Zeeshan Muhammad

My code is perfect... I need more features

2007-08-24T18:41:00.000+05:00

One of my good friend send this to me this morning and I can't resist myself from sharing it with others...

Normal people believe that ...if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Engineers believe that: "...if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet."-Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

MVP for Visual Developer - ASP/ASP.NET

2007-01-03T18:42:00.000+05:00

Yesterday I received an email from Microsoft stating that I have been awarded MVP for Visual Developer - ASP/ASP.NET. Its just like a gift I wanted for this new year. A very Happy New Year 2007 to everyone. There's more from New Jersey later. Cheers!

Dubai International Airport

2006-12-29T02:38:00.000+05:00

Here I am waiting for my next flight to New York at Dubai Internatinal Airport. The flight from Karachi to Dubai has left me with mixed feelings. Food was aweful, service is below average and overal experience was no where close to being acceptable. However, my 3 hours of stay at Dubai International Airport is exceptional. The airport is beautiful and the duty free is amazing. I saw Lamborgini and BMW there. Went to starbucks and used internet for free all over the place. However the internet speed isn't that good and I wish it could be better. The airport is full of transit passenger going different places. I am back to Dubai Airport after 16 years and I notice a huge change everywhere. My next flight to New York is delayed for an hour and will leave at 3 AM local time. Its a 14 hours of flight straight from Dubai to New York so wish me luck :).

You can view my album here.

An inside look at Sony's Next Generation Console

2006-11-12T23:39:00.000+05:00

For those who haven't heard about it, PS3 or PlayStation 3 is the next generation or (third generation) of Sony's gaming console which was released in Japan yesterday on November 11 and is going to release in North America on November 17. I wont be around for the launch but I hope I am going to see lots of them early next year. Until then I suggest you browse some pictures of this beautiful console and some early looks of the cell processer, RSX chip and other parts of the console. Cell processor is jointly manufactured by Sony, IBM and Toshiba and packs a massive 22+ Ghz of power in its 7 cores with each running on approximately 3.2 Ghz frequency. You can also download and install Folding(AT)home project by standford university and can run it in the background to utilize the maximum power of this machine for some good use. Here's how cell processor looks in its package:

You can see more PS3 pictures here in a translated version of a Japanese site.

It was Einstein, they say?

2006-11-01T19:22:00.002+05:00

Ya I know the title looks a bit wierd but believe me after reading following conversation you'll be sure to say that it was Einstein, they say. I got this on my mail from a very dear friend of mine and I couldn't resist my self from sharing it with everyone. So here it goes:

A Teacher asked the student: "Did God create everything that exists?"

The student couldn't respond to that statement causing the professor to conclude that he had "proved" that "belief in God" was a fairy tale, and therefore worthless.

Another student raised his hand and asked the professor, "May I pose a question? ",

"Of course" answered the professor.

The young student stood up and sked : "Professor does Cold exists?"

The professor answered, "What kind of question is that?...Of course the cold exists... haven't you ever been cold?"

The young student answered, "In fact sir, Cold does not exist. According to the laws of Physics, what we consider cold, in fact is the absence of heat. Anything is able to be studied as long as it transmits energy (heat). Absolute Zero is the total absence of heat, but cold does not exist. What we have done is create a term to describe how we feel if we don't have body heat or we are not hot." "And, does Dark exist?", he continued.

The professor answered "Of course".

This time the student responded, "Again you're wrong, Sir. Darkness does not exist either. Darkness is in fact simply the absence of light. Light can be studied,
darkness can not. Darkness cannot be broken down. A simple ray of light tears
the darkness and illuminates the surface where the light beam finishes. Dark is
a term that we humans have created to describe what happens when there's lack of
light."

Finally, the student asked the professor, "Sir, does evil exist?"

The professor replied, "Of course it exists, as I mentioned at the beginning, we see violations, crimes and violence anywhere in the world, and those things are evil."

The student responded, "Sir, Evil does not exist. Just as in the previous cases, Evil is a term which man has created to describe the result of the absence of God's presence in the hearts of man.

After this, the professor bowed down his head, and didn't answer back.

