Showing posts with label Misc Ramblings. Show all posts

Your Chance to Win .NET Training, Software and EBooks

I just wanted to give a quick shout-out that we are hosting a .NET GiveAway at www.dotnetcurry.com

There are some super cool prizes like

5 PluralSight Annual Subscriptions,
25 Oreilly EBooks,
6 RedGate Ants and Performance Profiler licenses
5 KendoUI licenses to be won.

Many prizes have been given away and there are many more to be won. So participate before the 31st of May and enter a chance to win some cool prizes.

DotNetCurry Completes 5 Years and There Are Some Prizes For You to Win!

TechEd India 2012–Watch it Live!

TechEd India is being hosted from March 21 – 23 in Bangalore India and like every year, I will be attending this year too. This paid event focuses on technical education to the community, coupled with deep-dive sessions, big news announcements and exploration of Microsoft tools, platforms and services.Being a Microsoft MVP gives me an easy access to Microsoft developer events locally as well as globally as well as provides an exclusive opportunity to meet the MS Product groups

Make sure you check my previous post on how to Make the Most of Technical Events like TechEd India.

This year, TechEd has come up with a new initiative that I wanted to share with you. If you are unable to make it to the event, no worries, you can now watch TechEd Live! TechEd Live is the live online webcast of the sessions on the ground during the three days of TechEd India 2012. Get a real-time experience of the hottest action at TechEd India 2012-live streaming of keynote addresses, demos, technical tracks and more - right from the comfort of your home or office.

Best of all TechEd Live is Free to view. The agenda of the sessions can be found at the Tech Ed India site at https://india.msteched.com/TechEdLive

TechEd Live will also host a new track called the Channel 3. Watch out for cool and exciting content showcasing Microsoft’s platforms and technologies including Windows Phone, Azure and Windows 8, Robotics, Microsoft research, Kinect platform, making movies using Expression Blend and so on.

So stay tuned from March 21-23 as the best technical event of this year, is being covered with TechEd Live!

Free Minesweeper and Sudoku for Windows Phone 7

If you are a Windows 7 Phone owner and are in the US, here’s a good way to spend the weekend. Microsoft has added Minesweeper and Sudoku to the Windows Phone Marketplace, and Owners of Windows Phone 7 devices can download both Xbox LIVE Sudoku and Xbox LIVE Minesweeper immediately.

Both the games come with the Metro UI style and both feature panorama menus. Just remember that Bing ads will be displayed prominently on every screen.

Ok now I am going to download these games and I hope the experience is similar to what I played on my consoles!

Awarded the MVP Title – 4 Years in a Row

“The key to happiness is having dreams. The key to success is making your dreams come true.” - Unknown

I was awarded the Microsoft MVP title again for the 4th consecutive year, and I thank Microsoft for bestowing this award on me. I am glad my efforts and contributions to the community via my sites DotNetCurry.com, DevCurry.com and SqlServerCurry.com were recognized by Microsoft. Last year my sites combined, reached out to over 800K developers every month.

About the MVP award

For those who are not aware of the MVP award, Wikipedia says:

The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) is the highest award given by Microsoft to those it considers "the best and brightest from technology communities around the world" who "actively share their ... technical expertise with the community and with Microsoft"

Some MVP award Facts:

Around 4000 MVP’s in the world
Live in more than 90 countries
Speak nearly 40 languages
Answer more than 10 million questions each year
Offer expertise in around 90 Microsoft technologies

MVP Award Benefits

Being an MVP is fun and rewarding too! Along with an MVP trophy and a certificate, Microsoft values its awardees by providing them with access to several technical resources such as complimentary subscriptions to MSDN or TechNet, access to MVP private newsgroups, technical support incidents, passes and discounts to MS events, insider news and an opportunity to interact with product teams and be a part of the product development cycle.

One of the primary benefits this award gives you is the opportunity to socialize with other MVP’s across the world – like the Microsoft MVP Global Summit and MVP Open Days held almost every year.

How do I Become an MVP?

“That some achieve success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.” – Abraham Lincolm

You may want to look at How do I become an MVP ? If you feel you have got what it takes to become an MVP, drop me a mail. This is an elite award, every IT Pro and Microsoft Developer dreams of getting.

Cheers to another year of success! I am an MVP and I am proud of it!

Win .NET EBooks, Training and Products in our GiveAway – 5 days left!

We are doing a $38K MegaAway of .NET Products, EBooks and Training on my other site http://www.dotnetcurry.com/. We are doing this GiveAway to celebrate DotNetCurry’s 4th Year on the Web. There are 156 exciting prizes to be won and I want to invite all my DevCurry.com readers to participate and enter a chance to win prizes in the GiveAway. The contest will last for only 5 more days!

