by Edward
30 March 2009 14:12
Talented developers know that innovation starts with imagination—technology is a tool that helps bring their creation to life.
Visual Studio 2010 is being designed directly for developers and development teams to take every advantage in getting the next cutting-edge application on the market before the competitors. The decisive is that the business gets to reap the rewards of tomorrow's efficiency today! The
CTP release is now available for download.
Here are some of the new changes to the latest version of Visual Studio:
Enhanced User Experience
The new Visual Studio 2010 delivers an up-to-date enhanced user experience for developers that make understanding the current context more natural. The new experience includes:
- Clear UI Organization
- Reduced clutter and complexity
- Improved editor
- Better support for floating documents and windows
- Enhanced document targeting
- Focused animations for action feedback
MOSS Development in Visual Studio 2010
Visual Studio 2010 also marks a major advance in usability and functionality for SharePoint developers, helping you accomplish tasks like:
- Customizing SharePoint with the help of new project and item templates.
- Creating Web parts and application pages using new visual designers.
- Designing association and initiation forms for your workflows.
- Aggregating and integrating back-end data into your application using Business Data Catalog (BDC) models.
- Importing existing solution packages (.wsp files) and then modifying and extending them.
- Customizing features and packages using new designers and explorers.
- Deploying and debugging SharePoint applications as easily as pressing F5.
- Navigating SharePoint sites using Server Explorer.
Get the Visual Studio 2010 datasheet
There are lots of more powerful features in Visual Studio 2010. Download the following 5-page datasheet in either PDF or XPS, as it will give you an insider's view of the next generation of Visual Studio.
For more information, please visit these web sites.
by Edward
25 March 2009 09:18
A German computer science student has hacked the three main browsers(IE8, Firefox and Safari), winning $15,000, showing that none of them is completely safe as we think they are.
At the annual Pwn2Own at the
CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, Canada, Charlie Miller hacked Apple's Safari browser in just seconds, but the others didn't last greatly longer. As Ryan Naraine says at ZD Net:
A security researcher named "Nils" (he declined to provide his full name for the press) performed a clean
drive-by download attack against the world's most widely used browser to take full control of a Sony Vaio machine running Windows 7.
He won a cash prize and also got to keep the hardware. Details of the vulnerability issue, which was described by contest main sponsor TippingPoint ZDI as a "brilliant IE8 bug!" are being kept under wraps for now.
Nils also pwned Safari and later, Firefox, winning a total of $15,000 plus 2 computers. Not a bad for a day's work for a young guy like him. Heise Online says Nils is "a 25 year old computer science student from the University of Oldenburg, in Germany".
by Edward
24 March 2009 08:35
Two of the new additions to ASP.NET 4.0, is the addition of 2 properties on the Page class:
- Page.Keywords
- Page.Description
If you are familiar with SEO, you will know that these 2 properties are mandatory for Google to pick up your website, and rank it in the search results. You can now create meta tags within your web page as follows:
<head runat="server">
<title>My New Page</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="dascode.net, edward' />
<meta name="description" content="Welcome to my web page" />
</head>
These two properties work the same way as Page.Title works:
If there are no meta tags or a description tag in the head element of the web page matching the property names for example name=”dascode.net” for Page.Keywords and name=”my description” for Page.Description, then we create these tags and fill in the string you entered as the content.
You can also set the keywords and description on the web page:
<%@ Page Language="C#"CodeFile="DefaultPage.aspx.cs" Inherits="DefaultPage" AutoEventWireup="true" Keywords="Dascode.Net, Edward, dascode" Description="DasCode.Net description" %>
By doing it this way, we override the meta and description tags. We can also set the values for programmatically, and by allowing this, we can store the keywords and description in a data store like SQL database or XML, and then just bind them to the page.
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//Keywords and Description of the web page
Page.Keywords = "Dascode.Net, Edward, dascode";
Page.Description = "DasCode.Net description";
}
This will override the meta tag contents (if any) already declared in the page.
by Edward
18 March 2009 11:51
Welcome to the
Deep Web Search Engine! A search engine so powerful, it will "scare the pants of your legs" as someone put it.
