Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

JavaScript Step by Step by Steve Suehring is a good "plain-English" book for beginners. Although it lacks both breadth & depth, it covers topics that are relevant to current client side Web development. Out of the 19 chapters, 3 are dedicated to AJAX. The author's explanation of HTTP headers & how they can be manipulated with the XMLHttpRequest object is pretty interesting. I found a couple of sentences in the book ridiculous Obtaining an MSDN account from Microsoft will give you access to legacy products, including older versions of Internet Explorer, so that you can see how your site reacts to a visit from Internet Explorer 4. IE4? Should anyone go out to please someone with a IE4 browser? addEventListener() is defined as a " cross-browser (except for Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer) event handler method " Now, that's a funny definition of cross-browser - excluding the most popular of browsers. IE4, by the way reminded me of the first Javascri...

The IE Team has been conducting live chats every month since the first IE 8 Beta was released. As per news on the IE Blog , there will be one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009 and then a final release.  Here is a compilation of some of the answers from the transcripts of the last two Chats that give a clue about what's coming - IE8 does not support different skins. However, you can create a custom version of IE8 using Internet Explorer Administration Kit. You can find out more about IEAK and different customizations it supports in this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/09/22/the-ie8-ieak.aspx We definitely want to implement opacity in the future. However, in order to do it right, so that it works across all elements, is smart about gamma, etc., we needed to spend a large effort, so it's not making it in to IE8. Beta 2 is considered feature-complete so we have no plans to add a large feature like download manager to IE8. IE8 does large file d...

Update (2013-05-16) - Google SMS Search has been shutdown. The txtWeb platform has some useful SMS-based apps to check a rail ticket's PNR status , spot current location of a train , know weather forecast for a specified city etc. Update (11/Aug/2014): txtWeb will now work only with the number 51115 and according to  info on their home page the number is valid on Idea, Tata Docomo, Airtel, Vodafone (upto Rs 1/SMS) Google has a cool new feature for India - Google SMS . You can send a search query by SMS & get back results by SMS without paying any premium charges. Considering that a majority of Indian mobile users don't have handsets that support Internet browsing, this should go well with tech savvy folks who need answers on the go. Let's say you wanted the dollar-rupee conversion rate, type 1$=?INR & send to 9-77-33-00000. The results will be delivered by a return SMS. Google has also added voice search to Google Mobile App for the iPhone . ...

In the past I've come across two great links on tweaking Firefox configuration settings, that I had to refer to yesterday again.  The first one is about how to do automatic Windows Authentication with Firefox . If you have been trying out some local website that requires Windows Authentication in IE & Firefox, you may have noticed a login box asking for your credentials appearing only in Firefox. To turn that off, type about:config in the address bar, locate the Preference Name network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris using the Filter option. As mistyping anything in the configuration settings accidentally can harm the stability of your Firefox browser, you get the following funny warning in Firefox ( click on the image below to see larger one ) - Double click on it & in the dialog box that opens enter it's string value as "localhost" or whatever is the website address that's pestering you. It's not easy to understand all the about:config entries , so ...

"I'm not opinionated, I'm always right" - spotted on a T-Shirt The book " I. M. Wright's Hard Code " is a collection of 49 opinion columns from among the many originally written "for Microsoft software developers and their managers, though they were drawn from my (Eric's) 28 years of experience in the software industry with six different companies". The book talks about the "folklore, customs, cultures, tools, processes, and rules of thumb that allow us (Microsoft) to build and ship the most complex software in the world". It has tips, tricks, techniques & thoughts about people and project management. It offers food for thought to developers and the chain above that manages them.  The author Eric Brechner is a software industry and Microsoft veteran. He talks through his alter ego I. M. Wright in a tone that makes you sit up & listen. You will love or hate I. M. Wright, but you can't ignore him. I. M. Wright is .. pr...

If you are keen about optimizing your website for search engines, Google has several resources - Webmaster Tools, Webmaster Help group, Webmaster Central Blog. Ocassionally they also conduct free Chat sessions where Googlers share tips & tricks and also answer questions. Here is a sampler - Suppose my website supports English and French. Should the English version of a particular page and the French version have different URLs? Any other best practices for multi-lingual site architecture? Matt Cutts: If you can afford it, I would do domain.com and domain.fr. If that's not possible, I would consider doing en.domain.com and fr.domain.com. If that's not possible, then domain.com/en and domain.com/fr can work. In webmaster tools, you can geographically target a site (and I believe parts of a site such as r.domain.com), which will help as well. Does inconsistent capitalization of URLs cause duplicate content issues and dilution of page rank? For example www.site.com/abc vs www...

