Introducing Microsoft SQL Server Code Name “Denali” (DRAFT Preview)

Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Understanding Microsoft Virtualization Solutions (Second Edition)

Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Update Your Skills with Resources & Career Ideas from Microsoft

Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2

Programming Windows Phone 7

First Look Microsoft Office 2010

Deploying Windows 7, Essential Guidance

Microsoft Office 365: Connect and Collaborate Virtually Anywhere, Anytime

You all are waiting for the result of our Silverlight 2: Write and Win Contest, isn’t it? Yes, we have five winners. But I’m not gonna announce that news. Oh! Don’t worry! I have invited Ivan Dragoev, Product Manager of SilverlightShow for announcing the winners of our contest. Hello Ivan, Could you please announce the winners of our contest? Thanks!

Dear Silverlighter’s,

The Silverlight: Write and Win contest just finished. I would like to say “thank you” to all ten authors for the great articles they submitted and for the courage to show to us, the Silverlight fans and developers, what Silverlight is capable of. We believe, that such contests helps the community to grow and share.

So, having the results of the votes, I’m proud to announce the winners of our contest, the two articles, that have the most votes:

• Creating a Silverlight game: By Boyan Mihailov – takes the $200 + Silverlight 2 in Action eBook.

• Silveright FlyoutPanel: By Ola Karlsson – takes $100 + Silverlight 2 in Action eBook.

And here are the other 3 articles, randomly selected by us, which will receive Silverlight 2 in Action eBook.

• Silverlight and Flash Interoperability using HTML Bridge and ExternalInterface API: By Jonas Follesø
• 10 Silverlight 2 gotchas resolved: By Antoni Dol
• The Making of Deep Zoom Obama: By Donavon West

Congratulations!

Ivan

Thanks, Ivan. Congratulations to all winners! I would like to say thank you to everyone who entered and to all of you who voted! I also like to say “thank you” to to Ivan Dragoev and Steven Hong for sponsoring this contest.

Hello Everyone!

It is time to vote for the winners of our Silverlight: Write and Win contest. The following are the list of great articles that I received for contest.

Silverlight 2 Articles

• Silveright FlyoutPanel: By Ola Karlsson
• Silverlight and Flash Interoperability using HTML Bridge and ExternalInterface API: By Jonas Follesø
• Connecting Drupal and Silverlight: By Matt Serbinski
• Tall skinny data columns using improved WrapPanel for Silverlight: By Matt Perdeck
• Silverlight Drag, Drop, Import , and Export: By Michael Washington
• 10 Silverlight 2 gotchas resolved: By Antoni Dol
• Creating a Silverlight game: By Boyan Mihailov
• Using Silverlight to Create a Video Player: By David
• The Making of Deep Zoom Obama: By Donavon West
• Post Galaxy in Silverlight – By Thomas Holloway

Manning Publications is giving away 2 free ebooks a day through April (April 17 to April 30). They will choose two winners randomly everyday. Winners are allowed to chose any ebook available on Manning.com.

All you need to do is that go to this link http://www.manning.com/free/ and give your first name and email address. That’s all. Good Luck!

Original Image

Generated Image

The image above is generated by uisng Ascgen2. If you want to take a look the generated HTML version, you can check this link. (Demo : http://michaelsync.net/demo/ASCII-tifa.html )

Credit : I got Tifa Lockhart’s photo from Google Image Search. Full credits go to the original creator.

BTW, this girl is animated but I think she is hot. Wat ya say?

Related ~

• ASCII-O-Matic

Contents

• Another day, another word
• The World’s Hightest Website (a CSS Experiment )
• Longest Domain on the net (Letters only)
• Longest Domain on the net (Numeric only)
• The Last Page of Internet
• Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?
• IE-Haters
• Deleted Images
• Just Fu*king Google it

Another day, Another word

URL : http://anotherdayanotherword.com/

I found this site from Dreamhost (DHSOTM). It has only one word at the middle of the page. That word is changing everyday. That’s why that site is called another day, another word. Strange, hum? If you turn on the speaker, you will hear the voice too.

—————

The World’s Hightest Website (a CSS Experiment )

URL : http://worlds-highest-website.com/

This website is the World’s Highest Website. Currently, it’s 18.939 kilometers high (that’s about 11.77 miles). The following is the some fine print and technical details.

For the rest of the crew, here’s some fine print. This website is a CSS experiment. Due to its nature, there are some accessibility limitations, but anybody just slightly experienced will understand. The technical and design principles of this site are simple:
* One HTML container;
* pure CSS styling;
* no workarounds, filters, or hacks.

Known, yet interesting issues:

* For the record – Gecko-based browsers like Firefox show an interesting behavior when you want to make the site any higher (than precisely 18.939583 kilometers, that is), namely by “shrinking” or “collapsing” its main container;
* Internet Explorer doesn’t accept internal references behind the real action, and it’s unclear if the container’s height really is 18.939 kilometers (though it’s damn high – or long – nonetheless).