Here are some prizes we are giving away:

.NET Products

100 licenses of Telerik JustCode Add-in For Visual Studio
1 license of Data Visualization for Silverlight Enterprise Edition Subscription License
10 licenses of Nevron Chart for .NET Lite Edition
1 license each of Crypto Obfuscator For .Net - Enterprise edition, CryptoLicensing For .Net - Enterprise edition, Crypto Logger For .Net and Shell MegaPack.Net
1 license of RedGate Smart Assembly and ANTS Memory Profiler
1 license of NDepend Pro license Combo developer + build-machine
10 licenses of ESET Smart Security

.NET Training

3 Annual subscriptions of Pluralsight On-Demand .NET Training

.NET EBooks

O’Reilly is sponsoring 5 copies each of the following EBooks

There are 156 prizes to be won, so make sure you give it a shot! You may just get lucky! Click this link to participate $38K MegaAway of .NET Products, EBooks and Training

Good luck!

Blogger is Back to Normal Now!

For all those who were wondering about the downtime of this blog as well as the others hosted on Google's Blogger, here's the answer - Blogger is Back

There was some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior. Since then, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages.

Infact the post for May 12th Silverlight 4 DataGrid Filtering using DataGridColumnStyle was not available for a couple of hours. After 20 hours of unable to post, happy to be back again!

Back to blogging now...

My TechEd India 2011 Experience

I had written a post on how to Make the Most of Technical Events like TechEd. Well I am glad I followed my own tips and made the most of the TechEd India 2011 event, I attended last month. The event was attended by around 3200 IT professionals and over 30 MVP’s including the MVP leads Abhishek Kant and Abhishek Baxi. Although I missed some planned sessions due to the round table conferences with Microsoft product and evangelism teams, I do not have any reasons to complain. The interactions with the MS product folks were fantastic! Here’s a quick wrap up of my experience.

Note: Original pictures taken by Abhishek Baxi, Vijay Raj, Anoop Madhusudhan, Lohith Nagaraj.

Day 1 – March 23rd

I reached early at the venue (Hotel Lalit Ashok, Bengaluru) assuming it would take me sometime to collect my pass. However there was a separate counter for Microsoft MVP’s and User group leads and I got my pass in 2 minutes flat! That saved me a lot of energy and it was a good first impression that this event is going to rock, and so did it!

The opening keynote was given by Dr. Qi Lu, President of the Online services division, Microsoft, followed by Yousef Khalidi, who is a Distinguished Engineer in the Windows Azure team.

While the other IT folks proceeded to attend different tracks, we Microsoft MVP’s had a special ‘Meet the MVP’ session, where we got an opportunity to network with fellow MVP’s, Microsoft Evangelist and enthusiastic IT professionals. We introduced ourselves and discussed about the challenges and opportunities of reaching out to the community and how to utilize MVP’s as well as the MVP program, in the best possible way. Unfortunately this session was not advertised in the TechEd booklet, so the attendee turnout was average. However the quality and context of the session was worth the time! That’s me on the right (front) in a black t-shirt, smiling away to glory!

Later in the afternoon, MVP’s had an exclusive one-on-one roundtable chat with Yousef Khalidi, a distinguished Engineer from Microsoft Azure team. Yousef is a developer at heart and he patiently heard us quibbling about the issues and pain points in the Azure platform and its SDK. Many MVP’s including Dhananjay (@debugmode_) had candid feedback and suggestions to share. It was a productive session and I am sure Yousef enjoyed the interaction, as much as we did.

In between, we MVP’s got many opportunities to interact with each other, and we made the best use of it! Here’s one ‘hot’ Silverlight/ HTML 5 discussion going on between MVP’s Hima, Krishnan(a.k.a @novogeek), Anoop (a.k.a @amazedsaint), Suprotim (me), Sumit, VijayRaj (a.k.a @msigeek) and Lohith(a.k.a @kashyapa). We even discussed how my Asus Netbook with 1 GB RAM, can run VS 2010 and SQL Server 2008. I had to show it to them to make them believe it ;)

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I between, I got chance to attend a few sessions as well.

Day 2 – March 24th

Day 2 started with a keynote by Brian Hall, GM – Internet Explorer and Live, followed by a keynote by Bharat Shyam, GM – Azure Developer Platform.

After the keynotes, we MVP’s again had the unique opportunity to attend roundtables with Brian Hall, GM, IE9 and Windows Live, Microsoft, Ramkumar Pichai, GM, Customer & Partner Experience and Bharat Shyam, GM, Developer Experience. These were again very constructive roundtable sessions. The interaction with Brian was so damn interesting that we completely lost track of time! We had a candid round with Brian, giving him feedback on IE9 and Windows Live and debated about creating an ecosystem for IE9 developers to contribute add-ons to the platform. I bet these MS folks are going to have many TO-DO’s and action points to look into, when they return back to office!

