Australian Grand Prix - 2009

I am just watching the Race Day program on Star Sports and 20 minutes to start the race.What a qualification we had yesterday and no F1 giants (Ferraries,McLeraens,Williams, etc) in the front row of the grid.

• P1 – Jenson Button from team Brawn GP ( Honda old team last year)
• P2 – Rubens Barrichello from team Brawn GP
• P3 – Sebastian Vettel from team Red Bull

Who would have thought that the old Honda team mates will be in the front row of the grid today.This is the old Honda package with a Mercedes engine in it.Honda will be kicking them selves if they do manage to win this opening race of the season after this performance by the new team Brawn GP.What a start to the new kid on the block.

Oh my god , power goes off, will I be able to watch the much waited start of the season.

Power is back :) hoorey. How dejected I was.

About to start the race, five red lights are illuminated and off they go and hence the race started.

Wonderful start by the Jenson Button and poor start by the team mate though.

3 laps to go and started the drama.Jenson Button is the race leader and 3 rd placed Robert Kubica tried to over take Sebastian Vettel and paid the ultimate prize , both crashed into each other and both hit the side wall after damaged to the left front suspension.Safety car was deployed and Sebastian Vettel tried desperately to drive the car through to the pit lane by 3 wheels but to no avail.

All these drama fell very well into Rubens Barichello’s hand who was in 4th place before this drama, he finished the race 2nd after his team mate Jenson.

What a start to the new team Brawn GP, and Team Principal Ross Brawn is the man who behind this team and pulled off this stunning performance which finished 1st and 2nd by a rookie team in his first appearance after 1954 French Grand Prix.

What a start to the F1 season and what a race to watch on live and I don't have words to explain the entertainment I got today.

Who says F1 is boring after this start to the season.Now the question is can the team Brawn continue in the same vein.From what I witness today they will really be a great threat to other front runners.Will keep my fingers crossed on this.

Formula 1 – 2009 season

I am really looking forward to seen the F1 2009 season with all the changes to the rules and regulations which starts on this Friday with the practice sessions at Albert Park in Melbourne.See this preview. This year, most of the teams have done so many technical changes to their package.

One of the new features included into this year was the KERS(Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems).

This year it is going to have only 17 races and the Yas Marina Circuit being the new comer will host the final race of the season.

Visit Formula 1 official web site for more information those who are curious about what’s all about this sport.

Enabling anonymous access in MOSS

Recently I wanted to enable anonymous access to one of my sites in Share Point.I enabled the anonymous access to the web application from the IIS 7.Unfortunately it didn't work.

Then only I started googling on this and found out this wonderful blog post by Sven Gillis.

It indeed save my time and sharing with you all too.

Keeping your cool while driving

This is something that I always had in my mind, how to keep your composure ( or cool in another word ) while you are driving.I am pretty clear that we all have come across situations where you totally get frustrated while driving with those totally out of mind drivers.The "frustration" is not the ideal word to show you how badly you felt it, "p..... off" is the right phrase I feel.Sorry for being very offensive.

Who are the notorious drivers in our country? Number one is the bus drivers, and two , 3 wheeler drivers and at last but not the least, motorcyclists in my opinion. Out of those, bus drivers are the most insane.Totally out mind , bunch of idiots who has taken the responsibility of taking commuters to their destination.Who would have wanted to be on board with such a stupid in control.

I know for sure that you don't need any examples of how they drive on the road.

So the question is how you keep your cool while driving.Following are the things I have tried out to keep my stress level to a minimum.In a way it worked really well for me.

