Goodreads Amazon ... Amazon has bought Goodreads

socaltech - Goodreads Acquired By Amazon.com

Book review and community Goodreads, which was founded in Santa Monica by Otis Chander, has been acquired by Amazon.com, Amazon said Thursday afternoon. Financial terms of the buy were not disclosed. Goodreads' site revolves around sharing book recommendations and networking between book readers ..."

Exciting News About Goodreads: We're Joining the Amazon Family!

When Elizabeth and I started Goodreads from my living room seven years ago, we set out to create a better way for people to find and share books they love. It's been a wild ride seeing how the company has grown and watching as more than 16 million readers from across the globe have joined Goodreads and connected over a passion for books.

Today I'm really happy to announce a new milestone for Goodreads: We are joining the Amazon family. We truly could not think of a more perfect partner for Goodreads as we both share a love of books and an appreciation for the authors who write them. We also both love to invent products and services that touch millions of people.

I'm excited about this for three reasons:
1. With the reach and resources of Amazon, Goodreads can introduce more readers to our vibrant community of book lovers and create an even better experience for our members.
2. Our members have been asking us to bring the Goodreads experience to an e-reader for a long time. Now we're looking forward to bringing Goodreads to the most popular e-reader in the world, Kindle, and further reinventing what reading can be.
3. Amazon supports us continuing to grow our vision as an independent entity, under the Goodreads brand and with our unique culture.

It's important to be clear that Goodreads and the awesome team behind it are not going away. Goodreads will continue to be the wonderful community that we all cherish. We plan to continue offering you everything that you love about the site—the ability to track what you read, discover great books, discuss and share them with fellow book lovers, and connect directly with your favorite authors—and your reviews and ratings will remain here on Goodreads. And it's incredibly important to us that we remain a home for all types of readers, no matter if you read on paper, audio, digitally, from scrolls, or even stone tablets.

For all of you Kindle readers, there's obviously an extra bonus in this announcement. You've asked us for a long time to be able to integrate your Kindle and Goodreads experiences. Making that option a reality is one of our top priorities. ...

This could be a marriage made in heaven. Though I do find it a little funny, in that Goodreads recently had a little tiff with Amazon. But still, as a user of both, this could be awesome and I'm happy for the Goodreads team. It's cool seeing a local company do good... :)

Plus I'd love to see the Kindle get some Goodreads love.

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40,785 Microsoft Patents (and counting). See all the patents Microsoft owns...

Microsoft on Issues - Enhancing Transparency: Putting Microsoft’s Patents on the Web

Last month at an event on Capitol Hill, Microsoft pledged to put information on the Web that would enable anyone to determine for which patents we are the real party in interest.

As I mentioned in my blog post about the event, transparency regarding patent ownership is an important part of a well-functioning patent system. One of the fundamental objectives of the patent system is to provide notice regarding inventions – not only the nature of what has been invented but who owns the patent.

...

Today, we launched a “Patent Tracker” tool that provides a list of all of the patents Microsoft owns. Through the Patent Tracker, users can obtain the list in two forms: (1) an online list that is searchable by patent number, patent title, country and whether the patent is held by Microsoft or a subsidiary, and (2) a CSV file containing the entire list that is downloadable and searchable in Microsoft Excel. We took this approach so that people can come to our site if they want to run a quick search, but can also download the information if they want to perform deeper analysis. Above is a video providing additional information about the need for transparency and how to use the Patent Tracker.

...

Not sure what good this is to me, really, but I think it's kind of cool anyway... :)

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What RPG has eight different bosses, achievements, is built with macros and lives in Excel? Arena.Xlsm!

404 Tech Support - Arena.Xlsm, an RPG built using Excel

If you have your nose buried in spreadsheets all day at the office, you might enjoy a little change of pace even with Excel open. Cary Walkin, a chartered accountant up in the great white north, has created an RPG using just Excel’s macro system. It works on the Windows versions of Excel 2007 – 2013.

