Pavan Gayakwad

After successful installation, vista invited me with a fresh new UI. The start menu with inbuilt search, windows sidebar, re-designed windows explorer, high-resolution icons, Aero 3D screen flips, 3D games, Neat new interface for all sort of network related setups, parental control, Bit locker to protect our data, secure, stable, new sleep mode for better power management, index based search…cool bunch of features. I was happy, but my hmm… Started when few things are missing from their native place and few new things are not good at improving user experience. - Disk defragmenter is less informative this time. No more color bars to check defragmentation status. - I connected to internet and wanted to check the network speed. It was not easy, I have to first go to “Network and Sharing” screen and then interrogate for required information. Earlier this information used to come in a pop-up when you hover mouse pointer on network icon sitting in system tray. - Windows media player 11 always...

“If someone is always busy in pointing out mistakes, there is only one way to stop him. Make him a part of mistake.” (“In this world” - a lesson which I honestly learnt on posted date/day. words or meaning of statement may match with some one’s view in this world, that’s why these statements are not copy protected and kindly note I am not a philosopher. These are just my true experience note.)

Check Delay's Blog to feel the of power of Silverlight and Surface.

An online web page creation, mashup, silverlight support and tight integration with Visual Studio.Net IDE - Microsoft's new online free tool "Popfly". http://www.popfly.ms/

Flexo is a personal accounting package. Since it is in very initial stage, it tracks only your expenses and generates variety of reports on it. (Recently I included income tracking module which is in alpha stage) In coming years Flexo will extend and mechanize most of money management activities under few button clicks. In parallel to cool features, creating a good and ease of user interface is also a head scratching work. It’s an art too. I don’t want to set more expectation saying that Flexo has very good interface but I feel it has got what it was expected to have. When you download and check all screens in Flexo, one thing you will sure notice, Consistency. Just open any UI guidelines book, this will be a first statement and there is no way to skip this rule in my software too. If we think traditionally, the design approach for consistent UI for all forms could be like these, Create header-footer ActiveX/Custom/User control and place it on all forms or create a static class ...

I own a website www.srushtisoft.com , which is an ad-board for my offline works. Right now the site talks over my 3 products (Quick Quest, Flexo and CD Indexer). It tries to give you an impression of big team behind it and commercial availability which may not be completely real but can not be neglected. SrushtiSoft showcases all my works, gives a shape of ‘product’ by identifying its respective domain. These may not be full fledged solutions but surely addresses basic needs. It all starts from here. The basic intention of restarting my blog is to share, collate wonderful experiences, worth full-worthless thoughts and many useful-useless actions during my offline work. Most of the time you will find tech talks here and no wonder if you start looking at me as a tech-alien.

Below given site has new MDSN TOC link. Surf it and mail MSDN people what you think. http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/