Online Resources I use...

As you all know, now I've got what I always wanted, I am kindda free now, so I've decided I'll answer most of the queries you guyz had when I was there. As a part of that, here are the online resources I use a lot :
Non-Microsoft Subscriptions I Use
SDTimes.com
Redmondmag.com
101Communications.com(For Free Subscriptions)
MCPMag.com
ENTOnline.com
Tcpmag.com
Microsoft Subscriptions I Use
MS Architecure Journal - Hard Copy as well as Soft Copy:D
MSDN Flash India and International
MCP Flash
Microsfot Security bulletin and Notifications
TechNet Flash
Mobile PC
Sites I Use
TechTree.com
Experts-Exchange.com
CodeProject.com
bytemycode.com
PCQuest.com
msdn.microsoft.com
geekinterview.com
google.com

Hosting JSP, PHP or any other Server Side Architecture(CGI) on IIS

Here I am writing my first important .. naah very very important blog entry from my desk. If you are a seasoned web developer you know how tough it is to work with various Hypertext Processors or Server Technologies. It was almost impossible to host cross-server side technologies on given web server. Like to host JSP/PHP you'll go and find some third party ISAPIs or will try to develop your own ISAPI that maps to given web technology. Now, As we see the things from different perspective and the world is going towards more and more flexibility, Microsoft has come up with a new tool/technology called FastCGI that empowers web developers to host various web technology extensions on IIS.

On IIS.Net FastCGI was described as:
The IIS FastCGI component enables popular application frameworks like PHP be hosted on the IIS web server in a high-performance and reliable way.

FastCGI provides a high-performance alternative to the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), a standard way of interfacing external applications with Web servers that has been supported as part of the IIS feature-set since the very first release.
CGI programs are executable launched by the web server for each request in order to process the request and generate dynamic responses that are sent back to the client. Because many of these frameworks do not support multi-threaded execution, CGI enables them to execute reliably on IIS by executing exactly one request per process. Unfortunately, it provides poor performance due to the high cost of starting and shutting down a process for each request.

If you are interested in, here is a link to a FastCGI whitepaper :

http://www.fastcgi.com/devkit/doc/fastcgi-whitepaper/fastcgi.htm

The source for this entry: http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=1000051

Windows File System : Archive Bit

Recently I got a a mail clearly asking information regarding Archive Bit that is available on FAT32, NTFS and its implications from Developer's perspective. So here is an article that will try to throw some light on this topic.

According to PCMAG : A file classification that indicates whether the file has been updated since the last backup. A bit is set in the file directory to indicate the archive status. When a file is created or saved, the bit is turned on. When it is backed up, the bit is turned off.
and technically its a file attribute controlled by the high-order bit of the t3 byte (FCB + 11) in a directory element. This attribute is set if the file has been archived.
Here is a VBScript code sample that shows how to access File Attributes.
http://sallisawok.org/caspdoc/html/vbscript_file_object_attributes_property.htm

Google launches Google Code Search

Google has launched yet another Developer friendly service yesterday ie Google CodeSearch(http://www.google.com/codesearch).
It's a search engine developed for developers and it provides an interface to use RegEx to search code snippets they are looking for. I didn't try it much as now I am headed to some other things... I felt it will be extremely useful to you people.
Google Code Search helps you find function definitions and sample code by giving you one place to search publicly accessible source code hosted on the Internet. With Google Code Search, you can:
- Use regular expressions to search more precisely
- Restrict your search by language, license or filename
- View the source file with links back to the entire package and the webpage where it came from

Visual Studio 2020

I was looking at the newsletter from CodeProject and got my eyes on this kewl article. Have a look at this tiny (aaaargh) article.

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/Visual_Studio_2020.asp

I became MCP

Hey hey.... it's been a long long time... I agree... yes.... its been a long time... had gone through many things in last 6 months, got VNS Series of projects, took part in MS Security Shootout 2006(http://www.securityshootout.com) also decided what I will be doing next few years...of course its Software Development but now I can see it, define it and then it comes to my mind that going on that path I'll need something on my side, some credential/certification and what in this world is better than MS Certifications if you are a .Net Developer? So today was a big day, I went to Crystal Arcade at CG Road, Ahmedabad and I got my first MS Certification i.e. Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 - Application Development Foundation C# (70-536). The exam was tough but the MSDN2, Virtual Labs and Visual Studio Express/Beta editions I used was sufficient enough to crack it. And I got it done, it took time, but it was done. And now I am heading towards the Final Destination for a Developer lets see how does it rolls out....

