Oh, that's quite long since I blogged. Personal problems pulled my energy level badly and took my focus away from my regular work/life. So bad that I felt I never existed in this technology world. Everything seems to be new to me! Well, I hope it's not going to be for long! :-) Al right, enough on justifying my long pause on the blogging front. With the release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta-2, Microsoft has dropped all those Team System Dev Ed, Arch Ed, DB Ed, etc SKUs and introducing three

Yet another training kit focused on developers: Windows 7 RC Training Kit for Developers .

I most of the time forget what offline free training resources are available from Micrsoft when someone asks for them. Now, I have a place to point them to: http://weblogs.asp.net/gunnarpeipman/archive/2009/06/04/list-of-microsoft-training-kits.aspx . One stop place for available learning kits. In case you aren't aware of MS training kits, they are learning materials (including video, slide deck, lab sessions ,etc) for technologies/platforms Microsoft releases every now and then. They also get

Microsoft has a WPF version of the DataGrid control outside its standard .NET Framework release 3.0+. This off-branch data grid is part of the WPF Toolkit maintained/released at CodePlex . However, a better one (in terms of features/ease of use, so far I have seen) is the Xceed XPF DataGrid Express Edition which has been around for quite sometime. It's a free control (reg-ware) - but won't be so after few weeks. If you want to explore its features, just take a look at their online demo (available

To be honest, when I came across this news bit few days ago, I thought it was a 4/1 prank sort of thing and never got the instinct to check it. When I saw the same news again, I decided to verify it thinking if Microsoft too could do such things. Wow! Yes, it's true!!! SPD 2007 is completely free (no trial version) from April 2, 2009. Read the official news and download SPD 2007 (after Passport registration) at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA103607611033.aspx . The official

In Part 1 , I discussed what the data: URI scheme is all about, its various usage scenarios and available browser support. Let's see few examples in this post. Just copy and paste the following HTML code into a HTML file and open it any of Firefox, Safari, IE 8 , Google Chrome or Opera. Since today's browsers are very forgiving, this bare HTML tag should work without any fuss! < img src ='data:image/jpg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEAYABgAAD/4QByRXhpZgAASUkqAAgAAAAFABoBBQABAAAASgAAABsBBQABAAAAUgAAACgBAwABAAAAAgAAADEBAgAQ

Almost no one doubts it, but still how powerful it is? Just go to http://www.chromeexperiments.com and see it for yourself! These awesome visuals use only JS and JS-based frameworks (such as Prototype & JQuery); no Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight! Not just that, these demos could also be stress testers for your browser's JavaScript engine. "Google Gravity", "Browser Ball" & "Ball Pool" are my favorites! There are other fun stuffs too. Another (game)

After other Microsoft developer training kits, now is a new one: ASP.NET MVC Training Kit . Get it (~12 MB)!

One of the new features introduced in IE8 is support for the data: protocol. Though IE8's support this protocol is a welcome one, it is very limited in terms of features and usage compared to other browsers that have been supporting this protocol for quite a long some time. The data: URI scheme (or protocol, to use a familiar term) has been around for more than a decade but it was hardly used due to inconsistent browser support. Some web browsers have been supporting this protocol right from

The final version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 has been released at last. I am not a big fan of alpha & CTP releases and never bother to install them and play around and read up stuff others have written about such releases - just to catch up with what is "in" and "out". However, I do play around with beta and RC versions only to some extent and did so on IE8 beta-2 and RC-1. The overall impression from these two was, yes, there are new features, more standards-based,