Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

If you are Pluralsight subscriber, you can try out the course assesment beta feature to test yourself on what you've learnt. Pluralsight is currently seeking feedback on the Q & A and intends to make this feature available in the future along with the course with score tracking after community vetting. For those fond of quizzies, the current limitation of allowing only 10 beta test assessments every 30-days may be a little stifling. I hope  Pluralsight   also start a Forums section soon to let its users discuss topics covered in the courses.

There is a nice compilation of JavaScript & jQuery learning resources in this community wiki on StackOverflow.com . I picked those which are publicly available online along with my own favorites. Here's the list - Videos: appendTo video tutorials   JavaScript from Null: Video Series Ontwik JavaScript videos   Crockford on JavaScript    eBooks, Articles, Tutorials - Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke   Learn JavaScript - Mozilla Developer Network W3Schools.com/jQuery   W3Schools.com/JS Stephen Walther's JavaScript Reference jQuery Fundamentals  (online book by Rebecca Murphey with contributions by James Padolsey, Paul Irish, and others.) (work in progress...) Also see: Popular JavaScript apps dissected  Free Online University Courseware & Video Lectures  JavaScript: The Good Parts - photo gag Stanford's CS101 course now taught with Javascript  (thanks  @tkadlec )

Notes from Scott Forsyth's session " IIS 7.x's Configuration System " in his 52-week video lesson series  - - IIS 7.x drastically different from IIS 6 - IIS 6 - IIS path (Metabase.xml) & .NET path (machine.config, web.config (root, site, app)) - Metabase.xml - app pools, site config, mime types, compression, various settings like default document - 2 paths have merged & .NET becomes a first class citizen in IIS 7.x - IIS 7.x - Distributed & Delegated Config system - applicationHost.config (kind of replaces metabase.xml, guts of IIS) & administration.config (IIS Manager related settings) host most of the settings of IIS. Both files are in the %windir%\System32\inetsrv\config\ folder - lot of settings related to not just .NET but also IIS config settings can live in the web.config or app web.config files - Settings managed by IIS admin can also be managed by the development team as well. - Feature Delegation - what settings are allow...

The current ASP.NET Starter Kits page does not show older Starter Kits built on ASP.NET 2.0 & links to them that you may find in old articles may be broken. When I have to refer these useful oldies to folks in need, I keep going back to the search engine. Rather than waste time searching, I thought I'll place them all at one place. So here goes - Club Site Starter Kit Extended Club Site Starter Kit TheBeerHouse: CMS and E-Commerce Starter Kit My Web Pages Starter Kit Small Business Starter Kit Time Tracker Starter Kit ( documentation ) Commerce Starter Kit Job Site Starter Kit Media Library Starter Kit   PayPal e-Commerce Kit

A puzzled ASP.NET developer asked on the ASP.NET Forums why the formatting of the same ASP.NET page looked different in Internet Explorer when rendered by Visual Web Developer & IIS seperately . When the entire source code is the same, why should they look different? Dave Sussman has this insightful answer - It's possible the application is running on IIS under a v4 application pool, meaning it will be run as though it were a v4 application, so the control rendering might be different. Two things to do: 1. On IIS machine, select the application and from the Actions tab on the right, select "Basic Settings ...". From the dialog that pops up, select the appropriate application pool (Classic .NET AppPool for an ASP.NET 2.0 application). or 2. In Web.Config, in the <system.web> section add: <pages controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion="3.5" /> That will ensure the controls are rendered as though the application was ASP.NET 3.5, so sh...

I plan to look out for & compile interesting, practical, real-world examples of HTML5 features that popular websites have started implementing. I hope all the browser manufacturers quickly agree on a common minimum set of HTML5 features & get HTML5 rolling. * Google Docs now supports uploading an entire folder. There is a nice explanation on StackOverflow about how this is achieved  by setting up an attribute "webkitdirectory" on a file input element. Unfortunately as this attribute is proprietary, this feature doesn't work on all browsers. * The Windows Live team recently released a faster new version of SkyDrive that incorporates HTML5 features. "We’re using HTML5 for CSS animations, reflow animations and other features. We’re using local storage for various parts of our caching support. We’ve also worked on making our HTML more standards compliant, so that everything you see works in as many modern browsers as possible." HTML5 versi...

I first tried Google Transit in Seattle in 2008  for help with bus routes and wished it came to India as well. I was happy when it started covering local trains of the Hyderabad Multi Modal Transit System (MMTS) in 2010(it seems to discontinued now) and then wished it worked with bus routes as well. Being a believer in public transport as a way to protect the environment, I was glad to find out that Google Transit provides help with bus routes in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi. It'll be great if they also show the cost & distance involved in different bus routes and bus types (buses in Bangalore & Hyderabad have multiple types of services with varying ticket costs)

Adobe BrowserLab is an online cross browser testing  service (free till April 12, 2012) that has more features than Browsershots.org, the other free online cross browser testing service. However, BrowserLab currently covers a smaller set of browsers & platforms than Browsershots - Chrome 10 - Windows Chrome 11 - Windows Firefox 3.0  - OS X Firefox 3.0 - Windows Firefox 3.6 - OS X Firefox 3.6 - Windows Firefox 4.0 - Windows Internet Explorer  - Windows Internet Explorer  - Windows Internet Explorer  - Windows Internet Explorer  - Windows Safari 4.0 - OS X Safari 5.0 - OS X Unlike Browsershots, BrowserLab requires registration. The screenshots are shown using Flash so Flash Player plugin 10.0.0 or higher is required and Javascript needs to be enabled in the browser. Opening screen showing BrowserLab generate screenshots for a chosen Browser Set Some unique features of BrowserLab: - Preview full screenshots with mul...

