This blog has moved
š This blog has moved to blog.merill.net.
Posts by Year
- 2025 1
- 2024 4
- 2023 5
- 2022 5
- 2021 4
- 2020 1
- 2019 6
- 2018 10
- 2017 3
- 2016 1
- 2015 3
- 2014 21
- 2013 8
- 2012 10
- 2011 3
- 2010 16
- 2009 24
- 2008 32
- 2007 43
- 2006 78
- 2005 117
- 2004 163
- 2003 115
2025
2024
I just launched š¦ Bluesky.ms!
š I just launched my weekend hack project š¦. With Twitter becoming unusable a whole heap of the Microsoft community is now on Bluesky and having a blast.
Graph API: Minimal permissions to read user group membership
Hereās an interesting question I received today.
Filtering members in Entra groups and admin units
Hereās a recent Graph query-related issue I helped troubleshoot.
Invoke-MgGraphRequest -OutputFilePath vs Out-File Performance Comparison
In case you were wondering which is faster.
2023
Device filter > Device platform
When designing a conditional access policy and have the choice between using device filter and device platform always use device filter.
What I use
Iām frequently asked about the apps I use. So hereās a list for future reference so I can avoid repeating myself š
Azure AD multi-tenant app vs single tenant app
Iāve recently noticed that Azure AD admins are being asked to create multi-tenant apps in their corporate tenant.
Use a custom app for Graph PowerShell delegate access
Set up a custom application registration for using with Microsoft Graph PowerShell
Azure AD and Microsoft Graph Extensions and Attributes
A comparison of the five different types of Azure AD extensions and attributes.
2022
Azure AD Shortcuts
Iām a command line guy and hate having to click to get to various Azure AD pages. Over time I created these shortcuts and thought you might find them helpful.
Graph PowerShell Conversion Analyzer
Graph PowerShell Analyzer is an app that helps you convert Azure AD PowerShell scripts to Graph PowerShell.
Get-MgUser_List1: Expect simple name=value query, but observe property āassignedLicensesā of complex type āAssignedLicenseā.
Are you seeing this message when trying to get user license information using the Graph API.
Azure AD Nudge (Authenticator registration campaign) failing to prompt users
Getting users to go to the aka.ms/mysecurityinfo page and set up the Authenticator app for MFA is not an easy task.
AzureAD Restricted Access - Guest Permission Level
ICYMI We introduced a new guest permission level in Azure AD that restricts what guests can view about other directory objects in your tenant.
2021
aka.ms/mgps
Having trouble finding the Graph PowerShell commandlet reference? I created an easy to remember shortcut at aka.ms/mgps.
Graph Permissions Explorer
If you are a developer in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem you will be well versed with the Microsoft Graph API reference docs and most probably know about permis...
Parsing the Azure AD federationmetadata.xml in PowerShell
If you try to parse Azure ADās federation metadata xml in PowerShell using a script like the one below you most probably end up with the error āThe specified...
Azure AD PowerShell script to generate a report on authentication methods registered by your users
NOTE: This API has been deprecated. Please use List userRegistrationDetails - Microsoft Graph beta instead.
2020
Setting up Azure AD B2B Direct Federation with Google GSuite
If you are looking to configure Azure AD B2B Direct Federation with Googleās GSuite and running into issues hereās a quick screenshot of how it needs to be s...
2019
PowerShell script to generate a report on all Power BI workspaces and groups in your Microsoft 365 tenant
Hereās a useful script I wrote the other day. This uses a few PowerShell modules to pull together information about all the Power BI workspaces in your Micro...
Password Hash Sync and Staged Rollout - Things you need to know
Now that Staged Rollout is out of NDA, I can finally talk about one of the projects Iāve been working on for the last twelve months. Why Staged Rollout?
Intune Custom Notifications
Google recently released the details of some major iOS security flaws. The good thing is that Apple already released the patch for five of them in the iOS 12...
Remove ms-outlook urls from your Google Contacts
Microsoft Outlook for mobile is one of the best, if not the best mobile mail client out there. However things can get a bit messy if you use the Save Contact...
Update the Azure AD password of a federated user
There are times you need to update the Azure AD password of a user thatās synced from Active Directory. However running either Set-AzureADUserPassword or Set...
Publishing private enterprise apps to the managed Google Play Store
Hereās a quick how to guide for publishing a private app to the managed Google Play store using the Custom App Publishing API and then surfacing it to your ...
2018
Remove the ms-outlook attribute added to your contacts
Like me if you had the unfortunate luck of using the Outlook appās feature to sync your Gmail contacts to iOS and then used a sync app like Google Contacts s...
Intune Data Centers
Want to know where all the Intune Data Centers are located? Hereās a handy linkĀ http://intunedatacentermap.azurewebsites.net
PayID
Have you tried PayID yet? Given that you can only have one PayID identifier for each account and bank it doesnāt seem to make much sense to use your telephon...
1163
The battle of the speakers has begun. My conundrum, one HomePod for $499 or two Sonos Ones for $349
1149
A good summary of 2017 status of the tech http://avc.com/2017/12/what-happened-in-2017
1147
I have been thoroughly enjoying the BigBash game over the holidays. Itās a step up from Stick Cricket and the daily challenges make you keep going back. http...
Setting up WordPress as your micro blogging platform
Deciding on WordPress as your source of truth for your micro blog is all good but how do you avoid spamming your RSS readers with your status updates meant f...
1137
ā¤ļø the magical window of time during sunsets #nofilter #brightonbeach #iphone #amateurphotographer
1134
Google really wants to get as many Minis as it can into Australian homes before Alexa launches locally. The twin Google Mini packs are currently at $78.Ā http...
Take back
Take back your voice in 2018. I love the whole idea around micro blogs. This feels like the early days of RSS and web logs. Find out more atĀ https://micro.blog
2017
Fix for MacOS Jittery Dock
Is your MacOS dock jittering and driving you nuts? In my case this was being caused by some apps that were ShareMouse and/or Synergy. Removing all the unnece...
Azure + iPad = Productivity
I donāt spend much timing writing code these days but when I do I want it to be productive as possible. Whether it is at my desk, in a meeting room or in bed...
Blocking Microsoft Flowās access to your Office 365 tenant
Did you know that any user in your organisation can sign into Microsoft Flow with their personal account and create a flow that connects to your organisation...
2016
Allowing third party applications in your Office 365 tenant
When managing Office 365 (and itās related Azure Active Directory) in a large enterprise your security team is wary about allowing third party applications t...
2015
Fix: Windows 10 (Technical Preview) OneDrive Sync Issues with Office 2016 Preview
After installing the Office 2016 Preview on build 10074 of the Windows 10 Technical Preview I came across a recurring sync issue with OneDrive. All the Offic...
Fix: Cannot sign in because the server version is incompatible with Skype for Business
To get Skype for Business (Office 2016) working with an older OCS or Lync server create the following registry key and you are good to go.
How to get the Azure AD Tenant ID without PowerShell
A quick way to get the Tenant Id for your Office 365 / Azure AD tenant is to login to the Azure AD Portal, drill down to the directory and copy the ID from t...
2014
Windows 10ās snap to edge feature is really useful in a multi monitor setup
Windows 10ās snap to edge feature is really useful in a multi monitor setup #win10
Tubecast
Love the Tubecast Windows Phone app which lets me cast to any device in the house.
Standalone Installer for Azure PowerShell modules
The How to install and configure Azure PowerShell MSDN article only provides a link to the Web Platform installer to download and install the Azure PowerShel...
Android users canāt stop raving about the Lumia 530
Came across these comments on the 1/2 priceĀ Telstra Lumia 530 deal for $39Ā https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/173750
Love never fails
Love bears up under anything and everything that comes, is ever ready to believe the best of every person, its hopes are fadeless under all circumstances, an...
Nothing in this world can satisfy. Jesus your the cup that wonāt run dry.
Nothing in this world can satisfy. Jesus your the cup that wonāt run dry.
A poem I wrote about Eric Garner, written solely with rearranged letters from the entirety of his last words. http://t.co/LLhHVCPPlv
A poem I wrote about Eric Garner, written solely with rearranged letters from the entirety of his last words. http://t.co/LLhHVCPPlv
WordPress JetPack
Just stumbled on WordPressā JetPack which lets you post to all the social networks directly from WordPress.
Office 365 Visio Stencils
Thanks to ShowerHacks for the bluetooth speaker photos. Anyway, This is a neat set of modern Visio stencils for Office 365. There is a whole heap of icons (1...
A heart transformed by grace looks at the mistakes of others & says āMe too. I am no better. How can I help?ā It doesnāt say āI knew it!ā
A heart transformed by grace looks at the mistakes of others & says āMe too. I am no better. How can I help?ā It doesnāt say āI knew it!ā
Rant: Windows 10 better be stellar
We have gone through this cycle with Microsoft when it comes to Windows Phone. At first it was Windows Mobile that was abandoned for a couple of years and M...
My blog is my voice
My blog (https://merill.net) is my voice. It existed before Twitter/FB and will live long after they die. So Iām leveraging IFTT ftw
Who decides what your going to read next?
Who decides what your going to read next? http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/08/the-choke-point.html
Meanwhile in Australiaā¦
via Facebook http://ift.tt/1tJKpB9
Locked the two boys in their room
Locked the two boys in their room and told them I was calling Child Services to take them away. They start packing and bawling because I kept yelling at them...
Love others so radically they wonder why
Love others so radically they wonder why.
One small tip for parents
One small tip for parents.
Latest build of Windows 10 removes āSmart Filesā. Go vote to get it back
Smart files is one of the most awesomest feature in Windows 8. It basically lets you āseeā all your files in OneDrive but takes up a ridiculously minute frac...
Why Iām strongly considering temporarily moving to an iPhone till Windows Phone catches up
Why Iām strongly considering temporarily moving to an iPhone till Windows Phone catches up: Just got an email that my work phone has been moved to Jabber. Ci...
Script to Download Yammer Image Profile
Hereās a neat script I wrote the other day to download the urls of all the userās in your Yammer network. This comes in handy when you want to re-use the pro...
2013
Creating PDF files dynamically with PowerShell
So how does one go about creating PDF files dynamically? You need a pinch of the open source PdfSharp library and 10 lines of PowerShell. Add-Type -Path .\P...
Retrieving the text from a message when writing automation tests using White
Quick tip on how to retrieve the value of a message box when writing automation tests using White for Windows desktop apps.
Creating jUnit/xUnit compatible xml test tesults in PowerShell
I originally wrote this function when I needed to create jUnit/xUnit compatible test results. The resulting xml file was then fed into the jUnit plugin in Je...
Debugging Javascript
Whatās the easiest way to break into the debugger in JavaScript especially when you have heaps of js files being loaded by a page (SharePoint 2013 & disp...
Tweaking the default search display template in SharePoint 2013
Letās look at what it takes to make a minor tweak to the out of the box search result in SharePoint 2013. Say my requirement is to show the document id in th...
Things to watch out for when migrating SharePoint 2010 FAST Search to SharePoint 2013
Iām currently working on a Search First migration to SharePoint 2013. This post is a placeholder to document the gotchas and workarounds.
Online XPath Tool
XPathToolĀ is a really great online XPath utility. Itās free, doesnāt need to be installed and has more features than a lot of the utilities that you find on ...
Making SharePoint JSon calls from PowerShell in SharePoint 2013
The Invoke-RestMethod in PowerShell 3 doesnāt send the appropriate header required by SharePoint 2013 to return JSon results. It took me a while to figure ou...
2012
Mobile Apps: Native or Web?
When building for mobile thereĀ isnātĀ a silver bullet. Instead we have a myriad of compromises to make. If your an enterprise wanting to build apps here are f...
Creating a BCS Content Source using PowerShell
You can use the following command to create a content source to crawl a Business Data Connectivity Service (BDCS). $lobSystems = @("LOBSystemName1","LOBSyste...
SharePoint Health Monitor App
Introducing the SharePoint Health Monitor App. More details coming soon once the app is published in the marketplace.
Tips for working with BCS and FAST Search
When building a FAST search solution to crawl external entities through BCS it can get very frustrating if you deploy a change and it doesnāt get updated in ...
