My first blog post on MSDN!

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I always thought my first blog post will be a tale to tell, totally interesting piece of work that people will instantly fall in love with. I thought I’ll write about my three year journey with Microsoft right out of college and add some heroic moments in between to spice things up.

But then I realized, that would be interesting only in two cases:

  • I’m targeting only me as the audience, or
  • I’m George Clooney and this is the movie “Up in the air” (nice movie, btw)

Since none of the conditions are satisfied, let’s skip the heroic entry.

Credits

A few folks inspired me to start a blog, and it’s only fair that I mention them here:

Wriju Ghosh – My Tech Lead at Microsoft. His blog has featured in the top 100 blogs on MSDN and it’s a privilege to be working along side him. You can visit his blog at https://blogs.msdn.com/b/wriju.

Rahul Gangwar – My colleague, a very close friend and mentor at Microsoft. His approach towards solving problems, technology and life in general has taught me many things. He has this aura of “anything is possible” around him and always manages to keep a fun atmosphere around him. It’s great to work and learn with him.  You can visit his blog at https://blogs.msdn.com/b/rahul.

Scott Hanselman – I don’t need to give an introduction to him, obviously! I feel he too is a good friend, but the fact is I’m yet to meet him! His blogs and presentations/talks are so cool, I feel as if I’ve  known him for years (which is true, it’s just that he doesn’t know me yet Smile). He has been an inspiration and I’d like to specifically point out this talk, where he says every developer should have a blog.

Phil Haack – He doesn’t need any introduction either! I had the chance to talk to him at TechReady 13 and the instant take away for me was how humble he is. His blogs, presentations (especially the HaaHa show with ScottHa) have been my long time favorites!

MSDN Blogs and Windows Live Writer

I’m going to talk a bit about stuff that might only be relevant to Microsofties. Please skip the section to avoid boredom/anger/frustration if not interested.

Folks starting with a new MSDN blog account (if you are yet to get an account, you know the drill…) – check out the Windows Live Writer. While it is a great tool for blogging, configuring it to work with your MSDN blogs is a bit of a pain without guidance!

Check this blog from Nikhil for the steps to configure it easily. I found a small difference in step 9 though.

I wasn’t able to connect using the “User name” which would be “Amar Nityananda” in my case and I had to give my live id as the user name. Once this is done, you can choose to publish a temporary post, which the tool will use to download the theme for your post.

And that’s about it – you’re all set to use a really cool tool for all your bloggy goodness!

(Yes, this post is written using Windows Live Writer)

That’s it for now!

At this point I’m thinking I’ll mainly be posting on development on the Windows Phone platform, Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight, Expression Blend, ASP.NET MVC and Spatial Data in SQL Server. (I’m not going to talk about the shiny new OS yet,  for that you’ll have to visit the //build/ site Smile)

I’ll try to share my perspective on what I learn and any tips & tricks I figure out along the way. I consider this as a great learning opportunity and any feedback, comments and suggestions are highly appreciated.

Last but not least, a quick disclaimer: The posts/opinions over here are my own views and not of my employer.

 

<Yet to find a witty closing line>

Thanks for reading!

Amar