This video course by Michael Palermo is useful for beginners to ASP.NET and ASP.NET developers who are yet to try MVC & WebPages. The seasoned presenter explains the difference between Web Forms, MVC and WebPages. He demonstrates how to create a new site, a new page, a simple input form, a data-driven list with each of the models. Some notes from the video - - A modern definition of ASP.NET – "Microsoft’s family of technologies to enable web development"; includes Web Forms, MVC, Web Page models - The Web Page model is a page-centric execution model, similar to PHP. Markup and code are both contained in the page itself, with helpers being leveraged to keep the code succinct. - If you have VS 2010 SP1, you should be able to see MVC3 options - A WebPage can be built with Web Matrix or VS 2010 - Site built with WebMatrix can be opened through VS - WebPage has the extension .cshtml. Works even without extension in the URL. - CASE methodology – Copy Always Steal Eve...

There are times when you just have a picture (of a monument, person etc) but can't frame a keyword for Google to search on. The search box on Google Images now sports a camera icon on the text box as an indicator that you can use to either upload an image from your computer (by just dragging & dropping with browsers supporting HTML5) or specify an url of an image that you want more info on. This image is then used as an search argument and the web is searched. This kind of visual search is already available with the Google Goggles mobile app . Although the results are not perfect in all cases, this is a remarkable development in terms of bringing complex computer science topics to practical use.

Now that I'm getting my feet wet in HTML5, I thought I should spend more time with features that are supported by all popular browsers rather than digging into HTML5 features that are implemented by only one or two browsers. Table showing browser support for HTML5 Input types from W3Schools.com I noticed a nice demo by Craig Shoemaker in the Pluralsight HTML5 Fundamentals course on feature detection with Modernizr that lists all supported features. Not finding any readymade sample similar to his script after some googling and lazy to write it on my own, I tweeted him to ask if could share his code. I appreciate that he did and I got it working locally after tweaking the CSS a bit to ignore a few images that he had used in his slightly old (it uses Modernizr 1.6) original code. I hope to work on it further while I learn more about HTML5 & Modernizr. Meanwhile, here is the HTML5 Feature detection script using Modernizr 1.6  (red indicates a feature is 'no...

No matter how big or small your ailment, you should never try to play doctor. However, there may be times when you want to verify details of medicines you are consuming. Typically, Indian doctors scribble names of medicines that are almost illegible but surprisingly understandable by the pharmacist. MedGuideIndia lets you check details of commonly used drugs in India by their brand name . Their search feature also shows brand names for a specified generic drug and you can find out which manufacturers sell that drug and at what cost. Composition of brands and comparative prices of various brands of same composition are shown as well. This website, aimed mainly at medical professionals, is not an alternative for an actual doctor but it helps consumers to be well-informed.

Google tells us not to focus on PageRank or “PR”, the famous part of their ranking algorithm, as a metric for success. It acknowledges that PageRank being a number is easier to measure than relevance which is what actually counts. Google removed PageRank distribution data from Webmaster Tools but if you still want to see in real-time how your web pages are faring, use StatCounter analytics . Note that the Search Rankings vary when searches are conducted from different parts of the world and at different times. The ranking you see displayed in your StatCounter account is the actual rank position that your visitor saw (for your web page) from the location they are in, at the time they did the search. Currently, this information is only available for some Google searches so you will not see a ranking beside every Google query or beside non-Google queries. In Google AJAX SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), when you click on a link Google redirects you to the search page and also p...

IIS expert Scott Forsyth has been running a video lesson series where he shares best practices, technical processes, tools of the trade, and occasional stories from working in the trenches. 25 of the planned 52 weekly, roughly 10 minute sessions are hosted on YouTube and currently available for free viewing. I checked out the "AppDomain - What it is and Why it's Important" & "IIS Virtual Directory vs. Application" sessions & found them very informative. I've jotted down some material from there & I'll add more as I finish watching the rest - * When to use Virtual Directory vs Application - - Use Virtual Directory when you want to point to a different physical path, when you want to share a physical folder across sites. + Use Application when you want: - New application root or - AppDomain isolation or - Subfolder to be in new application pool (2 folders of same site targetting different .NET Framework versions can be set to different...

Numbers tell a story. Interesting tidbits about India IT from the newspapers (work in progress) - Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), largest Indian software services provider, is closing in on Accenture to become the world's second-largest IT company in terms of headcount by the end of this financial year... TCS had 2.27 lakh employees on its rolls as of last December. Accenture, on the other hand, had a headcount of 2.46 lakh as of February this year. IBM is the biggest of the lot with a global headcount of 4.5 lakh.As on date, Infosys and Wipro have 149,994 and 136,734 employees respectively 23-Apr-2012 Hyderabad, which currently has a headcount of around 18,000 associates spread across the Gachibowli and Pocharam campuses, ranks third in terms of headcount after Bangalore that has 25,000 employees and Pune with 21,000 people. Chennai with a headcount of 17,000 is the fourth largest centre for Infosys. ToI 21-Jan-2012 Tata Consultancy Services has emerged as the largest re...