Your site may contain a wealth of technical terms. The user while viewing it may have to wonder about their meaning. What can be done to provide site visitors with instant answers to the questions they have? Previously technical terms were represented as links so that users could click them and get a definition window. This approach, however, is rather clumsy and time-consuming: one has to click the link, wait for the definition window to load and then close it. Now with AJAX we can move closer to users’ expectations. We can make the message window appear instantly once the mouse is over the term and disappear when the mouse moves farther. This service will not affect the size of your web-pages. When the contextual help is required Java Script will get definition from an external dictionary and display it.
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Introducing LINQ is the first part of a series of articles on Language Integrated Query (LINQ). This series will cover the core essentials of LINQ and its use with other technologies like ASP.NET, Win Forms and WPF.
This and the forthcoming articles are designed to be a comprehensive tutorial on LINQ, having completed the series you will have a thorough understanding of LINQ and C# 3.0.
All code in the series will use the latest publicly available CTP at the time of writing.
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The next version of VB .Net adds Xml as a built in data type using the new LINQ to XML API. As a built in data type, VB 9.0 provides the ability to create XML using XML Literals and to query XML documents using XML properties. This webcast contains a demo by David Schach, the lead developer in this project, of creating a program to share pictures over the internet.
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Microsoft is looking for members of the technology and business community who would be willing to provide Microsoft with their valuable insight on Microsoft web sites, products and service.
If you join and participate in an online discussion group, you will be paid a minimum of $50 and panelist who participate in an online survey are eligible for a Amazon gift certificates contest.
So, if you’ve ever wanted to tell Microsoft “where to go with our products”, uh, I mean give us your insight on how we can improve our products and services, then make sure you sign up.
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I’m a bit tired of the Getting Things Done mantra. Sometimes it feels like it’s a bad-fitting pair of jeans: tight where it shouldn’t be tight, loose where it shouldn’t be loose, and flattening my figurative butt besides. I don’t want to write down my next action. I want to doodle about my dreams, maybe with a web-based mind mapping tool.
Even though GTD’s hot, it doesn’t work for everyone, just like super-trendy skinny jeans don’t look good on all body types. We all have our individual personalities. We all have our unique priorities. We all have our own particular ways of being productive too.
Here are some productivity patterns and personalities I’ve seen online. Maybe you will see yourself in one of these descriptions, maybe in more than one.
I wondered how long it would take before Pageflakes responded to the new-look My Yahoo beta, given that the sharing and ‘pages’ features in My Yahoo beta are very similar to what Pageflakes has already done. Sure enough, the following quote by new Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen was just emailed my way. And actually Dan is uniquely qualified to discuss this, as before becoming CEO of Pageflakes in January this year he was head of MyYahoo. Here is what he said:
“The new My Yahoo is a step forward but misses the mark. It is more about Yahoo! and less about today’s users of the Web, who expect more from their personalized page. Their new personalization feature steers you towards Yahoo! services while restricting access to others like Google and MySpace. The new version limits user choice because it isn’t open to developers. Lastly, you can’t publish your personalized page on the web, or collaborate on your page with others.”
What it comes down to is that Yahoo obviously has a huge store of content and Web properties it can utilize in its personalized homepage. Whereas Pageflakes is one of the ‘little guys’ (along with slightly bigger little guy Netvibes), so its strengths and opportunities will be in opening up its platform and encouraging use of content from all over the Web.
Interesting subject which Daniel Moth explains:
At a recent event where I was presenting on LINQ, I showed a query with a join, similar to the following:
var results = from p in Process.GetProcesses() join p2 in MyProccess.GetMyProcList() on p.ProcessName equals p2.MyProcName where p.Threads.Count > 14 orderby p.ProcessName descending select new { p2.MyProcDescription, ThreadCount = p.Threads.Count, p.Id };
After the session one of the delegates asked me: “Why do we have to use the equals keyword and not just ==“. In other words he would have preferred to type:
on p.ProcessName == p2.MyProcName
I didn’t have a good answer but promised to look into it.
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Today everyone talks about Web 2.0. But while the idea of a collective intelligence, implied here by the term’s inventor Tim O’Reily remains an object of trivial speculations, it is obvious that the World Wide Web is changing. Web applications are increasingly approaching the level of functionality, which is usually found only in desktop applications. And as this trend is gaining momentum, we can already witness the dawn of a new era brought about by a novel kind of web applications - Rich Internet Applications (IRA). At the same time, the popularity of terms like Web 2.0 and RIA makes developers use them as an attractive label on their products, without actually understanding the meaning behind those notions. So what does RIA mean, eventually?
The March CTP of Visual Studio marks the debut of a much-requested and long-awaited feature: improved JScript IntelliSense. We’ve been working on this for almost a year now and I’m pretty excited to finally be able to share it with the public. There are a variety of topics I’d like to deep dive into, but for today let’s just take a quick aerial tour of the new features.
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The Web 2.0 will have a large impact on development technology choice. Erlang is the most likely language and development environment to benefit from this trend. The new erlang book will help accelerate this trend as will the ripples in the pond caused by Tim O’reilly’s blog. At Process-one we’re well placed to take advantage of this technology having used Erlang to build a massive messaging server.
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