Samant's blog

Copying Your Microsoft SQL Server Database to a New Machine

2012-06-22T02:24:00Z

At times we work in team, and need to share databases made by our friends so that we could also work on the same database from our own machine. The easiest way to do this is to create a separate local copy of the database in the new machine. Let’s see how to do this.

By default, your database will be created in a location as shown in the address bar of the figure below.

The above figure shows the data files for a database named 'airline'. The 'airline' file above has an extension of '.mdf'. It stores the actual data of the 'airline' database. The 'airline_log' is a file type with an extension of '.ldf'. It contains database logs of the 'airline' database. You need both of these files to make your database functional.

Try copying both of these files to a different location. You will be prompted with the following prompt. Click Continue.

Even if you provide the admin privilege, you will not be able to copy the files. Although your Management Studio is off, you will be prompted with the following error message, as SQL Server is using these files.

One way to solve this issue is by taking your database offline.

Go to SQL Server Management Studio. In object explorer, right click your database, go to tasks > take offline.

When your database will be offline, you will be given the following success message.

Now, your object explorer in management studio will show your database is offline.

Now, you will be able to copy your database files (the .mdf and .ldf files) to another location. You can freely take these files to any other computers and others will be able to use a copy of your database in their own machine..

But if you try to run query on your database now, it will throw an error as your database is in offline state. So, let's first bring it online.

Right Click the database, tasks > bring online to bring it back online.

After you get the success message below, you will again be able to query your database.

In my next post, I’ll be mentioning about how to use this database in a new machine.

Startups in Nepal – Why and How

2012-03-06T03:40:00Z

The Tragedy of a Career in Information Technology (IT) in Nepal

IT is a growing sector in Nepal, probably one of the most speeding up careers; but all the emerging job opportunities are not sufficient to provide employment to the large number of students who are graduating every year in the IT sector. Even in the upcoming few years, we can’t hope for a drastic change. This imposes a serious challenge to you - the IT students, to start thinking about your future by yourself.

Are you academically so good that you can stand out of others and get settled into a Government Job or a Telecom?
Are you technically so very resourceful that you are sure you can make your place in one of the software companies?
Will you get a job of a system engineer in the IT Department of any corporate?
Will you start as an instructor instead?
Or are you leaving it up to going abroad and let it decide where you are going to land?

We can make a rough estimate that all total there are not more than 300 job vacancies in the IT sector of Nepal every year, and even most of them are replacement job vacancies. Even if you are so good and you get a job, how much is the chance that you landed into the job that you dreamt of? Are you getting enough salary to survive in this expensive environment? Well, a serious question to seek an answer to, and you are the one who needs to find the answer for yourself.

Every Cloud has a Silver Lining : IT Does have One Too

Microsoft Innovation Centre, Nepal presented a documentary – CTRL+ALT+COMPETE, a documentary about new struggling IT Startups at US so that we could learn a possible solution to the problem we talked about. It says that the beauty of IT lies in the fact that all we need today for success, is a spark of an idea, and the strength to bring that idea to life. In the IT sector, we can startup a new company with a minimum of investment. Website hosting is cheap, and with it, we can take our idea to a global level. And if you are looking for the next big thing like Facebook, you would need to start with a small storage space, but you will never know when you have to expand it, needing a whole Data Centre and High Performance Servers. Well, don’t worry, cloud computing is there as a solution for you – giving exactly the cost and the level of flexibility you desire.

Before we ‘START’, we ‘COMPLAIN’..

Usually IT students complain. “I have a enthusiasm to do something, but don’t have an idea worth giving for.” Hey, is it really so easy to stand out of hundreds and thousands of other people just like you? Here is a list of what you’d need:

You need to understand the unspoken and unrealized needs of people.
You need to find an idea that can fulfill these needs.
You need to be Detective Sherlock Holmes, bringing all the haziest of clues together, and finding answers to all the fingers that can be pointed out against your idea.
You need to build up skills to bring your imagination to the perfect shape of technical reality.
And you need to be a leader, with the magical convincing capacity to show your potential investors and your targeted groups the same dream that you dreamt and help them envision your solution the same way you’ve designed.