...

The game even includes achievements, tons of different enemies, and 8 different bosses.

You can download and get playing from carywalkin.wordpress.com. Version 1.1, with a few bug fixes, is slated to be released this weekend. For more details of the game mechanics, read the letters that pop up at different milestones throughout the game or check out the official Arena.Xlsm wiki."

You had me at 8 different bosses... And who doesn't like a little macro love?

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RU 4 U - Registry Usage (RU) v1.0 released. Command line DU like utility for the Registry

Sysinternals Site Discussion - Updates: Autoruns v11.5, Du (Disk Usage) v1.5, Procdump v5.14, Procmon v3.04, Ru (Registry Usage) v1.0

Autoruns v11.5: ...

Disk Usage (Du) v1.5: ...

ProcDump v5.14: ....

Process Monitor v3.04: ....

Registry Usage (RU) v1.0: Ru (Registry Usage) is a new command-line utility that reports the size, value and subkey counts of registry keys. Like its Sysinternals Du (Disk Usage) counterpart, Ru can help you find the keys that contribute to registry bloat.

Any day we get a new Sysinternals tool is a bright day!

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Do You D U? Utility Reminder of the Day: Disk Usage (DU.exe)

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LifeHacker step by step guide to get going with your own hosted Tiny Tiny RSS

LifeHacker - How to Build Your Own Syncing RSS Reader with Tiny Tiny RSS and Kick Google Reader to the Curb

Yes, Google Reader is going away, and yes, there are great alternatives. However, if you're tired of web services shutting down on you, why not take matters into your own hands? Tiny Tiny RSS is a free, open-source syncing RSS platform with more features than Google Reader ever had, and it can't get shut down. Here's how to install it and set it up.

What You'll Get

Setting up Tiny Tiny RSS requires a little patience, but it's deceptively easy. I had my instance set up and web-accessible within a few hours, and I spent a few more tweaking all of the settings and options just the way I wanted them. At the end of the day you'll have a web page that you can visit at any time, on any device, to read all of the latest articles from the blogs you subscribe to. Tiny Tiny RSS supports filters and labels, so you can organize those feeds into categories, filter out the stories you don't want, and organize them so you read the interesting things first. You can also score feeds, so the blogs you like the most float to the top. There are more features than we have time to get into, but you can read more about them here.

Tiny Tiny RSS also has an Android app (sorry, no iOS app), a mobile-friendly web interface, a Chrome extension, and more third-party supported apps. There's even an XBMC client if you want to read your feeds on the big screen.

There are some things you won't get with Tiny Tiny RSS that Google Reader offers, though. For example, you won't get such a broad array of third party apps and clients. Sadly, Tiny Tiny RSS can't be used with your favorite desktop or mobile feed reader like Reeder or NewsRob. Plus, it's definitely harder to set up than just importing all of your feeds to Feedly. Even so, if you want ultimate control over your news reading, and you want something that'll never shut down on you, Tiny Tiny RSS Is worth setting up.

..."

While Tiny Tiny RSS uses a bunch of tech that I'm not comfortable with (and that might be a good thing?), I dig the idea of it. Spin up your own web/cloud based feed sync and no longer let your feeds be held hostage or shutdown at the mercy of others (cough... Google... cough).

Am I going to actually execute and do this? Doubt it. Would I spin up a VM that was already setup and configured? I'd seriously think about it. Amazon, Microsoft, it would be pretty cool if along with all the other VM images you had in your catalogs, you had VM's with this (and others like NewsBlur).

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Send To Send To... How to use Send To to add new items to your Send To

CodeProject - Using "Send To" feature to add destinations to itself

Introduction

Here is a time saver tip to add shortcuts to the Windows "Send to" menu by using the "Send to" feature on itself.

Background

The "Send to" context menu in Windows is a handy feature that enables you to quickly send a file to different locations or applications like floppy disk, desktop, e-mail etc.

