.NET Framework in an interactive manner.

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STUDENTS! Get a FREE Microsoft Certification Exam.

STUDENTS! Get a FREE Microsoft Certification Exam–and a head start on your IT career.

While supplies last!

These days, the job market can be a tough ride—but it doesn’t have to be. Boost your resume by getting Microsoft Certified. A Microsoft Certification can help validate your technical skills and show hiring managers you have the right stuff for the job. And right now, you can get a voucher code for a FREE Microsoft Certification Exam.

In today’s competitive job market, it can be the difference between looking for a job and landing a job. Hear it from other students: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwLFhC-R4lI

Like new jobs, these codes are in limited supply so don’t wait!

Please select “Get Key” above to get your voucher code, then follow the steps below to redeem it.

Voucher Redemption Instructions

Please note that each voucher code can only be redeemed once. Once the code has been redeemed, it cannot be used again.

Once you have your free exam code, follow the instructions below on how to redeem it:

• 
  
• Go to the following website: http://prometric.com/microsoft
• Click on the “Start” icon located in the “Get Started” section
• Select “Schedule an Appointment”
• Select your Country and State (if applicable)
• Click Next
• Next to Client, select Microsoft
• Next to Program, select Microsoft (072)
• Click Next
• Please read the page titled Microsoft Certified Exam Provider
• Click Next
• Select the exam number and the exam language for the exam you would like to take
• Click Next
• Select the test center location where you would like to take the exam by clicking on Schedule an Appointment next to the location that is nearest you
• When the next page appears you have the option of either logging in, if you have been to the site before or you can register as a new user
• NOTE if you are a new user – PLEASE enter a VALID EMAIL ADDRESS.
• All information for the Microsoft Certification Program will be sent via email and without a valid email address, you will not receive access to the MCP Secure site or be able to order your Welcome Kit when you achieve your certification
• Once you are logged in, you will then be able to select a date and time for your appointment, select a date and time
• Click Next
• Under Payment Information in the box that states Promotion Code or Voucher click Yes
• Next to Discount Type select Voucher Number
• Next to Voucher Number / Promotion Code – enter the code number you have been provided
• Click Validate – if the voucher has not been used you will be automatically directed back to the Payment Information Page
• Validate your email address and click on the radio button I agree (as long as you agree to the terms of the privacy notice)
• Click Commit Registration
• A Confirmation Page will come up, please print this page for your records and ensure you have noted the date and time for your exam

When you go to the testing center to take your exam, you must have valid student identification with a photograph. You will not be allowed to take your exam without student identification with photo.

If you encounter any problems during registration, please contact Prometric through their online webform at http://www.prometric.com/testtakers/contactus/Email.htm. Alternatively, you can also call their Regional Contact Center by selecting the appropriate location on http://www.prometric.com/Microsoft/default.htm#.

IMPORTANT:

Your code is for one Microsoft Certification exam.

This offer is only applicable to students, and is worldwide (offer not valid in China and India).

Students must have a valid student identification card with photo in order to take the exam. Students without a valid student ID card will have to pay full professional price for the exam.

You must use the code and take your exam by June 30, 2011

Good luck on your exam!

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Finally Silverlight 5 Beta Is Available.

Silverlight 5 continues the pace of rapid innovation, building on Silverlight 4's capabilities in the areas of rich applications and premium media experiences. With over 40 new features, the Silverlight 5 beta highlights dramatic video quality and performance improvements, as well as new capabilities that improve developer productivity

proved media support and rich UI capabilities:

Hardware Decode and presentation of H.264 improve performance for lower-power devices to render high-definition video using GPU support.

TrickPlay allows video to be played at different speeds and supports fast-forward and rewind. At up to twice the speed, audio pitch correction allows users to watch videos while preserving a

normal audio pitch.

Improved power awareness prevents the screen saver from being shown while watching video and allows the computer to sleep when video is not active.

Remote-control support allows users to control media playback.

Digital rights management advancements allow seamless switching between DRM media sources.