You should have already started thinking that you hardly have any of these good skills. Right?? Well, it’s because you haven’t started yet. Look at the brightest student of your class and try to compare him with yourself in this. He might be good in his academics. He may have some good technical skills. But does he have that world changing idea? Perhaps not. He has still not completed the very first step to Entrepreneurship. So, you are not very far behind after all. Hey, it’s still not too late, OK! Start today, start now !!

A Wrong Decision..

We bring up some ideas which really drive us passionate and determine to start working on it. We start from scratch, and on the way, we need to make a lot of choices. Mistakes do happen, as we are very young in this business. We make wrong team mates, we set wrong goals, we get over-ambitious, we miss to realize what the audience really want. And we fail. It requires that perfect combination of your vision, team, discipline, management and the public acceptance for your idea to succeed, and it’s definitely very hard. Statistics says it, more than 90% of the startups have failed within 3 years.

So, why take risk? Because your passion is worth living for, worth striving for, worth taking a risk for. There would be ups and downs. There would be times when you feel you let your team down, and it’s all your fault. In such cases, take a short break. Share yourself, have someone to comfort you. Forget everything for sometime and start up again. Correct the course that you had misjudged. Bring it all together. After all, it’s not the path that matters; it’s the finishing line that does – your goal. Make sure you grab it no matter what it takes.

And when our Hard Work Starts Paying..

Let’s say that your idea is slowly becoming popular. It’s starting to generate some revenue and investors are starting to get interested. So, should we sell the concept if someone wants to own it? Or should we grow on our own? Yahoo offered to purchase Facebook for 1 billion dollars. Zukerberg denied. Now his business is more than 6 billion. A few startups sold their concepts to corporate giants like Microsoft and Oracle. Their purity of idea was smashed. They were being bought merely because these ideas were a potential threat to these bigger companies. So, after the copyright was owned, the emerging solutions were brutally killed. So, at times, you need to be more cautious. You need to give a bit more effort to try and peek what could be beyond the horizon. Sometimes, we need to choose to strive a little longer. So, discuss with others too, take suggestions. Participate in Business Incubation Programs, events about Startup Companies if any is happening near you. Gain knowledge from the experienced ones. But be sure that at last, you should be the one who makes decisions. Don’t be scared to take the right decision, and don’t be too late in taking decisions.

Final Words..

The world of Information Technology is the most challenging sector of all. So, if you are a student of IT and you think academics is your problem, well start thinking again. You will realize very soon that more problems are going to come to you soon. So, start becoming more futuristic, more innovative. Start learning the reality of tomorrow and prepare yourself for it. Don’t wait to start in your final years, start in the first year of your academics. The final year is when you give it a finishing touch. You are an IT Rock Star. You should be the one solving others’ problems, not the one stuck up in yours. Happy Innovation !

Developer's Professional Practices.. A tour with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server

2011-06-21T05:45:19Z

- Archana Maharjan, Kushal Gautam and Samant Manandhar (me)

We are coming back to Tech Mela 2, and this time it’s getting even more exciting than before. We are always excited about programming languages, database engines and all. But we usually are so busy learning all those that we forget we need proper management of our project too. So, this time our effort will be in sharing some basics of professional practices of application development.

We won’t be covering the application development patterns here. It would be a lot of theory, takes a lot of time and usually they are covered in our academics too. We would be covering the practical parts, on how to divide works into modules (actually separate assemblies), how to keep each module independent of another, working collaboratively as a team, maintaining source code versioning and if time permits, application testing too.

There would be presentations and demos in this. The demo would be of making the simplest possible but complete application with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server, and would be focused on giving a big picture, rather than on the minor details so that our presentation would be suitable for all.

Our targetted audience would be the ones interested in programming, and who have learnt to play with databases.

It would be me (MSP 2010), Archana Maharjan (MSP 2009) and Kushal Gautam (MSP 2009) presenting on this topic. Please check http://nepal.micnetwork.org/TechMela2011/CommunityChautari.aspx for when our presentation would be scheduled. The Event managers will very soon set our event to the site (probably it would have been set by the time you read this). So, see you at Tech Mela !!

Locus 2010 and MSPs

2011-05-03T16:20:21Z

The closing ceremony of the 7^th Locus National Technological Festival took place recently and it was once again the turn of MSPs to shine. Not just in participation, MSPs were all over grabbing the winning shields too.