Unlike some of the popular search engines out there,
Pipl is designed to retrieve information from the deep web. Their robots can interact with numerous searchable databases, and gather facts on yourself, a relative, the neighbour next door, your aunt's cat and even bring back google results. Scary isnt it!
Some of the other uses for this search engine is to extract facts on directories, scientific publications, court records and numerous other deep-web sources. It's a mega store of information, and you can even return the sites where your email address or username is active.
Pipl started out very quitely in late 2007. Going by ComScore’s December 2008 numbers, Pipl is leading in the US with 557 thousand unique users to Spock’s 260 thousand, but is trailing internationally with 1.35 million uniques to Spock’s 2.38 million.
So what personal information about yourself is actually available on the web?
by Edward
17 March 2009 13:13
Over the last month or so,
Google has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. First there were the
Gmail downtime issues; this was followed up with
more downtime to their email service for some users a week later. At the beginning of this month, they were in the news again - this time a software bug "inadvertently" exposed documents thought to be privately stored in the Internet giant's online Docs application service.
The
security problem was fixed by the weekend and is believed to have affected only 0.05% of the documents at a Google Docs service that provides text-handling programs as services on the Internet. They even went so far to say that they themselves were affected by this security bug.
The question that needs be asked is Google and other Internet firms entice people to rely on applications offered online as services "in the cloud" instead of buying software then installing and maintaining it on their own machines? Although it's free storage and Google do promise to keep your records safe, there is no guarantee.
When I visit my personal space on the web (like Gmail, Google Docs, Windows Live, Hotmail, Facebook or MySpace), I want to be sure that my data is available all the time, and running in a secure environment. An apology does not do it! Is it shrewd to rely on the
Internet for access to information and applications like these companies would like us to do, or do they just want access to your information to use as they want? Where do you draw the line on security and trust?
by Edward
15 March 2009 18:20
Rumour has it that there are new iPhone features, that Apple would probarly unveil at a special event, it is holding next week.
Apple sent out invitations to a showcase at its headquarters in Cupertino, California, which it says will give people an "advance preview of what we're building".
Even though some opinion that the company is working on a completly new handset, the invitation – which directly mentions iPhone's operating system – appears to indicate that next week Tuesday's event will largely focus on upgrades to the software that run the device.
The first official iPhone was released back in June 2007, and the handset went on sale in the UK later that year in November. It was swiftly followed up last summer by a new model featuring GPS and a larger memory.
Last year the company unveiled its software developer's kit(SDK) - which enabled users/developers to create applications for the handset. This was then tied to the release of the iPhone 3G.
Either way, whatever the results of next week's preview happens to be, it will mark just the latest significant change to the iPhone since it was first announced back in 2007.
by Edward
11 March 2009 18:20
This afternoon I was reading the latest news on the MVC pattern, and came accross an open source project called NerdDinner.com - my first thoughts was that this is a "ripoff version" of the popular Dinnernow.Net open source ASP.NET project which showcase technologies like ASP.NET, ASP.NET Ajax Extensions,
LINQ, WCF, Windows Workflow, WPF, Windows PowerShell, IIS7 and the .NET Compact Framework. All wrapped in one solution, and a great project to learn from.
To get back to why I am posting this. The ASP.NET MVC Framework is a Model-view-controller framework(widely known as MVC) which Microsoft is adding to ASP.NET 3.5. The NerdDinner.com project is build using this pattern. This project's goal is to create the best website for Technology People to host their Lunches, Flashmobs, Dinners and informal get-together. Successful use of the pattern isolates business logic from user interface considerations, resulting in an application where it is easier to modify either the visual appearance of the application or the underlying business rules without affecting the other.
You can download the source code from Codeplex, at http://nerddinner.codeplex.com.
By the way, there is also a new MVC pattern book called "Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0" by Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack and Scott Guthrie. Go pre-order it, or get it later! A free 185 page sample is also available from http://aspnetmvcbook.s3.amazonaws.com/aspnetmvc-nerdinner_v1.pdf.
by Edward
08 March 2009 18:59
Adding JQuery Reference to ASP.NET pages
Quick How to...
