Useful Information to All

SQL SERVER – Reset sa Password

2011-12-26T09:09:00.000-08:00

1.Open the SQL Server express management studio
2.Connect to SQL Server using windows authentication
3.Right click the server name and choose properties
4.Go to security tab. Change server authentication to “SQL Server and Windows Authentication mode”
5.Click OK and restart SQL Server
6.Go to SQL Server studio management express
7.Expand the server and choose security and expand logins
8.Right click on SA, from properties modify the password and confirm password

Or

To reset the sa password, you can make the following:
1. Login to the SQL Server box as the Administrator.
2. Run SQL Server Enterprise Manager.
3. Right-click the server name and choose ‘Edit SQL Server Registration properties’.
4. Choose ‘Use Windows authentication’ and click OK button.
5. Expand a server, expand a Security and click Logins.
6. Double-click the sa login and specify new password on the General tab. (enable Login to)

Or You Can Use

USE [master]
GO
ALTER LOGIN [sa] WITH DEFAULT_DATABASE=[master],
DEFAULT_LANGUAGE=[us_english], CHECK_EXPIRATION=ON, CHECK_POLICY=ON
GO
USE [master]
GO
ALTER LOGIN [sa] WITH PASSWORD=N’’ MUST_CHANGE
GO

Or

From a command prompt
OSQL -S -E
1> EXEC sp_password NULL, ‘’, ‘sa’
2> GO

Pragmatic Bookshelf - Mastering DOJO

2010-05-12T23:49:00.000-07:00

Pragmatic Bookshelf - Mastering DOJO - Javascript and Ajax Tools for Great Web Experience

To download Click Here

OReilly Dojo The Definitive Guide

2010-05-12T23:35:00.000-07:00

OReilly Dojo The Definitive Guide

To download Click Here

Professional JavaScript Frameworks - Prototype YUI, ExtJS, Dojo, MooTools 2009

2010-05-12T19:57:00.000-07:00

Professional JavaScript Frameworks - Prototype YUI, ExtJS, Dojo, MooTools 2009

To download Click Here
www.amaderforum.com

Visual Studio 2008 Tips & Tricks for Developers

2009-01-25T09:55:00.000-08:00

Working in Full Screen Mode in Visual Studio
1. Alt+Shift+Enter is the shortcut to enter to fullscreen mode in Visual Studio
2. Its sometimes really helpful and more appealing for developers to work in full screen mode

Editing
1. For Copying a line in the IDE just go to the start of the line and press Ctrl+C,there is no need to select anything
2. For Pasting a line just go to the start of the line and just press Ctrl+V
3. For Deleting a line just go to the start of the line and press Ctrl+X, this is not actually delete but its similar to cut if you do Ctrl+X on current line and go to some other place in your code and do Ctrl+V then it will paste the same line there.

Expanding and Collapsing the code units
1. This nice little shortcuts has saved me a lot of time.Whenever i am working on a large piece of code i always get confused and make some changes in other Method or property because they were looking similar.
2. But now with this shortcut i collapse one method as soon as it is finished.
3. The shortcut is Ctrl+M+M.
4. Just go to the beginning or end of the method or property or any code block and hit the shortcut it will expand or collapse the code block comparing to its present state.
5. If you want to collapse all your code units or blocks to their definitions then the shortcut to achieve this is Ctrk+M+O or Ctrl+M Ctrl+O.This is also a very handy shortcut which helps a lot in development.

Automatic Text Indentation and Formatting
1. This shortcut helps me to write beautiful and decorative code which is easy to understand by any person.
2. Shortcut is just press Ctrl+K+D.
3. This works not only in C# and VB code behind but it works well in aspx pages.
4. If you want to just format the selected piece of code then just press Ctrl+K+F

Microsoft Unveils Next Version of Visual Studio and .NET Framework

2008-09-29T21:35:00.000-07:00

Reveals extensive enhancements for simplified application life-cycle management, provides sneak peek at all key focus areas for Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0.

Microsoft Corp. today provided the first look at the next version of its developer tools and platform, which will be named Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. Microsoft described the next release through the following five focus areas: riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management (ALM).

Today’s announcement included an in-depth look at how Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 (code-named “Rosario”) will help democratize ALM with a unique solution that brings all the members of a development organization into the application development life cycle, and removes many of the existing barriers to integration. Additional details on the other focus areas will be disclosed over the product development cycle.

“With Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0, we are focused on the core pillars of developer experience, support for the latest platforms spanning client, server, services and devices, targeted experiences for specific application types, and core architecture improvements,” said S. “Soma” Somasegar, senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. “These pillars are designed specifically to meet the needs of developers, the teams that drive the application life cycle from idea to delivery, and the customers that demand the highest quality applications across multiple platforms. You can expect to hear a lot more about Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 in the coming months.”

Democratizing Application Life-Cycle Management

Today, much of application development remains siloed throughout the enterprise, leading to decreased productivity and lengthy product development cycles. With VSTS 2010, Microsoft is taking the next step forward in giving individuals and development organizations an advanced solution that enables them to integrate effectively and build and deliver high-quality applications.

This includes new capabilities that make it easier for all contributors on the software team to participate throughout the life cycle — from the core developers and testers to the wider team of project managers, designers and business analysts. Highlights include the following:

Modeling tools. With VSTS 2010 Architecture, Microsoft will enable both technical and nontechnical users to create and use models to collaborate and to define business and system functionality graphically. The new version supports both Unified Modeling Language and Domain Specific Language support, so development organizations will have the right tool for right job. The new modeling capabilities in VSTS 2010 are a core part of the larger Microsoft modeling platform, which will also include the “Oslo” repository, tools and language.
Improved efficiency throughout the test cycle. With VSTS 2010, Microsoft has made a significant investment in testing features and dramatically simplifying the tools required to integrate testing across the life cycle. New features include the ability to eliminate nonreproducible bugs, fast setup and deployment of tests to ensure the highest degree of completeness of test, focused test planning and progress tracking, and ensuring that all code changes are properly tested.
Substantial improvements in collaboration capabilities. Microsoft has made major investments in the capabilities and scalability of Team Foundation Server (TFS) including significant improvements that allow teams to configure and adopt any flavor of Agile development processes. Teams can track and trace work more easily with richer linking of work items enabling hierarchical work item relationships. In the source code management system, TFS now provides visualization tools for tracking changes across branches and into the production build. VSTS 2010 also introduces workflow-based builds that catch errors before they have a chance to affect the rest of the team or, worse, enter production. Finally, administrators will find dramatically simpler TFS deployment and management.

“The application life cycle is an integral part of today’s business. Regardless of core competencies, all organizations are driven by software that is created and customized to deliver a competitive advantage,” said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of voke, inc. “Enterprises that invest in an ALM solution can decrease their total cost of ownership of applications in their IT portfolio, and bring about a global approach that is an integrated and expansive system consisting of people, processes and technology. This global approach to ALM facilitates collaboration and takes the risk out of software development to produce predictable and reliable results for an optimized business outcome. Solutions such as VSTS are poised to take advantage of market opportunity by offering an application life-cycle platform to help enterprises realize this ROI benefit.”

In another move to increase integration across the life cycle, Microsoft also announced that VSTS 2010 will provide a unified VSTS Development and Database product. As a benefit to existing Software Assurance (SA) customers, those who currently own Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition or Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition will receive all the following products starting Oct. 1, 2008, for free:

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Development Edition
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition
Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Software Developers
Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Database Professionals

VB.NET vs C#.NET

2008-05-06T03:27:00.000-07:00

VB.NET Advantages

Support for optional parameters - very handy for some COM interoperability
Support for late binding with Option Strict off - type safety at compile time goes out of the window, but legacy libraries which don't have strongly typed interfaces become easier to use.
Support for named indexers (aka properties with parameters).
Various legacy VB functions (provided in the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace, and can be used by other languages with a reference to the Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll). Many of these can be harmful to performance if used unwisely, however, and many people believe they should be avoided for the most part. Some methods here are apparently faster than the more idiomatic .NET equivalent, however. Readability should be considered: using VB functions probably makes the code easier for a VB-classic programmer to read, but harder for someone from a background in another .NET language to read.
Simpler (in expression - perhaps more complicated in understanding) event handling, where a method can declare that it handles an event, rather than the handler having to be set up in code.
The ability to implement interfaces with methods of different names. (Arguably this makes it harder to find the implementation of an interface, however.)
Catch ... When ... clauses, which allow exceptions to be filtered based on runtime expressions rather than just by type.
The VB.NET part of Visual Studio .NET compiles your code in the background. While this is considered an advantage for small projects, people creating very large projects have found that the IDE slows down considerably as the project gets larger. (Note: This may only affect VS.NET 2002. I haven't tested it yet with VS.NET 2003 or VS2005 beta 2.)