MVP’s and Microsoft Evangelists with Brian Hall

In between, I attended some sessions, had a tech chat with friends like Pranav, Abhijit, Lohith, Krishna, Abhishek, Shravan, Sumit, Anoop, Jacob, Govind, Hima, Mahesh and many more. In the evening, we attended a nice party hosted by INETA, GITCA and PASS. It was great fun!

Day 3 – March 25th

Attending Day 3 was a conscious decision! In a cricket loving country, a technical event has to be really interesting to attend, especially if there is a World Cup cricket match between India and Pakistan on the same day. I knew I could attend the event and watch the match too using my Datacard :)

Day 3 started with a gift from Microsoft. It was a Reebok IE9 watch for all TechEd attendees. ‘Fast is Beautiful’ was on my wrist. Here's a picture of the watch taken by Abhishek Baxi.

We then gathered to attend a keynote by Jason Zandor - Corporate VP, Visual Studio, Microsoft. Being a developer himself, Jason kept the demos very developer centric demoing new and exciting features in MVC 3, NuGet, EF 4 and VS with azure. His keynote was followed by the one by Murthy Uppaluri, Director DPE, who dressed as a cricketer, talked about “Metamorphosis of an Indian Techie”.

We (MVP’s) then had our lunch with Rajiv Kumar, IDC Head Hyderabad and discussed the new and existing features of MS Office. One of the key quality I noticed consistently in all these MS Product owners and team members is they were very humble in taking feedback and new feature suggestions. This was a very productive and interactive session again!

The next round table was with Jason Zander. Unfortunately I could not attend it as I was attending a developer session, but colleagues informed me that it was a great one! Time really passed by quickly on Day 3 and it was already time for the closing keynote. Guess who delivered it. Keeping the Cricket World Cup buzz in mind, it was none other than ace cricketer Anil Kumble

I am glad I invested 3 days attending this event. Not only did I get to meet old colleagues, MS product teams, Speakers and my MVP team leads, I also got an opportunity to meet my Blog readers! Thank you everyone and Microsoft for making this event so special.

Interested in checking out some more pictures? Check some cool pictures clicked by @msigeek in his album Some People Portraits from Teched India , by Abhishek Baxi and by @kashyapa.

Make the Most of Technical Events like TechEd India 2011

I am attending TechEd India 2011 next week (March 23 –25) and I am really excited about it! For those who are attending such events in these economically testing times, here are some pointers on how to make the most of such events.

What can you expect in conferences like TechEd?

TechEd India is a 3-day Microsoft technical paid event and focuses on technical education to the community, coupled with deep-dive sessions, big news announcements and exploring tools, platforms and services. With the focus on Azure, HTML 5, IE9, MVC, Silverlight, ASP.NET, jQuery and SharePoint 2010 this year, I am sure there’s something for everybody to learn. You also have breakout sessions, hands-on-labs, free certifications and product tents where you can interact, learn, network and get some cool merchandise. Did I mention, food and tea breaks during these 3 days are included!

And if you are a Microsoft MVP (oh talk about the benefits of being one which includes a free pass to this event!), you have an exclusive opportunity to meet the MS Product pundits, give them feedback and suggestions and get their insights. Last year, we also attended MVP parties hosted by companies like Telerik, Infragistics and PluralSight. It was great fun!

Make sure you take out time to Meet the MVP's at TechEd. We would love to interact with you!

How to Make the Most of these Events?

By preparing for these events in advance! Here are some pointers that could help you out:

Check the agenda in advance - Always make it a point to check the agenda and chalk out the sessions you plan to attend. For eg: In addition to the keynotes and meeting opportunities with the Microsoft top brass, here are some sessions I am really looking forward to:

Building High Performance, Interactive Visualizations Dashboards with Silverlight by Jason Beres
“Unexplained” of SQL Server Security by Vinod Kumar
jQuery and AJAX Control Toolkit: Better together for building rich web apps by Fritz Onion
The Top - 5 Enablers for Sustained Growth by Ranganathan S
“HTML5” - more than just HTML5 by Harish Vaidyanathan
Data Storage Services on the Cloud by Matt Milner
Building a real-world, Internet-scale stock trading application by Naveen Prabhu
Improving Application Performance with the Task Parallel Library by Fritz Onion
Lap around Silverlight 5 & comparative with HTML5 by Supreet Singh
Deep Dive: MVC Controller Architecture by Chris Eargle
SQL & Windows Azure: Customer Evidences from MTC by Aniruddha Deswandikar

Write notes. Don’t shy away from asking questions - Carry your laptop or a notebook to jot down notes. If a question pops up in your head during the session, make sure you note it down. If you are a gadget freak and carry a smart phone voice recording device, even better! You can avoid the time and hassle of note-taking.

