Did you know, India has 120 million Internet users & the Indian e-commerce market is worth $7 billion? Travel accounts for over 80 percent of the e-commerce market.Forbes believes "the rise of e-commerce is significant because it shows the limitations of physical retailing and the rise of aspirations of small town India. Between the large unorganised retail (kiranas and unbranded supermarkets) that serves the masses and modern retail that serves the aspirational class in large cities, there lies a thin wedge of aspirational classes...
Saturday, 31 December 2011
Monday, 26 December 2011
Did you know, SQL Server 2008 Management Studio has an in-built option to generate a script that can help you restore an entire database alongwith the data? Compared to a .BAK file that can also be used to restore a database, a script lets you peek into the schema AND data (INSERT statements for rows within tables are automatically generated) before you restore it.Unfortunately, this cool feature is hidden under layers of options and isn't easily...
Thursday, 15 December 2011
As per the most voted answer on Web Applications StackExchange forum, thefreedictionary.com with the print layout is the fastest and their content is pretty comprehensive too.WordWeb is my favorite desktop dictionary tool & now I also have thefreedictionary.com configured as my search engine for words within Chrome.The URL looks simple - http://thefreedictionary.com/p/Word & this makes it super easy to add the site as a search provider in...
Friday, 9 December 2011
When popular websites change their layout & design, it takes time for users to get accustomed to it. If you don't like frills and rather like features that get your work done faster, explore keyboard shorcuts that web apps like Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs offer. Just hit the question mark (?) key while you are logged into one of those sites and you will see a popup with a list of all supported hotkeys. While the keyboard shortcut...
Friday, 2 December 2011
The Wife finally cracked the mystery of how to take a screenshot of any screen on her Samsung Omnia 652.For months since she saw the message "Screen captured. Saved as image file" while trying to unlock the smartphone, we were intrigued what key combination had led to it. We turned to Google but found no answers and this was too trivial to ask on online forums.It's finally a relief to know that the combination is Alt+*+Confirm/OK keyYou can access...
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
Summary of the 2hour 40 minute duration Pluralsight Introduction to PowerShell course, including other interesting material I found -+ What is PowerShell?Windows PowerShell command-line interface is a new command-line toolIt's a scripting language from Microsoft that complements Cmd.exe in the Windows administration context.Based on .NETEverything is a .NET objectPowerShell version 2 is included with Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, XP SP3,...
Monday, 14 November 2011
There may be times when you want to look for results for a particular keyword or phrase from among discussion boards and online forums. For instance, you may want to know about opinions on solving a complex programming issue or find the experiences of people with a particular ailment or gauge the reactions of food aficionados to some exotic recipe. In such cases, articles don't help and to cut to the chase, you can turn to Google Groups Search. It...
Sunday, 16 October 2011
Supposedly friendly features like spell-check & auto-completion can be a bane sometimes. Imagine if your boss & best friend share the same name & you excitedly send a very private message to the boss instead of the friend because GMail cleverly fills the email address while you type a few characters of the name. If such a scenario rings a bell, here is one option to prevent GMail from supplying names you don't want to see in...
Friday, 7 October 2011
This page on the Browserscope website lets you choose versions of the same or different browsers & see how they stack up in supporting HTML5 features. Click on the "Compare UAs" link on that page, select User Agents you want to compare & then hit the Compare button.I chose versions 8, 9 & 10 of Internet Explorer to see what's new with respect to HTML5 in IE9 & IE 10click to enlarge imageYou can copy the table data to...
Thursday, 6 October 2011
From Scott Allen's C# Fundamentals Part 2 course on Pluralsight -Rule #10: Avoid Regions - as they are typically used to hide ugly code or classes that've exploded in size or responsibility. Think if you should break the regions into seperate classesRule #9: Use exceptions for errors..instead of status code or booleans...but not for control flowRule #8: Avoid boolean parametersRule #7: Avoid too many parameters - beyond 4, consider groupingRule #6: Warnings are errors - Go to a Project's Properties and in the Build tab of the dialog box that opens...
