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• Microsoft silverlight 5.0 features for developers

  - by Jalpesh P. Vadgama

  Recently on Silverlight 5.0 firestarter event ScottGu has announced road map for Silverlight 5.0. There will be lots of features that will be there in silverlight 5.0 but here are few glimpses of Silverlight 5.0 Features. Improved Data binding support and Better support for MVVM: One of the greatest strength of Silverlight is its data binding. Microsoft is going to enhanced data binding by providing more ability to debug it. Developer will able to debug the binding expression and other stuff in Siverlight 5.0. Its also going to provide Ancestor Relative source binding which will allow property to bind with container control. MVVM pattern support will also be enhanced. Performance and Speed Enhancement: Now silverlight 5.0 will have support for 64bit browser support. So now you can use that silverlight application on 64 bit platform also. There is no need to take extra care for it.It will also have faster startup time and greater support for hardware acceleration. It will also provide end to end support for hard acceleration features of IE 9. More support for Out Of Browser Application: With Siverlight 4.0 Microsoft has announced new features called out of browser application and it has amazed lots of developer because now possibilities are unlimited with it. Now in silverlight 5.0 Out Of Browser application will have ability to Create Manage child windows just like windows forms or WPF Application. So you can fill power of desktop application with your out of browser application. Testing Support with Visual Studio 2010: Microsoft is going to add automated UI Testing support with Visual Studio 2010 with silverlight 5.0. So now we can test UI of Silverlight much faster. Better Support for RIA Services: RIA Services allows us to create N-tier application with silverlight via creating proxy classes on client and server both side. Now it will more features like complex type support, Custom type support for MVVM(Model View View Model) pattern. WCF Enhancements: There are lots of enhancement with WCF but key enhancement will WSTrust support. Text and Printing Support: Silverlight 5.0 will support vector base graphics. It will also support multicolumn text flow and linked text containers. It will full open type support,Postscript vector enhancement. Improved Power Enhancement: This will prevent screensaver from activating while you are watching videos on silverlight. Silverlight 5.0 is going add that smartness so it can determine while you are going to watch video and while you are not going watch videos. Better support for graphics: Silverlight 5.0 will provide in-depth support for 3D API. Now 3D rendering support is more enhancement in silverlight and 3D graphics can be rendered easily. You can find more details on following links and also don’t forgot to view silverlight firestarter keynot video of scottgu. http://www.silverlight.net/news/events/firestarter-labs/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/katriend/archive/2010/12/06/silverlight-5-features-firestarter-keynote-and-sessions-resources.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/12/02/announcing-silverlight-5.aspx http://www.silverlight.net/news/events/firestarter/ http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/future/ Hope this will help you. Stay tuned!!!.

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• PowerShell Control over Nikon D3000 Camera

  My wife got me a Nikon D3000 camera for Christmas last year, and Im loving it but still trying to wrap my head around some of its features.  For instance, when you plug it into a computer via USB, it doesnt show up as a drive like most cameras Ive used to, but rather it shows up as Computer\D3000.  After a bit of research, Ive learned that this is because it implements the MTP/PTP protocol, and thus doesnt actually let Windows mount the cameras storage as a drive letter.  Nikon describes the use of the MTP and PTP protocols in their cameras here. What Im really trying to do is gain access to the cameras file system via PowerShell.  Ive been using a very handy PowerShell script to pull pictures off of my cameras and organize them into folders by date.  Id love to be able to do the same thing with my Nikon D3000, but so far I havent been able to figure out how to get access to the files in PowerShell.  If you know, Id appreciate any links/tips you can provide.  All I could find is a shareware product called PTPdrive, which Im not prepared to shell out money for (yet).  (and yes you can do much the same thing with Windows 7s Import Pictures and Videos wizard, which is pretty good too) However, in my searching, I did find some really cool stuff you can do with PowerShell and one of these cameras, like actually taking pictures via PowerShell commands.  Credit for this goes to James ONeill and Mark Wilson.  Heres what I was able to do: Taking Pictures via PowerShell with D3000 First, connect your camera, turn it on, and launch PowerShell.  Execute the following commands to see what commands your device supports.  $dialog = New-Object -ComObject "WIA.CommonDialog" $device = $dialog.ShowSelectDevice() $device.Commands You should see something like this: Now, to take a picture, simply point your camera at something and then execute this command: $device.ExecuteCommand("{AF933CAC-ACAD-11D2-A093-00C04F72DC3C}") .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Imagine my surprise when this actually took a picture (with auto-focus): Imagine what you could do with a camera completely under the control of your computer  Time-lapse photography would be pretty simple, for instance, with a very simple loop that takes a picture and then sleeps for a minute (or whatever time period).  Hooked up to a laptop for portability (and an A/C power supply), this would be pretty trivial to implement.  I may have to give it a shot and report back. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• PHP PSR-0 + several namespaces in one file and autoload

  - by Nemoden

  I've been thinking for a while about defining several namespaces in one php file and so, having several classes inside this file. Suppose, I want to implement something like Doctrine\ORM\Query\Expr: Expr.php Expr |-- Andx.php |-- Base.php |-- Comparison.php |-- Composite.php |-- From.php |-- Func.php |-- GroupBy.php |-- Join.php |-- Literal.php |-- Math.php |-- OrderBy.php |-- Orx.php `-- Select.php It would be nice if I had all of this in one file - Expr.php: namespace Doctrine\ORM\Query; class Expr { // code } namespace Doctrine\ORM\Query\Expr; class Func { // code } // etc... What I'm thinking of is directories naming convention and, unlike PSR-0 having several classes and namespaces in one file. It's best explained by the code: ls Doctrine/orm/query Expr.php that's it - only Expr.php Since Expr.php is somewhat I call a "meta-namespace" for Expr\Func, it make sense to place all the classes inside Expr.php (as shown above). So, the vendor name is still starts with an uppercased letter (Doctrine) and the other parts of namespace start with lowercased letter. We can write an autoload so it would respect this notion: function load_class($class) { if (class_exists($class)) { return true; } $tokenized_path = explode(array("_", "\\"), DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $class); // array('Doctrine', 'orm', 'query', 'Expr', 'Func'); // ^^^^ // first, we are looking for first uppercased namespace part // and if it's not last (not the class name), we use it as a filename // and wiping away the rest to compose a path to a file we need to include if (FALSE !== ($meta_class_index = find_meta_class($tokenized_path))) { $new_tokenized_path = array_slice($tokenized_path, 0, $meta_class_index); $path_to_class = implode(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $new_tokenized_path); } else { // no meta class found $path_to_class = implode(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, $tokenized_path); } if (file_exists($path_to_class.'.php')) { require_once $path_to_class.'.php'; } return false; } Another reason to do so is to reduce a number of php files scattered among directories. Usually you check file existence before you require a file to fail gracefully: file_exists($path_to_class.'.php'); If you take a look at actual Doctrine\ORM\Query\Expr code, you'll see they use all of the "inner-classes", so you actually do: file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/AndX.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Base.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Comparison.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Composite.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/From.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Func.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/GroupBy.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Join.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Literal.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Math.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/OrderBy.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Orx.php"); file_exists("/path/to/Doctrine/ORM/Query/Expr/Select.php"); in your autoload which causes quite a few I/O reads. Isn't it too much to check on each user's hit? I'm just putting this on a discussion. I want to hear from another PHP programmers what do they think of it. And, of course, if you have a silver bullet addressing this problems I've designated here, please share. I also have been thinking if my vogue question fits here and according to the FAQ it seems like this question addresses "software architecture" problem slash proposal. I'm sorry if my scribble may seem a bit clunky :) Thanks.

