Ashutosh Nilkanth's .NET Blog

Performance Comparison of Java/.NET Runtimes - Technical Consultant Kazuyuki Shudo has published a set of benchmarks comparing various Java Virtual Machine and .NET runtimes. Slashdot also has an on-going discussion of the results.

I was looking at Lucene .NET for a full-text search engine implementation but I was surprised to find out that the Lucene.NET application library is not open source anymore. It has been relaunched as a commercial product called SearchBlackBox. Lucene .NET is the core search technology behind the popular Lookout plugin for Outlook (later bought by Microsoft). Too bad that such a cool technology is not open source anymore. Atleast the developers could have left the last stable release of Lucene .NET under a public license. I'm not sure if there's any other open source search library for .NET in the market.

I've just received an e-mail from the Microsoft .NET Delhi User Group regarding the Tech Ed India 2004 registration offer. The registration fees is Rs. 6000 (=USD 130) per person, but as a special offer you only need to pay Rs. 4000 (=USD 85) if you participate in a group of 6 or more. You will also receive MS Press Books worth Rs. 1000 if you register on or before August 7th, 2004. TechEd India will be held in 4 Indian cities, and its scheduled in New Delhi for August 25th-27th 2004.

Just came across this nice open source tool called MyXaml (dev blog), which offers declarative markup (XUL-like) capabilities to .NET 1.1 and 2.0, and ASP.NET applications. The website includes the product download (open source), documentation and articles on XAML.

Redesigning Microsoft.com - with CSS, without tables. A 62% file size reduction anticipated! "If multiplied out by my measly 1 million page views estimate, that 25 KB savings comes to about 23.8 GB in bandwidth savings per day, or 8.5 terabytes per year." Go for it MS!

A few days back, my friend Pankaj was enquiring about a particular case where he needed to automate the backup (in the form of SQL scripts) of all SQL Jobs (schedules) on a SQL Server (2000). DTS doesn’t support automatic scripting of SQL Jobs from what I could tell. I remembered doing something similar a few months back on a particular project but I didn’t have the T-SQL snippet for it, so I looked up a bit and found ... (complete article on my other blog).

The whitepaper J2EE vs. Microsoft.NET - A comparison of building XML-based web services is now online at TSS. The conclusions seem quite interesting, which also talk about the arguments for, against and supporting both platforms.

Is the MSN Newsbot a Google News ripoff or an “innovative” competitor? I still like the simplicity and effectiveness of Google News. It does what it says - dynamically serve up-to-date news. Probably the only thing missing with Google News is a RSS/Atom feed.