Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

There were a lot of announcements at the MS Professional Developer’s Conference yesterday. Some interesting facts from PDC from Twitter & a live blog - 10 million downloads for IE9 beta - Ballmer .. Biggest beta ever. 500,000 downloads of the #WP7 dev tools already - @scottgu  #azure has more than 200,000 subscriptions to date  Over 1000 apps and games already uploaded to the marketplace. DataMart is Windows Azure MarketPlace The WP7 profiling tools run in the Express edition too HTML5 will be 'lingua franca' for Web apps, Ballmer says IE9 Platform Preview 6 is now available for download. Muglia: "We'll make Java a first-class citizen in the cloud. We will make PHP run great on Azure - or Ruby." Pixar is using Windows Azure. Channel 9 runs on Azure Why did Pixar choose Azure? Scalability: render farm for rent is not a new idea, but in the cloud, you can now scale these up as you need them. Sustainability: We need to ensure that a solution we put...

Did you know, you can download attachments faster in Hotmail as it packs individual files into a single zip? If the attachments are images, there is an option to view them as a slideshow without having to download those images locally. The slideshow runs using a Silverlight viewer that can also present the images in a full-screen format. Pretty cool! In its last make-over, Hotmail also introduced the Conversation threading feature which can be toggled. This flexibility also probably prompted Gmail to have the facility of switching views .

Christian Heilmann who is quitting his job as a full-time developer evangelist at Yahoo has made available a demo chapter from a prospective book on YQL . In case, you haven't heard of YQL, its " a technology that turns the web into a database and allows you to mix and match and filter before writing your first line of code. It also allows you to release an API without any infrastructure, knowledge of authentication and access control. In essence you can use Yahoo’s server infrastructure and processing power to unleash the awesome of the web into your products or the awesome of your data on the web ." Chris has to be one hard-core evangelist because he has published scores of presentations on SlideShare , numerous tutorials & even a handbook on Developer Evangelism Also see: Screen scrape with jQuery, AJAX, JSONP & YQL

Having sold 240 million copies so far , Windows 7 is Microsoft's fastest selling OS. The Windows platform will be completing 25 years next month. To look back at Windows history, check the Windows 1.0 artifacts that Ray Ozzie has shared at docs.com , which now provides “browser-based PDF reading” through a Silverlight-based PDF viewer. In other OS news, Google is readying its Chrome OS for the  fourth quarter of 2010 . Some points from the Chromium OS FAQ - Google Chrome OS is to Chromium OS what Google Chrome browser is to Chromium. Chromium OS is the open source project, used primarily by developers, with code that is available for anyone to checkout, modify and build their own version with. Google Chrome OS is not a conventional operating system that you can download or buy on a disc and install. As a consumer, the way you will get Google Chrome OS is by buying a netbook that has Google Chrome OS installed by the OEM. ...we are asking our hardware partner...

If you search for items frequently on popular sites (like Amazon), it may be easier to use that site's native search right from the browser. All popular browsers allow adding new Search Providers to the search box but it is fastest to do this in Opera, followed by Chrome. IE8 & Firefox require an add-on  to be installed for each search provider which internally uses a standard XML-based OpenSearch Description File . In contrast, Opera lets you quickly configure a search provider yourself for any any site that provides it. Let's see how to search StackOverflow, the programming Q & A site, right from the Opera browser. 1. Go to Tools > Preferences & select the Search tab in the dialog box that opens up. It contains a list of search providers like Google that are already added by default. 2. Click on the Add button & fill in these values - Name: Stack Overflow Keyword: so Address: http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%s 3. Click on t...