• Don't ever try to retaliate if the driver in front of you do something stupid while you are driving.That is the cardinal mistake you could have done.I know your adrenalin is pumping and you are furious to over take that bugger and learn a lesson to him.By doing this you will be putting yourself in greater danger, because you are not focusing on your driving and you are just thinking about learning a lesson to that idiot.I have experienced that and I know how was it like.
• Let pedestrians to cross over when ever you have the chance to do so.That will really cool you down for a few seconds and let you gather your breath.That doesn't mean that you have to do it all the time.But I have few situations where you can , let them go by.
• if you are not in that much of a hurry just put on breaks and let them cross.
• if there is a long queue behind you then just stop and let them cross, because they (pedestrians) don't have to wait for a long time to cross.Otherwise just keep on going because they can cross after you pass the crossing.
• Don't ever be restless while you are driving.I know you are in a hurry to go to office or any other work then you are trying to over take others.Then of course you in hot seat.So be patient and take you time to over take.
• Never ever try to overtake at bends.I have done so couple of times and avoided some close shaves.
• Try to avoid honking your horn like a crazy.I know for sure you have experienced the driver behind you is honking like a crazy, no need to explain what is your feeling at that time.So it is the same feeling the driver in front of you get if you do the same.So try to use it less and see.Of course you have to use your horn in situations where you have to let the others know about your presence.

I know, you readers also have different styles of driving.And I would like to know about those and reactions to what I have mentioned here.

Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint

I wanted to install VS 2008 extensions for SharePoint in my Vista box.I downloaded the package from here and started installing and got the following message

"This product can be installed if Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 has been installed first."

As usual searched in Google and found this blog entry on how to resolve the issue.

It was indeed save lots of time for me. Thanks goes to who ever contributed to this thread.

Sanomee mark her first birth day @ an orphanage

To mark the first birth day of our daughter , we decided to pay a visit to an orphanage and provide an alms giving to them.

It was indeed a fantastic feeling when you see those children enjoyed the occasion.And you felt that you have done something very very important to bring a smile to their faces.

It was a small place, well organized and taking care of 27 children.All of them are bellow the age of 15 years and all are girls.

As we finished preparing the dining room, the bell was rang by a child and then came all the children and was in a queue in front of the door.

Then one by one entered in to the room and took their respective seats.After having the meal they return to the main area.

There were lots of things in my mind when I noticed their behavior.

Most of them were very shy and reluctant to make eye contact with us.That showed the state of the mind they were in.Must have felt alone and neglected by their parents for what ever reason for that matter.I was felt really sorry for them.In a way they are lucky, they have been raised in this orphanage.Unless otherwise they are no more in this world in my opinion.I had no clue what might have gone in their mind.It must be very complicated to them.

Finally one of the children delivered a speech.She did thank us for what we did for them and made well wishes to my daughter to be a strong one in this society.

It was a very touchy one for me to listen.I was wondering how she made her composure while delivering that speech. She must have had so many things in her mind.It may have been a common thing to her, to deliver such speech to the people who comes to visit them in such occasions.I can still feel what I felt at bottom of my heart at that time.

Thought of sharing this with you all and if we can help such people in any means that really help them to live another day with a great smile in their faces.

Ajax with Share Point

Recently I had to integrate Ajax with Share Point in order to provide much needed user experience in my current project.One of the main concern was when ever a user submit a request in a page the page get refreshed.For some users it is indeed a frustrating experience.

As every one of you do ,tell me if not, I searched in Google with the term "Integrating ASP.NET AJAX with SharePoint". Bingo.... here comes the results and I read the preview of the first search result and opened the entry.

It was from the "Mike Ammerlaan's Blog " and I started reading the post and realized that this is exactly what I wanted and no need to look for a better post for the job at my hand.

I followed all the steps for the "Adding Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Technology to SharePoint Pages" and after about hour and so I managed to integrate Ajax to my sharepoint installation.

So I thought of blogging this wonderful post for those who are reading my blog.

Link : Integrate ASP.NET Ajax with SharePoint

Then I modified one of my web part used in the project with an update panel which takes care of your asynchronous postbacks.And then I deployed the web part in the integration server , to my embarrassment the web part was not working.Actually nothing got displayed.Started scratching my head and figuring out what went wrong.

Going back to drawing board and started every web.config entry for Ajax integration and that was fine.Then suddenly I saw in the top of the ascx page the version of the "System.Web.Extensions" assembly is 1.0.61025.0 which is the version I have installed in my development environment.Then I checked the version in the sharepoint environment.That is 3.5.0.0 which comes with the .Net Framework 3.5.And that was that. I changed the version and here comes the details.