With a huge attendee turnout like the ones in Teched, you may get 5 minutes or less to exchange ideas or questions with the speaker. Look at the agenda, try to gauge the content and keep your questions ready, wherever possible. In my case, my memory always fails me, so my ASUS netbook is my best companion to take down questions. By the way, did I mention it runs for a good 8 hours on batteries ;)

Focus on sharing and learning from one another - It’s always interesting to gather perspectives from fellow devs about the different technologies in the market or ask them about the project/products they are working on. Developers love sharing what and how they create. You will be surprised to learn there are so many smart devs out there. It’s a networking and learning event, so leverage your personality and be sure to take advantage of this networking opportunity.

Plan meetings or strike up a conversation – Technical events like Teched is not just about learning, it also opens doors to opportunities. So be ready to explore one when you see it. If you can, find who's attending and make a list of people you want to meet. Ask them for their time in advance for a meetup.

To strike a conversation with a prospect, the key is to feel capable and confident. Be open to introduce yourself without intruding. Be ready to answer questions like “What do you do”? Don’t talk too much about yourself. Listen intently. Also remember that you cannot talk to everyone, so go with the flow. You may or may not build up contacts, however the important thing over here is to network, meet new people and be yourself.

Business cards and Follow up – Keep your business cards ready and don’t shy away to exchange them. After the event, drop an email to the prospects you met at the event and thank them for the time.

Promotions – If you are running a blog or launching a new product, flaunt it using T-shirts, caps or any other merchandise. People will only learn about your product if you market it well.

Eat and Drink together – During conferences, make sure you eat your meal or get drinks with everyone else. This gives you a chance for informal conversation and to bond with one another. Last year, I attended MVP parties hosted by companies like Telerik, Infragistics and Plural Sight and it was good fun! To bring back some memories, here’s a picture from a TechEd party, with fellow MVP’s Ashish, Arjit, Nitin, Pinal, Suprotim and Sumit (left to right)

So those were some tips to help you make the most of this event. Feel free to share your tips!

I hope you’ll be attending TechEd this year and I look forward to meeting you and talk about the awesome stuff you are doing. If you are a visitor of any of our sites - DotNetCurry.com, DevCurry.com or SqlServerCurry.com, feel free to let us know how are we doing.

I will be doing a follow up post to share my experiences after I return from this event and I also plan to highlight the best tweets made during #techedin. So tweet your best!

It’s time to start packing my bags!

DevCurry.com Completes Two Years!

Happy New Year 2011 everyone! Today, it is exactly two years since I launched DevCurry.com and it has been a great journey so far! Check this link list of my popular posts written in 2010

Useful Developer Tools and Resources Posts – DevCurry.com

I can proudly say that in two years time, DevCurry.com has grown to be a popular blog amongst developers, reaching out to over 2 million developers. With one post a day, DevCurry had something new for its readers everyday. This year, apart from the posts, I plan to do some free Developer cookbooks, videos and screencasts too!

Many of you have regularly commented, Emailed me and shared your valuable feedback. Thanks all of you for the same. Although I have not been able to reply to each one of them, I do make it a point to read them, as and when I find time. I hope to see many more rounds of interactions with my readers and look forward to another fun-filled year and also hope that I will be able to stick to my routine of posting one developer post everyday!

You can keep up with the blog by Subscribing to the Feeds or via the Facebook page

Cheers and have a Wonderful Year 2011!

jQuery, ASP.NET, .NET and LINQ articles Link List – November 2010

Here’s a quick wrap up of the articles published on DevCurry.com in the month of November 2010.

jQuery and JavaScript Articles

Rounding Numbers in JavaScript - A very common question while dealing with Math methods in JavaScript is to round numbers. JavaScript provides 3 rounding methods: round(), ceil() and floor()

jQuery UI 1.8.6 Released - jQuery UI 1.8.6 is released. This update officially supports jQuery 1.4.3 and IE 9 and contains bug fixes and enhancements to jQuery UI Core, the Widget Factory, the Mouse widget and the Position utility as well.