Locus, so called the National Technological Festival is a nationwide technological mega-event initiated by the students of IOE, Pulchowk Campus in Nepal. Calling out the best students throughout the country, Locus organizes Software Competition, Hardware Competition, Electrical Events, Paper Presentation, Gaming Contest, Coding Contest and Technical Quiz Contest every year since 2003. The event serves as a wonder for the young school students who come and gather inspiration to guide their future. For the companies, it is the place where they can look for the upcoming genius. For the participants, it is where their careers find new paths and for the rest, to know how Nepal is moving forward in technology. So, for the thousands of people who come to become a part of the event, there is definitely something for everyone.

This year, MSPs had a real active participation in this national event. We had a whole day of technical sessions driven by MSPs. The sessions started with Gulshon and Sabina (MSP 2010s) presenting on Digital Photography, talking about Windows Live PhotoGallery, Photosynth and DeepZoom composer. Deepak and Rajan (MSP 2011) talked on Blogging, covering everything from Windows Live Writer to v-blogs with Camtasia Studio. Praful (MSP 2011) showed the magic of application prototyping with SketchFlow and finally, it was our Community Lead Pradeep Sir presenting on our Community portals MSDNNepal.net and TechnetNepal.net and its value to the learners in the developer and IT-Professional’s field. And not to forget, Madhusudan(MSP2011), Dikshya(MSP2011) and Amrita(MSP2010) bringing all ends together to make this session happen, and the whole MSP2011 team volunteering to make sure the presentations drove smooth and successful.

MSPs were not behind in competitions too. Pratima(MSP2010) participated with her team in Technical Quiz Contest. Ashok(MSP 2010) presented on Software Licensing in context of Microsoft Technologies in the paper presentation. Bishruti(MSP2011) participated with her team in Software Competition with her wonderful multiplayer game. Ashok(MSP 2009) with his project Cyber Management Application – a server-client based application built courageously in C. Mahesh(MSP2011) was probably the youngest and the only ‘one man team’ competing in the software competition with his project Voice Engine – operating Fans, TV and everything with his voice commands – a vista to the future world of comfort. Moreover, there was my team too. Me-Samant(MSP 2010), Archana(MSP2009) and Kushal(MSP2009) with our Multipoint Education Package ‘Rainbow’ – a collaborative learning package of Primary Level English with basic alphabets writing demos, alphabets-words-picture mapped learning, multipoint attendance taking, basic calculator, and a package of creative games to help make learning creative and quick. An application targeted not just to the kids but also to the grown-ups who had missed schooling, and for the differently able people, who cannot catch up with normal children.

With this exciting number of participation from MSPs, it was even more exciting to know that most of the MSPs bagged awards in the competition too. Pratima with her team bagged First Runner Up in Technical Quiz, Mahesh and his Voice Engine won Second Runner Up in the software competition while our Multipoint Team also won the First prize in the Software Competition.

In the upcoming days, I wish this team spirit remains forever and the MSP community grows even bigger, better and brighter.

KU IT Meet, 2nd Day and My Experience

2010-09-12T01:08:00Z

KUIT Meet 2010 was happening from yesterday, 10th of September, to 12th. And I was going there today. I was supposed to present on ‘Game Development Using Expression Blend in 1 hour’. I was preparing for my presentation yesterday, and then I came to know that I would not be having a presentation. We were not having a separate room or hall for presentation (all of them were already booked), but managing to push in some of the presentations in the 3D movie hall when there would be breaks between the movies. But managing it all was a complicated job and we didn’t get to present on the 3D hall. Still, visiting KU IT was of worth because so much of technological stuffs were happening there, and I even hadn’t got chance to meet with most of the MSPs for such a long time, and this was a chance for all of us to get together. So, we planned to leave at 8:00, but I could only leave at 10:30, and I was at KUIT only at 12:15.

KUIT was happening at IT Park, Panauti and it was a wonderful place to be in. There were lots of innovative stuffs on software and hardware.. Googling Competition was also being carried and there was a huge hall on the ground floor for the gamers- the Gaming Zone. We MSPs were having our room, next to the Gaming Zone. It was a small and sweet partitioned room, with its front completely transparent so that everyone could see what was happening inside. (The photograph at the left, day 1). When I reached there, I came to know that it had been planned to manage presentations right there in that room, with our information desk in one corner and projector and presentation stuffs set at the other. And I had to give a presentation!

