Microsoft today revealed details of Visual Studio 2010 (code-named “Rosario”) and .NET framework 4.0. This next generation ‘Integrated Development Environment’ focuses on the following five points as given in the Visual Studio 2010 webpage.

• Democratizing Application Lifecycle Management
• Enabling emerging trends
• Inspiring developer delight
• Riding the next generation platform wave
• Breakthrough Departmental Applications

In related news, Scott Guthrie yesterday announced on his blog that from now on  jQuery will be distributed with Visual Studio (including jQuery intellisense, snippets, examples, and documentation). This is a real exciting news since jQuery is a great lightweight library for Javascript, widely used by developers.

I consider Ars Technica to be among the best technology related blog (and matter of fact, according to Technorati, it is). These guys do an excellent job covering a lot of news and topics mixing their own brand of hilarious humor in it. I first stumbled on this web site while searching for a review of iPod Nano. These guys had the best review available and not only that, they took the reviewing business so seriously that they actually ran the Nano over with a VW car to stress test it! That was some review. Ever since then, it’s been exactly three years now that Ars is my most regular source for all things technology.

Here is an excellent article explaining the basics of 64 bit computing by Ars: An Introduction to 64-bit Computing and x86-64.

For all my software development days ahead, I want them to be well spent on a Macbook Pro. The main reason for me deciding to take the plunge to the Mac world is because of the following reasons:

• Having the ability to use Windows and Linux on the Mac itself without booting (virtual machines) using VMware Fusion (The joy of getting the best of both worlds).
• Rock solid UNIX platform.
• Recently I have developed a love for Ruby programming and there is no better platform to work on it than a Good-ol-Mac. (more…)

Every time scientists come up with some brilliant and pioneering concept, some stupid ignorants (read TRP seeking News Channels) come up with their own version of the story on how this is going to affect the world in all the wrong ways.

This time it is the LHC and the myths regarding the doomsday scenarios like black holes, killer strangelets, magnetic monopoles, and vacuum bubbles and how this is going to destroy Earth. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons with very high kinetic energy. Its is built to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. It is theorized (more…)

It’s been almost two months now that I am using Bluehost‘s hosting and I am really satisfied by the services they offer. One of these is the SSL service for the mail accounts they give along with the hosting services. For those of you who don’t know what SSL is, you can read about it here.

After I created a mail account using my domain name, the first thing I did was to configure it using Outlook 2007. I properly configured my mail account to use SSL using the following settings.

• Account Type: IMAP
• Incoming Mail Server: box***.bluehost.com (*** is the server number given by bluehost)
• Outgoing Mail Server: box***.bluehost.com
• Check for the outgoing (SMTP) server to require authentication using the same settings as incoming server. (more…)

Google yesterday launched Google Chrome browser which is based on an open source project named ‘Chromium’. It is currently in beta version, uses ‘webkit’, the same engine that runs Apple’s Safari browser, and is available for Windows XP/Vista only. Google says it is working on a Mac and Linux version as well.

To explain the features and motivations for the browser, Google sent a comic to developers around the world and also made the comic available in Google books. Going through the comic one can easily understand the vision behind Chrome and the features it brings in. I highly reccomend reading it and learn how Google envisions its browser to be a whole new operating platform.

Chrome has Google’s own Javascript engine, which provides for enhanced performance, blazing speed compared to other browsers and security. Google’s says, it built Chrome from the ground up taking into consideration applications likethe features offered by today’s webs pages. It also boasts of robust memory management, stability and security. (more…)

This List has ben updated.

Here is a list of all the applications that I use for technical as well as general purposes. When it comes to ‘getting the job done’, these applications are of great value.

• Operating System – Windows Vista Ultimate 32 bit
• Integrated Development Environment – Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Expression Web 2, Notepad++
• Languages – VB.NET, C, C++, C#, ASP.NET, HTML, Javascript
• Content Manegment System – Joomla
• FTP client – FileZilla (more…)