C# Advantages

XML documentation generated from source code comments. (Available in VB.NET with Visual Studio 2005.)
Operator overloading. (Available in VB.NET with Visual Studio 2005.)
Language support for unsigned types. You can use them from VB.NET, but they aren't in the language itself. (Available in VB.NET with Visual Studio 2005.)
The using statement, which makes unmanaged resource disposal simple. (Available in VB.NET with Visual Studio 2005.)
Volatile variables.
Explicit interface implementation, where an interface which is already implemented in a base class can be reimplemented separately in a derived class. Arguably this makes the class harder to understand, in the same way that member hiding normally does.
Unsafe code. This allows pointer arithmetic etc, and can improve performance in some situations. However, it is not to be used lightly, as a lot of the normal safety of C# is lost (as the name implies). Note that unsafe code is still managed code, i.e. it is compiled to IL, JITted, and run within the CLR.

What ASP.NET Developers Should Know About JavaScript - Part 3

2008-03-10T22:18:00.001-07:00

Part - 1

Part - 2

Part - 3

Where Are We With Object Oriented JavaScript?
With our brief diversion into JSON complete, let's return to the topic of object oriented JavaScript. So far we've learned the following:

Every JavaScript object is a dictionary.

This is useful information for constructing objects, but it's only a starting point. To get to the next level of abstraction, we'll need to add a second piece of knowledge:

Every JavaScript function is an object.

#2 is what we will discuss in the next topic.

JavaScript Functions
A JavaScript function is a chunk of executable code, but it's also a first class object. This is fundamentally different from methods in C# and Visual Basic. We can invoke methods in C# and VB, but we can't treat those methods as datatypes (although delegates and lamda expressions in C# make this area a little bit fuzzy). In JavaScript, we can manipulate functions using other JavaScript code, assign functions to variables, store functions inside arrays, nest functions inside other functions, and pass functions as a parameter to other functions. This might sound strange, so let's walk through a simple example.

function add(point1, point2)
{
    var result = {
        x : point1.x + point2.x,
        y : point1.y + point2.y
    }
    return result;
}

The above code defines a function named "add". The function expects two parameters, and expects that these two parameters will both have x and y properties that it can add together. It returns the result as a new object (created in object notation) with x and y properties. We could use invoke this function as in the following sample:

var p1 = { x: 1, y: 1 };
var p2 = { x: 1, y: 1 };

// use our add function
var p3 = add(p1, p2);

alert(p3.x + "," + p3.y);

The resulting dialog box will display "2,2".

Technically, what we've done with the add function is create a new function object, and assigned the function object to a variable named add. We could take the same function object and assign it to different variables and invoke the function through those variables.

function add(point1, point2)
{
     var result = {
         x : point1.x + point2.x,
         y : point1.y + point2.y
      }
      return result;
}

var foo = add
var bar = add

var p1 = { x: 1, y:1 };
var p2 = { x: 1, y:1 };

// invoke add through foo variable
// p3 should be 2,2
var p3 = foo(p1, p2);

// invoke add again through bar variable
// 2,2 + 1,1 = 3,3
p3 = foo(p3, p1);

alert(p3.x + "," + p3.y);

The resulting dialog box should now display "3,3".

Functions as Methods
We can also assign a function object to an object property. As we noted before, this promotes the function to the status of "method".

var point1 =
{
    x: 3,
    y: 5,
    add: function(otherPoint)
         {
             this.x = this.x + otherPoint.x;
             this.y = this.y + otherPoint.y;
         }
};

var point2 =
{
    x: 1,
    y: 1
};

// add 3,5 to 1,1
point1.add(point2);
// shows 4,6
alert(point1.x + "," + point1.y);

The first part of the code uses object notation to create an object with x, y, and add properties. The add property is a function object, and inside we've introduced the "this" keyword. Just as every instance method in C# has an implicit "this" parameter (and every instance method in VB has "Me" parameter), every JavaScript method has an implicit "this" parameter that represents the object through which the method was invoked. "this.x" will reference the x property of point1, because we invoke the add method using point1.

What is a problem is that we have two "point" objects, but one has an add method and one does not. Remember, we are not defining classes like we would in C# or VB, we are simply creating objects and adding properties and methods on the fly. If we wanted to same add method in both point1 and point2, we could write the following code.

function addPoints(otherPoint)
{
    this.x = this.x + otherPoint.x;
    this.y = this.y + otherPoint.y;
}

var point1 =
{
    x: 3,
    y: 5,
    add: addPoints
};

var point2 =
{
    x: 1,
    y: 1,
    add: addPoints
};

// add 3,5 to 1,1
point1.add(point2);

// shows 4,6
alert(point1.x + "," + point1.y);

Now we've defined a function object and assigned the object to a variable named addPoints. We use addPoints to create new add methods in both the point1 and point2 objects. Does the "this" reference still work in addPoints? Yes it does, because "this" will still reference the object through which the method was invoked. "this" is a bit ephemeral in JavaScript, as we see later on, but we can can now invoke the add method on either the point1 or point2 object.

This syntax is feeling uncomfortable, however. It looks as if we are trying to create a Point class that will define the properties and methods for all Point objects. But JavaScript doesn't have classes, so that would be a dream, right? We'll forever need to include all this object literal code every time we need a point object, right? Let's hope we never move into 3 dimensions where the definition of our point objects will change.

Fortunately, there is a better solution.

Constructor Functions
In JavaScript, a constructor function works in conjunction with the new operator to initialize objects. A constructor function can improve our previous code, because we can use the function to initialize every object we want to use as a Point.

function Point(x,y)
{
    this.x = x;
    this.y = y;
}

var p1 = new Point(3,5);
var p2 = new Point(4,6);

// shows 3,5
alert(p1.x, p1.y);

Constructor functions are just regular functions. It's just we've designed the function to be used with the new operator. By convention, we generally capitalize constructor functions to make other programmers aware of their significance.

When we use the new operator with the Point function, the new operator will first create a new object. The new operator then invokes the Point function and passes a reference to the newly created object in the implicit "this" parameter. Inside the Point function we are creating new name/value pairs using the parameter values passed to the function.

Constructor Functions and Object Methods
We can also create methods on an object inside a constructor function.

function Point(x,y)
{
    this.x = x;
    this.y = y;
    this.add = function(point2)
        {
            this.x += point2.x;
            this.y += point2.y;
        }
}

var p1 = new Point(3,5);
var p2 = new Point(4,6);

p1.add(p2);

// shows 7,11
alert(p1.x + ',' + p1.y);

This approach works well, but there is an alternate approach we can use which is more in favor today. To understand this approach, we'll need to introduce a new piece of knowledge. Let's review the first two:

Every JavaScript object is a dictionary.
Every JavaScript function is an object.

Now for number 3:

Every JavaScript object references a prototype object.

Let's talk about prototypes.

Object Prototypes
Prototypes are a distinguishing feature of the JavaScript language. C#, Visual Basic, C++, and Java are all examples of class-based programming languages. To create objects, we must first write a class that defines fields, properties, methods, and events. When we create a new object, we are creating an instance of that class.