I practiced out my demos and made sure it would run all perfect, ready for presentation. We would have to call up audience from outside, draw their interest and then give our presentations. There were two guys, probably of class 8, from SOS, who had been waiting eagerly to learn developing game. They scared me, because I used to give this presentation to the engineering level students, and I was not sure if they would understand what I was going to be presenting to them. Pradeep Dai (Our Community Lead) boosted up my spirit, and I decided to start up my presentation for two of them.

So, I got them seated near to me, and they were actually looking the presentation at my laptop. But the laptop was connected to the projector, the screen of which could be visible from outside through the transparent glass. Soon, a BIT first year student joined and some gamers from the gaming zone decided to sit too, as they had nothing to do waiting for their turn in the games, and this would have been the best utilization of the time that they had to kill. I was now in my full audience capacity. Everything was conceptual and moreover like general designing in Expression Blend, so even if they were from different levels of knowledge, and academic standards, they caught up pretty well. They really enjoyed the presentation and found to be of much value; and most of all, they were thrilled to get genuine Microsoft Expression Studio for free, and also the video tutorial that we provided to them, so that they would go back and try it out for themselves. I was full of bliss, when I saw the level of satisfaction in the attendees.. And that was what we were there for… Sharing what we had learnt, with fun. I think we achieved what we were there for, making our part of the contribution to the whole event, and to make sure that the visitors find the true value, for which they came along such a long way…

XNA Game Development Training

2010-06-09T12:14:00Z

When was the first time you saw a computer? Do you remember? May be you are like us, who first know computer as a gaming machine, rather than a ‘modern electronic device’; as they call it in schools. Well, we really enjoyed games since our childhood, spend best of the times with it; and today gaming has got a completely different perspective for us.

As we’re in computer engineering, we learn how to make things happen when a button is clicked, but it’s really wonderful to imagine how the same skill that we learnt make our game characters respond to our inputs. How computers understand what visual perspectives are, which we learnt with great difficulty in engineering drawing. How a single object can show varieties of behaviors, actions and emotions though it just seems to be a picture loaded into the screen. And also, how the whole game world residing inside the computer doesn’t suck up all of the computer memory and still maintain its efficiency of performance.

So, we kind of like came into XNA, the premiere game development library, and as the websites said, was the easiest of all to learn too. With the resources and materials available online, we kind of really caught up fast with XNA and then, getting an opportunity to conduct this two days’ boot camp too. It’s really going to be a huge experience for us, to share what we’ve learnt.

So, kind of like interested but don’t know if it’s going to be fruitful for you or not? Well, let us help solve some of your queries…

1) So, is XNA a programming language that I need to learn for game development?

No, we’ll be using C# as the programming language. XNA is a game development framework over .NET. In simple words, sort of like the library files that you use in C and C++.

2) What makes XNA simpler to learn?

XNA not only provides you with the classes and libraries that you can use for game development but also provides a complete game engine. So, you don’t need to lose your efforts into getting things work. Just focus on your contents that you need to add the game logic that you need to build. XNA does the rest. So, it definitely minimizes your effort requirement.

3) How are the games made in silverlight and flash different from the games made in XNA?

Well, in a nutshell, silverlight and flash eats up your processor performance to perform all of its rasterization and composition, while XNA uses your graphics hardware. So, the load over the CPU is greatly reduced which allows you to add high end graphics experiences to your games, which flash and silverlight cannot. Simply, if your contents are changing in every frames, then XNA can deliver you a much better performance. Well, I’d suggest to use flash and silverlight to make web-based games. They are really good there. ( Of course you can take your game development to 3D in silverlight as well, but it’s a 3D simulation only. )

4)Can you name some of the games developed in XNA?

Halo, Age of Empire and Flight Simulator, to name as the most famous ones.

5)So what values can we learn from the training?

Well, the foundation of 2D and 3D gaming, we’d say. It would cover stuffs like loading your contents, updating them in the time frame, drawing the updated contents into the screen, collision detection, object motion behaviors, score keeping, and audio integration. But the concepts of doing it in 2D and 3D are completely different. 2D makes your foundation and you will learn completely new values in 3D like camera angle, perspectives and much more.

Well, the game development logics and the mathematics involved is of so much value. You load your 3D models into the game, it then needs to be transformed into the game world. Then calculate how it would look from the camera perspective. You find if it lies within your field of view or not and finally adjust your aspect ratio for a perfect rendering of your 3D models into a 2D image which can be processed by the content pipeline. Of course, lots of theories to learn too, and these would be a real tribute to all the mathematicians and physicists who invented it!