If you look at the Microsoft documentation here there are many steps to add an item to the "Send to" menu every time you want to add a new destination.

Here is a quick hack that turns the “Send to” feature around itself so as to make this task much easier.

How to do it

Every user on a Windows computer has a SendTo folder. The SendTo folder contains the shortcuts for the destinations that are displayed on the "Send to" menu. When you add new destinations to the SendTo folder, they appear on the “Send to” menu.

To have the “Send to” feature send destinations to itself all you need is to place a short cut to the SendTo folder inside the SendTo folder.

Now if you are familiar with windows this information is enough to get you started. Incase you want to see how exactly this is done read the steps below: 

...

..."

No code but sometimes the best hacks don't need code. I love the recursive nature of this... If you're a "Send To"er and want what seems to be a drop dead easy way to add new items, check out this article...

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BUILD 2013 Announced - June 26-28 in San Francisco (Registration opens April 2nd)

BuildWindows.com

[scroll down...]

Firing off the email to the boss now... :)

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14 Azure whitepapers, ebooks and guidance...

Kurt Shintaku's Blog - WHITEPAPER: Windows Azure eBook References

There’s been a great deal of documentation published for Windows Azure over the past 6 months.  Take a look at some of these references if you’re working on an application for the cloud on the Windows Azure platform.

I've highlighted a number of these in the past, but it's great to have them all in one roundup post...

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PresentOn <-> PresentOff - Using the Productivity Power Tools to present your presentations

Michael Crump - Nice Tool for Presenters who use Visual Studio 2012

Introduction

While setting up for my Nokia Lumia Labs presentation, I had one of the organizers ask me how I was able to switch fonts and make everything easier to read in a matter of seconds. I told him that I simply installed the Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2012 and with 2 simple commands could switch between presenter mode or non-presenter mode.

Let’s see how it works.

By typing ‘present’, from the Visual Studio Quick Launch bar, then you will see the following:

By selecting, “PresentOn” then Visual Studio will adjust fonts, etc. automatically as shown below (Click to enlarge image):

...

Funny how this tip makes the rounds (Powering Presentations, Productivity Power. A peek at the VS 2012 Productivity Power Tools PresentOn/PresentOff).

Note: This is great for work presentations, meetings, code chats, etc. too.

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Powering Presentations, Productivity Power. A peek at the VS 2012 Productivity Power Tools PresentOn/PresentOff
Productivity Power Tools November 2012 Release (Think "Cool, new stuff for VS2012!" Release. Or "More Quick Tasks, Power Commands, Coloring Printing, [and more] oh my...")
The Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools just got better (with yesterday’s update). Now it’s Cool x 2!
“Visual Studio 2010 Pro Power Tools” available on the Visual Studio Gallery and free for everyone (VS 2010 Pro and above though). Think “Monster rollaway filled with cool power tools”
Visual Studio [Ultimate] 2010 Visualization & Modeling Feature Pack RTM now available on MSDN Subscribers Download

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Oh sheet... I mean, Oh Spritesheet Export plugin for Paint.NET

CodePlex - Paint.NET Spritesheet Export Plugin

A Paint.NET FileType plugin that takes an image that contains sprites on multiple layers and lays them out into an evenly spaced spritesheet.

This is one of those cool things that I would never find again if I ever needed it (Shut up...you never know... I could write a game or app that needs something like this. So I can't draw my way out of a wet paper sack, with holes on both sides and instructions on the side...I could... oh hell, I'll never use this... but hey, YOU might! :) Plus I just like too see people releasing source for cool Paint.NET plugins. (So there!)

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Need an ADS [Alternate Data Streams] Refresher?

SupportingWindows - Alternate Data Streams in NTFS

This blog has been a long time coming. There is a bit of confusion about the subject of alternate data streams (ADS) and no small amount of suspicion. So I want to take a few minutes to set the record straight on ADS.

