Pages

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Installing Windows 7 from USB

Installing Windows 7 from a DVD is the most common way and anyone won’t need any advices on that. Absolutely it is a very straightforward process and what you just need do is following the instructions. But there may be some situations where you need to use a USB as the installation media. For example, some notebook computers doesn’t have a DVD drive by default. Well, in my case, I had a desktop which it’s DVD drive wasn’t working :) Odd enough!



Anyhow if you need to use a USB stick as a medium for installing Windows 7, you will have to follow few steps. But with maximum care. Because there are some commands we are executing which will even cause complete disk formatting if you execute them in wrong manner. But no need to panic, just follow the instructions as it is.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

What is a DDoS Attack?

“DDoS attacks” (Distributed Denial of Service attacks) may not be an alien term for you by now. Of course it became one of the popular search keywords in the previous weeks; because a group of hackers called “Anonymous” launched an attack targeting some major banking web sites. ‘Anonymous’ claiming their “Operation Payback”, commenced several DDoS attacks supporting WikiLeaks. On 8th December 2010, a coordinated DDoS attack by Operation Payback brought down both the MasterCard and Visa websites. 



Wednesday, December 1, 2010

IFO++ : Memoirs of a Successful Event

It has already been a month after “IFO++”; the ICT exhibition held by University of Colombo School of Computing. As I told in one of my previous posts, this was planned and organized with the purpose of celebrating the 25th anniversary of Computer Science higher education at University of Colombo. I’m happy and proud to say, the exhibition was a huge success. It was held during 28th to 30th October at UCSC premises, which provided a novel experience to most of the crowd attended.



The credit of the success should go to all parties involved; undergraduates from all the current batches, former graduates, and of-course the university staff. With the immense dedication and the hard work from all parties, the success was a certain fact.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Bloggers, Are you there?

You already know this November is the Microsoft Student Champs Networking Month. So lot’s of things happening behind. New faces, new universities, loads of events at unis… We have done our last monthly meeting at Open University and reached IIT for an introductory session and several other activities are happening in other universities right now. Of course! this was a busy month. Recently number of new members joined the Student Champs community via our Web site, Facebook group and Facebook page. If you are not a part of this community yet, but you are a Sri Lankan undergraduate willing to become a member, do not hesitate to go and register on those web sites.


Thursday, November 18, 2010

Version Controlling : Working with Subversion in Visual Studio 2008

This is the second article to discuss about how to use Subversion version controlling system in Visual Studio. First part of this article discussed about how to install and configure subversion to work with Visual Studio. Also we discussed how to add a solution to the subversion repository. Now, the next step is to learn how to use this version controlling facility effectively. If you hadn’t read the first article yet, I recommend you to have a look at it before continue reading this one.

When you add a solution to the subversion repository, icon of the original project folder changed to a folder icon with a green check mark (See the picture). Also the solution hierarchy in the solution explorer get changed with separate icons in front of each file to display its’ state.





Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Hey, This is Champs Networking Month !

Sri Lanka’s largest and ever growing undergraduate student technical community, “Microsoft Student Champs” has broaden it’s horizons over the last few months. Since been commenced in 2005, it has been an active community. But from the number of community members, it didn’t had large quantities in the beginning. No worries! we do only count on quality more than the quantity. Champs only concern about encouraging members to be active in the society for their own betterment and for the goodness of fellow members. But year-by-year number grew rapidly.


Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Version Controlling : Adding Subversion to Visual Studio 2008

For a software developer, keeping a track of the projects and its versions is critical. So, people use to get the support of a version controlling system. Visual Studio 2008 doesn’t have an built-in version controlling system or mechanism. But still it provides you the Source Control Integration facility; which enables two options: source control solution based on the Source Control Plug-in API, or a source control VSPackage.

Here, in this post I’m going to explain how I add the the subversion support to my Visual Studio 2008 - Professional Edition installation. I have used AnkhSVN, a subversion source control provider for Visual Studio.  Along with that you need to use another Subversion client such as TortoiseSVN, in order to create a Subversion repository/repositories in your computer.


Friday, November 12, 2010

Create your own Ribbon tab in Office Word

Ribbon interface is the command bar that organizes a program's features into a series of tabs at the top of a window. In this post we will see how to create a Office add-in project in Visual Studio and create your own custom tab  in the ribbon of Microsoft Word. Actually, by following the same routine you can create your own tabs in Excel and PowerPoint as well.


