The South Asia MVP Blog

Vasu Jain, a new Windows Desktop Experience MVP from India and a blogger at WindowsVJ.com, has authored an eBook – Windows 7: Tips & Tricks.

The book is, available as a free download, is a compilation of over 50 tips and tricks about Windows 7 to enrich the desktop experience, and an added bonus section for Windows 7 applications.

Download: PDF (5.8 MB) | XPS (6.44 MB)

Microsoft MVPs are awarded every quarter and recognize the contributions of an individual to technical communities over the past year.

We are extremely happy to welcome the following new MVPs amongst our midst for this quarter:

• G Vijai Kumar - SharePoint Server                
• Gaurav Khanna - Visual Basic                 
• Visakh Murukes - SQL Server
• Tanmay Arjun Sonawane - Windows Desktop Experience
• Vasu Jain - Windows Desktop Experience       
• Jeya Kumar Devarajulu - ASP/ASP.NET
• Deepika Haridas - ASP/ASP.NET 

Congratulations to the MVP awardees on this prestigious award!

To know more about the MVP Program, please visit: http://www.microsoft.com/india/mvp

Windows 7 has set new definition of Personalization. Windows Desktop Experience MVP from Pilani, Rajasthan – Ramesh Kumar, who authors a popular Windows blog, codes up useful Windows utilities, and contributes to online forums couldn’t escape the temptation.

Ramesh has released a Windows 7 Theme pack - I’m Windows 7 PC. It is combination of four wallpapers and uses the inbuilt sound scheme - Festival. Each of the four wallpapers has one of the Windows flag color.
  

Download the Theme Pack from here, and then click Open. The theme is applied to your desktop and added to Personalization in Control Panel. The wallpapers are set to change every 30 minutes, but feel free to choose your own interval.

Ravishankar Shrivastava, a Windows Desktop Experience MVP, has won the Manthan 2009 Award – a prestigious IT sector award from Digital Empowerment Foundation and Department of IT, Government of India.

Chhattisgarhi KDE 4.2 Program Suite is a localization project aimed to remove digital divide from native Chhattisgarhi speaking people of Chhattisgarh state in India. More than 100,000 strings of KDE 4.2 had been translated in to Chhattisgarhi. The Chhattisgarhi-localized applications are available for Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac. It is a first of its kind applications suite for the Windows platform, in any Indian regional language.

The applications suite will allows users not knowing the English language surf Internet, email, work on office suite, and play games in their native Chhattisgarhi language.

Joydip Kanjilal, an ASP.NET MVP from India and an author of four books as yet, has just got his next book published. ASP.NET 4.0 Programming, published by McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, promises to make you design and implement faster, lighter, and more efficient distributed applications using the powerful technologies and tools available in ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010.

In a nutshell, this book helps you to:

• Design, debug, and administer cutting-edge web sites and applications
• Work with Web Parts, Web Services, ADO.NET, and the ASP.NET MVC Framework
• Maintain state, application, and session data across multiple requests
• Use namespaces to create multilingual, globalized, and localized applications
• Build and distribute powerful RIAs using Silverlight, Ajax, and SOAP
• Develop data-driven applications with LINQ and Entity Framework
• Leverage WCF features in ASP.NET applications
• Implement reliable role- and membership-based security policies
• Optimize page load time, memory usage, and database query performance
• Simplify event handling, animation, and document traversing with jQuery

ASP.NET 4.0 Programming

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media; 1 edition (December 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0071604103
• ISBN-13: 978-0071604109

Exchange Server MVPs from India – Nitin Gupta and Amit Tank – have founded Microsoft Unified Communication User Group – India, an independent group focused on encouraging communication between IT Professionals motivated by self-interest in Microsoft Unified Communication products like Exchange Server, Office Communication Server (OCS), and SharePoint Server.

The user group is designed as an information resource where Unified Communication professionals can find articles, how-tos, videos, industry News, forums, and new product features. Though this User Group is based out of India, there will be no regional boundaries as the group plans to host virtual monthly meetings and occasional in-person events.

Join the group at http://muc-ug.org.in, and spread the word around.

The 1^st edition of Virtual TechDays: REGIONAL event was held on 3-4 December, 2009. For the first time in the history of VTD, the event was conducted in four languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam – based on the maximum feedback received on a particular language from the community.

The event was a great success with 3,014 unique individuals attending the event – resulting in a cumulative 5,397 session attendees - not without the participation of MVPs who took three sessions at the event.

The popular Windows portal by Windows Desktop Experience MVP in Pune, India -  Anand Khanse  – The Windows Club is not only a destination for news and information, but also handy utilities which they keep churning out frequently.

Another Windows Desktop Experience MVP from Pilani, India, Ramesh Kumar is a portal loyalist and an active contributor in those applications list. They’ve recently developed and released a first-of-its-kind application for Windows 7 and Windows Vista - FixWin.

