I have a new toy.  Actually have it for a couple of weeks now.  I have a HP iPAQ hw6960 Pocket PC running Windows Mobile 5.0.

Now this is my first with a smartphone and I have been loving it.  After enabling unlimited GPRS through Hutch, I have been using the phone so much that I am having to charge the phone up every single day.  (And yes, the battery actually lasts much longer for normal usage).

I am sure this is the phase of initial excitement and I will get back to saner usage.  But at the moment, I really wonder how I lived without all of this all these days.

Email at my fingertips, so much so, that I spent a day when I was traveling responding to all my email through phone.  Other than my corporate email, I also manage Hotmail through the phone now.  GMail seems to have some problems - even after configuring POP3, the email doesn't get automatically pushed to my phone, I have to manually sync it up.

The plethora of Windows Mobile applications that we have access to our Intranet has me all charged up. I can use my phone as a wireless presenter to present a PPT on my laptop - when being able to advance slides through the mobile and also view speaker notes on the mobile. That's simply awesome.

Today, I just got to Jani's blog on recent trends on the TV and Music and learnt about Mundu Radio - which I think is a really cool application.  If you know of any other killer apps, do leave me a comment.

I have also been browsing a lot with Pocket IE.  I was amazed at how most sites render just fine on Pocket IE, including all the ThinkingMS blogs.  However, interfaces designed specifically for the mobile require less scrolling and make it much easier.  Windows Live has a whole suite of mobile interfaces for the various services at http://mobile.live.com

I was just emphasizing the need of having a mobile-version of websites to a customer recently. The day isn't far when computing will move more to devices than the PC.  

Microsoft just announced Windows Mobile 6.0 and I can't wait till our IT department announces a supported build that I can upgrade my phone to.  The interface is slicker and a lot of nags I have with getting used to the new form factor are made simpler and more intuitive in WM 6.0.

Just been a whole lot of time since I posted here.  Mostly been busy.  Had been to a vacation to Dubai and then attending the rocking Windows Vista launch at Mumbai and then at Seattle for an internal Microsoft conference.

Seattle was fun.  Got to go the Redmond campus.  The holy grail.  The pilgrimage.  Clicked a lot of pictures here and there. 

Bought a copy of Flight Simulator X Deluxe Edition.  Have been long wanting to play Flight Simulator.  Aircrafts simply thrill me and the closest to get it to flying is using Microsoft Flight Simulator.  So far, tried flying a plane, managed to take off and then spin around and crash.  Flying with keyboard or mouse is real hard.  I wish it was easier - but it is fun to learn it.  After all, flying in real must be hard too.

Seattle struck me as a different city compared to other places in the US that I have been.  For one, the atmosphere had some class to it.  Seattle Downtown looked very classy and beautiful.  There were a couple of streets that didn't look as good, but the central part of it has these tall-rise buildings that look really nice when lit up.   Mt. Rainer is a nice, huge, fat mountain with a snow cap a couple of hours away from Seattle.  The mountain looks great when taking off from the Seattle Tacoma airport.

The visit to campus was shortlived and I hope to get to see more of it in the coming years.  Will surely need many more trips to go see the entire campus.

Dubai pictures available at http://pandurangvn.spaces.live.com

Microsoft started off CES with a Bill Gates pre-keynote address.  BillG started saying that this is probably the last time he gets to go on the CES stage and talk about technology!  :(  I don't buy that completely though :)

However, the address was very exciting with some of the stuff that was never demo'ed before.

There was Windows DreamScene - something quite amazing spectacular and something that was a hush-hush thing at Microsoft for a while now.  Of course, it is another UI glitz, with playing videos now being able to be set as the desktop background.  I got to install a small internal BETA today and it works great.  Sure looks exciting and I think the Vista Ultimate Edition users will love the feature (that'll ship as a Vista Ultimate Extra).

If you haven't seen DreamScene, you should watch the CES keynote.

