Book Review - CSharp for Sharp Kids

Using real-world analogies, Martin Dreyer does a great job of explaining the introductory concepts of C# & OOP to absolute beginners in the free E-Book C# for Sharp Kids. The 2.9 MB MSI file, containing the E-Book in MS Word format & code samples, can be downloaded from the Kid's Corner of...

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Channel 9 "But Why?" Series

Did you know the alternative names that were initially thought out for Windows were "Interface Manager" & "Microsoft Desktop"? What's in a name? A lot, in retrospect.If you are interested in oddities and little known answers to mysterious questions about Microsoft products, check out the Channel...

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Image meta-search with SearchLite

Back in 2002, I wrote a small JavaScript program that searches multiple sites at once. A friend of mine keeps searching on the Web for reusable images & photos for personal use. I adapted my old script for him so that he can search multiple sites at once. The script takes advantage of the fact that...

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Internet Banking risks - Phishing, Vishing & now SIM-swap frauds

ICICI Bank has been running a Customer Education Series in Indian newspapers & they are one of the few Indian banks that bother to educate the public about banking facts that are not generally known. The columns in the series are available on the Web only as PDFs (AFAIK) & they do not seem to...

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"Export to Excel" without using components in a WinForms app

Way back in 2004, I wrote a program to generate a Word file dynamically without using any components in a Web application. The technique I used makes use of the fact that documents can be converted from Word/Excel to HTML (File->Save As) and vice versa.  When you manually save an Office document...

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Google Script Converter transliterates between Indian languages

If you can speak & understand one of 11 Indian languages (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu) but cannot read in that language, Google Script Converter can help you out by transliterating it into a language among them that you can read...

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"Open With Google Docs Viewer" IE8 Accelerator

Accelerators in IE8 work on text within a web page & let you access popular web services from the context menu. For instance, to translate a word you can highlight text from any webpage, and then click on the blue Accelerator icon that appears above your selection & choose the Translate with...

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Screen scrape with jQuery, AJAX, JSONP & YQL

Since reading this excellent article about scraping content from a Wikipedia page using Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) as a proxy for cross-domain Ajax, I'm hooked to YQL. YQL helps in circumventing the same-origin policy that prevents a script loaded from one domain from getting or manipulating properties...

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Deleting cookies doesn't clear Hotmail's "Remember me" in IE8

An anxious Hotmail/Passport user was bothered that in IE 8 his Accounts showed up even after deleting cookies. He posted this concern on the MSDN IE Web Development Forum.I verified this in IE 8 (on Windows XP SP2 & Vista) by clicking the Delete button in the Browsing History section in the General...

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View Selection Source in IE

One of the features I like in Firefox as a developer is the "View Selection Source" option that you can choose  from the context menu to view dynamically rendered source of a desired portion of the web page. This feature helps you focus on a specific portion of a web page that you want to investigate...

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HOW TO get files cached by Safari & Firefox

Unlike in IE 8 where you can view temporary files easily (Tools > Internet Options | General | Browsing History | Settings | View files), fetching temporary files that are cached is not straight-forward in Safari on Windows & Firefox.I learnt from this WebmasterWorld forum posting that on Windows...

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Sharepoint Case Studies

A good way to understand how to leverage Sharepoint is by reading about interesting solutions, scenarios & successful case studies. Here's a meta-list (work in progress): Top 17 case studies from the MS Customer Evidence teamMicrosoft Case Studies Public Web Sites hosted on Microsoft Office SharePoint...

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Read this if you are installing VS 2010 Web Developer Express on Windows XP

Be aware that the installation of Visual Web Developer 2010 Express on Windows XP will work only if it has SP3. I guess this holds true for other Express products as well. I didn't find an explicit page describing the minimum system requirements and I learnt about this by trial & error or rather...

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Free Photos & Images

Images & illustrations make content lively & sticky. Commercial websites can affoard to pay for slick images but thankfully for the rest of us, there are a good many sites that offer free photos & images. I spotted a list of over a dozen such sites with liberal licensing policies on the...

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TechEd India 2010 starts with a Bang

The 3-day TechEd India event started in Bangalore with a keynote by Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division, Microsoft. He announced the availability of the much awaited Visual Studio 2010 & and .NET Framework 4. (Photo by @msigeek)If you are missing the event (like me), catch the action...

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My favorite jQuery plugins

jQuery, John Resig's brain-child, has an irresistible charm that attracts legions of followers. Many of these followers selflessly share plugins they create for free. So if you have seen a clever, dazzling, intriguing, laborsaving, mind-blowing, {add your favorite adjectives} client-side feature on...

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Comparison of free Web Analytics tools

There are a bunch of free Web Analytics tools -Google Analytics  StatCounter  Piwik  Woopra  Clicky SiteMeterEach of them has something unique. The Clicky website compares all the above across some 40 odd parameters. Except for Google Analytics & Piwik, the rest have limitations...

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Book Review: Head First PMP

I purchased Head First PMP after a PM friend recommended me that book as a good starter guide to taking the PMP certification. As he mentioned & others have vouched, no one book including this one can help you pass the exam. What this book does is that it makes learning Project Management concepts...

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Tried these Hotmail, GMail features?

Email service providers have now gone way beyond just fetching & sending emails. Did you know, Hotmail has a SMS alerts feature that notifies you whenever an important e-mail (you can define what's important) arrives in your Hotmail inbox? (Ofcourse, if you are always connected to the Internet from...

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