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.

I first started working with languages when I was born! Seriously, I had to learn the so called “Human Languages” to communicate with other humans, a couple of them were basically restricted to my region/country and one which is accepted universally (at least with the people I am working with). During my school days I started with another set of languages which one needed to grasp in order to communicate with a mathematical machine known as ”Computer”. In that sense, my first computer language might be Finite State Machine/Automata (FSM/FSA) which I studied in my school. Then BASIC, C, C++, Java, etc. during my graduation period. After that variants of those main languages with use of extra class libraries such as Visual Basic, Visual C++ (with MFC & ATL), ASP, JSP, JDBC, ODBC, etc. Recently I am doing more and more stuff in CSharp (C#).

Now-a-days everybody has a Multi-core environment and you are required to code threads and/or multiple processes to be scalable and fully utilize the current hardware systems. And yes, it also proves that you are a good coder and are keeping up and committed to development of multi-threaded, multi-core applications. Now, now, I am talking a bit silly since threading is a concept existing since the dawn of computing. It was pretty much explicit and you can feel the power when you code in C or C++. But when it comes to high level frameworks and languages like .NET, C#, VB.NET, etc. the simplicity of using threads might become a big problem and lead to no understanding of how things actually operate. Of course execution context is something to learn about and a good programmer should always be aware of what execution context his/her thread/process is executing in otherwise he/she would find himself/herself in a lot of problems related to thread synchronization, deadlocks, etc.