Get Selected Items From DropDown control using jQuery - Here’s a very simple way to get the selected items in a DropDownList. Just use the jQuery change() method and write the results to a div control

Redirect a user from HTTP to HTTPS using JavaScript - Although a redirection is best done using your webserver or server-side code (for SEO purpose), here’s a simple way to redirect a page from Http to Https using JavaScript

Remove all White Space using JavaScript - Here’s how to remove all whitespaces (leading, trailing and in between) in a textbox using JavaScript

Loop Object literal using JavaScript - Here’s how to loop a JavaScript object literal and apply conditions to filter the object

Pass Function as a Parameter in JavaScript - You may at times need to pass a function as a parameter to another function. Here’s an example if you have a similar requirement

Generic Error Message in an Ajax call using jQuery - The jquery $.ajaxSetup() allows you to set default values for future Ajax requests. Here’s how to use this function to set a default generic error message

Highlight Elements on a Page using jQuery - Here’s a simple way to highlight elements on a page using jQuery. This example uses the Highlight effect of the jQuery UI library

ASP.NET Articles

Resolving ASP.NET 4.0 has not been Registered on the Web Server Error - While creating an ASP.NET Website in IIS 7 in Visual Studio 2008/2010, you may get the following error:“ASP.NET 4.0 has not been registered on the Web server. You need to manually configure your Web server for ASP.NET 4.0 in order for your site to run correctly, Press F1 for more details”. This post shows how to resolve the error.

Bind ASP.NET GridView to a Custom Object or Collection with Paging and Sorting - I find a lot of users asking how to bind a GridView to a Custom Class with Paging and Sorting enabled. Here’s some sample code that shows that.

Call ASP.NET Handler (ASHX) using JavaScript - I was working on an application which used AJAX and needed the XMLHttpRequest object to communicate with an ASP.NET Generic Handler (.ashx), which contained some server-side logic. Here’s a working prototype if you have a similar requirement

Set Width of GridView TextBox in Edit mode - To modify the width of a TextBox (inside the GridView control) when the GridView is in Edit Mode, use any of the two approaches shown in this post.

ASP.NET with Razor Syntax Beta 3 Free EBook and Tutorials - Microsoft recently released a free book and few samples to help you learn how to create dynamic Web content using ASP.NET Web Pages with the Razor syntax.

Merge GridView Header Columns - Continuing my ASP.NET GridView Tips and Tricks series, here’s another one that shows how to create a merged column in a GridView Header

Using the Deployment retail=true attribute - ASP.NET Settings - One of the most common errors while deploying ASP.NET websites into a production environment is to leave the Trace and Debug enabled or leave the custom errors attribute disabled.

Render Dynamic MetaTags in ASP.NET Page in Separate Lines – This post shows how to configure your code as that ASP.NET generate meta tags on separate lines.

LINQ and other .NET articles

Programmatically find CLR version for a .NET assembly - If you have to programmatically determine the CLR version of an assembly it was compiled against, then use the Assembly.ImageRuntimeVersion property as shown in this article

Rewrite Nested ForEach Loop in LINQ – Loop through two string array's of the same length without writing a foreach, using LINQ

List all .NET Attributes in the Loaded Assemblies - Here’s how to list all the .NET Attributes in the loaded assemblies.

Convert Date and Time to UTC - The TimeZoneInfo class in .NET contains two very useful methods called ConvertTimeToUTC() that converts the current date and time to UTC and ConvertTimeFromUTC() that converts a UTC to the time in a specified time zone.

F# November 2010 CTP available - The F# November 2010 CTP provides all the tools and resources needed to develop applications with the F# programming language

Check Database connection using C# or VB.NET - As a programmer, one of the most common tasks in your application is to connect to the database. Here’s a very simple way to check your database connection before you start any task or use this as a service to check the connection and pause tasks if the connection breaks.

Determine if your Laptop is Running on battery using C# or VB.NET - Here’s some code to programmatically find out if your laptop is currently running on battery power

Other Articles

Business Intelligence in SharePoint 2010 - Microsoft recently released a cool poster that gives an overview of the tools for Business Intelligence (BI) in SharePoint 2010.

USB 3.0 Support in Windows 7 - Did you know that USB 3.0 is not natively supported in Windows 7. So if you happen to plug in a USB 3.0 device and it does not get recognized, don’t be surprised! This post has some workarounds.

Share Visual Studio 2010 Layout Settings Between Machines - I would love to share my Visual Studio layout and other settings in between my two machines. Visual Studio provides just the option I need!

jQuery, ASP.NET, .NET and LINQ articles Link List – October 2010

Here’s a quick wrap up of the articles published on DevCurry.com in the month of October.

jQuery

Start and Stop an Animation in jQuery - Starting and Stopping a jQuery Animation is as simple as using the animate() and stop() functions

Retrieve DIV value in ASP.NET using jQuery - How to retrieve the value of a DIV in ASP.NET using jQuery

Replace Word in a Text using jQuery - How to replace a word in a text using jQuery

Date Time Manipulation using JavaScript - Perform some date time manipulations in JavaScript

Redirect to a New Page using JavaScript - See how to redirect to a new page and avoid the back button