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• How to install SharePoint Server 2013 Preview

  - by ybbest

  The Office 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 Preview is announced yesterday and as a SharePoint Developer, I am really excited to learn all the new features and capabilities. Today I will show you how to install the preview. 1. Create a service account called SP2013Install and give this account Dbcreator and SecurityAdmin in SQL Server 2012 2. You need to run the following script to set the ‘maxdegree of parellism’ setting to the required value of 1 in SQL Server 2012(using sysadmin privilege) before configure the SharePoint Farm. Otherwise , you might get the error ‘This SQL Server Instance does not have the required maxdegree of parellism setting of 1’ sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1; GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE; GO sp_configure 'max degree of parallelism', 1; GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE; GO 3. Download the SharePoint preview from here and I am going to install it on Windows Server 2008R2 with SQL2012. 4. Click the Install software prerequisites, this works fine with the internet connection. (However, if you do not have internet connection, it is a bit tricky to install window azure AppFabric as it has to be installed using the prerequisite installer. Your computer might reboot a few times in the process.) 5.After the prerequisites are installed `completely, you can then install the Preview. Click the Install SharePoint Server and Enter the Product key you get from the Preview download page. 6. Accept the License terms and Click Next. 7. Leave the default path for the file location. 8. You can now start the installation process 9. After binary files are installed, you then can configure your farm using the farm configuration wizard. 10.Specify the Database server and the install account 11. Specify SharePoint farm passphrase. 12 Specify the port number , you should choose your own favorite port number. 13. Choose Create a New Server Farm and click next. 14. Double-check with the settings and click Next to Configure the farm install. 15. Finally, your farm is configured successfully and you now are able to go to your Central Admin site http://sp2010:6666/ 16. You should configure the services manually or automate using PowerShell (If you like to understand why,you can read the blog post here) ,however I will use the wizard to configure automatically here  as  this is a test machine. After the configuration is complete, you now be able to see your SharePoint Site. 17.To start the evaluate the Preview , you need to install Visual Studio 2012 RC , Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012,SharePoint 2013 Designer Preview , Office 2013 Preview. References: Download SharePoint2013 Server 2013 Download Microsoft Visio Professional 2013 Preview Install SharePoint 2013 Preview Hardware and software requirements for SharePoint 2013 Preview SharePoint 2013 IT Pro and Developer training materials released Plan for SharePoint 2013 Preview Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 SharePoint 2013 Preview Office365 for the SharePoint 2013 preview SharePoint Designer 2013 Download: Microsoft Office 2013 Preview Language Pack Try Office

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• GPGPU

  WhatGPU obviously stands for Graphics Processing Unit (the silicon powering the display you are using to read this blog post). The extra GP in front of that stands for General Purpose computing.So, altogether GPGPU refers to computing we can perform on GPU for purposes beyond just drawing on the screen. In effect, we can use a GPGPU a bit like we already use a CPU: to perform some calculation (that doesn’t have to have any visual element to it). The attraction is that a GPGPU can be orders of magnitude faster than a CPU.WhyWhen I was at the SuperComputing conference in Portland last November, GPGPUs were all the rage. A quick online search reveals many articles introducing the GPGPU topic. I'll just share 3 here: pcper (ignoring all pages except the first, it is a good consumer perspective), gizmodo (nice take using mostly layman terms) and vizworld (answering the question on "what's the big deal").The GPGPU programming paradigm (from a high level) is simple: in your CPU program you define functions (aka kernels) that take some input, can perform the costly operation and return the output. The kernels are the things that execute on the GPGPU leveraging its power (and hence execute faster than what they could on the CPU) while the host CPU program waits for the results or asynchronously performs other tasks.However, GPGPUs have different characteristics to CPUs which means they are suitable only for certain classes of problem (i.e. data parallel algorithms) and not for others (e.g. algorithms with branching or recursion or other complex flow control). You also pay a high cost for transferring the input data from the CPU to the GPU (and vice versa the results back to the CPU), so the computation itself has to be long enough to justify the overhead transfer costs. If your problem space fits the criteria then you probably want to check out this technology.HowSo where can you get a graphics card to start playing with all this? At the time of writing, the two main vendors ATI (owned by AMD) and NVIDIA are the obvious players in this industry. You can read about GPGPU on this AMD page and also on this NVIDIA page. NVIDIA's website also has a free chapter on the topic from the "GPU Gems" book: A Toolkit for Computation on GPUs.If you followed the links above, then you've already come across some of the choices of programming models that are available today. Essentially, AMD is offering their ATI Stream technology accessible via a language they call Brook+; NVIDIA offers their CUDA platform which is accessible from CUDA C. Choosing either of those locks you into the GPU vendor and hence your code cannot run on systems with cards from the other vendor (e.g. imagine if your CPU code would run on Intel chips but not AMD chips). Having said that, both vendors plan to support a new emerging standard called OpenCL, which theoretically means your kernels can execute on any GPU that supports it. To learn more about all of these there is a website: gpgpu.org. The caveat about that site is that (currently) it completely ignores the Microsoft approach, which I touch on next.On Windows, there is already a cross-GPU-vendor way of programming GPUs and that is the DirectX API. Specifically, on Windows Vista and Windows 7, the DirectX 11 API offers a dedicated subset of the API for GPGPU programming: DirectCompute. You use this API on the CPU side, to set up and execute the kernels that run on the GPU. The kernels are written in a language called HLSL (High Level Shader Language). You can use DirectCompute with HLSL to write a "compute shader", which is the term DirectX uses for what I've been referring to in this post as a "kernel". For a comprehensive collection of links about this (including tutorials, videos and samples) please see my blog post: DirectCompute.Note that there are many efforts to build even higher level languages on top of DirectX that aim to expose GPGPU programming to a wider audience by making it as easy as today's mainstream programming models. I'll mention here just two of those efforts: Accelerator from MSR and Brahma by Ananth. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• This Week in Geek History: Gmail Goes Public, Deep Blue Wins at Chess, and the Birth of Thomas Edison

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Every week we bring you a snapshot of the week in Geek History. This week we’re taking a peek at the public release of Gmail, the first time a computer won against a chess champion, and the birth of prolific inventor Thomas Edison. Gmail Goes Public It’s hard to believe that Gmail has only been around for seven years and that for the first three years of its life it was invite only. In 2007 Gmail dropped the invite only requirement (although they would hold onto the “beta” tag for another two years) and opened its doors for anyone to grab a username @gmail. For what seemed like an entire epoch in internet history Gmail had the slickest web-based email around with constant innovations and features rolling out from Gmail Labs. Only in the last year or so have major overhauls at competitors like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail brought other services up to speed. Can’t stand reading a Week in Geek History entry without a random fact? Here you go: gmail.com was originally owned by the Garfield franchise and ran a service that delivered Garfield comics to your email inbox. No, we’re not kidding. Deep Blue Proves Itself a Chess Master Deep Blue was a super computer constructed by IBM with the sole purpose of winning chess matches. In 2011 with the all seeing eye of Google and the amazing computational abilities of engines like Wolfram Alpha we simply take powerful computers immersed in our daily lives for granted. The 1996 match against reigning world chest champion Garry Kasparov where in Deep Blue held its own, but ultimately lost, in a  4-2 match shook a lot of people up. What did it mean if something that was considered such an elegant and quintessentially human endeavor such as chess was so easy for a machine? A series of upgrades helped Deep Blue outright win a match against Kasparov in 1997 (seen in the photo above). After the win Deep Blue was retired and disassembled. Parts of Deep Blue are housed in the National Museum of History and the Computer History Museum. Birth of Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most prolific inventors in history and holds an astounding 1,093 US Patents. He is responsible for outright inventing or greatly refining major innovations in the history of world culture including the phonograph, the movie camera, the carbon microphone used in nearly every telephone well into the 1980s, batteries for electric cars (a notion we’d take over a century to take seriously), voting machines, and of course his enormous contribution to electric distribution systems. Despite the role of scientist and inventor being largely unglamorous, Thomas Edison and his tumultuous relationship with fellow inventor Nikola Tesla have been fodder for everything from books, to comics, to movies, and video games. Other Notable Moments from This Week in Geek History Although we only shine the spotlight on three interesting facts a week in our Geek History column, that doesn’t mean we don’t have space to highlight a few more in passing. This week in Geek History: 1971 – Apollo 14 returns to Earth after third Lunar mission. 1974 – Birth of Robot Chicken creator Seth Green. 1986 – Death of Dune creator Frank Herbert. Goodnight Dune. 1997 – Simpsons becomes longest running animated show on television. Have an interesting bit of geek trivia to share? Shoot us an email to [email protected] with “history” in the subject line and we’ll be sure to add it to our list of trivia. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines RGB? CMYK? Alpha? What Are Image Channels and What Do They Mean? Clean Up Google Calendar’s Interface in Chrome and Iron The Rise and Fall of Kramerica? [Seinfeld Video] GNOME Shell 3 Live CDs for OpenSUSE and Fedora Available for Testing Picplz Offers Special FX, Sharing, and Backup of Your Smartphone Pics BUILD! An Epic LEGO Stop Motion Film [VIDEO] The Lingering Glow of Sunset over a Winter Landscape Wallpaper

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• SQLAuthority News – Author Visit – SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch

  - by pinaldave

  June 11, 2010 was a wonderful day because I attended the very first SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch event held by Microsoft at Mumbai. I traveled to Mumbai from my home town, Ahmedabad. The event was located at one of the best hotels in Mumbai,”The Leela”. SQL Server R2 Launch was an evening event that had a few interesting talks. SQL PASS is associated with this event as one of the partners and its goal is to increase the awareness of the Community about SQL Server. I met many interesting people and had a great networking opportunity at the event. This event was kicked off with an awesome laser show and a “Welcome” video, which was followed by a Microsoft Executive session wherein there were several interesting demo. The very first demo was about Powerpivot. I knew beforehand that there will be Powerpivot demos because it is a very popular subject; however, I was really hoping to see other interesting demos from SQL Server 2008 R2. And believe me; I was happier to see the later demos. There were demos from SQL Server Utility Control Point, as well an integration of Bing Map with Reporting Servers. I really enjoyed the interactive and informative session by Shivaram Venkatesh. He had excellent presentation skills as well as ample technical knowledge to keep the audience attentive. I really liked his presentations skills wherein he did not read the whole slide deck; rather, he picked one point and using that point he told the story of the whole slide deck. I also enjoyed my conversation with Afaq Choonawala, who is one of the “gem guys” in Microsoft. I also want to acknowledge Ashwin Kini and Mohit Panchal for their excellent support to this event. Mumbai IT Pro is a user group which you can really count on for any kind of help. After excellent demos and a vibrant start of the event, all the audience was jazzed up. There were two vendors’ sessions right after the first session. Intel had 15 minutes to present; however, Intel’s representative, who had good knowledge of the subject, had nearly 30+ slides in his presentation, so he had to rush a bit to cover the whole slide deck. Intel presentations were followed up by another vendor presentation from NetApp. I have previously heard about this tool. After I saw the demo which did not work the first time the Net App presenter demonstrated it, I started to have a doubt on this product. I personally went to clarify my doubt to the demo booth after the presentation was over, but I realize the NetApp presenter or booth owner had absolutely a POOR KNOWLEDGE of SQL Server and even of their own NetApp product. The NetApp people tried to misguide us and when we argued, they started to say different things against what they said earlier. At one point in their presentation, they claimed their application does something very fast, which did not really happen in front of all the audience. They blamed SQL Server R2 DBCC CHECKDB command for their product’s failed demonstration. I know that NetApp has many great products; however, this one was not conveyed clearly and even created a negative impression to all of us. Well, let us not judge the potential, fun, education and enigma of the launch event through a small glitch. This event was jam-packed and extremely well-received by everybody who attended it. As what I said, average demos and good presentations by MS folks were really something to cheer about. Any launch event is considered as successful if it achieves its goal to excite users with its cutting edge technology; just like this event that left a very deep impression on me. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: PASS, SQLPASS

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• Automating XNA Performance Testing?

  - by Grofit

  I was wondering what peoples approaches or thoughts were on automating performance testing in XNA. Currently I am looking at only working in 2d, but that poses many areas where performance can be improved with different implementations. An example would be if you had 2 different implementations of spatial partitioning, one may be faster than another but without doing some actual performance testing you wouldn't be able to tell which one for sure (unless you saw the code was blatantly slow in certain parts). You could write a unit test which for a given time frame kept adding/updating/removing entities for both implementations and see how many were made in each timeframe and the higher one would be the faster one (in this given example). Another higher level example would be if you wanted to see how many entities you can have on the screen roughly without going beneath 60fps. The problem with this is to automate it you would need to use the hidden form trick or some other thing to kick off a mock game and purely test which parts you care about and disable everything else. I know that this isnt a simple affair really as even if you can automate the tests, really it is up to a human to interpret if the results are performant enough, but as part of a build step you could have it run these tests and publish the results somewhere for comparison. This way if you go from version 1.1 to 1.2 but have changed a few underlying algorithms you may notice that generally the performance score would have gone up, meaning you have improved your overall performance of the application, and then from 1.2 to 1.3 you may notice that you have then dropped overall performance a bit. So has anyone automated this sort of thing in their projects, and if so how do you measure your performance comparisons at a high level and what frameworks do you use to test? As providing you have written your code so its testable/mockable for most parts you can just use your tests as a mechanism for getting some performance results... === Edit === Just for clarity, I am more interested in the best way to make use of automated tests within XNA to track your performance, not play testing or guessing by manually running your game on a machine. This is completely different to seeing if your game is playable on X hardware, it is more about tracking the change in performance as your game engine/framework changes. As mentioned in one of the comments you could easily test "how many nodes can I insert/remove/update within QuadTreeA within 2 seconds", but you have to physically look at these results every time to see if it has changed, which may be fine and is still better than just relying on playing it to see if you notice any difference between version. However if you were to put an Assert in to notify you of a fail if it goes lower than lets say 5000 in 2 seconds you have a brittle test as it is then contextual to the hardware, not just the implementation. Although that being said these sort of automated tests are only really any use if you are running your tests as some sort of build pipeline i.e: Checkout - Run Unit Tests - Run Integration Tests - Run Performance Tests - Package So then you can easily compare the stats from one build to another on the CI server as a report of some sort, and again this may not mean much to anyone if you are not used to Continuous Integration. The main crux of this question is to see how people manage this between builds and how they find it best to report upon. As I said it can be subjective but as knowledge will be gained from the answers it seems a worthwhile question.

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• Add Windows 7’s AeroSnap Feature to Vista and XP

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you using Windows Vista or XP and want that Windows 7 AeroSnap goodness on your own system? Then join us as we look at AeroSnap for Windows Vista and XP. Note: Requires .NET Framework 2.0 or higher (link provided at bottom of article). Setup What exactly does AeroSnap do you might ask…here is a quote directly from the website: “AeroSnap is a simple but powerful application that allows you to resize, arrange or maximize your desktop windows with just drag’n'drop. Simply drag a window to a side of your desktop to snap it or drag it to the top to maximize. When you drag it back to the last position, the last window size will be restored.” As soon as you have finished installing AeroSnap and started it for the first time the only item that will be visible is the “System Tray Icon”. Before going any further you should take a moment to view and make any desired adjustments in the “Options”. Note: AeroSnap works with multiple monitors. You may want to have AeroSnap start with Windows each time but the really nice setting to enable here is the “Snap Preview”. If you are using AeroSnap on Vista and have Aero enabled this will really be nice. The second portion may be of interest for those who would like to enable the keyboard shortcut function. One point worth noting about this screen is that the highest number of pixels from the screen’s edge that you can set AeroSnap for is 20 pixels. AeroSnap in Action AeroSnap is extremely easy to use…just grab the top of an app window and drag it to the left, right, or top of your screen. Since we installed this on Windows Vista we made certain to enable the “Snap Preview” in the “Options”.  We started off with dragging our Firefox 3.7 window towards the left…once we got close to the edge of the screen you can see that the left half of the screen temporarily “shaded over”. Note: The “Snap Preview” displays on the left and right movements but not the top movement. Releasing Firefox snapped it right into the “shaded over” part of the screen. The great thing about AeroSnap is that it is really easy to return the app window to it former size…all that you have to do is simply click on and grab the top portion of the app window. Moving Firefox towards the top of our screen and… It quickly snaps into filling the screen. One thing that we did notice is that the window did not “Maximize” as per the function for the button in the upper right corner. Dragging towards the right side now… And snap! Tucked in all nice and neat… You can minimize the app windows to the Taskbar and they will return to their previous “snap area” when “maximized” again. Conclusion If you have been wanting to add Windows 7’s AeroSnap goodness to your Vista and XP systems then you should definitely give this app a try. AeroSnap is very easy to set up and operate… Links Download AeroSnap for Windows Vista & XP Download the .NET Framework Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Windows 7 or Vista System RestoreRoundup: 16 Tweaks to Windows Vista Look & FeelSelect Files using Check Boxes in Windows VistaSpeed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoostHow-To Geek Bounty: $103.24(Paid!) for Active Desktop for Vista TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Add a Custom Title in IE using Spybot or Spyware Blaster When You Need to Hail a Taxi in NYC Live Map of Marine Traffic NoSquint Remembers Site Specific Zoom Levels (Firefox) New Firefox release 3.6.3 fixes 1 Critical bug Dark Side of the Moon (8-bit)

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• 'Make' command compiling errors