In this page I have a list of items in a one list box and you can add selected items to another list.So started to check whether it was working.I selected an item from the source list and click on the button to move and it worked like a charm.ie the item get moved to the destination list without page getting refreshed. I was really happy with it.

But then I wanted to move another item from the list and nothing happened.Mission failed. :(

So I started looking back at the post I mentioned above and it stated that, there is a hack you need to do because of the way windows sharepoint services works.

So that was the trick and I managed to do that trick with the help of the following blog entry.

Link : Easy ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions 1.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007

Finally I managed to integrate Ajax with sharepoint and used an update panel in my web parts.

Credit goes to those two blogs.

Looking back at year 2008

It has been a fantastic year to me and my family.There were some critical moments in my family life as well as in my work.I would like to list down some of the key moments of the past year for me.

The first one was the best in the lot. Which was the birth of my lovely little daughter.It was a fantastic moment in my life to see her coming out in to this world , and I did witness it from the theater beside my lovely wife and the first cry my daughter made was still echoing in my ears.Everybody who were in the theater was amazed of the loud of it.It was a fantastic feeling and really hard to put into words.

The second one being the delivery of xtracare portal for Xtra.When I took over the project, it was challenging simply because of the time frame for the delivery which was merely a 2 months or so.Had to cope with a dev team which consists of a SE and an intern which made your life bit tougher to transfer the domain knowledge as well as learning curve for the new comer especially with the timeframe we had.Ultimately we pulled it off in a style with the fantastic team effort.Hats off to the entire team which includes dev team , QA team BA and the PM.

The third one was a bit of a scare to my life.It almost took my life unless my seat belt came to the party.It was a very hard day at office and after releasing the xtracare build to the QA and the dev team set to leave the office.I still remember the time we left the office was exactly 00:00 hrs.I told one of my colleague Sudheera, "look at the time we are leaving the office..." and we had a laugh.It could well have been the last laugh, but luckily not to be.

I was bit sleepy as I getting closer to home and I told my self, hang on for a second I am almost there no need to stop and have a nap or a glass of water.The last moment remember was passing the 20th mile post and then to realized that my car went out of the road (to my right) and hit a fence and rolled over and landed on the road facing towards where I was coming. That was very freakish and I had no clue how did it happen.Luckily for me not a single vehicle or a person was on the road at the time of the accident.If that was the case , the incident could have been tragic.When you saw the car aftermath, it was hard to believe that how did I escape from that fatal accident.Answer to that question was wearing the seat belts.Very simple.

So I still use to do it no matter how shorter your journey is, wear your seat belts.Food for thought for you readers, make a habit of it.

The fourth one was moving to an annex closer to my wife's office.The reason was my wife had to resume her work after maternity leave and needed to find a way to feed my daughter during the day time.It is highly unlikely that we staying at Yakkala and come to feed during the luncheon interval from her office at Bellantota, simply impossible.

So we took the decision to move to a place which within the closer range to my wife's office so that she can pay a visit during the luncheon interval and feed the baby.

Credit must go to my parents who volunteered to look after our daughter and joined with us to stay at Borelesgamuwa.I am sure that was a tough call to them.Thank you mom and dad for your support in big time.

Finally I would like to take this opportunity to thank my wife for all the support given to me during my difficult moments.She helped me all the time when it was required and always ready to listen and come up with the best possible answer to the situation.That is one of the most admirable aspect of her.And thank you for every thing you did for me.

Infragistics 2006 vol 3 CLR 2 installation failed in Vista

I have successfully installed the Infragistics 2007 Vol 1 CLR 2 in Vista.But I wanted to install the previous version of Infragistcs.

First I removed the latest version and then started installing the previous version.Then I got the following error message "Error 1606. Could not access network location %SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot\"

After searching the web, found the following entry from Infragistics.

http://devcenter.infragistics.com/Support/KnowledgeBaseArticle.aspx?ArticleID=9983

But I did only the registry entry change value of the key "PathWWWRoot" from "%SystemDrive%\inetpub\wwwroot" to "C:\inetpub\wwwroot".

Not needed to disable the UAC as suggested in the above article.