In JavaScript, there are no classes. JavaScript is a prototype-based programming language. Every object has a prototype property that references its prototype object. Any properties and methods that are a part of an object's prototype will appear as properties and methods of the object itself.

Remember that every function is an object, and every object references a prototype object. That means every constructor function references a prototype object. This is extremely useful when used in conjunction with the "new" operator, because of steps taken by the new operator:

Create an empty object.
Assign the value of the constructor function's prototype property to the new object's prototype property.
Invoke the constructor function, passing the new object as the "this" reference.

The above 3 steps mean that all objects created by a constructor function will have the same prototype – the prototype object for the constructor function. If we can modify the constructor function's prototype object, we will modify all objects the constructor function ever creates (or has already created). You can almost think of every object as inheriting from it's prototype, because it will include all the properties and methods defined by its prototype. I say "almost" because this thinking can be dangerous in some edge cases.

Fortunately, there is an easy syntax we can use to add new properties and methods into a prototype object.

Prototype Programming
Remember, all objects in JavaScript are dictionaries, and a prototype object is no exception. We can modify an object' s prototype simply by referencing it's prototype property, and we can add properties and methods to that prototype object. Let's rewrite our Point "class" one more time.

function Point(x,y)
{
    this.x = x;
    this.y = y;
}

Point.prototype.add = function(point2)
{
    this.x += point2.x;
    this.y += point2.y;
}

var p1 = new Point(3,5);
var p2 = new Point(4,6);

p1.add(p2);

// shows 7,11
alert(p1.x + ',' + p1.y);

The methods and properties we add to Point.prototype will be shared by all objects that are constructed from the Point constructor function. When we add methods to an object using the constructor function – each object gets a new property referencing a function object, so the prototype approach is more efficient (shared function objects) as well as being a little easier to read. This prototype approach is used by many of today's JavaScript frameworks.

Putting It All Together
The topics we've discussed so far put us close to "simulating" classes in JavaScript. There are just a couple more topics we need to introduce before wrapping up.

One topic is encapsulation. In JavaScript, every name/value pair we add to an object becomes a public property. There are no keywords in JavaScript to restrict accessibility (like the internal, protected, and private keywords in C#). Nevertheless, we can simulate private members.

Private Members
Douglas Crockford published an article "Private Members In JavaScript" that demonstrates how to add private members to a JavaScript object. Information hiding is an important technique in object oriented programming, and many JavaScript toolkits use Crockford's approach to private members.

Private members have to be made in an object's constructor function. Both local vars and parameters are eligible to become private members using a closure. A closure in JavaScript is an inner function that references a local var or parameter in its outer function. Those local variables and parameters, which typically go out of scope when the outer function finishes execution are now "enclosed" by the inner function, which can continue to reference and use those variables.

Let's re-write our sample once more, this time providing public "get" and "set" accesors for our points.


function Point(x, y)
{
    this.get_x = function() { return x; }
    this.set_x = function(value) { x = value; }
    this.get_y = function() { return y; }
    this.set_y = function(value) { y = value; }
}

Point.prototype.print = function()
{
    return this.get_x() + ',' + this.get_y();
}

var p = new Point(2,2);
p.set_x(4);
alert(p.print());

Client code can no longer access the x and y values of a point object directly. Instead, the code has to go through the set_ and get_ methods.

Namespaces
Namespaces are crucial for avoiding type name collisions, which can be a bad thing in JavaScript. Unlike a compiled language like C# or VB, where a type name collision will result in a compiler error and an un-shippable product, in JavaScript you can still ship the code and might not find out about the collision until it's too late. JavaScript will happily overwrite one value with another. Since we are now including JavaScript code from all over the place, the practice of using namespace is important.

There is just one problem.

JavaScript doesn't support namespaces.

This is ok, because we can "simulate" namespace using objects. Let's put our "Point class" into a Geometry namespace.

var Geometry = {}

Geometry.Point = function(x,y)
{
    this.x = x;
    this.y = y;
}

Geometry.Point.prototype =
{
    print: function()
    {
        return this.x + ',' + this.y;
    }
}

var p1 = new Geometry.Point(5,2);
alert(p1.print());

Essentially, we are adding our constructor function to the Geometry object. By adding other constructor functions (Rectangle, Square, etc), we could keep all of our types inside Geometry and not pollute the global namespace. Most JavaScript frameworks use a similar technique.

In Conclusion
This article presented three key pieces of knowledge:

Every JavaScript object is a dictionary.
Every JavaScript function is an object.
Every JavaScript object references a prototype object.

Those are three fundamental facts about JavaScript that also make JavaScript different from mainstream CLR languages like C# and VB.NET. Embracing and internalizing these differences will put you ahead of the game in understanding modern JavaScript frameworks, toolkits, and libraries.
This article is by K. Scott Allen. Questions? Comments? Bring them to my blog.

Part - 1

Part - 2

Part - 3

What ASP.NET Developers Should Know About JavaScript - Part 2

2008-03-10T21:58:00.001-07:00

Part - 1

Part - 2

Part - 3

Object Oriented JavaScript
JavaScript does have an object data type – but these objects can behave differently from the objects we create in C# and VB code. In C# and VB we create new objects by telling the runtime which class we want to instantiate. A class is a template for object creation. A class defines the properties and methods an object will have, and these properties and methods are forever fixed. We can't manipulate an object by adding or removing properties and methods at runtime.

In JavaScript there are no classes, so we have no template for object creation. Then how do properties and methods become part of an object? One approach is to dynamically create new properties and methods on an object after construction. To create a new property, all we need to do is assign a new value for a property. The following code creates a new object, then adds an x and y property to the object. Finally, the script writes the values of the two new properties into an area in the HTML document.

var p = new Object();
p.x = 3;
p.y = 5;
message.innerHTML = p.x + "," + p.y;

JavaScript objects are entirely different from C# and VB objects because they are ultimately a collection of name and value pairs. We can access an object's values using the dot operator "." followed by the name of the value. A value isn't constrained to holding simple integer types as we have shown in the first example, but could hold an array, function, or even other object.

If you are thinking a JavaScript object sounds like a Dictionary from the .NET framework class library, then you are heading in the right conceptual direction.

JavaScript Objects Are Dictionaries
A JavaScript object is similar to a Dictionary in the sense we can associate any arbitrary piece of data with any arbitrary string. In fact, there is an alternate syntax for accessing the values inside an object which makes the object look exactly like a dictionary. Instead of using the . operator to access a value, we can use the [] operator. The [] operator is a common sight when we work with collections like arrays, dictionaries, and hashtables.

Let's rewrite our first example using the [] operator.

p["x"] = 3;
p["y"] = 5;
message.innerHTML = p["x"] + "," + p.y;

The above piece of script produces the same result as our first script. It creates a new object, then adds x and y properties to the object, then writes out the values. Note that if we access a property that does not exist, we'll get back a value of "undefined". For instance, the line of code "alert(p.z);" would force a dialog box to appear with the string "undefined" inside

Creating Object Methods
We can also add functions into the collection of values inside an object. Functions associated with an object become methods of the object. The following code sample shows how to create and use a method with the name of "print".

var p = new Object();
p["x"] = 3;
p.y = 5;
p["print"] = function()
             {
               message.innerHTML = p.x + "," + p.y;
             }
p.print();

Notice we alternate use of the . operator and the [] operator. We can use these two operators interchangeably, for the most part, to create and access an object's properties and methods. Sometimes these operators lead to confusion, because it's not clear if a particular piece of code is trying to create new properties on an object, or if it's trying to set existing properties to new values. Fortunately, there is a third syntax available that makes our intent explicitly clear.

