and researchers share their views on the future of some of the most rapidly evolving industries: security, Web services, open source, personal technology and wireless communications.

Interesting read if you have time.

Java Blogs

java.blogs - A blog community for blogs which discuss Java regularly. Anybody knows if we have anything similar for .Net blogs.

Little Nybbles of Development Wisdom [via vsbabu.org]

While building and running jGuru for the last three years, Terence Parr documented some thoughts about his experiences running the jGuru site.

In this document, I have tried to remember and distill my hard-fought 3-year experience as I evolved into a programmer capable of building a commercial product, http://www.jguru.com. Naturally this is a not complete list of programming advice, but rather what I learned on this project.

A very relevant document for anyone in the IT/Software business either coding or managing.