Nuwan Online - Nuwan Weerasinghe’s Web Log

Microsoft has launched a touch screen computer which could be used as a table. This is meant to improve customer interaction mainly in a self service scenario in places such as stores, hotels, casinos etc.

Say for instance, i purchase a bottle of wine from a store (whcih is bar coded) and i put it on this table, and the table would proceed to tell all information such as where the wine originates from, other similar wines, wine growing region, and other food items to accompany the wine etc.

Microsoft Call this ‘Microsoft Surface’ . The device is a 30 inch display (surface) which comes with some basic applications. But its programmable. One such unit right now costs around 10,000$.

More Info at

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

http://www.selfserviceworld.com/article.php?id=17997

During the last couple of weeks, I was involved in some work which in my opinion is highly interesting providing me with a wealth of knowledge and opportunity. Basically, it was about proposing Software solutions for Client RFPs. Having to put forward solutions in different business domains with varying complexities was challenging. Yet again i find myself in a similar situation and yet another new domain with quite complex business requirements.

So how do we go about proposing a solution for such a project? As a Microsoft Gold Certified Company we are always on the look out for better ways of doing things and naturally i started looking at Microsoft solutions to tackle the various problems head on. But yet again there is a problem! Microsoft being the company it is has a myriad of products to suit quite different technology scenarios!

So how do i know which products to look for! and more importantly what were the ROI on those products? How they were typically pieced together to provide the final enterprise solution? Are’nt these valuable questions!

I doubt even a Seasoned Software Architect would know all these various Microsoft Products at his/her disposal, and how they were applied across various domains successfully!

So if there is a typical one stop shop to get this information from! Bingo!!!!!

Microsoft Case studies is a must for anyone who is looking for better information on Microsoft Products and their usage. These are very well written summaries of Past Experinces from the global Microsoft Partner Community on Solutioning their client requirements using Microsoft Products.

Please visit here for over 300 case studies. This is a better tool to search for the same information according to various criteria. These are Canadian Case studies, I’m looking for other country case studies as well, which if found will be posted here.

It seems as Microsoft is planning to release the source code for the .NET framework libraries pretty soon. This is in more detail.

I have taken the same heading of the Article to my blog post as well. I dont know how much you’ll agree with this. Nevertheless this is an interesting reading.

I was afraid at the beginning that my Short stint at a Consultancy would have had a negative impact on my technology skills. But thank god it has not happened as I’m still eager and hungry to go after anything new or interesting to learn. Naturally I’m a good reader and when a requirement comes for me to grab a new idea i never looked back.

So these days, I’m reading a good book by Ingo Rammer at Thinkteckture on .NET Remoting, and another book is yet to be started on Advanced Threading. Both these are on the Job Requirements at Zone24x7. Apart from that I got involved in some Unit Testing work as well which requires me to learn more on NMock. So has some reading to be done in there as well. I think It would be very difficult to move forward in Unit Testing some of our Mobile Applications without a proper understanding on Mock Object Utilization as the code is heavilly interacting with other classes. So testing in Isolation is never gonna be easy here.

Since I have explained my on the job reading/study assignments let me tell you what I read/study for sheer enthusiasm. First I want to get deeper into the .NET Micro Framework which so far is an ellusive target due to lack of reading/study material. So my random playing with the Micro Framework SDK is not currently taking me anywhere. But I’m happy to continue until such time I come across a book.Then I want to know more about Workflows. There should be a good reason for Microsoft to go bang bang with WWF, WCF(Indigo) and WPF and I need to find why. These are part of Vista and .NET Framework 3.0 as well. So I have an Idea to deep dive into WWF and see for myself and I have the book with me. Knowing the future directions in my industry is a must and when a company like Microsoft pours millions into something, it’s worth noticing that.

So here I am. I have got a hell of a lot to do and before everything I need to manage my time. But I truly enjoy what I’m doing and as hungry as ever.

This weekend I was all busy spending some quality time digging into NUnit Unit Test framework. My requirement was to write some Unit tests for a Windows CF version 1.0 application. After getting a fair bit of an understanding about the Assertions, and Attributes, I wrote some simple Test Cases and compiled. I got some disturbing compile time errors regarding mscorlib.dll. The VS Compilor was indicating some dll version issue. I tried in vain, and yesterday morning decided to remove the reference NUnit.Framework which I have added to my Project reference.

Hey…………Suddenly the application compiled successfully. I took a step back and saw this in the NUnit documentation.

So there it is. NUnit currently does not support Unit Testing on Windows Compact Framework. Also As Jamie Cansdale has replied to an inquiry which I made, neither TestDriven.NET support this. My Applications are on CF Version 1.0. So cannot take advantage of Orcas I guess.

With my new job I have the opportunity to try out certain things which were never really a part of my work before. I’m getting involved in Windows Mobile development for Devices such as MC 3090 and also in the process in using SQL Server 2005. Apart from these major involvements, I will also have to try VB.NET (I am a C# guy who loves curly brackets and semicolons), .NET Remoting, Windows Services etc.

So. Its quite a lot to learn with less time. After all, ASP.NET is not the end of the world.

GoogleDec21998, originally uploaded by Nuwan Weerasinghe.

Yesterday was Google’s 8th bithday.8 years is a short period of time for any other company, but IT. Information technology is such a rapid industry that innovations are sometimes daily if not weekly. So, it’s quite understandable that 8 years is a long time. what’s more interesting is to see the growth of google from a ‘Search Provider’ to an ‘Industry Innovator’.Microsoft and Bill Gates provides ample proof to this when they accept that Google is a ‘tough competitor’ for them. Google has the right vision when their efforts are predominantly on the internet.
The platform of choice for the next two decades atleast would be the NET. There fore its quite natural for Microsoft which is also a great company, to feel the heat at the market place with it’s dominance on the ‘traditional’ desktop.

Microsoft is more or less forced to accept this new technological reality, that in the ever increasing Cyberspace little matters whether you are on Windows or Linux. In this internet age Google played a huge role in making the platform redundant. Google forced this issue to such an extent that Microsoft is now almost ‘LIVE’……………

It is an Enthralling battle between these two IT heavy weights and we are witnessing and reaping the benefits of it.

I will also post this screen shot of Google search as seen on December 1998 when it was a beta.

We have decided to start our development work with Visual Studio 2005 for the new project. I had to make some changes to my computer first. I had Windows XP SP1 and finally decided to just update it with SP2 even though I have previously experinced that my machine got slowed down after this update. Any way I have no choice but to go with it.
Upgrading with SP2 was quite time consuming and took me more than 1 hr.

I installed VS 2005 to my E drive since I also have my VS 2003 in another drive. I’m not sure whether this will have any problem in the future. Upto now all my projects done in VS2003 are working smoothly.
I must admit that the VS2005 setup was smooth, but I did not install MSDN for VS2005 due to lack of disk space.
We will be start development on this new platform from next week and we will introduce ATLAS controls into our application.

Should be some very interesting weeks ahead……………………………………………………………………….

I once remember having a link to the number of Certified Professional from Microsoft, but I lost it. Today I was browsing through old posts of Merill Fernando’s (MVP) blog and I finally found the missing link.

This is the link

As a MCSD in .NET I’m one of 20582 globally.

As always I would like to thank my Parents, My Friends, My boss Yaseer and Dammika for all the help they have rendered which enabled me to achieve this feat. Thank you so much……………………………………………