If you have MSDN Subscription, you can download VS 2010 RC now.

Notes

1. Important to note is that VS RC will not support Silverlight 4 Beta so if you are working on Silverlight 4 development then you should keep VS 2010 Beta only.

2. I’m not able to install it in my office machine. The installation dialog will be disappeared without any message or error after clicking “Install” button. I got this message “[02/09/10,15:45:44] vs70uimgr: [2] UI Thread exiting with error code: -2147172341.” in dd_error_vs_vstscore_100.txt log file. I don’t have any solution for that now. I will update you guys once I found something on this issue.

Did you know about that?? I just read about this from MSDN Flash “MSDN Flash – Spotlight on Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” and Visual Studio Team System” . I think it’s pretty interesting.. You should not miss that chance.. Good luck to you all!!

Widen your horizons with MSDN Flash for a chance to Win!

When you subscribe and/or customize your free MSDN Flash newsletter before May 31st, you’ll be automatically entered for a chance to win a grand prize trip to New Zealand. This trip includes round-trip airfare for two, 10-day 9-night stay at a luxury hotel, and a Lord of the Rings movie location tour. Plus, 150 second prize winners will be drawn and awarded a copy of the newly released Windows Vista Business.

Opps: BTW, I found some other interesting links in that flash.. plz check-out the following links.

Free Microsoft E-Learning courses (Please check “Microsoft E-Learning” section and find the instruction for how to activate free e-learning course. )

• Course 5230 – Developing Enhanced Web Experience with Microsoft ASP.NET for AJAX
• Course 2915 – Working With ADO.NET 2.0 Within Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0
• Course 2913: Creating Your First Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Web Application

CLR INSIDE OUT – New Library Classes in “Orcas”

Thanks. Hopefully, you may find it useful..

I was trying to compile a new build of our project today morning. We used to give the build no of our project’s assembly in YYMMDD format. (Build No “70112″ for 12th January,2007). So, I changed the version no of assembly to “2.2.70112.2″ [<major version>.<minor version>.<build number>.<revision>] (More Info) before compiling the project.

When I tried to compile, I got the following error.

Error emitting ‘System.Reflection.AssemblyVersionAttribute’ attribute — ‘The version specified ’2.2.70112.2′ is invalid’

I was so surprised about it. I thought, we can give any number as we like for the version of our assemblies. Then, I googled it and I came to know that there are a lot of people who are facing the same problem. and I also found the reason why this error occur and how we should fix this problem.

Why this problem?

This article said,

Binary version number for the file. The version consists of two 32-bit integers, defined by four 16-bit integers. For example, “FILEVERSION 3,10,0,61″ is translated into two doublewords: 0x0003000a and 0x0000003d, in that order. Therefore, if version is defined by the DWORD values dw1 and dw2, they need to appear in the FILEVERSION statement as follows: HIWORD(dw1), LOWORD(dw1), HIWORD(dw2), LOWORD(dw2).

Solution

This article “Fixing invalid version number problems with the AssemblyInfoTask” said,

The arrival of 2007 bought a flurry of e-mails to the MSBuild team from people having trouble with the AssemblyInfoTask. The symptom is simple to describe – the builds start to fail with the following error:

Error emitting ‘System.Reflection.AssemblyVersionAttribute’ attribute — ‘The version specified ’1.0.70102.1′ is invalid

The fix to get builds going again is to change the date format used to generate the build number to something other than the default “yyMMdd”. The date formats are in Microsoft.VersionNumber.target, located in %program files%\MSBuild\Microsoft\AssemblyInfoTask, and there are two of them (one for file version and one for assembly version). You can use any format you want. Within Visual Studio we’re now using 01MMdd.

Note that you may have to go in and hand-edit your assemblyinfo.* files to change their version number back to a default starting point of 1.0.0.0 to get your builds going again.

However, I don’t think it’s a solution since we are not able to use the way that we already used to it.
So, Be careful when you are assigning the version of your build. “[assembly: AssemblyVersion("65534.65534.65534.65534")]” is maximum.

References ~
AssemblyFileVersions: 2.0.0.071005 is bad, but 2.0.0.061005 is good
Why are build numbers limited to 65535?
Fixing invalid version number problems with the AssemblyInfoTask

Note: Thanks to Tyne for forwarding this mail.