Building next-generation business applications:

Networking and Windows Communication Foundation enhancements:

Silverlight 5 performance improvements include:

Graphics improvements:

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) accelerated 3-D application programming interface (API) provides rich graphics on the Web for building advanced data visualizations and rich user experience (UI).

Immediate mode graphics API allows direct rendering to the GPU.

Hardware acceleration is enabled in windowless mode with Internet Explorer 9.

Silverlight 5 extends features of the ‘Trusted Application’ model to the browser for the first time. These features, when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate, mean users won’t need to leave the browser to perform complex tasks:

Host HTML content as a Web browser control within the Silverlight application. HTML pages, such as help content or e-mail, can be integrated within the application.

Read and write files to the user’s My Documents folder, making it easier to find media files or create local copies of reports.

Additional Silverlight 5 Features Included in this Beta

• Hardware video decode for H.264 playback.
• Multi‐core background JIT support for improved startup performance.
• ComboBox type ahead with text searching.
• Full keyboard support in full‐screen for trusted in‐browser applications, enables richer kiosk and
• media viewing applications in‐browser.
• Default filename in SaveFileDialog – Specify a default filename when you launch the SaveFileDialog.
• Unrestricted filesystem access – trusted applications can Read write to files in any directory on
• the filesystem.
• Improved Graphics stack – The graphics stack has been re‐architected to bring over
• improvements from WP7, such as Independent Animations.
• Performance optimizations –
• XAML Parser performance optimizations.
• Network Latency optimizations. Text layout performance improvements.
• Hardware acceleration is enabled in windowless mode with Internet Explorer 9.Silverlight 5 Features not included in this Beta
• The Beta is a step towards the final release of Silverlight 5. The full feature set planned for Silverlight 5
• was announced at the Firestarter event in December 2011 and also includes the following features not
• shipped in this Beta:
• Support for Postscript vector printing enables users to create reports and documents, including
• the ability to create a virtual print view different from what is shown on the screen.
• Improved power awareness prevents the screen saver from being shown while watching video and allows the computer to sleep when video is not active.
• Remote control support, allowing users to control media playback
• DRM advancements that allow seamless switching between DRM media sources.
• Enhanced OpenType support.
• Fluid user interface enables smoother animation within the UI. Inter‐Layout Transitions allow
• developers to specify animations to apply when elements are added, removed or re‐ordered
• within a layout. This provides smoother user experiences when, for example, items are inserted
• into a list.
• Text clarity is improved with Pixel Snapping.
• The DataContextChanged event is being introduced.
• WS‐Trust support: Security Assertion Markup Language authentication token.
• 64 bit support
• COM Interop for trusted applications running in‐browser.
• Calling unmanaged code using P/Invoke from trusted applications in and out of browser.
• The Pivot viewer control enables a visual way to rapidly sort through large collections of
• graphical data, for example a catalog of movies represented by images of dvd covers, using
• intuitive transitions to show the effects of filters on the result set

Microsoft DreamSpark Yatra - A Passage to Patna: Breaking New Ground in Bihar.

Microsoft Azure for Dummies – or for Smarties?

What is Microsoft Azure ?

I'm going to attempt to explain Microsoft Azure in "normal Web person" language.  Like many of you, I am more familiar with Linux/open source type solutions, and like many of you, my first forays into cloud computing have been with Amazon Web Services.  It can often be hard for people not steeped in Redmondese to understand exactly what the heck they're talking about when Microsoft people try to explain their offerings.  (I remember a time some years ago I was trying to get a guy to explain some new Microsoft data access thing with the usual three letter acronym name.  I asked, "Is it a library?  A language?  A protocol?  A daemon?  Branding?  What exactly is this thing you're trying to get me to uptake?"  The reply was invariably "It's an innovative new way to access data!"  Sigh.  I never did get an answer and concluded "Never mind.")