On Ode To My Father
Hi Dadda,
Troubleshooting the ā403 Forbiddenā error for SharePoint & ASP.NET Apps
If your site bombs out with 403 Forbidden error one quick way to identify the root cause is to run ProcessMon on the web server and filter it out to only sho...
Disable Windows Live Contacts from being synchronized to Windows Phone
One very useful Windows Phone feature is that it automatically adds all your Windows Live contacts to your Windows Phone when you sign in. This is all fine a...
Windows 8 ā New Folder
To create a new folder in windows explorer pre Win8 was Alt+F, N.
LogParser ā Converting IIS logs to local date and time and filtering by date range
This is a note to myself to remember how to convert the UTC date/time to the local timezone.
Fixed: The target āGetCopyToOutputDirectoryContentProjectItemsā does not exist in the project.
If your building a Windows Phone app and get this error then a quick fix is to download the XNA Game Studio 4.0 Refresh (40 MB) and install it.
2011
Configure the Belkin Play Max router for SLT ADSL Broadband
Iām on vacation back home in Sri Lanka and became the tech support guy for the in-laws. They were using an old D-Link router which supported just 802.11b and...
Generating a mock/stub WCF web service from a WSDL
When working on integration projects you sometimes need to build a stub or mock service to emulate the behavior of the targeted system in your dev environmen...
ULS Viewer stops working
If ULS Viewer suddenly stops reading from the ULS log, the quick fix is to move all the log files to another folder. Except for the last log file which Explo...
2010
FBA Custom Sign In Page returns 401 Unauthorized error
If youāve built a custom sign in page in SharePoint 2010 but keep getting a 401 Unauthorized error instead of the sign in page then youāve most probably depl...
FBA Configuration Manager for SharePoint 2010
Setting up forms based authentication in SharePoint 2010 requires making changes in three web.config files. [FBA.ConfigureMembershipProvider]::Configure($we...
Updating Extended Properties of a Database using SQL Server SMO
Updating the extended properties on a database using SQL Serverās excellent Server Management Objects API is not as straightforward as setting the value and ...
Dynamically setting multiple activity destinations in K2 with ASP .NET
When building a typical workflow you usually know which user or group needs to perform an activity at design time. Sometimes though the workflow needs to be ...
Limit SQL Server memory usage on your workstation, laptop or VM
Hereās a neat tip I learnt over the weekend.
Feature differences between SharePoint 2007 Enterprise and Standard for a Publishing Portal
I recently had to deploy a site template that was built using SharePoint Enterprise Edition 2007 on an instance of SharePoint Standard Edition 2007.
SQL Server 2008 Service Weirdness
Two weird things I learnt about SQL Server while building the SharePoint 2010 Service Manager.
SharePoint 2010 Service Manager
With the final release of SharePoint 2010, I finally had time to brush-up and release the Service Manager that I wrote sometime back when the 2010 betas was ...
Visual Studio 2010 Installation Issue ā Setup Failed with HRESULT -2147467259
If you Visual Studio 2010 setup keeps failing when it tries to install the Visual C++ runtime, hereās a quick fix for you.
Icons & Illustrations for SharePoint Architecture Diagrams
A picture is worth a thousand words. Like me if you spend a lot of time writing up functional specs and architecture diagrams and are looking for ways to co...
.NET 4 Free Beta Exam Vouchers
Looks like I somehow missed this. Free vouchers for the .NET 4 (Visual Studio 2010 Beta Exams) are available online in the Born to Learn blog. I couldnāt reg...
SharePoint Client on Windows 7 Phone
Yesterday I was excited when I could download the Win 7 dev kit, but that turned to disappointment when I realised that I could only run the application that...
Get Safe File Name
Hereās a quick utility that might come in handy. More than once Iāve seen code where the invalid chars were hard coded. The Path.GetInvalidFilenameChars has ...
SharpSvn: A Primer
The SharpSvn library basically gives you a .NET interface to all the operations that you would normally perform through a tool like TortoiseSVN. I found myse...
Workflow does not start automatically when bulk inserting items
This had me tripped for a while. I was bulk inserting items (~800) to a list which had event receivers as well as a workflow attached.
Implementing Business Rules in a SharePoint list
On the project I am currently working on I had to implement a custom business rule for a list. The requirement was that only users in an Administrator group ...
2009
Visual Studio Maintenance Mode
I started working my way through the hands on labs in the SharePoint 2010 Developer Evaluation Guide and found that I was missing the Visual Studio 2010 Comm...
Review: Gmail Extension
Chrome opened public extensions just a few days ago and already the quality of extensions available are awesome. Take a look at the Google Mail Checker Plus ...
Installing Office Web Apps on Windows 7
If you havenāt heard of Office Web Apps before itās basically Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote running inside a browser. It lets you edit documents right ...
Installing SharePoint Server 2010 on Windows 7
Hereās a quick summary of how I installed the public beta of SharePoint Server 2010. Minimum Requirements: - Windows 7 64 bit: What this means is that yo...
Windows 7: WiFi slow to connect or Limited Connectivity
Iāve been having this frustrating issue for the last month where the laptop would take about 10 minutes before it was able to connect to the internet. This h...
CKS: World Clock and Weather WebPart with Proxy Support
I recently had to add proxy support to the Community Kit for SharePoint: World Clock and Weather WebPart. IT Teams usually like to lock down the proxy server...
Google Wave Invites
UPDATE: No more invites. Sorry guys Iāve given away all my invites on a first-come first-serve basis. Cheers!
WPF Checked ListBox
WPF currently does not have a checked list box out of the box so youāll need to roll your own. Unfortunately most of the examples that come up on Google invo...
The War is Over
Sri Lanka is finally rid of the terrorists, the war is over. I hope and pray that we have seen the end of senseless bloodshed.
Fixing the Silverlight caching issue
Fell into this trap today. I deployed an update of my silverlight project to the Sharepoint site but on some machines the browser continously kept loading th...
Changing the default schema in Oracle
The application I was working on assumed that the user would always be in the default schema. I ran into a snag when I had to connect to the staging environm...
Date Ranges in Log Parser for EventLogs
If you need to trawl through your production server event logs. Hereās a quick tip for extracting just the entries for a given date range using LogParser. BT...
Making your portable hard disk work with the XBox 360
I like using my XBox as a media center. But when I plugged in a portable HDD to the 360 but it didnāt show up as a disc. Didnāt work on the Samsung home thea...
Show Folder Tree in Windows 7 Explorer
I spend a lot of my time switching between folders in Windows explorer and the Windows 7 explorer has been driving me nuts lately. Win7 (or at least the bui...
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 breaks Microsoft CCF (Customer Care Framework)
So your seeing this exception in your WCF client application after installing SP1 on .NET Framework 3.5 System.ServiceModel.Security.MessageSecurityExceptio...
Another Dell XPS M1330 tip: External Display Flicker
Although five of us have exact same setup, I am the only one at work to experience the external display flickering. I tried everything from downloading all t...
Windows 7: New Keyboard Shortcuts
There are quite a few new keyboard shortcuts in Windows 7 and some of them are a godsend when working on a multi-monitor setup. I can finally retire UltraMon...
Windows 7 beta and the beta nVidia Driver
Two words: Donāt install This is what nVidia says and you typically get it through Windows Update. I suffered with the title bar going missing and ugly black...
Ranaviru Fund
Let me start by saying that I donāt believe in war, Iām more in the camp of Gandhi and Mandela who showed that although difficult you can achieve what you wa...
Dell Studio: Slow mouse (touchpad) and missing keys issue
Just before I installed Windows 7, the new Dell Studio suddenly started slowing down. The touchpad movements would be jerky and some keys wouldnāt get presse...
Running Windows 7 Beta
With everyone reporting that Windows 7 beta was very stable I upgraded both my wifeās Dell Studio and my Dell 64-bit XPS to Windows 7. Both setups ran fine w...
Migrating from BlogEngine.NET to WordPress
Yet another migration post, feels like just yesterday I migrated from dasBlog to BlogEngine.NET.
Deleting millions of records from a table without blowing the transaction log
Over the weekend I realized that deleting 80% of the records on a table with 87 million rows is not quite as easy as issuing a delete statement with a where ...
2008
Viewing the disk space usage (size) of all the tables in a SQL Server 2005/2008 database
I spent a couple of hours searching for a script that returns the size of all the tables in a database. Most of the ones that you find use sp_msforeachtable ...
Went shooting
So we went clay shooting yesterday with Adam Tyler (an Athenās Olympic Bronze medalist and two time Commonwealth Gold medalist) showing us how itās done. A...
Melbourne
Itās been nearly four months since I moved to Melbourne and having been in Sydney six months prior, Melbourne was indeed a welcome change. Although itās very...
Could it be true? Is Live Search (Kumo) really getting better than the great Goog?
So I wanted to find a tool that would do fast folder comparisons. Searching on Google gave me a lot of useless stuff most of them related to fast folder acce...
A Personal Blog: Spaces vs Blogger
Iāve been wanting to start a personal blog for sometime and finally went ahead with it. This post though is not about my personal blog but rather about whic...
Automate Build for a ClickOnce Application Hosted on CodePlex using MSBuild
This is what I wanted my automated build to do: Get the latest version from CodePlex Update the version number in AssemblyInfo.cs Build the projec...
WCF Performance Optimization Tips
I wound up work on my last project and thought of sharing some performance challenges we faced when the product went live. Keep in mind though that optimizat...
Silverlight
Silverlight 2.0 just went live. If you are a .NET developer building ASP.NET or WinForms/WPF applications this is a HUGE deal. Your .NET code can now r...
Taking notes with Evernote
For a long time I've been searching for the ultimate note taking application. OneNote used to be my favorite but since I became a consultant and needed to mo...
WCF Add Service Reference gotcha with Windows Server
We recently switched from developing in Vista to Windows Server 2003. Someone had the bright idea that we should develop in the same environment the applica...
Bill Gates was right about spam
In 2004 BillG made a statement that spam will be solved in two years. In 2008 I can prove that it is. Here's how my Inbox looks today. That's 19,326 spam ...
Copy Paste Unformatted Text in Word
I was reading this old series of posts on the whole Office Ribbon bar design (quite a fascinating from a developer perspective). I came across the comments ...
Oh MSDN Language Filter
For the love of god why is the language filter on MSDN a list of checkboxes that default to ALL languages. You'd expect the guys at MSDN to have figu...
Un-MVPāed
It had to happen. Two years ago I made a conscious decision to make my family the center of my universe and my #1 priority. Joshua is now 16 months and Rafa...
Creating HTML Signatures on Outlook 2007
Outlook 2003 had a nice feature that allowed you to create a signature from an HTML file. This went missing in Outlook 2007 and a google search for Outlook ...
GMail is SCREAMING fast on FireFox 3 Beta 4
I've been using FireFox 3 beta 3 for quite some time and was pretty happy with it. Fired up FF today and was prompted with a nice upgrade button. They&#...
DasBlog to BlogML Converter
A couple of people have emailed me asking for the GUI version of the dasBlog to BlogML import / exporter, so I thought it best to share it with everyone. Yo...
Merill on Politics and Sri Lanka
Lately I haven't blogged much about politics but this post by Indi word for word matches my feelings on this topic.
SQL Server Data Services
With SQL Server Data Services, it looks like Microsoft is finally entering the foray that Amazon's S3 service provided. As a Microsoft developer the bes...
What are you blogging today?
As you may have noticed I recently went through a steep learning curve on SharePoint. The best part was it turned out to be a liberation on my blogging minds...
Making use of the ā??ā operator in C#
The ?? operator was introduced to C# in 2.0 and I made a mental note to myself to use it when possible. Recently I had to do some tinkering with good ole...
Write CAML queries in code
In my very first webpart that I wrote I needed to write some CAML queries to filter and sort the lists. Being the type of guy who hates seeing strings litter...
Migrated from dasBlog to BlogEngine.NET
After 5 years, starting from the humble BlogX that ChrisAn wrote to Clemens and then ScottH's dasBlog, I finally moved over to BlogEngine.NET today. My ...
Getting ModifyUserPropertyByAccountName to work
The documentation for the ModifyUserPropertyByAccountName method of the UserProfileService in the SharePoint Server SDK has a bug. You'll notice that althoug...
