Add Your Own Maps !!!

Believe it or not now you can add your own maps to Virtual Earth, at least I always wanted to do this, whenever I was limited views of my native place I always thought , why don't they ask real people for the detailed maps ? and finally they did it ..!! Well I know ..innovation is nothing new for Microsoft Research .. but wow guys thanks ..I like it !!

Have you ever looked at satellite photos of a building in Virtual Earth -- and wished you could zoom right in and see its floorplan? Have you ever used VE to plan a trip across town -- and wanted to seamlessly switch from its road maps to maps of bicycle trails, bus routes, or carpool lanes? Have you ever wanted to create and publish your own map mashups -- and wished you had a tool to make it easy to integrate a map you care about into Virtual Earth? With MapCruncher, you can!  

The Virtual Earth API allows web developers to supplement Virtual Earth's maps with pushpins and lines. MapCruncher brings mashups to a whole new level by allowing developers to import entire maps to supplement the existing road and aerial imagery with detailed, application-specific information. The possibilities are endless: bicycle maps, transit maps, national park maps, university maps, antique city maps, or whatever drawn-to-scale maps you personally find interesting. You can even augment Virtual Earth with Do-It-Yourself Aerial Photography. See our Gallery for more examples.

 
 

Inserted from <http://research.microsoft.com/mapcruncher/>

Ash Again..!!!

The most beautiful woman in the world

 
 

 

I know you will say what's so bit about it , the bigger thing is the international repo that ash has got ..! I picked up the following text from one of the famous blogs www.britboyla.com . have a look at the link below it has a few more picks ;) I know it's never enough to see ash pics… I have only one statement for Ash "You Are The Personification Of Indian Pride"

Indian actress Aishwarya Rai, widely acknowledged as the most beautiful woman in the world, was in Cannes this week promoting her new movie...but who cares? Who cares about anything except looking at her?? 

She is literally PERFECT 

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that she is not just the most beautiful woman in the world but the MOST BEAUTIFUL HUMAN BEING EVER IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE IN THE HISTORY OF EVERYTHING EVER... 

And if you disagree you are clearly mentally ill, on hallucinogenic drugs or an idiot.

And again as you know geek I always a geek .. I cannot finish my post without giving you some geeky tip, so here it goes.. doing this post was pretty easy I used OneNote word and IE 7 for doing this post.. I was just roaming on the web and saw the above post. And I knew copying pasting is problematic and if I add into favorites I will forget it afterwards blog.

So I selected half of the post clicked on send to onenote button, the selected part was moved into one note..and the onenote window was opened I right clicked on it and then clicked BlogThis ..and in a snap everything is in Word 2007 .. and now I will click blog.. Thank Office 2007 Team ..We All Love You..!

 
 

Inserted from http://britboyla.blogspot.com/2006/05/britboy-in-new-york-times.html

Microsoft Office Beta - 2 Is Available !!

Great News !!! Microsoft Office Beta 2 is available for public review, wow I am so happy ..let me try to count the endless list of things that you can do now ..!!!

• You can try the new ribbon UI, really it makes live easier ..
  
• You can blog using the new blog feature of Word.
  
• You can try new XML based extensibility modal, most add-in related plumbing is gone
  
• Use the new OneNote note sharing feature.
  
• Use OneNote BlogsThis feature.
  
• Try SmartArt.
  
• …. And so on ….
  

So how do you download it ..? good question to download it go to http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx

Blogging With Word 2007

One of the greatest advantages of working with Microsoft is Dog-Fooding, getting the hands on the technology before it actually comes out in the market, I really enjoy that and now as I already told you Beta 2 Word 2007 now has blogging that as a new feature.

Yes, I agree it’s a beta, it still has areas of improvement, but the important point is, product team, is working interactively with the dogfooders , in fact Joe, Krista jumps almost in every mail that you send to word blogging DL (it's a special DL in which all the MS bloggers who are blogging using word are members ) and also he keeps on monitoring his previous posts on word blogging for issues and questions and gets back when / as he has a good number of questions and ofcourse answers to them. Have a look at http://blogs.msdn.com/joe_friend/archive/2006/05/18/600710.aspx

In general, I prefer to sit back and watch the comments come in and respond to them in future blog posts. This means that some folks have to learn a little about delayed gratification. However, no one needs to worry about missing important information that only gets mentioned in the comment stream. So, here are a few answers to issues raised by recent comments.