I found out by accident that its not just Chrome that has the combined search and address bar ( Omnibox ) feature - the address bar in IE8, Firefox 3.0 & Opera 9.6 (the version numbers are the ones I've tested on) can also double up as a search box. You can type your search term in the address bar of any of these browsers and press the Enter key to see results from your default search engine. This doesn't work in Safari (version 4.0 on Windows) though. Its good to see browser features getting consistent across the board . Also see: Keyboard shortcuts common to Firefox & IE8 View math calculation results directly in Firefox Search bar

Did you know, while only 7% of U.S. consumers surveyed believed information about them online affected their job search, 70% of responding recruiters and HR professionals have rejected candidates based on information they found online.  86% of human resources professionals surveyed stated that a positive online reputation influences hiring. (Microsoft Online Reputation Research, 2010) A Microsoft Privacy & Safety blog post  offers these tips for individuals to protect their online reputations: Monitor your reputation by searching for information about yourself on the Internet. Apply appropriate privacy settings on social networking services. Enhance your reputation by posting positive information in your online profiles. Defend your reputation by correcting online information about yourself that is untrue.

Sleep & Hibernate are power-saving options in operating systems like Windows Vista & 7. Sleep preserves whatever you were doing in memory while Hibernate writes your settings and the content of memory to the hard disk (to a hidden system file called Hiberfil.sys located in the root folder of the drive where the operating system is installed) and then completely powers down the system. The size of the Hiberfil.sys file is approximately equal to how much random access memory (RAM) is installed on the computer. Hibernation is more power saving than Sleep but waking from a state of Hibernation takes longer than waking from Sleep. Use the  sleep mode  you won’t be using the computer for a short time and the Hibernate mode when you are not going to use the computer for more than several hours. To disable Hibernation , type powercfg.exe /hibernate off at the command prompt.

Script Converter is a Google Labs product that allows the user to read a web page in a script of their choice (currently 11 Indian languages, English, Greek, Nepali, Persian, Russian, Serbian are supported). For example, if the user can understand spoken Tamil but cannot read the script, they will be able to view Tamil web pages in English (Roman) script or one of the other supported languages. The online tool does not translate any content but transforms the words on the page to its phonetic equivalent in the desired script. It also supports the conversion from non-Unicode encodings to Unicode, so that users can view pages without installing the custom font otherwise needed. Any web-based service that takes its required parameters as a querystring is a good candidate for a bookmarklet. Here's the code for my attempt at building a bookmarklet for Google Labs Script Converter - javascript:(function() { window.location.href=' http://scriptconv.googlelabs.com/frame?sln=...

Twitter , Facebook, Digg, and Rackspace are notable sites using various types of NoSQL implementations. Michael Otey explains why NoSQL isn’t really a viable replacement for SQL Server  - The term “NoSQL” was coined back in 1998, and it originally stood for Not Only SQL. So the name NoSQL is a bit of a misnomer. NoSQL databases aren’t relational at all. Today’s NoSQL databases are distributed data stores that are designed for very large-scale data access requirements. Probably the most popular NoSQL database is the Cassandra open source project. Cassandra began as Facebook’s proprietary database, but Facebook released it as open source in 2008. Other NoSQL implementations include Google BigTable, Apache Hadoop, MapReduce, MemcacheDB, and Voldemort. ...though NoSQL databases are designed for performance and scalability, they aren’t designed to support the atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) properties that are standard in relational databas...

The SharePoint Developer Documentation Team has launched a new blog called SharePoint in Pictures with the intention of  providing visual SharePoint developer content on a weekly basis. Illustrations & diagrams make information sticky. This is a great idea that should be extended to other MS products as well. This diagram from that blog neatly summarizes features present in the different editions of Sharepoint 2010

2600 Magazine has compiled a list of objectionable words that Google Instant has blacklisted. Several volunteers have submitted blacklisted words or phrases and the current count of such entries stands at 445. If you run a website that allows user submissions, you may face the possibility of visitors posting swear words and content that is not family-friendly. To censor user comments , you can take advantage of the above mentioned compilation of black-listed words to validate against. This kind of filtering is a work perpetually in progress. While on the topic of crowd-sourced content validation, did you know, YouTube has a copyright detection system that can find if a user-submitted uploaded video infringes on copyrights? Also see: Crowdsource your supplemental learning with Stack Overflow