If you can come up with fixes or an even higher element, the formatting of which is broadly supported, email info at worlds-highest-website.com. Most likely, there’s some reward. And otherwise, if it’s found, it’ll be used ;)

—————

Longest Domain on the net (Letters only)

URL : <link>

Can you guess who own the longest domain on the net? Google! of course. There are 63 characters in that domain. Why don’t you visit by clicking the link above? :)

Longest Domain (Numeric only)

URL : <link>

This is another site that has very very long domain. AFAIK, the max length of domain (without subdomain and surffix) is 6 but this domain name is 64 numbers. So, I’m really confused about that. maybe. it might be cuz of number. If it’s characters only then the max length might be 63. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Note: Subdomains and domain suffixes are not included in consideration.

More ~

• 141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592
• gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle
• thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore
• abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk
• thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast
• llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

—————

The Last Page of Internet

URL : http://www.wwwdotcom.com/

Did you know that there is the last of Internet? :) Some of you might already know about that since I posted about this in my blog last year. I wonder why the owner of that site keep on paying the domain registration charges and hosting fees for that page. I got one thought when I saw this. There is a number of people who are making money online. At the same time, there are a lot of people who are willing to spend money online. :)

—————

Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?

URL : http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

I found this site in Dreamhost (DHSOTM). There is a question in title and an answer at the middle of page. So simple but strange! :)

—————

IE-Hater sites

I think that there are a lot of people who really hate the Microsoft Internet Explorer. They spent their money to show their hates.

• Microsoft Firefox **** : You should check out this site.. This site looks like so professional. And of course, it’s really funny.
• Dump Internet Explorer!

—————

Deleted Images

URL : http://www.deletedimages.com/

This site collected unsharp, moved, blurry and unfocused pictures from people. So, you can upload your photos that you are about to delete from your camera.

UPDATED on Jan 06, 2008

Just Fucking Google It

URL : http://www.fuckinggoogleit.com/

Don’t forget to google before asking something in forum. :)

That’s all for now. I will add more if I found some more sites. Yes, yes! You can also share me if you know some strange websites like above. Thanks. (Actually, there are three more sites in my list but when I check today, those sites are down.)

The main reason why I start this program is that it saves your time for reading all of latest articles from CP’s feed and tracking all questions and answers from Codeproject forum.

News

Site Upgrading

The whole Codeproject site has been upgraded from Classic ASP to ASP.NET version with a lot of improvements . This is really big changes which is done during 8 years of running. As this site has really huge amount of traffic, it’s very hard for them to upgrade this site with new version. However, the CP development team has done the great job to upgrade the whole site successfully. Congratulation! CP team

Chris shared a few interesting things here ~

For those interested here are some whacky and amusing things we found:

• SQL Server, IIS and the ASP.NET framework are possessed.
• Using development settings instead of production settings is a Bad Thing.
• Storing session state in a SQL database can be a performance killer. Especially when the database is an old P4 test harness machine 40 km away from the webserver. That was an interesting experience in scream therapy.
• Always check your indexes. Especially the ones that absolutely positively are not and cannot be fragmented. They will be the ones most in need of attention.
• 20,000 users hitting your application is wonderful load testing. We did load test but our testing machines did not generate the load you guys can generate
• no matter how many ways you check code there’s always an angle that you haven’t looked at. We’re finding errors in 10 mins of being on that we couldn’t find from 3 months of beta testing. This is just nature.

The Best Articles

• Silverlight 1.1 Fun and Games by Sacha Barber

  

  Sourcecode : Download Source

  Note: This is an award-winning article of Visual Studio 2008 Competition.

• Silverlight Alien Sokoban by Daniel Vaughan

  A fun Silverlight implementation of the game Sokoban. Contrasting Silverlight 1.1 and WPF, while showcasing some new features of C# 3.0, Expression Design, Expression Blend, and Visual Studio 2008.

  

  Sourcecode : Download Source

• Build Google IG-like Ajax Start Page by Omar Al Zabir

  Build a start page similar to Google IG in 7 nights using ASP.Net Ajax, .NET 3.0, Linq, DLinq and XLinq.

  

  Sourcecode : Download Source

  Demo : Ajax Web Portal

• WCF / WPF Chat Application by Sacha Barber

  How to create a peer-to-peer chat application using Windows Communication Foundation

  

  Sourcecode : Download Source

• ASP.NET Popup Control by Tomas Petricek

  Highly customizable JavaScript popup control for web page wrapped in ASP.NET custom control.

