ZedGraph : A Useful Graphing Control

In one of my recent projects, an aspx page had to have a graph which would indicate the performance of the system being monitored. This had to be developed quickly, so I was looking for a free graph control which I could use. And I came across ZedGraph, the open source graph control developed for .NET. There were other alternatives as well, but the good thing about Zedgraph was the documentation and examples given. With these I was able to develop what seemed like the most complicated piece of software in a matter of hours.

 

Zedgraph is a really flexible graphing control with lot of options. You can have line graphs, bar graphs, or any other type of graph that you may think of, multiple Y axes, multiple curves, different types of X axes from time based scaling to logarithmic scaling. For a free control it really provides a lot of features that will fulfill all your essential requirements.

So, if you are searching for a Free Graph control, I suggest you give Zedgraph a try.

WANNABEs

After a very long time, I was catching up with the news and happenings of the technology world thanks to the three day Independence Day weekend. I read this post on WATBLOG about Live Search and its new features. It is titled "Microsoft Live Search - will it steal the show?". I just wanted to discuss whatever has been written.

I always knew LIVE Search’s algorithm was as good as the other alternatives (Read:Google) - I had done enough trail-n-error to prove this - but users have been slow in adopting.

The author says that LIVE's search algorithm was as good as other alternatives (Read:Google). Every now and then when I get bored, I do test the prominent players in search to see whether anyone has caught up with Google. I did this recently when Cuil was launched and hailed as David who would take down Goliath. Of course, the results were far from satisfactory. Nothing compared to Google! Yahoo was pretty reasonable and Live Search wasn't as bad as it was 6-7 months back. And Cuil was over-hyped, thought they have improved a lot since then.

But when I read the post on WATBLOG, I decided to test once again and put up the results for people to decide. The latest hero for India is our very own Abhinav Bindra. Lets see how does Live Search fare against Google when you Search Abhinav Bindra (supposedly its algorithm is as good).

 

First, let us look at Live Search. It gives information about him from NBCOlympics.com. Cool! Isn't it? That is what one would think. But if you knew that NBC is using Silverlight for its Olympics site, you can easily do the Math as to why that particular site is showing as the first result. It is not the result of the as good algorithm used by Live Search, but is actually a strategy to get as many desktops installed with Silverlight as possible. That is why nbcolympics comes at the top. Secondly, the next result that you see is that of wikipedia. The snapshot shows that Abhinav was born in the year 1983. I will come this later. Thirdly, I went till the third page to see if his blog has been listed in the results. But why should it be? Our as good algorithm does not see it fit to be listed in the first three pages.

Let us now have a look at what Google gives us.

 

 

As you can see, Google gives the first Links as News Results and a YouTube link before that but very nicely places it as a Sponsored Link. But that is insignificant, and people's views on it will always differ. What I am concerned about are the results! Even here you get the first link as Wikipedia but a closer look reveals that Abhinav's year of birth to be 1982. How is this possible, as both results point to the same page? That is because the Google results are the latest. Also, his blog is listed in the first page as the fifth result. While the champ is not giving the TV media any masala to broadcast and is happy to be himself, he is connecting to his many fans and well wishers through his blog. While this really is an example of the power of Web 2.0, his blog is not listed in the results of our as good algorithm.

And not just with Abhinav Bindra, try any other search term and you will find that Google lies way ahead of Microsoft. When you search for any ASP.NET related query, Google would give you forums.asp.net in its first page and would always give a result which you are looking for. Live Search did not even show forums.asp.net in its first three pages till recently. However, they have improved but still have a very long way to go.

The usability changes done to the LIVE search are just wonderful. Add a lot of value to the user.

I have to agree that the Video and Image Search was indeed impressive. They are certainly trying new things or as one would say in Hindi "Haanth Paon to maar rahe hain".It will be interesting to see how do they fare but without a competetive algorithm, presentation is going to be useless.

Local Search

Hmmm, three taps in my room were leaking today. Stuff in my room were floating. I wanted a plumber. Heck, I needed a plumber. I didn’t know just hours later, I;m gonna witness something which could have helped me. Googling for plumbers in Mumbai is hardly useful, as you might know. So, what ? Well, plumbers in Bandra is what I was looking for. This was exactly what was demonstrated to me by Ravi, today at Microsoft. Putting in a search query like this, gives you names and numbers of the relevant services in that area. I actually noted down a number.

