It has been quite some time since I last blogged. Of course I can blame Al Qaeda for that or better still write about stuff that is really useful for the reader! Now now, I don’t say that one should never blame Al Qaeda ;)

The title of the blog says a lot on what I am going to write about today. It is all about business baby. A good successful business always generates money (otherwise it is termed as charity, I will touch that topic in some other post). After working for around 8+ years with technology companies, I am pretty sure that one doesn’t need to be a geek to have a successful business. One can be a successful packing box provider if they adhere to the basic values of doing business. Business as we all know is a symbiotic relationship between various entities that creates and maintains an ecosystem. The thriving, survival and prosperity of the ecosystem is pretty much characterized by the level of trust, maturity, quality, reliability and expectation fulfillment on part of the producer entities with respect to consumer entities. Beware that I am including the consumer entities as active and highly volatile members of an ecosystem.

I have downloaded and installed the latest Visual Studio 2010 and my fingers were not staying away from the keyboard to start it up and do something. As discussed in my post Forum Post - Activity App - Takes Screenshot and sends to an FTP server, I was browsing some freelancing sites and found a project which someone would like to be done for network user monitoring purposes. The idea is that an invisible app takes screenshots at specified intervals and sends it off to an FTP server / remote storage location for later analysis.

This is for all my friends who want to try out the new VS2010 from Microsoft. It is available for download from Microsoft’s site at: Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2. You can also download team elements and other stuff. Start coding and testing early. The Beta will expire on 30th June 2010. So it is a lot of time to do some serious coding with this package. This definitely is one of the good things that Microsoft is doing. Of course the final version might be incompatible with this Beta but hey, I can’t rant in this case :).

I received my free upgrade from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium. Of course the free upgrade was free (as in beer) where I had to pay for the shipping charges, etc. which were more then standard shipping charges (around 17 USD). The other thing was that since I am living/working in Sweden, I got my upgrade in the Swedish language. The stupid thing about packaging for Windows 7 Home Premium (W7HP) was that one cannot change the language of installation. Now that was something which was available in Windows Vista Home Premium (WVHP) edition. No idea why it was removed from Windows 7. Maybe UI language elements were hard coded! I searched the net to find out that Microsoft only allows for language changes in Professional and Ultimate editions. That is not very nice to you Mr. Microsoft. It is stupidity to believe that all users in a particular region would want their OS base language of that particular region. But you may ask me as to why I did not order the English version of W7HP when I was ordering the upgrade? Well because I bought the desktop in Sweden and so it came loaded with a Swedish version of WVHP. Hence it automatically selected the Swedish version of W7HP because of Microsoft’s stupid policy to provide upgrade to Windows 7 in the same language as was in Windows Vista.

Refer to my post on MultiDoc2HTMLv0.1 and I explained why I had to develop this software. The initial version that I started writing ran into some problems which I guess happened because of a corrupt installation of office on my PC or maybe the associated ActiveX libraries. Then I got an innovative mechanism running so the code worked fine. The only problem was that there were 2 executables reading and writing to an anonymous pipe and waiting on each other wasting (precious ;)) computing cycles. So I re-wrote this version in C# with .NET 3.5. This version is a single lean/mean executable of 15KB.

Last year a friend of mine upgraded from GirlFriend 6.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that it’s a memory hog leaving very little system resources available for other applications. He is now noticing that Wife 1.0 is also spawning Child Processes which are further consuming valuable resources. No mention of this particular phenomena was included in the product brochure or the documentation, though other users have informed him that this is to be expected due to the nature of the application.

My previous post http://www.naresh.se/2009/09/24/easysmsv0-1-for-windows-mobile-6-x/ describes in detail why I created EasySMSv0.1 for my Windows Mobile device. Just search the Internet for “tmail.exe crashing in Windows Mobile” and you will find loads of people with the problem. Not one of them has been able to find a proper solution. I have created the application to have a possible solution to typing in an SMS and sending it to your list of contacts. Some applications like “BaselsSMSer” were good but had their shortcomings. No copy, paste content features, no group mailing, etc. were pretty frustrating. And some like “Power SMS” were completely useless and did not meet my criteria. And most of these were paid. Phew.. so I created my own.

The tmail.exe (i.e. the messaging application) on my Windows Mobile v6.1 is crashing all the time and it really frustrates me. The other effect was that I was not able to write to my contacts or do anything with the messaging application which left me paralyzed and it also felt as a big drop in the functionality of my Windows Mobile device. I have an ASUS P570 updated with the latest code. The repetitive crashing started happening after I was in Germany and I don’t know why, it has never stopped. Google search brought up a lot of people with similar problems and as always people had lots of advice to give. I didn’t want to do a hard reset on my device because it has a lot of data and registry settings as well as is very tightly coupled to applications on my storage card. After some searching around, I found Basel’s SMS Sender to be quite a tool but it lacks functionality like sending to multiple contacts, copy, paste of the content, etc.