Spilling tea all over the laptop

I'm glad they make the laptops the way they do. They in that earlier sentence was Dell and I am referring to the fact that they make their laptops to endure a full cup of tea all over it!

Yes, it happened. I don't know how it happened, but it did. I spilled a cup of tea all over my laptop yesterday and I thought that would have been the end of it. I promptly switched it off, dried it as much as I can using tissues and let it dry for only about 5 minutes. I had to switch it on, as I had an urgent email to send. At that point of time, sending the email was more urgent than drying the laptop.

It booted up, but the scratch pad was not working. I used a USB mouse and finished my tasks for the day and packed it brought it home. I switched it on again today, praying to god that it will boot up. Not only did it boot up, even the scratch pad seems to be working.

Better be careful now. I am not sure whether it will take on a another beating with another cup of tea!

Using Timers with Windows Services in .NET

I was trying to help out a colleague by writing a small Windows service for one of his projects. The requirement was for the project to run periodically in a server and copy some documents from one place to another. Since this was a chance to get my hands dirty with some coding, I jumped at the chance.

Writing the service was a price of cake. But I hit a brick wall. The timer I had used (System.Timers.Timer) was not firing. As usual,I checked the tutorials to see if I was doing it right, and seemed it was all right. But still it was not getting fired when the service is started. So I started digging. And I came up with this article which explains using the Timers with Windows services. Helped me. Hope it helps someone else out there as well.

PS: It feels good to do coding on .NET.

I feel good - to be back on a .NET project

I feel good! Why? Because I am getting back to managing a .NET project after a long time.

For about an year I was managing Java projects. While I have nothing against Java, to me Java seems to be an overly complex language. I don't want to get in to an argument here. I don't want my Java teams members to get offended either. But my personal preference has been .NET all along.

This time around, I get to set the technical direction for the project as well. So I am going ahead with ASP.NET 2.0 and .NET AJAX Extensions and AJAX Toolkit. I want to use all the new cool features in ASP.NET such as the Master Pages, Generics, and maybe even .NET 3.0 features such as workflow support.

Hopefully, I will update this space with the progress I make with this project. Should put a weekly task in my Calendar to update this space.