Complete reference materials will be provided for the curriculum contents so that you can practice and learn after you go back home. You don’t need to panic.

It’s also important to learn what are not in the curriculum. Frame Based animation and Game Menu display are some stuffs which are not in the syllabus, but we’ll be trying our best to manage time to cover those as well. But we don’t find it possible to cover dynamic content loading using XML, networking and Artificial Intelligence in our training. But we have good examples which would be provided during the training from which you could learn it yourself too.

Well, boot camps have a benefit and a drawback. You can learn a lot of values in a short time. But as a lot has to be covered in a short time, deep dive is not possible. But the true value, to say is that you can learn many concepts and collect lots of materials which would have taken months otherwise. Keep this thing always in your mind and keep your expectations to the correct level.

6) But I haven’t learnt C#. Will I benefit from the boot camp?

Of course you will, even more than others! We will start from what C# is and what .NET framework is, before jumping into XNA. So, even if you are unaware about what C# and .NET is, and whether or not it’s the right programming language to choose for your career development, well you’ll find your answers here. Just to remind you, .NET is cross language and cross platform framework. It’s really powerful! And we have developed really awesome example to demonstrate its power to make you understand.

Chit Chat on Microsoft Innovation Centre

2010-05-22T00:13:00Z

MSP program provides us with lots of opportunities, and last week, it was a very good opportunity for six of we MSPs. We got to get face to face with Kirk Drage, Software Industry Development Manager of Microsoft Asia Pacific Regional Headquarter and got some time to exchange some of our ideas, views and thoughts. Kirk had been looking behind the software industry of Microsoft at Asia Pacific, and his know-hows about how the software world was being driven out in other countries, was of great value for us, and may be what our career interests are, and what in the field of IT excites us was a matter of interest for him.

One of the curiosities he presented to us was if we were interested to make up a career out here in Nepal or abroad. Well, the answer was unanimous from all of us. We wanted to grow in Nepal and wanted to help it grow.. Well, it might not be how our lives would turn up after a couple of years. You might not find what you need out here, and you might have to live with compromises. But for now, we still had time, we could still look for the ways and pursue not to let compromises take over what we desired. We could still explore where we and our skills would find a position somewhere in our own land, and definitely we could see the silver linings in the cloud. Actually lots of silver linings….

Microsoft Innovation Centre (MIC) is something which is the ‘next big thing’ for Nepal right now. We are very soon having an Innovation Centre out here, where students can get opportunities to grow, learn and innovate for the national market and industry through software development. We wanted to know how MICs over the Asia Pacific was going on. From Kirk, we came to know the different models on which MICs were running. It was collaborating with the Government, private organizations, the educational institutes and its most diligent students to bring about the innovation that would meet the specific need at the local level. It’s concept of strengthening the three main pillars: skills, partnership and innovation, to foster local development was really of true value.

A developing country like Nepal really needed an initiative like this to move ahead. Piracy has been curtailing all opportunities for creativity; and outsourcing, increasing the gap between the manpower and national development. This has been the main reason why the huge multinationals have not looked to establish branches out here in Nepal, and people fearing local entrepreneurship. Here are no genuine market, everything runs on piracy! Well, we have statistics of the world where countries like Vietnam and India had a significant increase in employment opportunities with even a nominal fraction of control over piracy. This could be a story of Nepal tomorrow if something can be done. I think MIC can play its part in this. It bridges the gaps between everything.

Let’s say a Company out here requires a robust information and resource management system to control and manage all of its branches spread nation wide. There are lots of readymade software available in the market, but they don’t quite match the Company’s functional architecture and policies. So, it is now looking for a rescue, but it hardly finds any local ISVs which can develop and test the software in an environment like that of its own. So, it comes to MIC. MIC collaborates with a local ISV, and also with some of the students to work in this project. The ISV gets an opportunity to work in a larger project, (bigger than its individual capacity) and realizes what it needs if it esteems to expand in near future. Students get a good opportunity to work in a real world problem, together, in a collaborative development platform. They get to get acquainted with the latest technologies and gain the most valuable experience that they need for their career pursuit. So, what happens after the project completion? The Company gets its required software solution from a local vendor, and it finds working with a local vendor to be more economical, easy to deal and reliable. Even other companies start realizing the importance and reliability of local software and local development is promoted. The vendor gains a good reputation for it, and plans to expand. It hires some of the students with whom it had worked with during the project. And the rest of the students, they realize the true value of innovation and entrepreneurship. They make up a proposal for the implementation of e-governance in Nepal and know exactly what they need to do and how they need to work out for it. And there comes the second project in MIC, with much more opportunities and much more of innovation ….. A win-win for all..

