Things I learnt from the Pluralsight course "Introduction to Visual Studio 2010"

Visual Studio is a complex IDE that mostly looks simple on the surface but has a number of invisible features. In the Pluralsight video training course Introduction to Visual Studio 2010 (duration: 4h 37m), Kate Gregory does a walk-through of the useful features of Visual Studio 2010. Many of the tips also apply to VS 2008. My notes -You can export & import Visual Studio settings. A whole team can identify best practices &...

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Are you building a WikiLeaks of your own life?

New York Times reports that there are now several people database websites that can aggregate personal information & present a dossier with your age, home value, marital status, phone number and your home address, even a photo of your front door. Snoops who take the time to troll further online may also find in blog posts or Facebook comments evidence of your political views, health challenges, office tribulations and party indiscretions, any of which could hurt your chances of admission to school, getting or keeping a job or landing...

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My 30-day personal project - watch 100 hours of Pluralsight videos

Inspired by Matt Cutts' 30-day challenges, I plan to watch 100 hours of Pluralsight online videos to get up-to-date with current & emerging Microsoft technologies. I find its faster to learn with videos than books. Moreover, videos are quicker to get detailed & structured info on emerging topics. Books are great as a reference but may not be suitable for emerging technologies. I hope to post my notes & reviews of the...

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HOW TO detect unused CSS style definitions

As your web app project & the team size get larger,  there is a chance that the CSS style definitions within the stylesheets grow uncontrollably due to lack of coordination among the developers. This could lead to duplicate style definitions & gradually this could impact web page performance.Luckily, there are tools to detect unused CSS selectors per page & weed them out manually -Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox...

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Things I learnt at the Windows Azure Camp in Hyderabad

Here are some of the new things I learnt at the Windows Azure Camp that was held yesterday at the Microsoft campus in Hyderabad -* Windows Azure Service Management API is a REST API for managing your services and deployments programmatically to do many of the things that you can do through the Azure portal. Usage of the API is free* Can the Service Management API be used to replicate a new portal that's like the Silverlight-based Azure portal?- Not exactly, some info like Billing cannot be fetched through API* csmanage.exe is a tool to...

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HOW TO try Windows Azure for free (without any credit card)

Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud platform offers .NET developers a great opportunity to extend their skills to this new platform. You don't have to spend a bomb to get started. While there is a free trial offer that doesn't have any upfront costs, you may have to submit your credit card. The free Windows Azure Platform 30 Day Pass doesn't need a credit card to register. I've seen promo codes that are needed to get a Pass in various...

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HOW TO show/hide items in the Windows 7 Start menu

Recent Items is a Start menu option that I frequently use to pick files I last worked on. I was surprised to find that option as well as the Run command that developers infrequently need, missing from the Windows 7 Start menu. It turns out that these items are just hidden. You can control showing or hiding any items in the Start menu. To enable Recent Items or customize how links, icons & menus look & behave in the Start menu,...

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Dashboard-like info with Browser tabs, Windows 7 Taskbar tabs

Browser tabs & Windows 7 Taskbar tabs are turning self-aware. This is how my browser looked the other day:I had the summary of all that was happening within those browser tabs because of the ubiquitous AJAX code running inside all those webpages which was dynamically updating the page title.In Windows 7, a Taskbar tab representing a browser can show the download progress of a file being fetched within that browser visually as a green flowing...

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