After installing I reverted the registry entry value back to the original value.

SharePoint development tips

Since I am working with SharePoint I thought of posting some development tips and tricks as I found so that I can easily recall them if I need it again for any reason.

• How to retrieve a list from an existing site and iterate items in the list

SPSite _site = SPContext.Current.Site;
SPWeb _web = _site.OpenWeb();
SPList myList = _web.Lists["<List name>"];

foreach (SPListItem item in myList.Items)
{
String title = item["Title"];
// your implementation
}

• Retrieve a list using SPQuery

Here the "Office" is a lookup field in the "Personnel" list.
So you need to use "FieldRef" and "Lookupid".

Check the implementation bellow.

SPQuery query = new SPQuery();
query.Query = "<Where><Eq><FieldRef Name='Office' LookupId='TRUE' /><Value Type='Lookup'>1</Value></Eq></Where>";

foreach (SPListItem personnel in teams.GetItems(query))
{
// your implementation
}

• How to use "AND" property in SPQuery

Here I need to select items where Office = 1 and Team = 2.
Query looks like this.And note that the reference fields are lookup type.

SPQuery query = new SPQuery();
query.Query = "<Where>
<And>
<Eq><FieldRef Name='Office' LookupId='TRUE' /><Value Type='Lookup'>1 </Value></Eq>
<Eq><FieldRef Name='Team' LookupId='TRUE' /><Value>Type='Lookup'>2</Value></Eq>
</And>
</Where>";

Blog it from Windows Live Writer (WLW)

Today when I was inspecting my tool bars in Windows Internet Explorer , I just found a drop down called "Blog It" in the windows tool bar.I curiously clicked on the "New Post" option in the list and got a set up wizard for creating a new blog or to connect to an existing blog.

Since I already have a blog, I selected the last option and provided the credentials of my blog.That is that and I am ready to post from WLW.

This is very easy since you don't have to log into you blog account every time you need to do a post or edit a post , etc.It's just a matter of selecting the option from the "Blog It" drop down in windows tool bar.

I haven't used any other posting tools so far.Any one who has done this using any other tool do not hesitate to comment about comparison with WLW.

Title winner for 2008 edition of Formula 1

The penultimate race , 2008 FORMULA 1 SINOPEC CHINESE GRAND PRIX will begin on this Sunday (19th Oct).And every F1 fans will keen to watch this race as McLaren's Lewis Hamilton can clinch the title on his second appearance after debut last year.He almost made history last year by being the first ever rookie driver to win the title, but he failed to do so.Will he be able to keep that away from his mind and do it on this Sunday.

With the current standings only 3 drivers have the chance to fight for the title, namely

1. Lewis Hamilton - 84 points -Team McLaren
2. Felipe Massa - 79 points -Team Ferrari
3. Robert Kubica - 72 points -Team BMW Sauber

Sadly for me, after my favourite Ferrari's driver Michael Schumacher, Kimi Raikkonen is out of the championship contenders with 63 points so far.

There are so many permutations for the title contender and all above mentioned drivers have a chance to become the champion.
But there is very little window of oppertunity for Robert Kubica to become the champion given the condition of the car (BMW Sauber) he has.

Lewis can do it on this sunday if he keeps his cool head.But should not by any means be under estimate the red Scarlet of Felipe.He will do every bit to become the champion.

It is interesting to read into the comments made by Renaults's Fernando Alonso who has a rivalry between Lewis Hamilton who was the teams mate last year in McLarens.

During this week end it is interesting to watch the start of the race and the turn 1 of the cercuit.We might see the safty car deployed very early stage of the race.

I am really looking forward to watch this race on this Sunday on Star Sports.

I would love to see Lewis pull it off this time even though I am a Ferrari fan.

Windows media player 11 cannot play the movie - codec missing ??

Couple of weeks back I got the movie "Death Race" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0452608/ ) from one of my co employees( Savindu ).

Since I was busy with the project work I thought of watching it after the release.
Just after the release I got my new laptop with Windows Vista installed and was working with setting up my development environment in it.So further delays of watching the movie.

