Vadivel's blog

Irrespective of what technology we work with how many times have we landed on Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange website on a daily basis? If we ask this to any developer the answer would mostly be MANY times in a day :) Site was launched in 2008 and is built using Windows, SQL Server, IIS, and ASP.NET along with HAProxy, Redis, and ElasticSearch, all served via Fastly CDN. Fun Facts: 1.3 Billion page views per month They transfer ~55 TB data per month 4 SQL Servers (organized as 2 clusters) Stack Overflow serves 528 Million queries per day (Peak 11000 queries per second) Stack Exchange, Careers, meta serves 496 million queries per day (Peak 12800 queries per second) Over 360 databases with the same schema, which changes frequently They made use of Microsoft Bizspark program before getting graduated All their production traffic is served using physical servers &  Cloud services are being used only for storing encrypted offsite backups (Glacier) and for DNS (Route53...

What is common between these desktop applications/tools? Slack Wordpress GitHub Atom Editor GitHub desktop Microsoft Visual Studio Code Microsoft SQL Operations Studio All are built using Electron Framework   (Open Source) Electron framework lets us write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It is based on Node.js and Chromium.  It allows us to (re)use web components - HTML, CSS and JavaScript in the creation of desktop applications.  Then it can be distributed across platforms - Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.

A few years back, Microsoft offered a free upgrade to Windows 10. That was an exciting move as their main competitor Apple was doing it for a long time now. As a consumer felt that Satya Nadella becoming CEO of Microsoft has brought in quite many changes, and started embracing open source, which was initially surprising. So for me, it was a no-brainer to pick his book "Hit Refresh" from the store immediately once it was released. The first half of the book was more interesting where he talked about his life in India, his kids, love for Cricket, and how he got more interested in Computers than Cricket over a period. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's Book One anecdote of how he was first interviewed at Microsoft was exciting. He was asked - "Imagine you see a baby lying in the street, and the baby is crying. What do you do?". - As a young engineer, he has answered the question exactly as I would have: "You call 911". - The interviewer'...

During my days as an MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional), I used to mentor few juniors from the community. One of them used to be very low on confidence and fear of failure was hurting him more than anything. Recently while cleaning up my mailbox found few of the old emails which I have sent him - cleaned it up a bit and just compiled all those into this  article .

Follow this link to check out my first Microsoft Sway about VS.NET 2015 CTP download and installation

Check out this article Zero-day details underscore criticism of Oracle “They (Oracle) are one of the slowest to get things patched. It is astonishing how backwards they are in terms of fixing security issues.” -- David Litchfield, co-founder and principal security consultant, NGSSoftware The Apache module, which contains the flaw, allows Web applications to use the Procedural Language/Structured Query Language (PL/SQL) to dynamically create database calls. The code has security weaknesses that have been perennial sources of problems for the database maker. Oracle has patched various issues found by NGSSoftware four times, and each time, the company finds a way around the patch, Litchfield said.

Interesting read ... I urge you guys to spend some quality time going through this . "If you look at the number of published vulnerabilities in software and the number of users and compare Windows versus Mac OS you will discover that Mac OS has far more published vulnerabilities per user than Windows does so I think the data pretty much speaks for itself." -- 3ric Johanson, security researcher

Chrome is learning from IE !! Google nothing to be ashamed off ... feel free to learn from the leader :) Google yesterday announced it has added several new security features to Chrome, including two that were first popularized by rival Microsoft in Internet Explorer 8 last year.

Find below some useful articles on Deployability. Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit Choosing a Deployment Strategy The Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) for Windows 7 Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit 5.5 Understanding Application Compatibility Five Steps to Windows 7 Application Readiness Deploying Windows 7 from A to Z Windows 7 Enterprise 90-day Trial

Windows 7 related Download the new eBook on Deploying Windows 7 - http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9691265 77 Windows 7 Tips - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-in/magazine/2009.10.77windows(en-us).aspx Groovy Security in Windows 7 - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-in/magazine/2009.10.win7security(en-us).aspx Inside Windows 7 User Account Control - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/magazine/2009.07.uac.aspx AppLocker: IT’s First Security Panacea? - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/magazine/2009.10.geekofalltrades.aspx Useful Downloads Forefront Edge Protection: http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/edgesecurity/en/us/default.aspx Forefront Security Products Trial Software and Downloads: http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/en/us/try-it.aspx Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit for PC Security - http://technet.microsoft.com/hi-in/solutionaccelerators/dd627343(en-us).aspx Security Compliance Management Toolkit Series - http://technet.microsoft.com/hi-in/library/cc677002(en-us).aspx...

