Thought Garage

What is really important to learn to first survive, then compete and ultimately win in this Internet powered Smart Phone driven Flat world ?   Here is a great video that puts this question in the context of learning "Math" at schools. Key question asked in this video is Should we continue to spend a great deal of time in learning how to 'calculate' or should we focus more on conceptualizing and formulating problems and using computers to perform computations. The argument the author makes is that we MUST do the later and at the earliest possible. If you understand the argument, you can easily replace "math" with any thing in the world or any branch of science for that matter. The argument still makes a sound and very important case. In fact, if you realize, this is NOTHING new. We have been redefining continuously what we need to learn and how we learn throughout the period of evolution. The resistance and incredibility are just part of that evolution. J...

Its not unusual for most of us to make resolutions on the New Year’s eve, every year. It’s a great milestone to look back and review ourselves and set our goals for the next year. Technically, I never made any resolutions on a New Year’s eve. Not that I don’t like to make. I just happened to have a different milestone, my birth day, that comes about a week before the New year’s eve. I do it mostly on my Birthday (:-)). The Resolution of 1999 I would like to share about one such resolution that I really enjoyed chasing it. Its about a resolution I made way back in 1999, immediately after joining in my first job. The resolution is about teaching at least  1000 hours in the next 10 years . The inspiration behind this resolution was a teacher I met, a lecturer by name VB (Vijay Balachandran) that taught us English at SMVM Polytechnic, Tanuku. He is undoubtedly, one of the BEST teachers I have ever met and I consider myself to be the luckiest bun...

Here is a great opportunity to learn more about Silverlight. A FULL day FREE Fire Starter Event on Silverlight on 2nd Dec 2010.  Great news is that the event is streamed online so you can watch from anywhere in the world.  Register for the event here .

Microsoft’s Developer eco-system is arguably one of the best and probably lot more active than others out there. And the eco-system produces tons of multi-media content. But I always cringe when I don’t see an RSS Feed with Media Enclosures that users can readily subscribe and watch or download instantly.  Its always left to somebody to help us out. PDC 2010 web site is a nice Silverlight application.  And absolutely no HTML fall back incase somebody doesn’t have a Silverlight plugin installed.  And of course, no RSS Feed (yet) as usual. Thanks a ton to Greg Duncan for providing a full list of Videos (with all formats available) and associated RSS Feeds that you can readily subscribe.  Visit his blog post and access either the individual list or RSS Feeds of your favorite formats here .  If you want to watch those Videos on your iPad or iPhone, try MP4(low) format. Active Player If you don’t have a Media Player or Application that can consume those RS...

Wondering which .NET version is the most popular version? Which .NET version got the most traction in the industry? Which version is the most discussed in the developer circles? Well, I am not sure if we have any public data that could answer any of those questions, particularly the commercial adoption part. But I looked at trends of search engine traffic and I found that these trends tell a story that is quite consistent with general perception. Look at the graph below illustrating the search trends of various .NET versions , captured from Google Trends . The story I believe is quite familiar to most .NET developers. I am not at all surprised to see .NET 1.1 still alive even in our searches, many companies are still running on .NET 1.1 and I guess haven’t found a compelling reason (that totally justify their investments) to upgrade. You can also see from the snapshot below, Visual studio editions follow the suit more or less closely along with respective .NET versions. ...

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -Gandhi An application to learn. A platform to share. For those, that loves to learn and inspired to teach. In private beta now!.