Filter and Convert JSON object to String - Filter only certain members of the JSON object and convert it into JSON text

Find the Nth Number of Fibonacci series using JavaScript - Here’s some fun finding the Nth number of a Fibonacci series using JavaScript Recursion

jQuery Mobile alpha and jQuery 1.4.3 released - This post discusses a couple of releases by the jQuery Team

Use jQuery to Detect if User has Scrolled to the Bottom or Top of a Page - Here’s a simple way to detect if the user has scrolled to the Top or Bottom of the page using jQuery

Find Nth Element on a Page using jQuery - A lot of developers often ask how to find the Nth element on a Page – for eg: Check if the user clicked inside the ‘4th TextBox’ or Clicked the ‘3rd Link’ on a Page. This post shows how to find the Nth Element on a page

Use jQuery to Scroll to Bottom or Top of a Page - Learn how to use jQuery to scroll to the bottom of a Page

.NET

Programmatically Determine the Operating System using .NET - Here’s how to programmatically determine the Windows OS you are using

Attributes Every .NET Developer Should Know About - Here’s a list of important .NET attributes that is commonly used in projects and proves very useful if you know about them beforehand

Log a String Collection in .NET - Simple routine to log messages to a text file for later analysis

List names of all Text files from a Directory and SubDirectories using .NET 4.0 - How to search and list the names of all Text Files in a Directory as well as its SubDirectories using .NET 4.0

Convert DateTime to Different TimeZones - How to convert a DateTime using different time zone identifiers like “India Standard Time”, “Pacific Standard Time” and so on

LINQ

Swap Words inside a String using LINQ - Here’s how to swap two words using LINQ in .NET 4.0

Count File Extensions and Group it using LINQ - Read file names in a folder and show the count of files grouped by the file extension

Generate Sequence of Float Numbers within a Range using LINQ - Generate float numbers within a Range say - 20 to 40 using LINQ

ASP.NET

Disable Weekends in ASP.NET Calendar Control - Prevent the users from selecting any dates that fall on a weekend (Saturday & Sunday)

ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta, WebMatrix Beta 2 and NuPack released - ScottGu announced updates to the release of ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta, WebMatrix Beta 2 and a new project called NuPack.

Count Items in a RSS/Atom Feed using .NET - Given a RSS or Atom Feed URL, here’s a simple way to count the number of items in the feed

ASPX vs ASCX (ASP.NET Page vs User Control) - A lot of web developers while learning ASP.NET get confused with the difference between an ASP.NET Page and ASP.NET User Control. This post clears some confusion

Display Default Image when No Image Found - A solution to display a Default Image in the Image control, when the original image is not available

Visual Studio

HTML 5 Intellisense In Visual Studio 2010 and 2008 - Visual Studio 2010 supports HTML 5 Intellisense through a free tool

Debug Silverlight Applications in Visual Studio - In order to debug a Silverlight application, you have to attach to a running instance of the application in your browser. Let us see how to do this

Visual Studio - Always Run as Administrator - By elevating permissions for Visual Studio, you can perform all tasks related to features such as building and debugging applications, which 'might not' work correctly under standard user permissions. Find out how to always run Visual Studio as Administrator

Miscellaneous

Free Training on Windows Server AppFabric - The AppFabric team has released a full online ‘downloadable’ training kit for Windows Server AppFabric. The 4-day training kit includes lab exercises and high-definition recordings of live sessions

Install IIS 7 on Windows 7 - In this post, we will go through the steps to install IIS7 on Windows 7

Free EBook: Programming Windows Phone 7, by Charles Petzold - Windows Programming legend Charles Petzold released a Free eBook about Windows Phone 7 Programming

I became an MVP again!

“When work, commitment, and pleasure all become one and you reach that deep well where passion lives, nothing is impossible” - Unknown

I became a Microsoft MVP again for the 3rd consecutive year, and I thank Microsoft for bestowing this award on me. I was awarded the MVP title as a result of my contributions to the technology community via my sites DotNetCurry.com, DevCurry.com, SqlServerCurry.com and to the ASP.NET forums

It’s sometimes hard for us running and updating all these sites ‘regularly’ along with a consultancy job, but all the energy comes from focusing on what excites us the most – Technology!

Chasing your passion is fun and it gets better, when you are awarded for it ;)

About the MVP award

For those who are not aware of the MVP award, Microsoft says:

We seek to recognize the best and brightest from technology communities around the world with the Microsoft® Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award.
These exceptional community leaders come from a wide range of backgrounds. They are teachers, artists, doctors, engineers, as well as technologists, who actively share their high-quality, real-world technical expertise with the community and with Microsoft.

Unlike other awards, you are re-evaluated for this award every year. I think this makes this award all the more special, since you are motivated to become better every year, to win it!

