Ignite

Ignite is a community event sponsored by O'Reilly in the major cities across the Planet. It is 5 minutes speech of an individual on a Stage with 20 slides being rotated automatically in 15 seconds.

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.

Ignite was started in Seattle in 2006 by Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis. Since then 100s of 5 minute talks have been given across the world. There are thriving Ignite communities in Seattle, Portland, Paris, and NYC.

This community site is sponsored by O'Reilly.

sIFR - Scalable Inman Flash Replacement

sIFR - Scalable Inman Flash Replacement is the Technology that allows to replace text elements on screen with Flash equivalents. It allows the screen elements to be styled in whatever font the designer chooses, without the user having it installed on their machine.

Know more here

Examples are here

DUX - Designing User eXperience

DUX - Designing User eXperience

Are You An User Experience Designer

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: ux design)

XML Encoding for Special Characters

 In MS SQL 2005, While parsing a XML document i got an error message 'illegal xml character'. Then i found that one of my XML data was containing a special character - ä within it. And i found that in this scenario, the XML Encoding tag in the header should be changed to "iso-8859-1" from the default "utf-8" (i.e)

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>'
 should be changed to
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>

MS SQL - Query to Get Columns Definition

To get the Column Definitions of a Given table in MS SQL, use this query:

SELECT so.name ,
sc.name ,
st.name ,
sc.length ,
CASE
WHEN sc.status = 0x80
THEN 'Y'
ELSE 'N'
END AS IsIdent ,
ColOrder
FROM sysobjects so
INNER JOIN syscolumns sc
ON so.id= sc.id
INNER JOIN systypes st
ON sc.xtype = st.xusertype
WHERE so.Name = 'YourTableName'
ORDER BY ColOrder

I used this for generating a Bulk Insert statement for a XML Rowset in C#.

US Voter Location Info

Want to know Where to Vote for this Presidential Election? Click Here. Google has released a special Voting Location Info Page.

Zephyr - Test Management System

Zephyr is a new Web 2.0 Test Management System. It has many innovative features like Testing Desktops, Department/Project Dashboards, Defect Desktop, Metrics, Collaboration, Test Case Repository and so on. The UI is very slick and cool. I did a test drive of the Department Dashboard and Defect Desktop and I was amazed with the UI and the Design of the Form. No wonder it is created by a bunch of QA Engineers and Developers. It is free for 3 Users for 12 months period.

Know more here

Take a Test Drive Here.


Good Luck Zephyr!!!

Best Practices for Form Design

'Best Practices for Form Design' - a Slide show by Luke Wroblewski.

Best Practices for Form Design

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: form design)

Reporting Services - Display Hour in 24 Hour Format with AM/PM

Recently I had a Requirement in SSRS 2005 to display a Report for Hourly Aggregation. The Report should look something like this:

Hour | Total
1 AM | 120
2 AM | 200
.
.
.
12 AM | 644
1 PM | 730
2 PM | 880
.
.
12 AM | 1458

---------------

In the Report Dataset using my SQL Query I got the Results like this

Hour | Total
1 | 120
2 | 200
3 | 328

So I had to display the Hour in 24 Hour format with AM/PM. I tried with various combinations of FormatDateTime() and Format(). Finally I found the format string - = Format(Today().AddHours(Fields!Hour.Value), "hh tt")

Visual Studio Tips and Tricks

Recently When I was going through MSDN Blogs, I found an interesting one from Stephen Walther, titled "Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know". I went through it and it had some good keyboard shortcuts. The one that attracted me was - Tip #3 – Never create properties by hand.

Thanks Stephen!

7 More Search Tools

I read from here "7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should"

There are 7 Search tools that are less popular.
Soovle
Kedrix
Fansnap
Fasteagle
Facesaerch
Tastekid
Compfight

Out of these, Soovle and
Kedrixare more useful.

Taffy DB

Taffy DB is a free and opensource JavaScript library that acts as thin data layer inside Web 2.0 and Ajax applications.

Think of it as a SQL database in your web browser. It has many cool features including a CRUD(Create, Read, Update and Delete) Support which is first of its kind.

Get Started here

Lorem Ipsum

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Long back when I started to learn about Scriptaculous Javascript Library, in the Unit Test samples i saw a long text starting with 'Lorem Ipsum..'. I thought it might be some random sample text used there. But after some time I have seen this text in some other web site also. I didn't know much about this text. But In my Project when designing a Report, my Project Manager Rohit Khanna told that this Text is a Web Standard placeholder text used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation, like font, layout etc.
Thanks Rohit!!!

I digged further and found these useful links:
Lorem Ipsum in Wiki
Lipsum.com

The Javascript Programming Language

'The Javascript Programming Language' - a good presentation by Douglas Crockford covering the History to Advanced Features of Javascript. A good one.

@ Yahoo! Video

Theory of the DOM

'Theory of the DOM' - presentation by Douglas Crockford.

@ Yahoo! Video

'Advanced Javascript' - By Douglas Crockford

'Advanced Javascript' - Series of presentation by Douglas Crockford

@ Yahoo! Video

Douglas Crockford presents "Web Forward"

Douglas Crockford presents "Web Forward" on October 9, 2008.

Douglas Crockford: "Web Forward" @ Yahoo! Video

Designing For Ajax

'Designing For Ajax' a slideshow by Bill Scott, Yahoo Evangelist.

Designing For Ajax

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: rich internet application ria)

jQuery in 15 minutes

jQuery in 15 minutes, a good slideshow

jQuery in 15 minutes

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: javascript jquery)

Web 3.0 = ?

Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS), a Definition by Sramana Mitra on one of her Blogs.

She says

"3C = Content, Commerce, Community | 4th C = Context | P = Personalization | VS = Vertical Search"

She is also conducting a RoundTable on Web 3.0 with RWW in DimDim. Know more here.