Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned: Nuget automatically creates a local package cache at %localappdata%\NuGet\Cache and you can use this if ever you have to work offline . Of course you have to had download the package at least once for this to work. To avoid checking in Nuget packages folder to source control , you can turn off source control integration for the Packages folder by setting the "disableSourceControlIntegration" propety in the nuget.config to "true". New bits are deployed to the Visual Studio Online service every 3 weeks Bootstrap 3 needs jQuery 1.9.0 or higher . jQuery 2.x isn't supported by IE8 though. Chrome Incognito Mode can be blocked through Group Policy . Firefox OS is the first device platform built entirely to open Web standards, with every feature developed as an HTML5 application.  Intex Cloud FX Firefox OS "budget" smartphone sells for Rs 1999 while the cheapest Android smartphone in India is Karbonn Smart A50s  which costs INR 269...

Online retailer Amazon offers an affiliate program but you need to be subscribed for each country's Amazon store program separately.  Amazon's links only work for a certain store.  Amazon doesn't mind if you incorporate the various Associates Programs into a single website  by geo-targeting your website's visitors but Amazon doesn't provide any tools to make it easy for affiliates. A-FWD's geolocation service allows an affiliate to create a single link and their service takes care of redirecting it to the store corresponding to the country where the site visitor is from, falling back to Amazon.com if there is no Amazon store for a particular country. If you don't provide your own tracking ids for Amazon stores in every country, A-FWD will use it's own (a_fwd-21 for amazon.co.uk) for those you leave blank. Amazon offers image thumbnails for products that it sells . By combining these two services, Amazon affiliates can create customized product l...

The Google Search page epitomizes web performance or rather, used to. Web performance guru, Steve Souders, noted in a tweet that the Google Search page now has 11 requests and measures 500KB when a user isn't logged into to his Google Account. Logged in is 19 requests. He questions if this is the new standard for "lightweight"? Due to Google's increasing focus on personalization of search results, it now takes a relatively longer time for results to be fetched and the page to load though it is still in the order of milli-seconds . It took 0.23 seconds to fetch results while logged in but it took 0.16 seconds with Google Custom  (which is lighter than the regular search page as it lacks a few bells and whistles) for getting results for the same keywords.  Notice how in the regular search page, the first record which is an ad is almost indistinguishable (there is a tiny orange icon marking it as an Ad) from search result that comes after it. Earlier,...

This Week I Learned: 3 ways to use implement ASP.NET Session State with Azure Websites - through external session state providers:  Table Storage, SQL Azure ,  Azure Redis Cache Service The Visual Studio 2013 Express edition for Web doesn't have a menu option to enable word wrap. The shortcut Ctrl+E+W can be used. Mono is a free and open source project led by Xamarin (formerly by Novell and originally by Ximian) to create an Ecma standard-compliant, .NET Framework-compatible set of tools including, among others, a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime. Mono can be run on many software systems including Android, most Linux distributions, BSD, OS X, Windows, Solaris, and even some game consoles such as PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360. Mono is Spanish for monkey. Mono's current version is 3.2.8 (as of February 2014). This version provides the core API of the .NET Framework and support for Visual Basic.NET and C# versions 2.0, 3.0, and 4.0.  - Wikipedi...

This Week I Learned: Windows Azure Pack (WAP) allows service providers (hosters) and enterprises to offer their “customers” Windows Azure like capabilities, hosted within their own data center. ASP.NET App Suspend is a new hosting configuration in Internet Information Services (IIS) in Windows Server 2012 R2. This applies to an app running on the .NET Framework 4.5.1. ASP.NET App Suspend enables apps to startup much faster and for each server to host many more apps. Deprecated ASP.NET features that impact performance & security - Starting with ASP.NET 4.5.2, the runtime enforces EnableViewStateMac=true . Even if you set it to false, the runtime ignores this value and proceeds with the value set to true.  The UrlPathEncode method was added to the .NET Framework to resolve a very specific browser compatibility problem. It does not adequately encode a URL, and does not protect your application from cross-site scripting. You should never use it in your application...

While searching for something else, I chanced upon these CDs of VS.NET Beta 1 distributed at a Microsoft seminar in Chennai and a Satyam I-way access card among the objects that I've hoarded. The CDs were meant to be run on Windows NT. I read about the Internet (mostly Sevanti Ninan's column in The Hindu) for a couple of years before actually using it for the first time in 1997. Having acquired a RocketMail account, it was a thrill to just send and receive emails. It was a challenge to keep the Hotmail mailbox size below 2MB as that was the storage limit that Hotmail offered back then.

This Week I Learned: HTTPS is now a ranking signal for Google though currently a very lightweight signal In November 2007, two years after Google acquired Android and five months after the launch of the iPhone, Android was announced. Lately, Android has even been running on a previously unheard of six-month development cycle, and that's slower than it used to be. For the first year of Android’s commercial existence, Google was putting out a new version every two-and-a-half months .  - arstechnica.com ...almost 80 percent of the 1.3 million programs in the App Store are essentially unused, estimates Adjust, a market analyst...Humin is the first contacts app that processes all its data on a person’s smartphone instead of relying on servers, meaning that the company won’t ever have access to private data such as e-mail and that contacts are searchable even without a signal.  - Businessweek PowerPoint can be used for a photo make-over Of America's 48 million "food insec...

If you prefer to learn about the content of a video by reading its transcript rather than watch a video, the way to get at the caption file (if it is available) when the video is available through a HTML5 video player is to look at the HTML source (right click on web page and choose View Page Source from the context menu) and grab the file name. You may look at HTML code like this corresponding to the video player when you look at the source - <video id="video1" controls autoplay> <source src=" http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Videos/BehindIE9ModernWebStandards/Video.mp4"  > <track id='track1' label='English captions' src="entrack.vtt" kind='subtitles' srclang='en' default >   </video> The file specified for the track element is the subtitles file. Internet Explorer supports two formats for closed captioning, WebVTT and TTML.   In IE11, support for Simple Delivery Profile (SDP) caption s...

This Week I Learned: The new SharePoint Farm Gallery option from the Azure Portal is now, by far, the easiest way to get started with SharePoint on Azure.  It is possible to run a SP environment for around 276 hours, or more than 30 days if it is only online 8 hours a day, on a Visual Studio Ultimate MSDN subscription with $150 Azure Credit. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning is an Azure Service. It is a web application that has a studio called Studio ML. You create experiments with this web application that represent your machine learning activities. There are 5 approaches you can use to create mobile apps - Responsive Web, Hybrid Web, Mobile Web, Hybrid Native, Native Apps . PSR.exe or Problem Steps Recorder is a tool that comes with Windows 7 (and other Windows editions that have come during the time of Windows 7 and after).  It’s intended for users to capture step by step actions and screenshots to illustrate a problem. It’s a great tool for its intended use. However,...