Although it’s not actually a unique feature. Asklaila has been doing it for ages now. And even Google local results can show you ones. Just that Microsoft LIVE search results were more relevant and they could be done right from the main Live.com interface. You don’t need to know of a different sub domain (like local.google.com) to perform the search. An incremental improvement.

Googling for plumbers in Mumbai is hardly useful, as you might know.  Well that is exactly what I did!

But first let us look at Live results. It does give local listings with address and phone numbers. But it gives only three results. No link for more results or similar results. What about Google?

It gives about 12 results with phone numbers but without any addresses. But it does give you a more results link.And mind you I did not do a local search from a subdomain. And what happens when you click on it?

It takes you to local.google.co.in and gives you 218 results with addresses and phone numbers. Isnt that better? And since we are talking about relevant local results I tried another thing which really was the nail on the coffin for the as good alogrithm. I searched for "The Dark Knight in Bangalore" in both Live Search and Google. The results are below.

Just one result for Live Search. And Google....

..gives me the show timings for cinemas in Bangalore along with about 105,000 results. Phew!

So there you are! Now what prompted me to write this article? People might think that I am one of those Google fans and Microsoft haters. Well I am not! Google is simply a far better search engine at this point than any other, and Microsoft knows this. That is why all the hullabaloo to buy Yahoo! It is playing catch up but still has a long way to go. But it certainly does have the capability to play a hard game. Just look at them! From OSs to Databases to Enterprise Software to Developer Tools, they are everywhere.

But what really peeved me was this. The author has written a lot of misleading things and the tone of the post is completely biased. And he is not ready to acknowledge this!

Wherever I see, I just find WANNABE's!

Upgrading from SQL Server 2005 Express to SQL Server 2008 Express CTP

I currently have SQL Server 2005 Express Edition installed on my system. I also have the Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Beta 1 installed, but while installing it I did not choose for SQL Server 2008 Express to be installed. So now I am going to try and install it separately. This post is about what I am doing on my system and the steps here may not work in your case. But still I am putting it up as a reference.

 

Go to the Microsoft Express editions site and click on download SQL Server 2008 CTP. Also back up your existing databases. One thing I have learnt in the industry is that it is never too expensive to keep backups. Always keep a backup, at least for those things that you feel are critical.

 

 

After you have downloaded the setup, when you execute it, the first screen you get is the EULA.

Read the License at least once. Most of us don't read and select the I accept terms checkbox and click next. By reading I do not mean understand each and every thing, but just skim through it once to see if it contains anything that might interest you. e.g The above License says that it is valid till July 25, 2008, which is not very far and that the software will stop working after 180 days since installation. These are things which caught my eye.

When you proceed you get the following screen.

 

I clicked on Install and then get the following screen.

 

I see the option of Upgrade SQL Server 2005 to 2008 which says I should run the Update Advisor first. I can't find the Update Advisor so I just select the option to see what happens. It opens a new windows where it checks my system. In the options on the left side of the Wizard I can see Select instance, meaning I would have to select my SQL Server 2005 Instance which I want to upgrade. Since I came across this post in ASP.NET forums, I am not sure that is what I want to do. Plus there is nothing wrong in having both the versions of SQL Server running as different Instances. At work, I have seen people with both SQL 2000 and 2005 on their systems. So I cancel the Wizard and then in the window above I select New Installation.

I get the System Configuration Check again which is Successful. But now on the left side in the steps, I DO NOT see Select Instance. So my guess is that this is going to install a new Instance of SQL Server 2008 and not do anything to SQL Server 2005 already alive and kicking. I click on Next.

 

I select all the options and click on Next. (Actually I had already clicked on Next and moved to the Next Step when I realized that I had not taken the screen shot of the step. So I moved to previous one to take the screen shot. But notice that in the steps on the left, the Next Step is already checked. A BUG!)

Instead of Default Instance, I select Named Instance and Give it a new name SQL2008CTP. I can see 2 existing Instances towards the bottom, one of which is SQL 2005 instance.

Next it is asking for the User Name and Password (Credentials) to configure the service. Provide the appropriate details. You are then shown the screen below for database engine configuration.

 

I chose the mixed mode authentication. I am no DB guy and I do this because one of my first mentors told me that always choose Mixed Mode.

I then get a screen above for sending data to MSFT. I click on Next.

I then get the summary of the Installation order.I click Install to begin the installation.

 

Above is a screen shot I took while the installation was in progress. Though the progress bar did not reach 100% the next button was enabled and the progress bar remained that way for quite some time so I just pressed next to go the following screen.