How to display an assembly in the Add Reference dialog box

Many of my friends recently asked me about GAC and the Side by Side Versioning support .Net provides. After doing a lot of R&D, one of them came up with a question like this : How to use two different versions of an assembly by using a GAC. He knew how to add Assemblies to GAC so that was not at all a problem, infact, if you refer to HOW TO: Install an Assembly into the Global Assembly Cache in Visual Studio .NET its pretty simple. However, after you add it to GAC, the .Net IDE doesnt show you those assemblies, listed in Add Reference Dialog Box.

After searching MS KB, I got an easy way to do that, here it follows :
Open Registry Editor and add the following Key to it.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\AssemblyFolders\ESSAssemblies]@="C:\\ESSAssemblies"

Here, ESSAssemblies is the name of the Folder where your Assemblies reside.

Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus

The People’s Almanac, pp. 1358–9. (Originally published in The New York Sun in 1897.)

We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:

Dear Editor—

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O’Hanlon

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, may 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

http://beebo.org/smackerels/yes-virginia.html

I got a Nokia 6630 :)

Well... Nokia 6630 was on my wish list since it came out... the fastest S60 mobile in market.
It looks real sleek n sexy...and is packed with tones of features that any techie would love to have....

Dimensions: 110x60x21mm — that's considerably smaller than the 3650. It'll fit in regular pants with no need for funny smiles from strangers. ;)

CPU: 220mhz ARM9 / RAM: 7MB free — that's more than twice the speed of the 3650 (107mhz) and almost three times the amount of RAM available (2.7MB)! You feel the speed instantly when working with the applications, games or even just opening Message Boxes.

Camera: 1.23 megapixel (1280x960) with 3.7mm lens — this takes much, much better pictures than both the 3650 and the 6600 (This is my personal openion) in daylight. Evening shots are still so-so. And there's almost no lag on the shutter. Click and the picture is taken thanks to the faster CPU.
Stereo audio and decent headphones — it's actually possible to enjoy listening to MP3's on the phone now.

3G! — This one is a real 3G phone with Excellent Network support and extremely fast download speed as compared to oldies.

The DoomsDay Launch

I was more than happy when we were about to launch a Project, we'll call it Project X, everything was fine, it's very well tested in Testing environment, but we never know when things can go wrong. At the day of launching we deployed that Project X to the Servers and it broke within matter of seconds. Well! we stayed till late night and we fixed it and came home, however, what I saw at that time was : Lack Of Communication between counterparts of the organization. The actual story that came out was we were configuring a test setup instead of the real one, so whatever changes we made were done on test setup only 'cause we were not informed that it was a test setup. When an enterpise grows, people have to learn effective communication methods that keeps everyone involved on a same page. I am not saying that we were not wrong, no we were not informed. Without adequate information it'll be difficult for anyone to go ahead and deploy projects like this. but afterall we learned new things, things that will help us in future when we deploy projects. Moral of the story is : When you are gonna do something, DOCUMENT it, inform concerned people about the things you are going to do. DO NOT make Assumptions or it'll come back to you.

Hi All,
Yesterday, I came across a real world RIA... naah... not a girl... but a Rich Internet Application called goowy it was a featured site on my favourite macromedia.com so I visited it .. and i was stunned by what I saw at goowy.com.

What They say :
goowy (re) is a rich experience service that offers you a new way of expressing yourself and interacting with your friends and family. We leverage the best web technologies to provide you with a fun, unique environment for managing your web mail, contacts, calendar, widgets, games and more.

What I would say...? Well...its a Web Based Desktop Solution, yes No Kidding... a Web based Desktop Solution (see below) its 100% Customizable as if its my Windows Desktop.... infact you can change your desktop theme too...

You can add necessary Widgets as per your requirements by using Manage Widgets Extension and for those, who loves to have the power of Windows Based Desktop, goowy comes as a Window based solution, a separate download is available for Windows and a Mac version is coming soon.


It gives you a 2 GB Mail Box, a RICH UI to explore, Calender, Contacts and Games :) I found its mailbox a real magic, notifiers, quick search and everything accessible at just one click.You can import your contacts from Outlook and alike mail clients.

Lets look at Mail Box first.
Its lil bit heavy for dial up users at first I suggest to use Lite version, and all those who are blessed with so-called Broad band, Goowy grooves... rocks... and wateverz..... its a 2 GB Mailbox with a nice Layout. Apart from traditional Mailbox features this one Comes packed with Audio-Visual notifiers for new mails, Manageable Folders, and a Fast Search Engine built into the mailbox itself.

Widgets allows you to customize your desktop by adding popular web services like Search Engines, Quotes, Stocks, News etc

Contacts Its a comprehensive contact manager, I would like to add I find it better than the one that comes with GMail. Its like the one that you see with Outlook. It has a useful feature : Import Contacts and for me it worked like a charm I added all of my GMail contacts to it by just clicking in the Wizard.

Games
Hiyaa... I wont say about Games here.... ;)

Calender Its well-structured and works fine, but I am not that good with scheduling my tasks so I didn't explore it much.

