Ajaxus place on the net

Again two free e-books from Microsoft!

Posted by admin on April 17, 2009 No comments

Hi again, here are two free books as present from Microsoft for the 25th anniversary of Microsoft Press.

9780735620704f Again two free e books from Microsoft! Windows Small Business Server 2008 Administrator’s Companion (24MB) by Charlie Russel and Sharon Crawford (27 chapters, 3 appendices, 712 pages)
Your comprehensive, one-volume guide to planning, setup, and administration. Get the critical information you need to build and run a Windows Small Business Server 2008–based network. This essential, single-volume reference details system capabilities and components—including Premium Edition features. Gain the real-world insights, workarounds, and troubleshooting tactics you need for on-the-job results.

9780735625419f Again two free e books from Microsoft! Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition: Build a Program Now! (7.7MB) by Patrice Pelland (9 chapters, Glossary, 254 pages)
Make building new programming skills fun and fast with a quick-start, project-based approach!In this lively, eye-opening, hands-on book, all you need is a computer and the desire to learn how to program with Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition. Featuring a full edition of the software, this fun and highly visual guide walks you through a complete programming project—a desktop weather-reporting application—from start to finish. You’ll get an introduction to the Microsoft Visual Studio® development environment and learn how to put the lightweight, easy-to-use tools in Visual Basic Express Edition to work right away—creating, compiling, testing, and delivering your first ready-to-use program. You’ll get expert tips, coaching, and visual examples at each step of the way, along with pointers to additional learning resources.

Two interesting database related articles

Posted by admin on April 7, 2009 1 comment

The first one is about INSERT with SQL 2008 By Don Schlichting. Here is a short introduction.
This article will explore the various methods of using an INSERT statement with SQL Server 2008. After database Tables are created, a method to perform basic data manipulation tasks like inserting, modifying and deleting data is needed. Such data manipulation is accomplished through SQL Server’s own dialect of Structured Query Language (SQL) called Transact SQL or (T-SQL). TSQL Commands can be executed by typing them in directly to SQL Server, or graphically though the SQL Server Management Studio. The SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) is an easy to use and intuitive graphical tool that lets you build and manage your database graphically. This article will explore the INSERT command of T-SQL’s Data Manipulation Language (DML).
To read the whole please follow the link above.

logo mysql sun a Two interesting database related articles The second one is about Five Query Optimizations in MySQL By Sean Hull. Again here is a short expert:
Query optimization is the often overlooked part of applications. Development schedules being what they are, getting the right results and getting the application working are the main priorities. So thoroughly testing, and benchmarking queries is often left as an afterthought.

With our short introduction to query optimization in MySQL, we hope to encourage at least some attention to these issues up front. We’ll also help you identify some of the more common optimizations you may run across.

Both are quite interesting read. Enjoy!

Couple of interesting links

Posted by admin on March 25, 2009 No comments

Brad Abrams writes about “What is .NET RIA Services“. Here is a small bit of this article:

Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

C# 4.0 goes dynamic – a step too far? Here is a small bit of this article:
With C# 3.0 still so new that many are only just beginning to appreciate, let alone use, its new features it might seem premature to be discussing the next version of the most popular .NET language. Microsoft, however, has its plans for C# 4.0 well advanced, and the changes are so important that you might not recognise your favourite language after the upgrade. Now is the time to look over the horizon in the hope that end users can influence the outcome.

The first thing to say is that C# occupies a very special niche in the panoply of .NET languages. When it was introduced there were essentially two classes of Windows programmers corresponding to mastery and use of either VB or C++. The split was fairly clear-cut as VB was easy to learn and easy to use but limited, and C++ was difficult to fathom but could do anything. You can even think of C++ as an object-oriented machine-independent assembly language if you want to, but VB, being interpreted and well removed from machine constructs, was no such thing. In addition there was also the aesthetic distinction to take into account – VB being messy and pragmatic and C++ pure and logical. Of course none of these characterisations is 100% true, they are just approximations to an average truth that is at least recognised by most programmers even if they’d argue over the fine details.

Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 free download

Posted by admin on March 12, 2009 1 comment

I saw this on Scott’s blog and decided to post it also over here. This is new book about ASP.NET MVC. Here is what is inside this sample chapter:
The tutorial starts by using the File->New Project command in Visual Studio to create a brand new ASP.NET MVC project, and then incrementally adds functionality and features. Along the way it covers how to:

* Create a database
* Build a model with validation and business rules
* Implement data listing/details UI on a site using Controllers and Views
* Enable CRUD (Create, Update, Delete) data form entry
* Use the ViewModel pattern to pass information from a Controller to a View
* Re-use UI across a site using partials and master pages
* Implement efficient data paging
* Secure an application using authentication and authorization
* Use AJAX to deliver dynamic updates
* Use AJAX to add interactive map support
* Perform automated unit testing (including dependency injection and mocking)

Download Links

Download the free end-to-end tutorial chapter in PDF form
Download the source code + unit tests for the completed application
Learn more about the book from the official Wrox page
Purchase the full book from Amazon.

Safari 4 – beta

Posted by admin on February 25, 2009 No comments

Here are some of the changes:
safari4topsites Safari 4 beta
Top Sites

Thanks to Top Sites, you can enjoy a stunning, at-a-glance preview of your favorite websites without lifting a finger. Safari 4 Beta tracks the sites you browse and ranks your favorites, presenting up to 24 thumbnails on a single page. You can even customize the display by pinning a favorite site to a specific location in the grid. That locks it into position, so you know just where to find it every time you open Top Sites.

Wonder which sites have changed since your last visit? Sites with a star in the upper-right corner have new content. A single click opens the page and updates its thumbnail. Whenever you want to return to your ever-evolving Top Sites page, just click the new Top Sites button in the bookmarks bar.

Cover Flow

New to Safari, Cover Flow offers a highly visual way of reviewing your site history and bookmarked sites, presenting full-page previews of the websites that look exactly as they did when you last visited them.

One look is all you need to recognize the site you want to visit. Simply flip through website previews in Cover Flow the same way you flip through album art in iTunes. Directional arrows let you browse forward and back. Or you can quickly flip through multiple sites using the slider. And when you find the site you want, simply click to open it.

Full History Search

With Full History Search and Cover Flow, what you see is where you went. Safari introduces a dramatic new way to revisit sites, letting you flip through full-page previews of the sites you visited in the past. You may not have total recall, but Safari does, automatically storing all the text and a thumbnail of every page in your history. That makes it easy for Safari to get results even if you remember little about the site you’re searching for.

Just type a word or phrase in the History Search field in Top Sites, and Safari quickly presents you with a list of possibilities. In fact, you can search for anything that was on a page you visited, even photo captions. To jog your memory, Safari presents the sites it finds in Cover Flow, giving you the opportunity to spot the right site on sight.

Tabs on Top

Tabs offer a great way to have multiple pages open at the same time in a single browser window. And to switch back and forth with a click. Now Safari takes tabbed browsing to new heights — to the very top of the browser window — instantly providing more room for you to enjoy the sites you’re reading.

Safari also makes it easy to create and manage tabs. To create a new tab, just click the + button in the upper-right corner of the Safari window. Want to rearrange tabs? Simply drag a tab by its handle and drop it in a new location in the tab bar. You can also use the handle to drop a tab into another Safari window. Or quickly create a new window by dragging the tab out to the desktop. You can create a bookmark from a group of tabs. Or even tell Safari to open a set of tabs every time you open a new Safari window.

Nitro Engine

Still the world’s fastest web browser, Safari outraces Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome. On even the most demanding Web 2.0 applications, Safari delivers blazingly fast performance thanks to the industry’s most advanced rendering technologies.

Using the new Nitro Engine, for example, Safari executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than 3 times faster than Firefox 3 based on performance in leading industry benchmark tests: iBench and SunSpider.

Windows Native Look and Feel

If you’re using Safari on a PC with Windows Vista or Windows XP, you’ll feel right at home. That’s because Safari features a native look — just like other Windows applications — including a native title bar, borders, and toolbars. To provide a consistent Windows experience, Safari now uses Windows standard fonts, but you can choose to use Apple’s crisp anti-aliased fonts if you prefer. Of course, Safari in Windows delivers the same lightning-fast performance provided by the Mac version.

Developer Tools

In Safari, developers will find the best set of development tools ever included in a browser. Just turn them on in Safari preferences and use them to examine the structure of a page, debug JavaScript, optimize performance and compatibility, inspect offline databases, or test experimental pieces of code on the fly.

Jan 28th Links: ASP.NET MVC 1.0, .NET Services White Papers

Posted by admin on January 28, 2009 No comments

These past weeks have been extremely busy around here, so excuse me for not writing regularly. Here are two links for:

– ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate Now Available

Today we shipped the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate (RC). It works with both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 (which is free).

Today’s RC is the last public release of ASP.NET MVC that we’ll ship prior to the final “1.0” release. We expect to ship the final ASP.NET MVC 1.0 release next month.

In addition to bug fixes, today’s build includes several new features. It also includes some refinements to existing features based on customer feedback. Please read the release notes that ship with the ASP.NET MVC download for full details on all changes. The release notes include detailed instructions on how to upgrade existing applications built with the ASP.NET MVC Beta to the RC.

