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Posted by on 13th October, 2008

Microsoft Releases Silverlight 2…

Microsoft Releases Silverlight 2…

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of Silverlight 2, one of the industry’s most comprehensive and powerful solutions for the creation and delivery of applications and media experiences through a Web browser. Silverlight 2 delivers a wide range of new features and tools that enable designers and developers to better collaborate while creating more accessible, more discoverable and more secure user experiences. [button link=”http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-13Silverlight2PR.mspx?rss_fdn=Press%20Releases” color=”#FFFFCC” size=”1″ style=”4″ dark=”1″]read...

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Posted by on 23rd August, 2008

Bug tracking software

Bug tracking software

I am evaluating several bug tracking/project management software packages and have found a couple of interesting one that seem very robust and are quite popular. Even better, I have found that two of these offer some sort of free version of their paid product, being the amount of users, the only limitation… OnTime 2008 by Axosoft. Offers a single developer edition for free (details here and here). FogBugz by FogCreek software. Offers a trial that (via workhappy.net) can be enabled to work fully functional for two users in student and startup edition ...

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Posted by on 14th August, 2008

Intellisense not working in Visual Studio…

Intellisense not working in Visual Studio…

IntelliSense is Microsoft's implementation of autocompletion, best known for its use in the Microsoft Visual Studio integrated development environment. In addition to completing the symbol names the programmer is typing, IntelliSense serves as documentation and disambiguation for variable names, functions and methods using metadata-based reflection." (Wikipedia) So, I can’t quite remember when exactly Intellisense stopped working for me in Visual Studio 2008, but I know I have been without (automatic) Intellisense for quite a while.When typing a dot after an object or method, it used to just show up automatically… I could however have it come up by pressing <CTRL><SPACE> and eventually got in the habit of just doing that when I needed it, without attempting to find out exactly why it was broken in the first place… So, several months later, I stumble upon an entry by Richard Fennell, who explains how to fix it. I thought I’d post it for when it breaks again, I know where to find the answer… In Visual Studio 2008, select Tools...

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Posted by on 12th August, 2008

Free 60 DevExpress controls…

Free 60 DevExpress controls…

Here is an opportunity to take advantage of: DevExpress is offering single developer licenses for 60 of their controls free of charge, without royalties or distribution costs. These are very high quality controls that should not be left out when considering any web (or windows) application development project. You see their ads in MSDN magazine every month and this is your chance to get them and use them without spending a cent. “Once you register, you will be forwarded an Email with your login credentials to our product download portal. With this information in hand, you will be able to download and install all the controls and tools listed above free of charge. The applications you create with these controls can be distributed royalty free (see the EULA that accompanies the products for more information). Note that the installation you download will include evaluation versions of our entire product line. You can install these trials if you wish during the setup process. Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008...

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Posted by on 12th August, 2008

Optimizing tools for ASP.NET

Optimizing tools for ASP.NET

We all know that you can ask for directions to the same destination multiple times and get different answers each time. They will all lead you to your destination; however, some direction may get you there faster, some have a more scenic panorama, some with clear instructions and others are difficult to follow. The exact same is true for software development; each developer will write code their own way and have a reason as to why some function was written a certain way. However, with software, a key requirement is that we often don't want the elegance, the scenic nor the "pretty" code, but simply the code that executes efficiently, robustly and fast. How do you know if your code does exactly that…? You don't really know until you take your code for a test run and measure its performance… There are a ton of tools out there that will assist in giving you a diagnosis of speed, performance, etc. Morgan at PHPVS.net has written a good article highlighting...

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Posted by on 11th August, 2008

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP1 released

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 SP1 released

Visual Studio Service Pack 1 and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 have been released today. The downloads are available here: [list style=”check”] Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (exe) Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (iso) Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 [/list] “The .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 includes a lot of improvements and especially TONS (literally tons) of performance improvements for WPF applications, ADO.NET Entity Framework, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ADO.NET Data Services Framework and much more.” PLEASE NOTE: If developing Silverlight apps with Visual Studio, please note that after installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 you must update the Silverlight Tools (more info and download links are available here)." (via MSDN blogs –...

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Posted by on 26th July, 2008

Secure GMail…

Secure GMail…

If you use GMail, you expect to be using a highly robust, efficient and secure application. You also expect that your password is encrypted and transmitted via https when you log in. These are all true statements…however, in regards to encryption, that is as far as it goes. In other words, when you send or receive email, the data is transmitted using plain http protocol, thus in clear text and relatively easily “sniffed”, especially when on a wireless connection. You used to be able to “hack” GMail and just add an -s to the http and make your connection secure when sending and receiving mail, however, that required a manual and often change every time you checked your email. Now GMail has the option to enable this feature permanently in the settings. You can now choose to transmit all you correspondence via a secure channel or not. The drawback is obviously speed: your connection will be somewhat slower, because of the encryption and decryption process on both sides on...

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Posted by on 19th May, 2008

Increase your (VMWare disk) size…

Increase your (VMWare disk) size…

Over the years I have used both Microsoft’s Virtual PC and VMWare. As to which one I prefer and is better, that is a whole other post. In this post I wanted to write about increasing the size of a virtual hard drive of a VMWare machine. When creating a new machine you are asked to define the size of your drive and when you choose 16Gb, you  think you’ll never use  that much anyways, until, after a while, you realize you do need more. In that case, there are no options to increase the size of your C: drive. Ofcourse, you could always add a new drive (D or E), but that is just more files lingering around, as if VMware didn’t create enough already…. With regards to your OS drive size, you are stuck with the size you chose. No menu options, dialogs, or wizards can increase it… …unless you do this trick. Thanks to Paul Marshall for outlining these steps. I have done this a couple...

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Posted by on 24th April, 2008

Adobe Reader alternatives…

Adobe Reader alternatives…

It is no secret that I am not an admirer of the Adobe product line. "Bloated" is the first word that comes to mind… I know that Adobe does a couple products that are quite complex (Photoshop) and those we expect to be large in size, but, there is no reason for a simple rendering tool like the Adobe Reader to be so large, gobble up so much memory and take an eternity to fully launch. As an alternative, I use Foxit PDF reader and have used it for several years. I would recommend this one blindly as it is lightning fast, very light and does its job very well…it lets me read PDF’s….for free, with no ads or anything… [you can get it here] There are plenty of alternatives, some with more capabilities than others, but here is a long list of other options for PDF readers. [button link=”http://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-reader/” color=”#FFFFCC” size=”1″ style=”4″ dark=”1″]read...

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Posted by on 4th April, 2008

Chase Game in Silverlight 1.0

Chase Game in Silverlight 1.0

Another brief experiment in Silverlight 1.0: this time a simple game. Originally I wanted to have an object that the player would drag around, but apparently Silverlight 1.0 does not have a hittest method for objects. It does in the next version… As the instructions say, keep your mouse pointer away from the wall and the bouncing box… If you do touch anything, the wall you touched or the box itself will highlight with red. My next experiment will be in Silverlight 2.0, because it is quite a bit different and I don’t want to fall behind… [note color=”FFFFCC”] [/note] javascript code var mouseX = 0; var mouseY = 0; var moveX = 0.0; var moveY = 0.0; var X = 170; var Y = 10; //------------------------------ var canvas = null; var plugin = null; var ball; var txtTicks; var lineLeft; var lineTop; var lineRight; var lineBottom; //------------------------------ var gravity = 0.1; var interval; var seconds=0; var ticks=0; function onCanvasLoaded(sender) { plugin = sender.getHost(); txtTicks = sender.findname("txtTicks"); lineLeft =...

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