India’s First Windows Azure MVP

Phew, Am I Busy ? While this a month back old news I am still glad to share it with all of you. Last October my MVP competency has been moved to Windows Azure. That makes me India’s first and currently the only Windows Azure MVP. Thanks to each one of you in community for your continued support and encouragement. Thanks to all my readers and all my session attendees. Thanks to my MVP lead and MVP friends. And finally thanks to my family for allowing me the time to pursue these dreams. I am also excited presenting tomorrow @VTD on – Integrating Silverlight and Azure with SharePoint. I Hope to catch you there. Thank you, once again!!!

The dream that you wish will come true

It’s the Cinderella song that I am talking about. At last Windows Azure ISV days in New Delhi, it was a personal lifetime experience receiving the Cloud developer award from hands of Steve Ballmer. I have no words to express my heartfelt gratitude to everybody at Microsoft, Microsoft communities, colleagues, friends and family. Below are the few pictures from the event

I wish you the success with your dreams. Keep Rocking!!!

TechEd 2010 Memorabilia

Phew!!! Another Great Event. Amazing sessions and amazing people all around. Like last year my top 5 picks for this Tech Ed.

1) First cool thing compared to last year – the Architect Track hall was bigger in terms of width (landscape mode). I prefer such an arrangement where everybody is within your eye reach & at the same time there are many seats to occupy.

2) My talk on Integration & Identity was largely scenario driven and hopefully was received well. For first time I was able to record the session entirely in my HD Handycam with help of a gentleman from Lalit. It’s almost a surprise viewing oneself in replay mode and guess there is a lot one can learn / unlearn.

3) I was part of the panel discussion on Cloud Computing with RamKumar, Sandeep, Anandan, et al. Great experience.

4) Parties – First day ended with dinner party hosted by Microsoft and I was lucky to be on the same table with John & David from Patterns & Practices. If there has ever been a team at Microsoft that can save your job it’s got be the P&P team . Second day was a Microsoft influentials reception by Infragistics / Pluralsight. It was fun meeting old friends & Microsoft buddies at dinner. Final day was breakfast with Aaron Skonnard. Nothing less than a dream come true.

5) Last but not the least the second memento to add.

It’s GIDS time now.

May 2010 be your Best Year so far!!!

Happy New Year, Guys. Phew!!! What a year of blogging… Although blog has seen substantial traffic increase above 1000% compared to last year, what mattered more was a year of self satisfying blogging. If you have any thoughts of improvisation like changing my blog theme, blogging style, no. of posts, using polls, etc. I would love to hear on that. As an experiment I had enabled ratings for my posts. I was hoping people to rate and leave comments whenever a post didn’t meet their expectations but unfortunately that doesn’t happen always. Luckily, none of my rated posts have an average rating of less than 3.5, which is encouraging. Like last year below are statistics for top ten posts of 2009:

1) MVC vs. MVP vs. MVVM – Little did I realize while writing this post that it would top the charts surpassing everything. With 19 votes and average rating of 4.5 clearly this post is a chart buster. This shows that you needn’t be esoteric with your blogging, plain simple grounded thoughts are good enough to bring people to your blog. So if you are thinking to start a blog but don’t have ground breaking ideas to share with others, you can still start and be as useful as anybody else. Hoping to get better of this post in 2010.

2) ControlTemplate vs. DataTemplate vs. HierarchicalTemplate vs. ItemsPanelTemplate – common point of confusion for WPF programmers.

3) Resolving XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas Error For WCF Compression using GZipEncoder – one of the frequent encountered errors by WCF developers – XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas.

4) NHibernate Lessons Learned – covers some field knowledge from one of the projects we were working on. Handy reference.

5) RAID 0 vs. RAID 1 vs. RAID 4 vs. RAID 5 vs. RAID 10 – Proud of this one. I don’t deal with infrastructure setup daily but was able to put this across in a concise way. In fact references to this post where from some prominent IT forums.

6) Username Authentication over basicHttpBinding with WCF’s ChannelFactoryInterface – Again a frequently used scenario but lesser known.

7) MTOM vs. Streaming vs. Compression – Large Attachments Over WCF – we all want to transfer as little as possible but just can’t away with it. This post highlights how can you transfer large data with WCF contrasting the options available.

8 ) Logging Best Practices – Only post from 2008 that made into top 10. A widely discussed topic and a post which can be improvised.

9) Inside WPF’s DependencyObject and DependencyProperty – Only post that I liked so much and imported it from old blog.

10) Snapshot vs. LogShipping vs. Mirroring vs. Replication vs. Failover Clustering – Last but not a least other ‘versus’ post that highlights important differences between techniques part of almost every enterprise setup.

Few other posts that liked but which didn’t make it to top list – Load Balancing vs. Failover Clustering, Tower Servers vs. Rack Servers vs. Blade Servers, WCF Serializers, Performance Testing, .NET Threads, …

That’s it from last year. May, year 2010 be the best year by far for all of us. Keep Rocking!!!

MS-Tech Ed India 2009, Theme Song

I rarely have a post like this, but I liked it so much . You got to check it out. Download it here.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Happy new year, Guys . Sorry for being late on this one. I intended to first publish a long pending article as a small new year gift. Finally the article is up & you can see it here. It talks about applying AOP with Unity on NHibernate. It doesn’t contain ground breaking stuff, but it was exciting personally to connect these diverse pieces. Hope Unity would bring DI & AOP into the mainstream of .NET development (I have used Spring.NET in past for these techniques).

As part of new year I have chosen new hobbies, Photography & Automobiles to be precise. I guess its imperative to start each year with a new productive hobby which stimulates your mind towards a new joy. I will have few posts on my new hobbies soon.

Though I started this blog only in June (previous was here) below are my top posts (going by number of views) for last year:

Total Posts: 27 ( – Improvisation required)

1) Debugging an XBAP / WCF application – Windows Vista + VS.NET 2008
2) Issues using Workflow with Code Separation (.xoml)
3) Installing Team Foundation Server (TFS) on Windows 2008
4) WCF Certificate Security with XBAP / IIS Issues
5) Logging Best Practices

Keep Rocking .

Ultimate Destination!!!

Be careful carrying extra luggage in Indian Railways!!!

This came as real surprise. I was trying to send a personal computer of mine back to my native with my mother. She was on a casual visit. We managed to reach railway station just on time due to ubiquitous traffic issues. We had just boarded the train and a person claiming to be an authorized luggage checker told us that we can’t carry the PC as per Indian railway norms. And if we need to carry one, we need to obtain a extra luggage ticket, for which we had no time. He took a fine from us approx. Rs. 938 & issued a token for the same . There were many people doing the similar checks & TC also confirmed this rule. Not sure when this rule was introduced, but I wish it had been publicized more for benefit of general public. Hope you don’t repeat my mistake. Also let me know if you do have any similar experiences.