Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned: * The  Azure portal  now joins the   list of sites that support keyboard shortcuts *  Azure’s Key Vault helps customers safeguard and control keys and secrets using Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) in the cloud . *  Michele Leroux Bustamante recommends migrating Cloud Services (which may use Worker Roles) to Azure Web Sites. WebJobs can help Azure Web Sites read from a Queue & replace the need for a Worker Role. WebJobs has the advantage that the history of jobs running can be maintained. *  The Microsoft Band fitness tracker is platform neutral, Office has been opened up to all Cloud services to fight back against iWork, iCloud, Docs and Drive . *  RWD (Responsive Web Design) and performance CAN play well together * ELSS schemes of mutual fund has given an average return of 66% in last year and 26% in last 3 years, turning the maximum 80c limit of Rs. 1.5 lakh into Rs. 2.49 lakh and Rs. 3.00 lakh r...

This Week I Learned: *  Microsoft's Power BI cloud service provides a free option for non technical business users to build dashboards & perform natural language querying against a variety of datasets. Its preview is currently only available to users in the United States. *  Batarang  is a  WebInspector Extension for Chrome which integrates with Chrome developer tools and provides interesting interesting insights into your AngularJS application. * Viewport units (vh, vw, vmin, vmax) are supported in most modern browsers. They can used for sizing things relative to the viewport size, a brilliant proposition for responsive design . *  If you've got example.com/something AND www.example.com/something both serving up the same content, consider "canonicalizing" your URLs. You can do this with rel="canonical" in your META tags, but that only hides the problems and makes the Googlebot happy. Instead, why not PICK ONE and serve a 301 redir...

MS Word has a Screen Clipping feature that makes it easy to grab only a part of a frame of a video or any content from a window that is open. I use this feature extensively while watching video tutorials & jotting notes. If you have to extract only the images, you can right click on each image & select "Save as Picture" but if you want them in bulk all at once, follow these steps: 1. Close Word & convert the extension of the file containing the images from .docx to .zip. One way to convert is by using DOS rename command - ren somefile.docx somefile.zip  2. A Word .docx file is in fact a compressed file so if you extract the renamed zip file, you will see a bunch of folders & files. The images in the document are in a folder called media under the folder  word 3. All the images under the media folder start with the word "image" followed by a number and have a .tmp extension. You can change the extension of all the files using a command l...

Slides from the informative webinar on " Microsoft Azure v/s Amazon Web Services " presented by Sandeep Alur, Lead Evangelist, Microsoft India * Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) = Azure Virtual Private Network (VPN) - view screenshots Related: Official Azure website: Azure vs.Amazon Web Services

The dates on which Hindu festivals occur may vary each year just like it happens for other celebratory holiday events like Mother's Day (which happens on the second Sunday in May in the US but is celebrated on different days of the year in other countries ). A quick way to know the exact date is to ask Bing. Bing "Instant Answers" can provide a direct answer for certain keywords. The Bing "Instant Answers" feature which provides direct answers can be utilized programatically through the Bing API

This Week I Learned - * The  new Microsoft Power BI  cloud service helps non technical business users create dashboards for free . It supports  natural language querying . *  It is possible to vertically scale (up or down) an Azure SQL Database on a schedule using Azure Automation. * Among JavaScript Source Code Analyzers, JSHint appears to be the most preferred *  ICICI Bank recently announced that almost 85 per cent of its transactions were online and only 15 per cent were done at branches. *  India has 833.02 million active mobile phone users as of December 2015. Around 90% of those are prepaid *  Social media is .. perfectly designed to manipulate our desire for approval * 75% of Israel's 8 million population is Jewish. * After a car crash, it takes .02 seconds for an air bag to deploy

The free ebook, Microsoft Azure Essentials: Fundamentals of Azure by Michael S. Collier and Robin E. Shahan, is a beginner level book that takes us on a tour of commonly used Azure services. With lots of screenshots, the book provides a high-level overview of Websites and Cloud Services, Virtual Machines, Storage, Virtual Networks, Databases, Azure Active Directory and Management Tools in with crisp explanations. It is suitable for developers, IT professionals & managers exploring the Azure Cloud landscape who may not have the time to scour through MSDN documentation & Microsoft blogs but just need to know the "essentials". I read the ebook with the Windows 8.1 Reader app  and found it very informative and up-to-date. I have heavily highlighted points within the book in order to review them in the future. Due to the evolving nature of the Azure Cloud Platform, it is hard to find books that are still relevant by the time they are published. Therefore, timely...

In Chrome, highlight just the text that needs to be printed and choose Print from the context menu. In Internet Explorer, after selecting the text that needs to be printed, choose Print Preview from the context menu. Choose the option "As selected on screen" instead of the default option "As laid out on the screen" from the dropdown in the toolbar. Optionally, the font size can also be increased by specifying a percentage to resize by. Google Chrome surprisingly, doesn't have the option to resize the page using the Print Preview option as in Internet Explorer.

Update (19/Mar/15) : There is now official documentation on Azure Subscription and Service Limits, Quotas, and Constraints  which lists the most common Microsoft Azure limits and makes the content below redundant. SQL Server continues to have an article titled Maximum Capacity Specifications for SQL Server for each new version that comes out. It has a handy reference of the maximum sizes and numbers of various objects defined in SQL Server components. I wish there was one for various Azure Services and as I did not find one, I plan to compile a list of numbers that you should be aware of to avoid hitting the limits: Azure Storage Maximum Storage accounts per Azure subscription 50 Maximum size of a Storage account 500 TB Maximum number of containers in a storage account unlimited Maximum size of files that a Block Blob can hold 200 GB Maximum s...