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
I'm a fan of several sites of the Stack Exchange family. I was thrilled to know that I'm among the top Pro Webmasters Stack Exchange users with over 950 reputation to receive cool swag. Thank you, Stack Exchange!The Stack Exchange family currently consists of 65 question and answer sites & has over 1.2 million use...
Saturday, 1 October 2011
Microsoft's Students to Business website connects graduating students with Microsoft, Microsoft Partners and its customers. This program is open to graduating students in India. The enrollment process is simple and does not require any fees.Microsoft's DreamSpark program gives students Microsoft professional tools at no charge.For students passionate about software development, there are also other avenues where they can publish their original projects or contribute to ongoing open-source projects and get noticed. Here is a...
Monday, 19 September 2011
In its Events That Shaped The Wired World section, Wired magazine credits Scott Fahlman with first using the Smiley :-) & "Frowny" :-( emoticons in electronic messages.On Sept. 19th, 1982, he had proposed on the computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University that the smiley be used as a joke marker & "frowny" to mark things that are NOT jokes.Scott came up with the idea after reading “lengthy diatribes” from people on the message board who failed to get the joke or the sarcasm in a particular po...
Saturday, 17 September 2011
Firefox 3.x used to have an option to block pesky images that were not part of the context of page that you were viewing - like image ads. You just had to right click on the image, & select "Block images from {domain serving the image}" to never see any images from that domain again. That context menu option is missing from Firefox 4 & above.It turns out that it is still there but there are some additional steps to reach it. Right click...
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
A web developer's education is never finished. Here is a list of trends & reference tables that, in my opinion, every web developer should track -HTTP Archive - Trends in web technology, interesting stats, repository of web performance informationBrowser Security Handbook - Key security properties of contemporary web browsers HTML 5 Reference TableHTML 4/ XHTML Reference TableCSS 3 Reference TableCSS 2 Reference TablePPK's Browser Event Compatibility Tables - Desktop, MobileHTML5 compatibility on mobile and tablet browserswork...
Saturday, 10 September 2011
If you need to find hardware details of your Windows PC, like any of the following -Version including Service Pack usedWindow Experience IndexProcessorRAMSystem type (32-bit or 64-bit OS)Computer name, domain & workgroup settingsWindows Product Id & whether Windows is activated... there is a easy keyboard shortcut to reach for this info rather than going for it through Control Panel - Windows key + Pause/BreakI discovered this shortcut...
I follow the Personal Technology page of "Economic Times" with interest for their India-centric coverage of gadgets & IT topics.This week ET listed 10 useful USB accessories. Among them, although a USB-based Hub & Mug Warmer, Cooler, paper shredder, Vaccum Cleaner have some novelty, they didn't appeal to me as much as these -Jabra Speak 410 - USB powered speakerphone ... with integrated cable managment system. Weighing a mere 250g, this speakerphone also has a headset port where you can plug-in any 3.5mm headphones in case you want the...
Friday, 2 September 2011
Weather isn't a hot topic in India (as it is in the US) & forecasts aren't taken seriously.Possibly to promote awareness, the Indian Meteorological Department has put out an ad in today's Times of India (with a glaring typo -Meteorological is misspelt as Meteorogical right at the beginning) to publicize the features if its site - IMD.GOV.IN click image to enlarge Besides a host of services & forecasts, the site publishes 3-day city...
Thursday, 1 September 2011
Microsoft's Web Hosting Gallery has a neat tool to let you search for hosting providers based on parameters like type of server (shared, dedicated, virtual server) cost, technologies supported (Frameworks, Databases, Publishing protocols), storage, number of SQL Databases, number of e-mail accounts, bandwidth per month, support, uptime.Also see:Tips on ASP.NET Hosting & Deploym...
Wednesday, 31 August 2011
A view engine provides Controllers with the ability to translate views into HTML. There are multiple reasons why you may choose one view engine over another. Here is a list of different types of ASP.NET MVC View Engines, the first two are available with ASP.NET MVC 3 -WebForms /ASPX – classic ASP.NET MVC views Razor (CSHTML) Spark NHAML - (pronounced enamel) is a pure .NET implementation of the popular Rails Haml view engine. NVelocity Brail It is possible to use multiple view engines in the same projectRelated reading:ASP.NET...