Some MVP Facts:

Around 4000 MVP’s in the world
Live in more than 90 countries
Speak nearly 40 languages
Answer more than 10 million questions each year
Offer expertise in around 90 Microsoft technologies

MVP Award Benefits

Being an MVP is fun! Along with a MVP trophy and a certificate, Microsoft values its awardees by providing them with access to several resources such as complimentary subscriptions to MSDN or TechNet, access to MVP private newsgroups, technical support incidents.

One of the primary benefits this award gives you is the opportunity to interact with the product team through your MVP Lead and also the first hand information you get while these products are being developed. The best of all is the Microsoft MVP Global Summit held almost every year. This Summit provides opportunities for MVPs around the world to network and socialize with each other, meet the product teams and attend technical sessions delivered by the teams – all of this, in Microsoft’s own headquarters, Redmond!

How do I Become an MVP?

You may want to look at How do I become an MVP ? If you feel you have got what it takes to become an MVP, drop me a line. This is an elite club, every IT Pro and Developer dreams to be a part of.

Well, I am an MVP and I am proud of it!

Microsoft Office 2010 GiveAway

Microsoft Office has been one of the most successful products from Microsoft. If you have been keeping yourself up-to-date with the latest news surrounding Microsoft Office, you are probably aware that a new version of MS Office 2010 is soon to be released.

Here’s a chance for you (only residents of India) to own a copy of the latest offering from Office 2010. We are providing 1 Office 2007 Home and Student for you to give away. This will be freely upgradeable to Office 2010 once it releases in June.

How Do I Participate in this GiveAway?

To participate, all you have to do is drop in a comment on this post and let us know why do you want this product. Make sure you enter your emailid or twitterid in the comment. The winner will be contacted and sent an email and they will redeem their awards via microsoftstore.co.in. The prizes can only be shipped to India.

Virtual Launch Event

The community is also hosting a Virtual Launch Event for Office 2010 on May 25 and 26th. The webcasts is FREE to attend and people can participate either online or by going to the nearest available center. The sessions will be delivered by MVPs. To register please visit: http://www.meraoffice.com/

In June, limited cities will be hosting Community Launch Events for Office 2010. At the launch events, attendees will get to see Office 2010 in action and learn how to do their work better with Office 2010. The details are available on http://office.merawindows.com/

Note: This contest is open to residents of India only. The winner will be announced on June 10th, 2010.

Update: The winner of this contest is Harpreet Singh Khandiyal(hsk1313). Congratulations Harpreet! Check your Email.

Grab .NET Products, Books and Training for Free – 4 Days Left

DotNetCurry recently completed it's 3rd anniversary and is celebrating by doing a Free GiveAway of .NET Books, Training and Products . There are 97 prizes to be won and the last date of the Giveaway is 24th May, 2010 . So Hurry up!

Update: The Contest has ended. The winners will be announced on May 31st. Stay tuned!

Here are some highlights of the GiveAway

Licenses of Image Uploader, .NET Chart components, .NET UI Components
IDE Productivity Tool, Project Managament Software, .NET Code Quality Software and .NET Obfuscator Licenses
.NET and Technology EBooks from O'Reilly, Manning and KnowledgeVisuals
.NET Training Subscriptions
Windows 7 Ultimate and ESET Antivirus licenses

Just click this link DotNetCurry Completes 3 Years - Free GiveAway to enter the GiveAway , follow @DotNetCurry on twitter and drop a comment on that link saying which product do you want and why? Make sure you enter your twitter handler in the comment.

Good Luck!

A Reliable Hosting for Non-techie Webmasters

This post was sponsored by Doteasy.

There are just so many websites right now and almost every niche and type of products can be found online. But unsurprisingly, most webmasters who own these websites are often clueless on how to actually set it all up by themselves. Well, that’s what web developers and programmers are for. But unfortunately, a lot of people really don’t have the budget to hire someone. So, they either end up trying to learn things on their own or just totally forget about the whole idea.

Well it doesn’t always have to be that way. Doteasy is one of the leading domain name registrars since 2000. They also offer reliable web hosting services and guarantee 99.9% uptime to all webmasters. Their best seller is their unlimited hosting package which is only $9.95 per month and best for setting up a business online. What they offer with their hosting packages is not just reliability but also something for anyone to easily manage and set up. And this is perfect even for those who aren’t much familiar with the technical stuff.

What they offer with their unlimited hosting?

Aside from the unlimited hosting storage, unlimited data transfer, unlimited email accounts and other things, they also provide a lot of free scripts, web tools, applications and services for their customers. You can easily set up a blog, forum, shopping cart and so much more with their one click install scripting. And if you got a script of your own, they could even help install that for you absolutely free. These are just among the many reasons why their unlimited hosting plan is great. Doteasy simply makes things really less complicated and instead much easier for first time webmasters but still competent enough for end users. They also offer free email, chat and telephone support for assistance.

