Installation took around 45 minutes in my Windows XP SP3/3GB/C2Duo system. The worst part I hated was when the installer asked me to reboot 3 times (once after .NET runtime got installed, the next after Windows Installer 4.5 got installed and one more reboot I don’t remember now for what). Usually I start off these time-consuming installations in the background and do my other stuff (usually E-Mail and PPT!) in the foreground. These constant reboots annoy you because you are forced to get off the thread you are in, you may even not go back to that thread again, trust me. I guess these reboots are probably because of the Windows XP, these may not be applicable on Windows 7.

After the final reboot and the success thing, I clicked on the VS2010 menu entry. First thing I noticed opening VS2010 was the revamped splash screen.

Looks good, but doesn’t show any progress nor any kind of status. This leaves one wondering what is happening in the background and when you will get to see the IDE, especially in a slow machine!

The main workspace window is totally revamped. it is immediately likeable. It certainly makes you feel as if you have more space, somehow, given the same area

Solution Explorer & other tabs are auto-minimized at start. Also, if you notice they give you the floating-window impression since they blend in well with the workspace color palette. This is in line with the max-space-for-development philosophy.

All the windows are totally dockable. Nice thing I found out was you can get the current source window to full screen by just double-clicking on the filename. This is great since this allows me to have multiple code windows open in my 2 monitors, or may be design window in one monitor and the corresponding code window in the other (see the image below).

In VS2008, for extra syntax highlighting + dev help, I rely a lot on Visual AssistX. I haven’t played with VS2010’s intellisense fully yet to determine whether I still need Visual AssistX or can throw that away. Also, the intelli-trace feature looks good, need to try out that too. Will post my follow up notes after a month or so of using the new IDE. Any specific cool feature I should not miss, do let me know.

After installation, I noticed my Windows server 2008 R2 booted in “Windows classic” mode. This was an eye sore, to say the least, after having used Windows 7′s themes. My machine has GeForce 9500GS along with the proper x64 driver. So I know it is capable of doing Aero. But, Windows “Personalization” option was not allowing me to select any Aero theme.

Quick googling showed me that I was not the first person trying to solve this – Here’s the link I used & found very helpful – http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2009/01/09/windows-server-2008-r2-beta-aero-enabled-workstation/. Though I had “Desktop experience” feature installed, my “Themes” service was not enabled.

I set it to “Automatic” and started the service. But, still Windows was not allowing me to set the Aero theme. If you are facing the same issue, remember to reboot at this point — that is after enabling the “Themes” service, do reboot once. Once logged in again, you will be able to switch to Aero!

BTW, its been close to 2 years now since I posted here — was heads down on a project all the time . We did a Wireless Display solution that recently hit the market. Will post more on it soon.

Today Microsoft has made a proposal to buy Yahoo!. All the outstanding stocks sum up to a whooping amount of $4.4bn ($31/share). This is an amazing offer and if the deal goes through, Microsoft will get a good holding to take Google heads on. The news just popped up, I am sure before I hit the bed tonight (IST), the web will be abuzz with this. Couple of things I noted in the initial reports:

IndiaInfoline states:

Microsoft has developed a plan and process that will include the employees of both companies to focus on the integration of the combined business. Microsoft intends to offer significant retention packages to Yahoo! engineers, key leaders and employees across all disciplines.

Hmm…so the headcount reduction Yahoo announced some days back holds good or is it going to increase? Will Microsoft clean out Yahoo’s house…sac all the no ROI projects? Specifically, what is the impact going to be on Yahoo India where most of the work is of sustenance nature (Quote: one of my friends working there)??

Another thing to note is the amount Microsoft is offering – $31/share. Already the prices of Yahoo stocks have gone up by $9.82, after seeing the MS proposal. This brings the price to $29.1. Has Microsoft offered a low price / stock?? I am not sure (my knowledge of how money works is very limited). BTW, you can see the actual letter sent by Microsoft to Yahoo board of directors here.

Interesting things that may happen, if the deal goes through:

• Microsoft will become “Microsoft!“, trying to keep the “Yahoo!” tradition alive
• Finally, you will be able to send messages to Xbox Live from Yahoo!
• Yahoo mail and Hotmail will be merged. More potential users for Hotmail.

The potential beneficiaries will be the Yahoo shareholders – a massive payday for them today

There is a nice method posted by Ed Bott of Zdnet on extending the Vista’s trial period to 120 days (~4 months). I stumbled on this only recently, while seriously contemplating installing Vista ultimate in a Core2 Duo + 965GF combo. Nice trick, if you need more time to become comfortable with Vista before taking the plunge.

Finally Microsoft has owned up to this and has rolled out a replacement program (Note that MS has its own list of Terms and Conditions). Luckily GoW is covered there

Check out this video that shows Xbox360 scratching a disc.

• H.264 video support: Up to 15 Mbps, Baseline, Main, and High (up to level 4.1) Profiles with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.
• Added MPEG-4 Part 2 video support: Up to 8 Mbps, Simple Profile with 2 channel AAC LC and Main Profiles.
• Show folder hierarchy for video and other content played from all devices.
• The screensaver is disabled when playing photos from any source

I am happy they chose to include the folder hierarchy display and disabling screensaver. Those I am sure people would agree, were sorely missed. Now, I can easily play a movie from my movie collection (named xyz part1.avi, xyz part2.avi…) with out searching for individual files. A single “Play” click on the folder containing all these individual files should do the trick!