1. Firefox flaws account for 44% of all browser bugs - http://www.computerworld.com/ s/article/9140582/Firefox_ flaws_account_for_44_of_all_ browser_bugs 2. Snow Leopard's more secure than Leopard, but it's not as secure as Vista or Windows 7 - http://www.computerworld.com/ s/article/9137992/Apple_ missed_security_boat_with_ Snow_Leopard_says_researcher? taxonomyId=17&pageNumber=2 3. Security Essentials tests better than Symantec, McAfee - http://blog.seattlepi.com/ microsoft/archives/189100.asp Latest Security Intelligence Report Shows Resurgence in Worm Attacks Review the latest Security Intelligence Report (SIRv7) to find deeper analysis and recommendations based on data input from over 450 million computers worldwide to help you successfully plan and manage protection technologies. - http://www.microsoft.com/ security/portal/Threat/SIR. aspx

Educate yourself and your organization on how to build more secure applications. The SDL Developer Starter Kit offers content, labs, and training to help you establish a standardized approach to roll out the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) in your organization - http://msdn.microsoft.com/hi- in/security/sdl-starter-kit( en-us).aspx The Trustworthy Computing Security Development Lifecycle http://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/ms995349.aspx SDL Home - http://msdn.microsoft.com/hi- in/security/cc448177.aspx SDL Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/sdl/ Security Forums - http://social.msdn.microsoft. com/forums/en-US/sqlsecurity/ threads/

Check out these videos to understand about Microsoft Surface computing. Both the videos are really cool I loved it thoroughly.   Technorati Tags: Microsoft Surface Computing

For some reason I am not interested in renewing my MVP award this year. So I haven't applied for it yet. That said, hopefully i can be called as a MVP till this month or next month end max :)

Bill Gates turns 52 today :) Happy Birthday BillG.

I am glad to know that I have been renominated as a MVP in SQL Server category this year (2007 - 2008). Thanks everyone for your support and encouragement!

If you are connected to a remote desktop (Using Remote Desktop Connection) and for some reason you want to use "Ctrl" + "Alt" + "Del" it would open up the local machines dialog box only. In order to initiate the dialog box of the remote machine to which you are connected to make use of "Ctrl" + "Alt" + "End" Hope this helps!

If you want to restart a computer which you have connected via Windows Remote Desktop do this. Start >> Run >> shutdown -r -f The machine would be restarted after 30 seconds automatically There are lots of other options available with shutdown command. You can view all the available options by typing " shutdown /? " in the command window.

Error Message: The web application you are attempting to access on this web server is currently unavailable. Please hit the "Refresh" button in your web browser to retry your request. Administrator Note: An error message detailing the cause of this specific request failure can be found in the system event log of the web server. Please review this log entry to discover what caused this error to occur. Error in Event Viewer: aspnet_wp.exe could not be started. The error code for the failure is 80004005. This error can be caused when the worker process account has insufficient rights to read the .NET Framework files. Please ensure that the .NET Framework is correctly installed and that the ACLs on the installation directory allow access to the configured account. OR aspnet_wp.exe could not be launched because the username and/or password supplied in the processModel section of the config file are invalid. Solution: Check out this microsoft support article >> http://suppor...

Microsoft announced a “ BlogStar ” contest last year and the winners were announced in the first week of November 2006. How do I know that I am one among the winners? On November 5 or 6th I got a call from one Ms. Bharathi claiming to be working in Microsoft. The number from which she called is 91-80-65605725. She said that I have won a prize and needed my size and full contact address to ship a jerkin. As the line wasn't clear I couldn't hear properly for what exactly is this gift for? But at that time Blogstar was the only Microsoft competition I was participating so I presumed it to be that. So, you got a call from Microsoft employee and hope you have received your prize as well! What else are you asking for? Excuse me :) As the female's communication was not that professional I thought its some spam caller and asked her to mail me the reason for requesting my contact address so that I can communicate my address back to her official ID. That said, it’s almost two months ...