And if you’re having doubts about their reliability and services, you can even try their free web hosting with no set up fee or extra charges. They are one of the few who guarantees 99.9% uptime and no annoying ads or pop-ups even with their free web hosting. Plus, you still get to have free web tools and apps to help you build your website with less hassle and a cPanel control panel. With their current promo of any .COM/.NET/.ORG domain name registration for only $7.95 a year, you can start your own blog with the personalized domain name and one year free web hosting with coupon code 1003BPM (just enter the coupon code before check out). A free web hosting package like that is definitely something worth checking out.

Win .NET Products, Books and Training in this $18000 Worth GiveAway

DotNetCurry.com is celebrating it’s 3rd anniversary with a bang! To say thank you to all its readers, DotNetCurry is excited to host a Mega $18,000 worth GiveAway, full of .NET Software, Books and Training. There are 97 fantastic prizes up for grabs, so best of luck to all of you for winning it!

DotNetCurry Completes 3 Years. $18,000 Worth Mega GiveAway

Hurry up! The GiveAway ends on May 24th, 09.

What is DotNetCurry.com all about?

DotNetCurry.com is not only a developer-designer focused content site, but also one that aims at giving a better understanding of a technology. Our aim has always been to present concepts and solutions in the simplest possible way and in a step-by-step manner. The site features articles and tips on .NET, ASP.NET, MVC, AJAX, jQuery, LINQ, Silverlight, Visual Studio, Expression Web, C#, VB.NET, Windows Forms, Windows Phone 7 etc. and delivers content to over 270,000+ visitors and 8,700+ Newsletter and RSS Subscribers every month.

TechEd India 2010 Rocked!

Due to a tight work schedule, I had almost decided not to go to TechEd 2010 held between April 12-14 in Bangalore, India. Well not attending it would have been a big mistake!

Fortunately, my work got over in time and thanks to my MVP Lead Abhishek, he arranged an entry for me at the 11th hour. All MVP’s got a free entry to TechEd – just another reason to become an MVP :)

The event completely rocked! Keynotes, Deep Dive Sessions, Product Announcements, Product Team interactions, Contests, Free MS Exams, Giveaways, MVP Parties, Community Track by MVP’s, Partner Stalls, Demo Extravaganza and not to forget, the endless opportunities of networking with business and technology experts. This event had it all. The TechEd India team did a bang-up job to keep everything in perspective and make this event a success.

I bet most of the TechEd attendees are now ready for the next wave of technology innovations and trends. This is one grand daddy of all events no one would want to miss!

Pictures speak larger than words, so I will let some pictures do the talking now! Thanks to Arjit Basu for clicking them.

Check this video of MVP’s at the launch of Visual Studio 2010. I am the one at the beginning of this video wearing a Black T-Shirt and speaking about why developers should attend this event!

Microsoft TechEd India 2010 from Abhishek Baxi on Vimeo.

I am already looking forward to the next TechEd - it's sure to be a blast!

I will be there at TechEd India 2010

I am glad that I will be attending TechEd India 2010. If you are attending too, make sure you drop by to say a hello! You can recognize me through my profile picture. If you are a regular visitor of my other site www.dotnetcurry.com, you must be familiar with Subodh, Shoban and Mahesh. They too will be around and would be glad to meet DotNetCurry readers!

Microsoft Tech.Ed, the largest technology conclave, is being held in Bangalore, India between April 12-14, 2010! Tech.Ed is an amazing event that introduces you to today's cutting-edge trends and gives you a whirlwind tour of the latest Microsoft technologies.

You can follow TechEd-India on twitter. For more information visit http://www.microsoftteched.in/

Create a Trial Version/Shareware .NET application

I see plenty of questions around creating shareware applications. Although there are some tools and code available on the web that let you do that, I thought of writing this post to let you know about the FREE Shareware Starter Kit

The Shareware Starter Kit was released a couple of years ago by Microsoft and is a sample application that implements the common features in shareware applications. Although this was released a couple of years ago, you can easily follow the code to create one of your own or enhance it further. Here are some features of this starter kit

- integrated e-commerce using PayPal for users to purchase a licensed copy of your software via webservices

- Try and Buy feature which lets you configure your application for a trial period before prompting the user for a secure product activation

- A simple form to let you register the product as well as accept customer feedback directly from the product using webservices

- Capturing errors and exceptions and reporting using Web services.

I hope you find the Shareware Starter Kit useful to create your own Shareware applications

You can see a Demo of this kit over here