I had moved to GoDaddy to host my blog last December but it proved to be very troublesome when it comes to hosting multiple domains on one account. Moreover, the hierarchy of folders and not be able to control IIS permissions etc. was a pain. Finally, I decided to try re-invent and after I can see the servers are more responsive and the DotNet ControlPanel works quite well.

Works well with VistaDB (partial trust environment) as well …… for my blog uses VistaDB and it was just a matter of uploading files to migrate the blog ….

I shall post my experience with this hosting as I use it more to try and host more sites …..

cheers!

/Digvijay

Finally…….. today i am done with all the 6 beta exams for .NET 4.0. I must say that ASP .NET exams have really been developed from scratch and were quite to the point. Its not something that one could expect to pass from cramming a few brain dumps or just going through a prep guide. The MS Learning team has done a good job here ……. cheers!

Here is a link to beta exam post on msdn

I hope i clear all of them (I am certain about 4 actually) or else i have to appear in the live exams later this year!

Earlier this month I joined Acando Consulting AB, Stockholm after leaving Tieto Sweden AB. It was a great experience at Tieto – very nice people, good working environment – and I still miss working there!!!

However, change is a virtue of life and like anyone else I can not escape it. So, I am at my new job – looking forward to learning more and doing more as a professional. Good thing is – there was an assignment for me as soon as I joined in.

First few days have been good and let us see how it goes!

I was just reading up on VistaDB and what is coming up next when I stumbled on a weblog entry and discovered Google gears.

It seems I still have to learn more and more before I know a lot, LOL.

However it is quite cool, and I shall play with it over the weekend and post some code here.

Some points of interest for me were:

Native .NET code does not mean that everything that is written in C# or VB .NET will run in Silverlight automatically!, for Silverlight has only a subset of the .NET Framework as its engine to have a smaller footprint.

Google Gears a small add on that can act as a server to cache and serve application resources i.e. HTML,

JavaScript or images. Another features is the database which is accessible like SQLite database system.

You can create and access tables with common SQL commands directly in JavaScript:

var db = google.gears.factory.create('beta.database', '1.0');
var rs = db.execute('SELECT recipe.rowid FROM recipe, recipe_aux ' +' WHERE 
                        recipe.rowid = recipe_aux.rowid AND ' +' 
                        recipe_aux.rating > ? AND 
                        recipe MATCH ?',[3, 'cheese']);
while (rs.isValidRow()) 
{
    console.log(rs.fieldName(0) + " == " + rs.field(0));
    rs.next();
}

rs.close();

All this looks very cool stuff and would surely bring more power to web based applications!

Last week, I appeared for the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 - Web-Based Client Development and cleared it. So I am now a MCTS.

It was mostly due to the help and collaboration of other colleagues that have emphasized importance of getting certified over last couple of months. Now the tempo is good so I hope I will get a few more certifications and make myself more useful as a consultant at TietoEnator!

I have been blogging on a sub-domain http://blog.digvijay.eu so far. Now I have moved to Blog Engine.NET v1.4.5 and I thought it would be nice to have a great looking theme and a VistaDB based storage so here it is. I shall now be writing a lot more on this blog when i have more motivation to learn and share,

Please post your comments or write to me about anything so that i know what is missing and where I can improve this blog.

Beta version of IE 8 is now available. I believe at least now it will bring more CSS support and other improvements that actually eases the browser wars and compatibility issues.

It does have some quirks (its a beta!) but you can switch to IE7 mode using the magic button they have put on :)

Hope Developers and Designers would start to explore the new things soon and we can move to maybe a easy IE experience. But I still am a FireFox fan!

Get it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/ie8/getitnow.mspx

I was just getting bored today so watched a few movies and then decided to try something that i couldn't because of heavy workload. I wanted to try out using the GhostScript DLL in C# and if i could write a wrapper for the same.
So after 30 minutes of hit and trial, I believe i have got the P/Invoke signatures working fine except for when calling gsapi_exit and gsapi_delete_instance which give some "corrupt memory" messages. i have just omitted them for now but yes, i got it to work.

But the output was bulky, convering a 250KB PDF to 300x300 tiff24 took almost 220 MB!!!

Anyway, here is the code for anyone to take a look at and try it out. 

GhostConvert.NET.rar (1.09 mb) (link removed because of a user comment)

I shall also put the full wrapper that I intend to write sometime this week in some other post. Drop in any comments if you like.