Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

According to Tim O'Reilly 's whitepaper , a company that has most of the seven features listed below may be considered Web 2.0 compliant. * Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability * Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them * Trusting users as co-developers * Harnessing collective intelligence * Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service * Software above the level of a single device * Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

SourceForge features the best projects picked each month based on their quality and success as an Open Source project in Project of the Month . Projects like FCKeditor , a XHTML-compliant online text editor by Frederico Caldeira Knabben, that was featured on that list is good stuff for hobbyists and application developers to check. There are also other good Open Source WYSIWYG Web Editors available on the Web to choose.

While deploying applications, you may require details of the SQL Server edition or other properties, like I did when I had to find if the latest Service Packs were installed and this function is useful to know: SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('ProductLevel') Edition ProductVersion ServerName Collation Engine Edition InstanceName IsClustered IsFullTextInstalled IsIntegratedSecurityOnly IsSingleUser IsSyncWithBackup LicenseType MachineName NumLicenses ProcessID

Microsoft Application Center Test (ACT) is an updated version of Web Application Stress Tool (WAST) , shipped with VS.NET. ACT provides the same basic capabilities as WAST, but is an updated code base user interface. While based on the .net Framework, it is capable of testing a remote site that is delivering content from ANY web based application. Weighty pages can be tuned by taking care of bottlenecks identified after interpreting the ACT results and performance counters .

Joel Spolsky , a longtime tech blogger with a huge following, writes fine and practical articles on various facets of software development and some of these has been compiled into 2 books - User Interface Design for Programmers & Joel on Software. He has devised his own way of rating the quality of a software team based on their practices. The Joel Test : Do you use source control? Can you make a build in one step? Do you make daily builds? Do you have a bug database? Do you fix bugs before writing new code? Do you have an up-to-date schedule? Do you have a spec? Do programmers have quiet working conditions? Do you use the best tools money can buy? Do you have testers? Do new candidates write code during their interview? Do you do hallway usability testing?