Our blogs have been down for quite some time now and it had been quite frustrating.

We switched hosters and the new hosting company pulled off support for ASP.NET Full Trust permissions - which is required by the current version of dasBlog that we are using.   There seem to be only few people who have managed to remove the full trust dependencies of dasBlog and even those aren't full solutions.  A hack here and a hack there. 

When it did feel challenging to try and see if dasBlog can be modified, or if the content can be ported via BlogML to some other engine, I couldn't quite find too much time to work on it  - the reason? - TechMela 2007.

At Microsoft India, we are very excited about this new event format - branded as TechMela - which will combine all the four erstwhile annual events - TechEd, IndiMIX, MEDC and ITPC.   All of these will be under one roof and it is going to be the first time ever that you will get to see a unified and connected view of all Microsoft offerings.

Check out the agenda at www.techmela.com to give you a sense of how different, varied and advanced topics we are looking at covering during TechMela.

TechMela is going to be in Mumbai in less than 7 days from now and we sure hope you will try to attend it in person or virtually. 

I am doing a couple of demos at the keynote and am super-excited about it.  I will be showcasing WPF and a really cool Silverlight application that we are building for one of India's largest film production houses.  I will also be doing several breakouts - mainly in the UX track (demo'ing Expression suite of products) and the Rich Internet Applications track.

In the RIA track, I will be doing sessions on Silverlight.  For those who know Gaurav Khanna, he is flying in to do a couple more deep-dive tracks on Silverlight on the same day and I am looking forward to that as well.

Overall, it will be a fun event.  And we hope to see you there!