We all are really looking forward to see when this story would come true. So, the question that arose in our mind was: which stream would be the prime target of MIC in Nepal?… Education, Health, Industry, Communication….? Well, guess what, Tourism… Wow! A true tribute of technology and innovation for the beautiful Nepal! Curiosity was never ending, we wanted the talk to prolong to few more hours, but time is always the problem. We all had a program to attend at KCC. So, we had to conclude. His message to all of us was – “ Be passionate, opportunity always looks for the passion and the passionate”. Hearts full of gratitude from our side, and millions of thanks to Microsoft MDP Nepal, and everyone behind the scene for making sure MIC was coming to Nepal.

Tech Mela Conference (Delegate) Sessions

2010-04-25T21:34:00Z

The delegate sessions at Tech Mela was the most awaited and valued sessions of the event. To kick off, there was a panel discussion on "Bridging the gap between State, Academia and Industry". This session was honoured by respected personalities from various fields sharing their knowledge, and experiences about what they think about the subject matter; from their individual viewpoint and also from the perspective of the bigger world they represented. The queries overpowering from the students in that session clearly showed how badly they needed a platform where their voices could be heard. Of course, due to time constraints, the session ended with many questions yet to be put forward, but it sure did took a very good initiative. I think technical forums could be a place where answers to these queries could be discussed further.

David Lim, the Technical Audience Lead and Developer Programmer Evangelist from the Asia Pacific Region, was next with his awe inspiring presentation on what potential the students of technical stream have, what technology have to offer them and what it had expected from them. I was really impressed by the short clippings of Project Natal and Microsoft Surface that he had included in his MultiMedia Presentation. These are probably the biggest wonders today, and I got to see how the world is actually working with it. (Look at the following links on the videos to learn more about Project Natal http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/overview-of-project-natal/128sjxyoj and Microsoft Surface http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/microsoft-surface-exclusive-review/45aa99a17b7a1090f09f45aa99a17b7a1090f09f-1727461654625. ) Most of all, it shook me from inside when he said we had the ability to work for 22 hours a day, and that was possible because of Multitasking. Of course, in this world of fierce competition, that's the only way you can survive. You have to be talented, you have to be dynamic.

Then there was the SQL authority, Pinal Dave. He's the person who knows Microsoft SQL better than Microsoft itself. His blogs are very popular and his presentations highly demanded internationally. It was a true honour for us to have him present for us. Understanding the knowledge level of the students, he presented on indexing and showed how indexing played its role for the management of a database and efficeint querying. Definitely a planned database structure has flexibility, managability, efficiency and time economy as its essential give outs and his presentation on the first day, should have triggered this thought inside every programmer and database guys. On the second day, he had his presentaion on image creation on database to surprise everyone. And most of all, there stood he himlelf, as a source of inspiration for all, with his career outspeaking to pursue excellence and not success.

Many presentations followed.... There was WINDOWS 7 with its tips and tricks, EXPRESSION STUDIO as a magic box for all the designers, SHAREPOINT with its concept of centrailzed data storage and document sharing, LOCALIZATION taking the softwares and applications from universal English language down to the local language level and OFFICE 2010 with whole lot of new, exciting and amazing features.

And not to forget the DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY session. It was a triple application demo session. AUTOCOLLAGE with its ability to blend multiple pictures and tag photos automatically, DEEP ZOOM to work swiftly with ultra high resolution pictures, and PHOTOSYNTH to stitch pictures together, one completing the other to create a complete 3-D view.

Rarely such continuous technical sessions take place in our country and I doubt if all the deligates could take all that was intended to be given. Months long of traditional trainings and courses may have their own values, but these sessions have their own meaning and significance. These are the small packets of big dynamytes and only explorers can explore and understand it better. So, if you missed it this time, never mind... It's happening next year..bigger and better..