One of the biggest announcements yesterday was Windows Home Server.  Windows Home Server is the vision of having a server in every home that takes care of backend infrastructure for the digital home.  In many ways, a "home server" makes perfect sense to orchestrate all the digital devices that make up today's homes.  Hook up your Media Center PC, your laptop, your personal computer, your XBox, your Windows Mobile phone and everything to the backend server and let it manage backups, synchronization, and a lot more for you.  That's the message.  However, to learn more, you can also check out the Center for Digital Amnesia Awareness Web Site. :)

In the meanwhile, Bill Gates has also written this must-read article titled "A Robot In Every Home".  When you read the paper, you realize the real parallel universe between the "origin of the PC" days and today's world.  I played around with Microsoft Robotics Studio v1.0 yesterday and created my first robot in a simulated environment that I could control with a small controller-like Window (called the Direction Dialog).  That was pure thrill!

Exciting times ahead, and with this company - that's a statement that'll always be true!

It is official and Vadi beat me to the announcement thanks to an email I had sent him. If you haven't already clicked the link to Vadivel's blog, don't. Read further.

I am super, super excited!!! It is practically a dream come true in a way!!!

I am joining Microsoft India as Windows Live Developer Evangelist, starting next month.  My role will include a lot of developer community interaction and working with the latest technologies.  More than that, I will be part of a team that has a lot of geniuses, so it will be a fun environment. Moreover, I will be moving lines from eight years in services with projects, timelines, deadlines, requirements, tracking, process, metrics and the like! 

At this point, a huge load of thanks to Divya (my lovely wife) for the tremendous support in helping me make the decision and then throughout the interview process (love you!!).  Thanks to family and a few close friends who knew a while ago and played the all-important role of providing moral support. Special thanks to some friends in Microsoft who provided insight into the role and guidance for making the decisions easier.

Thanks also to all the friends who for the past eight years have always kind of assumed that this would be an eventuality, who wished for it, who asked me time and again when I would do this, etc.  So here it is guys - I am joining Microsoft!!! 

In Pooja's style, Woo Hoo!!!!!

Web 2.0 has no doubt arrived. What initially looked like a spate of XML/HTTP-driven websites, now has terms like AJAX (which no doubt was a marketing genius) and Comet making its way into programmer skill-sets.

There was time, back in 1999, when I was just an year into programming, when JavaScript was dreaded.  Nobody was interested in writing more than a few lines of client-side validation. I remember writing what we called a "double dropdown", which basically meant having two JS arrays and then populating a HTML SELECT list based on the selection of the first SELECT list. Like in a country-state selection. Doing that bit was a niche skillset that a couple of us could achieve with minimal code. All because of JavaScript illiteracy.

And then I had the opportunity to work on an IE-only intranet application (oh yeah, there was Netscape 3 and 4 to support otherwise) and thankfully we persuaded the customer to go with IE 4 as the base platform. Doing that application taught me DHTML and JavaScript like never before. In fact, after that I could look at JavaScript to do inventive things. I have had the privelege to code using Remote Scripting, Design-Time Controls (VSDTC) and Visual Basic DHTML project templates - all pioneers in making it easier to code in "AJAX".  However, the best of those days was coding in Notepad.  XML HTTP, which made its debut in IE 5.0+, was something I got introduced to only in 2003.

Why all this?  To give you an indication that the Web 2.0 AJAX thing was always around. But somehow, due to the then backward nature of non-Microsoft browsers, non-standardization and the usual time for user adoption and comfort with new trends, it took a while to appear the way it has now. However, Web 2.0 is not just about AJAX. This is a key thing to remember. Check out Manoj's excellent post on Web 2.0 - a great perspective that I share too and hence am not going to repeat things here.

So, now that the background is set, let me get to what I wanted to actually talk about.

Though there are a variety of new innovative websites out there that harness Web 2.0 technologies and ideologies, it is still quite a small percentage of the larger web. One of the main reasons still remains that JavaScript, that plays a pivotal role in creating powerful interactive websites, is still a nice skillset. Excellent programmers hate coding in JavaScript (take Sid for instance - got to link to that awful post on AJAX here - Sid, place the link in the comments. Interestingly, the company Sid is part of is building something really cool on AJAX to make it easier to build mash-ups). 

