Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

"He's living the Web 2.0 dream!" - Scott Hanselman What do ooVoo, veodia, 30 Boxes have in common? The weird sounding websites are some of the 100 top Web apps for 2008 that Webware.com has identified. In the spirit of Web 2.0 , most of the websites are in beta. I feel checking the winning websites would be useful for web developers to draw ideas from. I wish they had a smaller number of winners for different categories. If there are 100 winners, is it really a contest? In a way, the categorization & ranking reminded me of the old MAD Magazine tagline, ‘Number One in a Field of One.’ Related links: How to identify whether a website is Web 2.0 compliant

F acts about MySQL: Sun paid $1 billion for MySql which has only $70 million in annual sales (Source: SqlMag.com). MySQL is the "M" in LAMP - the software platform comprised of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl. MySQL is headquartered in Cupertino, CA and Uppsala, Sweden and has 400 employees in 25 countries. MySQL's open source database can be deployed across multiple operating systems & hardware vendors. MySQL is used by Yahoo!, Alcatel-Lucent, Google, Nokia, YouTube, Facebook and Slashdot among others. MySQL is pretty feature complete when compared to SQL Server but lacks the rich business intelligence (BI) stack that SQL Server offers, integrated reporting & an integrated ETL tool. Related links: List of Open-source software & proprietary freeware RDBMSs

"Problems with grammar have I." - Yoda M ispronouncing English words especially those which have originated from a foreign language like French or mis-spelling words while writing the way they sound can sometimes cause social embarrassment. WordWeb is much more than a cool & free dictionary & thesaurus. It has been a good & constant companion for me during the last 5 years. It has helped me with pronunciation of words that are spelled one way but pronounced differently. I haven't tracked the additions across versions but noticed that in the current version 5.2, it utilizes the default speech reader Microsoft Sam's robotic voice (on Windows XP) to pronounce words when you click on the speaker button. You have the choice of installing .wav sound files of 84MB size to hear pronunciations from sweet sounding humans. And of course with it's fine UI it scores better than a good paper-based dictionary or thesaurus. The online version of Wordweb is ad-fre

T he different mechanisms to persist data between user requests in ASP.NET are: Application Cookies Form Post / Hidden Form Field QueryString Session Cache Context View State Control State Web. config and Machine. config Files Profile This MSDN Mag article and this post by Tatham Oddie can help you decide which option is more appropriate.

J eff Atwood loves community driven .NET Open Source Projects so much that he gave away $5000 from the advertising revenue he earns from his blog. ScrewTurn Wiki was picked for the grant from among 95 .NET Open Source Projects on the basis of this criteria: The project must use an open source license. The project must use a commonly available method of public source control. The project must provide public evidence that it accepts and encourages code contributions from the outside world. Jeff's compilation can be useful to developers who wish to learn new tricks or incorporate it in Projects that have a low budget that need something quick & easy or because there aren't any good commercial alternatives - just a few reasons to be involved with .NET Open Source Projects.

W ith new technology & developer tools coming faster than ever, videos/webcasts/screencasts are turning to be a good learning medium than books. There is a good collection of free & useful material available for ASP.NET developers. Here is a list of such collections for easy reference: ASP.NET (58+) ASP.NET 3.5 (20+) VSTS (24+) ASP.NET AJAX (68+) SQL Server Express (13+) Silverlight (70+) The duration of most of them is below 30 minutes. Know of any other free learning videos/screencasts I missed? Please post your comments. Also see: ASP.NET 2.0 Videos

T here are tricks to disable pesky image ads & iframe ads but annoying Flash based ads are a different species. When Flash starts to be a nuisance in IE7, you can easily disable it by going to Tools > Manage Add-ons > Enable or Disable Add-ons and in the dialog box that opens, select the Disable radio button in the Settings panel. Firefox 3 is expected to have a way to view, disable, and enable plugins using the Add-ons manager (accessible from the Tools menu). Luckily we don't have to wait till it arrives. According to this MozillaZine KB article , you must close your browser and either remove the NPSWF32.dll file associated with Flash from your Mozilla application's plugins folder and place it in a backup location or rename the plugin file. To rename the plugin, add an "X" in front of the file name. ..the Flash plugin may also be located outside the browser's plugin folder. The Flash plugin may be installed in the C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash f

V isual Studio neatly alerts you rightaway whenever you commit an XHTML indiscretion. But what if you have inherited an application from someone who is not Standards-savvy & the pages are messed up with green squigglies? A casual coder may hand-code HTML without bothering about the case. How do you correct all the HTML in upper case across multiple pages & make them XHTML compliant? Select the HTML text in VS 2005/2008, right click and select "Format Selection". Sit back & watch while Visual Studio nicely arranges the code with proper indentation & converts the appropriate HTML tags in upper case to lower case.

A Mad Magazine Fold-In is a feature on the inside of Mad’s back cover that poses a question whose answer is found by folding the page in thirds . It embeds a hidden joke within a seemingly straightforward illustration . It is an idea pioneered and drawn by the now 87 year old artist Al Jaffee in each edition for 44 years! You will have to see it to enjoy it & marvel at Jaffee's Leonardo da Vinci-like creativity. Al Jaffee is my hero.