Microsoft has released their new cloud offering, Azure.  Our company is a close Microsoft partner since we use a lot of their technologies in developing our company's desktop software products, so as "cloud guy" I've gotten some in depth briefings and even went to PDC this year to learn more (some of my friends who have known me over the course of my 15 years of UNIX administration were horrified).  "Cloud computing" is an overloaded enough term that it's not highly descriptive and it took a while to cut through the explanations to understand what Azure really is.  Let me break it down for you and explain the deal.

Point of Comparison: Amazon (IaaS)

In Amazon EC2, as hopefully everyone knows by now, you are basically given entire dynamically-provisioned, hourly-billed virtual machines that you load OSes on and install software and all that.  "Like servers, but somewhere out in the ether."  Those kinds of cloud offerings (e.g. Amazon, Rackspace, most of them really) are called Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS).  You're responsible for everything you normally would be, except for the data center work.  Azure is not an IaaS offering but still bears a lot of similarities to Amazon; I'll get into details later.

Point of Comparison: Google App Engine (PaaS)

Take Google's App Engine as another point of comparison.  There, you just upload your Python or Java application to their portal and "it runs on the Web."  You don't have access to the server or OS or disk or anything.  And it "magically" scales for you.  This approach is called Platform as a Service (PaaS).   They provide the full platform stack, you only provide the end application.  On the one hand, you don't have to mess with OS level stuff - if you are just a Java programmer, you don't have to know a single UNIX (or Windows) command to transition your app from "But it works in Eclipse!" to running on a Web server on the Internet.  On the other hand, that comes with a lot of limitations that the PaaS providers have to establish to make everything play together nicely.  One of our early App Engine experiences was sad - one of our developers wrote a Java app that used a free XML library to parse some XML.  Well, that library had functionality in it (that we weren't using) that could write XML to disk.  You can't write to disk in App Engine, so its response was to disallow the entire library.  The app didn't work and had to be heavily rewritten.  So it's pretty good for code that you are writing EVERY SINGLE LINE OF YOURSELF.  Azure isn't quite as restrictive as App Engine, but it has some of that flavor.

Azure's Model

Windows Azure falls between the two.  First of all, Azure is a real "hosted cloud" like Amazon Web Services, like most of us really think about when we think cloud computing; it's not one of these on premise things that companies are branding as "cloud" just for kicks. That's important to say because it seems like nowadays the larger the company, the more they are deliberately diluting the term "cloud" to stick their products under its aegis.  Microsoft isn't doing that, this is a "cloud offering" in the classical (where classical means 2008, I guess) sense.

However, in a number of important ways it's not like Amazon.  I'd definitely classify it as a PaaS offering.  You upload your code to "Roles" which are basically containers that run your application in a Windows 2008(ish) environment.  (There are two types - a "Web role" has a stripped down IIS provided on it, a "Worker role" doesn't - the only real difference between the two.)  You do not have raw OS access, and cannot do things like write to the registry.  But, it is less restrictive than App Engine.  You can bundle up other stuff to run in Azure - even runJava apps using Apache Tomcat.  You have to be able to install whatever you want to run "xcopy only" - in other words, no fancy installers, it needs to be something you could just copy the files to a Windows PC, without administrative privilege, and run a command from the command line and have it work.  Luckily, Tomcat/Java fits that description. They have helper packs to facilitate doing this with Tomcat, memcached, and Apache/PHP/MediaWiki.  At PDC they demoed Domino's Pizza running their Java order app on it and a WordPress blog running on it.  So it's not only for .NET programmers.  Managed code is easier to deploy, but you can deploy and run about anything that fits the "copy and run command line" model.

I find this approach a little ironic actually.  It's been a lot easier for us to get the Java and open source (well, the ones with Windows ports) parts of our infrastructure running on Azure than Windows parts!  Everybody provides Windows stuff with an installer, of course, and you can't run installers on Azure.  Anyway, in its core computing model it's like Google App Engine - it's more flexible than that (g00d) but it doesn't do automatic scaling (bad).  If it did autoscaling I'd be willing to say "It's better than App Engine in every way."

