Home » Archive for March 2011

Thanks Scott Mitchell, 4GuysFromRolla!

13 years after founding the website 4GuysFromRolla & writing for it for all these years on Classic ASP & ASP.NET, Scott Mitchell is calling it quits. And oh! I got to know just today that the site I've been following since 2000 is pronounced 4GuysFromRawl-ah, not 4GuysFromRoll-ah. He has made a candid assessment of why the site started failing after he sold it to Internet.com during the dotcom heydays.

Scott Mitchell belongs to that rare breed of developers who can also explain things well as they can identify with the audience. Like scores of other web developers, I relied heavily on his tutorial site when I started my career with Classic ASP. He has consistently maintained the quality of articles & they are always educative. His "An Extensive Examination of" series of articles covering important .NET topics is excellent material for self-learners.

As I mentioned earlier, I find it is an interesting coincidence that besides sharing the same first name, Scott Mitchell, Scott Guthrie, Scott Hanselman & Scott Allen - all big names in the ASP.NET community, have an entertaining & simple style of writing.

I hope Scott Mitchell continues to write a lot more great books & articles.
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HOW TO study (or copy) code related to JavaScript effects from websites you envy


To build web apps with a great UI, its ok to draw inspiration from the best sites on the web. Sometimes the good-looking websites with great JavaScript effects may obfuscate their code knowingly or unknowingly or the code may be difficult to understand by just viewing the HTML source. 

Visual Events is a nifty bookmarklet that shows the events attached to each of the elements in a webpage. The keyboard & mouse events are represented as icons & when you mouse over any icon the source code related to it is shown. This is helpful because on JavaScript intensive sites you don't have to rummage through the entire source to find a small code block that you need.

For instance, when you mouse over a Tag button on the StackOverflow site, it shows a tooltip

If you call the Visual Event bookmarklet while this page is loaded, you will see this icon  over the javascript Tag button  indicating that there is a mouseover event attached to it. The complete mapping of icons & their corresponding events is listed on the Visual Event bookmarklet's homepage. When you hover your mouse pointer over the icon, the Visual Event bookmarklet scans through the source code & fetches just the code corresponding to the javascript Tag button's mouseover. The code window also informs that this particular StackOverflow webpage uses jQuery version 1.5.1 

Click image to enlarge 
This bookmarklet can detect event handler code that is written using one of these libraries -
  • DOM 0 events
  • jQuery 1.2.x +
  • YUI 2.6.x (2.x might work!)
  • MooTools 1.2.x
  • Prototype 1.6.x
  • JAK (Events 2.2)
  • Glow
Visual Event is beta grade software. It doesn't currently work in IE

Also see:

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ASP.NET MVC Usage Trends

As per the BuiltWith website, there are 34,183 websites using ASP.NET MVC and among them, 1,840 websites are within the top million most visited sites on the internet.


Also see:
Large sites that run on ASP.NET
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HOW TO track time for multiple time zones in Windows 7 & Vista

In our highly globalized world, we may sometimes have to keep track of not just our time but also the time in other countries due to business reasons or to follow a live sports or event broadcast on TV that is happening in another part of the world.

Did you know, you can track the time in up to two countries/time zones besides your own, right from the system tray in Windows 7 & Vista?

To configure the extra clocks, click on the time in the system tray & within the dialog box that opens, click on the "Change date & time settings..." link.  In the new dialog box that opens, select the Additional Clocks tab & configure them to show upto 2 new clocks.

If just two are not enough for you, pick a gadget from the Windows Live Gallery, that can handle even more.

While the additional clocks cannot handle Daylight Saving Time(DST), the primary clock is intelligent enough to do the conversion for you.
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HOW TO display Word, Excel, PowerPoint documents within the browser

If a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document (.doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx formats) hosted on the web is accessed through a browser, it typically asks if you want to open or save the file. You can then view it if you have MS Office or the corresponding Word/Excel/PowerPoint Viewer (freely downloadable) installed.

To increase the reach of the content in those Office documents among non-PC/Mac users, you can use Google Docs Viewer to embed them within a web page. Google Docs Viewer now supports 12 new file formats including Excel & Powerpoint.

