Just finished installing Vista December CTP (Build 5270).

Except for few minor issues it looks and feels rocking to me. Lets see. Still got tons of things to install. Will post more info later.

After many months of beta Gmail is still it is in beta. Will it go full live ever?

or are they planning for a super surprise?

Last couple of days were boring because didn't had must hardcore coding stuff.

So thought of adding something to the blog. Everybody has Bloggers List, Cool Links, Recent Entries, Hot News, Downloads, etc etc. Anybody got a Story Box . Well! I have one now. Lot of friends are sending funny stories in mails. Those 'Udurawana's' stuff are the coolest. So I just thought of adding a section to have all these fun and stupid stories. Check it out below the Search Box in the right hand side column.

Day before yesterday I purchased the FreeTextBox Pro License. It's cool with lots and lots of tools than the Free version. Image Gallery is the coolest.

The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years
Here's PC World's official (and entirely idiosyncratic) list of the top tech gadgets of the last half century.

We're living in the golden age of the gadget. Don't believe it? Check your pockets. Odds are you're carrying a portable music player, an electronic organizer, a keychain-size storage device, a digital camera, or a cell phone that combines some or all of these functions. And you'd probably be hard-pressed to live without them.

At PC World, we'd be lost without these things. We don't merely test and write about digital gear, we live and breathe the stuff. In honor of this raging gizmo infatuation, we polled our editors and asked them to name the top 50 gadgets of the last 50 years. The rules? The devices had to be relatively small (no cars or big-screen TVs, for example), and we considered only those items whose digital descendants are covered in PC World (cameras, yes; blenders, no). We rated each gadget on its usefulness, design, degree of innovation, and influence on subsequent gadgets, as well as the ineffable quality we called the "cool factor." Then we tallied the results.

After a lot of Web surfing, spreadsheet wrangling, and some near fistfights, we emerged with the following list. Some items in our Top 50 are innovative devices that appeared briefly and then were quickly consigned to museums and future appearances on eBay, but whose influence spread widely. Others are products we use every day--or wish we could.

With the holidays in full swing, and as folks shop for the right gear to give their loved ones, join us as we visit with the ghosts of gadgets past and present.

Second session of the .NET workshop was held on last Friday (23rd) @ moratuwa university. Microsoft Student Champs did a great job in organizing it. In this session the main focus was on developing Web Services with Visual Studio 2005.

Couple of photos from the session.

Wish you all a

Merry Christmas

Fingers crossed until the Windows Vista December CTP download finishes.

All the infrastructure is ready for the new version. Hope it will be a stable version. I'm thinking of running full time on Vista. I tried on a previous build, But due to too many issues had to switch back to Windows XP. Anyways this time also i'm going to give a try.

Reinstalling everything is a pain in the a**, but it's fun.

For last couple of months my hard disk was filled with stuff downlaoded from chanell9 videos, other .NET videos, captured stuff from my cam, bacnkups, and many more. Because my old DVD writer was broken.

Last Wednesday I got a new ASUS DVD Writer. God this one is fast. previous one could write only 2x, but this can write 8x. So once again all my hard disks are getting free. On the otherhand my CD/DVD colection is growing .

The X Prize Foundation last year award $10 million to a team led by aircraft designer Burt Rutan and Microsoft's Paul Allen for a pair of suborbital flights aboard SpaceShipOne. NASA would need to offer $100 million to generate private interest in developing a vehicle for human orbital flight.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20051212/spaceprize_spa.html

MS Student champs have done a great job in planning this workshop in such a short period of time. Great work guys. Lab document looked great .

Main target of this 3 hours session was to give the start to .NET 2.0 as most of the students were totally new to .NET 2.0. But the good thing is most of them have plans to compete in ImaginCup 2006. I had to spend a considerable amount of time to explain the basics/theories.

Feedback was much better compared to the previous sessions. I'm happy to see University Students are interacting in a workshop session . Last time I remember only two students asked questions (so rest of the questions I had to ask the question and give the answer).

Most of them are highly excited about ImaginCup. Seems like Student Ambassador and Student Champs are doing a good job in encouraging their buddies to compete in ImaginCup. Also I hope we could expect a good contribution from the 2005 local winning team (Chandima, Gayan, Sithira and Anupama). Herd they are busy with work. Keep up the good work folks!

