“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

The saying above probably fits developers the most. More so if one happens to be a Microsoft technology developer, spending his day in and out of Visual Studio – the ultimate development experience (no offence intended to the Notepad developer). I am almost always amazed by the insane complexity that Visual Studio abstracts away from a developer, presenting it in a visually elegant and magnificent way. Before you even think of disagreeing, think of the top 3 features of the Visual Studio code editor according to you and try integrating it on a Rich Text Box in the language of your choice.

Continue reading

Ever since Windows Vista (sorry Microsoft, for reminding you of that product again) and .NET Framework 3.0 were released, the Windows client developer (the one who is intentionally unaware and exceedingly pleasured by ignoring JS, HTML, DHTML and other useless irrelevant terms in technology) was puzzled with an (frankly) unwanted choice that never existed for him before: continue using the ultimately productive Windows Forms framework, that has been the cornerstone of Windows client applications ever since Visual Basic (classic), or learn, explore and rewrite the apps in the WPF framework for building (what’s now become an overly exploited term in software development) next generation user experiences.

Microsoft has always assured (many consider it a curse) its developers of continued abundance of options and tooling support for all the major line of business applications that one develops. While this has obvious and much desired advantages, the real problem comes in at the start of the adoption phase of the new technology or framework. The earlier releases of the framework don’t (in almost all cases) provide a complete replacement of the previous technology and there is a very steep learning curve involved, with an exceedingly high cost and risk factor in recreating the missing bits, by extending the not so feature complete releases.

Continue reading

For those of you who were so unfortunate to not know about the Rajinikanth, here is a tip of the iceberg about him. Of course I understand you were amongst the unfortunate who were exiled to the planet Pluto, (all other planets are aware of Rajinikanth) and couldn’t keep up with the most illusive force on planet Earth.

What follows are 77 outright (an understatement indeed) facts about the man himself that demystifies (more than what Da Vinci did) literally every fact that you have ever known or would ever know. Some of the facts mentioned below are highlighted to do the intended justice.

Disclaimer: All the following facts, incidents or individuals involved are real and any resemblance to any person, living or dead is purely intentional.

Continue to the facts

Indelicately speaking, self-adaptable software is any software (specialized or otherwise) that has the ability to respond to the needs of the users and doesn’t completely depend on the operating environment and is further proficient in dealing with faults, curtailing the chances of partial or complete failures. At its core it’s flexible. With flexibility, comes complexity. But then, we are software developers, and complexity is as native to us, as pointers to C/C++ (no pun intended).

I am a decently mini-pro type of a PC gamer (I am proud of it, even though its mini) and was trying out FIFA 2010 on my PC with an NVidia GeForce 8400GS graphics card installed onto it. As is true for all the recently launched games, on-board graphics simply doesn't suffice their needs. They humbly need more powerful GPUs to render the superior graphics intensive characters, surroundings and their interactions. On the beautiful start of a weekend (yes I can still recall, it was a beautiful Saturday morning) my graphics card passed away (pardon me for my emotions, but they are as real as the real data-type).

Continue reading...