Another interesting feature (and the topic of this post) is the “Chat with MSN contacts”. Wow! Now, I can chat with my relatives, who don’t own a Xbox, sitting in the living room, with my parents besides me! This is a killer feature, I’d say. I am not sure if this Xbox update supports video chatting with MSN, but if only they do, man…nothing like it! The above picture is the new accessory Microsoft is planning to release this summer. Kinda bulky looking for a controller, but would make chatting painless. We should be able to use the normal USB keyboard too.

I can now finally leave my wife chatting with my in-laws, to go work on that WordPress Chess plugin with out any disturbance

We went through the performance appraisal phase in my company last quarter. As we had come to expect, it was one of the stressful periods, so much that we literally threw a party when 360degree feedbacks were prepared and sent (ok, am just kidding. But, you get the point!). We call this process FOCAL; when I joined 3 years back, I asked one of the managers why the perfomance appraisal was called FOCAL. My luck, that manager was forced to quit in our last round of “leaning”/”increasing efficiency” process, before he got a chance to reply me

FOCAL is more of a ritual for us; focal FAQs and training mails get sent to everyone by November of every year. The newbies are forced to take an half-a-day instructor-led course. Then one fine day, we start getting lots of requests for feedbacks on our peers and stakeholders, we spend 60-70% on filling up all these. Except a few, I have seen most of my colleagues just copy/pasting the content from one feedback to another person’s feedback. Bad, I know, but if you look from their perspective, who would want to be original in their 24th feedback form? After this the managers come in to the focus, they need to collate all the feedbacks on a person, along with that person’s own (check this out for some good points on writing one’s own strenghts/weaknesses) in to one report.The “ritual book” states that the managers need to present this to other peers, convincing everyone that the person under scrutiny deserves something better or gets screwed. Fair enough, right? Wrong! As far as I’veseen, people tend to take shortcuts everywhere, and as Kelvin claimed “there is always thins thing called POLITICS“. The main problem, at least the employess are stating is that nothing is transparent! Most of the times they don’t understand why they got what they got.

The period after focal report delivery is again a “fun” filled phase. Disgruntled employees leave, promoted / well-compensated ones put in more time/effort, new people are brought in and the cycle starts afresh! Does this process need to be replaced? I don’t think so. Does this need to be made fool proof? Oh yeah! Should intel get away with this complex process for something simple, like Microsoft? May be a good idea!!

I know there are couple of other pages like this and this, but at least I don’t believe things are so bad in India.

BDLC covers both web and desktop applications. The best part is, it doesn’t assume any prior programming knowledge. I am pretty sure this is a great resource and is gonna boost the Windows developer base exponentially!

Some interesting topics from BDLC

• Web as a platform. The absolute basics of browsers, HTTP et al
• Kids corner
• RSS reader project
• ASP.NET events and postbacks

I have bookmarked some for my wife to go through, this weekend. I am pretty sure I will be directing her to this site more often from now!!

The premium system doesn’t ship with any game. I was aware of this, even then I didn’t buy any games. First thing – it is pretty costly again – 2500/- per title is kind of expensive for a game. Next thing is, that day I wanted only to check out the interface and if possible connect my PC to the Xbox 360. So, I was not that keen on buying a game that day itself.

The setup woes started the moment I opened the box. Microsoft has “cleverly” decided to ship Xbox360 (from now on, just Xbox) with a 16A plug. What?? Don’t they know that the only places where we use a 16amp socket in India is either in the bathroom or in the kitchen? After a frantic search in the near by electrical shops, I found a 16A extension box – another Rs. 500/- dent in the pocket. Next I noticed that the component cable was missing in the Xbox package. I called up Kempfort and talked to the manager there. Unfortunately he was not aware of what I was asking for. I called up the next day to talk to the MS representative and he said it didn’t come by default but MS had asked them to provide the component cable separately. So, if you are buying Xbox 360 in India and find no component cable, do call up the place where you bought from and ask them. You get a RCA cable free

I used the RCA cable initially and then switched immediately to the component cable to test out my HD LCD TV (R71b). The Xbox user interface was smooth, check out the screen shots here. I setup a profile quickly and started exploring the menu options. In 720p, it was simply a visual treat switching using this interface!

I didn’t buy the wireless bridge for Xbox, so I was stuck with connecting a looong wire from my study room router to the Xbox in the living room. Xbox configured itself with out any hitch and, voila, I was on Xbox Live! It asked me to install some patches – actually threatened me to install it immediately or else I would be kicked off Live…Woah, very subtle! I installed all it asked me to. I installed TVersity in my PC and from Xbox I connected to my PC. Great. I could browse through my photo collection and videos and could even stream them seamlessly. Only hiccup was that my PC was very old (a P4 with out HT) and was not able to handle DivX transcoding.

Two days after that, I bought Gears of War and later PGR3 from Hyderabad. I will talk about them in a different post.

Microsoft Readies DirectX Replacement

Microsoft is very close to releasing its newest iteration of DirectX. Dubbed the “Windows Graphics Foundation” (WGF), Microsoft will reunite DirectDraw and Direct3D into one package allowing the graphics subsystem of a PC to be completely integrated into the operating system.

Reports cite the latest versions of the WGF to be at version 0.99, just shy of an initial release. The initial release of WGF will allow hardware vendors like ATI and nVidia to begin work on hardware offerings compliant to the new graphics spec. The WGF will also allow graphics card creators the first opportunity to develop Shader Model 4 compliant hardware.

Read the full story…

If you are a mobile developer, this is a great opportunity to showcase your product

http://www.microsoft.com/india/windows/mobile/contest/windows4mobile/