Two more sessions are schedule, one in Web Services and other other on in ASP.NET 2.0

I have tried lot of RSS readers because I wanted to find the best one . Finally I decided to stay with NewsGator because it is fully integrated into Outlook. And during most of my day I have Outlook opened. So I don't have to open another program to check my RSS feeds list.

And the good scene is Similar kinda feature is built into Outlook 12.

I herd that XBOX 360s are having a very high demand in eBay due to the unavailability of stocks. So I also just had a look. And found this ...

XBox 360 Front Cover on eBay

Well! this $36,000 is only for the front cover. Plus it will be couple of hundred more for the actual XBox. Checkout why this front cover is so damn expensive. IT'S MADE OUT OF GOLD.

During my presentation @ yesterdays User Group Meeting feedback I got from the audiance was really good. For most of the questions I gave the answers. But for one I said 'I don't know', because I didnt know an answers.

Well! After the meeting one guy said, saying 'Don't Know' to a question is not a good thing and you should have said something. Dude ... how can I say anything about something which I don't know. I think it is better to say 'I don't know' without just saying some bullshit.

Another comment what this person made was 'You should know everything' . How in the world that I can know everything about something. If somebudy is thinking that MVPs know everything or they must know everything ... dude ... you are wrong. We are not a group of people who knows everything about everything. We know certain things very well, and rest we have the guts to face it.

I have seen lot of speaches from Microsoft Speakers and even they say 'I dont know' in some cases. Nice thing is when they say 'NO' people think 'his experties are in a different area'. BUT when we say 'NO' it becomes 'You should know everything'. 

So .. How can you say 'NO'? ... you just put letter 'N' and letter 'O' together and it becomes 'NO' . There is nothing wrong in saying 'I dont know'.

Couple of hours ago I did a presentation @ the .NET User Group December Meeting. It was about the new features in VS 2005. My main idea was to point out some things which we do now in a hard way with VS 2003 and how easy it is to do those in the smart way with VS 2005.

See how cool Windows Movie Maker is. Manzi creaed this cool video by playing with all the videos we recorded with my cam.

http://www.welasharp.net/videos/eCarnival_0004.wmv

This clip was taken by merill

http://www.welasharp.net/videos/me_at_ecarnival.avi

Just came home after the third and last day of the eCarnival event. Today there was a considarable crowd compared to the first two days. Anyways it's not much as expected, or it's not even can be compared to the crowd at last years ASOCIO event. Some aspects of the event was not properly planned. Anyhow as always it is .NET User Group did an awsome job. As always it is majority of the attraction was @ the .NET User Group stall because of the new applications we demonstrated. Lot visitors were really amazed to see Windows Vista and specially Office 12 for the first time in Sri Lanka. Also developers and students were really thrilled about the Visual Studio Express Editions.

Merill did a cool job in getting things organized in a very short period of time. This time our team consisted of MVPs, .NET User Group Memebers and Student Champs from Moratuwa University. My self, Ruwan, Manzi, Jinath and Buddhike are the MVPs. Shafraz (Casper), Ameen (Razor), Charith, Chandana, Fiqri, Dinesh, Ludmal are from the .NET User Gruop. And Student ambasseder Isuru and 5 Student Champs from Moratuwa contributed a lot (Sorry friends I couldnt get all your names and blogs, so I thougt to mentioned the names once I get detailes about all of you ... please drop me a mail). Thanks Folks!, and Special thanks to Shafraz (Casper) for spending all three days at the .NET User Gruop stall. Too bad our friends from MDP couldn't participate as they were out of the country at the MDP summit. Also our MVP Prasanna missed the event due to he had to fly to US on a more important mission.

Even though the crowd for the exibition was not satisfactory the 'entertainment' activities were really good. Couple of fashion shows, cool dancing items, Karaoke sessions by 'Ginger' and a short musical show by 'Bathiya and Santhush'.

So it's the end of another event and another namecard tag to my collection :).

I'll post the photos and videos of the event very soon. Too tired to do it now because very tired after three long days at the exibition.