Some answers from the Silverlight 2 FAQ that I found insightful - What is in Silverlight 1 that is not in Silverlight 2? Nothing. Silverlight 2 is a full superset of Silverlight 1.0. It is 100% compatible with Silverlight 1.0 applications and provides more powerful features and functionality. Silverlight 1.0 applications even benefit from improvements in media playback and performance characteristics of Silverlight 2 without any additional changes needed. When would a customer use Silverlight instead of ASP.NET AJAX? ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight are designed to be complementary technologies. Because Silverlight can talk to any AJAX application, both client-side and server-side, customers can enhance existing ASP.NET or ASP.NET AJAX applications by integrating Silverlight media experiences and RIAs into their Web applications. Conversely, ASP.NET AJAX can additionally be used to control Silverlight-based visualization of data or the delivery of rich experiences. When would a customer u...

Foxit Reader is a free, lean (just 2.55 MB) PDF reader that I have been using for more than a couple of years. Although Adobe started it all, I find it's Adobe Reader unwieldy. Being lazy I generally prefer keyboard shortcuts instead of accessing things with the mouse although it takes a little effort to memorize. Over the years, I've found myself using the following Foxit Reader (Version 2.3) shortcuts often - Shortcut Command Alt+2 Full Screen Alt+3 Hand Tool Alt+6 Select Text Alt+9 Text Viewer Ctrl+- Zoom Out Ctrl++ Zoom In Ctrl+1 Actual Size Ctrl+2 Fit Page Ctrl+3 Fit Width Ctrl+F Find F3 Find Next Ctrl+Shift+H Auto Scroll Ctrl+Shift+N Go to Page F11 Reverse View F9 Toggle Menu bar I found the Auto Scroll and Text Viewer features unusual & interesting. When you activate Auto Scroll, Foxit Reader will automatically scroll the pages of the PDF file. What's more you can enable the Full Screen option while it auto scrolls. I got a chance to try this out while browsing ...

For students aspiring for a career in the software industry or those who are passionate about building software, this should be great news. Microsoft is giving away the latest developer and designer tools that normally cost hundreds of dollars at no charge to verified students through its DreamSpark program. DreamSpark was so far restricted to a few countries. The goodies include the following - Visual Studio 2008 & 2005, Professional Edition SQL Server 2008 & 2005, Developer Edition Windows Server 2008 & 2003, Standard Edition Virtual PC 2007 Expression Studio XNA Game Studio 2.0 12-month free Academic membership in the XNA Creators Club This offering for students is much better than what they can expect out of open-source tools. These tools are available both online as well as offline on DVD through NIIT, Aptech and Hughes Net Fusion Centers in several towns & cities across India. My first brush with computers was more than a decade ago when I was in college. All we ...

IE 8 is the most standards compliant and feature-packed version of IE that is currently in Beta. If you are a web developer, you owe it to yourself to know how the changes will impact what you are currently building. Getting conversant with the new version can also help you plan for your future releases. To stay updated on IE developments, the IE Blog is the best resource. It was recently announced there that folks in the IE Team have authored articles for a special issue of Code Focus magazine. It is a available as a PDF file (7.2MB) & there are some interesting articles in it. Go grab it. Also see: Free ebook - Firefox 3 REVEALED

If you are not satisfied with the kind of screenshots you can generate with the PrintScreen button & MS Paint, you should evaluate these free tools that offer you a lot more options - Cropper is a lightweight screen capture utility written in C# with a lot of nifty features. It is available from Codeplex and the download size is 270KB. You can not just save the screenshots in JPG, PNG formats but also as Animated Gif & AVI using Cropper plugins . Snipping Tool which comes with Windows Vista is accessible from the Accessories section. With this you can "snip" a full-screen window or a particular window or extract portions in a rectangular or free-form format and save it as a GIF, JPG, PNG or HTML file. It also allows you to do other simple manipulations to the image like highlighting & writing on it. Paint.NET is a free image and photo editing software that has been drawing rave reviews. You can do more complicated manipulations to your screenshot with this. Th...

One of my favorite features in Firefox is the Error Console in the Tools menu. It's a Developer feature inherited from Netscape that has been enhanced over the years. Whenever a page has a Javascript error, the precise error message with line number in the source code shows up in the Error Console. When you click on the error message, you can jump to the exact line in the source. IE 8 (Beta 2) introduces a similar Console under the Script tab in Developer Tools. To invoke this hit F12 (for Developer Tools), CTRL + 3 (to jump to the Script tab which is third in the tab list) and then CTRL + ALT + I to go to the Console window. You can also choose to see only Script Errors. Also see: Developer Tools: Keyboard Shortcuts

There are innumerable features in SQL Server Management Studio. In my years of working with SQL Server 2005, I've discovered some that I feel are underused. Here are a few that have helped me - Tip #1: Open Object Explorer and new query on start up - If you have used SQL Server 2000 Query Analyzer a lot in the past, you will surely notice that the query window does not open on start up. Go to Tools > Options. Select the Environment option in the treeview and from the At startup drop down on the right, select "Open Object Explorer and new query". From the next time on, a new query window will automatically open when you start a new instance just as in the old times. Tip #2: Screen tips & Shortcut Keys - If you don't normally use keyboard shortcuts, there is a simple way to get acquainted with icons on the toolbar and their related shortcut keys. Select the Show Screentips on Toolbars & Show shortcut keys in ScreenTips checkboxes from the menu option Tools ...