Efficiently Delete / Purge All Items from a SharePoint List
If you want to delete or remove all the items in a SharePoint list you need to iterate through each item and perform a delete. Most of the examples on the we...
Uploading Videos
I've been playing with uploading videos today and MSN Video seems to outshine the other when it comes to uploading as well as viewing video. The biggest stre...
Joshua & water
One of Joshuaās favorite activity is playing with water. A bath anytime of the day is sure to cheer him up. I usually like to spoil him by giving about four ...
Rafael
It turned out to be a wonderful coincidence that our second son Rafael decided to be born on our second wedding anniversary! The little fella has a loud vo...
2008 Sri Lankan Holidays for Outlook
A few people reminded me about posting the new holidays for this year, but I never got around to it. Luckily Kavinda has put it together here.
Itās good to be a consultant
I'm working as a consultant for the first time in my ten year career and I'm loving every minute of it. In the last couple of months I've worked in three ver...
Playing the currency game
If like me you frequently send money back to Sri Lanka, it's important to know how to play the game. You can save yourself some dollars or rupees by knowing ...
Tomorrow
"I view my life in a way ā¦ I'll explain it to you, OK? The greatest thing about tomorrow is, I will be better than I am today. And that's how I look at my l...
2007
No color coding for Classic ASP in Visual Studio 2008
This seems to be a bummer. Color coding and intellisense for VBScript code in Classic ASP pages have been deprecated in VS 2008. There is a workaround for m...
Moq: Linq to Mock
Daniel Cazzulino just announced the birth of Moq, now this is mocking done right. // ShouldExpectCallWithArgumentvar mock = new Mock<IFoo>();moc...
The Dangers of Static Events In User Controls
Static events in user controls can lead to all sorts of weird behavior in your application. Especially when they are hosted in forms that are loaded and unlo...
VSTS ā Multiple tests with ID <guid> found
When you trying to run your tests and you come across this error message "Multiple tests with ID <guid> found", simply hit the Refresh button on the Te...
Visual Studio 2008 TFS breaking Unit Test Projects
On the next iteration of my current we'll be using Visual Studio 2008 and targeting .NET 3.5. As usual I jumped the gun and installed it before the rest of t...
My First Postā¦
Wow, it's been more than a month since my last post from Sri Lanka. Life has been quite busy and I've been overwhelmed sometimes, but things are slowly falli...
My last post here
Looks like this will be my last blog posting from Sri Lanka. Tomorrow I'm flying out to Australia. My new job is at Unique World and my first assignment will...
Migrating
Finally a post after an awfully long time. I'm in the midst of moving my life and twitter too is to blame. In the meantime I have this cute picture of Joshua.
Following friends on Twitter
The twitter web UI has a bug when you try to follow friends. The simplest workaround is to add friends by typing the 'follow username' command in t...
I just tried twitter last week and was blown away! This is one really really cool service. For me the coolest part about it is the SMS/Texting fe...
Free Outlook 2007 Preview Handlers (PDF, XML, ZIP, MSI, BIN, CSV, XPS, and XAML files)
If your using Vista or Outlook 2007 then the free Outlook Preview Handler in this MSDN article by Stephen Toub gives you a whole bunch of new files incl...
The two Scotts
One of the cool things that happened at the MVP Summit this year was that I got to meet two people I really admire and both of them are Scotts. Wh...
Invisible backward compatibility in Vista
If you have Vista running try this. Open an Explorer window, move your mouse to the top right left corner (thanks Kavinda) and double-click. What happens nex...
Debugging SQL Server 2005 Stored Procedures in Visual Studio
I used to use the debug feature in Query Analyzer when working with SQL Server 2000 quite a lot. There were a number of time when I did want to do this in SQ...
Code Profiling
Until yesterday, if anyone asked me about dynamic code profiling, I would have said that the only way to do it is to buy the Red Gate ANTS Profiler or the Je...
HOWTO: View all images on a site
Did you know that you can view all the images on a site by searching for site:<url> e.g. site:merill.net. Works on Google Image search as well.
Get to Messenger, Yahoo, Skype with the keyboard
Most IM clients minimize to the system tray which becomes a problem for keyboard freaks like me. I need to use the mouse to get to the window. Enter Windows ...
Another Silverlight post
I didn't want to cloud the blogosphere with yet another post on Silverlight, but this post on TechCrunch is one of the better written article on Silverl...
Getting your Cricket score fix
Chandana is bitching about Dialog's so called Live Updates on 777. I've found Sky's 'Cricket Live Scores' to be pretty reliable on my really lousy phon...
Joshua @ 4 months
It's Joshua's fourth month today and I totally adore him!
About the author?
If your in the local forum you'll know by now that I'll be speaking today on RAD as in RoR speed. What's funny is the 'About the author: (Same as befor...
SQL Server User Group
Dinesh, our very own SQL Server MVP, just announced the launching of the SQL Server User Group along with an online forum for all things SQL Server at www.sq...
Backup your data for free
I ran across this on ScottH's post today. The Mozy.com gives you 2GB of backup storage for free. Currently, I use the free SyncBack utility t...
Mobile projection & 64GB Flash
Two cool things that came through my feeds today include Samsung announcing a 64GB Flash Drive and way cooler are the pico-projectors which may some-day end ...
TFS now gets Web Access
Microsoft just announced the acquisition of devbiz solutions, the guys who make TeamPlain Web Access. The best part is that it's free now. If you've been hol...
Wait for usā¦
This says it all. Beating India was sweet revenge. In the '99 World Cup, Dravid and Ganguly went on a run spree to eliminate us from the tournament. I'm gl...
Double your reading rate
I'm always on the lookout for productivity tips that help me be a better myself. I used to love Steve Pavlina but most of his posts in the last si...
Super secret project and the MVP Summit 2007 so far
I just got back from the session by Don and ChrisAn and they did 'partially' talk about the super secret project they've been working on. I've captured ...
A new direction?
Will Don and ChrisAn talk about this? ChrisAn was in the WPF team...
Looking forward to the MVP Summit
I'll be at Redmond next month with the rest of the SL MVP gang. Don Box just gave yet another reason for me to get excited. We're being let in on the top sec...
TV Channels in Sri Lanka
Time to tune in the newest addition to the local tv stations, Channel One MTV. Do you have all 13 channels tuned in? Rupavahini Rupavahini Eye ITN Sirasa TV...
Oh Sri Lanka
Indi and Raditha have their say on the current politics. Indi's is a hilarious read. Oh, btw if you want to know what douchebag means.
I LOVE open source software like this
I've got a great many videos that I've captured in .wmv but haven't had the time to figure out resolutions, formats and burning them to DVDs, yet. That's all...
Window Clippings
I take a lot of screenshots and Vista posed a problem with it's window shadows. My workaround was to place the screen behind a Notepad background before taki...
Microsoft vs. BlueJ
I was first introduced to BlueJ when I started lecturing on OOP using Java at Keele (IIT) for their MSc program. Teaching first time programmers about object...
HOWTO: Renew your Passport when it expires
With my impending visit to the MVP Global Summit 2007 in Seattle it was time to renew my passport which expired last year. Dinesh pointed me to the well laid...
BlogJet 2.0 and Live Writer
BlogJet 2.0 has been released. I’ve tried it out but I think I’m going to give it a pass and stick to the old version. IMO BlogJet 2.0 suffers f...
Free Download Manager
I’ve been a long-time user of LeechGet for managing my downloads but had problems running it under Vista. Internet Download Manager was a good choice u...
Office 2007 Keyboard Shortcuts
I’ve been using Office 2007 for the past six months but its just today that I ran into the awesome keyboard shortcut. Man, the Office guys have re...
WiMAX in Sri Lanka
This is wicked cool. Dialog has started pilot testing WiMAX with data speeds of 10MBPS. They areas being tested right now are Hambantota, Matara, Galle,...
Yes. I use GMail. Iām an idiot.
I didn’t think it would happen this soon. Firefox developer doesn’t trust Google anymore. via Paul Thurrot.
2007 Sri Lankan Holidays for Outlook
There are few housekeeping stuff that you need to do at the start of the year and adding the Sri Lankan holidays to your Outlook calendar is one. ā ā ā ā ā ā...
Counting my blessings
Happy New Year everybody! Looking back, 2006 for me has been a very special year and one that I'm thanking God for blessing me so wonderfully. I got marrie...
2006
TypeForwardedToAttributes
While preparing for the 70–551 exam I came across the new TypeForwardedToAttributes class. Searching for this on MSDN brought up “no search resul...
www.joshuaf.net
My son has his own site now at www.joshuaf.net. At just $10 a year, we love you Google Apps!
Free Microsot Exam Voucher [Limited Number]
Microsoft Sri Lanka is offering a generous gift (limited number) this Christmas season to all dotnetforum community members on a first come first serve basis...
Joshua
Well my baby boy finally made it into this world exactly two weeks ago. Life has been pretty hectic since then with many a sleepless nights. Although tiring,...
I love the Vista unzip
I love the Vista unzip dialog. Just two steps to unzip a file. Although XP first added the unzip to Windows, it was crudely done. It always went through the ...
Microsoft Innovations
Is Microsoft Innovative? A fun debate between Robert Scoble and Dave Winer on the Wall Street Journal online. What’s even more interesting is this comm...
Manage your passwords
Another program from my ‘Must Have’ folder. KeePass stores all my privata logins in a safe, secure encrypted file. It’s open-source, s...
Office 2007 UI Licensing
Microsoft this week announced the licensing of the Office 2007 User Interface (i.e. the Ribbon bar) to the partner community. The licensing is royalty free, ...
XML Notepad 2007
Have I been living under a rock? This is one heck of a tool. No more XML Spy for me. Incremental search (CTRL+I) in both tree and text views, so that ...
Ooh aah just a little bit!
Finally one less beta on my system. Office 2007 here I come!
One tool to bind them all
Or just two on this occassion. But man what a tool, Filemon and Regmon have been mashed-up into one. Better yet not just a mashup it has been written from th...
Ready for a new day?
Get your hands on all the brand spanking new releases from a single location at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/devsolutions/ Includes download links to t...
Gmail Mobile
Google has released Gmail Mobile, a new cell phone client application, for everyone's favorite web-based email service, Gmail. In general the new Gmail Mob...
SQL query optimization
Wow. Two SQL posts on the same day. The SQL query processing team blog is quite a gem. I wonder how I missed this. The query processing team - query optimiz...
Publishing your SQL Server 2005 database?
Ever wanted to MySQL feature that let’s you script out a database (including the data) when working with SQL Server? Fear no more the Database Publishi...
Outlook Shortcuts
I spend a lot of time in Outlook and I’ve found these shortcuts to be invaluable. Ctrl+Shift+M : Open a new email window Ctrl+Enter ...
Steve Jobs on Design
I’ve been reading a lot of Steve Jobs quotes recently here is another one I can relate to with the products that I’m building. “Most peopl...
EPF.lk launched
An okay start, they at least have some information on taking loans and stuff, the highlight being the forms are available for printing. The site though is do...
Tech.Ed Keynote Review
My thoughts on the keynote that was presented at Tech.Ed Sri Lanka. To start off with the keynote was way too long and went on for what felt like four hours....
Innovation Comes From Saying No
I was reading the free Getting Real book from 37Signals and came across this Steve Jobs quote. I love it! "We Don't Want a Thousand Features" Steve Jobs gav...
Sysinternals saved my day. Again!
So I got into office early today and was greeted with this error when I fired out Outlook: Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook win...
Three reasons to attend Tech.Ed this year
Sessions: There will be a total of 60 sessions and 8 (HOLs). This is nearly double the number of last year’s sessions. Your getting more bang for your...
Find out whoās linking to you
Find out which web pages are linking to you by using the linkdomain: operator like this. While the Live search caters to end users, Yahoo’s searc...
Is your company proud of you?
James Governor, an analyst. talks about how the WS02 guys cherish their developers. What a nice change from the norm- where corporate web sites only h...
Google Reader ā Design Simplicity
Joe Wilcox of Microsoft Monitor joins the ever growing group that keeps raving about Google Reader. He touches on one of the key aspects in product design w...
Bye, bye SmartClient, hello WebApp
Well I never thought I would say this but I’ve just bid goodbye to RssBandit my feedreader for the last three years and completely switched over t...
