Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

The video recording of Martin Woodward's two sessions at Tech-Ed, NA 2011, Team Foundation Server for Everyone  &  The Accidental Team Foundation Server Admin  provide an overview of TFS 2010 in about 2 hours. Some notes - TFS installation choices - Basic, Advanced TFS Basic Wizard - most compact TFS installation possible, provides only Source Control, WorkItem Tracking & Build services; can even work with SQL Server Express No requirement for Windows SharePoint Services, SQL Server Reporting Services Supports client installations - Windows 7, Windows Vista Grows when you grow - Client OS, Single server, Multi-server farms x64 Support Supports Java development Team Foundation VSSConverter command-line tool can migrate projects, files, version history, labels, and user information from your Visual SourceSafe database to your server for Team Foundation version control. This tool is included with TFS. Helps with Build Automation & Continuous Integratio...

To highlight its achievements in the 100 years of its existence, IBM has released a full-page ad in some Indian newspapers & a dedicated  site for IBM's 100 Icons of Progress . A few interesting facts & trivia from that list of accomplishments - IBM programmer John Backus and his team produced the first high-level language, FORTRAN (for FORmula TRANslating System) in 1957. Contributed to the rise of the Internet by designing with its partners a new high-speed National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) to connect US universities and 6 US-based supercomputer centers. Developed storage devices like Magnetic tape & Floppy disk Invented the UPC barcode system in 1973 The first IBM Personal Computer (IBM 5150) had a price tag of $1,565 & earned Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” award. The brand name PC has got so popular that it is now used as a synonym for a micro-computer. IBM engineer Forrest Parry's wife contributed to the development...

Steve Evans' presentation "Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5 for Developers" at Tech-Ed, NA 2011, had some interesting IIS tips & tricks. I transcribed some of them from the more than hour-long video recording on Channel9 - - Developers have Swiss cheese knowledge – they know a lot but there are holes in what they are familiar with. Certificates - Certificate Authority (CA) creates a cert for a specific site & date range, the OS trusts it. - Client connects to server, pulls down cert & check for 3 things - * Certificate creator trusted? * Host header matches? * Date is in range? - Configuring SSL certificates - A wildcard certificate can be used for multiple sites related to each other - You can drop a non-CA issued cert into the Trusted Root Certification Authority to simulate a real scenario while experimenting with a feature PowerShell - strong support in IIS 7.5 - PowerShell treats IIS as a drive DefaultDocument setting - DefaultDo...

Photo gag by an observant Niyaz PK  (click on image to enlarge)

Programming with new Microsoft products & technologies does not have to cost anything. Besides offering time-limited (trial editions) or feature-limited (Express editions) versions of its products, MS also makes available VHD s of some of its popular products. Here is a list of such VHDs that I've come across (work in progress) - IE6, IE7, IE8, IE9   Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Visual Studio 2010 Lab Management Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Project Server 2010 Windows Server 2008 The downside is that most of these VHDs are time-bombed and are VERY bulky. If after evaluating a product, you wish to seed these trial editions of the OS, SQL, VS, etc. with MSDN keys so the VPC doesn't expire, you can (as acknowledged by an MS evangelist in the comments section of this link) . Also see:  HOW TO try Windows Azure for free (without any credit card)

Google organizes " the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful " but info about some of its own products may be a little difficult to find. If there was a reference to  Driving Directions gadget & the Static Maps wizard on the  Google Maps API Family page, they could be easily discovered. As these useful utilities exist on orphaned pages and are hard to find, many developers may go on to create their own components . The Google Driving Directions gadget is a nifty utility that organizations can configure for their websites to show on a map where they are located. More importantly, it optionally lets users type their location & then shows the travel route visually & through textual instructions.

Stoyan Stefanov, a web performance expert, Facebook engineer, ex-Yahoo, smush.it creator & YSlow 2.0 architect, has released the draft of Book of Speed  for free & public access. Currently 5 of the planned 9 chapters are online. In his blog post announcing the release , he also mentions another free, online JavaScript resource by Marijn Haverbeke - Eloquent JavaScript . 

Chrome uses a installer that you have to first get which then downloads the latest stable version of the browser. If you have to install Chrome on several machines, you can grab the offline installer . That way, you don't even need internet connectivity for each install. I found this helpful tip on the official Chrome Forum .

This is a crude trick that I found out by experimenting. This has worked for some but it may not always work as there are multiple parameters involved. I recently needed to copy Contacts from a LG-Reliance CDMA Mobile handset to a GSM smartphone. After a bit of monkeying around with the available options, I found that you can copy Contacts to the CDMA SIM. I inserted the CDMA SIM into the GSM smartphone and could successfully copy the Contact details to the smartphone. Also see: Infographic: 3G vs 4G  

List compiled from Lucene wiki's link database & references in various online articles - Apple Disney IBM LinkedIn Wolfram Research, Inc. - Wolfram Research uses Lucene for internal tools, the Demonstrations project, the Mathematica documentation search and site searching. Pluralsight StackOverflow (work in progress) Also see:  Large sites that run on ASP.NET