The young man's name was ALBERT EINSTEIN, they say :)

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Windows Vista and Imagine Cup 2007

2006-08-28T13:24:00.000+05:00

I went to Usman Institute of Technology yesterday for 2 presentations on Windows Vista and Imagine Cup 2007. The event went good and everything surprisingly worked fine on Vista, atleast after 1 day of struggle for running my demo on Vista I prepared for the event. But the demo always crash the desktop so I decided to run it on Xp. Display driver may not be that strong yet in Vista. The demo was made using June CTP of .NET Framework 3.0 and was built again on July CTP so it can run on Vista July CTP, lol so many CTPs to keep track off. The demo runs 7 videos simultaneously in the background and can bring them forward when mouse hover over them and will run it on full screen when a selection is made. Its an early version of the application I am working on in the part time and will talk in detail after a few days, or may be I'll post the source code and binary as well.

I felt people are most interested in seeing the AERO Glass interface in Vista, but I personally feel the beauty lies beneath it. As DWM (Display Window Manager) is the key application for handling those killing vista looks and all those transparencies and 3d surface rendering. Those who are unaware of DWM, its a full screen WPF application, responsible for managing all desktops in Vista and its also exposed as an unmanaged API for programmers which Vista uses natively. I found it quite a powerfull tool in terms of providing all those beautiful effects in our own applications. DWM is a huge topic to cover, so I am leaving it for some other time and I may also put some code examples to show its power.

You can download both presentation slides from here. Cheers!

Cool Media Center Edition style WPF App

2006-08-20T00:15:00.000+05:00

Mobilewares Big Screen Photos is a WPF application that provides not only addin for Windows Vista and Windows Media Center Edition but runs as stand alone application in WindowsXP as well. Its a WPF web application that will run on your browser and you can browse Flickr photos just like using MCE, very cool. But wait thats not enough, you can run it from your XBOX360 on you HDTV as well, now thats super cool.

You can download this application here and can view its screenshot here. Cheers!

Insufficient System Resources to complete the requested API

2006-08-13T00:45:00.000+05:00

If you are having issues with Hybernation in WindowsXP and getting the error "Insufficient System Resources to complete the requested API" and you have 2GB or more system RAM then you are not alone to be hit by this bug. You can get a fix by searching an unreleased and unsupported hotfix by Microsoft. According to them, its still in testing phase and they plan to release it with their next Service Pack. If like me, you don't have the patience to wait till then the you can search for the hotfix WindowsXP-KB909095-x86-ENU or can download it from here. Read more about it on Microsoft KB article here. I haven't seen this error again after installing this hotfix, and unsupported one but works for sure. Cheers!

Windows Mesa

2006-08-04T14:57:00.000+05:00

I was downloading a lot of webcasts today from MSDN and a survey popuped so I decided to fill it out as a return of the favor to Microsoft. The surprising part is at the end of the survey there was a question which said:

Have you heard, seen, or read about Windows Mesa?

I am not sure what this is all about, but I think Microsoft has something very exciting going on in the background. I wasn't over with the Vista hype and there is something more to be excited about. I think we have to wait to see what this Windows Mesa turn out to be. Until then, keep smiling :).

Atlas everywhere

2006-07-07T02:46:00.000+05:00

There has been so many things happnening at my end these days, and everything is AJAX enable, HA. I got an invitation to speak at Minnesota Developers Conference 2006 which is hosted by ILM Professional Services (my employer) on September 19th, 2006 on the topic of "Building Highly Rich ASP.NET 2.0 Applications with Atlas and AJAX". I have also started preparing table of contents for Real World ASP.NET 2.0 Best Practices. I am co-authoring a few chapters with my colleagues on the same topic I am presenting at MDC06. The main guy behind this book series is Farhan Muhammad, CEO and Chief Architect ILM. I hope everything turn out great. Will keep you posted of all the latest. Cheers!