  

  Sourcecode : Download Source

Links

• Request Google´s Pagerank programmatically
• 10 SEO tips for your ASP.NET website
• Building ASP.NET Bot protection (CAPTCHA-like)
• Protect files for download

The best posts in Codeproject forum

• How to store the password in Database? Encrypting Vs Hashing, Salt

  This is a discussion about storing the password in database. As the user authentication used to be a part of almost every software system, the developers should have good understanding about how to store the password in database. We have discussed about encrypting vs hashing, adding salt or adding the user name after the password and etc.

  Summary

  • Don’t use encryption/decryption for password.
  • Don’t need to append the user name to the password.
  • Hashing the password with random salt (SHA2 might be the best for hashing.)

  You can read about it in the link below.

  Read More ~ guidelines on password encryption

• Does the System.Deployment namespace cover a great deal of scenarios?

  I have been asked this question regarding ClickOnce deployment in CP forum. As I’m using ClickOnce APIs on SCSF (Smart Client Software Factory) project, I found a few missing things in System.Deployment namespace. The following are the things that ClickOnce can’t handle.

  Summary

  • No way to get the list of latest modules
  • The version of the whole application need to be updated if we wanna update just one module
  • ClickOnce doesn’t care about the version of assemblies.
  • DownloadFileGroup (“”) works only if “optional” is checked. There is no way to download the group of file by force

  Read More ~ An application that will get the updates from server automatically

• ADODB.DataTypeEnum.adBigInt problem “Bad variable type!” in Windows 2000

  One people who are using ADODB in .NET asked the question below in our CP forum.

  The identity field of one of my SQL DB tables is a bigint, using ADODB to query the DB based on this bigint works fine in my XP machine, but gives me a “Bad variable type” error when I use my app in a W2000 machine.

  The W2000 machine has every service pack issued by MS, what could be the problem?

  Something works fine on XP doesn’t work on Windows 200 is very strange issue. As I never use ADODB (something that we used for VB6 projects in old days ) in .NET, I don’t have that experiences. The possibilities that I think of at that time did solve his problem.

  The trick is that casting the original datatype (long datatype in his case) to double datatype. :) Honestly, I’m not so sure why we need to do this but it did solve the problem.

  Cmd.Parameters.Append(Cmd.CreateParameter("TransId", ADODB.DataTypeEnum.adBigInt, 1, , CType(iTransId, Double)))
  

  Read More ~ In XP works fine, W2000: Bad variable type!

Okay. That’s all for now. This is just a taste of new thing in my blog. What do you think? Is it interesting? As this program is just started, your feedback is highly appreciated. I think that there are a few area that I can’t add in this post. Based on the feedback from all of you, I will make this program better and interesting.. If you like it, don’t forget to subscribe my feed ( http://michaelsync.net/feed ).

Thanks.

Thanks to original author and Julia who forward me this mail.

She finds him sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in front of him. He appears to be in deep thought, just staring at the wall. She watches as he wipes a tear from his eye and takes a sip of his coffee.

“What’s the matter dear?” she whispers as she steps into the room. “Why are you down here at this time of night?”

The husband looks up from his coffee, “Do you remember 20 years ago when we were dating, and you were only 16?” he asks solemnly.

“Yes I do” she replies.

The husband pauses – the words were not coming easily. “Do you remember when your father caught us in the back seat of my car making love?”

“Yes, I remember” said the wife, lowering herself into a chair beside him.

The husband continued. “Do you remember when he shoved the shotgun in my face and said, ‘Either you marry my daughter, or I’ll send you to jail for 20 years?”

“I remember that too” she replied softly. He wiped another tear from his cheek and said, “I would have been released today.”

Keep smiling… :)

Note: Thanks to Rahul Singh for forwarding this mail.

Other Jokes that I’d like to share with you all

• Coincidence!!!
• [Photos] – In Male & Female Toilets
• [Photos] – Lively-Beach
• [Photos] – Unusual Toilet Signs

Have Fun! Have a nice weekend!

All you need to do to get a free account is very simple. Just submit some of your information in their sign up page. Then, you will get the Free Account that you can upload your ASP.NET 1.1 or 2.0 project.

URL: https://somee.com/FreePackage.aspx

Of course, There are some rules for using this *Free* Package.

• Our web service can not be used as file storage.
• Our web service can not be used as a source of images and or media for other sites (hot linking).
• Adult or illegal content is not allowed.
• Web site can not contain viruses of any kind.
• You are not allowed to hide our advertisiment.
• Web site must be visited at least 10 times per month.

If you are okay with these rules, just go and get an account here.

Note: The main advantage of having a free hosting is that you may have some understanding of how to manage/maintain a website. The most of people, even web developers, do not have that much experience in managing a “Live Website” because we, web developers, are just enjoying with localhost, internal web service and SQL/Database Server within our LAN. :)

UPDATE:

• FREE ASP.NET Hosting from WebHostForASP.NET
• Free ASP.net Hosting