Website: http://www.indialand.net/
Gallery: http://www.indialand.net/gallery.htm

UPDATE : The title of this post has been updated from “Proposed Microsoft Office @ Bangalorel” to “Cheenai Tech Park“. (Thanks to SLN who give me the right name of those buildings.). Actually, I received those photos from one of my friend who is working in India. I like those photos so much so that I posted in my blog with the title as mention in that email that I received. Sorry.

~ Michael Sync

Microsoft is offering such a great service called Microsoft Office Live Basic for everyone who love to have owned website.

You will be getting the following cool features with free of charges ~

1. Free Domain Name : It’s NOT sub domains.. You can register a unique and personalized domain name (eg: michaelsync.net, yourname.org, yourcompanyname.com and so on.).
2. 500MB Free spaces
3. 25 Email accounts
4. Advertising
5. Easy-to-use web design tools

And a few more: Here is the link.

The following steps are required to register.

1. Register a new domain name
2. Create your Windows Live ID
3. Type your contact information
4. Enter payment information *** :(
5. Business information
6. Disclosure
7. Complete your sign up

It’s just 7 steps to register so that it won’t be very difficult for everybody.

What do you think? Cool? :)

Did u know that?

I came to know a web site called MSFirefox today.

I’m wondering if Microsoft really made that product and this website because there are a lot of things which are very very strange to me.

1. Smiling Bill Gates Photo at the left banner.

2. The one they are giving as download is IE7-WindowsXP-x86-enu.exe

This is the installer for Internet Explorer 7.

3. It’s not FREE

30$?

4. The definition of RSS in Full Features Page or this page.

RSS means … Arh! .. Better go and check it out.

If you wanna read more, you may chk their support page.

5. Strange Photo in 4th Feature “Fast Fun” which is mentioned in Home Page.

That girl from this photo looks very like one of the porn stars from Japan. (but not sure.)

Yeah. Maybe there are some more but let me stop here.

I just assume that this website might be created by someone who hate Microsoft. Let me know if you guys have any idea about this site.

Opps! Almost forget.. Here is a movie from their site..

Microsoft is offering privacy guidelines for Developers. This document is a public version of Microsoft’s interenal private guidelines. It can be downloaded from the link below and there are 49 pages included in that document. (Ya. a lit bit long doc.)  Im still reading this document and I will share some notes from that doc after I have read.

Download Link: Privacy Guidelines for Developing Software Products and Services

Here is one link for those who are looking for a place at Microsoft.

International Recruiting – Where and when we’ll be near you!
http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2006/08/25/724710.aspx

Note: Thanks to Aliabdin for this link. He is a blogger from Microsoft and he used to post a lot of useful informations about Microsoft in his blog.

Note: All Credits go to Gopinath(gopinathnet AT gmail.com).

http://www.syncfusion.com/faq/aspnet/default.aspx
http://www.aspnetfaq.com/
http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=4081&lngWId=10

http://blogs.crsw.com/mark/articles/254.aspx
http://blog.daveranck.com/archive/2005/01/20/355.aspx

http://www.techinterviews.com/?p=176

http://www.techinterviews.com/?p=193

Microsoft Interview Questions

The following are actual questions from actual interviews conducted by Microsoft employees on the main campus. Microsoft Consultants are sometimes allowed to have a life, so questions asked of them during interviews don't really count and aren't listed.The questions tend to follow some basic themes:

• Riddles
• Algorithms
• Applications
• Thinkers

Riddles

• Why is a manhole cover round?
• How many cars are there in the USA? (A popular variant is "How many gas stations are there in the USA?")
• How many manhole covers are there in the USA?
• You've got someone working for you for seven days and a gold bar to pay them. The gold bar is segmented into seven connected pieces. You must give them a piece of gold at the end of every day. If you are only allowed to make two breaks in the gold bar, how do you pay your worker?
• One train leaves Los Angeles at 15mph heading for New York. Another train leaves from New York at 20mph heading for Los Angeles on the same track. If a bird, flying at 25mph, leaves from Los Angeles at the same time as the train and flies back and forth between the two trains until they collide, how far will the bird have traveled?
• Imagine a disk spinning like a record player turn table. Half of the disk is black and the other is white. Assume you have an unlimited number of color sensors. How many sensors would you have to place around the disk to determine the direction the disk is spinning? Where would they be placed?
• Imagine an analog clock set to 12 o'clock. Note that the hour and minute hands overlap. How many times each day do both the hour and minute hands overlap? How would you determine the exact times of the day that this occurs?
• You have two jars, 50 red marbles and 50 blue marbles. A jar will be picked at random, and then a marble will be picked from the jar. Placing all of the marbles in the jars, how can you maximize the chances of a red marble being picked? What are the exact odds of getting a red marble using your scheme?
• Pairs of primes separated by a single number are called prime pairs. Examples are 17 and 19. Prove that the number between a prime pair is always divisible by 6 (assuming both numbers in the pair are greater than 6). Now prove that there are no 'prime triples.'
• There is a room with a door (closed) and three light bulbs. Outside the room there are three switches, connected to the bulbs. You may manipulate the switches as you wish, but once you open the door you can't change them. Identify each switch with its bulb.
• Suppose you had 8 billiard balls, and one of them was slightly heavier, but the only way to tell was by putting it on a scale against another. What's the fewest number of times you'd have to use the scale to find the heavier ball?
• Imagine you are standing in front of a mirror, facing it. Raise your left hand. Raise your right hand. Look at your reflection. When you raise your left hand your reflection raises what appears to be his right hand. But when you tilt your head up, your reflection does too, and does not appear to tilt his/her head down. Why is it that the mirror appears to reverse left and right, but not up and down?
• You have 4 jars of pills. Each pill is a certain weight, except for contaminated pills contained in one jar, where each pill is weight + 1. How could you tell which jar had the contaminated pills in just one measurement?
• The SF Chronicle has a word game where all the letters are scrambled up and you have to figure out what the word is. Imagine that a scrambled word is 5 characters long:
  1. How many possible solutions are there?
  2. What if we know which 5 letters are being used?
  3. Develop an algorithm to solve the word.
• There are 4 women who want to cross a bridge. They all begin on the same side. You have 17 minutes to get all of them across to the other side. It is night. There is one flashlight. A maximum of two people can cross at one time. Any party who crosses, either 1 or 2 people, must have the flashlight with them. The flashlight must be walked back and forth, it cannot be thrown, etc. Each woman walks at a different speed. A pair must walk together at the rate of the slower woman's pace.Woman 1: 1 minute to cross
  Woman 2: 2 minutes to cross
  Woman 3: 5 minutes to cross
  Woman 4: 10 minutes to cross
  For example if Woman 1 and Woman 4 walk across first, 10 minutes have elapsed when they get to the other side of the bridge. If Woman 4 then returns with the flashlight, a total of 20 minutes have passed and you have failed the mission. What is the order required to get all women across in 17 minutes? Now, what's the other way?
• If you had an infinite supply of water and a 5 quart and 3 quart pail, how would you measure exactly 4 quarts?
• You have a bucket of jelly beans. Some are red, some are blue, and some green. With your eyes closed, pick out 2 of a like color. How many do you have to grab to be sure you have 2 of the same?
• If you have two buckets, one with red paint and the other with blue paint, and you take one cup from the blue bucket and poor it into the red bucket. Then you take one cup from the red bucket and poor it into the blue bucket. Which bucket has the highest ratio between red and blue? Prove it mathematically.