Microsoft Tech Mela

2010-04-25T20:41:00Z

Technology is something which knows nothing but advancement, likes nothing but speed. Every single day, it comes up with new surprises. As the students of technology, it's our job to keep ourselves abreast of these changes, and also to change the world with it.

Tech Mela was all about celebrating technology. It is one of the biggest event of the whole year that Microsoft Nepal and MSPs organize as their community program, and this March, it was happening for the very first time at Staff College, Jawalakhel. It promised to bring someting for everybody. For special delegates, there was conference room, where every hour, presentations on high end and deep dive technologies were going on. These delegates were the geeks who had decided to stay for the complete two days' session to know about all that Microsoft had brought. DPE lead of the Asia Pacific Region, David Lim and The SQL authority Pinnal Dave were the international presenters to grace the conference. For the rest interested in learning, there was Community Chautari where new exciting and juicy stuffs were being delivered and it was a platform for all those who wanted to share their knowledge on technology.

Microsoft Proudly announced its IT-Academy program launch at Tech Mela. Under this program, it was providing 10 engineering and IT related colleges with Microsoft Certification Course Curriculums, teaching and learning materials along with the required software for their labs to drive the certification courses at their colleges. The main idea behind the program was to give access to the highly demanded course curriculums and materials, for free, to the students to strengthen their career lines, which would not have been affordable otherwise. With these courses running parallel to their academics, students would definitely benefit, and develip their skills to meet the industry needs.

It also announced Microsoft Innovation Centre getting established very soon, where students could look forward for their internships, take part in the innovation and understand the real world challenge of developing and innovating real world technical solutions.

And never to miss the fun parts that Tech Mela brought with it. The gamers from every nooks and corners were there to compete.. The MultiPoint Challengers were there showing how they programmed multiple mices on the same computer to help bridge the world's problem of Digital Divide. And also, the top selected photographs of the Click To Win photo contest was something where every visitors' eyes would rest upon.

Tech Mela was a win win for all. For technology enthusiasts, for gamers, for competitors... and of course for the organizers.. MSPs got to showcase all that they had learnt and skills that they had developed; and Microsoft Nepal, it showcased it's unlimited potential.... Do wait for my next blog on the Main Conference Sessions at Tech Mela.

Making your drawing into MultiPoint Button

2010-01-25T10:23:00Z

During Application development, we come across situations when we have to click at different regions, and want events to respond to it. Well, with MultiPoint, it may not be that easy to do so. Let’s say I have clouds in the sky and when I click at any one of the cloud, it needs to respond to my Multipoint Mouse Click with a “Cloud Clicked” text on my textbox. Well, you might have got the idea that the easiest way to do that would be to make it into a MultiPoint Button. But if there are three clouds floating in the sky, will it be possible to make all the separate clouds into a single button? Well, just dream about it and your dream will come true. Here is how to do that.

Create a new WPF solution in Visual Studio and in it, add your MultiPoint Button to the ToolBox. Also, add required references to MultiPoint in both Xaml view and Code View. Now, open your solution from Blend (I’m using Blend 3). Here, select the Grid at the Object and Timeline Section and delete it.

Select a Canvas from your toolbox and double click it to add it to your empty Window. Adjust the size. I chose Canvas instead of Grid because Canvas allows overlapping of the objects I place in it which I need to draw my clouds.

Now, to draw a cloud, select the ellipse tool and make 3-4 circles as shown in the picture.

Take selection tool (Black arrow at the toolbox) and select all the circles. Go to Object Menu > Combine > Unite. You’ll obtain your cloud. You can also get the Combine menu by right clicking on your selection.

Now, make a new copy of it (Ctrl+C and CTRL+V). The copy will exactly overlap each other. So, drag one and place it in proper position. Select Both of it and repeat the same steps to unite it to one. You have successfully integrated two separate images into one.

Now the part of making it into MultiPoint Button. Select your cloud and right click. Click on Make into Control.

Under Controls option, select All. Find MultiPointButton. Name it CloudButton, and define it in This document and click Ok. Your MultiPointCloudButton will look something like the one below. Now, to remove the label MultiPointButton from your cloud, go to Common Properties in Properties section. And remove the “MultiPointButton” text from there.