Goowy is not a Big Budget Adventure, it was started as a PoC, and now it has 25K registered users. Its a development effort, I request all of the developers out there or who ever reads this mail to register with goowy not just to maintain another mail box but to support the efforts.

Regards,
Chinmay

Kewl.... MS Office 12 Screen Shots - PDC 2005

I got some screen shots from Microsoft Web Site ... I was impressed.... I would like to share them wtih you.... :)

Powerpoint

Access

Excel

Word

I am goin for MCA :)

Hi All,

Today, I got ready early in the morning, it was raining out there, sometimes I wonder, is there something I've to do with monsoon? it drives me crazy when I see its raining... anywayz! I reached RCC at 1, and than I waited till 3 to get in to the process, it was funny, but I forgot to
carry a pen... so had to borrow all the times I needed to fill/sign the form. but at last I got it.
I was lookin towards LD...and yeah... I got it... Now I'll be doin my MCA from LD.

well! thats enough for today... see ya tomorrow...

A good Article on AJAX

Hi Guyz,

Here follows an article that will change your world of web application.
How you code them, how you use them, how you persive them... Everything
that you have seen so far in Web Applications is gonna go nuts once you
see this. This is something that will help us to go beyond the
Edge(That's ESS Style...) of Web Apps... so here we go... say welcome
to the NextGen technology - AJAX

Regards,
Chinmay

I m back! :)

Hi Guyz!

I m back after such a long period..... I got some time to take a breath... huh... man! I m telling you... those were days... toooo busy....I cant beleive that I can
work so hard ;)

btw, I'll be posting some cool pics and clips which I recently took during this
rainy season

ASP.Net - Trace Viewer

ASP.NET introduces new functionality that allows you to view diagnostic information about a single request for an ASP.NET page simply by enabling it for your page or application. Called tracing, this feature also allows you to write debug statements directly in your code without having to remove them from your application when it is deployed to production servers. You can write variables or structures in a page, assert whether a condition is met, or simply trace through the execution path of your page or application.

One interesting feature comes built in with .Net Framework is : Trace Viewer.
To Test this functinoality you have to enable tracing in your application. Change <Trace> element in the Web.Config as follows :
<trace enabled="true" requestLimit="10" pageOutput="false" traceMode="SortByTime" localOnly="true" />

Once you have enabled tracing for your application, each page in the application will execute any trace statements that it contains when it is requested. You can view these statements and the additional trace information in the trace viewer by requesting Trace.axd from the root of your application directory.

Note When you enable tracing for an application, you can view the trace statements, and additional information, in any page in the application by setting the pageOutput attribute to true in the Web.config file.The trace viewer allows you to choose a specific request from the pages that have been requested from your application.

Well, if you are still using Classic ASP, than here is a similar utility for you. Click Here download.

Norton Ghost 2003 Quick Walkthrough

So Friendz, here is a Quick Walkthrough to create an Image using Norton Ghost 2003...(This one was requested by my friend.... DJ)

1. Click on Backup
2. Select Physical Disk
3. Select Partition, you can use CTRL to select Multiple Partitions
4. Select Destination - File
5. Browse to the location where you want to save the Image, you can't store it on the same partition of which you are making Ghost Image.
6. Now, you can configure Advanced Settings(They are beyong the scope of this walkthrough)
7. Now it will show you task summary. click on Run Now.
8. it will reboot your computer and then you'll be provided option to perform Ghost Image Operation or cancel it.
9. if you select to perform Ghost Image operation, it'll create a ghost Image of selected partition/s.

Raising File Save Dialog Box on Client Side using C# and ASP.NEt

Hey Fellas! As I promised to you, this is the sample project to Raise a File Save Dialog Box for known MIME Types like Images, Doc Files, PDF, etc. on Client Side.

Click Here to Get the Source Project. If you have any question please feel free to contact me.
Ref. MIME Type by Content Type

Here is the Code to use the Component :

1. Add a Reference to ForceDownload.dll

2. Add "using ESS.APP.WebUtil"

3. Add this snippet to the Event on which you want to Force the Download

ForceDownload fdl = new ForceDownload();
fdl.FilePath = Server.MapPath(Request.ApplicationPath +"\\filename.ext");
fdl.Download();

Great News...I will participate in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Beta Program

WOW! Great News for me, few days back I got an Invitation to Participate in Microsoft(r) Windows Server 2003 "R2" Beta.(Few months back I registered on their site to join this program). And today I got confirmation that I've been selected for this beta program. I am more than happy to get this opportunity. Now I'll be testing this excellent Server Product from Microsoft.

Adobe take overs Macromedia...

Well... Well... Here is the news... read the full story...

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobeandmacromedia.html