Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

I f you need a dynamic Menu for your ASP.NET website that should show up differently for different kinds of users, you need not look beyond the ASP.NET 2.0 Menu. It has umpteen properties (over 75!) that can be set declaratively to configure beautiful standards compliant Menus with no effort at all. But if all you need is a simple static Menu to navigate through a few pages, the ASP.NET 2.0 Menu could be overkill. Instead, you can consider building your own lightweight Tab Menu Control and play as you like with it. This Simple Tab Menu Control leverages the power of Javascript & DOM to detect the hyperlink that matches the page visitor is on and highlights it. As all the processing is done on the client-side with Javascript & CSS, it is relatively faster & light-weight. Check this no frills, bare-bones example... If you need a lightweight multi-level static menu for your ASP.NET pages, you can adapt & wrap the Suckerfish Menu into a User Control.

Wikipedia is a free, multilingual, open content encyclopedia project launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. As of April 2008, Wikipedia had over 10 million articles in 253 languages, about a quarter of which are in English. Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, or database queries (such as for Wikipedia:Maintenance). All text content is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). If you need only English content, you can fetch the English Wikipedia SQL (or rather MySQL) dump . You can also access any article programmatically, one at a time in XML or as an RSS Feed . This is what Answers.com possibly uses to fetch aggregated results including Wikipedia content, for user queries.

Take a look at Michael Flanakin's comparison of Web-Based Issue Trackers next time you need a free Bug Tracking/Issue Tracking tool and pick the one with the features you need. (Thanks Corey Trager ) And if you need one for a quick non-confidential personal project, there are also some hosted online for free to choose from - Defectr , Unlimited Accounts AceProject Basic LightHOUSE Free edition, 1 project with 10 users Issue Tracking Anywhere , supports up to 3 users BugHost Lite , supports up to 3 users SourceForge.net and CodePlex are popular open source project hosting websites that also provide supporting features like source control, discussion forums and issue tracking. Related link: Rating the quality of a software team

S ix months ago I signed up for the BSNL Broadband Internet Home 500 Combo Plan . While the bandwidth and speed offered under the plan have been decent, all my interactions with the State-owned BSNL staff have been unpleasant. The unhelpful local Help Desk, lethargic Billing clerk, tip-seeking Linesman, and the discourteous Customer Service personnel (Helpline # in Hyderabad - 12678) were painfully slow in discharging their duties and tested my patience to no end. They are all yet to get over their bureaucratic mindset. I paid Rs. 1500 (deposits for the Landline phone & Broadband Internet service) initially. The monthly charge is Rs 629 (Rs 550 for the Internet + 60 for the Modem monthly charge + service charges). If you pay your bill online on their sloppy & extremely amateurish website, you get a 1% discount. Never mind if perky Priety Zinta swears by BSNL Broadband in the ad (she is paid to act), go for BSNL Broadband only if you can endure bureaucratic behavior.

For certain time-sensitive info on the Web to be useful, it helps to know when a particular web page was posted. Google now extracts and shows the byline date from pages that have one . The byline dates are presented uniformly even though they may be in different formats. Search Google by providing the URL of the web page whose posting date you want to find. If this does not help, try the Internet Archive Wayback Machine . Related link: HOW TO get back a missing web page or website

The MSDN Webcasts site has a nice bunch of downloadable webcasts (beside Virtual Labs & Podcasts) on SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005 Michael K. Campbell has recently launched www.sqlservervideos.com –a site that provides free SQL Server training videos. There aren't too many videos for now, but it's something to watch out for. In the Windows Dev Pro Update Newsletter, he has shared deployment issues that he has faced while putting up the website that made for interesting reading. I'm excerpting it here as I didn't find an online link for the same material - 403 Access Forbidden. Initially, every page on my site greeted me with this error. As an IIS 6 veteran, my initial thought was that I’d forgotten to ACL my files and content. But the site was running on IIS 7 where automatic worker process injection removes that headache. As such, my first thought was that maybe something like UrlScan was interfering with my URL Rewriting Engine. Happily, however, the site...