Developers

 
A quick note on Closing lambda loop variables in C# 5.0 - Breaking Changes in C# 5.0 compiler

By Anoop Madhusudanan published on 12-17-2012

This post is regarding a breaking change in C# 5.0 related to using variables in lambdas with in a loop….(more)

Basic Operations on Windows Azure Table in Windows Azure Storage in Storage Client Library 2.0

By Dhananjay Kumar published on 12-17-2012

To work with Windows Azure Storage Client 2.0 grab the library from NuGet package. Right click on the project and select Manage….(more)

Sending Email through ASP.Net or Dotnet applications

By Venkatesan Prabu published on 12-18-2012

Here is the small piece of code to send emails through Dotnet Applications….(more)

HTML Encoding in MVC

By Abhimanyu Vatsa published on 12-22-2012

One of the best feature in Razor view engine that I like most is ‘HTML Encoding’. In many cases (like a comment form on blog) we receive the data from users….(more)

IT PRO



How To Include Or Integrate Drivers In Windows 8 ISO Image

By Ganesh Bhat published on 12-18-2012

Reinstalling Windows operating system can be quite a tedious task. You need to install Windows first, download and install drivers from….(more)

Working with Exchange Control panel and RBAC in Exchange 2010

By Ratish Nair published on 12-18-2012

With enhanced remote management methods, Microsoft has taken its products to another level. Power Shell capabilities were introduced by Exchange Server 2010….(more)

Recovering from Windows Azure Virtual Machines failures – Unable to establish RDP connection

By Niraj Bhatt published on 12-20-2012

Your ability to recover from failures is quintessential while working with any cloud platform and same applies to Windows Azure Virtual….(more)

Fix : Windows 8 Shutdown / Restarts if left IDLE

By Shantanu Kaushik published on 12-17-2012

After reading this post you will be able to fix an issue where your windows 8 computer might restart or shutdown automatically if left….(more)

How to Enable Backup on Windows Phone 8

By Nirmal TV published on 12-17-2012

With the release of Windows Phone 8, Microsoft has added another new feature to the mobile OS- Backup and restore. When you sign in with….(more)

Office 2013

Filter on a column of Date and time values

By Ashish Mathur published on 12-20-2012

Assume a three column database – Site ID, Reason & Date and time.  The data is available in range A2:C6 of sheet1 of this….(more)

Monitoring Monthly Service Levels using Excel Charts [Example]

By Purnachandra Duggirala published on 12-20-2012

Jared, One of our readers liked this chart very much. Jared works as a workforce scheduler and has data similar to our chart….(more)

This month, India MVP team reached out to “Nauzad Kapadia” one of the veteran MVPs in India region. We asked him for his experience being MVP for past several years and any best practices or tips which he would like to share with the broader MVP community.

In his own words……….

The MVP Program was initiated in India for the first time in the year 2001 and I became one in 2002. At that time, there were only about 20 MVPs from India and we were a very close knit community.

In my initial years as an MVP, there were lot of focus and importance given to newsgroups and user groups. As time evolved, new digital avenues like blogs exploded, some of the User groups, which were very active a couple of years back, saw their activities diminish and in some cases completely vanish. I have seen it happen personally with the Mumbai .NET User group. If I was asked the number one reason for this, I would attribute it to lack of team effort.

A UG is something that is very difficult for an individual person to run on his own. There are lots of people who are doing it individually, but it requires a lot of time and dedication from an individual. Most people are unable to sustain this effort and dedication over a long run because they have regular jobs and commitments to take care of as well. This is where having a team becomes very useful.

Some of most vibrant user groups that I have seen, like the Pune and the Bangalore user group, have this core team which supports each other and that’s how the momentum has not been lost even after a decade. And in my opinion, team building happens best when people interact with each other regularly and have face to face meetings every once in a while.

The monthly events in Mumbai and Pune became like a meeting point for different MVPs to share ideas and what activities they would carry out in the coming weeks. I remember conducting almost 30 workshops in different universities and colleges in Pune and Mumbai as a result of these interactions.

