This Week I Learned:Windows Azure Mobile Services and Windows Azure Web Sites are now "generally available". Auto scale, alerts and monitoring are now available in preview.The Windows Azure Pack for Windows Server delivers Windows Azure technologies for you to run inside your datacenter, enabling you to offer rich, self-service, multi-tenant services that are consistent with Windows Azure. It is available to Microsoft customers at no additional cost. SQL Server treats table and columns names case-sensitively if the database has a case-sensitive...
Sunday, 30 June 2013
Wednesday, 26 June 2013
Following a recent announcement, folks with a MSDN Subscription can get enhanced Azure benefits. However, the catch is that those Windows Azure MSDN benefits are intended for development and test purposes only. Usage within that Windows Azure MSDN subscription does not carry a financially-backed SLA.However, if you want to continue using the older MSDN benefits subscription (which has less features and a higher per-compute rate - but does support...
Sunday, 23 June 2013
This Week I Learned:A new version of Employee Info Starter Kit, a basic CRM-like application, built with ASP.NET MVC 4 is out. It's a good resource for developers to learn from and re-use.The ultimate guide to mobile emulators & simulators50% of Fortune 500 are using Windows Azure Microsoft now offers direct cash payouts in exchange for reporting certain types of vulnerabilities and exploitation techniques.The website IFTTT is indeed...
Thursday, 20 June 2013
Try these inexpensive ways to find out Stock Exchange indices via a text message:1. IFTTT (If-This-Then-That website) - IFTTT has "recipes" powered by Yahoo Finance, to set a trigger so that whenever a stock (the symbol for BSE Sensex is ^BSESN and that of NSE Nifty is ^NSEI) is rising or falling beyond a pre-set figure, you can be alerted by a text message or email or other ways. Looking at this public recipe for NSE, you can build your own for BSE or any other stock traded in the Stock Exchanges.2. txtWeb is a platform to make...
Wednesday, 19 June 2013
While the Windows Azure documentation is pretty comprehensive and developer friendly, there are some other great resources as well:1. Channel 9 Microsoft DevRadio 21-part video tutorial series - Looking to get started with Windows Azure without poring over text? Check out the 21-part video tutorial series "Practical Azure with Jim O’Neil":Azure Basics: 11 minutes, 13 secondsWhat to do with Blobs?: 15 minutes, 14 secondsWhy do we need Drives?: 9 minutes, 23 secondsUsing the Content Delivery Network (CDN): 10 minutes, 33 secondsTable...
Tuesday, 18 June 2013
My Wife and I share a love for good, healthy food and cooking. We analyze (mostly vegetarian) recipes we find online, on TV or in print. Not only that, we occasionally hang out in the Seasoned Advice forum, a Q & A discussion board in the StackExchange family, to learn about what people around the world are cooking. This kind of fascination for cooking, made us jump at the idea of reviewing "Cooking for Geeks" when I spotted it in the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program's list of books. We enjoyed it during the first reading and will keep going...
Sunday, 16 June 2013
This Week I Learned:.. a Ph.D. student named Thomas Knoll started working on a revolutionary program for making images. Photoshop, as it was eventually named, turns 25 this year, and has been so successful that it has made the rare transition from brand name to verb.BSNL, the Indian Government-run telecommunication company, has discontinued the 160-year-old telegraph service. Telegrams encouraged concision. British General Sir Charles Napier is said...
Saturday, 15 June 2013
Books in the PacktPub Instant series aim to provide "short, fast, focused guide delivering immediate results". I found the last two jQuery-related "Instant" books I read very useful as they covered the essentials in less than 50 pages. When I received a review copy of the book Instant jQuery UI Starter by Jesse Boyer, I expected it to be in the same league as the earlier books but it fell short.jQuery UI, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library,...
Thursday, 13 June 2013
A SPA is a web app contained in a single page – where ‘pages’ are nothing but DIVs being shown/hidden based on the state of the app and user navigation.Single Page Applications heavily use client side scripting to provide rich functionality to the end user.Gmail is probably the first well known SPA implementation which has been around since 2004.ASP.NET MVC 4 provides a basic framework for building SPA applications.Pros:The big reasons to do SPA are the 3 R's: Reach, Responsive UX and Reducing roundtrip postbacks.Cons:Navigation – SPA’s by...
Monday, 10 June 2013
1. No date of publication/update - I often land up in MSDN via search engines. There have been countless times when I've read half-way through a piece of documentation and then found the article to be obsolete or referring to an older version. In recent years, MSDN does have a drop-down to switch between versions of the product documentation but this is not consistent across its range of products. Does it hurt to have a date of publication/update?2. Lacks images & illustrations - Realizing the importance of illustrations in quality content,...
Sunday, 9 June 2013
This Week I Learned:Google has killed Quick View & Instant Preview features in Search. Instant Previews are page snapshots that allow users to get a glimpse of the layout of the web pages behind each search result, in order to help them decide whether or not to click a link. Low usage has been suggested as the reason for abandoning Instant Preview. Some detractors complain the low usage may have been because the button was almost hidden.Foursquare founders, Naveen Selvadurai and Dennis Crowley always tried to pitch Foursquare less as a check-in...
Wednesday, 5 June 2013
A proponent of the Quantified Self movement and the co-founder of Foursquare, Naveen Selvadurai, has published a "personal API" consisting of his day-to-day personal details (related to his sleep, weight, steps, fuel/activity and checkins) as a step towards building self-awareness software. He calls it api.naveen. The data therein has been normalized from various sources: manual capture, nike fuelband, jawbone up, withings, fitbit, foursquare and...
Saturday, 1 June 2013
This Week I Learned:JSDelivr is a CDN for developers and webmasters that hosts JavaScript libraries, jQuery plugins, fonts, CSS frameworks. JSter maintains a catalog of (over 1153) JavaScript libraries and tools for web development.Microsoft is the first multinational company to make public cloud services available in China.Opera 15 will use Blink rendering engine and V8 JavaScript engine.One of the reasons for the delayed capture of the Boston Marathon...
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