By ashvil on 12/30/2003 3:40 PM

Wishing you all the joy and happiness for the coming year. This New Year is also special to me and my beautiful bride as it's our first wedding anniversary.

Thank you Orina for standing by me in all the good and bad times.

By ashvil on 12/24/2003 8:05 PM

Wish you all the happiness and joy of Christmas.

By ashvil on 12/22/2003 6:35 PM

The new buzzword going around is SOA or Service Oriented Architecture. Chip Irek explains the concepts behind SOA, cutting through the hype.

By ashvil on 12/17/2003 8:03 PM

If you are a programmer, then you have two modes for Development - Design time and Run time. You design your UI and write code in the Design Time mode and run it in the Run time mode.

But if you are using something like Excel, there is only one mode. You edit a formula and the spreadsheet updates. There isn't a Design and Run time mode. Another software that does this is Mathematica, that uses a UI like a Canvas.

There are advantages to have a design mode
1. There are more users than programmers, so not everyone has to deal with what goes on during the Design time
2. You can optimize the program

But as focus shifts from computer productivity to user productivity, I see these two modes merging and a new class of development environments that take the concepts in Excel and Mathematica to the next level by letting non programmers create, navigate and publish information. In fact, Alan Kay's Squeak does something like this right now.

By ashvil on 12/5/2003 12:44 AM

I posted a new beta of IM.NET. This release now uses stored procedures and has a more cleaner and optimized data layer.

By ashvil on 12/1/2003 10:29 PM

If you are programming in .NET, then you will find Lutz Roeder's Reflector very useful. Reflector is a class browser, decompiler and XML documentation browser for .NET components (assemblies).

Also, take a look at his presentation on Interactive Source Code which talks about a more richer development environment than plain text.

By ashvil on 11/27/2003 8:54 PM

For the last few months, I have been researching and playing around with .NET, Java and other innovations in the software space. These new platforms bring new concepts to the Software development process. For example, Aspect Oriented Programming simplifies traditional contructs like logging, etc.

There are a lot of innovative software projects that are experimenting with entire software development process and I am trying to figure out their impact in the real world.

At the same time, there are large questions floating around. Outsourcing and Globalization is changing the software world. The Internet is breaking down a lot of barriers but like every disruptive technology causes pain. How will it all end up. There are a lot of questions that need to be asked and debated.

I plan to write a series of articles and invite feedback to refine them.

Have a great Thanksgiving weekend! This is the right time to reflect and give thanks for all the gifts showered on you.

By ashvil on 11/27/2003 8:37 PM

I re-posted a few blog entries that I had made few years back to i3Connect's internal message board and Gyanquest.net. The main reason for posting them is Wordsmith, my current blogging tool, allows me to look back and learn more about my decisions and thoughts at that point of time.

By ashvil on 11/24/2003 10:47 PM

Don starts with explaining with why the CLR is better than COM and moves to the fundamentals of the .NET framework like components, assemblies, types, domains, security, etc. He presents an indepth view on how the CLR works and how to interact with it.

If you are a hardcore .NET developer or architect, you need to read this book.
If you are a Java fanatic, you must read this book, so you can explain better how Microsoft copied Java concepts :-)

By ashvil on 11/24/2003 3:34 PM

Thanks to Robert Scoble's interview on .NET rocks - I found out about Skype. It is a P2P telephony software that works really well with NATs and firewalls.

It is created by the folks that brought you Kazaa and you can find it at www.skype.com.