This Week I Learned:AzurePreviously, Azure Virtual Machines deployed in suspended subscriptions would be deleted when the spending limit was passed (the data drives would be preserved – but the VM instances themselves would be deleted). Now when a subscription is disabled, VMs deployed inside it will simply move into the stopped de-provision state that was recently introduced (which allows a VM to stop without incurring any billing).JavaScript Editing JavaScript code in real time is possible in Chrome and Chromium based browsers. After loading...
Sunday, 29 September 2013
Saturday, 28 September 2013
Here are a few examples of services that can manage social media on your behalf:The Kit Kat Social Break desktop widget can automatically Like, Re-tweet, Share posts from your contacts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.For a fee, HeadHonchos offers to manage & possibly furbish your LinkedIn ProfileThe times we live ...
Thursday, 26 September 2013
Top 10 Free Security Apps for Android phones as rated by Right Choice magazine:McAfee Antivirus & SecurityAvast Mobile Security & AntivirusBitDefender AntivirusLookout Security & Antivirus Norton Security AntivirusESET Mobile SecurityTrend Micro Mobile Security & AntivirusTrustGo Antivirus & Mobile SecurityKaspersky Mobile SecurityDr.Web AntivirusSome of the features provided by these apps include blocking spam text messages, backing up your data, remote locking and remote deletion (you can wipe data on your phone or SD...
Sunday, 22 September 2013
This Week I Learned:Tools & Services:DbVisualizer generates better database diagrams than SQL Server Management Studio. It also lets you export the diagram to JPG, GIF, PNG, SVG & PDF format files.You can take any bit.ly link and add a + symbol to the end to see stats and details about the link.draw.io is an online diagramming application built using the mxGraph JavaScript librarySite44 turns Dropbox folders into websites. You can edit your HTML locally, and your website will always be up-to-date. With their Starter plan, they offer free...
Wednesday, 18 September 2013
A HTTP Waterfall chart can provide a quick visualization of what is wrong with a slow loading website.Chapter 3 of Stoyan Stefanov's Book of Speed has a nice explanation of what the colors in the a bar of Waterfall view (of twitter.com) generated by WebPageTest, mean:Dark green represents the time taken to perform a DNS lookup. DNS (Domain Name Service) lookup is the process of matching the friendly domain name twitter.com to an IP address (such...
Saturday, 14 September 2013
This Week I Learned:Azure+ If you own a MSDN subscription you can use up to your monthly Windows Azure credits at no charge. If you exceed your monthly credits, your service will be disabled for that month. I found out the hard way that the 10 "free" Azure Web Sites that you get will be disabled too if you exceed the limits of any of feature categories. For testing, if you activate the Azure SQL Reporting feature that comes as a MSDN benefit, make sure you stop it after you finish testing or else it will count towards your quota limit.+ A...
Thursday, 12 September 2013
Microsoft Visual C# 2012 Step by Step is a good book for beginners. It covers a considerable breadth of the C# language in 800 odd pages while showing how to program with the language using Visual Studio, the most commonly used IDE. As with other books in the Step by Step series, the explanations are pretty detailed but never boring.The coverage of Visual Studio features while explaining C# programming topics is interesting. There are tables & illustrations to make the content engaging. The Quick Reference at the end of each chapter with brief...
Wednesday, 11 September 2013
The transparent overlay image to introduce web site features/elements is an interesting UI Pattern to do more with less - a visual explanation is better than reams of notes.Don't know if Gmail was the first popular website to use this idea but I now see a lot of other websites use this kind of an overlay to visually explain new UI elements or features that are added.Gmail used this overlay idea earlier to show Gmail keyboard shortcuts with the...
Monday, 9 September 2013
The GoogleFinance function can be used to fetch historical data for a specified time period.Try these to get historical data of Sensex & Nifty indices for the first 9 days of September 2013:=GoogleFinance("BSESN", "close", "09/01/2013" , "09/09/2013", "DAILY")=GoogleFinance("NSEI", "close", "09/01/2013" , "09/09/2013", "DAILY")You can even go back in time. The Sensex was at 4031.55 this day in 19...
Sunday, 8 September 2013
JavaScript Pocket Reference isn't really a dictionary styled reference that I imagined it to be. This book reads more like a O’Reilly book in the Nutshell series than a Reference. It should have been called JavaScript in a Nutshell for this is a distilled & condensed version of the author's immensely popular JavaScript: The Definitive Guide. It is however a well-written book that covers the important parts of JavaScript and the essentials of ECMAScript 5 in less than 300 pages.This book is like a quick tour of the modern-day JavaScript landscape...
Saturday, 7 September 2013
This Week I Learned:Bing and Google Search make extensive use of localStorage for stashing SCRIPT blocks that are used on subsequent page views. localStorage is a HTML5 API within modern browsers to allow web developers to store small amounts of data within the user's browser.To view list of Chrome URLs: chrome://chrome-urls/ & to see what's stored in your the Chrome cache: chrome://view-http-cache/PC Maintenance Tip - Use System Restore: You can create a System Restore Point to save current settings and revert to those...
Thursday, 5 September 2013
Windows Azure SQL Reporting Succinctly is a freely downloadable 100-paged (90 without the pleasantries) e-book (available in Amazon Kindle and PDF formats) from Syncfusion.The ebook provides a great overview of Windows Azure SQL Reporting that will be helpful to developers and architects. It starts with a comparison of SQL Reporting and SSRS & takes the user through Report Development, Report Management, Report Parts, Security & Report Access.I...
Wednesday, 4 September 2013
An enterprising supermarket I go to is concerned that I may not be checking the promotional offers that they send to my Gmail account. They sent me steps on how to force Gmail to show emails they send always under the Primary category:To disable the Tabbed Inbox feature click on the settings cog in the upper right-hand corner, go to "Configure Inbox," and uncheck everything except "Primary." This will remove the tabs and bring you back to the...
Sunday, 1 September 2013
This Week I Learned:You can track Indian Stock Exchanges Sensex and Nifty indices using these formulas in Google Spreadsheet - =GoogleFinance("BSESN","price") and =GoogleFinance("NSEI","price") respectively. It is possible to have Google Docs send updates about changing values as a text message.Amazon Web Services & Microsoft Azure aren't the only places where you can host a Cloud-based .NET application. There are atleast 4 other .NET PaaS-like providers. The learnings of one experienced developer:There is no "right way" in software developmentReading...
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