In other ways, it's a lot like Amazon.  They offer a variety of storage options - blobs (like S3), tables (like mySQL), queues (like SQS), drives (like EBS).  They have an integral CDN.  They do hourly billing.  Pricing is pretty similar to Amazon - it's hard to totally equate apples to apples, but Azure compute is $0.12/hr and an Amazon small Windows image compute is $0.12/hr (Coincidence?  I think not.).  And you have to figure out scaling and provisioning yourself on Amazon too - or pay a lot of scratch to one of the provisioning companies like RightScale.

What's Unique and Different

Well, the largest thing that I've already mentioned is the PaaS approach.  If you need OS level access, you're out of luck;  if you don't want to have to mess with OS management, you're in luck!  So to the first order of magnitude, you can think of Azure as "like Amazon Web Services, but the compute uses more of a Google App Engine model."

But wait, there's more!

One of the biggest things that Azure brings to the table is that, using Visual Studio, you can run a local Azure "fabric" on your PC, which means you can develop, test, and run cloud apps locally without having to upload to the cloud and incur usage charges.  This is HUGE.  One of the biggest pains about programming for Amazon, for instance, is that if you want to exercise any of their APIs, you have to do it "up there."  Also, you can't move images back and forth between Amazon and on premise.  Now, there are efforts like EUCALYPTUS that try to overcome some of this problem but in the end you pretty much just have to throw in the towel and do all dev and test up in the cloud.  Amazon and Eclipse (and maybe Xen) - get together and make it happen!!!!

Here's something else interesting.  In a move that seems more like a decision from a typical cranky cult-of-personality open source project, they have decided that proper Web apps need to be asynchronous and message-driven, and by God that's what you're going to do.  Their load balancers won't do sticky sessions (only round robin) and time out all connections between all tiers after 60 seconds without exception.  If you need more than that, tough - rewrite your app to use a multi-tier message queue/event listener model.  Now on the one hand, it's hard for me to disagree with that - I've been sweating our developers, telling them that's the correct best-practice model for scalability on the Web.  But again you're faced with the "Well what if I'm using some preexisting software and that's not how it's architected?" problem.  This is the typical PaaS pattern of "it's great, if you're writing every line of code yourself."

In many ways, Azure is meant to be very developer friendly.  In a lot of ways that's good.  As a system admin, however, I wince every time they go on about "You can deploy your app to Azure just by right clicking in Visual Studio!!!"  Of course, that's not how anyone with a responsibly controlled production environment would do it, but it certainly does make for fast easy adoption in development.   The curve for a developer who is "just" a C++/Java/.NET/whatever wrangler to get up and going on an IaaS solution like Amazon is pretty large comparatively; here, it's "go sign up for an account and then click to deploy from your IDE, and voila it's running on the Intertubes."  So it's a qualified good - it puts more pressure on you as an ops person to go get the developers to understand why they need to utilize your services.  (In a traditional server environment, they have to go through you to get their code deployed.)  Often, for good or ill, we use the release process as a touchstone to also engage developers on other aspects of their code that need to be systems engineered better.

Now, that's my view of the major differences.  I think the usual Azure sales pitch would say something different - I've forgotten two of their huge differentiators, their service bus and access control components.  They are branded under the name "AppFabric," which as usual is a name Microsoft is also using for something else completely different (a new true app server for Windows Server, including projects formerly code named Dublin and Velocity - think of it as a real WebLogic/WebSphere type app server plus memcache.)

Their service bus is an ESB.  As alluded to above, you're going to want to use it to do messaging.   You can also use Azure Queues, which is a little confusing because the ESB is also a message queue - I'm not clear on their intended differentiation really.  You can of course just load up an ESB yourself in any other IaaS cloud solution too, so if you really want one you could do e.g. Apache ServiceMix hosted on Amazon.  But, they are managing this one for you which is a plus.  You will need to use it to do many of the common things you'd want to do.