Pakistan Developer Conference :: Day 2 and 3

2006-07-07T02:35:00.000+05:00

It has been a little while since I blogged. I remember I left my last post to continue my experience at PDC (Pakistan Developer Conference) 2006 and how the overall event turned out. 2nd day was good, I took first 2 sessions by Stephen Forte and he was great as always. Then after the tea break I was so tired and decided to leave as there wasn't anything exciting left for the day. However, I decided to take Chad Hower session on "Vista for Developers" and actually I wanted to see how he is going to present Vista in front of developers. The session was pathetic and it had nothing to do with developers. He introduced Vista and its new and exciting features throughout the session I thought there may be a little glimpse about development in vista, wpf, gadgets and so on, but I was wrong. Anyways, I then instantly jumped to the other hall to attend Rafal session on Criptography in Vista. Rafal made my day and he was brilliant throughout the session. The whole presentation focused on criptography and whats new in it in Vista. After that I came back home.

I came during the 2nd half of the 3rd day of PDC due to some work. Took Hammad bhai's session and it was great as always. The next session was on CMS, but it was so boring that I left after 10 minutes. Stephen Forte and Richard Campbell made the ending ceremony an event to remember by showing an amazing demonstration of WPF in their ending keynote. After the rafel distribution and other boring stuffs I returened back home.

The overall event was not as good as previous PDC's, however I enjoyed first 2 days. I hope there will be a much better event next year.

Pakistan Developers Conference :: Day 1

2006-06-29T01:14:00.000+05:00

Today PDC (Pakistan Developers Conference) 2006 launched at Pearl Continental Hotel, Karachi and Awari Towers, Lahore simulatenously. Lunch ceremony was boring as always, except Rafal. He talked this time about how online Authentication will significantly change and how an average user is going to interact with online services without the need for providing todays authentication (id and password), all courtesy of CardSpace which was formerly known as (Info Card). I attended all Stephen Forte's sessions today on Security, Web Development and SQL Server. I really like the SQL Query Governer, that he and Richard demonstrated together. Query Governer is a small but quite useful tool that developers or database admins can use to run a query on the server on the basis of server load. If the server is on a very high load, then the governer wont let the query to execute. The algorithm they used to determine the load on the server was very basic, but can't be enhanced for various situations. I didn't attend the Q/A session at the end, decided to leave early to finish off some of my pending work at home. Stay tuned for more on day 2. Cheers!

WinFS no more !!

2006-06-28T01:30:00.000+05:00

Well I was just about to hit bed, decided to sleep early tonight. Gotta wake up early to attend PDC. And just as I thought I could finally leave for bed, I came across this shocking news. WinFS may not be a part of Vista as said by the team behind this amazing technology. This is what Quentin Clark has to say about it.

Is WinFS dead?
Yes and No. Yes, we are not going to ship WinFS as a separate, monolithic software component. But the answer is also No - the vision remains alive and we are moving the technology forward. A lot of the technology really was database stuff – and we’re putting that into SQL and ADO. But some of the technology, especially the end user value points, are not ready, and we’re going to continue to work on that in incubation. Some or all of these technologies may be used by other Microsoft products going forward.

Looks like I already lost my sleep for tonight. You can read more here. See you at PDC.

Longhorn Server Beta 2 and IIS 7.0

2006-06-04T00:18:00.000+05:00

Today, after a long time has been a good day for me. I ate lunch which I usually skip, I slept for a full five hours, I finally got my XML script running on a test app, I resolved Atlas issues over another project and to top it off, I got a free beta test hosting account featuring Longhorn Server Beta 2 and IIS 7.0 by MaximumASP. I can't wait to see their web based UI for connecting with IIS 7 in the backend. They have an amazing interface for IIS 6.0 over their regular hosting which provides us with pretty much everything we need to set our applications using IIS over the web.

Location of my new site is http://zeeshan.maximumaspbeta.com/ which currently showcase some demo content. I'll be putting up some cool Atlas Mashups as well as some other sample applications at my new hosting in weeks to come and will be testing this new account to see how much stable IIS and Longhorn are, commercially. Will keep you posted, cheers!

Windows Vista Beta 2 :: The Ultimate Edition

2006-05-29T01:17:00.000+05:00

Today I got a chance to check Windows Vista x64 Ultimate Edition Beta 2. First impression is always, jaw dropping. There were some issues with the installation but after a few attempts, I got through. The problem was the minimum harddisk space required by Vista for a successful installation. This build, which is 5384, requires atleat 15 Gigabytes of free space on the partition you wist to install and another 8 to 10 Gigabytes of free space on your primary partition. Anyways the user experience is awesome as always. WDDM (Windows Display Driver Module) now has more hardware in its supporting GPU list. The idea is to provide a hassle free installation of the next generation of Windows with OS as well as required drivers. Aero showed much improvement as well from the previous built and run alot smoother then ever before. Some new Gadgets are also added into this built. Saw the first glimpse of Internet Explorer 7+. There has been some added feature in this new version of IE and my guess is its relationship with IIS 7. This is a part which I still have to explore so I am putting it on hold for the time being. Here are some screenshots of Vista running on my desktop machine. Cheers!