  - by G_T

  Im trying to locally install a program which is written in C++. I have downloaded the program and am attempting to use the "make" command to compile the program as the programs instructions dictate. However when I do I get this error: /usr/include/stdc-predef.h:30:26: fatal error: bits/predefs.h: No such file or directory compilation terminated. Looking around on the internet some people seem to address this problem by sudo apt-get install libc6-dev-i386 I checked to see if this package was installed and it was not. When I try to install it I get E: Unable to locate package libc6-dev-i386 I have already run sudo apt get update Im sure this is a rookie question but any help is appreciated, I'm running 13.10 32-bit. UPDATE: I've tried other suggestions I've found on similar error. All I have managed is a different but similar error. Here is what I get. Geoffrey@Geoffrey-Latitude-E6400:/usr/local/src/trinityrnaseq_r2013_08_14$ make Using gnu compiler for Inchworm and Chrysalis cd Inchworm && (test -e configure || autoreconf) \ && ./configure --prefix=`pwd` && make install checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes checking for gawk... no checking for mawk... mawk checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes checking for g++... g++ checking for C++ compiler default output file name... a.out checking whether the C++ compiler works... yes checking whether we are cross compiling... no checking for suffix of executables... checking for suffix of object files... o checking whether we are using the GNU C++ compiler... yes checking whether g++ accepts -g... yes checking for style of include used by make... GNU checking dependency style of g++... gcc3 checking for library containing cos... none required configure: creating ./config.status config.status: creating Makefile config.status: creating src/Makefile config.status: creating config.h config.status: config.h is unchanged config.status: executing depfiles commands make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/local/src/trinityrnaseq_r2013_08_14/Inchworm' Making install in src make[2]: Entering directory `/usr/local/src/trinityrnaseq_r2013_08_14/Inchworm/src' if g++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -pedantic -fopenmp -Wall -Wextra -Wno-long-long -Wno-deprecated -m64 -g -O2 -MT Fasta_entry.o -MD -MP -MF ".deps/Fasta_entry.Tpo" -c -o Fasta_entry.o Fasta_entry.cpp; \ then mv -f ".deps/Fasta_entry.Tpo" ".deps/Fasta_entry.Po"; else rm -f ".deps/Fasta_entry.Tpo"; exit 1; fi In file included from Fasta_entry.hpp:4:0, from Fasta_entry.cpp:1: /usr/include/c++/4.8/string:38:28: fatal error: bits/c++config.h: No such file or directory #include <bits/c++config.h> ^ compilation terminated. make[2]: *** [Fasta_entry.o] Error 1 make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/trinityrnaseq_r2013_08_14/Inchworm/src' make[1]: *** [install-recursive] Error 1 make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/local/src/trinityrnaseq_r2013_08_14/Inchworm' make: *** [inchworm] Error 2

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• Build Explorer version 1.1 for Visual Studio Team Explorer is released

  - by terje

  Our free extension to Visual Studio , the folder based Build Explorer Version 1.1 has now been released, and uploaded to the Visual Studio Gallery and Codeplex. We have collected up a few changes and some bugs, as follows: Changes: Queue Default Builds can now be optionally fully enabled, fully disabled or enabled just for leaf nodes (=disabled for folders).  If you got a large number of builds it was pretty scary to be able to launch all of them with just one click.  However, it is nice to avoid having the dialog box up when you want to just run off a single build.  That’s the reasoning between the 3rd choice here. Auto fill-in of the builds at start up and refresh  This was a request that came up a lot, and which was also irritating to us.  When the Team Project is opened, the Build explorer will start by itself and fill up it’s tree. So you don’t need to click the node anymore. There was also quite a bit of flashing when the tree filled up, this has been reduced to just a single top level fill before it collapses the node. The speed of the buildup of the tree has also been increased. The “All Build Definitions” node is now shown on top of the list Login box appeared in certain cross domain situations. This was a fix for the TF30063 authentication problem we had in the beginning.  Hopefully the new code has that fixed properly so that both the login box and the TF30063 are gone forever.  Our testing so far seems to indicate it works.  If anyone gets a real problem here there are two workarounds: 1) Turn off the auto refresh to reduce the issue. If this doesn’t fix it, then 2) please reinstall the former version (go to the codeplex download site if you don’t have it anymore)  Write a comment to this blog post with a description of what happens, and I will send a temporary fix asap. Bug fixes: The folder name matching was case sensitive, so “Application.CI” and “application.CI” created two different folders.  View all builds not shown for leaf odes, and view builds didn’t work in all cases.  There was some inconsistencies here which have been fixed. Partly fixed:  The context menu to queue a new build for disabled builds should be removed, but that was a difficult one, and is still on the list, but the command will not do anything for a disabled build. Using the Queue Default Builds on a folder, and if it had some disabled builds below an error box appeared and ruined the whole experience. As a result of these fixes there has been introduced some new options, as shown below:   The two first settings, the Separator symbol and the options for how to handle Queuing of default builds are set per Team Project, and is stored in the TFS source control under the BuildProcessTemplates folder, with the name Inmeta.VisualStudio.BuildExplorer.Settings.xml The next two settings need some explanations.  They handle the behavior for the auto update of the build folders.  First, these are stored in the local registry per user, at the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software\Inmeta\BuildExplorer. The first option Use Timed Refresh at Startup, if turned off, you will need to click the node as it is done in Version 1.0.  The second option is a timed value, the time after the Build explorer node is created and until the scanning of the Build folders start.  It is assumed that this is enough, and the tests so far indicates this.  If you have very many builds and you see that the explorer don’t get them all, try to increase this value, and of course, notify me of your case, either here or on the Visual Gallery site.

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• Logging connection strings

  If you some of the dynamic features of SSIS such as package configurations or property expressions then sometimes trying to work out were your connections are pointing can be a bit confusing. You will work out in the end but it can be useful to explicitly log this information so that when things go wrong you can just review the logs. You may wish to develop this idea further and encapsulate such logging into a custom task, but for now lets keep it simple and use the Script Task. The Script Task code below will raise an Information event showing the name and connection string for a connection. Imports System Imports Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime Public Class ScriptMain Public Sub Main() Dim fireAgain As Boolean ' Get the connection string, we need to know the name of the connection Dim connectionName As String = "My OLE-DB Connection" Dim connectionString As String = Dts.Connections(connectionName).ConnectionString ' Format the message and log it via an information event Dim message As String = String.Format("Connection ""{0}"" has a connection string of ""{1}"".", _ connectionName, connectionString) Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Information", message, Nothing, 0, fireAgain) Dts.TaskResult = Dts.Results.Success End Sub End Class Building on that example it is probably more flexible to log all connections in a package as shown in the next example. Imports System Imports Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Runtime Public Class ScriptMain Public Sub Main() Dim fireAgain As Boolean ' Loop through all connections in the package For Each connection As ConnectionManager In Dts.Connections ' Get the connection string and log it via an information event Dim message As String = String.Format("Connection ""{0}"" has a connection string of ""{1}"".", _ connection.Name, connection.ConnectionString) Dts.Events.FireInformation(0, "Information", message, Nothing, 0, fireAgain) Next Dts.TaskResult = Dts.Results.Success End Sub End Class By using the Information event it makes it readily available in the designer, for example the Visual Studio Output window (Ctrl+Alt+O) or the package designer Execution Results tab, and also allows you to readily control the logging by choosing which events to log in the normal way. Now before somebody starts commenting that this is a security risk, I would like to highlight good practice for building connection managers. Firstly the Password property, or any other similar sensitive property is always defined as write-only, and secondly the connection string property only uses the public properties to assemble the connection string value when requested. In other words the connection string will never contain the password. I have seen a couple of cases where this is not true, but that was just bad development by third-parties, you won’t find anything like that in the box from Microsoft.   Whilst writing this code it made me wish that there was a custom log entry that you could just turn on that did this for you, but alas connection managers do not even seem to support custom events. It did however remind me of a very useful event that is often overlooked and fits rather well alongside connection string logging, the Execute SQL Task’s custom ExecuteSQLExecutingQuery event. To quote the help reference Custom Messages for Logging - Provides information about the execution phases of the SQL statement. Log entries are written when the task acquires connection to the database, when the task starts to prepare the SQL statement, and after the execution of the SQL statement is completed. The log entry for the prepare phase includes the SQL statement that the task uses. It is the last part that is so useful, how often have you used an expression to derive a SQL statement and you want to log that to make sure the correct SQL is being returned? You need to turn it one, by default no custom log events are captured, but I’ll refer you to a walkthrough on setting up the logging for ExecuteSQLExecutingQuery by Jamie.

