Bit recovered after the high fever since Friday night. But still feeling dizzy and sleepy. Next couple of days I'm going to get stuck with a 'screwed up' schedule due to all my weekend plans got screwed. Had about 12 tasks to be completed within the weekend and barely managed to complete two and still got few hours in the day to complete 2 or 3 more.

Anyways what the hell!, few energy boosters, coffee cups and bit more of effort + effort will get the jobs done ... as always it is.

14th, 15th and 16th things were really busy in my schedule due to the Future Minds exhibition. Before start writing anything I must say thanks to my friend Mithra who brought this event into my attention. In general things were OK @ the exhibition. But as I mentioned on Sunday crowd was not big as expected. Anyways things have been really good for the .NET User Group.

Day 1 (14th)
Even though the exhibition was scheduled to start @ 10 AM, things started way early for us. My self, Charith and Razor arrived at the location around 8 AM to start setting things up. After putting up the banners, posters and LCD screens things looked good. Padman (new MVP) and Alan joined around 9.30 to support us with the setup. Also Merill joined in for few minutes to hand over the MVP standing poster and the other banners. Other than that Joy and Chandana dropped in in the evening.

By 11 AM I had to step out for few hours as I had to do the sessions @ Moratuwa event.

Day 2 (15th)
Jinath, Charith, Chandana, Casper, Razor were there the whole day. I was also there except for few hours which I went to Moratuwa to do a session on Vista. Malith from SLIIT joined in, in the evening. 

Day 3 (16th)
Last day of the exhibition was better than the previous two days. Few entertainment activities happened at the main stage etc. Fiqri and Casper joined around 12. Pasan and Charith bit later and Madhawa, Ludmal and Dinesh dropped in in the afternoon for few hours. Also our new friend Fazmil also joined with us. All of us visited the RedHat stall in the evening and we exchanged RedHat Caps with MVP bags. Casper and Razor was there with me till the last minute and helped me to pack things up to end the show. Thanks buddies.

me checking the machines and projector display	guests interested in the MVP tattoo	Scene from the dancing item 'Kahmalee'. It was really nice
left to right: Pasan, Fazmil, me, Dinesh Junior, Dinesh and Ludmal	We at the RedHat stall sharing some ideas	left to right: Charith, Fazmil, me, Pasan and Razor
Me, after three tiring days of hard work	Razor, Charith and Casper busy with things @ the stall	Me and Fazmil after a long chat on various things

A very big thanks from the MVP team to all the volunteer buddies from the forum who helped, in their names Charith, Razor, Casper, Fiqri, Pasan, Joy, Malith, Madhawa, Ludmal and Fazmil. And a big thanks to Alan and Chanditha from the MDP for a support given. Also our MVP Lead Lilian and Kristy from the APAC team for sending all the cool goodies. Hey Lil, those bags are really nice. We have few left which we are going to give to the user group members at the next monthly meeting.

Dang! last three weeks has been a real hard waiting time for me because my next gadget is on the way. Supplier called me today and informed that there is a small delay (Again!!!) and promised to hook it up on Friday.

So here I am ... waiting again ... Will tell ya what it is later.

Faculty of Information Technology (FIT), University of Moratuwa celebrated their 5th anniversary last week and they organized an exhibition and a series of technical presentations. My self and other MVPs were invited to do few sessions. After discussing I agreed to do two sessions and Merill agreed to do one.

Day 1 (14th)
Fuzzy time Chamdima (buddy from last years Imagine Cup team) came to pick me from the Exhibition and Convention center. I was expecting it to be a presentation for a small crowd. But I was amazed to see the demand for both Office 12 and Vista sessions. At the last moment we had to change the hall due to the high demand. It was nice to see an audience of 450 both students and teachers representing schools, universities and technical colleges.

Day 2 (15th)
Actually it was Merill who was planning to do this session. But suddenly he was missing. I think I tried about 25 times to reach him over the phone. Since couldn't locate him I decided to do the session for him. Later found that Merill was badly sick during the weekend. Get well soon brother. It was a smaller crowd today representing different companies etc.

Section of the crowd for the Office 2007 session on day 1	Section of the crowd for the Vista session on day 1
me doing the Vista presentation on day 2	Appreciation token from FIT Thanks folks!

Thanks to Wajira, Thinesh, Gayan, Prageeth, Chandima and everybody else who I don't remember the names.

Strange that I havent made any post in the .NET Forum in a long time. Not even logged in sevreal days. Been really busy with too many things.

Earlier it was projects, projects and more projects. and then finally when that started getting cleared I got busy with my new phone. Anyways now things are getting cleared one by one. It's time to re-start in the forum.