Once we raise an issue , we will see mails bombing from the entire team, Joe, Krista, Natalie, David, and many more in the team, if required they will actually have live meeting with you, will remote debug the issue and give you the results, its wonderfull working with people with such great commitments towards what they do.

 

 

Being In Microsoft - 2

This is the continuation of my post "Being In Microsoft - 1" actually when I started writing my previous post I was going to tell you things in Microsoft that make me proud that I am the part of such a company , but somewhere along the way, I got distracted from the main topic. In this post I will try my best not do get distracted, but before that let me tell you one more interesting thing that reinforced my thought of being in Microsoft.

Reinforcement Of Thought

When I was learning implementing COM using VB, I came across a book by Dan Appleman. If you have ever read his book the only thing you can say is he can never improve, because its hard to improve perfection (by the way if you were his blog reader a good news for you is he restarted blogging, thank Jeff Atwood for that ). Apart from COM I read a few more interesting incidents in his book. Here I am presenting one specific incident from his book that reinforced my thought of joining Microsoft, In his own words.

When people ask me how do you feel working with the biggest fish in the pond (i.e. Microsoft) , I tell them Microsoft is not the biggest fish in the pond; it’s the pond.

So yes, it’s the pond..!

Although I have many experiences in Microsoft in these 2 years of job, that I can dedicate an entire website with those, but to keep it simple, I will tell you the latest one.

Experience Of Support

Generally when I talk of support I talk of support that I we (our team or other teams in developer support) give to our customers, but this time the story was different I was asking for support.

Yesterday I checked that RSS feeds on my MSDN blog were not working, so I promptly wrote a mail to msdn blogs support and I went to sleep, I was expecting a reply in a couple of days as it was a weekend, but after a few hrs maybe three when I checked my mailbox , there was a mail from Jana, who is working in Microsoft communities(she is in Microsoft even before I started dreaming of Microsoft , yes more then 7 years) and the issue was resolved !! on a weekend ! in a few hrs.

When she read the mail , she immediately escalated the issue to telligent, the community server people (in case you don't know MSDN Blogs is hosted on community server) and even the support guy also started working on it even though it was a weekend, and issue was resolved..!!

Thanks Jana .. Thanks Microsoft ..Thanks Dan ..Thanks Jeff ..Thanks everybody who is associated with Microsoft in any capacity.

Being In Microsoft - 1

People keep on asking me how it feels being in Microsoft . Actually it's hard to explain because my limited vocabulary doesn't have so many good words tom match my feelings ! but the good thing is I always have a pack of incidents which explain why I am proud being a part of Microsoft.

Let wander through history, don’t let me scare you I am not talking about history of mankind or history of universe, I am talking about history of a small micron in the universe and that’s me..

My First Love With Microsoft

This begun back in '99 exactly around the time when Jana Carter joined Microsoft (I will tell how Jana came in my mind latter in this article in the next article ). I must admit that it had nothing to do with actually the company, but it had to do with idea.. it was the time when people started to talk about .NET and comparing .NET to Java, and ofcourse everybody on earth likes to predict things based on their opinion, I found out whenever anybody said anything bad about .NET I was not able to stand ..reason unknown, I didn't even know exactly what's .NET ! strange ..isn't it ? It was at least for me. Then I started examining my thoughts like psychoanalyst would do and when I found the root cause it was actually the love for a specific language "Visual Basic 6.0".

Why I liked the language .. ? Yes , you are right.. it's simplicity. But when you carefully analyze the language you will see that almost every redundant thing was made easy and code-free, so the developer did not have to waste his / her precious time, thinking about window handles, positioning, message loop etc. and if you needed more control API was always there to your rescue.

Dream Of Being A Part Of Microsoft

When anti-piracy thing was going on in our city I happened to meet with one of the people, whose name I don't remember as per now, but he was an MS employee and somehow associated with anti-piracy. I bump into him in a coffee shop. After a round of coffee, he gave me his card and after taking that card in my hand I started imagining my name printed on that card and finally it did happen, although I did take around 6 yrs of efforts but it's worth it. I wanted to say a few things more but I personally do not like too read too big articles so I avoid posting it as well, I will be posting rest of it in an hr with the title "Being In Microsoft - 2 "

Want me to blog on your tune..??

Just a new experimental idea .. I am starting to blog on your issues !! ofcourse they should be related to Office Automation or InfoPath.. so how to you tell me what to blog..good question.. I just created a channel9 wiki that will help you do it ..let's hope it doesn't get removed from there !

