Avalon Community Technology Preview Released

Microsoft released a Community Technology Preview of "Avalon," the new presentation subsystem for Windows.

The following are the highlights of this new release though there are a couple of caveates to this release:

• Support for today's operating systems.
• Layout and control features.
• 3D drawing enhancements.
• Continued refinement.

To read more on this release visit Avalon November 2004 Community Technical Preview.

Evolution of Computer Languages

I happened to read this interesting article that explores the way Computer Languages have evolved and how the layering of the computer users has happened. Thanks to Anand for the link.

Google launches Google Scholar

Google has launched a new search service aimed at scientists and academic researchers. Google Scholar is a free beta service that allows users to search for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports. The new service accesses information from resources such as academic publishers, universities, professional societies and preprint repositories. because the service automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, users can find references to older works that may only exist offline in books or other publications.

I am now working on a project that involves a lot of reading and documentation work. Today, I tried using this new search tool and found the result very useful in locating whitepapers and other document resources. This tool proves to be a better option than google search for people who do research oriented development and documentation.

Read the news article here...

Access Google Scholar Search Service here...

Interesting thread on Array Vs ArrayList

Here is an interesting thread on the Array and ArrayList data structures in the Microsoft newsgroup. Have a good read... :-)

Inside the Guts of CLR!!!

"Inside the Guts of CLR" - this was the topic of the MSDN session held on November 3rd Chennai, India. M Anand, MVP presented this Level 400 session and these days he is becoming the regular presenter for the MSDN sessions in Chennai. the session was quite informative and interesting. The crux of the presentation was CLR hosting and GC. A short listing of the things discussed:

1. CLR Hosting - CLR hosting basics and advanced concepts like manually hosting CLR through COM. Actually it was interesting to learn that the infrastructure of the CLR is completely COM based.
2. Garbage Collection - Basics of Memory handling, .NET GC algorithm, Object Finalization, Strong and Weak references etc. A demo on GC process using a simple string concatenating application was really informative. Infact I/we were amazed to see the GC differences when building strings with usual string concatenation and StringBuilder. This demo also helped to understand the best practice for string building.
3. CLR enhancements in Whidbey - EnC and Generics.

Interesting Power Wattage Calculator!!!

With the new components of today, everyone wanting to upgrade to the latest and greatest, it goes unrealized that we might be overloading the power supply in our computer.

With all the high end mainboards, super fast processors, extra hard drives for storage, and case mod items such as LED fans, cathode lights (not to mention all the USB devices hanging off today's PC), people don't stop to think about all the wattage being used. However, the power supply is a very important and often overlooked component.

Check here to see if your power supply is large enough to take care of your power-hungry computer!

FxCop 1.312 Released

The FxCop team has released FxCop 1.312. Major features of this release:

• Simplification of report xml.
• New Fix Categories: Each message is marked to indicate if the suggested fix will constitute a breaking change for previously shipped code.
• User Interface Improvements: windowing behavior has been made more consistent
• Auto Update: Sign up to get notified when a new version of FxCop is available.

New rules in the areas of Design, Interoperability, Mobility, Naming, Performance, Portability, Security and Usage has been introduced. To read more on this release visit What's New in FxCop and download the tool here.

For people who ask what is FxCop, it is a code analysis tool that checks .NET managed code assemblies for conformance to the Microsoft .NET Framework Design Guidelines. It uses reflection, MSIL parsing, and callgraph analysis to inspect assemblies for more than 200 defects in the following areas:

• Library design
• Localization
• Naming conventions
• Performance
• Security

FxCop includes both GUI and command line versions of the tool, as well as an SDK to create custom rules.

Blu-ray : The next-generation optical disc format

Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD) is the name of a next-generation optical disc format. The format was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition television (HDTV). The name Blu-ray is derived from the underlying technology, which utilizes a blue-violet laser to read and write data. The name is a combination of "Blue" and optical ray "Ray".

The format was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Founders (BDF), a group of eleven leading consumer electronics companies:

• Hitachi, Ltd.
• LG Electronics Inc.
• Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.
• Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
• Pioneer Corporation
• Royal Philips Electronics
• Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
• Sharp Corporation
• Sony Corporation
• TDK Corporation
• Thomson Multimedia

To read more on this visit Blu-Ray.