Object Literals
The object literal syntax of JavaScript allows us to create an object and specify its properties using shorthand. The syntax uses a comma-separated list of name and value pairs, where the name and the value themselves are separated by a colon. Let's rewrite our code and create our object using this object initialization syntax.

var p =
{
    x : 5,
    y : 3,
    print : function() { message.innerHTML = p.x + ',' + p.y; }
}

p.print();

In the above code it becomes clear where object initialization begins and ends. Also note that we can nest object literals, and that the property values inside the object literals do not need to be constants – we can use any legal JavaScript expression. The following code will contains a nested object (address), and assigns the current date to a new createdDate property.

var person =
{
    name: "Scott Allen",     createdDate: new Date()
    website: "OdeToCode.com",
    address: { state: "MD", postalCode: "21044" },
};

alert(person.address.state);
alert(person.createdDate);

The object literal syntax is popular because of its explicit intent and compact size. If you look at the source code for many of today's popular JavaScript frameworks, you'll see they are using object literals inside. Frameworks, however, aren't the ones using object literals.

Object Literals and JSON
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a lightweight data-interchange format based on a subset of the object literal syntax. Technically, JSON is a stricter version of the object literal syntax. For example, string literals must be enclosed in double quotes – no single quotes are allowed.

JSON allows JavaScript to exchange data over the network (typically with the XmlHttpRequest object) and interoperate with other applications. Many web service providers offer JSON as a serialization format and as an alternative to XML. When our JavaScript contacts the web service, the web service will return its data in JSON. There is no need for our code to manipulate XML data with an XML API - instead our code can use JavaScript's eval statement to convert JSON into an object graph.

var jsonString = "({ x : 3, y: 5 })";

var p = eval(jsonString);
alert(p.x + ',' + p.y);

JSON is becoming hugely popular on the web. JSON is human readable and easily consumable in JavaScript. Also, exchanging data with JSON typically results in smaller payloads than using XML. ASP.NET AJAX includes a JavaScriptSerializer class to use JSON on the server-side in managed code.

Part - 1

Part - 2

Part - 3

What ASP.NET Developers Should Know About JavaScript - Part 1

2008-03-10T21:48:00.000-07:00

Part - 1

Part - 2

Part - 3

JavaScript – It's beat up, put down, shrugged off and kicked around. Cursed by the web browser's inconsistency yet blessed by a pervasive ubiquity -it's a technology many try to disregard even when its potential is something few can ignore. If you want to write an interactive application for the web today, then you'll need some JavaScript code on your side.

This article approaches JavaScript from the perspective of an ASP.NET developer who is comfortable with the paradigms and patterns of either C# or Visual Basic. The article doesn't look at how to use JavaScript from ASP.NET exactly, but it does look at why JavaScript is so different from the two languages we commonly use with the .NET CLR. The article assumes you already know that JavaScript is a loosely-typed language (because you don't have to declare the type of data you store in a variable), and that the syntax is similar to the C family of languages (with charming curly braces and stunningly beautiful semi-colons).

What Is Wrong With JavaScript?
The introduction didn't paint a flattering picture of the JavaScript language, but the truth is JavaScript is a good language. The biggest sources of pain when programming with JavaScript aren't because of the language. The biggest pains come from:

The tools
The implementations
The bad practices

JavaScript Tools
Most of the tools we use in a Visual Studio environment are geared to languages targeting the CLR. If you program in C# or Visual Basic, you'll be assisted by Intellisense, class browsers, class diagrams, code snippets, code analysis, and a world class debugger. The menus will list refactoring commands, and unit testing is only a few keystrokes away.

Contrast the above with the experience of programming with JavaScript. There is no Intellisense (although the feature is coming in the next version of Visual Studio), the debugger is finicky, and most of the other tools listed above are missing entirely. Of course, the majority of the code we write in Visual Studio is not JavaScript, but as the demands of the web have required more scripting, we've started to need better tools. The lack of tools makes JavaScript more difficult to work with.

Bad Implementations
JavaScript is hosted by many different types of web browsers, and is generally our primary means to manipulate a browser's DOM. While ostensibly governed by W3C standards, we all know each browser contains variations and idiosyncrasies. Script code that works on one version of a browser might not work on a different version of the same browser. These scenarios cause a lot of pain in testing and re-writing of JavaScript code. This pain isn't the language's fault – we will never see the day when all browsers implement web standards with 100% accuracy.

Bad Practices
JavaScript is an accessible language. We don't need special tools or compilers. We can view the source code of any page on the Internet and copy the script code for our own purposes – and many people do. Of course, not everyone who uses JavaScript is a software developer with an eye for good code. All sorts of people use JavaScript, and all sorts of ugly JavaScript code perpetuates itself on the Internet.

Even software developers (the author included) have taken a quick and dirty approach to writing JavaScript. It's only script code, after all, and just slapping the code into a text editor to get the desired result is all we need. It's not until we have to untangle a mess that we realize a more disciplined approach would have ultimately saved us time.

With all of these problems in the JavaScript environment – why do we still want to torture ourselves by writing JavaScript code?

What is Right with JavaScript?
Over the last few years, the amount of JavaScript code you'll find in the typical web application has surged. There are a couple good reasons for the surge:

JavaScript is ubiquitous
JavaScript is mature

Ubiquity
If you want to write an application that will reach as many users as possible, then you'll be writing a web application. You can reach users on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and hundreds of other platforms on devices both large and small.

How will you make a web application interactive? You'll use JavaScript. Your users won't have to install a runtime, or an ActiveX control, or download some interpreting engine. They'll install a web browser that includes JavaScript support, as so many do, and they'll happily use your application. JavaScript is the most ubiquitous programming language on the planet.

Maturity
As the demand for JavaScript code has increased, the frameworks and libraries of well-tested and robust JavaScript code have begun to emerge. Many of these frameworks abstract away the browser idiosyncrasies we discussed earlier, and can greatly reduce the amount of time we invest in writing and debugging cross-platform JavaScript code. Here are some of the most popular frameworks:

ASP.NET AJAX
Prototype
Script.aculo.us
The Dojo Toolkit
Yahoo! UI Library

We've also begun to see the emergence of proven practices and design patterns. The practices put the object oriented features of JavaScript to good use. What's that? You didn't know JavaScript was object oriented? We might not have applied OOP practices to JavaScript code over the last few years, but the capability does exist.

Part - 1

Part - 2

Part - 3

New in Visual Studio 2008

2008-03-04T04:07:00.000-08:00

Visual Studio 2008 is the version of Visual Studio which comes with the .NET Framework 3.5. It was released to MSDN subscribers on 19 November 2007 alongside the .NET Framework 3.5.

Visual Studio 2008 can target development in .NET Framework versions 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5. Visual Studio 2008 comes with many new feature over Visual Studio 2005. Visual Studio 2008 features a XAML based designer (codenamed Cider), workflow designer, LINQ to SQL designer (for defining the type mappings and object encapsulation for SQL Server data), XSLT debugger, JavaScript Intellisense support, JavaScript Debugging support. Here is a list of some of the new features found in Visual Studio 2008.

Multi-Targeting support
Javascript Intellisense
Javascript debugging
Code editing improvements
Nested Master Page support
Web designer and CSS improvements
New Split View including vertical split
Enhanced support for the ASP.NET AJAX Extensions
LINQ to SQL designer
Enhanced XML support
Support for Silverlight
Support for WPF
Support for debugging .NET Framework 3.5 class libraries

Apress Beginning ASP NET 3.5 in CSharp

2008-02-01T00:13:00.000-08:00

Apress Beginning ASP NET 3.5 in CSharp 2008 From Novice to Professional 2nd.Edition Nov 2007

To download Click Here

Good Books for ASP.Net

2008-01-10T02:38:00.000-08:00

Asp.net Bible Vb.net & C#
Download

Programming in ASP.NET Bible
Download

ASP.NET Bible
Download

Beginning ASP.NET Databases using VB.NET
Download

Asp.net 2.0 in C#
Download

Pro ASP.NET in C# 2005

Download

Pro ASP.NET 2.0 E-Commerce in C Sharp 2005
Download

Essential ASP.NET With Examples in C Sharp
Download

O'reilly - C Sharp in a Nutshell
Download

Tips & Tricks - SQL Server 2008

2007-12-26T04:37:00.000-08:00

Did you know... How to perform date/time conversions using SQL Server
The first considerations is the actual date/time needed. The most common is the current date/time using getdate(). To change the format of the date, you convert the requested date to a string and specify the format number corresponding to the format needed using select convert(varchar, getdate(),)

Did you know.. How to get operating system content into SQL Server
Use the xp_cmdshell extended stored procedure to access the file system and bring the contents into SQL Server. By using a combination of both OS level commands and SQL Server commands you can pull this data into SQL Server for processing.