FixWin is a small portable application, distributed as freeware, to repair and fix common Windows annoyances & issues. FixWin detects whether you have Windows 7 or Windows Vista installed and accordingly offers you the relevant fixes only. The solutions to repair and fix 50 common Windows issues have been categorized as Windows Explorer, Internet & Connectivity, Windows Media, System Tools, and Additional Fixes.

To see the screenshots showing the list of Windows fixes available, click here or download the application from here.

Bursting the popular myth that Microsoft MVPs or .NET developers are anti open-source principles, for this weekend we dig two useful code-snippets/applications developed by MVPs, made available with source code, true to the principles of open-source. Cheers!

• Convert/Display PDF & Word Files as Images in .NET
• Dark – Switch off Monitor using .net

Big props to Client Application Development MVP Shoban Kumar and Windows Desktop Experience MVP Vinod Unny.

Niraj Bhatt, a Connected System Developer MVP, participated in the Cloud App Contest by Microsoft, and won himself a Windows 7 laptop for submitting the best solution in the .NET category for the professional developer audience.

As Niraj explains on his blog, the interesting application, created on Windows Azure Platform is EmergencyBloodBank.

The two driving factors for this application were to create an application covering all offerings of Azure platform that can help community members to bootstrap their Azure efforts and second was coming up with a scenario that effectively leverages cloud services displaying no elements of over engineering (which can make solution look artificial).

Here is the link to application, while the actual solution document can be downloaded from here.

Purnachandra Duggirala, and Excel MVP from India, shares Excel and Charting tips on his popular blog – Pointy Haired Dilbert – since 2007, and today has over 300 articles and tutorials on using Microsoft Office Excel effectively and making better charts.

Chandoo, as his readers now him as, has authored a six part series on using Excel effectively for project management. Though Project in the Office suite of products is a great product for the purpose but worldwide, several project managers and executives use the number-cruncher Excel for managing projects; frequently due to wider availability.

• Gantt Charts – Project Management Using Excel
• Team To Do Lists – Project Tracking Tools
• Project Status Reporting – Create a Timeline to display milestones
• Time sheets and Resource management
• Issue Trackers & Risk Management
• Project Status Reporting – Dashboard
• Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project Progress

And not just this series, look around on his blog, and you’ll find huge set of Excel resources including free templates to download and an ebook – 95 Excel Tips – if you subscribe to the blog via email.

It’s a cloudy day here in New Delhi, India, but we preferred to skip the usual package of hot cup of tea and munchies for the weekend, and dig nice posts from our MVPs talking about cloud.

No not in a poetic way, but in an Azure way - Tips, how-tos, and tour! After all, a lot of Azure announcements were made at the recently concluded PDC 09 in Los Angeles, USA (Check the Azure container tour in one of the posts).

• SQL Azure – Microsoft SQL Data Services – Introduction and Pricing
• Microsoft Azure Container in Microsoft PDC ‘09
• Configuring Windows Azure development machine
• Azure Start Guide – Step by Step Installation Guide
• SQL Azure Explorer Add-in for VS2010
• How to send Email on Windows Azure Application

Big props to SQL Server MVP Pinal Dave, Solutions Architect MVP and Regional Director Venkatarangan TNC, and ASP.NET MVP Mahesh Mitkari.

Arijit Basu, a Dynamics AX MVP from Kolkata, India, has often seen that it becomes difficult to manage AX Configurations in an implementation. To relieve this pain in one of his implementations, he came up with an AX Configuration Launcher which can be installed on each user’s machine.

The launcher creates two local folders, one for .axc files and other for .url files. This launcher then shows all the files in groups to the user. These two folders can now be remotely updated/ synced by the admin so when new configurations are available, it is dropped into these folders and end users can access them. Also when existing configurations are no longer used, they can be remotely removed from the folders.

In version revisions, Arijit has revamped the user interface, and added the ability to sync from a centralized network share and to configure the application.

Download - AX Configuration Launcher

Jacob Sebastin, a SQL Server MVP from India, was a speaker at PASS 2009 Summit, where he spoke on Creating XML Schema Collections. Jacob’s attendee ribbons, based on attendees’ achievement, involvement and responsibilities with PASS, were a sight for sure!

As he mentions in his event summary, he was excited to be presenting at the Summit for the first time, and also enjoyed handing over signed copies oh his book - The Art Of XSD – SQL Server XML Schema Collections during his session. His session was also attended by Michael Rys, the Lead Program Manager for XML in the Microsoft SQL Server product team at Microsoft.

At the recently concluded Microsoft PDC09, Scott Guthrie announced and showcased Silverlight 4. While it earned all the wows from the attendees, for this weekend, we dig four of many awesome posts on Silverlight by the MVPs.

• Silverlight 3 DataGrid
• Bing Maps Silverlight Control
• Leverage content editor web part to render Silverlight application
• Create a custom web part to render Silverlight application

Big props to Silverlight MVP – Vikram Pendse and SharePoint MVP - Sundar Narasiman.