The URL of the entry is http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/wikiedit.aspx?topic=Channel9.BlogRequest&return=Channel9.OfficeDevelopmentBlogs just login and let me know what you want and in most cases you will get it done..!! and I will ofcourse I will blog it on This Blog not on Blogspot or Spaces Blog

Strange Times..

What do you call a strange time..? I can tell you my definition because I am going through ..the basic reason is something I know but unfortunately cannot post here because my blog readers are known's and unknown's. I don't have issues sharing everything ( well almost ..everything) . but ofcourse I cannot share everything with known's , did you ever feel the same things in your life..? it's strange.. when you are ready to share anything and everything with the world but not with the people you know..

My schedule ..my day is going haywire..can you believe I am generally in office for more than 38 hrs generally ..? then even if I go home..(the so called..my definition of home is simple ..a place where somebody is waiting for you ..and this doesn't happen in my home ) I will be doing something like mabe watching TV for some time..if possible I will take a rest for around 1 hrs 20 mins or 30 mins at most, will take bath and then will be back in the office..etc. in office after my job if I sleep ..it's so relaxing that I sleep for no less then 12 hrs..today was a weekend and I was sleeping in my office and I slept for 19 hrs.. hehe

brrreeeport

Now what's this ..? think of brrreeeport as a new kind of experiment , to compare search engines and more importantly to see the power of blogosphere! Maybe I am late(3 months 5 days 23 hrs and 27 minutes to be exact ) in joining but better late than never.
The only advantage of being late is now I have more data that can be used for a basic analysis, although an advanced analysis will need more data ..but IMHO it will be better to reinforce "brrreeeport" , after every few posts ..are you reading me Scoble ?
So the current data is .
Google Web Search 112000
Google Blog Search 1628
Technorati Search 2408
Yahoo Search 63300
MSN Search 13723
Windows Live Search 18830
Windows Live Feed Search 461
And needless to add I am blogging using Office 2007 Cool Blog Feature… hey Scoble which editor do you use ..? also as an FYI i am adding this to all of my blogs..in case you don't know its:
http://blogs.msdn.com/pranavwagh
http://pranavwagh.blogspot.com/
http://spaces.msn.com/pranavwagh

Vagus Starts Blogging

It gives me immense pleasure to introduce my friend, actually I should not be telling his name ..so be it vagus , as he tells you on the blogosphere, yesterday I came to know that he started blogging ! well .. we thought you will never do it vv..agus .

The initial posts that I see are well great .. and surely I did not know what vagus means until I saw Hello World . Make sure to stop by in case you would like to see a blog becoming more and more technical day by day but still keeping the originality

Maybe this week is not good for me

So question is why ? can we actually blame a week for something going wrong ..? well that’s a philosophical question and I am no philosopher .. but what I understand from the human mentality is we tend to release our pain..problems ..issue..and everything bad that happens to us by blaming somebody. It could be some other human being, a specific day a specific month, a specific week , god or anything and everything.

So all said and done..today is the week's turn..! this week I got stuck in many cases.. at places where I never did before, met with an accident, one of my friends had a broke up, one of my friends ran from home, and his boyfriend is not ready to marry at this point of time as he is planning to move to London. Then one of my newest friends was fired from her job, where she was working since 2-3 years.

Last but not the least today my onenote 2007's blogthis feature stopped working magically, then when we had a debugging session, finally came to know that somehow word 2003 overrode some of the word 2007 features, so the basic problem here was I am running an almost not recommended configuration. Then i had to pull the old rabbit out of the hat, that is go to add-remove programs , select office 2007 select change, select add-remove, don’t change anything and say next. It will redo the configurations, whew done.

I don't know why life doesn't have registry so that we can hack it to makes things work.. good concept isn't it..?

Published New Article

Published new article..about ways, and issues associated with using ADO with excel, initially I published it as a post and then removed it from there, and hey mike..(in case you don't know this gentleman gave a comment to that post "what a useless post") maybe it’s a useless post if you look at it isolated but I will tell you when it becomes very important (we call it Sev A).

Actually Server Side Automation Of Office of excel and other office applications is something that many people use but unfortunately as office was made for interactive usage. Server Side Automation is not a recommended or even supported approach. Now if you have a excel application that automates excel on the server side(you made it because you never knew about the issues associated with it). And then you come to know that this is a bad approach what do you do ..?? in *many* cases the only approach left is using ADO to pull the data out of excel and to put the data out of excel ..hence the post.

Btw the URL of the post is http://blogs.msdn.com/pranavwagh/articles/excel_ado.aspx and mike you are again welcome to do the comments ;)