Windows Azure Contest

Microsoft Virtual Tech Days is conducting a contest for “best php application”,”best asp.net application” and “best community selected application” and winner will get grand prizes. Really its a great initative from Microsoft to develope applications using Windows Azure services.

The contest is open from 19-Aug to 16-Oct.

I am going to particpate and the solution is around the corner. If you want to particpate,click here to learn more.

When there is a change ,accept it (LINQ to SQL is most likely going to be replaced by .NET 4.0 Entity Framework)

As per ADO.NET Team Blog ,.NET 4.0 the Entity Framework will be the recommended data access solution for LINQ to relational scenarios.

The moral of this post is even though there are already lots of projects has been developed using Linq to SQL which is a very good O?R mapper tool,but still If there is a change for good,we shud accept it.

Could not load the type error “is not marked as serializable”

There are various issues which may occur on custom application running under SharePoint ,if the application and configuration doesn’t done properly. But one of the issue which I thought really pained was Could not load the type and the specific type “”is not marked as serializable“.

Basically the reasons to serialize is to persist the state of an object to a storage medium so an exact copy can be recreated at a later stage, and to send the object by value from one application domain to another.It is also used by remoting to pass objects by value from one application domain to another.
 
But the chief disadvantage is the overhead involved in serializing and de-serializing data, as well as latency issues with transmitting text over a TCP network.

So I don’t want to mark the class as “Serializable” and started to do the investigation and ended up with a simple solution by setting the <sessionState mode=”InProc” /> instead it was earlier “SQLServer”  in my QA environment and the application started work perfectly.

But still I am just having concerns about using “InProc”  because I think my environment is a WebGarden and I don’t think so storing the session state in memory will not help any change to web.config or application pool restart will vanish my session objects.

SEO Features in ASP.NET 4.0

Sorry guys,I had been off for last 2-3 days  due to I had been badly affected by a virus flu ,thank god finally I am not a victim of  H1N1 crazy isn’t  jokes apart here is one of the feature I really admired in asp.net 4.0.

I beleive every single .NET web developers are eagerly waiting to know what’s up still available with ASP.NET 4.0,since from the VS.NET 2010 beta has been released  I am getting lots of request to write post on ASP.NET 4.0. I am proud to say that I am one of such reviewer for the beta release of VS.NET 2010. I am really impressed with SEO features.

As web traffic becoming a great challenge nowadays  and mostly the identification and indexing is happening using a page title,description and keywords. The new feature in asp.net 4.0 allows programmers to set the page title,description and keywords from code behind like below.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
 

        Page.Title = “BestOfCyber – Downloads”;
        Page.MetaKeywords = “BestOfCyber,Downloads,Microsoft”;
        Page.MetaDescription = “This page contains the ebook downloads”;

}

I will write more with other features available once I dig into VS.NET 2010 further.

Windows 7 RTM now available for TechNet Plus Subscribers

Now you can download Windows 7 RTM along with support and technical content included with your subscription.

Can I Upgrade Vista Enterprise to Windows 7 Ultimate

There are lots of request from the readers  like whether they might be facing any issues while installing Windows 7 RTM Ultimate x64.

The answer is If you have vista enterprise you can only upgrade to 7 enterprise.But just try this workaround

Basicall upgrade Windows Vista Enterprise to Ultimate (not enabled by default) so Before inserting the Windows Vista Ultimate CD Go to, Start, Run: and type: regedit.exe Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

Change the key : ProductName from “Windows Vista ™ Enterprise” to “Windows Vista ™ Business”

Change the key: EditionID from “Enterprise” to “Business”

Pls do not restart Now insert Windows Vista Ultimate CD and start upgrading ..Good Luck

ASP.NET Dynamic Controls – ThumbRule

Dynamic Controls Should be Loaded on Each PostBack

One of the biggest challenges with working with dynamically added controls is that these controls must be programmatically added on each postback. That is, you can’t just load these controls on the first page load, and then not reload them on subsequent postbacks. Failure to explicitly add the controls on each postback will cause the controls to literally disappear on postbacks.

Understand better the ViewState and Dynamic Property Settings

Expecting your ViewState to retain after the postback, always assign same ID to the dynamic control

SharePoint 2010 A real developer Affable

As the technical preview engineering milestone has been crossed successfully ,I am really glad that the feedback where so good from the public and still Microsoft looks for better feedback.Watch out more on SharePoint Conference 2009.

Here is some informations in perspective of developers ,SharePoint 2010 provides a robust development platform to rapidly build solutions using familar tools like VS.NET 2010 and SPD 2010. Developers will gain access to rich set of out-of- the-box features such business connectivity services for read and write integration between external data sources. LINQ integration with SharePoint is a great feature which allows the developers to strongly typed access to data in the SharePoint Lists. Ohh..What a beauty over Developer Dashboard ,I really love it.

Enjoy Guys,SharePoint 2010 is rocking

CSS Goodies in IE 8

Microsoft has made plenty of changes and additions to IE8 which is fully compliant with the CSS Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS2.1) specification and supports some features of CSS, Level 3 (CSS3).

I am happy that again Flying Text with MARQUEE  has been supported with plenty of changes. Have a look here for a sample.

Here is an article from Microsoft regarding the improvements to CSS

Microsoft Guidelines for SharePoint development best practices

 

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 SDK (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=72208)
• Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SDK (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=113927)
• Development Tools and Techniques for Working with Code in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123413)
• Working with ASP.Net 2.0 Web parts and WSS 3.0 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123429)
• Best Practices: Common Coding Issues When Using the SharePoint Object Model (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123414)
• Windows SharePoint Services Developer Center (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123428)
• MSDN Webcast: Essentials of Application Security (Part 1 of 3): Secure Communications (Level 200) (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123430)
• SharePoint Server 2007 Developer Portal (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=119449)
• Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library V1.5 (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123431)
• Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123432)
• Exception Management Architecture Guide (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123433)
• SharePoint Products and Technologies White Paper: Implementing Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Solutions (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=114834)
• How to programmatically test for canonicalization issues with ASP.NET (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123434)
• Validating ASP.NET server controls (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123435)
• MSDN Webcast: Digging into Server-Side State Management (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=123436)
• SharePoint Products and Technologies customization policy (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=92311)
• SharePoint Products and Technologies Customization Best Practices (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=123984)