Did you know... How to delete duplicate rows when there is no primary key
An option that SQL Server gives you is the ability to set ROWCOUNT which limits the numbers of records affected by a command. The default value is 0 which means all records, but this value can be set prior to running a command.

Tips & Tricks - Visual Studio 2008

2007-12-26T04:29:00.000-08:00

Did you know... How to reach the Navigation bar via the keyboard?
To jump to the navigation bar via the keyboard, press Ctrl+F2. This is bound to the command Window.MoveToNavigationBar, so your keyboard shortcut mileage may vary. To toggle between the Objects list and the Members list press Tab or Shift+Tab. Additionally, you can hide (or show) the navigation bar by going to Tools - Options -Text Editor - All Languages - General and setting the Navigation bar option to the desired setting. Note that since this is found in AllLanguages, you can customize this for any listed language under the Text Editor node.

Did you know... what's the difference between smart indenting and block indenting?
Smart indenting is the option you want provided you want the cursor to be properly indented whenever you press enter or arrow up and down through the code. An example is when you create a new method called foo(), then hit enter. You'll notice the cursor will automatically indent itself. If you continue to hit enter, the cursor will remain indented. Not all languages support this smart indenting, but if it does, this should be the default setting for that language. Block indenting is similar to a document editor. The difference here is when you type in foo() and hit enter, only that first new line is automatically indented. The next newline places the cursor at column 0. None will not indent any new lines. You will have to indent everything manually.

Did you know... How to turn off Intellisense by default
Go to Tools - Options - Text Editor - All Languages - General and uncheck Auto List Members and Parameter Information. If you just want to disable intellisense by default for a particular language, go to the Text Editor - - General option page and set the behavior there.

Did you know... How to change the Brace Matching color?
Go to Tools - Options - Fonts and Colors, select Brace Matching (Rectangle), and set to the desired color.

Did you know... How to keep tabs or to insert spaces?
Go to Tools - Options - Text Editor - - Tabs to switch between using tabs or to insert spaces instead.

IT Glossary Words

2007-10-31T22:05:00.000-07:00

ADSL - Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line
A new standard of Internet connection which allows very large download speeds over your existing phone line by utilising the high-frequency ability of the existing infrastructure.

ASCII - American Standard Code for Information Interchange
This is the standardised code used by computers to recognise letters and numbers by groups of seven 1s and 0s (called binary code). Gradually being superceded by Unicode, which allows a much wider number of symbols to be encoded. There are several ‘artists’ on the net who make pictures out of letters and punctuation, resulting in ASCII art.

ASP - Active Server Page
Microsoft made this scripting language, and you need to run it off one of their servers. It allows dynamic page generation.

AVI - Audio/Video Interleaved
One of several compression techniques (this one’s by Microsoft) for Internet video with sound.

Bandwidth
The speed that information can travel, measured in kilobits per second (kbps). Some servers will have better bandwidth than others, allowing quicker access and more users at a time. Large files consume lots of bandwidth as they download. Think of it as a pipe - only a certain amount of information can fit through at a time.

BMP - BitMaP
This is the file extension for saving Windows bitmap files (used by primitive programs like Microsoft Paint). A bitmap is an image that is made up of lots of rows of little dots. A GIF is another type of bitmap, but is a better format for the web than normal BMPs.
pronounce it: ‘bimp’

Browser
The program you use to view webpages. You’re more than likely reading this through one right now. They translate, or interpret HTML code into the page you see. The most common are Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE), and Netscape Navigator (NN). There are also text-only browsers, used for speedy information gathering.

Cache
A place on your hard drive where downloaded pages are stored temporarily, which means that pages don’t need to be downloaded again if you press the ’Back’ button for example, or if you are reading offline.
pronounce it: ‘cash’

CGI - Common Gateway Interface
This is one way of creating dynamic pages, like when you fill out a form and on the next page the information you entered is displayed. They’re used in Search Engines too. They are scripts which are placed on the server, usually in a directory called the “cgi-bin”, which stands for binary. CGI scripts are usually written in PERL, a programming language; which we have tutorials up for in the CGI Scripting section.

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets
Stylesheets are the hottest thing in web design since they were introduced a few years back. They give you huge control over your design, and with a few small changes, you could change the look of your whole site. Only more recent browsers support them, but now about 90% of web users can see them, so you should use them in your site. To find out how, read our stylesheets section.

DHTML - Dynamic HTML
This is what a page is often called if it uses a combination of both CSS and JavaScript. It is often used to create a highly interactive page that changes as you browse through it. Need to have DHTML Explained for you in more depth? ECMAScript - European Computer Manufacturer’s Association Script. This is what we’re going to be calling JavaScript in the future. Otherwise it’s pretty much the same as before.

File Extensions
This is the 3 or 4 letter suffix at the end of any filename. For instance, this page is called glossary.html, with the .html bit being the extension. It tells the computer what type of file it is and therefore, what program to use to open it. You can learn how to save as a .html file, see a list of commonly-met file formats on the Internet, or check out the web’s most popular image formats.

FTP - File Transfer Protocol
A common way that files are moved from one computer to another. If you want to put your website up on the web, you generally need to FTP it up onto a server. To get a worthy program, head over to the Software Review page.

GIF - Graphics Interchange Format
This is the most popular graphics format on the Internet (along with JPEG). It was made by CompuServe, is limited to a palette of 256 colours, and is generally the best format for simple graphics. For a complete profile of this format, head over to the image formats page.
pronounce it: ‘jif’

GUI - Graphical User Interface
This is the part of a program you see - the icons, buttons and menus are all parts of the interface. Everything that surrounds this page in your browser is all interface that allows you to interact with the program.

HEX - HEXadecimal
The format of colours on the web. If you are telling a browser to make a background white, for example, you write background="#ffffff". You could say background="white", but some browsers wouldn’t know what you’re talking about, so expressing colours in HEX is better.
Hex codes are 3 groups of two numbers, which in turn signify the amount of Red, Green and Blue in the colour, hence “RGB”. These are the three primary colours of light. The range is 0 to 9 plus A to F. So, 0 means none (therefore #000000 is pure black; while f means full, resulting in white). With this knowledge, you can now create tonnes of colours by changing numbers. Although, some look better than others at all colour depths - these are the 216 safe colours.

HTML - HyperText Mark-up Language
HTML is the language you’re here to learn. Get the full picture in What is HTML?. “HyperText” is the way you surf the net - by clicking on links to travel between pages, and therefore travelling to sites that are located elsewhere in the world at a click of a mouse. This text is called hyper, because presumably, it’s text that has gone quite mad. “Markup” denotes the way you format documents, by marking up tags around the text; and “language”, because HTML coders like to boast at parties that they are "very multilingual". Or something. HTML revolves around the standards made by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium); and so far we are up to version 4 of these standards (hence HTML 4).

HTTP - HyperText Transfer Protocol
The rules (called a protocol) on how a webpage goes between the website and your
computer.

IE - Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer is a popular browser, made my Microsoft. For more, or to download,
go to Microsoft’s IE page.

IP - Internet Protocol
IP Addresses are a set of 12 numbers, arranged in sets of 3 (e.g. 205.123.254.145)
that are the ’name’ of a computer connected to the Internet. When you enter an Internet address into your browser, the computer checks what IP number goes with that address - the address you enter is just an easier way to remember sites, and is called a domain name.

ISDN - Integrated Services Digital Network
A digital upgrade of your phone line, which downloads up to twice as fast as a modern modem - around 128 kbps. It’s moderately expensive, and not available everywhere. If you have the option, ADSL is a better connection.

