Loud Thoughts

Today I installed Windows 7 on my Thinkpad X41 Tablet PC and here is how it went:

First of all, this PC didn't have a CD drive and my external CD drive was not working. So I decided to create a bootable USB drive to install Windows 7, thanks to the innumerable and affordable 8GB USB pen drives available now:-). I created the bootable drive as per the instructions listed in http://www.bwana.org/2009/01/11/how-to-install-windows-7-beta-from-a-usb-drive-to-an-hp-mini-1000-without-vista/. But whenever I booted my Thinkpad with the new USB drive, it said "Missing Operating System". After some hunting around, I found that the problem was due to a missing switch "/mbr" switch in invoking bootsect.exe. So I ran the following command:
bootsect.exe /nt60 G: /mbr

With this command, the USB was made bootable and the installation started. And guess what, the installation completed in just 20 minutes on my 40 GB 4200 RPM hard disk. Wow!! Too good, huh?

After the installation, I ran the Windows Update to update the drivers for network card, audio card etc. The display driver was still not installed, so I installed the XP-compatible driver from Intel support site. Now the system is up and running.

Yes, it was a pleasant experience.

I have registered for Bar Camp Bangalore, to be held on 7th and 8th of March 2009. Bar Camp is a network of user-generated conferences held around the globe. It is an open workshop event where the contents are provided by the participants themselves. Anybody can register a session and other members can join the session. The presenter creates a topic page on the Bar Camp website and participants can discuss the topic prior to the event. During the event, on hour time will be dedicated to discuss the topic.
To know more about Bar Camp, read their FAQ page or this Wikipedia link..
I am really looking forward for this event.

Amid criticism about the annoyingly frequent UAC (User Account Control) notifications on Windows Vista, Microsoft decided to prompt users less frequently in Windows 7. But this decision has generated sharp criticism from all circles. Security experts have criticized that this exposes a vulnerability that will put users at high risk. Basically, with Windows 7, users can choose how often they want to be notified - the default setting is to notify only when a third-party application is making a change. The catch here is that any changes to the UAC setting itself are being made within the OS and not by a third party. Hence malicious code could turn off such alerts entirely without notifying the user that such a change had been made. MS is literally getting beaten up for this decision. Finally, Microsoft announced that they have decided to adjust the feature such that it notifies users when the UAC itself is modified. These changes will be available in the Windows 7 RC due later this year.
As I write this, I am reminded of the Malayalam proverb "Velukkan thechathu paandaayi" (translation: the face cream that was applied to become fair has created a patch)

Today when I hit F5 in my Visual Studio project (a sample Win32 console application), I got this weird error "msdia80.dll cannot be loaded". I did a quick search in the Internet and found a few solutions:

• Reinstall Visual Studio SP1: Unfortunately, this is not a viable option because we know how much time it takes to install SP1
• Register the msdia80.dll: This is a very easy fix. But where do we find this DLL? Here is the answer: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VC

I tried the second solution and it worked fine. So this is what we need to do:

1. Open command prompt.
2. Navigate to the folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VC
3. Run this command "regsvr32 msdia80.dll"

That's it. Enjoy debugging your application.

Today I read about Xobni , a pretty good Outlook plugin that extends Microsoft Outlook's functionality in many ways. Xobni maintains a profile for the user's contacts and keeps track of his/her email usage, statistics etc.
When you click on an email conversation in Outlook, Xobni displays the following information about the sender in the sidebar in Outlook:

• The sender's profile
• Profile of the sender's contacts
• All threads of the conversation with the sender
• All attachments sent by the sender

In addition to this, this plugin provides a nice and fast search feature with search-term highlighting in results pane. And what's more, Xobni does all this without degrading Outlook's performance and more important, without crashing it.

Another interesting news is that Microsoft had tried to buy Xobni sometime back, but it didn't work out (yeah, not all MS deals work out these days). Xobni CEO just walked away from the deal. Wonder why? Apparently, Xobni is more of a platform than a simple email helper application. The Xobni platform has hooks deep into Outlook which enables them to even integrate with Outlook's default search. The platform is their trump-card and they know that they can make more money if they make the platform available to third-party vendors. This means that other vendors can use Xobni toolkit to seamlessly integrate their applications with Outlook.

By the way, Xobni claims that it can even extract phone numbers from the email; but I am not sure how effective this would be. The demo video shows that it extracts a phone number from an email message which contains the simple text 'my cell number is 99999'. But how intelligent their content extraction and pattern-matching algorithm would be if the text is grammatically or contextually different? Let's wait and watch.

At last, published the DotSVN article that explains the basic philosophy of DotSVN and gives step-by-step instructions on how to use DotSVN to access Subversion repository from .NET applications. The article is titled Accessing Subversion repository from .NET using DotSVN. I have published it in DotSVN, CodeProject and Programmer's Heaven.

Following are the links:

• At Codeproject: http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/subversion_using_dotsvn.asp
• At DotSVN: http://www.dotsvn.net/articles/accessing-subversion-repository-from-net-using-dotsvn.html

Last Sunday, we published the first iteration of DotSVN, a pure .NET repository access library for Subversion. In this iteration, the DotSVN library can read the repository and list the directory contents. This implementation is the best of breed of original SVN and SVNKit, the JAVA port of SVN.


We built a Repository browser to browse the repository. See the screenshot below:

Compare with the original SVN Repository Browser. Can you see any difference? Kudos to George's UI skills.

This was an important milestone for this project. Though not big, this was a dip for us.

We also got many unit tests running:
It was thrilling to code, test, code test, code test.......

Last month, I joined the DotSVN project, which is a .NET implementation of SVN (Subversion). The idea behind this project is to create an SVN implementation that is well-suited for a Windows platform. The original SVN targets all platforms; whereas DotSVN is focused on Windows based deployment. The project owner George Chiramattel says that the origin of this project is yet another project called nTrac, a .NET port of Trac. When he started working on nTrac, he realized that a true Windows implementation of SVN is not available. He wanted a .NET implementation that can access SVN at the repository level, instead of at the client layer. So he decided to create one; that is DotSVN.

I am very excited to be part of this project. Work is progressing well.
Shall post the progress here...