Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Google Sites

Few months back (February 2008) Google released a new web product known as Google Sites. Unlike Google Page Creator, it has more features to build and host complete websites for free.



The announcement on Google Page Creator home page says that they are getting rid of this service to focus on the new Sites service. The complete announcement is here:

We are no longer accepting new sign-ups for Page Creator because we have shifted our focus to developing Google Sites, which offers many of the capabilities of Page Creator along with new features like site-level navigation, site-level headers, control over who can see and edit your site, and rich embeddings like calendars, videos, and Google docs.

If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year. We are committed to making this transition as smooth and easy as possible, and we will post more details as we get closer to the transition time. You can also manually move your web pages from Page Creator to Google Sites or other service providers at any time.

I played around with Sites and found it very easy to host a new site. All it took was few clicks. Here is the site I created: http://sites.google.com/site/sameerct



It has a killer feature to host files. While creating a new page, you can choose its type as File Cabinet and you get unlimited version controlled file storage for free.

Here is a sample file I hosted: http://sites.google.com/site/sameerct/sourcecode/SilverlightApplication1.zip

Really cool… Thank you, Google!

Friday, August 22, 2008

SQL Server 2008

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (code named as Katmai) is now ready and the trial version is now available for download. See details here.

This major release after SQL Server 2005 (Code named as Yukon) has got lots of new features. Processing of delimited strings, C like math syntax, Intellisense in the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) are some of them. Read more here or here.

SQL Server 2008 Express Edition (Free version) is now available for download, but it's free Management Studio is not yet ready.


SQL Server never had a logo before. With this new release, now SQL Server has also got a logo. Read about it here.