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