ISP - Internet Service Provider
Your ISP is the company that you ring to connect to the Internet. Common and popular
examples would be AOL, CompuServe, or BT. They generally also offer you more features
than just Internet access, like email and webspace.

Java
Java is a programming language developed at Sun Microsystems, used to write programs and small-scale applications called “Applets”, which can be used in a website and induce powerful animation effects, reflections and other more crazy magical effects.

JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group
The image file format best suited to photographs, due to its ability to handle colour transitions well and compress complicated photos into a smaller size. It is 24-bit, and capable of showing millions of colours.
pronounce it: ‘jay-peg’

JS - JavaScript
Not formally linked to Java, this is a scripting language that is coded into your page (unlike Java), and is used primarily for increased interactivity and special effects not possible with plain HTML. Go to our JavaScript section and add some tricks to your repertoire.

KBPS - KiloBytes Per Second
The speed at which you are downloading a thousand (kilo-) bytes of information. For example, a 28.8 kbps modem can transfer 28800 bits a second. A bit is a single 1 or 0, and a byte = 8 bits. Confusing, eh?

MPEG - Motion Picture Experts Group
Another compression technique for video and audio. Over time, there have been versions, called ‘layers’. One such layer was MPEG Layer 3, which was shortened to MP3, a very popular music format.

NN - Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator is a popular Internet browser, which was originally based on the Mosaic browser, which contributed greatly to the popularity of the web a long time ago. It has been overshadowed by better browsers since. Download it.

PHP - PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor
PHP is a simple and widely-used scripting language that can be used to create dynamic websites. First, a .php page is processed by the server and them put together into a HTML page that can be displayed in a browser. More info at php.net.

Pixel - picture element
A pixel is the smallest area that can be displayed on a monitor. Pictures are made up of lines of different-coloured pixels. Your screen resolution is the amount of pixels your monitor is displaying at a time.

PNG - Portable Network Graphic
The rightful successor to the GIF image format, PNGs sport better compression efficiency, a wider possible palette, and just plain betterness. Only the more recent browsers support them so far, but they’ll become mainstream soon. pronounce it: ‘ping’

Scripts
A piece of text that either gives commands to your web-browser (in the languages of JavaScript and VBScript), or to your web-server (in CGI scripts).

SE - Search Engine
Search engines are websites that build up huge indexes of the Internet. Popular examples are Google, MSN or Ask Jeeves. We have a complete list of the popular search engines over there.

Server
A server is a computer connected to a network that offers some service to users, such as file storage. In terms of websites, the server your site is stored on is a computer permanently connected to the Internet that you upload your website files to. The server will then send your webpages and other files to visitors as they connect to your site. Servers can become overloaded with visitors (their bandwidth is depleted) and stop allowing people in, which is why you sometimes are stopped from getting into websites.

SGML - Standard Generalised Markup Language
This is HTML’s daddy, as HTML is a set group of tags that is unchanging.
SGML contains an infinite number of tags as it is customisable. It is defined
as “the international standard for the publication and delivery of electronic
information”. Very helpful... Here, try this link out.

Spam
Also known as ‘junk email’, this is bulk email sent out to thousands of addresses at a time, usually advertising a site or product. The hateable thing about it is that no-one asks for it, you just get it and it clogs up your inbox. Advice: don’t do it.

TCP-IP - Transmission Control Protocol - Internet Protocol
On the Internet, some computers are connected through Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and some through Internet Protocol (IP). Used in conjunction they form TCP-IP.
This is a standard for connecting to the net. Therefore, your computer can connect
through any other computer that uses TCP-IP, which most do.

T-1
This is a connection capable of 1,544,000 bits a second. The speed goes up to T-3, which is capable of shifting 44,736,000 bits/second. Zoom!

UNIX
An operating system used only by the odd traditional bearded computer professor. Otherwise mainly for web-servers these days. The increasingly popular Linux operating system is based on UNIX.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator
That’s techie jargon for the address of a page. For instance, the url of this page is http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/starthere/glossary.html. It tells you the protocols (http:// or ftp://), and then the path to the file and the file’s name. You can see the address of whatever page you’re reading by looking in the address bar in your browser.

VRML - Virtual Reality Modelling Language
This is a largely unused Internet technology which lets you explore 3D worlds. Communities have been set up where you walk through virtual towns talking to people.

WebMaster
If you own or take care of a website, you now can proudly call yourself a webmaster.
This is also the guy to get on to if you need to contact any site you’re on.

WWW - World Wide Web
The name given to the vast library of Internet sites hosted by and served to the network of computers joined together which form the Internet and allow web browsing.

WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get
This is the term used to describe the HTML editors that give you a graphical representation of what you’re coding. A highly popular example is DreamWeaver.
pronounce it: ‘wizzy-wig’

XHTML - eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language
This is a real effort to clean up code creation by making the rules of coding very strict. It is a new standard of HTML (after HTML 4.0) and in essence bridges the gap between HTML and the more powerful XML, below. It won’t take off for a while, but read XHTML Explained and get ready for the future.

XML - eXtensible Markup Language
This is a markup language separate from HTML, which is extensible - i.e. you can make up your own tags and so create your own structure. It involves changing how your browser interprets tags. This is highly advanced stuff, so you probably should stop caring right now.

File Formats

2007-10-17T23:56:00.000-07:00

.AVI - Audio/Video Interleaved
Standard video format supported on the windows platform. They do not stream, however, so you have to download the entire file before you can watch any of it.

.BIN - Mac BINary archive
A way of compressing many files into one together, for the Mac only.

.CSS - Cascading StyleSheet
CSS files are a tool in the repertoire of webmasters that take care of how their websites look. CSS files can be created or edited in any text-editor, like Notepad.

.DOC - Microsoft Word DOCument
Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world. You probably won’t come across loads of doc files, but if you do it can be annoying if you haven’t got a program that can open them.

.EXE - EXEcutable file
If you download a program that you need to install, it will likely come as an exe file. Just double click it to install on your PC. Be careful of viruses!

.GIF - Graphics Interchange Format
The most common image format on the Internet. Good for simple images.

.HTML/ .HTM - HyperText Markup Language file
Most pages you create for a website will be HTML files - What is HTML? You’re reading one right now. Sorted.

.JPG/ .JPEG - Joint Photographic Experts Group file
Another very common image file format, mainly used for photos. Again, for more check out the page.

.MIDI/ .MID - Musical Instrument Digital Interface
Midis are sequenced music files made on keyboards. They’re usually really small and often sound great, although it largely depends on your soundcard. Midi collections are one of the few places in the world where you can find classic game and movie music, and for that I salute them.

.MP3 - MPEG Layer 3 sound file
Singlehandedly caused a revolution. MP3 is a sound file format which is highly compressed, which allows download-happy filesizes and excellent quality. Has caused much grief for the music industry as songs are now small enough to be traded online.

.MPEG/ .MPG - Motion Picture Experts Group file
One of the standards for streaming movies.

.MOV/ .QT - QuickTime MOVie
The QuickTime format was designed by Apple and originated on the Mac, but has made the transition to the PC and is hugely popular.

.PDF - Portable Document Format
Adobe Acrobat files were invented so that documents could be transferred between computers and indeed platforms, and still look the exact same, something which can’t be said about HTML files...

.PNG - Portable Network Graphics
PNGs are a file format designed to be used in place of GIFs. They are usually slightly smaller, and sport advanced features like alpha-channel transparency and 24-bit colour support.

.RAM - Real Audio Movie
Real Networks created formats for streaming audio and video, and gave away free players for the formats, before allowing themselves to become so smothered in advertising that everyone with sense decided to stop using their programs.

.RAR - RAR archive
This is a compressed file format similar to the popular .zip format. It sports advanced functions like special multimedia compression and has many benefits over zip files.

.TIFF - Tagged Image File Format
For really high quality images, TIFFs are used, but cannot be viewed through a browser.

