Vijrag's Nest

After a long break of 6 years i am back in the blog world.

During this 6 years many things have changed right from my personal life to my professional life.
I got married to Harini and we have 2 beautiful girls Kanakadharshini (elder 3 yrs old) and Sahana (7 months old).

I have climbed my Professional career from a Developer to a Project Manager. Worked in the United States for 5 years with various clients.

Currently i am in Cork, Ireland. This is a very new place but mostly it is similar to how i was in US minus the easy availability of Indian Foods and Indian Community. I will be here in Cork, Ireland for a month doing System Study for one of the worlds biggest Pharmaceutical Manufacturer. Will be back in Chennai, India by Sep 7th with more memories to carry.

First Time In Life:

It is a great experience for any one when it happens first time in life, I had a lot of first time experiences :

1) First Time i am out of India
2) First Time i cooked for myslef
3) First Time i am in USA
4) First Time i had a look at Hollywood
5) First Time had watched the election campaign of US President.

I have lot of sweet memories i will carry when i land in India again.

Dream Comes True,

As a Software professional everyone wants to go to US. I am in the software field for the past 9 years and it was only a dream for me that i visit US. This Dream has come true for me now...

I am in USA - Colorado - Boulder. The initial few days were really troublesome for me, I being a Pure Vegetarian, i in fear didnt took anything for the first 3 days other than Apples and Banana. Later i found an Apartment, Started Cooking myself and things are going on smooth now.

I am learning a lot here right from how to walk on the streets here. I have found a .Net User Group in Boulder and joined them.

Next week i will be visiting one of our client in Los Angeles - California (Near Hollywood the dream place).

Lot of things i need to share with, will do that in coming days.

In continuation of the journey on Visual Studio.Net 2005 IDE features, the other thing that attracted me was the Code Refactoring features.

During our development, as the code keeps growing we face situations like we have common code to be used at several places, at some times we may have to move a local method variable as a parameter for a method, create property methods for private class members, rename a method, field etc., and mostly we get into errors during CTRL + C & CTRL + V and we spend considerable time troubleshooting this, Now in the Visual Studio.Net 2005, considerable emphasis has been made to developer productivity enhancements and one such feature is the "Refactoring Code", In the Code editor, you can either right click the mouse and choose the refactor code option to achieve most of the above tasks or as usual you can access these features from the IDE Main Menu.

VS 2005 IDE Features

In continuation to the "Wows" i express during my journey into the Visual Studio 2005 ide, The next feature that really amazed me was the Expansions.

What is Expansions:

expansions are a type of short aliases, and then expanded into a common programming construct. For example in the code editor you can type for and when you press TAB, it automatically expands into an empty for loop construct such as

for (int i = 0; i < length; i++)
{
/**/
}

This expansion can be achieved in the ide by the following ways

1) in the code editor type the short alias (Such as for,if etc.,) and press TAB
2) in the code editor type CTRL + K and then type X, it will show you a list of expansions from which u can choose
3) You can also use the Menu, Intellisense -> Insert Expansion.

Vijrag.

Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1:

Yesterday i had my first view of VS 2005 Express editions beta 1 circulated in the TechEd 2004.

I was maneuvering through the IDE and i was really amazed to see the ease in which u can write better code.

The first thing that made me sound "WOW" was the Insert Code snippet feature. in the code view, right click, in the popup menu, choose "Insert Code Snippet", will give u almost all frequently used Common Functionalities as ready made built in codes. I tried few of them, basically Database Related codes like execute "Stored Procedures" from .net, "Filling DataSet" etc and it was amazing.

As i keep pondering into deeps of IDE i am sure i am heading for amazing days to come...

Tech Ed 2004: The Developer's Festival - Chennai.

The Microsoft TechEd 2004 completed in Chennai Today and i am coming out of this Extravaganza.

Just few words about my experience:

Key Note:

Keith Rowe during his KeyNote Speech, Demonstrated Visual Studio Team System - The session was exciting, with a to-the-point presentation. The VSTS is a collection of tools which provides support for the complete Software development team and life-cycle, tasks are represented as work items and they can be tracked right from requirements, design, coding, unit testing, code review...

Speluking CLR 2.0:

Gaurav Khanna did some real in-depth talks on the CLR, Generics and other C# features.

ChalkTalk:

There was a new evenk: chalk talk session on CLR Internals which was really wonderful where we discussed on the internals of the CLR and .Net.

Connected Systems: Working with Web Services enhancements:

Janakiram MSV led us in a world of Web Services Enhancements and the support for this integrated within Visual Studio.Net.

Managed Gains with SQL-CLR Integration:

Praveen Srivatsa spoke about the SQL - CLR Integration. With the SQL 2005 (YUKON), Microsoft integrates CLR Hosting inside the SQL Server Engine. I really wondered how this speaker could go to such deap understanding even before the product is released. He explained all the best practices, pit falls, Cautions on using this feature.

Developing Secure ASP.Net Web Applications:

Sanjay Shetty shared his experiences on mind reading of the Hackers, How they get into the vulnerable sites, How they get data, He showed demos on handling such scenarios. The session was really live with lot of participation and sharing experiences.

Plunging in ADO.Net 2.0:

Anand M gave a very good insight into the new Disconnected Stack of ADO.Net, the new DataTable, Support for XML, MARS (Multiple Active Record Sets), Bulk Copy, Provider Independent API's that comes with the next version of .net Framework 2.0.

The exciting session was the ASP.Net 2.0 Powered Data Controls by Vinod Unny - He showed cool demos where by just drag & drop and a few property changes, we can develop highly productive applications. He demonstrated in details the enhancements to the DataGrid, GridView, New DataSource controls, TreeView controls and showed us samples.

Abhishek Kant, the Microsoft India MVP Lead Should be congratulatedfor some really innovative ideas for the community programs like PassionQuotient Contest, MVP Programs, Community Star Programs.

Overall the Teched was really mind boggling, It showed a sneek preview of Microsoft's Roadmap for the future.

Microsoft Rules...

Vijrag.

After a long strech of tight work in client's place i am back in action...