Robot employees
An excellent post by Kathy, here’s an extract: In an earlier post I said, "If you asked the head of a company which employee they'd prefer: the perfe...
I LOVE Google Code Search!
This is wicked cool! Check out google code search to find out how various commands are being used by developers. Say you want to figure out how to use the ...
Introduction to .NET 3.0 slides and links
Thanks a lot for all the positive feedback I’ve been hearing from you guys on yesterday’s presentation. I need to make a public apology to Manzi&...
Introduction to .NET 3.0 ā October User Group Meeting
I will be presenting an ‘Introduction to the .NET Framework 3.0’ today at the October User Group meeting which will be held at the Microsoft &nda...
Hold your horses, Vista RC2 on Friday
Hold your horses, Vista RC2 on Friday, say Paul. Microsoft this Friday will ship the final pre-release version of Windows Vista and, unexpectedly, will name...
Lyrics Plugin for Windows Media Player
from Lifehacker: Lyrics Plugin is a piece of software tailored for music fans. To put it simply - it is an add-on to view lyrics in WinAmp or Windows Media...
TNL Rocks with Podcasts
Last weekend I heard about the podcast while listening to the radio. Somewhere at TNL is a geek whose into some really wicked cool stuff. The station that pi...
Multi-Tasking makes you stupid
If your currently working on more than one project take a couple of minutes to read Jeff Atwoord’s post on multi-tasking. He concludes with: I've ofte...
Get a makeover for your XP with Desktop Themes
If you want to spruce up your desktop, one decision you need to make upfront is whether to stick to themes supported by Microsoft or be more riskier and inst...
Google Reader and Word 2007
Google Reader got a fresh update today and the experience is nearly as good as my favorite offline reader, RssBandit. It even works on my slow dial-up line f...
Guidance Explorer goes online
Wohoo. Guidance Explorer has gone online at http://www.guidancelibrary.com/GuidanceExplorerBeta/. This is the first smart client that I’m happy has tur...
What are you waiting for? Get your own domain today!
If your a geek (or not so much a geek but) with Rs. 1000/- to spare a year, then owning your own domain has become so cheap now that there's not much of an e...
Upgrade
With dasBlog 1.9 being released today I made a quick jump and got the site upgraded to the latest version. I also joined the dasBlog mailing list to see if I...
Blogging from home (finally!)
I finally managed to connect to the internet from home today. The dial-up line that I’m connecting from though is excruciatingly, painfully slow and ke...
Inline Search for IE
A feature that Firefox users have been enjoying all along finally comes to IE. Infact I was not happy when IE7 didn't include this feature and even...
Get your copy of Vista RC1 today
The latest version of of Vista (RC1) is available for public download. Go get it now at http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/en/download.htm
Windows XP EULA in Plain English
The guys over at LinuxAdvocate.org have a slightly biased ‘Plain English’ translation of the legalise in the Windows XP EULA. Many of us have cli...
XslCompiledTransform Performance
Have you’ve ever written any code on .NET that does XSL transformations? Here’s another strong reason why you might think of making the jump...
Review: eTickets.lk
Sri Lanka is finally starting to take it’s fledgling steps in moving to the internet. Yesterday, I booked tickets through www.etickets.lk (wow 200...
Windows Live Writer
Microsoft just released Windows Live Writer today and I'm guessing this is going to replace BlogJet as my default editor. Get it here. Just a quick summary o...
Skype 2.5 ā Outlook Contacts
I’m in love with Skype’s new integration feature with Outlook contacts, now I can pull up phone numbers in super quick time without having to use...
August User Group Meetup
Quick note out to all you guys that we’ve shifted the user group meeting to the Microsoft office at WTC and unfortunately you can only attend if you re...
June User Group Meeting
This month’s user group meeting would go down as one of the funnier ones. Imagine me presenting in a pitch dark room with no lights, I only realized ho...
Automatic Brace Matching
The Visual Studio shortcut of the day is CTRL+] which allows you to jump between two matching braces. The name is somewhat misleading since brace matching wo...
On Sex and Linux
I was browsing through my stats pages and came across a couple of pretty interesting findings. It's quite funny that my blog turns up #1 on Google when someo...
Imagine Cup ā Panchayudha Wins!
After a gruelling 3 hours the winners of Imagine Cup ‘06 were announced for the Sri Lanka. It was great to see the time and effort that all the teams h...
Guidance Automation Toolkit
There were a couple of recent posts in the forum asking what GAT was and how one gets started on using this, so I thought of writing a post to cover the answ...
Imagine Cup Finals ā Today!
The day is finally here, five teams were chosen from over forty-five entries from almost all the universities in Sri Lanka. Today evening at the Taj, each te...
MSDN June Webcasts
This month’s MSDN webcasts line up looks like a pretty impressive resource on all things Web Services. Our very own fellow MVP, William “Software...
Imagine Cup Sri Lanka site
Wela announced yesterday about the launch of www.imaginecupsrilanka.com. As usual a job well done by Wela and team which included both Razor and Charith. The...
SQL Prompt
If you spend time writing Stored Procedures or SQL Queries then SQL Prompt is a must have tool. It basically adds Intellisense for SQL Server and works well ...
Whatās up?
Wow. I just remembered that I had a blog. I’ve been quite busy the last three to four weeks putting some of my personal development items in place. The...
Database diagram problems on a database migrated from SQL Server 2005
I ran into a wierd error message when trying to view the Diagrams on a database that was migrated to SQL Server 2005. Something about the user not being...
So whatās the first timezone PITA for you?
You’ll need to change the timezone on your box to be +5.30 (India Standard Time) until we have a service pack release from Microsoft that mov...
ASP.NET Tips and Tricks
I hope those of you who came to the .NET User Group meeting yesterday enjoyed my session on Cool ASP.NET Tips and Tricks. As promised the slides and demos ca...
.NET User Group: Smart Client Deep Dive
The Sri Lankan .NET developer community will be given a rare treat today when Dr. Nitin Paranjape an Office MVP does a talk on Developing VSTO Applicati...
Imagine Cup 06 Sri Lanka Finalists Announced
Jina just started announcing the five finalists for the Imagine Cup ā06 so I guess I can blog about it. The shortlisted teams in no particular order are...
IE7 Feature #1: Reopen Closed Tabs
I’ve been using IE7 since the Beta 2 Preview was released a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been discovering a few gems which I feel needs...
Re-training graduates and the Imagine Cup 06
Towards the end of last year I was involved in training a batch of non-IT graduates on .NET. The specific program was a pilot project with Mor...
Hereās to Linux
The very first posting to this blog from a Linux box! The lab that Iām lecturing on .NET Compact Framework development for an Advanced MSc batch has all the...
Visual Studio Community Launch at Moratuwa
Wela and I had a blast at the University of Moratuwa last week where we hosted the Visual Studio Community Launch for about 200 odd students. Wela started of...
WiMAX in Sri Lanka!
This is so friggin cool and I thought were so behind on things. SLT has already installed and is testing out WiMAX broadband wireless in Sri Lanka. If these ...
One Language to Bind Them All
[from Luca] The award for best creative in a story goes to the SD Times team and Larry O'Brien for the story on LINQ (Language INtegrated Query) - One Langua...
Windows Live Messenger invites to give away
If you want an invite just leave a comment here. Windows Live Messenger beta </p> You have 23 invitations remaining This will be the next-g...
Add Sri Lankan holidays to your Outlook calendar
How many times have you scheduled a meeting in Outlook only to find out later that it was a holiday? I just did today and here’s how I’m going to...
Oh to be in Singapore
William Tay boasts about Singapore becoming one BIG Giant hotspot. Unfortunately I don’t see a single visionary soul in our current government thinking...
Samsunig i310 Announced ā With an 8Gb HD!
This is one sweeet baby that I’d like to own! Samsunig i310 Announced - With an 8Gb HD! Our mates at NewMobile.com</a> have got news on ...
Turning back the clock
This turning the clock around thingy is becoming a fashion statement that every Sri Lankan President wants to do. Right now its Mahinda mamaa’s turn an...
March user group meeting today
If your a .NET developer in Colombo and are into developing smart client applications make sure you don’t miss the user group meeting today. We have tw...
Leaving Microsoft
A lot of you guys already know that I left Microsoft Sri Lanka after being on the job for just five months. The big question everyone wants to know is. ...
Iām back!
Dudes. Start your aggregator engines!
Please update your feeds
To all you guys who are reading this through an aggregator please update your feed subscription to use http://feeds.feedburner.com/merill as this will c...
2005
So tell me again, why is it an interesting time to be a Windows developer?
Check this out! - Microsoft stunned its customers last month with a swarm of product announcements at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC). - An u...
Iām pissed off with the consular officer at the US Embassy
I've been seeing a lot of new lately on all the fun that the MVPs are having at the Global MVP Summit in Redmond and boy it pisses me off that none of...
Google Office!
Internet news reports about an announcement that Google and Sun are to make later in the day today about Google Office. What with Office 12 in th...
Sri Lankaās newest mobile portal: eg.lk
If youāve got a mobile with GPRS check out Sri Lankaās newest portal over at http://eg.lk. A lot of cool stuff including news andĀ blogs along with updates ...
Huge Tech.Ed discounts for top posters!
The posters at dotnetforum.lk do a great selfless service to the development community in Sri Lanka, and whenever possible we at Microsoft like to show the...
Donāt call it a comeback
Vic Gundotra's post would make anyone's mouth water! Don't call it a comeback Don't call it a comeback!I been here for years -LL Cool J Within a fe...
Free Opera!
IE and Firefox get a new 'free' competitor. Described as the fastest Web browser available on any platform, Opera pioneered several features that we now ta...
Can open source companies innovate?
Ever since I attended the FOSS conference a couple of weeks ago, I've been trying to figure out how viable an option Open Source is for the software indust...
Tech.Ed Sri Lanka Blog
I started blogging over at www.teched.lk/blog. Check it out and keep posted on all thatās happening at Tech.Ed Sri Lanka.
Alonzo Doll catches the blogging bug
http://spaces.msn.com/members/alanzod/Ā Subscribed.
Back Online
Ahh.. Feels so sweet to be back online. My hosting server got screwed up and I had to wait till Madura got back to work to fix it up. Wierdly, all that was ...
Windows Vista 2 Screenshots
Windows Vista Beta 2 screenshots taken from TechEd have been posted at bink.nu check it out here.
Lunch with Jim and Rasmus
During lunch today I was joined at my table by Rasmus Lerdof (the creator of PHP) and Jim Zemlin the executive director of FSG (Free Standards Group). Jim i...
FOSS: Keynote
I was able find a power socket at the end of the room where I was able to get my notebook charged again and guess what Dr. Ruwan from the Colombo University...
CDNUG: September User Group Meeting ā CLR Integration with SQL Server 2005
We will be holding the September User Group Meeting today at the Gateway Auditorium at Cotta Road. A fresh new face will be talking today and this guy is a...
Merill Takes The Red Pill
That's right folks, I've taken the Red Pill and boy does it feel good. Although I've been here for just one day, I'm mightily impressed with how things are...
London O/L and A/L Results Online
The London O/L and A/L results have just been published online at http://www.britishcouncil.org/srilanka. The results are fairly easy to get to but there se...
Google Talk
Google has started yet another war, this time taking on chat. MSN, Yahoo, Skype watchout! Go download from http://www.google.com/talk/ my username is merillf...
Job Openings at NuMatrix
Rukmal, President of NuMatrix mailed me about this job opening available at NuMatrix. These guys are actually our office neighbors and are housed one floor a...
Blogging
Itās been a long time since my last post and I being kept away from regular blogging due to a number of things. Between the hectic work at office and some of...
Microsoft Update
Have you browsed to the shiny new Microsoft Update site? Get all Microsoft products updated at one point (Windows and Office currently).
Ajax ā July User Group Meeting
As promised at the user group meeting yesterday here are the slides and the link to the Ajax .NET library. Download: Ajax - Presentation Ajax.NET Library: ht...
Migraine
Imara suffers a lot from Migraine and last week was a terrible one for her with a four day migraine that wouldn’t leave. This prompted me to start read...
PostXING
After seeing a few posts today about PostXING, I just downloaded it to figure out how much better it is than my current blogging tool BlogJet. This is my fir...