.TXT - TeXT file
The most basic of files, it’s just some text. You no doubt already have either NotePad, SimpleText, or your browser, which you umm... definitely have.

.WAV - WAVe sound file
A basic, either un- or not very- compressed sound file, usually used for short sound samples. Your computer will be able to play these anyway (when it turns on and sings it’s playing a .wav).

.ZIP - ZIPped file
Zipped files are really groups of other types of files kept together and compressed a bit. Many downloads will consist of zip collections, so be sure to have something to open them with.

Creating a keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet for Visual Studio 2005

2007-10-01T04:49:00.000-07:00

Most people don't know this, but there are actually over 450 keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio by default. But there is no easy way to find out all the keyboard shortcuts inside Visual Studio. You can find out what all the default keyboard shortcuts are by writing a simple macro to enumerate all of them. The following shows the code for this.

Public Module Module1

    Public Sub ListShortcutsInHTML()

        'Declare a StreamWriter
        Dim sw As System.IO.StreamWriter
        sw = New StreamWriter("c:\\demo\\Shortcuts.html")

        'Write the beginning HTML
        WriteHTMLStart(sw)

        ' Add a row for each keyboard shortcut
        For Each c As Command In DTE.Commands
            If c.Name <> "" Then
                Dim bindings As System.Array
                bindings = CType(c.Bindings, System.Array)
                For i As Integer = 0 To bindings.Length - 1
                    sw.WriteLine("<tr>")
                    sw.WriteLine("<td>" + c.Name + "</td>")
                    sw.WriteLine("<td>" + bindings(i) + "</td>")
                    sw.WriteLine("</tr>")
                Next

            End If
        Next

        'Write the end HTML
        WriteHTMLEnd(sw)

        'Flush and close the stream
        sw.Flush()
        sw.Close()
    End Sub
Public Sub WriteHTMLStart(ByVal sw As System.IO.StreamWriter)
        sw.WriteLine("<html>")
        sw.WriteLine("<head>")
        sw.WriteLine("<title>")

        sw.WriteLine("Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts")
        sw.WriteLine("</title>")
        sw.WriteLine("</head>")

        sw.WriteLine("<body>")
        sw.WriteLine("<h1>Visual Studio 2005 Keyboard Shortcuts</h1>")
        sw.WriteLine("<font size=""2"" face=""Verdana"">")
        sw.WriteLine("<table border=""1"">")
        sw.WriteLine("<tr BGCOLOR=""#018FFF""><td
align=""center""><b>Command</b></td><td
align=""center""><b>Shortcut</b></td></tr>")


    End Sub

    Public Sub WriteHTMLEnd(ByVal sw As System.IO.StreamWriter)
        sw.WriteLine("</table>")
        sw.WriteLine("</font>")
        sw.WriteLine("</body>")
        sw.WriteLine("</html>")
    End Sub

End Module

To use this macro, go to Tools, select Macros, and then choose Macros IDE. . . to launch the Macros IDE. Expand the MyMacros project, MyMacros namespace and double-click on Module1. Simply copy Listing 1 to the Macros IDE and run the macro. After running the macro, you would have produced a keyboard shortcuts reference for Visual Studio. Open your output at C:\demo\Shortcuts.html. Figure 1 shows the partial output. Feel free to print it out and post it near your computer as you learn new keyboard shortcuts.

Microsoft® Silverlight™

2007-09-27T05:03:00.000-07:00

Microsoft® Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

Microsoft Silverlight (code-named Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere or WPF/E) is a proprietary runtime for browser-based Rich Internet Applications, providing a subset of the animation, vector graphics, and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation.

Silverlight aims to compete with Adobe Flash and the presentation components of Ajax. It also competes with Sun Microsystems' JavaFX, which was launched a few days after Silverlight.

ASP.NET 2.0 Features - Ten things you might not know about ASP.NET 2.0

2007-09-01T02:22:00.000-07:00

While I have been writing a lot about ASP.NET AJAX and other stuff, I also wanted to keep adding my little nuggets on ASP.NET 2.0 which is one of the favorite platforms for Web Development. While working with ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, you may not know certain new things which are a part of it and usually go unnoticed. At least I missed them and after a year, completing a big application realized that it would have been great if I had used these features.
So, here it is, 10 things you might not know about ASP.NET 2.0

No need to press "Ctrl + Shift + B" (Build) for everything

When working with ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, you dont need to press Ctrl + Shift + B (in other words build) to check every change you make to the source / design. Both the ASPX Page and Code behind files are compiled dynamically when you run the page and if there is a change, the source / design is recompiled accordingly so you dont have to rebuild the solution. In fact the only instance where you want to rebuild the solution is when you add an external DLL reference / modify and add an external DLL again, where I have found some cases when the change is not reflected.

This would save a lot of time particularly in big projects where you have lot of source files and building all of them for each and every change would consume lot of time.

Data Source doesnt always need to be SQL DataSource

When working with Data Sources most of us would have seen the SQL Data Source examples and always said "Ah, this is good for Demo but what about enterprise applications where I cannot have the SQL Query or Stored Procedure mentioned in the Data Source definition in the ASPX Page" Object Data Source accepts your business layer methods as inputs and very well acts as a bridge between your business layer.

Web.Config is more friendly to IIS

Web.Config is one of the favourite things and the toughest nuts to crack in terms of editing them. While most of us might have seen Web.Config edited using the Website Administration Tool (if it sounds like alien to you or have never tried out, go to "Website - ASP.NET Configuration" in Visual Studio 2005), little is known that you can edit the Web.Config settings using IIS - yes Internet Information Services.

When you install ASP.NET 2.0 (gets installed when you install Visual Studio 2005 as in most of the cases), you get the "ASP.NET" Tab for virtual directory properties and that provides you a whole bunch of utilites like version management as well as Configuration management wherein you edit the Web.Config properties, very handy for deployment scenarios where you dont have Visual Studio 2005 and hence no Website Administration Tool.

Client Script Call Back allows you to AJAXify your page

While the whole world is running behind installing AJAX Toolkits including ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET 2.0 had this little nice feature called "Client Script Callback Manager" which allows you to make asynchronous calls to your server side methods and hence enabling partial page update or remote scripting or AJAX enabled, whatever way you like to call it. For more information check out

TreeView - You always wanted, now it is here

While a TreeView is such a popular control required, it was always missing in the earlier versions of ASP.NET. Users have to resort to using the less extensible "IE Webcontrols" or run behind third party solutions. ASP.NET 2.0 comes with a built-in TreeView control which is tested and works fine across Firefox, etc., and also provides properties and methods including On Demand (again AJAX Feature) loading of child nodes. Check my own blog's ASP.NET 2.0 Category articles for a few posts on TreeView

MultiView - Finally there is a Tab Control

As much as TreeView is important, a Tabbed Control was always required to show different portions of page in the same page. The MultiView provides you a tabbed interface for showing different sections of your page within the same page, on demand. It is a cool utility to provide Tabbed interface to your pages.

Subsitution Control

Whenever you Cache enable your page, all portions of your page become more or less static until the Cache gets invalidated. However, if you have a little nifty section of your page (Cricket Score? eh ? ) that needs to always retrieve fresh data, dont blame Cache and remove it from the whole page. Use the substitution control which can help you in making a portion of your page dynamic using the method you provide to use for constant update.

PreviousPage - How I wonder what was there (in the previous page)

Dealing with web applications is such a nuisance considering that it is state less and we need to preserve values across postback. Session has been beaten to death though its still a good way. But what if I want to retrieve the TextBox value of the previous page, use the Page.PreviousPage property to retrieve the control's reference and get the value of the TextBox. Of course this works only if you were in the previous page before coming to this page, but that can be checked and validated.

Default Button - Hit Enter Key and get what you want it to do

Enter Key has always been challenging in form submission and if you have multiple buttons in your page, you never know which one is firing when user hits enter. I have seen sites till date which allow me to enter registration information and when I press "Enter" to complete take me to the "Search" Page since it is the first button on the top of the page. With ASP.NET 2.0, the Default Button is a property that can be set at the Form level / panel level to specify which button should be fired when the user hits the "Enter" Key and accordingly act. Its a cool utility which provides complete control of where you want to fire an event upon user hitting the "Enter" button.

