May this Christmas be bright and cheerful and may the New Year begin on a prosperous note!Lots of love, joy, happiness and Merry Christmas

More than 100 studies have now found that the most engaged employees — those who report they’re fully invested in their jobs and committed to their employers — are significantly more productive, drive higher customer satisfaction and outperform those who are less engaged.

But only 20 percent of employees around the world report that they’re fully engaged at work.

Our first need is enough money to live decently, but even at that, we cannot live by bread alone.

Think for a moment about what would make you feel most excited to get to work in the morning, and most loyal to your employer. The sort of company I have in mind would:

1. Commit to paying every employee a living wage. To see examples of how much that is, depending on where you live, go to this site. Many companies do not meet that standard for many of their jobs. It’s nothing short of obscene to pay a CEO millions of dollars a year while paying any employee a sum for full time work that falls below the poverty line.
2. Give all employees a stake in the company’s success, in the form of profit sharing, or stock options, or bonuses tied to performance. If the company does well, all employees should share in the success, in meaningful ways.
3. Design working environments that are safe, comfortable and appealing to work in. In offices, include a range of physical spaces that allow for privacy, collaboration, and simply hanging out.
4. Provide healthy, high quality food, at the lowest possible prices, including in vending machines.
5. Create places for employees to rest and renew during the course of the working day and encourage them to take intermittent breaks. Ideally, leaders would permit afternoon naps, which fuel higher productivity in the several hours that follow.
6. Offer a well equipped gym and other facilities that encourage employees to move physically and stay fit. Provide incentives for employees to use the facilities, including during the work day as a source of renewal.
7. Define clear and specific expectations for what success looks like in any given job. Then, treat employees as adults by giving them as much autonomy as possible to choose when they work, where they do their work, and how best to get it accomplished.
8. Institute two-way performance reviews, so that employees not only receive regular feedback about how they’re doing, in ways that support their growth, but are also given the opportunity to provide feedback to their supervisors, anonymously if they so choose, to avoid recrimination.
9. Hold leaders and managers accountable for treating all employees with respect and care, all of the time, and encourage them to regularly recognize those they supervise for the positive contributions they make.
10. Create policies that encourage employees to set aside time to focus without interruption on their most important priorities, including long-term projects and more strategic and creative thinking. Ideally, give them a designated amount of time to pursue projects they’re especially passionate about and which have the potential to add value to the company.
11. Provide employees with ongoing opportunities and incentives to learn, develop and grow, both in establishing new job-specific hard skills, as well as softer skills that serve them well as individuals, and as managers and leaders.
12. Stand for something beyond simply increasing profits. Create products or provide services or serve causes that clearly add value in the world, making it possible for employees to derive a sense of meaning from their work, and to feel good about the companies for which they work.

How does your company measure up? What’s the impact on your performance? Which needs would your company have to meet for you to be more fully engaged?

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HTML 5 Specifications current as of April 28, 2011 (the day this blog is posted) can be found at:

• http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html

If you are trying to stay ahead of the curve with respect to the current web technology,please take a look at this specification.

You might be saying: HTML5!  I see infinite possibilities and I am not tied to anytechnology.  Good point, but consider all of the people who have to maintain your application in that infinite future.

Some of the questions you might be thinking about:

1. What about HTML 5 versus XHTML

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/introduction.html#compliance-with-other-specifications

2. A good introduction to HTML

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/introduction.html#a-quick-introduction-to-html

Have fun getting ahead of the curve, make sure to review and read the changesover the next few months!

All Windows Phone devices have a built-in Assisted GPS (aGPS), which is used by various phone applications including maps, camera, and search (to provide location-based search results). Developers can access location information on Windows Phone by using the System.Device.Location namespace, which is supported in .NET 4 and later. The GeoCoordinateWatcher class supplies location data based on latitude and longitudecoordinates.

Working with the GeoCoordinateWatcher is relatively simple. Later in this piece, we’ll explain in more detail how to work with that class and how to test your application on a Windows Phone 7. However, sometimes your application requires more than just a single location, it requires tracking movement, and you may need to test how your application behaves in different locations.

read full article at the Windows Phone Developer Blog

Interested in trying out the support for parallel computing in Visual Studio 2010 or .NET 4,  You can now use the MSDN Virtual Labs site to try these out from the comforts of your favorite browser.  Multiple labs are available:

• Introducing .NET 4 Parallel Extensions
• Introduction to Parallel LINQ
• Introducing the C++ Concurrency Runtime
• Introducing the Visual Studio 2010 Parallel Debugger
• Introducing the Visual Studio 2010 Parallel Performance Analyzer

Hope it helps..

protected void Page_PreInit(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
// This is necessary because Safari and Chrome browsers don’t display the Menu control correctly.
// All webpages displaying an ASP.NET menu control must inherit this class.
if (Request.ServerVariables["http_user_agent"].IndexOf(“Safari”, StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase) != -1)
Page.ClientTarget = “uplevel”;
}

සදාදරණීය ගුරුතුමණි ඔබට නිවන් සුව!!!

http://wmcreations.blogspot.com/2010/07/to-sir-with-love.html

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