Their access control - is a mess.  Sorry, Microsoft guys.  The whole rest of the thing, I've managed to cut through the "Microsoft acronyms versus the rest of the world's terms and definitions" factor, but not here.   "You see, you use ACS's WIF STS to generate a SWT," says our Microsoft rep with a straight face.   They seem to be excited that it will use people's Microsoft Live IDs, so if you want people to have logins to your site and you don't want to manage any of that, it is probably nice.  It takes SAML tokens too, I think, though I'm not sure if the caveats around that end up equating to "Well, not really."  Anyway, their explanations have been incoherent so far and I'm not smelling anything I'm really interested in behind it.  But there's nothing to prevent you from just using LDAP and your own Internet SSO/federation solution.  I don't count this against Microsoft because no one else provides anything like this, so even if I ignore the Azure one it doesn't put it behind any other solution.

The Future

Microsoft has said they plan to add on some kind of VM/IaaS offering eventually because of the demand.  For us, the PaaS approach is a bit of a drawback - we want to do all kinds of things like "virus scan uploaded files," "run a good load balancer," "run an LDAP server", and other things that basically require more full OS access.  I think we may have an LDAP direction with the all-Java OpenDS, but it's a pain point in general.

I think a lot of their decisions that are a short term pain in the ass (no installs, no synchronous) are actually good in the long term.  If all developers knew how to develop async and did it by default, and if all software vendors, even Windows based ones, provided their product in a form that could just be "copy and run without admin privs" to install, the world would be a better place.  That's interesting in that "Sure it's hard to use now but it'll make the world better eventually" is usually heard from the other side of the aisle.

Conclusion

Azure's a pretty legit offering!  And I'm very impressed by their velocity.  I think it's fair to say that overall Azure isn't quite as good as Amazon except for specific use cases (you're writing it all in .NET by hand in Visual Studio) - but no one else is as good as Amazon either (believe me, I evaluated them) and Amazon has years of head start; Azure is brand new but already at about 80%! That puts them into the top 5 out of the gate.

Without an IaaS component, you still can't do everything under the sun in Azure.  But if you're not depending on much in the way of big third party software chunks, it's feasible; if you're doing .NET programming, it's very compelling.

Do note that I haven't focused too much on the attributes and limitations of cloud computing in general here - that's another topic - this article is meant to compare and contrast Azure to other cloud offerings so that people can understand its architecture.

I hope that was clear.  Feel free and ask questions in the comments and I'll try to clarify!

Basics of C# / .NET.

I am discussing about the Basics of C# & .NET. All the Namespaces which contain the basic libraries form the foundation of .NET Framework.
A Namespace in Microsoft .Net is like containers of objects. They may contain unions, classes, structures, interfaces, enumerators and delegates. Main goal of using namespace in .Net is for creating a hierarchical organization of program. In this case a developer does not need to worry about the naming conflicts of classes, functions, variables etc., inside a project.
Some of the important Namespaces which we discussed about were

System

This namespace include the core needs for programming. It includes base types like String, DateTime, Boolean, and so forth, support for environments such as the console, math functions, and base classes for attributes, exceptions, and arrays.

System.Collections

Defines many common containers or collections used in programming, such as lists, queues, stacks, hashtables, and dictionaries. It includes support for generics.

System.IO

Allows you to read from and write to different streams, such as files or other data streams. Also provides a connection to the file system.

System.Net

Provides an interface “for many of the protocols used on networks today”, such as HTTP, FTP, and SMTP. Secure communication is supported by protocols such as SSL.

System.Data

This namespace represents the ADO.NET architecture, which is a set of computer software components that can be used by programmers to access data and data services.
We also discussed about the fundamental types included in the .NET Framework. I am embedding a presentation here

Visual Studio 2010 – /* Life Runs at Code */.

Visual Studio 2010

Since then I had started working on Visual Studio 2008 which felt like a pretty decent IDE for developing applications. In the end of last year I had been chosen as a Microsoft Student Partner & from that intuitively I am having inclination towards Microsoft products.
Announcement of Visual Studio 2010 was an exciting news for me because I am a regular user of Visual Studio for coding web based & desktop based applications. Recently as the VS2010 download came on MSDN, I have downloaded it and started using it.