When I started going through the Pluralsight course " Lessons from Real World .NET Code Reviews " by Shawn Wildermuth, I thought it was a great topic and expected it to offer tangible suggestions that I could use a checklist. I'm a fan of checklists and I like the style & organization of the checklists in the Patterns & Practices book   Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability  (published in 2004 but never updated). I felt that the two hour course started well but got preachy. I wish it was more comprehensive, focusing on coding issues that impact projects significantly rather than touching upon a few random experiences. Key points from the course: - A code review is a systematic way of quantifying code quality - The job of a code review is to determine what is being done well as well as what can be done better. It is not a witch hunt. - Look for common problems, not on-off issues - Review 200-400 lines at a time - Avoi...

I learnt from the Channel 9 video Windows App Studio: How to take your app from idea to app in record time , how data-driven Windows Phone & Windows Store apps can be developed using the free, online Windows App Studio tool's drag and drop interface & then its functionality can be extended using Visual Studio 2013. Some of the important facts I picked about App Studio that I picked from that presentation are: * RSS, HTML, YouTube, Flickr, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, Static & Dynamic Collection-type Data Sources are supported. *  There is a limit to the number of “rows” in your Data Collection which is currently at 40 per collection . *  For large data, Azure Mobile Services can be leveraged. * While building apps with simple functionality, you can upload the final package generated by App Studio to the Store directly without having to write a single line of code. That way, you don't even need a Windows 8.1 PC to build the app. * To...

This Week I Learned - * To find out how many credits remain for the current billing month in a Azure account acquired through MSDN, head to this URL - https://account.windowsazure.com/Subscriptions * Microsoft now provides a Cloud Platform roadmap to find out what it recently made generally available, released into public preview, is still developing and testing, or is no longer developing. * Microsoft’s cloud datacenters provide the core infrastructure and foundational technologies for its 200-plus online services, including Bing, MSN, Office 365, Xbox Live, Skype, OneDrive, and Microsoft Azure. Today, Azure is available in 141 countries, including China, and supports 10 languages and 19 currencies, all backed by Microsoft's $15 billion investment in global datacenter infrastructure -  Scott Guthrie * The Azure SQL Database (V12) service update introduces near-complete SQL Server engine compatibility, greater support for larger databases, and expanded Prem...

With over a hundred million of India's billion plus population now online, e-commerce is booming . However, in the absence of an effective e-commerce regulator, online retailers have the upper hand. In the pretext of online deals to grab the attention of bargain-hunters, breaches of trust and privacy are being committed. When a unwitting buyer signs up for a deal, the online retailer gets a life-long right to stuff your browser with evil cookies that will keep tracking you, spam by email and text messages. Unsubscribing from their marketing messages is deliberately made cumbersome. I wonder if online buyers in India have any well-defined rights & simple ways for redressal in case of genuine complaints. For instance, how long after a purchase can a customer's address & saved debit/credit card details stay in an online retailer's database? What happens to customers if that database is hacked and that causes financial damage to customers? Based on my experiences ...

When I have time to kill, I like going through my blog visitor logs. I find it fascinating to study system statistics of visitors using  StatCounter which does a better job of providing me with friendly, easy to understand data than Google Analytics . Some findings: * Chrome version 40 works on Windows XP though newer versions of IE may not work: * Google is the biggest search engine referrer. Thanks to its spell-check feature I got some new visitors: * The majority of my blog readers have a screen resolution of 1280-1366px but increasingly I see resolutions in the range 1920-2560px - an indicator that I should revamp my blog layout * Some folks from Brunei & Macau find my blog of some use: * The additional notes I wrote for the Code Project article I wrote in 2006, Dynamically generate a MS Word document using HTML & CSS  and a SharePoint trick I discovered in 2012 to download multiple documents in a SharePoint 2010 Library at once ,...

AngularJS: Get Started is a beginner level three hour video course by Scott Allen that currently tops the list of popular courses on Pluralsight, a subscription-based video tutorial site. I enjoyed the course as there were practical samples I could try along while watching the videos. I highly recommend it to anyone getting started with AngularJS. Experts on a topic are generally under the curse of knowledge. They know so much about a subject that they cannot explain it to their grandmother in simple terms. Scott Allen is a great teacher though. He simplified the topics and applied it to real-world scenarios. He provided adequate background (Revealing Module pattern, Immediately Invoked Function Expression (IIFE), pronounced iffy) before setting out to explain progressively more complex AngularJS topics. The course material was well-organized. Thanks to him, I got to try out Plunkr , the online code editor (it's open source & IMO more feature rich than JSBin & JSFidd...

This Week I Learned - *  Echoprint is an open source music identification system that allows anyone to build music fingerprinting into their application. Echoprint “listens” to audio on a phone or on your computer to figure out what song it is. * Automated Insights can produce 2,000 automated articles per second. Their Wordsmith platform generates millions of articles per week for partners like Associated Press, Allstate, Comcast, and Yahoo - The Verge * Microsoft spends upwards of 11 percent of revenue on R&D * Alex Kipman is the creator behind Microsoft's Kinect motion controller & the chief inventor of Hololens * Thankfully, there is a page that describes icons on Windows Phone * In 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he resisted apps, preferring his customers to access the web through their Safari browsers. But after that approach tanked, in 2008 he released a software development kit for app makers and launched the App Store - Wired ...