Now, make up a TextBlock by selecting the [ T ]icon from the toolbox as shown in the picture below and name it MyTextBlock. Then select your cloud, click on MultiPointButton tab on the top and go to the lightening icon (indicating events)at the top left corner of your properties tab. Find MultiPointMouseDownEvent and type ShowText. By doing so, the MultiPointMouseDownEvent will trigger the function ShowText.

Now, hit enter and you will be presented with the code view of the Window with the ShowText event created for you.

Type:

MyTextBlock.Text=”Cloud Clicked”;

Note that MyTextBlock is the variable name that you have given to your TextBlock.

Save it and run it. Your Cloud should start doing what you told it to do.

Kick off your application development with SketchFlow

2009-12-12T08:21:00Z

It’s been time that Expression Studio 3 has hit the market and I had been reading a few articles about it. The thing which actually attracted me was SketchFlow, which came with Expression Blend 3. I had got the surface idea of what it was made for by then, but never knew its true potential until I actually went through the mini video tutorials to actually start and learn about it. It is unbelievable to learn that we could actually materialize our rough ideas, about our application development, before even starting to code.

By the way, if you have a software project to do, how do you actually start? Directly go to the codes? You should not! You first need to start up with your ideas and build a basic framework from that. Plan what kind of pages you’ll have to display, what would be the contents of each page, and how the control actually flows from one to the other. Do you use sketches on papers to do that, or some tools like Illustrator?

Well, actually they can help you make the pages, but the actual feel and flow of a ready made program, never.. Sketch Flow can be your best tool to simulate and demonstrate all your thoughts.

With SketchFlow, you can make different pages, with all types of controls you want to add, like a textbox, button, background image or so on… And these would be the rough sketches, like the ones you make with your pencil in your hand. Make a complete framework of what your application would actually look like and put the necessary links to your pages.

Also show how the transitions move in the SketchFlow Map.

Now, press F5 and your sketchflow project will actually start running in SketchFlow Player environment. Your sketches will start working like your real application. The buttons can be clicked, the textboxes, combo boxes and scroll bars, all demonstratably functional. The links can be actually clicked and you can actually move from one page to the other through these links. If you are making an application for an online shopping, you can put images of the products you want to add in it, and try the demo in which you’ll be led from the welcome page till the check out with a sample bill displayed to you. And you can say if that was the actual feel you wanted in your application.

SketchFlow is also important because it’s not just for you that you make up your ideas, it’s also for the other members and for your clients. But everyone may not have Expression Blend to go through your designs... Never mind. You can actually export your work to a .doc file so that MS Word can easily open it.

Your clients and other companions will post their feedback to your solution with actual indications at different places. Check at the next picture. In the Sketchflow Player, there is a separate Feedback Panel where you team members or clients can choose the pen and color of their choice, to mark the area of the page where they want changes, or the areas that they really admire about your page. They can write their feedbacks and export it so that you can import it in your file and view all those feedbacks to know your strengths and weaknesses. Look at the picture below. You can see the arrow and the circle mark which are the areas that are commented. And the feedback can be seen in the Feedback Panel. The blue arrow says “Why is this empty?” and the orange circle says “you’d better add an advertisement out here”. This is just like our photo tagging that we do in facebook and if you want to temporarily hide the feedbacks and the indications that has been made, you can simply turn it off. Your original SketchFlow is there. So easy...

Also, in the picture below, you can see lots of images right there and contents alongside. Yes, images and sample data (texts, numbers) can also be generated, with the declaration of proper data types in sketchflow. You can actually play with sample data, before you start with Visual Studio, Expression Web or Dreamweaver. Afterall, this is the phase where you plan everything...

At first, the Details section in the picutre below was empty. You could select any of the Terrian from the scrollable frame and its detail would then appear dynamically in the details section.

And as you would click to the checkout, it would lead you to the billing page. Check it out in the next picure. So much of user experience with such a little effort!

Well, sketchflow is what is needed to kick off making a project, because a good plan is needed to make a good project and to guarantee a better user experience. Of course, it's the designer's part to use it, but the whole team benefits; as it gives a pretty good overview of the whole project to the team so that everyone can work out effectively and efficiently. So why not move on to the next level? Want references? Here is a link to start with. I recommend you the video in this link.

http://blogs.msdn.com/canux/archive/2009/06/28/mini-tutorial-blend-3-sketchflow-part-i.aspx

Do follow up the other videos as well...