Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

I was amused to expand the panel for a word meaning provided by Google's define feature ... and was impressed with the graph showing the popularity/usage of the word over the last 200 years sourced through Google's Ngram Viewer Funny things happen though when information is mashed-up from separate sources. For the word "nerd", there is a note that the word originated in the 1950s (originally US) but the chart shows it has been around since the 1800s. It probably meant something else earlier. Also see:  Track & learn about Aphonetic Words

This Week I Learned - *  4.9M organizations are using Azure AD to manage > 430M identities *  In mono/master 1,251 classes have been replaced with Microsoft's open sourced ones. With over 144 patches to MS reference source. *  NetWorx &  BitMeter OS are free tools that offer bandwidth monitoring and usage reporting * Amazon's Cloud Drive 5 GB plan which was free earlier is no longer available and has been replaced with a free 3-month trial of one of the Unlimited plans. Access to existing files has not changed. This could impact the Send to Kindle by E-mail feature * 10% of Amazon's total revenues come from AWS' revenues *  On October 24, 2012 Corning announced that over one billion mobile devices used Gorilla Glass. Gorilla Glass 3 is up to three times more scratch-resistant than the previous version * A 64-GB iPhone 5s costs $218 to manufacture and retails at $849. * Section 66A of the  Information Technology Act 2000  which curbs the freedom

To design and develop effective Cloud solutions, Azure developers have to keep track of evolving changes and key facts & numbers. The official information on the following needs to be reviewed frequently: List of currently available Azure Services   Azure Subscription and Service Limits, Quotas, and Constraints Azure Roadmap Azure SLAs Blogs:  Azure Blog ,  Scott Guthrie's blog ,  Cloud Solution Architect ,  AzureCAT Guidance , Azure in Education   Azure Updates Azure Pricing Calculator Azure Preview features This  Azure Status  page shows the status of services across Microsoft's data-centers around the world. Events Documentation by service   Learning Paths to guide yourself through the documentation for various services Azure SDK Breaking Changes Azure Code Samples Azure Quickstart Templates (ARM) Azure Case Studies Azure Regions & their locations

This Week I Learned: *  Currently, there are over 70 PaaS vendors *  OpenID Connect 1.0 is a simple identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol. OpenID Connect performs many of the same tasks as OpenID 2.0, but does so in a way that is API-friendly, and usable by native and mobile applications. *  There is a setting in the Azure Preview (Ibiza) Portal  that allows you to disable all animations to make the page run faster. * MapmyIndia, a India-specific GPS navigation and location-based services provider, now offers REST-based APIs for a range of services * Twitter now provides analytics for each tweet viewable only by the subscriber i.e I can see analytics for my own tweets. * 93% of Fortune 1000 use Active Directory *  Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, the beloved American comic strip, was the very definition of a cartoonist who hated provocation....In the late 1960s and 70s Schulz had a squeaky clean image. He didn't drink. He taught Sunday school. His b

This Week I Learned: * With Office 365 and SharePoint Online, you don’t have the luxury to deploy your farm solutions, which is where your traditional timer jobs normally live.  Azure WebJob can be used to schedule our tasks . *  Microsoft Azure Mobile Engagement is a new service that provides real-time actionable analytics to increase app usage. It is a data-driven user engagement platform that combines real-time analytics with push notifications and in-app messaging. *  OneDrive for Business and Sites APIs now support cross-origin resource sharing (CORS). Soon, Mail, Calendar and Contacts are next in line for CORS support. The release means that developers can call Office 365 APIs from both the server and client sides. Client-side calls result in developers writing single-page applications that interact with Office 365 APIs. Calls no longer need to proxy through a server-side service. Microsoft anticipates the offering will lead to a better user experience and better performan

Scott and Liam discuss Azure Search in the Azure Friday "shorts" series Highlights: * Azure Search is a search-as-a-service solution or a "poor man's search" equivalent of SQL Server FTS * Features include search box auto-suggestions, handling of misspelled words * No crawler involved, you have to push the content as JSON document. Instead of a pull by a crawler to index content, content to be searched is pushed Schema Content to index * Pure REST-based API service which supports OData so it can be leveraged by any platform not just .NET. A query to filter search (all fields) records would have querystring key-value as follows: &search=*&$filter=elevation+lt+1000 * To show a highlighted search result, use querystring key-value  highlight={fieldname} * How does it compare with Lucene, Solr? Search is fully-managed by Azure & it is easier to maintain & tune * There is a free plan that allows a sandbox environment to exper

This Week I Learned: *  Azure bills VMs by the minute based on size of machine and time running.  An A1 machine (1 core, 1.75 GB ram) will cost you $0.002 US a minute (approx. $0.13 an hour) to run but our largest G5 series machine (32 cores, 448 GB ram) costs $0.13 a minute (approx. $7.80 an hour). *  Regardless of which mobile platform you are targeting, you can use Azure as your universal mobile cloud backend *  EF7 (Entity Framework) we will be enabling providers that target non-relational data stores, such as Azure Table Storage. EF7 will work on Windows Store, Windows Phone and the Cloud Optimized .NET, Mono (on both Mac and Linux) *  modern.IE has a Site Scan tool (scroll to the bottom) among a bunch of other tools that can scan for common coding problems on the client-side. It is an open-source tool that can also be installed offline * More than four-fifths of Earth's organisms known to make light live in the ocean. More than 90 species of fungi glow in the dark