After that I wanted to watch that movie and I opened it with the Windows Media Player in my new laptop.
To my amazement I could only hear the sounds but no visuals. I was scratching my hair and thinking what could be the reason for it.

Then I realized that one of the codec is missing and needed to install the codec.Then I start Googling and search for codecs for Media player in Vista.Non found which relates to Windows Vista in Microsfot sites.

Then I forget about searching for codecs and installed Real Audio player 10 Gold and tried to play the movie(.avi) file.

Bad to worst, got the same error and luckily it mentioned about the component that could be missing in order to play this file which is "ICM.XVID".

Then I Googled with that name and found the following link http://www.divxmovies.com/software/

Then I downloaded the XviD codec v1.1.3 and installed it.
Official site : http://www.divx.com/

Bingo here we go , at last I can see visuals and sooner than later I am going to watch the movie.

But my worry is why Microsoft cannot ship Windows Vista with all the codecs OR at least make avilable those codecs in their support sites.

This is rediculous.......

Microsoft Visio 2007 Trouble shoots

I had a problem with Microsoft Visio 2007 installed in Vista.

When I was closing the Visio application a message popup saying that the "Visio is not responding" and having a problem with COM add-in.

After doing some googling, find out that the problem could be on of the add-ins you have installed in Visio.

Then I opened the add-in manager in Visio and disabled the only add-in I had which is the "Sent to Bluetooth".I hadn't install this adding but it is coming with the default installation.

I have already disabled the blue tooth in my box, so that could be the reason to this issue.

But I havent tried out the other way round which is enabling the blue tooth and then closing the visio before disabling the add-in.

Setting up dev environment in Vista

Things I have done in Windows Vista while creating my development environment.

1. Installed the SP1.
2. Disabled the Business Contact Manager in Outlook with Business Contact Manager.
Reference : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/903094

Thanks goes to my co-developer Chatura for providing me the link.

3. Installing VS 2005 and VS 2008 side by side

First install VS2005 and then VS2008

Step 1 : Installed VS 2005 ( Team server architect )
Step 2 : Installed VS2005 SP1
Step 3 : Installed VS2005 Vista SP
Step 4 : Installed VS2008

4. Installing SQL Server 2005 developer edition

Step 1 : Run the owc11.exe

This will install the MS Office web components 2003

Step 2 : Make sure to remove the express edition ( MS Sql Server Mobile )

I did install without removing it and finally intallation failed. :(

Once again thanks goes to Chatura for helping me to trouble shoot the issue.

Step 3 : Install SQL Server 2005 dev edition

5. Installing Nant

Step 1 : Extract the nant bundle into a folder
Step 2 : Add the Nant.exe path into the environment variables (path).

6. Adding the Nant Addin into VS2005

Step 1 : Extract the zip contents into [User Name]\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Addins
Step 2 : Start VisualStudio
Step 3 : In Tools>Addin Manager check NAntAddin and Startup columns
Step 4 : Now activate the Add-in in Tools>NAntAddin
Step 5 : The Add-in should now be visible (you can dock it and resize as desired)

So far so good, I need to see how the box going to perform when I start developing again in full throttle.

New Operating System - Windows Vista

I got my new laptop with windows Vista installed.My first reaction to that is not that good simple because the bad user stories I have heard from my co-workers as well as others.

But I decided to take that challenge and start working with it.Then only you can figure it out all the speculations are correct or not.

Time will let me know about my decision.

The very first thing I did with it was installing the SP1. Thanks for my co-worker Chatura for the tip.

Many more to follow since I have to create the same development environment I had with the Windows XP which used for a long time.

I will post all the steps which I had to follow to create my development environment in my next post.

Site in production

Today I am very happy about the fact that, my first project using the DNN technology is in production - www.xtra.no
It has been a Herculean effort from all the team members and finally it paid rich dividends to all parties.
Customer,Company - Eurocenter DDC and the team itself.

My First Blog

This is my very first blog which was published year ago and I have modified it since I got my own domain name www.itrathnasekara.com

Thank you very much Chamindu ( www.chamindu.com ) who is my co developer for telling me how to get my own domain name from www.godaddy.com