You are already writing a Mobile Applicaiton

In ASP.NET 1.x versions you had to use the MMIT (Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit) for writing pages that can be rendered on Mobile Devices. However, with ASP.NET 2.0 your pages that run on the browser, automatically run on mobile devices since the rendering capabilities and the user agent is automatically determined before the page is rendered. So, your ASP.NET 2.0 Page can also be viewed over devices, without additional effort from you.

I think I tried to provide 10 things you might not know about ASP.NET 2.0 and that is the reason, I have avoided mentioning things like GridView, MasterPages, Themes etc., which have been dealt with for a long time now.

Many of these are little things which can help with your web development and if you have issues with these, we would like to hear your development experiences, so please post them in your comments.

What are Indexes? (SQL)

2007-08-25T02:36:00.000-07:00

Microsoft SQL Server index is a structure associated with a table that speeds retrieval of the rows in the table.
An index contains keys built from one or more columns in the table. These keys are stored in a
structure that allows SQL Server to find the row or rows associated with the key values quickly and efficiently. If a table is created with no indexes, the data rows are not stored in any particular order. This structure is called a heap.

The two types of SQL Server indexes are:

Clustered
Clustered indexes sort and store the data rows in the table based on their key values. Because the data rows are stored in sorted order on the clustered index key, clustered indexes are efficient for finding rows. There can only be one clustered index per table, because the data rows themselves can only be sorted in one order. The data rows themselves form the lowest
level of the clustered index.

The only time the data rows in a table are stored in sorted order is when the table contains a clustered index. If a table has no clustered index, its data rows are stored in a heap.

Nonclustered
Nonclustered indexes have a structure that is completely separate from the data rows. The
lowest rows of a nonclustered index contain the nonclustered index key values and each key value entry has pointers to the data rows containing the key value. The data rows are not stored in order based on the nonclustered key. The pointer from an index row in a nonclustered index to a data row is called a row locator. The structure of the row locator depends on whether the data pages are stored in a heap or are clustered. For a heap, a row locator is a pointer to the row. For a table with a clustered index, the row locator is the clustered index key

What are DBCC COMMANDS? (SQL)

2007-08-25T02:30:00.000-07:00

The Transact-SQL programming language provides DBCC statements that act as the “database consistency checker” for Microsoft® SQL Server™. These statements check the physical and logical consistency of a database. Many DBCC statements can fix detected problems. These database consistency-checking statements are grouped into these categories.

Maintenance Statements:
Maintenance tasks on a database, index, or filegroup.

DBCC DBREPAIR
DBCC SHRINKFILE
DBCC DBREINDEX
DBCC UPDATEUSAGE
DBCC SHRINKDATABASE

Miscellaneous Statements:
Miscellaneous tasks such as enabling row-level locking or removing a dynamic-link library (DLL) from memory

DBCC dllname (FREE)
DBCC TRACEOFF
DBCC HELP
DBCC TRACEON
DBCC PINTABLE
DBCC UNPINTABLE
DBCC ROWLOCK

Status Statements:
Status Checks

DBCC INPUTBUFFER
DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS
DBCC OPENTRAN
DBCC SQLPERF
DBCC OUTPUTBUFFER
DBCC TRACESTATUS
DBCC PROCCACHE
DBCC USEROPTIONS
DBCC SHOWCONTIG

Validation Statements:
Validation operations on a database, table, index, catalog, filegroup, system tables, or allocation of database pages.

DBCC CHECKALLOC
DBCC CHECKTABLE
DBCC CHECKCATALOG
DBCC NEWALLOC
DBCC CHECKDB
DBCC TEXTALL
DBCC CHECKFILEGROUP
DBCC TEXTALLOC
DBCC CHECKIDENT

What are Isolation levels? (SQL)

2007-08-25T02:28:00.000-07:00

An isolation level determines the degree to which data is isolated for use by one process and
guarded against interference from other processes.

Read Committed - SQL Server acquires a share lock while reading a row into a cursor but frees the lock immediately after reading the row. Because a shared lock request is blocked by an exclusive lock, a cursor is prevented from reading a row that another task has updated but not yet committed. Read committed is the default isolation level setting for both SQL Server and ODBC.

Read Uncommitted - SQL Server requests no locks while reading a row into a cursor and honors no exclusive locks. Cursors can be populated with values that have already been updated but not yet committed. The user is bypassing all of SQL Server’s locking transaction control mechanisms.

Repeatable Read or Serializable - SQL Server requests a shared lock on each row as it
is read into the cursor as in READ COMMITTED, but if the cursor is opened within a transaction, the shared locks are held until the end of the transaction instead of being freed after the row is read. This has the same effect as specifying HOLDLOCK on a SELECT statement.

What are the different types of Filebackup options? (SQL)

2007-08-25T02:21:00.000-07:00

All data and objects in the database, such as tables, stored procedures, triggers, and views, are stored only within the following operating system files:

Primary
This file contains the startup information for the database and is used to store data. Every database has one primary data file.

Secondary
These files hold all of the data that does not fit in the primary data file. If the primary file can hold all of the data in the database, databases do not need to have secondary data files. Some databases may be large enough to need multiple secondary data files or to use secondary files on separate disk drives to spread data across multiple disks.

Transaction Log
These files hold the log information used to recover the database. There must be at least
one log file for each database. File groups allow files to be grouped together for administrative and data allocation/placement purposes

Rules of Files and Filegroups
Rules for designing files and filegroups include:

A file or filegroup cannot be used by more than one database. For example, file sales.mdf
and sales.ndf, which contain data and objects from the sales database, cannot be used by any other database.
A file can be a member of only one filegroup.
Data and transaction log information cannot be part of the same file or filegroup.
Transaction log files are never part of any filegroups.

Types of BackUP

Database
Transaction log
Differential
Filegroup & Backup

What are the different types of Joins? (SQL)

2007-08-25T02:16:00.000-07:00

Joins as used to combine the contents of two or more tables and produce a result set that incorporates rows and columns from each table. Tables are typically joined using data that they have in common Join conditions can be specified in either the FROM or WHERE clauses; specifying them in the FROM clause is recommended. WHERE and HAVING clauses can also contain search conditions to further filter the rows selected by the join conditions.

Joins can be categorized as:

Inner joins - (the typical join operation, which uses some comparison operator like = or <>). An inner join is a join in which the values in the columns being joined are compared using a comparison operator Inner joins use a comparison operator to match rows from two tables based on the values in common columns from each table.

Equi Join - It returns all the columns in both tables, and returns only the rows for which
there is an equal value in the join column ( SELECT * FROM authors AS a INNER JOIN
publishers AS p ON a.city = p.city ORDER BY a.au_lname DESC )

Self Join - A table can be joined to itself in a self-join

Outer joins - Outer joins can be a left, right, or full outer join. Outer joins are specified with one of the following sets of keywords when they are specified in the FROM clause:

LEFT JOIN or LEFT OUTER JOIN - The result set of a left outer join includes all the rows from the left table specified in the LEFT OUTER clause, not just the ones in which the joined columns match. When a row in the left table has no matching rows in the right table, the associated result set row contains null values for all select list columns coming from the right table.

RIGHT JOIN or RIGHT OUTER JOIN - A right outer join is the reverse of a left outer join. All rows from the right table are returned. Null values are returned for the left table any time
a right table row has no matching row in the left table.

FULL JOIN or FULL OUTER JOIN - A full outer join returns all rows in both the left and right tables. Any time a row has no match in the other table, the select list columns from the other table contain null values. When there is a match between the tables, the entire result set row contains data values from the base tables.

Cross joins - Cross joins return all rows from the left table, each row from the left table is combined with all rows from the right table. Cross joins are also called Cartesian products.