I then go to services.msc  and check if the service has been installed.

 

As you can see, now there are three instances of SQL Server running. So SQL2008CTP seems to be running fine along with SQLEXPRESS which is SQL Server 2005 Express.  I now go to SQL Server Management Studio Express but I cant find the 2008 CTP instance I just installed. So I think I should restart my computer once. It is always better to restart in my experience.

I restarted and checked but still I don't see the 2008 CTP instance in Management Studio Express, probably because the Management Studio Express is and older version and may not recognize newer versions of SQL Server. So now I open VWD 2008 Express Beta 1 and go to Database Explorer and try to add a new connection.

As expected I can see the 2008 CTP instance I installed.  I provide the sa login and password and select tempdb database and test the connection and Voila!

So things seem to be working fine. Phew!

Hope this was helpful! Please comment if you have any queries.

Firefox 3 launch Goof up?

Many a times when techies talk about goof ups and product launches, they remember the OS crashing at the launch of Microsoft Windows 98, the video of which I have included just in case you forgot about it.

While that certainly is something which will probably rank first in the list of product launches and goof-ups, we have another one today.

Yes, today is Download Day. I did get the mail on time reminding me about the download. But there has been a goof up in this all hyped Guinness style product launch.

As you can see in the above screen shot, I have showed you the mail which I got informing of the download time. There when I hover above the link download Firefox 3, I get the url on the status bar of the browser which I have encircled.

Now, when I go to the same url what do I get?

Firefox 2?? You got to be kidding me!! And all we get is a sneak peek into Firefox 3, to test drive the latest version.

Probably, the guys at Mozilla were so busy counting the numbers pledged for the download that they forgot to make the to do list, or worse they made the to do list and forgot to update the page that the url redirects to.

I dont know what was the mistake and who made it, but you sure dont want to this to happen when you are publicizing the event with the Guinness tag attached to it!

So what do you guys think went wrong?

My Date with the VC's

As I had said in one of my previous posts, one fine Saturday I had been to an event called Startup City organized by the The Smart Techie. I had mailed a few of my friends about the event and lured a few of them to wake up early on a Saturday morning. I almost did not make it, as I was feeling very sleepy and did not feel like getting up, but since I had promised NEO that I would be picking him up around 8:00 am I got up and got ready. We reached 10 minutes before the start of the event and decided to have breakfast somewhere. By the time we were finished with our Masala Dosas and Musambi Juice it was well past 9:30. I had already missed the event which I had come for, opening address by Mr. Ashish Gupta about the milestones in the journey from an idea to a successful venture. When I reached, a techie from Sun Microsystems was talking about how Sun can help startups. Frankly, it was more of a marketing presentation which I did not find very riveting.

 

I moved around the stalls where some startups were displaying their products and services. It reminded me of BangaloreIT.In of 2006 where Darshan and me had gone though the venue this time was very small as compared to that. You can read about the exhibiting startups here. I then went in to the room where you could meet the VC's. People from different Venture Capital firms from over India were present.

 

I must say that never before has there been a better time to start a company. With 13 Venture Capital firms, each planning to invest around a million dollars per annum into new Ventures in India, you have approximately 10 million dollars of Venture Capital flowing in. That is huge! And it is not just for the technology companies!

 

So what did I get to know in my date with the VC's? I have put them down in points as follows:

• They got the money and they are looking for ventures to invest.
• An Idea is not good enough! They need a Proof of Concept!
• If you worry about the hassles of managing things like marketing, finance etc., don't worry. They have their networks and will help you find people who can help you manage aspects of your company.
• They are looking to invest in areas which have a proven market and growth areas. So in case you have something revolutionary as Google, don't expect it to be easy to get funded.
• People in their network help them to evaluate their ideas. e.g. if I have been funded by a VC and have been successful, she may ask me to evaluate your idea.
• Be as frugal as you can.

One very important thing that I noticed there was that there were quite a lot of people there who had already started off something and were looking for venture capital to expand. I mean like anything else in India, the competition to get a slice of the VC pie is hot here as well. But that doesn't mean you wont get a slice.

 

All said and done, it is always good to be aware of what is happening in the world. I became aware of a whole range of things thanks to event.

So, what do you feel about the points I mentioned above?

Guinness World Records

If you have studied MIT, Manipal around the same time that I did, you would think I was talking about the successful attempt by students of MIT to break the Guinness World Record for the longest chain of straws in the world. Around 1500 or so students of MIT joined hands and made a straw chain of over 8 kilometers if I remember correctly, breaking a record by made by some 16 school kids in the US. The record made has already been broken by someone else quite a while back, though I think it still holds good in the Limca Book of Records.

