Book Review - CSharp for Sharp Kids

Using real-world analogies, Martin Dreyer does a great job of explaining the introductory concepts of C# & OOP to absolute beginners in the free E-Book C# for Sharp Kids. The 2.9 MB MSI file, containing the E-Book in MS Word format & code samples, can be downloaded from the Kid's Corner of MSDN's Beginner Developer Learning Center. The code samples are expected to run with Visual C# 2005 Express Edition but you can get it to work on a newer...

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Channel 9 "But Why?" Series

Did you know the alternative names that were initially thought out for Windows were "Interface Manager" & "Microsoft Desktop"? What's in a name? A lot, in retrospect.If you are interested in oddities and little known answers to mysterious questions about Microsoft products, check out the Channel 9 "But Why?" Series from the folks who brought you "The History of Microsoft"45...

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Image meta-search with SearchLite

Back in 2002, I wrote a small JavaScript program that searches multiple sites at once. A friend of mine keeps searching on the Web for reusable images & photos for personal use. I adapted my old script for him so that he can search multiple sites at once. The script takes advantage of the fact that the term to search on can be appended as a querystring value to the search pages supplied by websites providing freely reusable images.Also see:Free...

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Internet Banking risks - Phishing, Vishing & now SIM-swap frauds

ICICI Bank has been running a Customer Education Series in Indian newspapers & they are one of the few Indian banks that bother to educate the public about banking facts that are not generally known. The columns in the series are available on the Web only as PDFs (AFAIK) & they do not seem to be easily reachable.I've heard of Phishing & Vishing, but SIM-swap fraud was news to me. Excerpt from a today's column on SIM-swap fraud -Your mobile...

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"Export to Excel" without using components in a WinForms app

Way back in 2004, I wrote a program to generate a Word file dynamically without using any components in a Web application. The technique I used makes use of the fact that documents can be converted from Word/Excel to HTML (File->Save As) and vice versa.  When you manually save an Office document as a Web page, you can see from its source that it renders some interesting HTML, CSS & Office XML. By understanding and emulating this conversion technique programmatically, we can generate Word or Excel documents through web pages.This snippet...

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Google Script Converter transliterates between Indian languages

If you can speak & understand one of 11 Indian languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu) but cannot read in that language, Google Script Converter can help you out by transliterating it into a language among them that you can read or to English. So let's say you are a Hindi speaker living in Hyderabad who can understand Telugu but cannot read local news in an online Telugu newspaper...

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"Open With Google Docs Viewer" IE8 Accelerator

Accelerators in IE8 work on text within a web page & let you access popular web services from the context menu. For instance, to translate a word you can highlight text from any webpage, and then click on the blue Accelerator icon that appears above your selection & choose the Translate with Live Search Accelerator.I recently built a "Open With Google Docs Viewer" IE8 Accelerator that lets you view a PDF, Powerpoint or TIFF document on the...

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Screen scrape with jQuery, AJAX, JSONP & YQL

Since reading this excellent article about scraping content from a Wikipedia page using Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) as a proxy for cross-domain Ajax, I'm hooked to YQL. YQL helps in circumventing the same-origin policy that prevents a script loaded from one domain from getting or manipulating properties of a document from another domain.  YQL has been around for about 2 years now & last year Yahoo introduced the capability to execute the...

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Deleting cookies doesn't clear Hotmail's "Remember me" in IE8

An anxious Hotmail/Passport user was bothered that in IE 8 his Accounts showed up even after deleting cookies. He posted this concern on the MSDN IE Web Development Forum.I verified this in IE 8 (on Windows XP SP2 & Vista) by clicking the Delete button in the Browsing History section in the General Tab of Internet Options. I believed this "Remember me" feature depended on cookies & should go away on deleting cookies. I even closed the browser...