Milk chocolate melts in your mouth, not on your ass
If you were wondering what my MSN personal message today was all about, here’s the scoop. Models, wearing chocolate covered outfits and jewelry, eat ch...
VBās My for C# Developers
Dan Fernandez has posted about Juval Lowy’s My wrapper for C#. What’s hilarious is the name that Juval is using for the wrapper. Here’s how...
Books
Okay, I admit it. I’m a J.K. Rowling fan. (FYI: I’m a serious Dan Brown fan too, oh and James Herriot as well.) I’m into the third Harry Po...
IE Tabbed Browsing
For all you IE fans who’ve been waiting for tabbed browsing, your waiting is all over. Get it now at MSN. http://toolbar.msn.com
Free E-Learning and Skills Assessments for VS 2005/SQL Server 2005
Microsoft Learning (MSL) has just announced the availability of 16 skills products designed to help you build your Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 ski...
Turnabout ā Greasemonkey for Internet Explorer (Yep, Itās Another One)
For those of you who installed Trixie after reading my earlier post, you should now really look into Turnabout, one of the key reasons being that the develop...
The Big Four
With AOL’s announcement of their 2GB free email service here’s a current snapshot of the big guys: Gmail – 2.3 GB AOL – 2 GB Yahoo &...
e-mail on Windows Mobile ā RIM -> RIP
Wow. Now this is a major boost to the Windows Mobile platform. On the go: Microsoft will give away software upgrades to provide Outlook users access to wirel...
The Next Version of Start.com is Out
The next version of MSN's experimental RSS reader is available at http://www.start.com/3. You have to solve the questions before getting access to the next v...
New Passport Features
Has anyone noticed the newest features in the latest Microsoft Passport upgrade? My MSN account had somehow gotten locked so I was taken to this page to rese...
Trixie ā Greasemonkey for Internet Explorer
If you’ve heard about GreaseMonkey and always wanted to use it but didn’t like FireFox then Trixe is for you. I can now happily run GreaseMonkey ...
How to become an early riser
I personally have always been an early riser and consider my morning hours to be the peak time during which my productive is the best. If you’ve alway...
The Admiralās Pipe
Brad Adams posted this piece. I hope none of *my* management is reading this! I was recently reminded of a story one of our development managers told me.&nbs...
Structured Procrastination
This short post on Structured Procrastination by John Perry (a Stanford Professor) makesĀ extreme sense to me. Quite scary!
BTA is hiring!
We’re looking for smart, talented folks to join our core group in Systems Engineering. If you get what Career Calculus is all about and are a...
zone24x7 is hiring
Dhammika from zone24x7 just forwarded this ad to me. They’re looking for Software Engineers and Web Developers, click on the thumbnail below to see the...
MVP Summit Day 1
There was one particular event on Day 1 that I can safely say wasn't under NDA so I'm free to blog about it. What do you think happens when 200 testosterone...
Gates wants more insourcing
Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates is asking the US government to let more foreign citizens work at US corporations. Gates says that ...
Back from the MVP Summit
Just got back from the MVP Summit last evening and boy did we have fun. I’ll be posting about what I’ve seen and heard in the past week as soon a...
Microsoft Certified Architect Program
Microsoft announces their newest certification http://www.mcpmag.com/news/print.asp?EditorialsID=789
Remotely Enable Remote Desktop
I didn’t know this was so easy. Connect to the remote registry of the machine Browse to HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server Change f...
Everday tips from MonkeyFilter
An assload of handy (and sometimes hilarious and asinine) everyday tips. Some NSFW. Here’s few of my faves: When you drop a small object, like a pill,...
Colombo .NET User Group Meeting ā April
Prasanna’s session on NHibernate at this month’s user group meeting was a really cool eye opener into the world of ORM. I’ve heard a lot ab...
Visual Studio Beta 2 Released
Visual Studio Beta 2 Released along with a ‘Go Live’ license, so you can start deploying your .NET 2.0 solutions on production machine...
MVP Night
To continue on with yesterday’s post, after the Imagine Cup judging was over all the MVPs got together and went for a night out. We first hung around a...
My brother blogs
Well what do you know, my brother Julius has started blogging. Subscribed. MSN Spaces is making it so easy for anyone to start blogging and sharing photos.
Imagine Cup Judging
With all the work going on at office, I didn’t have much time on my hands to be doing any posting. Anyway this post is way overdue and goes back to the...
Chris Brummeā¦ Where are you?
Chris Brumme is the father of all .NET bloggers. His posts are more like booklets on the CLR that I usually print them and read it off-line. Half-way through...
Kottu Blog Drive
Come on guys, what are you waiting for? Add yourself to the local blogosphere! Kottu Blog Drive: That’s right boys and girls, it’s competition ...
Free ASP.NET 2.0 C# 2005 Training!
Yes, that's free as in beer. AppDev, a leader in video-based training and SQL Server Reader's Choice winner, was kind enough to provide a portion o...
How to become a Microsoft MVP
Robert McLaws writes about how you can become a Microsoft MVP. I’m half way through my MVP status and I’m thoroughly enjoying the ride. In fact l...
Keele ā OOP
This post is for those from Keele who attended the OOP class I took yesterday, here are the links I promised. BlueJ – http://www.bluej.org/ Sun ...
Private universities and Sri Lankan bloggers
There’s been some really heavy discussions happening in the blogosphere about the whole Private University debate for Sri Lanka. Indi and Morquendi are...
Glass tombstones
I wonder if I’ll be able to get a tombstone like this when I die. (I need to add this to my TODO list!)Mark Frauenfelder: Lundgren Monuments makes glas...
Green-card regulations encourage offshoring
New rules make hiring foreign nationals more difficult than ever ByĀ EphraimĀ Schwartz I recently spoke with Frida Glucoft, a leading immigration lawy...
Microsoft Engineers
Jinath from Teamwork Technology threw out a challenge to BTA. So Jinath, here are our numbers… What? How many? Whom? Microsoft MVP 2 Prasanna, Me...
DebugView
Another very nice tool is DebugView. This is a tool from Sysinternals that enables you to monitor all debug messages on your system. This allows you to have ...
IE Search Prefixes
I use Maxthon as my default browser and it has this cool feature for using keywords. For example to search google I just type g and the search word in th...
Installing Visual Studio .NET on a Domain Controller
As part of setting up the TDD environment for the next project that I’m going to be working on, I started by trying to setup CruiseControl.NET on my VS...
Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good For Your Career
Tim Bray from Sun Microsystems postsĀ ten reasons why blogging isĀ good for your career. You have to get noticed to get promoted. You have to get noticed ...
An asteriod hits Colombo city
Sulochanaa mailed me this joke, which takes a play on Tsunami.Ā An Asteroid hits Colombo city
Crisis and chaos
This is the editorial published by the Daily Mirror today. Pala, one of my friends, was telling me about how the overhead for almost all donations went towa...
March User Group Meeting on Enterprise Library
I had to work really hard preparing for last week’s session on the Enterprise Library. Since this is a relatively new release, there is scarcely any i...
Microsoft Offers Free Exam Retakes Worldwide
Hey, all you people. This is the time to go bonkers taking Microsoft exams. Microsoft is giving a free āsecond-shot offerā to anyone who takes a Microsoft e...
.NET User Group Meeting in Colombo today
Itās another which brings along yet another user group meeting. This month Iāll be taking the stage after a long lapse of over six months to talk about the ...
Exciting annoucements for the MVP program
Howard us teasing us about some exciting announcements for the MVP programs that will be announced this week. Heās keeping mum for now thoughā¦ Cāmon ...
Back in Sri Lanka
Dammika wanted to know where the hell I was. Things have been pretty hectic for me since I landed in Colombo last Tuesday morning. Let me see… On Tue...
Singapore
This is the last leg of my long trip back to Colombo. It's really cool that the Changi Airport at Singapore has free internet access. What have I been doing ...
Microsoft on āRootkitsā: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Microsoft security researchers are warning about a new generation of powerful system monitoring programs, or "rootkits," that are almost impossible to detect...
A gift for my brother
My brother and sister teamed up to buy me this, so to return the favor I bought Julius (my small bro) one heck of an MP3 player. I ordered the SanDisk 1GB&nb...
My home away from home
It’s my last day here in Boston, so I cleaned up my desk and took a snap to capture the moment. Look at how MSF is all the rage now.
XP Sinhala Language Pack
Jinath has posted some screenshots of Windows and a Google page with the Sinhala Language Pack installed. Microsoft released the beta version of the Sinhala ...
Co0L, chEcK THis 0U+
Now, why would Microsoft need to publish this web page for parents to de-greek teen speak. D00D MIcR0S0PH+ R0x0r 4nD 15 w4y t0 k3WL! If you didn't understand...
Windows Beats Linux in Live Security Contest
Well, well, well. Now this isn’t what you get to see everyday. Paul Thurrott reports in his latest newsletter. During a live duel of sorts between back...
Dataset performance in .NET Framework 2.0
Andrew Conrad writes about Dataset performance improvements in .NET 2.0. For me these improvements are really, really good reasons to switch to .NET 2.0 as s...
SHA-1 Broken
Schneier reports that SHA-1 has been broken. ‘SHA-1 has been broken. Not a reduced-round version. Not a simplified version. The real thing.’ Time...
MSDN Hard Drive Pilot
I can't wait to go back and get my hands on the pilot MSDN Hard Drive that Microsoft is testing out. The MVPs are doing pilot tests on a future where the MSD...
stock.xchng: Free pictures
Now I know where to go, to get free picture for my presentations, websites, applications you name it: sxc.hu
Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful
Ian Hickson has an published an intruiging paper on the case for avoiding XHTML. Here it is in a nutshell: Browsers decide how to handle a file based on t...
One Free GMail Invitation
I have a free GMail invitation. First come first served. Click this link to create your gmail account.
Sighseeing in Boston
Damnath (my co-worker in Boston) took Lasantha and me out sightseeing in Boston today. We went out to Cambridge and checked out Harvard and MIT, with its ol...
Backlog clearedā¦
I just finished clearing up my backlog on going through my feeds. My current count of feeds is 143 and I just brought down the unread post count from 1400 t...
Writing is like prostitutionā¦
āWriting is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few other close friends, and then for money.ā ā Moliere. I guess Iām in the s...
Firefox Pomposity
Now this I can totally relate to. āToday we secretly replaced the hive-mind of Slashdot with Folgerās Crystals ā letās see if anybody noticesā¦ā As...
The Infinite Cat Project
Check out the Infinite Cat Project, that only a geek would think of. It's a picture of a cat watching a cat watching a cat watching a cat... and you can even...
Sniff, and you want to make babies too
FORGET flowers, chocolate and musky colognes. For revving up a woman's sex drive, breast milk is best. Find out what these crazy scientists are up to at new...
My Boss reads my blog!
I found out last week that my boss, Thusith Mahanama, the CEO of my company reads my blog! Wow, gotta be careful ;) But seriously how many C...
Microsoft Virtual Labs
Over at our company we're evaluating various Microsoft technologies to figure out if we can leverage them when building our next generation development platf...
Technology Workers
In his latest column, Tom Yager from Infoworld starts off with: Technology workers who don’t see themselves as passionate, creative professionals...
Windows Forms Source for .NET Framework 2.0
Now isn’t this the best news ever! Shawn Burke writes about plans to release the source code for the Windows Forms (which is basically a .NET wrapper a...
Usability Engineering
Manoj has posted the presentation that he made at the last .NET User Group meeting in Colombo. Going by the slides on the presentation it looks like I've mis...
F/X Gods
Are you a movie freak who loves F/X? Wired has a special on the 10 Hollywood F/X gods and insight into how some of the clips like ‘The Day After Tomorr...
Tsunami Song
Those of you who haven't seen 'Rebuilding Sri Lanka' song that airs on the Sirasa/MTV channels can do so now by browsing to http://astream.net/links/asia/son...
100 Metres Buffer Zone
[Daily Mirror]
Microsoft Exam Discount ā Till May 2005
GET THE MICROSOFTCERTIFICATION ADVANTAGE Taking the Microsoft examination between now and 31st Ma...