Sunday, 28 August 2011
A relevant comic strip introduced into an article or presentation can make a topic more appealing & livelier (assuming you have permission to use if it's not your own). Finding the image of a strip on the web that you remember reading in a Sunday newspaper may not be easy. Don't you wish there was a comics search engine that could get you cartoons for a keyword you submit?Here are a few that I found -Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine by Michael "Bing" Yingling Dilbert Strip Finder by BF Martin XKCD - use this search filter...
Monday, 22 August 2011
To show that DuckDuckGo, a search engine site winning rave reviews, doesn't "filter bubble" or track you, they have illustrated guides to demonstrate how Google may not be as saintly or good as it may appear. The facts they present are something to ponder on.On a different note, DuckDuckGo provides a great API alongwith other goodies like the easily configurable Karma Widget that displays your online karma (e.g. twitter follower count,...
Saturday, 20 August 2011
Using a Print stylesheet is a more convenient way to generate a printer-friendly page than creating such a page through server-side coding. Tim Connell has a nice CSS tip in his article on things to note while coding a stylesheet meant for printer output.At some point, you have probably found yourself reading a printed article when you get to an engrossing section that includes a link for more information. A link that sits there teasing you with...
Interesting points from BuiltWith.com's Mobile Web Technology Report 2011 -The growth of the mobile web is staggering, with approximately 726 million people having access to a 3G mobile subscription The viewport meta tag was originally designed by Apple to resize the layout viewport of a website, a requirement for the mobile device to understand how the website designer has defined how the content should be displayed to the end user. Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and iPhone all support the viewport meta tag Close to 3% of the top 10,000 sites...
Wednesday, 17 August 2011
There are currently close to 400 videos on Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel featuring Matt Cutts who answers questions posted to the Webmaster Help Forum or to the Twitter handle @googlewmc. Occasionally, some Google secrets slip out in these videos. You can also pick up some tips & tricks on SEO by watching these typically 2-minute videos.If you are SEO inclined, the videos have some interesting titles that draw you to find out the answers....
Monday, 15 August 2011
I've used cross-browser testing tools like Adobe BrowserLab, Browsershots & Expression Web SuperPreview but didn't know there were a dozen more.Smashing Magazine has done an exhaustive review of all available cross-browser testing tools with a nice tabular summary at the end for easy comparison. It covers the following list of tools -Free:Adobe BrowserLab Browsershots Expression Web SuperPreview (free and commercial) Lunascape 6 IETester IE NetRenderer Spoon Sauce Labs (free and commercial) - 200 free minutes/month Browsera (free and commercial)...
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
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...
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 SeriesOntwik JavaScript videos Crockford on JavaScript eBooks, Articles, Tutorials -Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke Learn JavaScript - Mozilla Developer NetworkW3Schools.com/jQuery W3Schools.com/JSStephen Walther's JavaScript...
Sunday, 24 July 2011
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 &...
Saturday, 23 July 2011
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 KitExtended Club Site Starter KitTheBeerHouse: CMS and E-Commerce Starter KitMy Web Pages Starter KitSmall Business Starter KitTime Tracker Starter Kit (documentation)Commerce...
Wednesday, 20 July 2011
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...
Monday, 18 July 2011
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"...
Sunday, 17 July 2011
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...
Saturday, 16 July 2011
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 - WindowsChrome 11 - WindowsFirefox 3.0 - OS XFirefox 3.0 - WindowsFirefox 3.6 - OS XFirefox 3.6 - WindowsFirefox 4.0 - WindowsInternet Explorer...
Thursday, 14 July 2011
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...
Monday, 11 July 2011
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...
Saturday, 9 July 2011
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.comI noticed a nice demo by Craig Shoemaker in the Pluralsight HTML5 Fundamentals course on feature detection with Modernizr that lists all supported...
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