Seriously telling you guys I have been in Love with the great User Interface of this latest version of VS. I am having a very smooth and enchanting experience writing binaries for my customer’s applications.
Some other exciting features in Visual Studio 2010 are

Visual Studio 2010 IDE and .NET Framework 4.0

• Call Hierarchy of methods
• A New Quick Search
• Multi-targeting more accurate
• Parallel Programming and Debugging
• XSLT Profiling and Debugging
• The XSD Designer

New ASP.NET features

• Static IDs for ASP.NET Controls
• The Chart control
• Web.config transformation

New VB.NET features

• Auto Implemented Properties for VB.NET
• Collection Initializers
• Implicit Line Continuations
• Statements in Lambda Expressions

New C# features

• Dynamic Types
• Optional parameters
• Named and Optional Arguments

For more details about VS 2010 do visit
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd831853(v=VS.100).aspx

Kinect for Windows SDK beta.

Com­ing later this spring, the Kinect for Win­dows SDK is a pro­gram­ming toolkit that will enable researchers and enthu­si­asts easy access to the capa­bil­i­ties offered by the Microsoft Kinect device con­nected to com­put­ers run­ning Microsoft Win­dows 7.

With this SDK, you’ll be able to take advan­tage of:

• The lat­est advances in audio pro­cess­ing, which include a four-element micro­phone array with sophis­ti­cated acoustic noise and echo can­cel­la­tion for crys­tal clear audio.
• Sound source local­iza­tion for beam­form­ing, which enables the deter­mi­na­tion of a sound’s spa­tial loca­tion, enhanc­ing reli­a­bil­ity when inte­grated with the Microsoft speech recog­ni­tion API.
• Depth data, which pro­vides the dis­tance of an object from the Kinect cam­era, as well as the raw audio and image data, which together open up oppor­tu­ni­ties for cre­at­ing richer nat­ural user inter­face experiences.
• Highly per­for­mant and robust skele­tal track­ing capa­bil­i­ties for deter­min­ing the body posi­tions of one or two per­sons mov­ing within the Kinect field of view.
• Doc­u­men­ta­tion for the APIs and a descrip­tion of the SDK architecture.
• Sam­ple code that demon­strates how to use the func­tion­al­ity in the SDK.
• This SDK is intended for non-commercial use to enable exper­i­men­ta­tion in the world of nat­ural user inter­face expe­ri­ences, with new state-of-the-art fea­tures planned for future releases that will con­tinue to pro­vide new ways to experiment.

Source — http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/

Free 5GB Online storage Space from Amazon — Amazon Cloud Drive.

Ama­zon offers 5Gb of free online Cloud stor­age Space for every one. You can use this drive a a win­dows drive too.

Ama­zon Cloud Drive is your hard drive in the cloud. Store your music, videos, pho­tos, and doc­u­ments on Amazon’s secure servers. All you need is a web browser to upload, down­load, and access your files from any computer.

Fea­tures

• 5 GB of free online storage
• Unlim­ited, secure access from any computer
• Songs pur­chased from Ama­zon MP3 are stored in your Cloud Drive for free

You can pur­chase addi­tional space if you want, see the price below

Read more and get a 5gb online cloud space for free

IE10 Platform Preview 1 now Available for download.

IE10 Plat­form Pre­view 1, avail­able for down­load today is the first step in deliv­er­ing the next wave of progress in native HTML5 sup­port. Web sites and HTML5 run best when they run natively, on a browser opti­mized for the oper­at­ing sys­tem on your device.

Just when you were expect­ing to hear more about IE9 on this open­ing day of Mix ’11, Microsoft will be talk­ing about the IE10 Plat­form Pre­view. IE10 builds on IE9 with sup­port for even more stan­dards like CSS3gra­di­ents, and grid layouts.

In this video Rob Mauceri walks us through some of the new fea­tures ofIE10 includ­ing an exam­ple of flow­ing of con­tent in multi-column layouts.

Be sure to check the links at www.ietestdrive.com andwww.beautyoftheweb.com for more exam­ples of standards-based web tech­nolo­gies that deliver on the promise of standards.

For more details, see the IE Blog post here