Personally and professionally I have benefitted a lot from the MVP Program. I grew up attending local Microsoft events and watching eminent speakers like Sanjay Vyas, Sanjay Shetty, Raj Chaudhary amongst others speak. I never imagined that I would be sharing the stage with them in the near future. I spoke regularly at local UG events and then Microsoft gave me (and other MVPs) the opportunity to speak at MSDN Events, DevDays and eventually at TechEd. Regular Product Group interactions, access to MS Connect and beta software’s, early insights into upcoming products thru the MVP summit and Open Days have given me a competitive edge compared to my peers and helped me further excel in my profession.

If I could give some tips to the new and upcoming MVPs, they would be as follows –

• Your MVP award certifies you as an independent expert and has a lot of value and respect associated it. Do not trivialize it by adopting a holier than thou attitude and resorting to flaming MS when you are asked to do something or don’t get something that you want. Even though most MVPs are technically brilliant and dedicated in the kind of community work they do, their perceptions and expectations change as soon as they become MVPs. They suddenly begin to feel that they have right to get certain things from Microsoft – like free entry into Tech-Ed or other technical events.

• Recently an MVP commented that he is expected to support MS Products blindly and would not be renewed if he said “bad” things about them. If you think like that, you haven’t really understood anything about the MVP Program. In my term as an MVP, I know for a fact that MS and the Product teams WANT constructive feedback and criticism from MVPs. As long as the criticism is genuine and not just ranting or personal preferences, it is always encouraged and expected.

• Do attend any local meetings involving other MVPs, evangelists from MS or your MVP Lead. Nothing beats human interaction and lots of good ideas and plans emerge from such meetings. Do not under any circumstances; miss the MVP open days program whenever it is conducted. It’s a lot of fun!!

• Even though we all do a lot of voluntary work, sometimes we may feel that since it is voluntary, we should not be called upon to document it in a certain way. Most of the times, the reason why you are asked to document your activities in a certain way is to present it to others in Microsoft and make them aware of your impact and reach. And more of this can only benefit you and the MVP program in future.

• Be polite and patient in your communication with others.

Blog Posts of the Week

09^th - 15^th December’12

Developers

 

Exception Handling and Error logging in TSQL

By Rami Vemula on 12-11-2012

Most of the times it would be tricky on how to catch exceptions of different types such as business errors, data sanitation errors and logical errors….(more)

Writing Unit Tests for an ASP.NET MVC Action Method that handles Ajax Request and Normal Request

By Shiju Varghese published on 12-09-2012

In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to write unit tests for an ASP.NET MVC action method, which handles both Ajax….(more)

HTTP PATCH Requests (Partial Updates) in ASP.NET Web API and EF DB First

By Brij Dammani published on 12-14-2012

To update an entity in ASP.NET Web API, PUT request is used and we have to send all the properties even if only a subset have changed means if only one field....(more)

What-If analysis – Various ways to implement using MSBI

By Sorna Muthuraj published on 12-14-2012

Presently I am working on the What-If analysis capability in MSBI. So I went ahead on researching on what are the various ways….(more)

What is BI Semantic model (BISM) in SQL Server 2012?

By Shivprasad koirala published on 12-09-2012

Some days back I was installing SQL Server 2012 enterprise service pack 1. During installation when I was running through the setup, it gave me two options….(more)

Office 2013

Calculate a unique count with conditions in a Pivot Table

By Ashish Mathur published on 12-15-2012

Assume a three column table arranged as follows: Circle, Date of Fault and ID. Dates in the date range span one week….(more)

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: Manage and Remove Connected Services

By Geetesh Bajaj published on 12-10-2012

We already showed how you can add connected services in PowerPoint 2013. Although it may seem that you are adding these services to PowerPoint, you are essentially connecting….(more)

Blog Posts of the Week

2^nd - 8^th December’12

Developers

 
Inheritance with JavaScript

By Brij Mishra published on 12-05-2012

In this post, we will discuss, how we can use other features of Object Oriented concepts in JavaScript. Today I’ll discuss one of the main concepts of Object Orient Programming….(more)