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• Apply Skins to Add Some Flair to Windows Media Player 12

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Tired of the same look and feel of Windows Media Player in Windows 7? We’ll show you how to inject new life into your media experience by applying skins in WMP 12. Adding Skins In Library view, click on View from the Menu and select Skin Chooser. By default, WMP 12 comes with only a couple of modest skins. When you select a skin from the left pane, a preview will be displayed to the right. To apply one of the skins, simply select it from the pane on the left and click Apply Skin.   You can also switch to the currently selected skin in the Skin chooser by selecting Skin from the View menu, or by pressing Crtl + 2. Media Player will open in Now Playing mode. Click on the Switch to Library button at the top left to return to Library view.     Ok, so the included skins are a little boring. You can find additional skins by selecting Tools > Download > Skins.   Or, by clicking on More Skins from within the Skin chooser.   You will be taken the the Microsoft website where you can choose from dozens of skins to download and install. Select a skin you’d like to try and click the link to download.   If prompted with a warning message about files containing scripts that access your library, click Yes. Note: These warning boxes may look a bit different depending on your browser. We are using Chrome for this example.   Click on View Now.   Your new skin will be on display. To get back to the Library mode, find and click the Return to Full Mode button.    Some skins may launch video in a separate window.   If you want to delete one of the skins, select it from the list within the Skin chooser and click the red “X.” You can also press the delete key on your keyboard.   Then click Yes to confirm.   Conclusion Using skins is a quick and easy way to add some style to Windows Media Player and switching back and forth between skins is a breeze. Regardless of your interests, you are sure to find a skin that fits your tastes. You may find WMP skins on other sites, but sticking with Microsoft’s website will ensure maximum compatibility. Skins for Windows Media Player Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Make VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 10Make VLC Player Look like Windows Media Player 11Make VLC Player Look like Winamp 5 (Kinda)Fixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add FilesInstall and Use the VLC Media Player on Ubuntu Linux TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips VMware Workstation 7 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Use Flixtime To Create Video Slideshows Creating a Password Reset Disk in Windows Bypass Waiting Time On Customer Service Calls With Lucyphone MELTUP – "The Beginning Of US Currency Crisis And Hyperinflation" Enable or Disable the Task Manager Using TaskMgrED Explorer++ is a Worthy Windows Explorer Alternative

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• No HDMI Audio with GeForce 9600GT and nForce board

  - by Bobby

  I've been trying to get HDMI with sound working for the last few days, and I'm a little bit out of ideas. (I've verified that the hardware/Setup works via Windows.) aplay does not list my HDMI device: $ aplay -l **** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices **** card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 0: ALC662 rev1 Analog [ALC662 rev1 Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 card 0: NVidia [HDA NVidia], device 1: ALC662 rev1 Digital [ALC662 rev1 Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0 I've already compiled the alsa drivers (1.0.24) from a snapshot (with --with-oss=no) and added the line options snd-hda-intel model=auto # Tried 3stack-dig and 6stack-dig too to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf. Still, the device does not show up. If it is important, the HDMI TV is at the moment not configured to be part of the X session (I've tried that to, at least with X restart, and it didn't change anything). What did I miss? $ lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: nVidia Corporation Device 07c3 (rev a2) 00:00.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce 630i memory controller (rev a2) 00:01.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce 630i memory controller (rev a1) 00:01.1 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce 630i memory controller (rev a1) 00:01.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce 630i memory controller (rev a1) 00:01.3 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce 630i memory controller (rev a1) 00:01.4 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce 630i memory controller (rev a1) 00:01.5 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce 630i memory controller (rev a1) 00:01.6 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce 630i memory controller (rev a1) 00:02.0 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation nForce 630i memory controller (rev a1) 00:03.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP73 LPC Bridge (rev a2) 00:03.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation MCP73 SMBus (rev a1) 00:03.2 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP73 Memory Controller (rev a1) 00:03.4 RAM memory: nVidia Corporation MCP73 Memory Controller (rev a1) 00:04.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 7100/nForce 630i USB (rev a1) 00:04.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation MCP73 [nForce 630i] USB 2.0 Controller (EHCI) (rev a1) 00:08.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP73 IDE (rev a1) 00:09.0 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP73 High Definition Audio (rev a1) 00:0a.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP73 PCI Express bridge (rev a1) 00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP73 PCI Express bridge (rev a1) 00:0c.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP73 PCI Express bridge (rev a1) 00:0d.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation MCP73 PCI Express bridge (rev a1) 00:0e.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation MCP73 IDE (rev a2) 00:0f.0 Ethernet controller: nVidia Corporation MCP73 Ethernet (rev a2) 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G94 [GeForce 9600 GT] (rev a1)   $ aplay -L default pulse Playback/recording through the PulseAudio sound server front:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog Front speakers surround40:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog 4.0 Surround output to Front and Rear speakers surround41:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog 4.1 Surround output to Front, Rear and Subwoofer speakers surround50:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog 5.0 Surround output to Front, Center and Rear speakers surround51:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog 5.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Rear and Subwoofer speakers surround71:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog 7.1 Surround output to Front, Center, Side, Rear and Woofer speakers iec958:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Digital IEC958 (S/PDIF) Digital Audio Output dmix:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog Direct sample mixing device dmix:CARD=NVidia,DEV=1 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Digital Direct sample mixing device dsnoop:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog Direct sample snooping device dsnoop:CARD=NVidia,DEV=1 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Digital Direct sample snooping device hw:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog Direct hardware device without any conversions hw:CARD=NVidia,DEV=1 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Digital Direct hardware device without any conversions plughw:CARD=NVidia,DEV=0 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Analog Hardware device with all software conversions plughw:CARD=NVidia,DEV=1 HDA NVidia, ALC662 rev1 Digital Hardware device with all software conversions

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• Exploring packages in code

  In my previous post Searching for tasks with code you can see how to explore the control flow side of packages, drilling down through containers, task, and event handlers, but it didn’t cover the data flow. I recently saw a post on the MSDN forum asking how to edit an existing package programmatically, and the sticking point was how to find the the data flow and the components inside. This post builds on some of the previous code and shows how you can explore all objects inside a package. I took the sample Task Search application I’d written previously, and came up with a totally pointless little console application that just walks through the package and writes out the basic type and name of every object it finds, starting with the package itself e.g. Package – MyPackage . The sample package we used last time showed nested objects as well an event handler; a OnPreExecute event tucked away on the task SQL In FEL. The output of this sample tool would look like this: PackageObjects v1.0.0.0 (1.0.0.26627) Copyright (C) 2009 Konesans Ltd Processing File - Z:\Users\Darren Green\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\SSISTestProject\EventsAndContainersWithExe cSQLForSearch.dtsx Package - EventsAndContainersWithExecSQLForSearch For Loop - FOR Counter Loop Task - SQL In Counter Loop Sequence Container - SEQ For Each Loop Wrapper For Each Loop - FEL Simple Loop Task - SQL In FEL Task - SQL On Pre Execute for FEL SQL Task Sequence Container - SEQ Top Level Sequence Container - SEQ Nested Lvl 1 Sequence Container - SEQ Nested Lvl 2 Task - SQL In Nested Lvl 2 Task - SQL In Nested Lvl 1 #1 Task - SQL In Nested Lvl 1 #2 Connection Manager – LocalHost The code is very similar to what we had previously, but there are a couple of extra bits to deal with connections and to look more closely at a task and see if it is a Data Flow task. For connections your just examine the package's Connections collection as shown in the abridged snippets below. First you can see the call to the ProcessConnections method, followed by the method itself. // Load the package file Application application = new Application(); using (Package package = application.LoadPackage(filename, null)) { // Write out the package name Console.WriteLine("Package - {0}", package.Name); ... More ... // Look and the connections ProcessConnections(package.Connections); } private static void ProcessConnections(Connections connections) { foreach (ConnectionManager connectionManager in connections) { Console.WriteLine("Connection Manager - {0}", connectionManager.Name); } } What we didn’t see in the sample output above was anything to do with the Data Flow, but rest assured the code now handles it too. The following snippet shows how each task is examined to see if it is a Data Flow task, and if so we can then loop through all of the components inside the data flow. private static void ProcessTaskHost(TaskHost taskHost) { if (taskHost == null) { return; } Console.WriteLine("Task - {0}", taskHost.Name); // Check if the task is a Data Flow task MainPipe pipeline = taskHost.InnerObject as MainPipe; if (pipeline != null) { ProcessPipeline(pipeline); } } private static void ProcessPipeline(MainPipe pipeline) { foreach (IDTSComponentMetaData90 componentMetadata in pipeline.ComponentMetaDataCollection) { Console.WriteLine("Pipeline Component - {0}", componentMetadata.Name); // If you wish to make changes to the component then you should really use the managed wrapper. // CManagedComponentWrapper wrapper = componentMetadata.Instantiate(); // wrapper.SetComponentProperty("PropertyName", "Value"); } } Hopefully you can see how we get a reference to the Data Flow task, and then use the ComponentMetaDataCollection to find out what components we have inside the pipeline. If you wanted to know more about the component you could look at the ObjectType or ComponentClassID properties. After that it gets a bit harder and you should get a reference to the wrapper object as the comment suggest and start using the properties, just like you would in the create packages samples, see our Code Development category for some for these examples. Download Sample code project PackageObjects.zip (5KB)

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• Displaying JSON in your Browser

