I'm on Facebook..................

From what I have experienced so far, I believe Facebook is a better social networking website than hi5. It's kind of complecated to start with, but once you settle in, it's so much fun. It offers a varaity of applications to tell the world who you really are..

visit me on Facebook @ http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=729407971

I couldn't figure out a way to get direct access to Facebook profiles like in hi5. So the logic is simple. Members only.... Infact it should be friends only in my case (i.e. you have to be my friend to access my profile.) So send in a friendship request first & it'll be all fun afterwards.

Achieving Interoperability between VB.NET & MATLAB

‘MATLAB’…. Might sound bit strange to most of you, but its logic is no strange to any other popular programming language. MATLAB is somewhat a high level language written in Java & widely used to write scientific applications. Me & my team used this interesting language to develop an iris based human recognition system for our final year research project of SLIIT.
Halfway through we faced a number of issues when using MATLAB at the frontend due to its lack of support for GUI. So we opted to use VB.NET at the frontend & use MATLAB to develop the backend application. Each module was implemented as a function and called by the VB app. as follows. I believe this is the easiest method to build a GUI based MATLAB system as VB is extremely high level & doesn’t even refer to a single additional namespace to call functions implemented at the backend.

Dim MatLab As Object
MatLab = CreateObject("Matlab.Application") // the MATLAB object
result = MatLab.Execute("cd 'C:\ISSS NN'") // path where file is located
result = MatLab.Execute("match") //execute the file

Curtains rise on the final release of VS 2008

Microsoft released the long awaited VS2008 Final set of editions last Monday(19th) and is up for grabs for the MSDN subscribers. Framework 3.5 was also released simultaneously with VS2008.
As I calculated, it would probably take 17 to 18 hours to download the 3.9 GB image file with my DSL connection. But decided against it as I’m continuously running a couple of Java Projects these days which I think need a hard disk size RAM to run smoothly.
Since it’s a 90-day trail edition, the indecision is whether to go for it or use express editions & try out the new technologies until the professional edition is released. I can hardly wait to explore LINQ with C# 3.0 .
Anyway, one way or the other I’m gonna say goodbye to NetBeans soon and get on with the new VS.

The power of LINQ

LINQ has become bit of a buzz word among C# & VB.NET developers around the world with the pre-release of VS2008. So I too couldn't resist going after it to figure out how it's going to revolutionize C# 3.0 & VB 9.

LINQ stands for Language Integrated QUery and fundamentally is about integrating query operations into the .NET platform in a comprehensive and open manner. It's also about providing a unified way to query across any kind of data, despite of the data sources being relational, objects or XML.

LINQ has three major components:

• LINQ to Objects
• LINQ to ADO.NET, which includes LINQ to DataSet (originally called LINQ over DataSet), LINQ to Entities & LINQ to SQL (originally called DLinq)
• LINQ to XML (originally called XLinq)
  

LINQ to Objects deals with in-memory data. Any class that implements the IEnumerable interface (in the System.Collections.Generic namespace) can be queried with LINQ’s standard query operators (SQO), which are implemented as methods in class Sequence in the System.Query namespace.

LINQ to ADO.NET deals with data from external sources, basically anything ADO.NET can connect to Any class that implements IEnumerable or IQueryable (in the System.Query namespace) can be queried with LINQ’s standard query operators (SQO), which are implemented as methods in class Sequence in the System.Query namespace.

LINQ to XML is a comprehensive API for in-memory XML programming. Like the rest of LINQ, it includes SQO, and it can also be used in concert with LINQ to ADO.NET, but its primary purpose is to unify and simplify the kinds of things that disparate XML tools, like XQuery, XPath, and XSLT, are typically used to do.

Silverlight. Microsoft's newest web technology

Silverlight ( code-named Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere or WPF/E) is a cross-platform, cross-browser web client runtime, designed to bring the Windows Presentation Foundation experience to the Web. Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system, similar to WPF and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime. It is being designed to work in concert with XAML and is scriptable with JavaScript. XAML(Extensible Application Markup Language) can be used for marking up the vector graphics and animations.

Silverlight supports playback of WMV, WMA and MP3 media content across all supported browsers and has no dependencies on other products such as Windows Media Player for video playback or the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 for XAML parsing.
The architecture that supports the Silverlight application is shown below. The main programming interface is the JavaScript DOM API. This allows you to respond to events raised within the Silverlight XAML (such as when content has finished loading or when an animation is complete). You can also call methods to manipulate the presentation (such as starting an animation or pausing video playback). Underneath this is the XAML parsing engine. The parser creates the in-memory XAML DOM for use by the presentation core, which handles the rendering of the graphics and animations defined by the XAML.
Silverlight aims to compete with Adobe Flash and the presentation components of Ajax. It also competes with Sun Microsystems' JavaFX, which was launched a few days after Silverlight.

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