Trivia from the " Inside: Google " program that I got to see last week on National Geographic channel in my part of the world (India) - Google has plans for taking the cloud to the sea. It has a patent for a  "water-based data center" Their offices have whiteboards everywhere & a lot of note-taking is done electronically Googlers don't just get free food at office but also services like free laundry & haircuts Many of the popular Google products like Google Earth, Docs (Writely), YouTube, Blogger are acquired

I thank everyone who made it possible for me to win the Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award in the ASP / ASP.NET category  again  for my community contribution s. As I mentioned earlier, the best part of the award is that you get to hobnob with folks passionate about Microsoft technologies - authors , speakers and other technical community leaders. I was among  1014 MVPs worldwide who were re-awarded during this quarter. Beginning this October Award quarter, additional technical expertise’ are now being recognized--Windows Phone Development and Windows Azure. Niraj Bhat is the first Windows Azure MVP from India.

Whether you need a desktop shortcut to a frequently accessed Google Docs document or a quick way to compose a new Outlook mail message, creating one is similar & simple. 1. Right-click the desktop and choose New | Shortcut. 2. In the Create Shortcut dialog box, enter mailto: as the item to launch for the Outlook new mail message or the URL of the Google Docs document for which you need quick access. Click Next. 3. Specify an appropriate shortcut name then click Finish. So the next time your boss asks you to email some report when you have closed Outlook while wrapping up for the day, fire up the Outlook New Mail message shortcut instead of opening Outlook explicitly.

Deciding which data access strategy to choose is not always an easy job. Here's a compilation of articles that discuss this topic - This Infosys whitepaper presents a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of ADO.NET, LINQ, Entity Framework & WCF Data Services. There is also a comparison of Entity Framework & NHibernate. Excerpt - ADO.NET offers best performance amongst its peers (LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, WCF Data Services)   C# guru, John Skeet's post in StackOverlow on the  pros and cons of LINQ   (work in progress..)

Eric Lawrence is a program manager on the Internet Explorer team & best known as the creator of Fiddler . He has also developed several IE addons & browser-related tools . I have found his blog posts to be insightful. His answers to difficult questions asked on forums are informative & comprehensive. Here's a compilation of his posts that I liked most - The Performance Impact of META REFRESH Forcing Internet Explorer To Forget To Not Remember Understanding Session Lifetime Understanding Cookie Controls Friendly HTTP Error Pages (work in progress...) Also see: Fiddling with Fiddler

Google Mobilizer is a free service that can: display stripped down mobile-friendly version of web-pages bypass corporate firewalls & allow access to blocked sites optionally hide images so that pages load faster, especially on a slow connection To get started, click on this Google Mobilizer URL -  http://www.google.com/gwt/n Google Mobilizer will not mobilize a page if the page is already a mobile page, or the website has chosen to opt out of allowing us to "mobilize" their pages. You can customize this  Google Mobilizer Bookmarklet for simplified access. Auto Google Mobilizer is a Chrome extension automatically load Google "mobilized" pages. Opera Mini is a mobile browser that fetches all content through a proxy server that reformats & compresses web pages down to about 10% of their original size. Related:  View clutter-free web pages with TidyRead, Safari Reader

Update (0-Jan-2015): Chrome Developer Tools provides a way to throttle connection speed / bandwidth & artificially limit the maximum download throughput (rate of data transfer) In the Pluralsight Silverlight 3 Fundamentals video course , the instructor suggests a tip to test a custom progress bar by mimicking a slow web server on the local computer. This can be done by generating modem speeds with Fiddler, a HTTP proxy, using the menu option Rules > Performance > Simulate Modem speeds. The speed can also be customized . This technique is more convenient than using the System.Threading.Thread.Sleep method to create an artifical delay with code. Firefox Throttle plug-in also allows you to cap download/upload rates and monitor current bandwidth utilization. This plugin seems to be currently removed from the Mozilla add-ons directory but as per this Firefox support Forum its available on the Mozilla FTP server(direct link to .XPI) . Also see: FiddlerCap make...