Now do you smell an opportunity?  Everybody wants to be on Web 2.0, but JavaScript is a road block. And even if you love coding in JS, writing reams of code is a no-no for productivity. Of course, the larger corporations of the world did sense this and the result is a barrage of "AJAX toolkits" trying to ease the burden.

There is Microsoft ATLAS, Yahoo Developer Network, Google Web Toolkit, the Dojo toolkit, the Prototype toolkit, just to name a few. And there are tools and parsers - you will find plenty of them.

Though all of these are around, the developer view of Web 2.0 is still very confusing. The reason - each one has its own way of solving the problem. Some are even solving the wrong problem.

ASP.NET 2.0 introduced script callbacks which in itself is a great way of writing AJAX-style code. But then many of the associated controls do not have the AJAX capabilities built-in and still rely on postbacks. ATLAS aims at solving this problem - hence enabling developers to write ASP.NET code (read server-side) without having to worry about JavaScript and client hacks. Neat. But this causes two problems - one, it is tied to a server platform and two, it will take longer to mature because Microsoft has assumed that the developers know ASP.NET 2.0 already, something that is not necessarily true in all cases. Moreover, it is taking just way too long to release. I am afraid they might well miss the curve if something really better comes up.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) works with code generation. Write in Java, generate JavaScript. Though I haven't tried GWT personally, I am pretty sure this is not a great approach. The problem is that no matter how well you write your code generation, purists will tell you that it limits the language that is being generated. If I wanted to do something one way and the tool generated in another way, it is always going to be a problem. Frankly, I had expected Google to come up with something targeting the Microsoft developer base primarily, but coding in Java will limit the user base of GWT as well.

Yahoo UI, Dojo and Prototype are all nice client libraries. In fact, I like Yahoo UI a lot for its simplicity. Dojo is really powerful.  Both of them expect you to understand how JavaScript work - which could very well mean it is for developers who are already comfortable with JavaScript.

Tools like the Microsoft Research Map Cruncher and Google Sketchup are really nifty tools that can be used to do some good innovative Web 2.0 programming. But each of them are again limited to a particular context, particular website, particular technology, etc.

What is missing is a comprehensive IDE for developing Web 2.0 applications. A platform for creating, mashing up, merging, collaborating and developing applications using innovative ideas. Sites like Codeplex should aim at not just being another source control repository, but instead creating an environment, providing the right tools and enabling developers to code collaboratively. That will be the true realization of the Web 2.0 vision.

Getting a little time on hand is a rare thing these days. (No) thanks to a flu that has grounded me, I have a little time now as I am recouping with dozes of green and blue pills. Should be back on my feet in a day.

However, since I had a little time, I thought I will make some good use of it and put an entry in - something that also has become a rare thing. And I already have people complaining about it - which, needless to say, is a good thing to know.

So before I make a post that has been running in my head for a long while now, let me also put in a few lines about time and the meaning of "no time for blogging", strictly in my own context.

I hate to say I have no time for blogging. Many of my friends say, how can you be that busy - it takes just a few minutes to blog an entry. But then there are other friends of mine as well who like to roll an idea in their heads for a while before it is blogged.

Weblogs have become more than a fad now. Anybody who spends considerable time online has a blog. There are different categories of blogs (and no, I am not talking about categories like tech, programming, literary, etc.). Categories created by people simply because as humans we fall into different categories ourselves.

There are the simple bloggers, that use their blog space as a hyperlink aggregator, sharing with people all links they found interesting. Many people also start blogging this way. Then there are the ones who build upon this a little, add a viewpoint or two.  And then there are the ones who get linked because what they have put in is pretty much an original post or a different viewpoint that others find interesting.