First, to use the ribbon you must create a “Word 2007 Add-in” project in Visual studio. Go to File –> New –> Project.. and the “New Project” dialog box will appear. choose the “Office” from the project types and select “2007” which is under that category. From the templates, choose “Word 2007 Add-in”. As I said, you can select either Excel 2007 Add-in or PowerPoint 2007 Add-in instead of the word add-in, then you can create tabs for those applications respectively.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

IFO++ : IT Exhibition by UCSC

It is less visible that Sri Lanka has a history of more than 25 years in computing. University of Colombo and UCSC (University of Colombo School of Computing) holds the pride of being the pioneer in Computer Science/ICT education in the country - a legacy bestowed upon us by the father of Sri Lankan Information Technology and the founder of UCSC, late Professor V. K. Samaranayake.



Celebrating this unique achievement; Silver jubilee of Computer Science education at University of Colombo, we (Students and the Staff of UCSC) proudly presents the IFO++ (Ideas : Free and Open) as an exhibition completely dedicated to IT and Computer Science conducted by a Sri Lankan university. This is only the main event of the activity series carried throughout the year of celebration.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Champs Workshop at UCSC

Microsoft Student Champs with the purpose of empowering students with latest technical knowledge and assuming their community responsibilities for helping fellow students, reached University of Colombo School of computing for a single day workshop. Workshop was held at UCSC on 29th of September 2010 with the participation of more than 200 students. 



The event proceeded with two main goals. That is, to give an idea to the students about .Net technologies from an industrial point-of-view, and to motivate young students to take part in the world’s largest student technical competition, Microsoft Imagine Cup!

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Add Code to Your Blog

Well, have you ever put code samples in your blog? If you have did that, but without using any code syntax highlighter, it will certainly look like a mess. Don’t agree? See this. This is a code fraction for java. It doesn’t have any of those text-formatting, just typed using only the normal Blogger fonts.



/**
* This application simply prints hello world in the screen
*/
class HelloWorld {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hello World!"); // Display the text
}
}


What do you say? Is it readable or look pretty? Not at all! This kind of code samples will certainly drive your readers out of the site. Even we wrap the code with the HTML 'code' tag, it won't look much better. Therefore you should use a code highlighter. I was searching for that stuff and finally one of my friends tell me about a syntax highlighter. And later I found another technique. So I thought I will share it with you.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

1984 – Apple Macintosh Commercial

Does 1984 remind you about the favorite novel written by George Orwell? Well that's not what I'm exactly going to talk about. But this is about the favorite television commercial by Apple computers which based on the so called book. If you can remember, the novel 1984 depicts a time where world is governed by three superpower holders (superstates) after a global atomic war. And the government maintain a pervasive surveillance, and incessant public mind control to control the information and stop civilians standing against them. And finally the symbol of the book – "Big brother", the dictator of the Oceania (which is one of the previously called states) controls and decides everything the public must know. People are constantly being reminded of him by displaying "Big Brother is watching you"



Friday, June 18, 2010

Imagine Cup 2010 : My experience

Imagine Cup Sri Lanka is the biggest and the most competitive student technology competition in Sri Lanka. This program is organized by Microsoft Sri Lanka as a part of the program Imagine cup which held every year globally by Microsoft Corporation.


The Sri Lankan competition commenced in 2005 since then it gained the student attraction and now has become the most important IT competition in the country. In this year, it has reached more than hundreds of students who test their skills in five different categories and some other awards.

After this introduction, I’m proud to say that I was one of the software design competition finalists in this year finals. Me, and three of my friends (Chathika Gunarathne, Lasantha Samarakoon and Aruna Karunarathne) presented the “Green Globe”, which is our solution to address the poverty and hunger problem in developing countries. Our goal was to use our expertise in Information Technology to replenish and organize agricultural development in areas which would benefit from it the most.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Hello World !

Hi Everyone! First and fare most, since you are reading the very first post of my blog; let me say “Welcome!” J.

hello world in programming

I am a developer. Nowadays, it seems bit odd to be in the IT industry and not to have a blog. Why is it so important to have a blog? May be the answer is we really need a place to put our ideas, perspectives or share our experience on a particular matter. Of course, for software developers, blogs really mean a lot of help because someone else from anywhere in the world might have the answer for the problem you are facing.