Microsoft launches DreamSpark in India!

On 5^th November 2008, Microsoft unveiled DreamSpark - a software giveaway for an estimated 10 million eligible students in India. DreamSpark will provide students access to the latest Microsoft developer and designer tools at no charge.

Microsoft DreamSpark will be available to all students whose studies touch on technology, design, math, science and engineering. The software available to students will include:

Microsoft developer tools

• Visual Studio 2005 Express
• Visual Studio 2005 Professional
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional
• Visual Basic 2008 Express
• Visual C++ 2008 Express
• Visual C# 2008 Express
• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express
• XNA Game Studio 2.0
• 12-month free Academic membership in the XNA Creators Club

Microsoft designer tools

Expression Studio 2, including

o Expression Web

o Expression Blend

o Expression Design

o Expression Media

Microsoft platform resources

• SQL Server 2008 Developer
• SQL Server 2008 Express
• Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition
• Virtual PC 2007

Training Resources

• IT Academy Student Pass
  

This broad range of professional-level software will be available both online via www.dreamsparkindia.com; and in offline format via DVDs distributed by program partners NIIT, Aptech and Hughes Net Fusion Centers. A student merely needs to offer a proof of identity at a branch of these institutes to avail of a DreamSpark DVD. There are 125 NIIT, 175 Aptech, and 200 Hughes Net Fusion Centers participating across the country.

These program partners will also provide technology training on the DreamSpark software tools at a nominal cost; as well as have the option of soft skills training in languages like English and Hindi. Microsoft India is also working with academic institutions, government bodies and student organizations across the country to ensure that all students get a chance to benefit from DreamSpark.

The DreamSpark program in India is tailor-made to join the dots between software access and employability - which means making training and enablement complement simple access to technology.

DreamSpark will also facilitate student participation in Microsoft’s annual marquee contest, Imagine Cup, through various contest categories such as software design, short films, photography etc. Students from India that qualify for the Imagine Cup 2009 World Finals will get to travel to Egypt. Selected teams will also get the opportunity to get mentored by the Centre for Innovation, Incubation & Entrepreneurship (CIIE) at IIM, Ahmedabad.

Addressing students and academicians at IIT Delhi – where the DreamSpark program was unveiled - Bill Gates, Chairman, Microsoft Corp, said, “We want to do everything we can to equip a new generation of technology leaders with the knowledge and tools they need to harness the magic of software to improve lives, solve problems and catalyze economic growth. Microsoft DreamSpark provides professional-level tools that we hope will inspire students like you to explore the power of software and encourage you to forge the next wave of software-driven breakthroughs.

Compiling Singularity

Its been a long time since I posted.. have been very busy lately, but with some time well spent; tinkering with the Singularity RDK 1.1

So finally I managed to install .Net framework 1.1 (Required to compile Singularity) on Vista.. One hell of a job. You will have to slip-stream both .net1.1 and .net1.1sp1 into a single exe and then install it on vista..

After spending hours on installing .net 1.1 and compiling World Distro and Tiny Distro of Singularity, I finally hosted it on a Virtual Machine for the first time.. here is a screen shot.

Currently running the world model.. Will post more soon.. gotta rush and complete some pending files.

Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP)

Hello all, so here is my first post on urjit's blog : www.thenewtech.blogspot.com .. I have been keeping tabs on VRRP lately so decided what better than this to kick-off..

Prologue: This series is about a recently developed approach undertaken by a number of network administrators to provide better availability of the critical network components in a complex network. They take aid of the virtualization construct and implement it on the router. We’ll see how this actually happens. As such this is a wide topic in its own right and so I’ve decided to partition it into a number of posts. I would be dealing with specific areas in each post to provide a sound understanding of the underlying concepts and the related issues.

Introducing - Harsh Dhulia

Lets the drums roll... switch on the lights... here comes a new messiah of technology.. Introducing our new "Guest-Column-Write" : Mr. Harsh Dhulia, (HD for short)

So, HD is an enthusiast who digs Information Security and Networking.. all pdfs on these topics are devoured like hot cakes. For times to come, we will see a lot of articles by HD on my blogoshpere..

HD will also share his C# programming experiences at http://www.csharpinmylife.blogspot.com/. His other areas of interest include Virtualization and Operating Systems (we share these interest though..)

So welcome Harsh, looking forward to your expert columns here..

Microsoft Mindstorm

On 30th of August, we finally witnessed the Microsoft Mindstorm at Ahemdabad. We had been planning for such a long time for this, with a lot of initial set-backs right from unavailability of auditoriums to clashing schedules, but finally the event was a huge success.

While planning for the event, we never imagined such a huge response, the seating capacity of the auditorium was about 370 something.... and the total turn over was over 480 students who attended the event. Those who reached late even sat on the stairs!! Whew! that was a very good response to the event..

There were 5 sessions at MM:
1. LINQ by Anand MSP - Kamal Singh Rawat
2. .Net 3.5 features and framework by DDIT MSP - Dhara
3. The third one was a session on Silverlight by our new MSP Acad program manager at Microsoft - Siddharth Prakash.
4. There was a short session by a SQL server MVP - Mr. Pinal Dave
5. Session on NextGeneration Technologies was delivered by myself - Urjit Singh Bhatia, I talked about Cloud computing, Virtualization and the likes.. you can find some articles on Cloud Computing on my blog..

In the end there was a quiz and algorithms round, very entertaining I must say.. All in all a huge success. The press and media coverage are awesome, we got media space on 3 dailies and 2 news channels.. WOW!! Here is the video..

Microsoft Student Partner Lead

There it is, the email announcing that I have been promoted to the rank of Microsoft Student Partner Lead for the year 2008-09.. wow! that feels really good. I have been so busy these days.. So this email was a great break from the monotony of all that truck-load of work. The other Leads are:

1. Kaushal Bhavsar
2. Lakshman Srikant
3. Mayur Tendulkar
4. Raveesh Maaya
5. Biyan Bhar (Edit 18-sept-2008 - sorry, forgot to add the name, thats what happens when u have 3 projects and the same deadlines!!!)

So a total of 5 leads were announced for this acad schedule.. Congrats to all and thanks to the India MSP Acad team.. you guys really rock!

Compiling the Cloud…

Cloud Computing... The future Haze.

Cloud computing has been in the news, a lot actually..

Understanding the cloud:

Cloud computing refers to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) IT paradigm, where the end-user does not know (or have to know) where the IT enabled service is hosted, maintained or stored.

The end-user is simply assuming that the service is somewhere there in the “Cloud”.

Here is a typical Cloud architecture : There can be many background services making up the cloud, DataStorage, Applications, Infrastructure etc, with virtualization adding another dimension to the whole 'Cloud' scenario. The 'Cloud Clients' can be anything right from Mobile Clients to desktops to laptops on Wi-Fi, and as the concept goes, the Client is totally oblivious to the technology in the background, accessing software as a service just as we use electricity on use per unit basis. In the future of things to come, we might be using Visual Studio "Online Edition" and compile our programs on a transparent third-party server and simply save the code on our disk. Pay for as many hours you use the service!!

This is the excerpt from my presentation at the MicrosoftMindstorm - a student DevCon at Ahemdabad on 30th August.