Spamming in Sri Lanka
Kavinda has blogged about an email thread conversation that took place between a Hameedia Brand Manager and an email recipient called Dinesh (Kavinda, who is...
No sex tonight?
Nadeera of Atlantis One forwarded this hilarious mail. No sex tonight? I never quite figured out why the sexual urge of men and women differ so much. And I ...
Boston
Well this is my first post from Boston for 2005 (I wonder how many times I will be coming to Boston this year). Anyway I’m in Boston for a company Boot...
Lecturing at a University
Iāve always felt that it would be an honor to lecture at a university and just after the completion of my Masters a couple of doors have opened. The first i...
w.bloggar
Iām testing out w.bloggar in the hopes that it works as well as the BlogJet when posting to dasBlog. Wish me luck. You should see the We Rock image if the im...
Testing BlogJet
I have installed an interesting application - BlogJet. It's a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://b...
Photo Gallery
By the way, Iāve got my Photo Gallery up and running again. Right now Iāve only uploaded some pictures from my Graduation but Iām hoping to put up all the pi...
Kavinda blogging
I posted earlier about Kavinda blogging at MSN Spaces, he's since moved over to his own dasBlog site. He quickly whipped up his own template and it does look...
Up and running on dasBlog 1.7
I just completed a painless upgrade to dasBlogCE 1.7 and boy does it look good. There aren't much UI changes but the performance of the site has gone through...
My own fingerprint reader
Guess what I'm using to blog this entry with? My very own Microsoft Optical Desktop with Fingerprint reader! I've been using the fingerprint reader to sign ...
MVP Gift Voucher
Microsoft gives us MVPs with a $150 voucher that we could use to buy anything we want at the Microsoft Company Store. Unfortunately I have a feeling that the...
Tsunami āHelp Usā site by the student of the University of Moratuwa
The students at the the University of Moratuwa have setup a site focusing on the students who were affected by the Tsunami. The also link to the find missing...
Who is Scott?
One of my former colleagues Nadeera forwarded this mail to me, I wonder how authentic it is?</SPAN> You must have always wondered why the username / p...
2004
Start a movement! Donate all your Google AdSense Revenue to Earthquake Relief
Scott Hanselman has started a wonderful campaign to donate your site's annual Google AdSense revenue to the the Asian Quake relief. I think this is a bl...
IIS 6.0, 1 year old and NO security bulletins released yet!
It's quite hard to believe that IIS 6.0 has been out for over a year and there have been 0, that's right zero as in nil as in nada as in ziltch security bull...
Messenger 7
Go get Messenger 7 now! The coolest part for me is being able to sign in on Offline mode.
Muraliās redemption, and our arrogance
Dammika forwarded a link to this article on Murali, a must read for anyone who as an opinion on Murali’s bowling action. I would love to see the docum...
The eighth wonder!
One of my friends forwarded this to me. Would you risk entering this place?
Iām Longhornāing now!
I finally got some free time on my hands to installed Longhorn on my machine on top of Virtual PC. I spent the whole day yesterday fooling around with Longh...
What Anyone works in IT should remember every day
Dhammika from EuroCenter mailed this to me, a very interesting read: <SPAN lang=en-us>The IT industry looks much different from the outside than it doe...
IIS Lockdown & .NET
I recently ran into quite a few problems when the IIS Lockdown tool was applied on one of our production servers. I'm listing it here so that I don't tr...
Spymac Launches The Internetās First Free 1 Gigabyte Email Service
One gigabyte of storage is available to all Spymac Mail accounts, effective today, Monday April 5, 2004.Spymac agrees with the staff at Google that a 1 GB e-...
Fiddler, et al
Scott Watermasysk (and Dave Wanta) point out a tool that should be in everyone's party chest -- ...
Google launches free email service
Google has announced a free email service that is fully searchable and offers 500-times the storage capacity of Hotmai...
Good News and Bad
I got both good news and bad today. The good news is that I got my MSc results at last, but the bad news I can’t...
Whidbey (a.k.a. Visual Studio 2005) preview available to MSDN subscribers
In case you haven't heard, MSDN subscribers can download a March build of VS 2005 over here. ...
Microsoft to remove the Calculator from Windows
News from Repeou: The country Repeou threatens Microsoft to pay a fine as much as 10 percent of its ...
Israel unveils tiny drones
The Israeli military is equipping its forces with a new range of spy drones small enough to fit in a soldier's backpac...
ASP.NET is on a Tear!!
Wow! Thomas Lewis who works on the ASP.NET evangelism team (and who recently gave me some good feedbac...
Victim Of Peace
The man who is seeking re-election as Sri Lanka's prime minister at April 2 polls halted an ethnic war raging for deca...
Testing
Testing is the Focus of MSDN Magazine for April. Read articles on testing your code, including extreme programming wit...
Fooodās Icons
Meet the guy who made some of the icons for Windows XP’s web site and download some of them for your o...
Google before asking questions
Found this on the web this morning... it's almost scary how true this really is. I almost never ask a questi...
Port Reporter
Yesterday, Microsoft released the nifty "Port Reporter" utility (here). The doohickey tracks and logs traffi...
The Benefits of Going Local
Last week Microsoft announced the local language program, which provides tools that would allow governments ...
Process Explorer
Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you ...
Vaas & Murali
I thought this was really funny. ‘Sri Lanka's batting was hardly better than Australia's. It t...
IrfanVIew ā simpler, faster, and FREE
Scoble recommends ACDsee to view your digital pictures, and I partially agree. I used it for a lo...
Your Vote
In the next election that you are going to vote, I would like to ask you to vote intelligently. Find out information y...
Microsoft Delays Yukon and Whidbey until 2005
Yesterday, in a stunning move that will likely have ramifications for the next Windows version (code-named Longhorn), ...
Microsoft Releases March Security Updates
Yesterday, the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) issued three new security bulletins, none of which is rated c...
Pictures from Boston
I've was ab...
From Boston
My first post from Boston. Got my machine setup, installed NewsGator and I'm ready to do some posting baby! Ashan and...
Rationalize Away, Brother!
I saw this on Green Hat Journal: Eric Raymond lambasted open-source ...
Microsoft Exams 30% Discount
Pay only Rs. 3500/- till May 31 for Microsoft Exams. More information here.
Windows XP ā¦ Reloaded
Despite Microsoft's repeated denials, the company will indeed release an interim version of Windows XP that will bridg...
What does your phone number spell?
Ever wondered what your phone number spells? PhoneSpelling.com generates different word combinations for your phone nu...
Radio Lovers
Listed to o...
activePDF Unveils FREE PDF Creator
PrimoPDF is a free tool for high-quality PDF creation. With a user-friendly interface that enables āprintingā to PDF f...
MVC and WARS
MVC apparently is way too simple ;-) Now we have "WARS" - Worflow, Action, Rep...
Qantas Flight Reports
Nadeera forwarded this to me and I almost fell of my chair while reading it! After every flight, pil...
Microsoft to Provide Antispam Technology, Foster Email Standards
At the RSA Conference 2004 Internet security conference in San Francisco yesterday, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Softw...
Open Source In Developing Countries
Sanjiva Weerawarana the Chairman and Executive Director of the LSF (Lanka Software Foundation) and Jivaka ...
Itās the whining Aussies now
Dammika mailed me this article from The Island. The English are often referred to as "Th...
A fine gesture that will strengthen the game
World cricket woke up stronger on Monday morning. Not just because it had witnessed a pulsating game of one-day cricke...
Two Mahanayakas condemn monksā election bid
The country’s top two Buddhist prelates yesterday condemned the decision by a section of Buddhist monks to conte...
J2SE 1.5 Preview Goes Into Beta
Sun Microsystems Inc. this month has released the beta of J2SE 1.5 for public review, moving the latest version of des...
Microsoft Places Bet On Whitehorse
A good business article on Whitehorse, outlining what Whitehorse is (a new graphical designer in Whidbey that supports...
zone24x7 vacancies
Shoba’s (my batch mate) company zone24x7 is looking to recruit a bunch of people. The openings include Software ...
Ranatunge ā Warne Friendly Banter
Retired Sri Lankan cricket captain Arjuna Ranatunga hit back at his running adversary Australian leg-spinner Shane Warne saying he (Ranatunga) would...
Sri Lanka Win a Thriller
Wow, what a match! I love the Lankan Lions. Vaasy pulled a blinder on the Kangaroos with his wonderful las...
Tour plea to Murali
Former Sri Lankan coach and Australian spinner Bruce Yardley will this week make a personal plea to champion spinner M...
Basics for Building Microsoft Office Access 2003 Runtime-Based Solutions
Would you like users without Access 2003 installed to be able to use your Access-based applications? They ca...
A Quick Look At the Win2K Stolen Source
From the various articles that I read, the warning was not to go near any of the stolen source due to its IP. This art...
thirteen
Sound advice from ChrisAn. Tonight I watched the movie "thirteen". Truely dist...
Download Free ASP.NET Resource Kit
The ASP.NET Resource Kit is an essential resource for any web developer whether you are already using ASP.NET today, o...
.NET Programming for Chimps
Manjeeva posted this link to a hilarious article on NewTechUSA.
Back In Action
My apologies for not posting the past few days, the main reason was the NewsGator died on me and crashed Outlook each ...
Microsoft co-founder to demo always-on mini PC
Vulcan, the company set up by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, will show off its FlipStart always-on mobile "mini PC" this week. ...
Intel to Announce Telecommunications-Speed Breakthrough
Intel researchers will announce today a major breakthrough in chip design that will make it possible to inexpensively ...
Elections
Dammika and I have been having an interesting discussion on the current political state. Now this is what I like to se...
Software Testing on Mars
[Bruce Williams] Here is an interesting summary of the problem encountered by the Spirit probe o...
Intranet Open Source 2.7.2, Free
Digger Solutions is an intranet application that takes a classic open-source marketing tack: give away a bunch of usef...
Is the bad guy in Sri Lanka a lady?
THERE comes a time when one senses the approach of a turning point, and catastrophe is but a few ticks of history away...
PC drives will reach 600GB by 2007, industry says
The standard desktop PC of 2007 will have a hard disk drive with capacity between 500GB and 600GB, according to Mark G...
Getting Started with ObjectSpaces
If you are a .NET developer you have got to know all the tricks in the bag. ObjectSpaces is to .NET what EJB is to Jav...
ASP.NET 2.0: DataGrid Sample
ASP.NET 2.0 streamlines data-driven application development. This example uses the categories and product tables in SQ...
Mozilla trots out Firefox browser
The Mozilla Foundation released a new version of its open source Web browser this week, with improvements to its downl...
Market Vote
It was the ninth day of February and the Colombo bourse gave to many investors a heart burn as they watched their port...
Parliament Dissolution May Cost Sri Lanka Billions in Aid
A US $4.5 billion aid package for Sri Lanka is in jeopardy with the dissolution of Parliament by President Chandrika K...
Users Canāt Know Their Requirements Early
This is a golden rule that all project managers, developers and testers need to understand. ...
Microsoft to preview Whidbey toolset
Microsoft plans to offer developers a pre-release version of its next Visual Studio .Net platform, codenamed Whidbey, ...
Can Apple Keep the Worms Out?
"In the wake of the MyDoom/NovaRG fiasco, every Mac columnist has an easy out. After yet another virus attac...
Open Source Testing
Open Source Testing is a compendium of 138 open source testing tools, including unit testing, feature testing, perform...
Parliament Dissolved?
The President pointed out that the Sri Lanka Freedom Party has been victorious when it united with other parties from ...
Microsoft Patches Three IE Security Holes
Microsoft issued fixes for three major security flaws in Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) yesterday. The fixes include...
Microsoft releases metadata removal tool
A year ago, 10 Downing Street published a dossier on Iraq's security and intelligence organisations. It was cited by n...
Kudoās to British Airways
Got this from Dhammika (EC), any links to prove its authenticity? ...
Guess what happened at the superbowl halftime show
Naughty, naughty! [Read more + pics]
Egg says they see a Longhorn/Smart Client future
Warning. This is going to be the future guys! News.com: U.K. bank sees br...
Russia Scoffs at U.S. Mars Plans
The head of Russia's space program describes the sudden shift in U.S. space exploration planning as unrealistic and di...
Reporting Services
Get the SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services download from the Microsoft Download Center. If you own a SQL Server 2000 l...