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View Selection Source in IE

One of the features I like in Firefox as a developer is the "View Selection Source" option that you can choose  from the context menu to view dynamically rendered source of a desired portion of the web page. This feature helps you focus on a specific portion of a web page that you want to investigate instead of getting the entire HTML source. IE 8's Developer Tools lets you view the HTML source for selected content as well but using it is cumbersome....

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HOW TO get files cached by Safari & Firefox

Unlike in IE 8 where you can view temporary files easily (Tools > Internet Options | General | Browsing History | Settings | View files), fetching temporary files that are cached is not straight-forward in Safari on Windows & Firefox.I learnt from this WebmasterWorld forum posting that on Windows XP, the file-path for the Safari cache is something like this:C:\Document and Settings\[username]\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\SafariThe...

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Sharepoint Case Studies

A good way to understand how to leverage Sharepoint is by reading about interesting solutions, scenarios & successful case studies. Here's a meta-list (work in progress): Top 17 case studies from the MS Customer Evidence teamMicrosoft Case Studies Public Web Sites hosted on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007Also see:Free Sharepoint 2007 goodies on Microsoft e-Learn...

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Read this if you are installing VS 2010 Web Developer Express on Windows XP

Be aware that the installation of Visual Web Developer 2010 Express on Windows XP will work only if it has SP3. I guess this holds true for other Express products as well. I didn't find an explicit page describing the minimum system requirements and I learnt about this by trial & error or rather after reading this thread on the IIS.NET Forums after encountering the error. The post also provides a link to an ISO image of Windows SP3 (544.9 MB)...

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Free Photos & Images

Images & illustrations make content lively & sticky. Commercial websites can affoard to pay for slick images but thankfully for the rest of us, there are a good many sites that offer free photos & images. I spotted a list of over a dozen such sites with liberal licensing policies on the morgueFile website (at the bottom of the home page). morgueFile allows usage without attribution.Smashing Magazine also has a nice compilation of free...

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TechEd India 2010 starts with a Bang

The 3-day TechEd India event started in Bangalore with a keynote by Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division, Microsoft. He announced the availability of the much awaited Visual Studio 2010 & and .NET Framework 4. (Photo by @msigeek)If you are missing the event (like me), catch the action on the slick TechEd India website. While you are at that site, there's a neat Silverlight-based Win-a-Min Quiz contest that you should try out....

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My favorite jQuery plugins

jQuery, John Resig's brain-child, has an irresistible charm that attracts legions of followers. Many of these followers selflessly share plugins they create for free. So if you have seen a clever, dazzling, intriguing, laborsaving, mind-blowing, {add your favorite adjectives} client-side feature on some site, the odds are high that there is already a jQuery plugin for it. For long I have smirked at folks who post their compilation of favorite jQuery...

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Comparison of free Web Analytics tools

click to enlarge imageThere are a bunch of free Web Analytics tools -Google Analytics  StatCounter  Piwik  Woopra  Clicky SiteMeter Each of them has something unique. The Clicky website compares all the above across some 40 odd parameters. (updated broken link on 1/Oct/2013)Except for Google Analytics & Piwik, the rest have limitations on features with their free editions. They restrict the data retention size & period.Piwik...

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Book Review: Head First PMP

I purchased Head First PMP after a PM friend recommended me that book as a good starter guide to taking the PMP certification. As he mentioned & others have vouched, no one book including this one can help you pass the exam. What this book does is that it makes learning Project Management concepts enjoyable. This was my first book in the Head First series. I liked the book's unusual, non-linear style (with things like notes in the margins) of presentation although the excessive use of goofy pictures put me off a bit. The tone throughout is...

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Tried these Hotmail, GMail features?

Email service providers have now gone way beyond just fetching & sending emails. Did you know, Hotmail has a SMS alerts feature that notifies you whenever an important e-mail (you can define what's important) arrives in your Hotmail inbox? (Ofcourse, if you are always connected to the Internet from your mobile, this may not sound like a novelty)I was impressed with GMail's Auto-unsubscribe feature after noticing it today. Let's say you spotted...

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