Thursday, February 23, 2006

Windows Vista News

It's just released and its official.
Microsoft Corp. is giving businesses a preview of Vista, the next version of its flagship Windows operating system. Microsoft now says Vista is now "feature complete," with the release of Vista Build 5308,meaning that all of the fundamental capabilities that Vista will eventually offer are now baked in. Development efforts aren't slowing-the user experience will continue to evolve, bugs will get fixed, performance and compatibility will improve-but the basic shape of the operating system has been solidified, and from here on out we expect to see mostly fine-tuning rather than wholesale changes.

Earlier this year, the Windows SDK team started working on the "Windows Vista Developer Story". This massive 500+ page document provides real content to developers looking to get started writing Windows Vista applications using the new Windows SDK.They have named the document as:

"Making Your Application a Windows Vista Application: The Top Ten Things to Do".

From the developer pint of view, the main features that i am looknig forward to are:
Search, Organize and Visualize in Windows Vista
Security for Applications in Windows Vista,
Windows Communication Foundation ("Indigo")
and
Windows Presentation Foundation ("Avalon")

Saturday, February 18, 2006

5 careers: Big demand, big pay

Recently i came across an article on CNN Money, which mentioned five top jobs in demand at the moment. It says that if you're in one of the jobs listed here, you may be able to negotiate a sweet pay hike for yourself when changing employers. It sounded ineresting and going through the article i found that .NET jobs is among one of the five mentioned.

The List is as follows:

Accounting (CPA designation)
Sales and marketing (healthcare and biomedical fields)
Legal (Intellectual property attorneys specializing in patent law and the legal secretaries)
Technology (.NET Developers)
Manufacturing and engineering (quality and process engineers)


It feels good to see that my main stream (.NET Enterprise Software Development) is one of the most in demand jobs. I hope i improve my skills even further and cash in on this boom.

For the full article check it out here
http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/03/pf/pay_hike_jobseeker/index.htm?cnn=yes

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Deployment Process for .NET applications

Long time i havent blogged. Actually i had been really busy with my past wednesday deadline and after that my health was not keeping up.

My dissertation project involved a windows service, an ASP.NET web application and SQL Server 2000 Database. I had to create a single setup which would install my windows service, my ASP.NET web site and SQL Server 2000 database on to the server machine. It is pretty straightforward to create seperate setups for windows service and ASP.NET web app. But a single setup handling all the stuff is a bit tricky issue.
After more than two days of research and fiddling around with different setup projects and merge modules, i found out that i had to create a custom installer class and provide the output of it to my setup project. It was a great learnnig expereince.

Now while i am working as a .NET Developer in the company, i also handle the deployment of the software and creating the installers so that the managers can install it on thier machine and analyse as to what is the current project stage.

Recently i have been assigned a new task to smoothen the deplyment process and come up with astrategy and a process to carry out effective and hassle free deployment process for over 500 machines some of which are running on Windows 2000, some on Windows XP and a few on Windows Server 2003 and deploying those applications efficiently and reliably throughout the company environment.

As i research more about the best ways to handle all the dependencies realted to depolyment and frame up an effective solution for the deployment process, i will be posting and sharing my expereinces with all of you here on this blog.