.NET 101
It may have taken Microsoft years, but the company finally has put together a reasonably clear primer on .Ne...
Ctrl-Alt-Del inventor makes final reboot
David Bradley, one of the 'dirty dozen' engineers who created the original IBM PC at Boca Raton, Florida, is to retire...
ASP.NET Applications without Web Projects
I’ve spent countless hours trying to get ASP.Net Web Projects setup on different machines. This article based ...
Microsoft Office for Sri Lanka
Microsoft could couple a home edition license of its new Office 2003 software package free with every corporate licens...
Anders talks about Generics
Artima.com has Part VII of an interview with Anders Hejlsberg about Generics in C#, Java, and C++ onli...
LongHorn Video rocks ā this was worth all their R&D
http://tinyurl.com/2u826 is shortcut to video. This video really shows how clever the R&D for Lo...
The Sun Also Surprises
Sun calls its Java Desktop System "the first viable Microsoft Windows alternative," but it’s apparently much mor...
Search This, Google: Microsoft Adds Free Toolbar, Pop-Up Add Blocking to IE
Like Netscape before it, tiny Google has awakened a sleeping giant. Today, Microsoft unveiled a free...
Dilmah Cricket Network
Just got an announcement of the new Dilmah Cricket Network site which is run in partnership with CricInfo. ...
Bill Gates receives knighthood
Britain is to recognise Bill Gates' contribution to UK enterprise and the fight against poverty worldwide with the sor...
Family Car
My ex-boarding mate Hareen from MIT sent me this really useful site called The Family Car. I haven’t...
Simple tricks for more usable forms
Simon Willison has a really cool article which points out simple things that you can do to make html forms extremely e...
Max Jacobs on Bushās space vision
A different train of thought on Bush’s space vision. Via Common Sense &a...
Gates forecasts victory over spam
The Microsoft boss says spam e-mail will soon be a thing of the past, and praises rival Google at the WEF in...
MSBuild ā Whidbey Chronicles
The newest MSDN TV installment, MSBuild, has recently been added. You're probably saying to yourself, ...
Guerrilla gardening
Now this is a good idea! Guerrilla gardening is the art of using a piece of land whi...
Mars or AIDS?
I read somewhere that the cost of going to Mars may eventually total up to $170 billion which is nowhere c...
A Girl with an X-ray vision
"Moscow's medical workers discovered a magnificent gift of a sixteen-year-old girl Natalya Demkina from Sara...
The Future of Visual SourceSafe
At last Microsoft seems to have suddenly remembered that they own VSS. Korby Parnell, one of the guys in the Source Co...
Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 45-Day Free Trial Edition
This is a free 45-day time-out, full version of the Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 product. No serial number is r...
Authorization and Profile Application Block
Iām a heavy user of two Microsoft Applications Blocks, namely the Data Access block and the Exception Management block...
My Advice to Students: Education Counts
Bill Gates talks about dropping out of high school (this is the Advanced Level for us Sri Lankans). ...
Microsoft Quietly Posts New MBSA
Security mavens will want to download the most recent version of Microsoft's security-analyzer tool, Microsoft Securit...
Testing The C# Compiler at Microsoft
Do you know how many testers are there at Microsoft to test the C# compiler, Alink, the C# expression evaluator, JScri...
Why do men ask for a womanās hand in marriage?
Because they are tired of using their own!
Sleeping makes you smarter?
Can you wake up smarter? Scientists say our brains may be solving problems during 8 hours sleep. [Read mor...
Linux is not free, part II
Hewlett-Packard (HP) last week disclosed company record-setting revenue of $2.5 billion from its Linux-base...
Free Code Coverage Tools
Two open source .NET code coverage tools that I came across recently, funnily both have the same name ‘NCover&rs...
Microsoft up for Linux award
Bink reports that Microsoft is a finalist for LinuxWorld award. Oh, I bet that just goes over li...
Keele MSc @ IIT ā Results Delay
Last year I completed my MSc in IT from Keele, this is through the Informatics IIT centre in Colombo. Unfortunately ev...
Interesting comparison of .NET to IBM WebSphere
@stake, Inc compared .NET Framework 1.1 to IBM WebSphere 5.0. [Th...
Neat VS.NET Trick
One of the best keyboard shortcuts for a developer! When in a code window for Visual Studio, you can go full screen, h...
iRider
Many years ago I vowed never to purchase an Internet browser. It's just one of those things that I couldn't ...
The second rising from the sub-continent
Cricket: No south Asian captain has commanded as much respect of his opponents as Ganguly has since the era of Arjuna ...
Drought in Sri Lanka
Cabinet has given the go-ahead to ‘maximise’ use of thermal power in the short term, as officials warn of ...
Bryan Adams in Colombo!
Two Indian entertainment companies are jointly organising a concert of Canadian pop icon Bryan Adams in Sri Lanka to s...
TheServerSide.Net
The TheServerSide.Net is a must read site for .NET developers, I’ve been a fan of TheServerSide.com ...
blogs.msdn.com
Using Scott Watermasysk's .Text program, over 150 Microsoft bloggers can now be found at blogs.msdn.com. T...
Microsoft takes on Linux with free tools
Microsoft is giving away SFU (Services For Unix) free of charge (this was earlier charged $99). SFU was awards Best of...
Flaw threatens VoIP networks
Microsoft and Cisco are on a long list of technology companies whose products may be affected by vulnerabilities in a ...
Any News on the Microsoft Event?
I wasn’t able to go for the Microsoft Event over here in Colombo the other day due to two reasons. The first was...
Free WinForm Tree Control
In the latest MSDN Flash newsletter, there is an offer from Infragistics for a FREE ...
MySQL AB Adds Enterprise Features in MySQL 5.0
Stored Procedures on MySQL… at last! MySQL AB, developer of the world's most popular open sou...
Microsoft Skills Assessment Home
Check out Microsoft’s Skills Assessment page. You can take assessments which are typically 30 questions with an ...
SpaceMonger
Download SpaceMonger directly from here. Ever find that your hard-drive is full but ...
HOWTO: Make Outlook Web Access Your Default Mail Agent
Here's a little off-topic post for you all. HOWTO: Make OWA your default mailer. ...
Password protection in Microsoft Word criticized
Microsoft Word documents that use the software's built-in password protection to avoid unauthorized editing can easily...
Appleās Unlikely Guardian Angel
Who is Apple’s unlikely Guardian Angel? The Macintosh has had its ups and downs over...
Gates Previews āAmazing Decadeā
Wired News reporting on the opening key note by Bill Gates at CES 2004 show, read more.
Gates: Itās time for convergence
Charles Cooper of ZDNet interviews Gates on convergence between PCs and consumer electronics.
The New MSN
I opened my browser a second ago, and a butterfly busted out of the page. What are they feeding that thing? ...
SOA is Just Inteface Based Programming?
Steve Eichert suggests that SOA is just hyped up interface based programming: ...
Introduction to ObjectSpaces
I’ve blogged about ObjectSpaces before and this time Nice West (of Fast Chicken Fame) has written a nice little ...
Debugging Windows Services
For anyone working on a windows service using .Net I advise you to read this article first. It will help you...
Minimize Outlook to notification area
Outlook 2003 has an option that allows it's window to be minimized to the system notification area, near the...
For you linux guys who think Windows Server canāt hangā¦
Check this out! Microsoft.com statistics Summary...
Police slap Web designer with public nudity ticket
Caught with her pants down at Mickey's Irish Pub http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/34674.html ...
Iām a DropLoad fan!
A few days ago, I saw a post from someone about DropLoad.com, a website that lets you leave files for people...
Grokker and Vivisimo: new ways to search
Wired News is running an article on new search paradigms. I went to check them out. Grokker sounds ...
Uncle Sam fingerprints visitors
It’s now Uncle Sam’s turn to start fingerprinting and unlike the UK they’re fingerprinting everyone ...
Adobe Acrobat ā Fast Web View
Finding information on Adobe Acrobat PDF, especially version 6 related issues, is extremely hard to come by. We recent...
Dodgeit
Dodgeit, free throw away email. Give out a dodgeit address out whenever you need to. Check deezn...
Make More Mistakes
Eric Sink the founder of SourceGear publishes another must read article for startup companies on ‘ma...
A Programmerās Introduction to Visual Studio .NET āWhidbeyā
Learn about the top 10 new features in the upcoming "Whidbey" release of Visual Studio .NET. [MS...
Thwarting Reverse Engineering
Gabriel Torok and Bill Leach have a good article on MSDN about thwarting reverse engineering ...
Jim Fawcette: āWhy would anyone with excellent computer skills want to workā¦
Jim Fawcette: "Why would anyone with excellent computer skills want to work long hours to create...
FAQ on System.Web.Mail Namespace
There is a FAQ on the ASP.NET Forum pinned by Mike and mainly focus on th...
Working with ASP.NETās Graphics on the fly?
This is one of the coolest, most useful ASP.NET things I've ever seen. ...
MSDN Chapter Meeting in Colombo
Microsoft is holding it’s first MSDN chapter meeting in Colombo on the 13-Jan-2004 at the Colombo Plaza. You can...
MSN Messenger Virus Alert
Be careful who you’re chatting with! A new virus is being sperad over MSN Mess...
Merill-Air
What do you get when Merill sends out air? www.merill-air.com of course!
2003
Horizon School
Check out Horizon school situated in Mahavilachchiya in the Anuradhapura district. It is a small informal IT school wh...
A Sri Lankan Portal owned by you and me?
I just got an idea reading this piece on Wired News on how Howard Dean was able to use the power of social networks to...
Back from Vacation / Driverās License Exam
Merry X’ Mas everybody! I’ve been at home in the Majestic city of Kandy during the past few days. I didn&r...
England Vs Sri Lanka
Hareendra (Pala) and I went to watch the final England Vs Sri Lanka Test match at SSC on the last two days. Shasheendr...
Buy Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004ā¦ and help save the world
Seattlepi.com has an interesting series of articles on the work that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation...
APICTA Awards
I know I promised to write about the APICTA awards, basically all I can say that it was a real waste of time. The fina...
Got Longhorn!
Got my Longhorn PDC DVDās delivered today through DHL. I didnāt expect to receive this for two reasons 1. This was fre...
I love software testing
KC Lemson a Microsoft PM and a former Tester. Franci pointed out an ...
Murali Rhyme
Dammika, my BCS and MSc batch-mate wanted me to post this here. "Throw, throw, throw the ball, gentl...
The Uncanny Disappearing Window
How do you programmatically close a browser window when you didn't open it? Of course, everybody knows you can't. If t...
Lara scores most Test runs in an over
End of over 120 (28 runs) West Indies 361/6 (trail by 200 runs) RJ Peterson 13-2-76-0 - Corlett Drive End M...
In case youāre just waking upā¦
The US Military has captured Saddam Hussein. [WebLogs @ ASP.NET]
.NET Online Seminars
Why move to Visual Basic .NET Understand all of the reasons to move to Visual Basic...
Jealous wife ācut off sleeping husbandās penisā ā www.smh.com.au
Yikes! Be careful about what you get on your phone. A jealous wife reportedly cu...
Nasty new IE vulnerability
Most people reading are probably aware of the common trick whereby spammers and other assorted ne'er-do-well...
Javascript Trick
Did you know that you can execute javascript statements against a web page, just like using the Immediate window in Vi...
WinFX: An All-Managed API
Ian Griffiths has an excellent article on WinFX (the managed API for Longhorn). It also gives you a clear insight into...
Itās Official ā Office is an Operating System
When you can write nearly perfect versions of PacMan and Space Invaders in your favorite productivity applic...
Mystic Microsoft
This was a fascinating ebook, it was so good that I read the whole book in a weekend. Spir...
Microsoft targets young geeks with blog service
Microsoft targets young geeks with blog service called theSpoke.net Microsoft Corp. has quietly launched a Web logging, or bl...
Microsoft In Sri Lanka
Microsoft Corporation, USA will set up its own subsidiary "Microsoft Sri Lanka Pvt Ltd" in Colombo next January [Read more] ...
Thanks for coming!
At last, Iāve got the site on my own domain, previously I was using the free http://europe.webmatrixhosting.net to hos...
