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) in case you need it. You can use an open source tool like 7-Zip (that also does compression) to extract files from the ISO file.


The setup for Visual Web Developer 2010 Express requires Web Platform Installer (WebPI) to be installed. In my case, after I executed the Installer, I expected it to drive me through the steps but it suddenly fell quiet. I had to go to Windows Start > Programs to see Web Platform Installer there, activate it & proceed further.

If you run into any other issues with the Web Platform Installer,  the WebPI section on the IIS.NET Forums is probably the best place to look for answers.


Unlike the VS 2008 comparison of editions, the VS 2010 comparison of features among editions does not include the Express edition (yet)

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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 stock photography sites.

Here are a few more obvious & popular ones that both the lists missed (sites are linked to their pages on licensing terms):

• Wikimedia Commons
• Flickr
• Flickr "The Commons"

Photo from Nationaal Archief's collection on Flickr "The Commons"

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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. The contest is going to run between 9:30AM to 7:00PM during the event days & its open to everyone in India. They are giving away movie tickets every couple of minutes during that time.



Many Indian MVPs are tweeting about the event & you can tune in to that as well for live updates.

Also see:
Developer Contests

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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 plugins with attention grabbing titles like  "37 More Shocking jQuery Plugins", "37 Phenomenal jQuery Plugins..", "75+ Top jQuery Plugins.." but now I know how hard it is know to about some amazing plugin & keep it to yourself. I wouldn't want to forget the beautiful ones that I've benefited from, so here goes my list of favorites (work in progress) -

1. JCrop - to crop images programmatically
2. SearchHighlight - Highlights matched words on a search results page
3. jQuery-gestures - adds mouse gestures to a webpage
4. imgAreaSelect - select a rectangular area of an image to crop or annotate
5. Image Annotation plugin - to add an annotation at a desired position on an image
6. AutoComplete - "autocomplete" an input field to enable to users quickly find and select some value
7. Multiple File Upload - upload multiple files at once
8. quickSearch - for searching through tables, lists, etc quickly
9. jGrowl - to show fading & sticky message boxes
10. Pagination - ~5KB plugin to add paging to result-sets

The official jQuery Plugins site accepts plugins from contributors & publishes details in a standard format. The good thing is they come with a demo that you can try out.

I feel the best way in which developers making use of the plugins can help this effort is by rating submissions & reporting issues for the common good.

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Comparison of free Web Analytics tools

click to enlarge image

There 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 is a downloadable, open source (GPL licensed) real time web analytics software program that uses PHP & MySQL. It needs to be installed on your server, so you own your data.

The number of hits captured by each of the tools for the same site could vary. This could be because some tools like Google Analytics use JavaScript & a user may disable it in their browser. Some of these may not count bots and some register hits based on user's visit length.

Also see:
HOW TO generate a Heat Map with Google Chart API

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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 very informal, friendly & conversational which makes the guide engaging.

The 42 processes which form the core of the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) Guide, 4th Edition and cross-cut 9 Knowledge Areas & 6 Process Groups are explained well. Processes grouped by Knowledge Area make up a chapter. Besides the 9 chapters focusing on the Knowledge Areas, there are 6 more which cover the preliminaries & practice tests with answers. Important points in them are reiterated & highlighted. 2 complete chapters including a Practice test are available for free download. You could check these out & see if the book suits you before you buy it.

On the negative side, there are some typos & errors that you would have to look out for. I found some of the examples in the book to be too unrealistic & contrived to be of practical benefit.

Summary: Whether or not you are taking the exam, I feel this is a good guide on Project Management to start with if you are an aspiring PM or one by circumstance.

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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 in your GMail inbox, a newsletter that you are no longer interested in or a message from a list group that you don't remember subscribing to. When you mark such a message as spam by clicking on the "Report Spam" button, you may see a dialog box that asks if you want to report spam as well as Unsubscribe from that list.

Once you click on it, GMail will send a request to the sender on your behalf that your email address be removed from the list. The Unsubscribe option is not available though for all mailing lists and this option won't  be shown for lists that are known to be owned by spammers.

You can try a bunch of other similar tricks by going to the Gmail Labs feature from the Settings link that's at the top right corner after you are logged in.

Also see:
A Spooky (but fun) incident with GMail
HOW TO fetch unread emails from a mail server
HOW TO send an email programmatically using C# with GMail

..

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