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Welcome, Visual Studio 2017
Today is the 20th birthday of Microsoft’s Visual Studio which has remained the environment of choice for millions of developers around the world. To celebrate this day, Microsoft has launched the latest version-Visual Studio 2017 today. You can download it from here. When I went through my attic now, I found 3 artifacts that were connected to early days of Visual Studio, the below picture shows them: books on Visual Basic 3.0, Visual Interdev 6.0 and a box of Visual Studio.NET 2002. My first contact with Visual Studio was in it’s earlier life when it was called as Visual Basic 3.0. Then for years I was coding with my favourite…
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Software design, little has changed in the last 70 years
On 19 February 1946 Alan Turing designed the first well-known software for a stored-program computer. Seventy years later, each of us is carrying numerous apps (software) in our pockets and wrists. Software today can be incredibly powerful, they contain millions of lines of code, can guide nuclear missiles to their target, and even recognize the human voice and translate them on the fly. Today’s mobile apps like Microsoft Word or Facebook are more complex than the entire software stack that powered Apollo 11 spaceflight. The technology powering Apple’s Siri, Google Now or Microsoft’s Halolens were impossible even ten years before. The growth in areas like Cloud Computing, Big Data, Machine…
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Online Payment options in India
The other day a friend of mine asked me on how he can receive payments online for a small website he is getting developed for an Eye-care NGO in India. Doing some research online and speaking to my dev team I gathered information on the subject, which I am sharing here. To receive money online, you need to integrate with a Payment gateway, most of the gateways accept Net Banking, Credit Card, Debit Cards and nowadays Digital Wallets. India For receiving money in Rupee (INR) or to an Indian Entity, Indian Payment Gateways are the best due to their compliance with local rules of Government of India & Reserve Bank of India (RBI).…
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eWIT – APIs rule the world
Last week I got an invite from SPIN Chennai for an event today organized by eWIT titled “Why API’s rule the world”. The speaker is a young software engineer & budding entrepreneur Swaathi Kakarla of Skcript, an enterprise compression company. In the talk Swaathi spoke on her experience of designing APIs for their Skcript platform, key concerns when it comes to scaling, and some lessons learnt on how to run a API driven business model. She covered on how to encryption in your API interfaces and the need to use a Timestamp. If you interested in building your own APIs for your system, I will recommend you check Apigility, DeployD and REST API Tutorial.
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Windows 10 upgrade and OneDrive icon not appearing
I have been using Windows 10 preview builds under Windows Insider program for quite few months in my Surface Pro 1. With Windows 10 getting released last week I upgraded to RTM version, all seems to work fine, except OneDrive. Today when I wanted to add few folders to sync in OneDrive, I couldn’t find the option in Right-Click on OneDrive Folder in File Explorer. I then looked for the OneDrive icon in System tray, it was not there, it was not to be found through through Cortona or in Settings App. So there was no way configure OneDrive client app. Luckily I stumbled on %AppData%\Local\Microsoft\OneDrive\17.3.5892.0626 folder. There I found OneDriveSetup.Exe there, running…
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Visual Studio 2015 installs Google Chrome
As a Microsoft technology enthusiasts for over two decades, I thought I had seen them all. But with the “new” Microsoft under the stewardship of Satya Nadella, they seem to be defying tradition. From Microsoft’s former CEO Steve Ballmer calling “Linux is a cancer” to today Satya’s Microsoft open sourcing .NET Framework and making it available for Linux, it has been a remarkable ride. Recently when I was installed Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 from Windows Insider Program, this change hit me in the face, what blew me away was, wait for it, seeing the option in Visual Studio 2015 to install Google Chrome! To be technically correct, Visual Studio…
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Microsoft Project Spartan Browser
It was in August 1995, that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser got released along with Windows 95 Plus pack, nearly two decades ago. Last time a popular browser brand got introduced was with Google Chrome 6 years ago, even the humble Mozilla Firefox is 12 years old. If you add Apple Safari to the mix, there are good number of choices in the marketplace. With the upcoming launch of Apple Watch lacking a web browser and popular E-Commerce brands & Facebook focusing their development efforts on Mobile Apps (iOS, Android), Web Development looks relegated. In this context, does the world need one more web browser?. Microsoft thinks so. One reason for…
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Teaching my son to write software
The other day my 11-year-old son asked me to teach him on how to write apps. I was thinking on what programming language I can start him with. I didn’t want to start him with Mobile Apps as I feel that will curtail his possibilities. This meant Android Java, Objective C & Apple Swift won’t cut it. Being an ardent Microsoft language engineer I never liked Java, but that discussion is for the other day. My friends know well about my “affair” with Visual Basic. Going with VB6 (there is a charm to this acronym’s sound) will mean he will be learning more about GUI/Drag ‘N’ Drop rather than programming…