Last week our good old mentor Ed :) forwarded me a mail looking for some tech support to configure a Community Server. These days Community Server 2.0 is among my favoutites list. Checking all the different features and configuration options in that to upgrade Sri Lanka .NET Forum. So I took the challenge to do this. It took longer than expected with my busy schedule and also due to some issues in the hosting place. I spent most of my last weekend on this. Configuring the database manually was what took most of the time. Finally with some help from the technical support dudes in the hosting service I managed to hook it up. Site is on Community Server 2.0 and it looks great. Bangladesh Microsoft Technology Community is up and running now. It reminds me how our forum was a long time back.

Now! Sri Lanka .NET Forum dudes... don't be jealous. Our forum will also be upgraded to Community Server 2.0 very soon.

All the best to Hamid (the man in charge in blangladesh :) ). And if any support needed you know the number to call

Last Friday (7th) we had a .NET day @ Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT). Former students and lecturers at SLIIT organized the event and the list of speakers consisted of Merill, Raja, Fiqri, Dinesh and my self. Head count was close to 400 I guess.

• Merill - Introduction to .NET Framework 2.0
• Raja - ADO.NET 2.0
• Wela - Smart Client Development with VS 2005
• Fiqri - Mobile Development in VS 2005
• Dinesh - Introduction to SQL Server 2005
• Wela - ASP.NET 2.0 Tips and Tricks

Thanks for Malith (SLIIT x-student and event organizer) for taking us for a tour around the SLIIT campus during the lunch break. Dude, you got loads of facilities there.

Few snaps ...

Merill doing the intro to .NET 2.0 session	Me doing the ASP.NET 2.0 Tips & Tricks session	Dinesgh doing the intro to SQL Server 2005 session
Fiqri doing the Mobile Dev with VS 2005 session	Raja doing the ADO.NET 2.0 Session	Me and Dinesh having a small chat with a lecturer
Portion of the crowd	Portion of the crowd

I have been a Sony Ericsson fan for several years until I switched to my iPAQ last week. Used a T610 for almost 3 years and a K700i for couple of months. Best among all the good features in SE is the battery life. If it is a light usage it can easily go up to 6 days. In my case been a heavy user I still used it at least 2 days in one charge. When the battery indicator is in the last red bit, just turn off the vibrator and it was still good to go for several more hours. But my new iPAQ ... it barely can keep it up for one full day. Hah! there are some energy saving tips given in the user manual such as keep the brightness to a minimum, volume to a minimum ... NOW! what kinda tips are those.

Battery life in iPAQ sucks, but the device ROCKS! YEAH! I really mean it. I just did few comparisons online to check battery life's of other Windows Mobile devices. It's all the same. Looks like it is a common problem with all the devices with big screens and fast processors. Is that the best that all the technology can do about the battery life ?????

Anyways I just bought an extra USB cable to keep it plugged while I'm at office. now the problem is solved.

Strange that I haven't watched a movie in about 10 days. Beign really busy. about 20 movies are in the pending list. But it seems like I have to spend this weekend also without any movies as the schedule it bit tight with some pre scheduled work. However monday is a holiday here.

Well! wishes are not for you or me, it for our .NET User Gruop. Yeah! guys it's beign 2 years. We started the whole thing in July 2004 with Merill leading the team and our good old mentor Ed Guiding us. We have continued the meeting every month expect last October where we had the TechEd and this February where we had the VS Launch.

Due to the busy schedule I actually forgot about this. Otherwise I would have atleast brought a cake to the Today's User Group Meeting. A Big thanks to Jinath for reminding this.

It really feels good to be a part of something important.

Just now uninstalled Windows Desktop Search. Why?   My experience with it is not good. It Sucks!.

I installed it because Outlook 2007 was giving a message to install it for fast search results. After installed it always stayed loaded, and eats about 25 - 100 Mb of my RAM, also sometimes processor usage goes wild. Not sure whether this was due to a problem in my machine, but I doubt it because everyting else was and is running sommothly expect this. It was not a 'happy computing feeling' at all. So I removed it. Considering the number of times I perform a search in outlook or in a drive within a week, it's not worth to waste such a big load of memory and processing power for that.

Almost all my files and outlook items are properly organiszed, I know where things are ;) So very rarely only I perform a search. Good lessen to me for installing what I don't want

So guys ... don't install what you dont want ... even when it is free

Sri Lanka MVP list is extended by one ... new man is Padman and he is awarded in Windows Server Systems - Exchange Server category.

Welcome to the club :)

Just now installed IE 7 Beta 3 and it is much better than the beta 2.

Loading a new tab is super fast, and tab ordering is enabled. You can simply drag and drop tabs on the tab to re-arrange the order. And the enhancement on the image zooming option is great. In the previous versions when a large image is displayed it automatically gets fits into the browser size and to bring it back to the original size we have to click the resize button appear on the bottom right corner which appears when the mouse is kept on the image for few seconds. But now mouse becomes a zooming glass and no need to wait few seconds. When working on a busy schedule this is very useful.

So all IE fans ... what are you waiting for?

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx