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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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Posted by on 26th March, 2008

Wear sunscreen….such good advice!

Wear sunscreen….such good advice!

Distracted from what I was doing, I stumbled upon this excellent and inspiring clip. Truly one clip we should all watch every single day, first thing in the morning… I mean that. We go about our daily lives not realizing how we are wasting our youth; that precious substance of which we have less of, every day that goes by…. that and other magnificent advice. From the Wikipedia article: “Wear Sunscreen or Sunscreen Speech are the common names of an essay actually called “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young” written by Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune as a column in 1997. The most popular and well-known form of the essay is the successful music single released in 1999, credited to Baz Luhrmann.” This version with subititles in Spanish. Listen carefully and...

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Posted by on 18th March, 2008

Boston Dynamics Big Dog…

Boston Dynamics Big Dog…

You just have to wonder that with today’s technology and vast knowledge that we’d have robots in place everywhere, exactly as we were promised 30 years ago. Most attempts at designing and developing robots that emulate human or animal like movements have been, well, let’s say, not so human or animal like… Until I saw Boston Dynamic’s Big Dog: incredibly beautiful and creepy at the same time. The project is funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency), you know the same folks that brought you the Internet… Make sure to check out 0:37…the immediate response is simply incredible and behaves so realistically that I think I even felt a bit sorry for the steel beast. Their website is not much to look at and painfully slow, but check out their other...

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Posted by on 5th March, 2008

Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 available….

Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 available….

Finally Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 has been released. This is a big release with lots of new features, as Scott Guthrie mentions: “Silverlight 2 includes a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework, and enables a rich .NET development platform that runs in the browser.” Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython and IronRuby)." Of course I will be posting some new experiments very soon. Get the download, documentation, SDK and tools via...

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