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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 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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Posted by on 10th February, 2008

Visual Studio 2008 hotfix

Visual Studio 2008 hotfix

Visual Studio 2008 had several issues in its first release of slowing down or even freezing temporarily when developing web applications, especially large ones. This hotfix addresses some of these issues. A readme file included in the download details every issue covered in this hotfix. For more details check out Scott Guthrie’s post on this release. [button link=”https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=10826&wa=wsignin1.0″ color=”#FFFFCC” size=”1″ style=”4″ dark=”1″]read...

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Posted by on 9th November, 2007

Visual Studio 2005 Accelerators

Visual Studio 2005 Accelerators

Visual Studio 2005 is probably one of the most complex pieces of software ever developed. It has so many features, so many tools to (try to) satisfy every developer that is trying to accomplish such a wide variety of tasks, that it is easy to see how a product like that could become very bloated and sluggish. So, how do I speed it up? Here are some tips I have collected over time: Disable the Splash Screen Add the following parameter to your VS2005 shortcut: “C:Program Files…devenv.exe” -nosplash Note: the same trick applies to Business Intellgience Managment Studio and SQL Management Studio…. Install Visual Studio Service Pack 1 get it here. Turn off any IDE animated windows Go to Tools | Options | Environment and uncheck Animate environment tools. Get a faster hard drive – seriously Scott Gu writes: “What you are much more likely to block on is the Seek and I/O speed capacity with which your computer accesses your hard drive.  If you are using an application...

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Posted by on 17th September, 2007

Disable restart after Windows Update

Disable restart after Windows Update

“Do you like the annoying message that keeps asking you to restart your computer after installing windows updates every 10 minutes? If you choose ‘Restart Later’, this question will appear again every 10 minutes.” Here is a way to eliminate this behaviour… [button link=”http://www.techdo.com/?p=86″ color=”#FFFFCC” size=”1″ style=”4″ dark=”1″]read...

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Posted by on 6th September, 2007

Live Javascript form validation

Live Javascript form validation

I had to do some simple form validation the other day and thought to myself that, in our current Web 2.0 world, I should do it with AJAX since it is really everywhere and it didn’t even cross my mind todo it the old fashioned way with plain Javascript, which might do the job just a good. So, I stumbled upon Live Validation which offers a lightweight, open source javascript library to do just that: real time form validation with some very useful features. They have some excellent examples here and the code is decently commented. Definitively a must have in my toolbox! [button link=”http://www.livevalidation.com” color=”#FFFFCC” size=”1″ style=”4″ dark=”1″]read...

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Posted by on 2nd August, 2007

Amazon Flexible Payments Service

Amazon Flexible Payments Service

Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS) is the first payments service designed from the ground up specifically for developers. The set of web services APIs allows the movement of money between any two entities, humans or computers. It is built on top of Amazon’s reliable and scalable payment infrastructure.” It seems very flexible (hence the name, I guess…) and the pricing is surprisingly decent as well. There are several companies out there doing this this, PayPal being one of them, but I think this will offer some serious competition. [button link=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=342430011″ color=”#FFFFCC” size=”1″ style=”4″ dark=”1″]read...

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