There was a time when every link I found interesting, I wanted to pounce upon it and share it with friends. That interest has waned now. I no longer want to do the "check this out.." posts.  I want to do more of the viewpoint stuff. Which is why I need more than a few minutes to do a blog post. Which is why you see the number being scanty.

I only hope I had more time on hand. Maybe I should take up a full-time blogging job - on the lines of Robert X Cringely (by the way, Cringely is not a real person).

But till I get that kind of readership, I have to just keep sneaking time and hopefully without being sick.

With no particular intention of looking at something in particular, I was looking at a few blogs and came across KPL - Kid's Programming Language. An official website is hosted at www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com and MSDN has a few articles on KPL (owing to the fact that it is developed using C# - if you didn't know, MSDN has a section called coding4fun which has to do with Game Programming and stuff).

Now, KPL is pretty interesting. It is a language with editor and all, and is pretty simple. I am not quite sure how easy it would be for kids to work with, but I guess if somebody has the aptitude, they could pick it up pretty soon.

KPL revived some memories of my own younger days. I was in school when I first got introduced to programming. BASIC used to be the language for kids then and I got a hang of BASIC pretty soon. BASIC continued to be my favourite language for a long time and I worked with various BASIC interpreters - BASICA, Microsoft QBASIC and the others that shipped in floppy disks at that time.

I still think kids can learn a lot more with BASIC. I have met many kids and students of late who were born in the Windows era. They have absolutely no exposure to DOS - not that I blame them. But DOS was fun. BASIC was great fun - screen modes, sounds, animation and all.

I wish there was still a version of BASIC (not Visual Basic) floating around for the kids. KPL is probably attempting to take that place, but it is not quite BASIC, arguably the first PC computer language and the one Bill Gates himself coded in years ago.

UPDATE: Check this Channel 9 post on KPL: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=166995

This was a moment to cherish!

Being at the Golden Gate is just an experience. The bridge is so massively huge, it just brushes you aside and completely overwhelms you.

This is the one of the entry points to the USA from the wide, wide Pacific. That's also where it gets its name from.

Back in the United States. Arrived yesterday at San Francisco after 38 hours of flying and waiting to fly.

San Francisco looks like a nice city - not that I've had much time here - but it sure is busier and livelier than Minneapolis/St. Paul (which I visited two months ago).

I'm here for a month and if any of you have any suggestions on what I could explore here, leave me a comment.

You're sure to see more blog entries on things I get to encounter here.

For now, back to work.

Its been messy. And frustrating.

www.cenvo.com where we had the earlier hosting of thinkingms.com gave us a lot of issues. First of all comments and any new blog entry went poof. Thanks to some access rights issues. And then when we sought cenvo support, we did not get any response. It can be frustrating when an online transaction ceases to respond and there is no way to walk into an office and slap somebody tight on their face.

However, we've now moved to our new home at discountasp.net - which looks far more reliable. We are also on a state-of-the-art hosting provider that hardly seems to have any complaints.

What did happen though in this transition, are a few changes:

1. Unfortunately the sub-domain registration at discountasp.net is priced a little too high for our budget and hence we have a change in our individual blog URLs.  I am blogging at http://www.thinkingMS.com/pandurang - please update your bookmarks. You can visit our homepage for the blog addresses of the remaining bloggers on TMS.

2. Vyasaraj Kulkarni joins the blog bandwagon on ThinkingMS.com - I am looking forward to some exciting blogs about some of the exciting technologies he's been working on. Welcome, Vyas.

3. We've moved to a newer version of dasBlog - hence with some newer features and better look.

4. Some of our earlier posts might have some broken links or broken images, thanks to the change in URL mentioned in point 1. We are on our way to fix these - drop us a mail if you find anything, it will be appreciated.

Overall, it took some time, took some hit on our blogging which was beginning to be a good habit - but then a break is always rejuvenating.

There are other changes in life and everything, that I will leave to the individual bloggers to announce.

It is good to be back. And thanks to everyone who kept mailing or asking us about when we'll be back. Here we are, and sorry it took so long.

In Douglas Adam's words, Sorry for all the inconvenience.

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