How SilverLight was build by Gaurav Khanna (Microsoft Corp):
- SilverLight is Microsoft’s paradigm of developing rich internet application (RIA) that runs in Browser Sandbox and are cross-browser in nature
- Gaurav started with a nice white page (Ink Application), wrote on it, rather than do slides
- One file core.dll contains both the CLR and JITing part
- Browsers due to W3C standard downloads only 2 threads (images, CSS whatever), what happens in SilverLight. He didn’t answer to my satisfaction, as I suppose everything should be bound by the WinInet limitation.
Building Cool Virtual Earth Mashups by Janakiram MSV (Microsoft India)
- Jani is brilliant and his demos on the mashups with theatres in Mumbai, tab popups, integration with Sulekha Yellow Pages Feed and BharatMatrimony RSS feed was cool
- I am waiting for him to post the samples, code in his blog
- His humour on “You can do anything and everything – server side, client side, JavaScript, XML, Web Services anything, because at the end it is all mash-ups”
- He talked about Map Cruncher (Custom tile generator), MapPoint Web Service (Enterprise Service) & Virtual Earth (Enterprise Service)
Astoria – Data on the Cloud by Janakiram MSV (Microsoft India)
- Accessing data stored in the cloud and access it using HTTP REST
- Astoria is Data Access Pattern, Online Service, .NET Library
- It is about Web Data Access and not Database Web Access – the difference being accessing Data from a URI using REST and not SOAP or anything else
- Explained the difference between Astoria which is an online service and ADO.NET Entity Model and Web Data Extensions
- (References: MSDN Data Access Incubation projects including Astoria and Jasper)
I don’t know what happened, may be it is due to the hard work (or hands off approach) done by Laloo (Hon’ble Railway Minister), Railway Stations are nowadays much cleaner and better looking. It was more than a year or two, I travelled by Indian trains. Last month I went with my family to Tirunelveli from Egmore for a co-worker’s marriage. I found Egmore exceptionally clean for an Indian Railways Station, fitted with Elevators, Well Lit signs for each coach, packaged water & usable toilets. Even in stations in between, the coffee/tea were served by making it just in time – hot milk from a thermo flask with Tea Bags or Coffee; impressive.