  - by Rick Strahl

  Do you work with AJAX requests a lot and need to quickly check URLs for JSON results? Then you probably know that it’s a fairly big hassle to examine JSON results directly in the browser. Yes, you can use FireBug or Fiddler which work pretty well for actual AJAX requests, but if you just fire off a URL for quick testing in the browser you usually get hit by the Save As dialog and the download manager, followed by having to open the saved document in a text editor in FireFox. Enter JSONView which allows you to simply display JSON results directly in the browser. For example, imagine I have a URL like this: http://localhost/westwindwebtoolkitweb/RestService.ashx?Method=ReturnObject&format=json&Name1=Rick&Name2=John&date=12/30/2010 typed directly into the browser and that that returns a complex JSON object. With JSONView the result looks like this: No fuss, no muss. It just works. Here the result is an array of Person objects that contain additional address child objects displayed right in the browser. JSONView basically adds content type checking for application/json results and when it finds a JSON result takes over the rendering and formats the display in the browser. Note that it re-formats the raw JSON as well for a nicer display view along with collapsible regions for objects. You can still use View Source to see the raw JSON string returned. For me this is a huge time-saver. As I work with AJAX result data using GET and REST style URLs quite a bit it’s a big timesaver. To quickly and easily display JSON is a key feature in my development day and JSONView for all its simplicity fits that bill for me. If you’re doing AJAX development and you often review URL based JSON results do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of JSONView. Other Browsers JSONView works only with FireFox – what about other browsers? Chrome Chrome actually displays raw JSON responses as plain text without any plug-ins. There’s no plug-in or configuration needed, it just works, although you won’t get any fancy formatting. [updated from comments] There’s also a port of JSONView available for Chrome from here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chklaanhfefbnpoihckbnefhakgolnmc It looks like it works just about the same as the JSONView plug-in for FireFox. Thanks for all that pointed this out… Internet Explorer Internet Explorer probably has the worst response to JSON encoded content: It displays an error page as it apparently tries to render JSON as XML: Yeah that seems real smart – rendering JSON as an XML document. WTF? To get at the actual JSON output, you can use View Source. To get IE to display JSON directly as text you can add a Mime type mapping in the registry:   Create a new application/json key in: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\ContentType\application/json Add a string value of CLSID with a value of {25336920-03F9-11cf-8FD0-00AA00686F13} Add a DWORD value of Encoding with a value of 80000 I can’t take credit for this tip – found it here first on Sky Sander’s Blog. Note that the CLSID can be used for just about any type of text data you want to display as plain text in the IE. It’s the in-place display mechanism and it should work for most text content. For example it might also be useful for looking at CSS and JS files inside of the browser instead of downloading those documents as well. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET  AJAX  

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• View Weather Underground Forecasts in Google Chrome

  - by Asian Angel

  If you like a simple straightforward interface for keeping up with weather forecasts then join us as we look at the Weather Underground extension for Google Chrome. Weather Underground in Action As soon as you click on the “Toolbar Icon” you will need to enter a location. Keep in mind that you will need to enter the “city and country” if using that option. Going with less information will yield an “error”. Note: The extension did not work for some Asian locations during our tests. In honor of the Olympics we chose Vancouver, Canada. You can hover over the “Toolbar Button” to see the current conditions or click to view the current day’s conditions, the current day’s forecast, and the forecast for the following three days. It is a simple straightforward interface. Note: There are no options to worry with. Clicking on the “Detailed Forecast Link” in the drop-down window will take you to the Weather Underground webpage for your location. Clicking on the “Weather Underground Link” in the drop-down window will take you to the Weather Underground U.S. Homepage. Additional Weather Underground Fun Since we were focusing on Weather Underground we have an extra bit of fun for you. If you love being able to view a “large scale” map of your location with current conditions and forecast combined then you might want to have a look at Weather Underground’s “wxmap webpage”. Using the link below you can access the basic starting page where you will be asked to enter your location. Once you have entered the information you will see the default “Terrain View” for your location and a “Current Conditions & Forecast Window” in the lower left corner. You can modify how your map looks by choosing from “Temperature, Precipitation, Clouds, Satellite, Hybrid, & Terrain” views. Going full screen in your browser with this gives your monitor a wonderful and unique look that will have your family & friends asking you how you did it. Note: Terrain View shown here. Clicking on the “Settings Link” in the upper left corner will let you tweak your map view very nicely. Conclusion If you love using Weather Underground for your weather forecasts then you can add a “double dose” of goodness to your browser. Links Download the Weather Underground extension (Google Chrome Extensions) Access the Full Screen Weather Underground Map & Forecast for your area Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Weather Forecasts to Google ChromeMonitor the Weather for Your Location in ChromeView the Time & Date in Chrome When Hiding Your TaskbarView Maps and Get Directions in Google ChromeGoogle Image Search Quick Fix TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver Optimize your computer the Microsoft way Stormpulse provides slick, real time weather data Geek Parents – Did you try Parental Controls in Windows 7? Change DNS servers on the fly with DNS Jumper

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• SOA Suite 11g Asynchronous Testing with soapUI

  - by Greg Mally

  Overview The Enterprise Manager test harness that comes bundled with SOA Suite 11g is a great tool for doing smoke tests and some minor load testing. When a more robust testing tool is needed, often times soapUI is leveraged for many reasons ranging from ease of use to cost effective. However, when you want to start doing some more complex testing other than synchronous web services with static content, then the free version of soapUI becomes a bit more challenging. In this blog I will show you how to test asynchronous web services with soapUI free edition. The following assumes that you have a working knowledge of soapUI and will not go into concepts like setting up a project etc. For the basics, please review the documentation for soapUI: http://www.soapui.org/Getting-Started/ Asynchronous Web Service Testing in soapUI When invoking an asynchronous web service, the caller must provide a callback for the response. Since our testing will originate from soapUI, then it is only natural that soapUI would provide the callback mechanism. This mechanism in soapUI is called a MockService. In a nutshell, a soapUI MockService is a simulation of a Web Service (aka, a process listening on a port). We will go through the steps in setting up the MockService for a simple asynchronous BPEL process. After creating your soapUI project based on an asynchronous BPEL process, you will see something like the following: Notice that soapUI created an interface for both the request and the response (i.e., callback). The interface that was created for the callback will be used to create the MockService. Right-click on the callback interface and select the Generate MockService menu item: You will be presented with the Generate MockService dialogue where we will tweak the Path and possibly the port (depends upon what ports are available on the machine where soapUI will be running). We will adjust the Path to include the operation name (append /processResponse in this example) and the port of 8088 is fine: Once the MockService is created, you should have something like the following in soapUI: This window acts as a console/view into the callback process. When the play button is pressed (green triangle in the upper left-hand corner), soapUI will start a process running on the configured Port that will accept web service invocations on the configured Path: At this point we are “almost” ready to try out the asynchronous test. But first we must provide the web service addressing (WS-A) configuration on the request message. We will edit the message for the request interface that was generated when the project was created (SimpleAsyncBPELProcessBinding > process > Request 1 in this example). At the bottom of the request message editor you will find the WS-A configuration by left-clicking on the WS-A label: Here we will setup WS-A by changing the default values to: Must understand: TRUE Add default wsa:Action: Add default wsa:Action (checked) Reply to: ${host where soapUI is running}:${MockService Port}${MockService Path} … in this example: http://192.168.1.181:8088/mockSimpleAsyncBPELProcessCallbackBinding/processResponse We now are ready to run the asynchronous test from soapUI free edition. Make sure that the MockService you created is running and then push the play button for the request (green triangle in the upper left-hand corner of the request editor). If everything is configured correctly, you should see the response show up in the MockService window: To view the response message/payload, just double-click on a response message in the Message Log window of the MockService: At this point you can now expand the project to include a Test Suite for some load balance tests etc. This same topic has been covered in various detail on other sites/blogs, but I wanted to simplify and detail how this is done in the context of SOA Suite 11g. It also serves as a nice introduction to another blog of mine: SOA Suite 11g Dynamic Payload Testing with soapUI Free Edition.

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• Is Agile the new micromanagement?