Modernizr Library in MVC 4

By Abhimanyu Vatsa published on 12-08-2012

We all web developers have the responsibility to maintain the look and feel of web applications same for all users and browsers. One challenge is that there are still….(more)

Implementing dynamic secure FTP process using SSIS

By Visakh Murukesan published on 12-07-2012

This blog post explains one of the approaches for automating file export/import between a remote secure FTP site and local folder. This is one of the common scenarios….(more)

 
Behavior of Rollback Transactions in Triggers

By Rami Vemula published on 12-05-2012

There are at times when you want to your trigger to do some specific job for you like cleaning up things, archiving data, auditing certain objects, validating related data etc. Specifically at the former….(more)

IT Pro

 
SQL Server - Strange things do happen, but why are they allowed in the first place - THE ANSWER

By Amit Bansal published on 12-03-2012

And you all gave me interesting tips including Refreshing SSMS, checking for preceding space in from the db name, not to use sp_renamedb, checking the connection, checking permissions….(more)

 
Flip minus sign from right to left in a multi column range

By Ashish Mathur published on 12-05-2012

In range B3:B7, assume the following values: 12,34-,23,6-,8.  As can be observed, the minus sign is appearing after the number thereby….(more)

Add Services in PowerPoint 2013

By Geetesh Bajaj published on 12-03-2012

The biggest changes in Microsoft Office 2013 stem for the additional cloud capabilities. While SkyDrive integration at a basic level existed in previous versions….(more)

Outlook cannot connect to Exchange 2010

By Ratish Nair published on 12-03-2012

Outlook 2003 users who are connecting to Exchange may receive one of the following error messages….(more)

Windows Explorer Keyboard Shortcuts in Windows 8

By Nirmal TV published on 12-08-2012

We all love keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts are really useful when you want to get the work done faster. Keyboard shortcuts always….(more)

Blog Posts of the Week

25^th Nov’12 - 01^st Dec’12

Developers

Method Caller Information in C Sharp 5.0

By Dhananjay Kumar published on 11-27-2012

Before we understand Method Caller Information feature of C# 5.0, we need to understand Optional Parameter feature of….(more)

Fast Downloading with Parallel Requests using ASP.NET Web API

By Brij Dammani published on 12-01-2012

In this article, we will implement to download parts of file in parallel to get the complete file faster. It is very useful to download large file….(more)

Windows 8 SDK Update with updated WACK Criteria for Win8Dev

By Kunal Chowdhury published on 11-26-2012

The Windows 8 Software Development Kit (SDK) contains header libraries and a set of tools which you can use to develop Windows Store apps using technologies like….(more)

Dependency Inversion, Dependency Injection, DI Containers and Service Locator

By Niraj Bhatt published on 12-01-2012

Here is a post I have been planning to do for years. Yes, I am talking about Dependency Injection, which by this time, has most likely made its way into your code….(more)

LINQ query to compare only date part of DateTime

By Pranay Rana published on 11-29-2012

In this post I am going to discuss about comparing the date part of datetime in a LINQ query. In a LINQ query it is easy to perform datetime comparisons….(more)

IT Pro

Extract data using Advanced Filter and VBA

By Purnachandra Duggirala published on 11-27-2012

In this post we will learn how to use the Advanced Filter option using VBA to allow us to filter our data on a separate sheet. This has been requested by a lot of our readers….(more)

Outlook.com adds new features; some of which make transition from Gmail easier!

By Vasudev Gurumurthy published on 11-29-2012

Outlook.com was launched in July this year. It is growing fast and feedback to it has been overwhelmingly positive! People love its clean looks and….(more)

Fix : Windows Update fails / hangs in Windows 8

By Shantanu Kaushik published on 11-25-2012

After reading this post you will be able to troubleshoot issues with Windows Update in Windows 8. The post focuses on resolving issues where specific….(more)

Learn PowerPoint 2011 for Mac: Columns within Text Containers

By Geetesh Bajaj published on 11-26-2012

You might have seen columnar text layouts often in Word documents or even in published formats used by desktop publishing software. PowerPoint 2011 may not give you all those bells and whistles….(more)