Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Visual Studio is a complex IDE that mostly looks simple on the surface but has a number of invisible features. In the Pluralsight video training course  Introduction to Visual Studio 2010  (duration: 4h 37m), Kate Gregory does a walk-through of the useful features of Visual Studio 2010. Many of the tips also apply to VS 2008. My notes - You can export & import Visual Studio settings . A whole team can identify best practices & share the same settings.  .NET tab in Add Reference lists assemblies stored in the Global Assembly Cache. There are 50 VS toolbars! They show up in context.  To learn the names of toolbars, right click on a toolbar & the currently opened toolbars are shown in the context menu with a checkbox next to it. Check additional ones that you require to make them show up. The last option of this context menu is Customize. This can be used to add new commands to a specific toolbar. This is one way to control what commands are on each toolbar. The keyboard

New York Times reports that there are now several people database websites that can aggregate personal information & present a dossier with  your age, home value, marital status, phone number and your home address, even a photo of your front door.  Snoops who take the time to troll further online may also find in blog posts or Facebook comments evidence of your political views, health challenges, office tribulations and party indiscretions, any of which could hurt your chances of admission to school, getting or keeping a job or landing a date. Many privacy experts worry that companies will use this data against users, perhaps to deny insurance coverage or assign a higher interest rate on a loan. Like the way some weight loss clinics charge for each pound lost, there are sites that charge a price ($75-$99) for removing personal information from the top online databases! Also see: Say Goodbye to Privacy Impact of online reputation on job recruitments

Inspired by Matt Cutts' 30-day challenges , I plan to watch 100 hours of Pluralsight online videos to get up-to-date with current & emerging Microsoft technologies. I find its faster to learn with videos than books. Moreover, videos are quicker to get detailed & structured info on emerging topics. Books are great as a reference but may not be suitable for emerging technologies. I hope to post my notes & reviews of the courses I finish. Here's a tip about Pluralsight videos to jump back to the last topic that you were viewing. I've been watching the videos on & off since several weeks now & the path that I've had to take after logging in, is to go the Course Library & scroll down to the course and then drill down to the specific topic to continue that series. I recently discovered that you can save a few seconds by clicking on your name in the header (highlighted in the image below) & it'll show you the link to the topic you were vie

As your web app project & the team size get larger,  there is a chance that the CSS style definitions within the stylesheets grow uncontrollably due to lack of coordination among the developers. This could lead to duplicate style definitions & gradually this could impact web page performance. Luckily, there are tools to detect unused CSS selectors per page & weed them out manually - Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox Extension (Firefox version 4 is not currently supported) that scans all the definitions inline & within external stylesheets and reports the unused ones. Audit tab within Google Chrome Developer Tools (Ctrl+Shift+I) lists unused selectors as part of its performance recommendations  Also see: HOW TO cut & paste just the text in a browser, not the formatting

Here are some of the new things I learnt at the Windows Azure Camp that was held yesterday at the Microsoft campus in Hyderabad - * Windows Azure Service Management API is a REST API for managing your services and deployments programmatically to do many of the things that you can do through the Azure portal. Usage of the API is free * Can the Service Management API be used to replicate a new portal that's like the Silverlight-based Azure portal? - Not exactly, some info like Billing cannot be fetched through API * csmanage.exe is a tool to manage your deployments and services, using the Windows Azure Service Management API * What you can do with Windows Azure Service Management API - - Integrate with Tools/Dashboards - Integrate with Build & Deployment - Nightly builds - Monitoring systems - Specialized scenarios - Auto scaling * Azure cannot (currently) auto scale dynamically. Options to implement auto scaling - - use publically available command-line tools o

Update (13/June/2015) - Microsoft now lets you experience Azure App Service for up to an hour with no Azure subscription, free of charge and commitment.                                                                                            - 0 -                     Update - The free Day Pass offer ran for a while but the promo codes are no longer being offered. A credit card (won't be charged if consumption of resources is within limit) has to be provided to avail a 30-day trial of Azure. Though not as feature-rich as Azure, an alternative to Azure is AppHarbor. AppHarbor is a fully hosted .NET PaaS with a free feature-limited plan , which includes 20MB storage .                                              - 0 - Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform offers .NET developers a great opportunity to extend their skills to this new platform. You don't have to spend a bomb to get started. While there is a  free trial offer  that doesn't have any upfront cost

Recent Items is a Start menu option that I frequently use to pick files I last worked on. I was surprised to find that option as well as the Run command that developers infrequently need, missing from the Windows 7 Start menu. It turns out that these items are just hidden. You can control showing or hiding any items in the Start menu. To enable  Recent Items or customize how links, icons & menus look & behave in the Start menu, follow these steps: Right click on the Windows 7 Taskbar & select "Properties" from the context menu In the Taskbar & Start Menu Properties dialog box that opens, select the "Start Menu" tab. From the Start Menu tab select the Customize button.  Select or de-select the customization options that you require

Browser tabs & Windows 7 Taskbar tabs are turning self-aware.  This is how my browser looked the other day: I had the summary of all that was happening within those browser tabs because of the ubiquitous AJAX code running inside all those webpages which was dynamically updating the page title. In Windows 7, a Taskbar tab representing a browser can show the download progress of a file being fetched within that browser visually as a green flowing gel. Hotmail  has added email notifications to its pinned site that displays the number of new messages directly in the taskbar.