Beautiful and mesmerizing Maldives

Maldives, a set on Flickr.

Pics from my last trip to Maldives. It's a nice, very hospitable and beautiful country.

Solution: Virtual Drives not working in Windows 8

If you are having problem loading Virtual Drives on Windows 8 (most probably after you upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8), the following should solve the problem.

• Open devmgmt.msc and see if you have yellow warning icon in front of your virtual drives. Try to reinstall the driver for them and see if it fixes it.
• If it doesn't then uninstall the drivers. Goto HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} and delete the following values
• UpperFilter
• LowerFilter

After deleting these two registry values, you should be able to see your virtual drives in the explorer. These keys created problem for all my native virtual drive and also with the CloneDrive. I had tried uninstall/reinstall of clone drive many a times but in the end it's the registry that always helps.

Reference: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772156(v=ws.10).aspx 

Rising Petrol price in India under UPA Govt

Lol...
Courtsey: TheekHai Dr. Manamohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi
Source: https://www.facebook.com/swami.ramdev

Proof that excessive sunburn makes your skin darker.

Proof that excessive sunburn can permanently color you black.

Look at the dog sleeping in the shade, it's still white while the one sleeping in the sun became dark.

0x80070422 while deploying application to Windows Phone device

I’m developing an application for my Windows Phone 7 and today I got an error when I was finally ready to deploy my application on my Phone. I hit deploy and whoa I get an error that “WP7 - Zune software is not launched. Retry after making sure that Zune software is launched.” Sure Zune was opened and connected to my phone alright. It did sync and stuff but still no luck.

Luckily I found about WPConnect.exe found in your “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.1\Tools\WPConnect\x86”

Running this again gave ne the same error but at least with an error code 0x80070422

Now we have a little bit more information so I was able to identify the solution.

Due to my very slow system I’m working on I had disabled all the unused System Services and one of them was “zune windows mobile connectivity service”. This Service is used by Visual Studio to connect to your Windows Phone 7.1/7.5 and restarting it fixed it.

So in short if you get an error stating error code 0x80070422 or “WP7 - Zune software is not launched. Retry after making sure that Zune software is launched.”  one of the first thing you should try is to enable and start “zune windows mobile connectivity service”

 

Will be posting my app to Windows Phone Marketplace very soon.

Choosing a CMS for your website

One of the first and most difficult question while you are planning to build your own hosted website is “which CMS to use for my blog/website”. Googling for the best CMS doesn’t help either as all people have their own expertise and comfort level with their recommendation. I too have my bias towards the CMS I chose but since I had no particular experience with any of the CMS I have tried and I’m building it from ground up, it’s applicable to all newbies (I’m primarily a .Net developer so I haven’t worked with other php based CMS and mainly looking for a .Net CMS, people preferring php should use some other reliable resource).

I have tried Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke, Kentico, Blog.Net and blogger of course (had tried several others but don’t remember their names). I’ve given them a try multiple times but for one reason or another always comes back to the following two.

1. Wordpress, and
2. Orchard

Wordpress is one of the best CMS out there, mainly a blogging platform but can easily (and I mean really easy) be extended for website purpose. There are so many themes and modules out there that it simply doesn’t make sense to choose any other if you don’t want to customize via code (which is not a problem if you are a php developer). I prefer .Net so I chose Orchard over wordpress but on every other aspect it’s simply perfect, fast and extensible. You can customize it the way you want and most of it is available from admin interface.

Orchard is ASP.Net/MVC based CMS from Microsoft. It is being actively developed by a very talented team and I’ve seen a lots of improvement over the time in Orchard. Installation is simple. Developing a theme is also easy and you can easily build modules for Orchard (I ‘m still learning it but it’s really good).

If you are looking for a easily setup and extensible CMS for your website, choose one of these two without blinking. They are worth their cost which is free . I love freebies.

For simple blogging purpose blogger.com is also a very good choice. You don’t need to host buy a hosting space for your blog and it allows you to use custom domains (which is a disadvantage for wordpress free hosted blogs).

One CMS I would dis-recommend is DotNetNuke. It’s cumbersome, slow and not very user friendly (my personal opinion ofcourse). It’s highly commercialized and developed in VB.Net and you’ll find a lots of paid modules for DNN as well but since I like freebie I dint find it good. Also it was too slow for my taste when I last tested it (I’ve been using it on shared hosting so that could be a reason for slowness but I can’t afford costly servers not now) so it’s a no-no for me.

Recommendation: No brainer Wordpress (non-developers or php developers)/ Orchard (.net developers)

 

If you are using Orchard I’d highly recommend TheThemeMachineResponsive theme. It’s a simple responsive theme from the Orchard developers. I’m using it on my beta portal http://backup.sandeeprawat.com which will soon replace my primary domain http://www.sandeeprawat.com

[Update] Forgot to mention another CMS which is very good, light-weight and .Net based. N2 CMS is also very nice to work with. Had worked with it and is very easy and powerful.

If you are bored, sharing a nice song from a very talented singer Rabbi

Challa by Rabbi