  - by Smith James

  Hi, This question has been cooking in my head for a while so I wanted to ask those who are following agile/scrum practices in their development environments. My company has finally ventured into incorporating agile practices and has started out with a team of 4 developers in an agile group on a trial basis. It has been 4 months with 3 iterations and they continue to do it without going fully agile for the rest of us. This is due to the fact that management's trust to meet business requirements with a quite a bit of ad hoc type request from high above. Recently, I talked to the developers who are part of this initiative; they tell me that it's not fun. They are not allowed to talk to other developers by their Scrum master and are not allowed to take any phone calls in the work area (which maybe fine to an extent). For example, if I want to talk to my friend for kicks who is in the agile team, I am not allowed without the approval of the Scrum master; who is sitting right next to the agile team. The idea of all this or the agile is to provide a complete vacuum for agile developers from any interruptions and to have them put in good 6+ productive hours. Well, guys, I am no agile guru but what I have read Yahoo agile rollout document and similar for other organizations, it gives me a feeling that agile is not cheap. It require resources and budget to instill agile into the teams and correct issue as they arrive to put them back on track. For starters, it requires training for developers and coaching for managers and etc, etc... The current Scrum master was a manager who took a couple days agile training class paid by the management is now leading this agile team. I have also heard in the meeting that agile manifesto doesn't dictate that agile is not set in stones and is customized differently for each company. Well, it all sounds good and reason. In conclusion, I always thought the agile was supposed to bring harmony in the development teams which results in happy developers. However, I am getting a very opposite feeling when talking to the developers in the agile team. They are unhappy that they cannot talk anything but work, sitting quietly all day just working, and they feel it's just another way for management to make them work more. Tell me please, if this is one of the examples of good practices used for the purpose of selfish advantage for more dollars? Or maybe, it's just us the developers like me and this agile team feels that they don't like to work in an environment where they only breathe work because they are at work. Thanks. Edit: It's a company in healthcare domain that has offices across US, but we're in Texas. It definitely feels like a cowboy style agile which makes me really not wanting to go for agile at all, esp at my current company. All of it has to do with the management being completely cheap. Cutting out expensive coffee for cheaper version, emphasis on savings and being productive while staying as lean as possible. My feeling is that someone in the management behind the door threw out this idea, that agile makes you produce more so we can show our bosses we're producing more with the same headcount. Or, maybe, it will allow us to reduce headcount if that's the case. EDITED: They are having their 5 min daily meeting. But not allowed to chat or talk with someone outside of their team. All focus is on work.

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• Uncovering Compiler Errors in ASP.NET MVC Views

  - by Ben Griswold

  ASPX and ASCX files are compiled on the fly when they are requested on the web server. This means it’s possible that you aren’t catching compile errors associated with your views when you build your ASP.NET MVC project in Visual Studio.  Unless you’re willing to click through your entire application, rendering each view looking for errors, you application is left a little vulnerable to user issues.  Fortunately, there’s a work around.  Open up your MVC project file in notepad or within the Visual Studio IDE by unloading the project and then editing the .csproj file (both actions are available by right-clicking on the Project Node in Solution Explorer.)  Notice the MvcBuildViews option.  It’s probably set to false.  Flip the value to true and you’ll magically start compiling your views when you build your application. <MvcBuildViews>false</MvcBuildViews> Taking this action will slow down your builds a bit, but if you’re a hack like me, it’ll probably save your day in the long run. Now you’re probably thinking, “Neat trick – how’s it work?”  Scroll down toward the bottom of your csproj file and you will notice the AfterBuild target triggers the AspNetCompiler action if the MvcBuildViews option is set to true.  <Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">   <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp"                   PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" /> </Target> Great. One more thing. Let’s say you don’t want to slow down all of your builds, but you absolutely want to know if there are any compiler issues with your views before you commit your code to version control or deploy or whatever.  Here’s what you can do – change the AfterBuild condition to run if your configuration is set to Release mode.  <Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(Configuration)'=='Release'">   <!– Always pre-compile ASPX and ASCX in release mode –>   <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp"                   PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" /> </Target> Now your debug mode builds will continue to be as fast as ever and you can quickly validate your views by building in release mode when you so choose.  There’s one little catch – this setup won’t consider the MvcBuildViews option whatsoever! So if you decide to go with this configuration, you might want to add a comment near the MvcBuildViews option letting other developers know they can change the MvcBuildViews option as much as they’d like but it’s not going to affect the AfterBuild action.  Or don’t include the comment and let your team members figure it out for themselves…

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• POP Forums v9 Beta 1 for ASP.NET MVC 3 posted to CodePlex!

  - by Jeff

  As promised, I posted a beta build of my forum app for ASP.NET MVC 3. Get the new goodies here: http://popforums.codeplex.com/releases/view/58228 This is the first beta for the ASP.NET MVC 3 version of POP Forums. It is nearly feature complete, and ready for testing and feedback. For previous release notes, look here, here and here.Check out the live preview: http://preview.popforums.com/ForumsSetup instructions are on the home page of this project. The new hotness in the beta, or what has been done since the last preview: All views converted to use Razor E-mail subscription/notification of new posts New post indicators/mark read buttons Permalinks to posts Jump to newest post (from new post indicators) Recent topics Favorite topics Moderator functions for topics (pin/close/delete, plus move and rename) Search, ported from v8. Not a ton of optimization here, or new unit testing, but the old version worked pretty well User posts (topics the user posted in) Forgot password Vanity items (signatures and avatars) Hide vanity items per user preference Some minor data caching where appropriate A little bit of UI refinement Lots-o-bug fixes Lots-o-unit tests What's next? The plan between now and the next beta is as follows: Continue working through features/tasks, and fix bugs as they're reported Integrate the forum into a real, production site Refine the UI Refactor as much as possible... the code organization is not entirely logical in some places After the second beta, a release candidate will follow, with a real "final" release after that. Subsequent releases should come relatively frequently and without a lot of risk. The trick in building this thing has been that it mostly tossed the previous WebForms version, which was all full of crusties. The time table for this is a little harder to pin down, as day jobs and families will have their effect. Other notes Refactoring will be a priority. As the features of MVC have evolved, so have my desires to use it in a fashion that makes things clear and easy to follow. I don't even know if anyone will ever start mucking around in the code, but on the off chance they do, I'd like what they find to not suck. Other nice-to-haves are builds to target Windows Azure and SQL CE. A nice setup UI would be super too. I think the ASP.NET MVC world has gone long enough without a decent forum.The biggest challenge that I've found is making the forum something that can be dropped in any app. While it does rope its views into an area, areas are mostly just routing details. I haven't thought of a clever way yet to limit dependency injection, for example, to just the forum bits. I mean, everyone should be using Ninject, but how realistic is that? ;)How much time and effort should you spend on POP Forums in its current state? Change is inevitable, but at this point I'm reasonably committed to not changing the database schema. I really think it will stay as-is. All bets are off for the various interfaces throughout the app, but the data should generally resist change. It's not even that different from v8, which was one of the original goals because I didn't want to rewrite SQL or introduce a new ORM or whatever. My point is that if you wanted to build a site around this today, even though it's not entirely functional, I think it's low risk in terms of data loss. I can't vouch for whether or not you know what you're doing.I've been having some chats with people lately about quoting posts, and honestly there has to be something better and straight forward. That continues to be a holy grail of mine, and some day, I hope to find it.Enjoy... it's starting to feel more real every day!

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• Christian Radio Locator iPhone app

  - by Tim Hibbard

  For the last three months or so I've been working on an iPhone (and iPad) app in my spare time. It all started when I took the kids to Minneapolis and had a hard time finding radio stations to listen to on the trip. I looked in the App Store for an app that would use my GPS to show me Christian radio stations nearby, but there wasn't one. So I decided to build my own. Using public information from the FCC and a few other sources, I built a database in Google docs that contains the frequency for all Christian radio stations, where the tower is located and how far the tower can reach. I also included any streaming audio information and other contact information like Facebook or Twitter that I could find. Google spreadsheets publish in JSON format (yes, really) and Xcode can automatically deserialize JSON into a properly formatted entity. This is one area that Xcode is far superior to C#. In a just a few lines of code, I can have a list of in-memory strongly typed objects from a web-based JSON feed. To accomplish the same thing natively in .NET would be much more work and wouldn't feel nearly as clean when it was said and done. The snazzy icon shown above was built by my very talented wife. She hasn't yet provided any feedback on the app's user interface, which is why it is so plain and boring. I used a navigation view controller and EGO pull to refresh table view to construct the main window. Pulling down to refresh initiates a GPS lookup, which queries the database for radio stations in range (yes, you can pass parameters to Google spreadsheets and get a subset back in JSON). Pulling up on the table extends the range of the search and includes stations that may not be close enough to get clear audio. This feature is not that intuitive and the next version contains an update to that functionality. Tapping a cell will show a detail view that displays additional information about the station. The user can click to view the station on a map, click to listen to an online stream (if available) or click to see the station's Facebook or Twitter pages. Swiping back and forth on the table changes the information that is displayed on the right hand side of the table cell. It scrolls through the city where the tower is located, how far the phone is from the tower, the range of the tower and in the next version a signal strength indicator. This was pretty easy to implement once I figured out how to assign the gesture recognizer delegate.  Tapping and holding on a cell will jump the user to the map view screen. Which is pretty cool, but very hard for even a power user to discover. To tackle the issue of discoverability, the next version has a series of instructions displayed at the bottom of the screen to show the user the various shortcuts. Once the user has performed the swipes and long holds, the instructions disappear. I've learned a lot developing this app. Spending over a decade exclusively in .NET made the learning curve a bit steep, but once I learned the structure and syntax of Objective-C, I've learned to appreciate the power and simplicity of it. Here are a few screenshots. I would really appreciate any feedback and especially iTunes reviews. Technically it is open source and a smart googler could probably find it. I just haven't promoted it as open source.     Cross posted from timhibbard.com