Firstly create your website project, or select a page on your current website where you want to add JQuery functionality.
Get the latest jQuery javascript file from here.
Add the file to the root of your website, or a specified folder. Add a reference the the js file from the page you want to use it. You can also add the Script Reference to the JQuery file in ASP.NET’s AJAX Script Manager Control.
Instead of writing the script element directly, the script can be added to the set of scripts that the ScriptManager controls using a ScriptReference element. By including it this way, we are assured that it will be loaded at a point when the ASP.NET AJAX Library is available.
<asp:ScriptManager runat="server" ID="ScriptManager1">
<Scripts>
<asp:ScriptReference Path="jQuery.js" />
</Scripts>
</asp:ScriptManager>
You can now add jQuery functionality to your page. Make sure you add your logic to JQuery’s "ready event" as below:
$(document).ready(function(){
// Your code here
});
It makes sure that all the object(s) you reference are available and safe to manipulate the DOM.
If you want to manipulate all the links element <a>, take a look at the following snippet.
$("a").click(function(event){
alert("Hello World!");
});
Above code snippet will get all the <a> elements to be worked on and execute when you click the link(s) available on ASP.NET page which shows an alert box.
Next, we need to create a CSS Class. Add the CSS class in your page like this.
<style type="text/css">
a.mylink
{
font-weight: bold;
}
</style>
then add the CSS class as below:
$("a").addClass("mylink");
all your <a..> elements would now be bold. To remove the CSS class you’d use
$("a").removeClass("mylink");
Special Effects [Animation]
In JQuery, some basic effects are provided, to test how it works take a look at following snippet.
$("a").click(function(event){
event.preventDefault();
$(this).hide("slow");
});
Now, if you click any link, it should make itself slowly disappear.
For more help on JQuery, please visit the tutorials page on the JQuery Documentation website.
by Edward
04 March 2009 19:30
Microsoft surprised its technology industry rivals and high street retailers by announcing their plans to open its own line of branded shops.
The call to launch a "few" Microsoft stores comes during the worst recession for decades, and just weeks after the listed company made its first ever mass redundancies.
The company, which is based in the Redmond(USA), said its hiring David Porter, an executive from the Hollywood movie studio DreamWorks, to oversee a network of shops that will sell Windows PCs, mobile phones and other devices. Microsoft feels its an exciting time with their strong line-up of upcoming product release like Windows 7, and the release of the new Windows Live and Windows Mobile.
They will also be working hard to tranform the PC and Microsoft buying experience at retail, so that it's straightforward and clearly for consumers the world over."
Even though the range of hardware now being made by Microsoft, their primary focus will be selling PCs to the consumer, which could be an important way for the company to motivate the sales of the upcoming
Windows 7 operating system, due out later this year.
Aside from this, the decision to launch into such an high-priced experiment while the world economy is in difficulties confused some analysts, while others suggested that remaining electronics retailers are likely to be aggravated by the move.
by Edward
03 March 2009 19:37
Facebook have been targeted by malicious hackers and companies seeking to steal valuable data from its members.
The social network site has been hit by five separate security problems in the last seven days, which is a big concern for Facebook self, and the public using the social networking heavyweight.
By adding 'fake' messages which includes details of Facebook members the thieves are capitalising on the trust and social links that drive the network. Online Security Expert firms warn that the popularity of social networking sites like Facebook makes them a tempting target for hi-tech thieves.
The new variant of rogue applications uses a Facebook message to try to get people to visit a fake YouTube page and install the malware on their facebook profile. To make it look more plausible, the virus posts the image from a Facebook member's profile on the video page to try and catch you in believing the post is real.
Once installed on your facebook profile, the malicious program hunts for cookies on a victim's computer and uses the details it finds in the small text files to log into other social sites that person may be a member of.
Facebook also needs to take privacy more seriously, especially after the debacle of last week's Terms and Conditions blunder.