ActiveWords SE
This is another must have utility for keyboard freaks like me. Now you can download it for free until January 10...
Tech Rich Guy Give It Back
Shel Israel talks about the rich guys who are giving their fortunes back to improve the world. Notable is ...
Do you have a 17ā³ monitor?
I’ve been using 17” monitors for over three years but it’s always been on a resolution of 1024x768. ...
Longhorn Transformation Pack
If you have Windows XP or Windows 2003 then you have got to download and apply the Longhorn Transformation ...
Busy
I've not been able to post regularly lately due to a couple of reasons. Office Work We have been getting ...
Session State
Steve talks about how we can make more efficient use of the Session state in ASP.NET. It...
Microsoft and Groove Networks help Sri Lanka Peace
Groove Networks along with Microsoft will help in promoting peace and improving communication between the major stakeh...
Shake it off!
This got passed on to me by a colleague - good enough to pass on.... The best motivational message o...
Hey, SQL Server DOES scale!
For the first time, Microsoft products made their way onto some of Winter's ...
HSBC Internet Banking is Free!
HSBC earlier used to charge Rs. 600/- annually for their internet banking service. But it looks like they are no...
Getting Ahead in Your Career
Franklins.Net Sales Weasel Todd Follansbee has come up with what I think is a great...
Longhorn Preview now available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads
The Longhorn preview distributed at the PDC is now available on MSDN Su...
Google Zeitgeist ā Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google
For both breaking news and obscure information alike, people around the world search on Google at www.google.com. With...
Tweakomatic
The Tweakomatic is a nifty new utility that writes scripts that allow you to retrieve and/or configure Windows and Int...
New Google Tool. Search Google without leaving your desktop.
Something new from the folks at Google. Search Google without leaving your desktop with the Google Desk Bar....
Microsoft exams are specially priced at $35
Microsoft exams which are normally $50 have been specially priced at $35 for a limited time. ...
Want your own blog?
Get your free weblog! Get it now, for free! Some guy is hosting Moveable Type ...
Sortable Table
If you thought the Tab navigation was good, check out the Sort-able grid script. By simply setting a class on any tabl...
EasyToggle (Tab Navigation)
Simon Willison has created an easy way to enable tabs in web pages. There is no javascript coding involved. Just inclu...
Multiple Internet Explorers
Never thought this was possible. In possibly the best news web designers will hear this ye...
StrokeIt
This is a must have utility on all Windows machines. StrokeIt is a mouse gesture recognition program. Once you i...
Worldās Third Fastest Supercomputer Built On A Mac
This is a great achievement, Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan of Virginia Tech has built the currently third fastest supercomputer by putting together 1,100...
Use scope_identity() instead of @@identity
TravisL explains why we should use scope_identity instead of @@identity when we want to get the ID of the last record that was ...
Keyboard Shortcuts
Are you a keyboard freak like me? Then you've got to know how to add shortcuts to your frequently used programs so that you can launch ...
Preview of Web Development with Visual Studio Whidbey
Discusses the new features in Microsoft Visual Studio code-named "Whidbey" that will make development of data-driven Web applications e...
Microsoft courting Google for possible takeover
Microsoft Corp. has reportedly approached Google Inc. about a potential buyout of the search technology company. Goog...
Top 30 Features of SQL Server āYukonā
Top 30 Features of SQL Server "Yukon" Discover how the next version of SQL Server, code-named "Yukon," will benefit y...
The Business of Software
Are you an ISV (Independant Software Vendor)? A lot of companies in Sri Lanka are. Then you should definitely read this article...
Generics in C#
I've been hearing a lot about Generics the past few months and how it's going to let us write less code and more robust code....
ASP.NET 2.0
There are a lot of important things happening if you're a Microsoft developer. Two key technologies that you need to get on top ar...
MSN Messenger 6.1
MSN Messenger 6.1 is out. This is a fairly minor upgrade to 6.0 and includes some new backgrounds and emoticons. It also hooks in ...
Free PDF Creator
A free PDF printer driver from Acro Software. Download it here. No watermarks! No annoying popup advertisements!
Free Anti-Virus Guard
The AVG Anti-Virus is a free and one of the top ten antivirus for personal use and letās you download the latest updates for free as well. Iāve read reviews...
Colombo, Sri Lanka: Bus Route
This guy working at IFS has done a really neat job of showing the bus routes in the Colombo area. I wonder how m...
Dog beats man in breath test
MSNBC is reporting about a survey carried out in Briton which came up with the finding that more than half surveyed had mouths ...
Why I F***ing Hate WebLogs
Want to know what weblogs are all about? Read it here. The Statement of Audience is the best part! Sta...
Bollywood āpen-palā cheats US man
Manjeeva sent me this article on the BBC about an American named Mr. Corley who had been cheated by his pen-pal who was apparan...
Whoa! Nokia Phones Exploding!
You guys using Nokia phones with non-Nokia batteries watchout. A woman from Netherlands was injured less than three months ago in an ex...
Record Videos
Have you ever spent time explaining the steps to perform an action and wished you could just show it to them instead. ...
Academic Resource Kit for .NET
The Academic Resource Kit Version 3.0 available off the MSDN AA website is a fantastic resource for anyone working with .NET te...
Free Book on ASP.NET
Charles Carrol of LearnASP has released a free book on ASP.NET. This is a really good starting place for anyone learning the ro...
Changes to the Default Handling of ActiveX Controls by Internet Explorer
All you developers who have created sites that use ActiveX controls need to know this. Due to a recent lawsuit against Micro...
VB .NET Resource Kit
There are some really great stuff in this resource kit that can be downloaded from MSDN. While the .NET Resource ...
Cool Dialog Tip
I've got a really cool tip for you guys with Dialog connections. Dialog let's you divert calls to a special number (777012012). Wh...
ASP.NET 2.0 Will Create History
I have a feeling that ASP .NET 2.0 is going to be truly revolutionary. Just take a look at the table of contents for this book. ...
Host VS.NET on a Server for 20 Users
Development System for .NET is a page from Microsoft Research. Aimed at academic institutions, this page has detailed instructions for building and administe...
Free VOIP ā Skype
This is truly revolutionary. Skype let's you have voice conversations with your friends and it's really really good quality. Check it out at Skype.c...
MCSD.NET ā Check!
Finally, took my last exam for the MCSD.NET today. This was the Designing and Implementing Databases with SQL Server 2000 exam and I sc...
The Power of the Human Mind
I got this in the mail today: The paomnnehil pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigd...
Moving to Microsoft Visual Basic .NET
Thanks a lot for everyone who came to the seminar yesterday. I hope you all saw the power and productivity gains of moving to the .NET ...
Office 2003 Released
Although Office 2003 is slated to be released to the public in October, Microsoft has released Office 2003 for MSDN Universal u...
Passed 70-300 Analyzing Requirements and Defining Microsoft .NET Solution Architectures
The exam consisted of three case studies having 15, 10 and 7 questions. My preparation for this exam was reading the MOC Course ...
Swing/SWT History
Anybody interested in the development history of AWT, Swing and SWT? Explains the tussle going on between Sun and IBM.
Inside the Microsoft .NET Framework
Okay folks here are the downloads to the presentation (2.7MB) and the code samples (120KB) that I promised at yesterday's semin...
MCAD .NET
Passed the 70-320 exam on Developing XML Web Services and Server Components with Microsoft Visual C# today. My score for this e...
Career Calculus
This is a must read for a developer at any level by Eric Sink. For thos who don't know him, Eric Sink lead the development for the earl...
Creating a Virtual Directory
I always wondered what the differences were between creating virtual directory using the IIS and through Windows Explorer (Web Sharing)...
70-316 Developing and Implementing Windows-based Applications with Visual C# ā Passed
Two down three more to go! This exam was easier than the Web exam and I was able to finish the exam in about an hour....
Mio8380 SmartPhone
I'm going to grab this Mio8380 SmartPhone as soon as they become available in Sri Lanka. Yo Nokia better watch out. ...
70-315 Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Visual C# ā Passed
One down four more to go! The real exam was much tougher than the Transcender practise questions. The questions were ...
MSN Search
Hey I just did a search on MSN and these guys are FAST now, as fast as Google! Will Microsoft really beat Google? ...
70-315 Exam Preparation
Thought of outlining how I'm preparing for the (70-315) Web Applications exam. Step 1: I started out by reading the ...
Australian Double Standards
World anti-doping body condemns the ruling that allows Shane Warne to play in charity matches. [CricInfo]
Path to MCSD.NET
I suddenly realised that September is creeping up next month and I have not been able to do a single Microsoft certification on the .NE...
Tracking Accounts using Microsoft Money
I've started using Microsoft Money to keep track of all my accounts. This is a really powerful tool that every professional must have i...
MCP, MCAD, MCSE, MCSD Numbers Worldwide
Microsoft has a page which lists the statistics of the number of certified professionals worldwide which is updated on a monthly basis....
Electronic Voting in India
Looks like India is getting ahead of the western countries by implementing it's whole voting system electronically. India needs nearly ...
Really Cool Animation
You have got to check out this flash animation, a singing chorus of horses! [click here]
Ranked First On Google!
Yeah! I didn't think it would be so easy! I come on top for a search on 'merill fernando' and 16th place for 'merill'
Blogging from Home
Finally got my machine setup at home. Windows XP gave a weird problem the power went off suddenly and the next time I booted up the machine the it gave an āU...
Motorola making Microsoft Smart-phones
Microsoft is slowly breaking into the phone market. Motorola has just announced that they would be creating phones running Microsoft Sm...
Americans love Dell, Microsoft (but Sony most of all)
Microsoft has come in at no.5 in a bullet in the 2003 Harris poll of best brands in the US. In 2002, the company didn't even make the t...
Styling Forms With CSS
Lachlan shows how to style forms using CSS.
ASP.NET StackOverflowException
What do you do when ASP.NET throws an exception like this? Exception of type System.StackOverflowException was thrown. ...
-gry Puzzle
Think of words ending in -gry. Angry and hungry are two of them. There are only three words in the English language. What is the third ...
Spam Mail Trick
I come across so many web sites that ask for an email address just to do a download or to access some site and then spam that address. ...
Researchers Crack Windows Passwords in Seconds
'Swiss researchers have developed a password-cracking scheme, based on a method first developed in 1980, that lets them crack mos...
Match.comās upgrade to .NET
Jason of Match.com describes how they upgraded from classic ASP to .NET just goes to show how much you can gain with .NET. ...
NotifyWebLogsDotCom in BlogX
The day before an ex-coworker friend (Nimalan) posted a comment to to one of my blogs but I only noticed it when I was brows...
Michael Jackson āspeechlessā on P2P jail bill
Too Whacko even for Jacko! http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/31872.html
Designing Without Tables Using CSS
This book 'HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS' describes how to create a semantically correct web site where absolut...
BuyMusic @ $0.79 (Rs. 77/-)
Buy.com has launched a music store with rates cheaper than Apple's iTune. Hey now you can legally own your music for 77 bucks. ...
Microsoft to the rescue?
Microsoft to the rescue? A marketing weasel came by and asked me to fix a dead notebook, as if I'm his personal geek slave. ...
Microsoft tests its own ādog foodā
Microsoft tests its own 'dog food' A CNet interview with Rick Devenuti, Microsoft's Chief Information Officer.
Windows Server 2003 growing faster than Linux ā Netcraft
Windows Server 2003 approaching 100,000 active sites; 8,000 sites switch from Linux
Messenger Plus for Messenger 6!
Patchou has done it again, he has been able to get Messenger Plus running with MSN 6, it has quite a bit of cool tools, including the o...
Lousy Lanka Internet Connection
We are on a 128K leased line with Lanka Internet. All I can say is that it's pretty lousy. In the morning the line was fine and I was h...
SQL Server (Yukon)
SQL Server (Yukon) has been released to about 200 customers for testing. Public beta expected early next year. ...
Exchange 2003
Just looked up the MSDN Download site and saw that Exchange 2003 is available. I already started downloading it! There was a Standard a...
Car
After a long time I have now finally decided to buy a car. I called up HSBC and they are giving a personal loan for 17.25% plus I also ...
Setup!
I've finally managed to get blogX set up on my machine. For now I'm only going to post private stuff here on things that only I should ...