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• How to Browse Without a Trace with an Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  No matter how diligently you clear your cache and erase your history, web browsing leaves traces on your computer. If you need keep your browsing private, then an Ubuntu Live CD is the answer. The key to this trick is that the Live CD environment runs completely in RAM, so things like your cache, cookies, and history don’t get saved to a persistent storage location. On a hard drive, even deleted files can be recovered, but once a computer is turned off the data stored in RAM is unrecoverable. In addition, since the Ubuntu Live CD environment is the same no matter what computer you use it on, there’s very little identifying information that a website can use to track you! The first step is to either burn an Ubuntu Live CD, or prepare a non-persistent Ubuntu USB flash drive. Ubuntu treats non-persistent flash drives like CDs, so files will not be written to it, but if you’re paranoid, then using a physical CD ensures that nothing gets written to a storage device. Boot up from the CD or flash drive, and choose to Run Ubuntu from the CD or flash drive if prompted (for more detailed instructions on booting from a CD or USB drive, see this article, or our guide on booting from a flash drive even if your BIOS won’t let you). Once the graphical Ubuntu environment comes up, you can click on the Firefox icon at the top of the screen to start browsing. If your browsing requires Flash, then you can install it by clicking on System at the top-left of the screen, then Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. Click on Settings at the top of the Synaptic window, and then select Repositories. Add a check in the checkbox with the label ending in “multiverse”. Click Close. Click the Reload button in the main Synaptic window. The list of available packages will reload. When they’ve reloaded, type “restricted” in the Quick search box. Right-click on ubuntu-restricted-extras and select Mark for Installation. It will note a number of other packages that will be installed. This list includes audio and video codecs, so after installing these, you should be able to play downloaded movies and songs. Click Mark to accept the installation of these other packages. Once you return to the main Synaptic window, click the Apply button and go through the dialogs to finish the installation of Flash and the other useful packages. If you open up Firefox now, you’ll have no problems using websites that use Flash. When you’re done browsing and shut down or restart your computer, all traces of your web browsing will be gone. It’s a bit of work compared to just using a privacy-centric browser, but if it’s very important that your browsing leave no traces on your hard drive, an Ubuntu Live CD is your best bet. Download Ubuntu Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Reset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDAdding extra Repositories on UbuntuHow to Add a Program to the Ubuntu Startup List (After Login)How to install Spotify in Ubuntu 9.10 using WineInstalling PHP4 and Apache on Ubuntu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 2010 World Cup Schedule Boot Snooze – Reboot and then Standby or Hibernate Customize Everything Related to Dates, Times, Currency and Measurement in Windows 7 Google Earth replacement Icon (Icons we like) Build Great Charts in Excel with Chart Advisor tinysong gives a shortened URL for you to post on Twitter (or anywhere)

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• Backup and Transfer Foobar2000 to a New Computer

  - by Mysticgeek

  If you are a fan of Foobar2000 you undoubtedly have tweaked it to the point where you don’t want to set it all up again on a new machine. Here we look at how to transfer Foobar2000 settings to a new Windows 7 machine. Note: For this article we are transferring Foobar2000 settings from on Windows 7 machine to another over a network running Windows Home Server.  Foobar2000 Foobar2000 is an awesome music player which is highly customizable and we’ve previously covered. Here we take a look at how it’s set up on the current machine. It’s a nothing flashy, but is set up for our needs and includes a lot of components and playlists.   Backup Files Rather than wasting time setting everything up again on a new machine, we can backup the important files and replace them on the new machine. First type or copy the following into the Explorer address bar. %appdata%\foobar2000 Now copy all of the files in the folder and store them on a network drive or some type removable media or device. New Machine Now you can install the latest version of Foobar2000 on your new machine. You can go with a Standard install as we will be replacing our backed up configuration files anyway. When it launches, it will be set with all the defaults…and we want what we had back. Browse to the following on the new machine… %appdata%\foobar2000 Delete all of the files in this directory… Then replace them with the ones we backed up from the other machine. You’ll also want to navigate to C:\Program Files\Foobar2000 and replace the existing Components folder with the backed up one. When you get the screen telling you there is already files of the same name, select Move and Replace, and check the box Do this for the next 6 conflicts. Now we’re back in business! Everything is exactly as it was on the old machine. In this example, we were moving the Foobar2000 files from a computer on the same home network. All the music is coming from a directory on our Windows Home Server so they hadn’t changed. If you’re moving these files to a computer on another machine… say your work computer, you’ll need to adjust where the music folders point to. Windows XP If you’re setting up Foobar2000 on an XP machine, you can enter the following into the Run line. %appdata%\foobar2000 Then copy your backed up files into the Foobar2000 folder, and remember to swap out the Components folder in C:\Program Files\Foobar2000. Confirm to replace the files and folders by clicking Yes to All… Conclusion This method worked perfectly for us on our home network setup. There might be some other things that will need a bit of tweaking, but overall the process is quick and easy. There is a lot of cool things you can do with Foobar2000 like rip an audio CD to FlAC. If you’re a fan of Foobar2000 or considering switching to it, we will be covering more awesome features in future articles. Download Foobar2000 – Windows Only Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Backup or Transfer Microsoft Office 2007 Quick Parts Between ComputersBackup and Restore Internet Explorer’s Trusted Sites ListSecond Copy 7 [Review]Backup and Restore Firefox Profiles EasilyFoobar2000 is a Fully Customizable Music Player TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 Windows Media Player Glass Icons (icons we like) How to Forecast Weather, without Gadgets Outlook Tools, one stop tweaking for any Outlook version Zoofs, find the most popular tweeted YouTube videos Video preview of new Windows Live Essentials 21 Cursor Packs for XP, Vista & 7

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• What makes them click ?

  - by Piet

  The other day (well, actually some weeks ago while relaxing at the beach in Kos) I read ‘Neuro Web Design - What makes them click?’ by Susan Weinschenk. (http://neurowebbook.com) The book is a fast and easy read (no unnecessary filler) and a good introduction on how your site’s visitors can be steered in the direction you want them to go. The Obvious The book handles some of the more known/proven techniques, like for example that ratings/testimonials of other people can help sell your product or service. Another well known technique it talks about is inducing a sense of scarcity/urgency in the visitor. Only 2 seats left! Buy now and get 33% off! It’s not because these are known techniques that they stop working. Luckily 2/3rd of the book handles less obvious techniques, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth buying. The Not So Obvious A less known influencing technique is reciprocity. And then I’m not talking about swapping links with another website, but the fact that someone is more likely to do something for you after you did something for them first. The book cites some studies (I always love the facts and figures) and gives some actual examples of how to implement this in your site’s design, which is less obvious when you think about it. Want to know more ? Buy the book! Other interesting sources For a more general introduction to the same principles, I’d suggest ‘Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion’. ‘Yes!…’ cites some of the same studies (it seems there’s a rather limited pool of studies covering this subject), but of course doesn’t show how to implement these techniques in your site’s design. I read ‘Yes!…’ last year, making ‘Neuro Web Design’ just a little bit less interesting. !!!Always make sure you’re able to measure your changes. If you haven’t yet, check out the advanced segmentation in Google Analytics (don’t be afraid because it says ‘beta’, it works just fine) and Google Website Optimizer. Worth Buying? Can I recommend it ? Sure, why not. I think it can be useful for anyone who ever had to think about the design or content of a site. You don’t have to be a marketing guy to want a site you’re involved with to be successful. The content/filler ratio is excellent too: you don’t need to wade through dozens of pages to filter out the interesting bits. (unlike ‘The Design of Sites’, which contains too much useless info and because it’s in dead-tree format, you can’t google it) If you like it, you might also check out ‘Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion’. Tip for people living in Europe: check Amazon UK for your book buying needs. Because of the low UK Pound exchange rate, it’s usually considerably cheaper and faster to get a book delivered to your doorstep by Amazon UK compared to having to order it at the local book store or web-shop.

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