You can generate the HTML tag for the embedded viewer that you can paste into your own web page from the home page of Google Docs Viewer. You can alternatively use the example below to append the URL of the Office document to the url querystring of the service -

<iframe src="http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocs.google.com%2Fviewer%3Furl%3
Dhttp%253A%252F%252Flabs.google.com%252Fpapers%252F
bigtable-osdi06.pdf&embedded=true" style="border: none;" 
height="780" width="600">
</iframe>


You can also tweak the dimensions of the embedded Viewer within the browser.
Embedded Viewer displaying an online PowerPoint file within a webpage

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Head First Design Patterns - C# & VB.NET Code Examples

Head First Design Patterns - C# & VB.NET Code Examples

Books in O'Reilly's Head First series are like "For Dummies" books, covering technical topics in an unconventional way. They contain goofy pictures and their content generates extreme reactions - readers love it or hate it. Going by the reviews on Amazon, Head First Design Patterns, a majority of the readers like it. The code samples in the book are in Java. So if you pick the book, be aware that the same samples have been ported to C# & VB.NET by volunteers -


Also see:
Learning resources on Design Patterns for .NET Developers
Opening Questions For A Design Patterns Study Group
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Facebook embarrassment

A Facebook update of an acquaintance who expressed solidarity with the cause of Children dying from Cancer, showed up thus -


Also see:
See what Google is suggesting
See what Google is suggesting - II
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The Glorious History of Internet Explorer

Love it or hate it, you will have to appreciate IE’s staying power. Having been around for 16 years, it is still the browser market leader. Here are some interesting facts about Internet Explorer:
IE 1.0
  • IE 1.0, based on Mosaic, was released together with the Windows 95 Plus! Pack in 1995
  • Used on Windows 95, IE 1.0 was only slightly more than 1 MB in size.
  • IE 2.0 was the very first cross-platform browser that supported both Windows and Mac.
  • Released in 1995, IE 2.0 had support for JavaScript, frames & cookies
  • At the end of the first week of IE 3’s release in 1996, more than 1 million copies of the browser were downloaded.
  • IE4 which came in 1997 introduced Microsoft's Trident layout engine, which is still in use today in Internet Explorer.
  • Released in 1999, IE 5 was the first browser to support bi-directional text.
  • IE 5 introduced XMLHttpRequest which enables building AJAX applications.
  • The XMLHttpRequest object was not completely functional until as late as version 1.0 of Gecko released on June 5, 2002.The XMLHttpRequest object became a de facto standard amongst other major user agents after it was implemented in Safari 1.2 in February 2004 & Opera 8.0 in April 2005 (Source: Wikipedia). Chrome wasn't even around at that time.
  • IE6, released in 2001, was the most widely used web browser during its tenure. At its peak in 2002 and 2003, it attained a total market share of nearly 90%. IE 6 sounded the death knell for Netscape Navigator.
  • Coming in 2006, IE 7 delivered the Web 2.0 experience.
  • IE 8.0, which came in 2009, focused on secure browsing. It introduced a bunch of new features like web slices, accelerators, automatic Tab crash recovery and inline search within pages.
  • After 2 beta releases which had millions of downloads, IE9, the oldest among popular browsers, promises to give the rest a run for their money.
Related:
Timeline of web browsers
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    HOW TO cut & paste just the text in a browser, not the formatting

    Typically when I have to paste formatted text within a rich text box of a web app, I paste it into the search box of the browser first to remove the formatting & then paste the un-formatted text in a rich text editor. What a pain!

    I learnt from the WebApps StackExchange forum that in Chrome, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + V to paste the unformatted version of the copied text.

    While monkeying around to see if there is any trick to make this work in browsers other than Chrome, I serendipitously discovered that  Ctrl + Shift +C opens Developer Tools in Chrome & triggers the Inspect element hotkey that shows a tooltip for a webpage element that you hover upon.



    Also see:
    Keyboard shortcuts common to Firefox & IE
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