So how did a thousand students decide to come together to break into the Guinness Book of World Records? Was Manipal such a boring and dull place that the restlessness of the students got the better of them? Well, by no means is Manipal dull. With just students it is one of the most vibrant and energetic places to study in India.

The Guinness World Record attempt was a branding and marketing strategy by my old pal Rishabh Sachdeva, for the inaugural edition of techtatva. He wanted to create a niche brand for the event among other similar events in the region, and if I may say so, it is one of the most successful marketing and branding strategies that you will come across. Not only did it generate a buzz within Manipal, but was also responsible for attracting sponsorship for the inaugural edition of the event. Without this strategy I wonder how would the sponsors have looked at the event which was happening for the first time! The sheer genius of the idea is why I would have Rishabh be the marketing and strategy guy if I were to start a company some day.

Anyway, the idea behind the post was not to discuss about Rishabh or Manipal, but how Guinness World Records provide a great way to market your product. That is what Mozilla Foundation is doing by targeting for the maximum number of downloads in 24 hours for Firefox 3.They are calling this initiative as Download Day, which is on June 17. I have tried the beta version and it was pretty impressive. It is supposed to be fastest browser till date. I have already pledged my support for the initiative. What are you waiting for?

What's Cooking?

Now that the IPL is over, what am I up to these days? Well, last week I was completely involved in understanding the concepts and implementation of a 3 tier architecture using C# in an ASP.NET application. In fact, I had started on this subject about two weeks back and I am quite satisfied with the progress over the last the last two weeks. But more detailed posts on that may not be coming anytime soon as I have some other engagements till July.

 

Meanwhile, another news is that I have invested a heavy chunk of my savings in buying a Lenovo Ideapad Y500.Why the need for a notebook PC? Well first of all, I was kind of bored with my desktop. It has been a very good companion for the past five years and has been party to many memorable times, but was somewhat losing its charm. Secondly, there were issues with the Ethernet Card which really started to get on my nerves. Thirdly, and most importantly, I felt the need for a notebook PC. This was because earlier I was not at a level to use my desktop for writing code or anything like that. In fact, I did not write a blog as frequently and never felt that I needed my stuff with me all the time wherever I am. But lately, I have been having an itch for such an arrangement and decided that it was time to graduate to the next level. Plus Notebooks have a very different feel to them don't they!

 

So I guess now that I have a Notebook, you would expect a lot more blogs and info from me. Well, I don't blame you, especially given the fact that I am writing this blog using Windows Live Writer, a special editor especially for writing blogs easily. And I must confess, that the experience has been good so far. One of the only problems is that the Ideapad shipped with Windows Vista Home. I had heard a lot of people criticize Vista and after using it, I can see why. You will be a bit challenged by the OS and some of its irritating features like User Access Control, which prompts you for your permission every time you start a installation or a program. True that it improves the security vastly, but I was beginning to wonder what was better, being irritated by the security alerts every now and then and being secure or just plain and simple reinstalling Windows whenever you had taken a bad hit from a Virus attack. Or as some of my friends would say, use Mac or Ubuntu.

 

Anyway, I guess I am getting used to it. The UI certainly makes it a nice experience and goes to show how rich applications are going to be the driving force for developers in the next few years.

 

Here's a picture of mine clicked from the webcam. This is just to test how easy is it to post pictures using Live writer. It may look as if I am sleeping but my head is positioned in such a way that it looks like that. When I was in school, I was reading a book kept on my lap rather than on the desk and my head was straight but my eyes were down on the book. The teacher thought that I was sleeping but was surprised when I responded to the question that was asked. I told her that I was merely referring to the book. Later on I have used the same ploy many a times and teachers have never been able to make out if I was sleeping or awake! (At least no one has ever asked me not to sleep in the class or go and wash my face.  My aunt thinks that's because I look like a cute baby when I am asleep(Ahem! Are the girls listening??)and no one would want to wake me up.)BTW, the notebook has a face recognition software which is pretty cool. 

 

I had been to an event organized by The Smart Techie in Bangalore focusing on Startups. My friend Darshan Santani had asked me how was my date and I am yet to respond to him. Will be doing that in the next post soon.

And lots more coming on 3 tier architecture and Object Oriented Design in the weeks to follow. Cheers!!