What is an MVP, Anyway?

2006-05-18T21:16:00.000+05:00

Well I came across an interesting piece of writing by Jonathan which is posted at ASP.NetPro. Jonathan talked in detail about the Microsoft MVP program, selection criteria and interviews with the member of the selection board. He also pointed out the issues with the current selection criteria for MVPs and the improvements that we are going to see very soon.

Still wondering what an MVP is and how to become one? Well then click this piece of text and get your answer. Cheers!

Atlas Control Toolkit

2006-05-07T02:56:00.000+05:00

Do you Want to add nested drop-downlists to your page? In-line popup support? Implement smooth show/hide support? Add water-marking support to input controls? Use dropshaows, rounded curves and much more for your existing server control in ASP.NET 2.0? Already getting cold feet and thinking about spending long hours over the weekend to write ugly, unmanageable javascripts for your existing web apps. Well, that's a life of a web developer always pushed to his limits for adding more features in his application.

Well then there's a sigh of relief for you all, we now have Atlas Control Toolkit with us. Just head over to its website here and see some beautiful, mouth watering AJAX treats. Make sure to download this toolkit and start using it from today to add some cool AJAX features in your web apps.

Wanna know more about this toolkit? Then Shawn Burke's blog is your place to be. Enjoy!

Control Adapters in ASP.NET 2.0

2006-05-06T16:33:00.000+05:00

How many of you are willing to alter the layout of current server controls in ASP.NET 2.0? I am sure many of you are interested in playing with the layout and change the way it looks and reacts by default. One way to achieve your goal is to either use CSS style sheets or newly introduced Themes in ASP.NET 2.0. But at the end of the day, what you are doing is to alter the presentation of your server controls or html tags. There is no possibility of changing the way your server controls react and render at client side, because it always ends up in producing html markups for server controls. Server Controls are always rigid and is not able to adapt changes. It is a bit difficult to grasp the idea at first place, so let me add more details and references to support this concept.

Control Adapters in ASP.NET 2.0 is a fairly fresh concept for web developers to hold. In the background what it does is it allows you to do pretty much with the way your web application or, in other words server controls react to the browsers. You can create your one web application to run on web browsers of all types, even on mobile devices but just adding a ".browser" file to your web app. You can differentiate where the browser that send the request is of either a browser that runs on a desktop machine or is a mobile device browser. And can produce different layouts for different browsers with some additional lines of codes.

So what's the big deal, you may be thinking? Think about producing XAML through your current web application and play with the UI to run on top of WPF (Avalon). Think about creating your controls to render at client side, so to be more user friendly. Like you can do with javascripts for client side execution. You can do pretty much with custom controls and third party tools available these days. But think about having the same feature for your existing <asp:textbox> control or anyother.

Amazed aren't you. I am having a felling that I may not be as clear in explaining the feature so I would like to recommend a few resources for you to dig in and explore this feature at your own pace.

There's an amazing demo by Plip's on creating XAML from your existing web apps. Have a look at it here.

ASP.NET team member Scotts talks about the new CSS Control Adaptor toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0. Click here if you are willing to know more.

Visual Studio and BSOD's

2006-05-02T18:17:00.000+05:00

BSOD's (Blue Sceen Of Death) had annoyed me for quite a few weeks and it always appears when I am working on a project inside Visual Studio. Things got worse when they started appearing once everyhour, especially when I am downloading the latest files from Source Safe. Stop error I get always suggested the error is either related to a RAM related issues or BIOS. I tested my ram and it came out clean so I thought something else is messing up with my system. So after spending a couple of hours I found that ZoneAlarm has some issues with Visual Studio and even stopping the service wont solve the problem. So I have to completely remove it to get rid of these ugly BSODs. So remember, don't use ZoneAlarm if you are using Visual Studio for primary development purposes untill its team solve this issue.