Algorithms

• What's the difference between a linked list and an array?
• Implement a linked list. Why did you pick the method you did?
• Implement an algorithm to sort a linked list. Why did you pick the method you did? Now do it in O(n) time.
• Describe advantages and disadvantages of the various stock sorting algorithms.
• Implement an algorithm to reverse a linked list. Now do it without recursion.
• Implement an algorithm to insert a node into a circular linked list without traversing it.
• Implement an algorithm to sort an array. Why did you pick the method you did?
• Implement an algorithm to do wild card string matching.
• Implement strstr() (or some other string library function).
• Reverse a string. Optimize for speed. Optimize for space.
• Reverse the words in a sentence, i.e. "My name is Chris" becomes "Chris is name My." Optimize for speed. Optimize for space.
• Find a substring. Optimize for speed. Optimize for space.
• Compare two strings using O(n) time with constant space.
• Suppose you have an array of 1001 integers. The integers are in random order, but you know each of the integers is between 1 and 1000 (inclusive). In addition, each number appears only once in the array, except for one number, which occurs twice. Assume that you can access each element of the array only once. Describe an algorithm to find the repeated number. If you used auxiliary storage in your algorithm, can you find an algorithm that does not require it?
• Count the number of set bits in a number. Now optimize for speed. Now optimize for size.
• Multiple by 8 without using multiplication or addition. Now do the same with 7.
• Add numbers in base n (not any of the popular ones like 10, 16, 8 or 2 — I hear that Charles Simonyi, the inventor of Hungarian Notation, favors -2 when asking this question).
• Write routines to read and write a bounded buffer.
• Write routines to manage a heap using an existing array.
• Implement an algorithm to take an array and return one with only unique elements in it.
• Implement an algorithm that takes two strings as input, and returns the intersection of the two, with each letter represented at most once. Now speed it up. Now test it.
• Implement an algorithm to print out all files below a given root node.
• Given that you are receiving samples from an instrument at a constant rate, and you have constant storage space, how would you design a storage algorithm that would allow me to get a representative readout of data, no matter when I looked at it? In other words, representative of the behavior of the system to date.
• How would you find a cycle in a linked list?
• Give me an algorithm to shuffle a deck of cards, given that the cards are stored in an array of ints.
• The following asm block performs a common math function, what is it?
  cwd xor ax, dx
  sub ax, dx
• Imagine this scenario:
  I/O completion ports are communictaions ports which take handles to files, sockets, or any other I/O. When a Read or Write is submitted to them, they cache the data (if necessary), and attempt to take the request to completion. Upon error or completion, they call a user-supplied function to let the users application know that that particular request has completed. They work asynchronously, and can process an unlimited number of simultaneous requests.
  Design the implementation and thread models for I/O completion ports. Remember to take into account multi-processor machines.
• Write a function that takes in a string parameter and checks to see whether or not it is an integer, and if it is then return the integer value.
• Write a function to print all of the permutations of a string.
• Implement malloc.
• Write a function to print the Fibonacci numbers.
• Write a function to copy two strings, A and B. The last few bytes of string A overlap the first few bytes of string B.
• How would you write qsort?
• How would you print out the data in a binary tree, level by level, starting at the top?

Applications

• How can computer technology be integrated in an elevator system for a hundred story office building? How do you optimize for availability? How would variation of traffic over a typical work week or floor or time of day affect this?
• How would you implement copy-protection on a control which can be embedded in a document and duplicated readily via the Internet?
• Define a user interface for indenting selected text in a Word document. Consider selections ranging from a single sentence up through selections of several pages. Consider selections not currently visible or only partially visible. What are the states of the new UI controls? How will the user know what the controls are for and when to use them?
• How would you redesign an ATM?
• Suppose we wanted to run a microwave oven from the computer. What kind of software would you write to do this?
• What is the difference between an Ethernet Address and an IP address?
• How would you design a coffee-machine for an automobile.
• If you could add any feature to Microsoft Word, what would it be?
• How would you go about building a keyboard for 1-handed users?
• How would you build an alarm clock for deaf people?

Thinkers

• How are M&Ms made?
• If you had a clock with lots of moving mechanical parts, you took it apart piece by piece without keeping track of the method of how it was disassembled, then you put it back together and discovered that 3 important parts were not included; how would you go about reassembling the clock?
• If you had to learn a new computer language, how would you go about doing it?
• You have been assigned to design Bill Gates bathroom. Naturally, cost is not a consideration. You may not speak to Bill.
• What was the hardest question asked of you so far today?
• If MS told you we were willing to invest $5 million in a start up of your choice, what business would you start? Why?
• If you could gather all of the computer manufacturers in the world together into one room and then tell them one thing that they would be compelled to do, what would it be?
• Explain a scenario for testing a salt shaker.
• If you are going to receive an award in 5 years, what is it for and who is the audience?
• How would you explain how to use Microsoft Excel to your grandma?
• Why is it that when you turn on the hot water in any hotel, for example, the hot water comes pouring out almost instantaneously?
• Why do you want to work at Microsoft?
• Suppose you go home, enter your house/apartment, hit the light switch, and nothing happens – no light floods the room. What exactly, in order, are the steps you would take in determining what the problem was?
• Interviewer hands you a black pen and says nothing but "This pen is red."

Honestly Speaking!

This is the copy of http://www.sellsbrothers.com/fun/msiview/default.aspx?content=question.htm

Thanks.