Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

I took the new Safari 3.1 on Windows , now out of beta , for a spin on my machine with Win XP Professional. In the first 2 hours of my surfing on Safari, I noticed a few bells & whistles but did not find anything innovative or adding any new value. Tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, security - features proclaimed as things you'll love in Safari are basic things end-users expect by default. The Spelling & Grammar option is a nice feature that lets you check them while you type. Safari's Find window sticks to the top like Firefox which sticks to the bottom but unlike the intrusive way it shows up floating in IE. It interestingly gives the count of search words found but lacks the type-ahead Find functionality that I love in Firefox. Safari 3.1 is apparently the first browser to support the new video and audio tags in HTML 5 and the first to support CSS Animations. I feel being ahead of time can be a disadvantage sometimes. Where is the usable content to view it? I noticed...

Citing Eric Lippert's classic essay " How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb? ", avid blogger Jeff Atwood in a recent post raises questions on the process overhead - Are large commercial software companies crippled by their own process? Isn't the radical lack of process baggage in open source software development not a weakness, but in fact an evolutionary advantage?

You can utilize the Silverlight.isInstalled helper method in the Silverlight.js file as beautifully explained in this article in Silverlight Developer Center on Yahoo Developer Network (!!) or adapt Nikhil K's plain Javascript code snippet . The YDN article has a couple of other interesting points about developing with Silverlight: An easy way to test the experience users without Silverlight will get is to use Internet Explorer 7's add-on manager to temporarily disable the Silverlight "AgControl Class" add-on. It is important to provide users who don't have Silverlight installed the best possible user experience. This includes providing the user with a preview of the content they will get in return for taking the time to install, keeping them within your page and automatically showing the Silverlight enabled content once the installation has completed. Unfortunately, currently all other browsers except Internet Explorer on Windows will require the user to restart ...

There are a bunch of editions for each. There are 6 SQL Server 2005 Editions: 1.Enterprise Edition 2.Standard Edition 3.Workgroup Edition 4.Express Edition 5.Developer Edition 6.Compact Edition It can be enlightening for Project planners & the deployment folks to know about the feature differences . SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Service Pack 1 will run on Windows Vista but has known issues with User Access Control. For all other editions of SQL Server 2005, Service Pack 2 will be required for Windows Vista and Windows Server "Longhorn" support when those products are released. SQL Server 2000 (including MSDE) is not supported on Windows Vista or Windows Server “Longhorn”. The Visual Studio 2008 Product Comparison page on MSDN has a comprehensive comparison of the features of the different editions: 1.Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions (VWD, VB, C#, C++) 2.Visual Studio 2008 Standard 3.Visual Studio 2008 Professional 4.Visual Studio Team System 2008 Architecture E...