But don't you think its odd that only Visual Studio has issues with ZoneAlarm, one of the leading firewalls in the market? Think about it :)

ASP.NET 2.0 at NED.net

2006-04-18T00:34:00.000+05:00

I was invited at NED.net user group to give an introduction on ASP.NET 2.0 last weekend. Event went great and I enjoyed the session. Audience were mostly beginner ASP.NET student developers and were quite passionate about this new release. I talked about new Controls, Page Framework, Services, API's, Execution Model, Compilation and Deployment. You can download presentation slides and source code from here. Here are a few snaps of the event. There are more events lined up by NED.net and I am sure you don't wanna miss any. For updates join NED.net mailing list at Yahoo Groups.

RSS as DataSource in ASP.NET 2.0

2006-02-23T22:13:00.000+05:00

Did you ever think about using RSS as a datasource in your web applications? Well then think no more as ASP.NET team member Dmitryr has posted an awesome RSS Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0 on his blog. This toolkit supports both exposing and consuming RSS from ASP.NET applications made on version 2.0 of the .NET Framework and it also includes full source code.

More on Scott's Blog.

Anthem.NET :: Another AJAX Library

2006-02-16T00:31:00.000+05:00

I have just downloaded Anthem.NET, another library for using AJAX features in ASP.NET applications. First its an open source project and is hosted at SourceForge.NET. And the best thing about Anthem.NET is, it can be used with both ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0. Soon after Atlas release, I always wanted to have some kind of similar library for previous version of ASP.NET.

By adding Anthem.NET library and some scripts, you can use AJAX features in the form of server controls. Just like Atlas, Anthem.NET provides server side control model for ASP.NET. Nearly all existing server controls are now AJAX enabled with this tool, and we can make our existing web applications AJAX enabled in no time. The only thing needed is to replace <asp:> tag with <anthem:> tag. Cool isn't it :)

You can read more about Anthem.NET here.
Download Anthem.NET from here.

Visual Studio 2005 Addons

2006-02-15T00:37:00.000+05:00

Microsoft has released some addons for Visual Studio 2005, earlier this month. These addons are to provide more flexibility for the developers who are used to of making ASP.NET projects using the traditional model of ASP.NET Project system of VS 2003 or before. Due to many suggestions from the developers, ASP.NET team has provided this addon that will support the previous project system in VS 2005 as well as the the current model.

You can download these addons from the following locations:

VS 2005 Web Application Project
VS 2005 Web Deployment Project

Hotmail Live Beta

2006-01-25T13:57:00.000+05:00

I got an invitation from Hotmail to try Hotmail Beta Live and without wasting a single moment I jumped into the site, accepted the invitation and sign in to see the new Hotmail. First it took a while to load all the scripts to provide client side processing functionality. Hotmail live will give you feeling that you are working inside Outlook. Resize columns, Spell check, move between folders and download mails without refreshing the page all the time. According to them, Hotmail Live will take over current Homail within few weeks, and hopefully everyone will be repeaing the benefits from the new exciting services. The sad part is, it does not provide all AJAX functionalities with browsers other then IE. However, Hotmail team will provide all the features for all browsers before the final release. This is how Homail Live looks like:

You can sign in for an invitation here. See all the features here.

Fuel Cell Vehicle :: The cleanest car on the planet

2006-01-23T00:44:00.000+05:00

I was watching Discovery Channel lately and discovered about the FCX (Fuel Cell Vehicle) through an advertisement and I couldn't resist myself from finding more about it. So in search for more, I hit its own as well as other websites. FCX is a technology introduced by Honda Research Department and according to them its a simple but fascinating way to produce electricity to servce as fuel for the cars of tomorrow. FCX employs an electrochemical reaction between Hydrogen and Oxygen to directly convert chemical energy into electrical energy. Yes its the same experiment but done in a reverse order that we did in our ninth grade to separate Hydrogen and Oxygen from water through Electrolysis. These cars do not require petrol, diesel or gas and produces zero harmful emissions. It generates electricity from two virtually unlimited sources, hydrogen and oxygen and is already on the roads in Japan and the U.S.A.

For more information, visit:
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