Omkumar's blog

Generally, I double-click on my .sln files from Windows explorer to open the correct version of Visual Studio (I have VS 2005 and 2008 running on Windows XP).One day one of my Visual Studio 2008 solution file’s icon changed to that of the new VS 2010 icon (with blue and purple rings). And ever since when I double click it did not open VS 2008 nor my solution file. However, I open VS 2008 devenv.exe separately and do a File->Open and open my sln file. This got me on my nerve today and wanted to figure out what happened. Many Google searches revealed that the sln file is now set to open with Visual Studio version selector and not VS 2008 itself. Hence the disappearance of the 2008 icon (with a little 9 on it). Further search revealed that if the Line formatter in the file gets corrupted somehow (could be due to your source control system – I use SVN and it indeed corrupted the file), then the VS version selector will not be able to identify the version. If you hover over the soluti

For a while now, I use several websites in order to find auspicious days and times based on Tamil astrology. Daily sheet calendars in Tamil provide all the information about a day. However, finding those daily sheet calendars online is a pain. There is not one reliable source out there. Either you go to one of the Hindu temple’s websites or you find local Tamil newspaper online. Even then you have to search there a lot. One recent finding seems to be reliable since 2009 which I got it from my favorite Hindu temple . But then the problem is every time I need to go through the calendar website and click on drop downs and wait for the image to load. For a long time, I was wondering whether I could add such calendar info, like nalla neram, raaghu kaalam etc. to my Google calendar. Data entry is a tedious work and error prone. Maintenance of those manual entries is also a problem. When I was browsing some other feature in Google calendar I found out this cool event called Google Event G

The coding experience is getting better and better. I just happened to get Visual Studio 2010 Premium installed on my personal laptop. I also picked up the April edition of MSDN magazine . It focuses mainly on the new Visual Studio release. Couple of articles talk about some of the many new features that VS 2010 offers, including Vertical edits and IntelliTrace. I was reading about IntelliTrace and how you can avoid “no repro” scenarios. More often we come across such cases at work. I will test out the IntelliTrace this weekend in order to fully understand it. I am sure it is great feature that will very useful for developers. Vertical editing – How long have I loathed text editors in general that I cannot replace text vertically. With VS 2010 it is pretty simple. Just Alt+select your text vertically and you can replace them all together. I wish they bring this feature to SSMS as well. This combined with .NET framework 4.0 features will definitely be a sure winner. I will explore m

For a long time I was not blogging because at work (which is where my idea-horse is running in full speed) all social networking and blogging sites are blocked ( may be one of the reasons is to not get distracted, but come on! I should be able to express my views when and wherever I can ). Then recently one of my friends, Madhu , was telling me about Windows Live Writer (WLW). Its pretty cool. I am able to blog from work now. I also found this post to be useful when was searching for cool tips about WLW. Oh! By the way I also recently started using Microsoft OneNote at work. It comes in very handy. Takes time for me to get used to it. Extremely useful tool when I do research online – be it finance or technology.