– Microsoft .NET Services White Papers (Dec 2008 CTP)

Overview
An Introduction to Microsoft .NET Services for Developers. This overview paper introduces Microsoft® .NET Services, each of its building block services, and how they fit together.

A Developer’s Guide to the Microsoft® .NET Access Control Service. This whitepaper shows developers how to use a claims-based identity model and the Microsoft® .NET Access Control Service – part of the Microsoft® .NET Services family – to implement single sign-on, federated identity, and role based access control in Web applications and services.

A Developer’s Guide to the Microsoft® .NET Service Bus. This whitepaper shows developers how to use the .NET Service Bus – part of the Microsoft® .NET Services family – to provide a secure, standards-based messaging fabric to connect applications across the Internet.

A Developer’s Guide to the Microsoft® .NET Workflow Service. This whitepaper provides details about the Microsoft® .NET Workflow Service, its relation to Windows Workflow Foundation, and what developers need to know to begin building workflows for the cloud. It not only explains the current tools and capabilities but also outlines the vision for future releases.

The Future of .NET Languages?

Posted by admin on January 21, 2009 No comments

I came across this article and really enjoyed it, thats why I have to share it with you. Written by Damon Armstrong this article gives a bit of light what is next in .NET field.

Co-Evolution for VB.NET and C#

One of the most prominent messages coming from Microsoft right now is geared towards Microsoft Visual Basic® .NET developers. VB.NET and Microsoft Visual C#® are both built on top of the Common Language Runtime (CLR), which means they both compile down into the same Common Intermediate Language (CIL). Since they both compile down to the same code, there should be no intrinsic benefit of one language over another. However, both languages are maintained by separate teams at Microsoft, and over the years this separation has led to a variety of language-specific features in both C# and VB.NET as the teams focus on different areas with their respective products. Many VB.NET developers feel that the most exciting new features appear in C# first and are only later introduced into VB.NET. Naturally, this has generated a bit of animosity in the VB.NET community.

Introducing the Dynamic Language Runtime

Microsoft is acutely aware that the .NET Framework is not the only choice for building applications. All you have to do is take a quick glance around the development sphere and you’ll find a number of language options, and that number is only expected to rise as domain-specific languages emerge. People are spending time and energy writing useful components in these languages, so the question is, how can you use a component written in another language without having to rewrite it in .NET?

At a high level, you can think of the Dynamic Language Runtime as having three layers (see figure 1 below):

* .NET Language Integration
* DLR Core Components
* Language Binders

image001 The Future of .NET Languages?

The first layer, .NET Language Integration, simply represents the need for .NET languages to have a notion of what the DLR is and how to use it. For the most part, you won’t even notice this aspect of the DLR because most of the .NET languages had a natural integration point. IronRuby and IronPython are both dynamically typed languages, so the DLR fit right in. VB.NET has always supported the notion of late binding on the Object type, so the DLR incorporated nicely into late binding resolution. C#, however, has no notion of late binding and needed an additional static type for dynamic language support. It’s called the dynamic type, and we’ll talk about it in more detail a bit later.

Language Binders, which make up the third layer, are language-specific implementations of certain operations the Dynamic Language Runtime needs to understand about each language that wishes to participate in the DLR.

New Language Features in .NET 4.0
– Dynamic Lookup (New to C#)
– Named and Optional Parameters (New to C#)
– Anonymous Method Support (New to VB.NET)
– Co-variance and Contra-variance (New to C# and VB.NET)
– Dynamic Import (New to C#)
– Omitting Ref Parameters (New to C#)
– Compiling without Primary Interop Assemblies (New to C# and VB.NET)
– Implicit Line Continuation (New to VB.NET)
– Simplified Property Syntax (New to VB.NET)
– Array Type Inference and Jagged Arrays (New to VB.NET)
– From Keyword (New to VB.NET)

Functional Programming with F#

F# is a succinct, high performance, type-inferred, functional language built on top of the .NET Framework. Microsoft has a solid base of imperative programming languages with VB.NET and C#, but there is a trend in computing that tends to be moving towards a more declarative style of programming. What’s the difference? In an imperative language you write code that tells the compiler exactly how to do something, whereas in a declarative language you write code that says what you want to do, but leave the “how” part up to the compiler. Now, the ultimate declarative language would allow you to write something like “Morph the screen into something cool” and then compile your thoughts into a wicked screen saver or some such, but we’re not there just yet. F# offers developers the opportunity to explore declarative concepts and offer a useful language to customers whose thinking is geared more towards functional development.

Read the whole of this article from the source.