A couple years ago I wrote a blog on NTFS attributes.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2010/08/25/ntfs-file-attributes.aspx

You might want to review that blog before continuing. I’ll wait….

Welcome back.

One of the common questions I get is, “Robert. What is an alternate data stream?”

My reply is always the same, “It is a data stream that is alternate”.

I don’t mean to be smart aleck about it…but that’s what it is. We know from my older blog that a file is divided up into ‘attributes’ and one of these attributes is $DATA or simply called the data attribute. It is the part of the file we put data into. So if I have a text file that says, “This is my text”, then if I look at the data attribute, it will contain a stream of data that reads, “This is my text”. However, this is the normal data stream, sometimes called the primary data stream, but more accurately it is called the unnamed data stream. Why? Because it is a data stream that has no name. In the jolly land of programming it is referred to as $DATA:””

..."

Funny how this happens, but ADS just came up at work last Friday.

Notes: ADS is a NTFS feature. A feature of the file system, not the OS. So it's somewhat easy to nuke ADS. Email a file, copy it to another file system (like FAT32, CD-ROM, ReFS), etc. From/to NTFS is fine, off of NTFS, not so much... But then again I don't believe it was designed for anything else. Heck there's other file system metadata that doesn't survive FS moves either...

Anyway, if you've not heard of ADS, this is a great refresher post.

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Think you have some ADS in your NTFS? You do, Alternate Data Streams (ADS). Here's some ADS information you might not have seen before...
ADSdotNET – Access NTFS Alternate Data Streams from your managed languages without P/Invoke
Accessing NTFS Alternate Data Streams with C#
HijackThis gets all open. Download the VB6 (yes, VB6) code now...

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You CAN eat this paste... well... kind of. Pretty Paste makes pasting into Visual Studio, well pretty [easy]!

.Net Slave - Introducing Pretty Paste for VS2012

Download Pretty Paste now!

One of the things that have annoyed me about Visual Studio for many years, is the inconsistency when pasting code copied from websites. Depending on the browser you get different results. Consider the code snippet below copied from one of Sayed’s blog posts.

If I copy that from Internet Explorer and paste it into Visual Studio, this is what I get:

And copied from Chrome result in this:

As you can see, both browsers include the line numbers, but they interpret them differently. Both browsers fail to understand my intent for copying the text and it has been that way forever. Very annoying. In tooling, understanding the user’s intent is the holy grail.

So, in a rare moment of clarity a few days ago, I decided to fix this issue by writing an extension for Visual Studio - Pretty Paste. The idea is to inject some logic just before the regular Paste command in VS executes. That logic will quickly analyze the text being pasted and correct any non-intended line numbers and extra blank lines.

..."

Visual Studio Gallery - Pretty Paste

Fixes the issue where copied text introduces new blank lines and line numbers

Open source and pull requests accepted https://github.com/madskristensen/PasteR

Suggest features and report bugs here

Learn more about why Pretty Paste is a good idea.

..."

Because I seem to be on this "paste" kick for some reason... Really, I write my code... really... :/

And I really appreciate that this is source available... :)

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Think maybe you do CTRL-V code too much? Here's a Visual Studio feature to help you (find those code clones, that is...)
If CTRL-V is your coding friend (admitted or not), Check out Paste FixR

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Think maybe you do CTRL-V code too much? Here's a Visual Studio feature to help you (find those code clones, that is...)

JasonSingh - Problems with Copy Pasting Code - And Modifying Slightly... Then How To Go Back And Fix It All Up Afterwards.

As developers, we often find ourselves under a lot of pressure to crank out code and copy then paste it somewhere else in a solution and make a slight modification here and there and get the product out the door. It's a frequent occurrence and hence the number of lines of code is not a great measure of quality code. There's nothing wrong if it gets the code out the door, however, when we have time we can go back and fix this.

What happens, if we don't and some code has been copied and pasted in different renditions and a bug comes up in one of the scenarios? We can fix it in the one instance, but that bug may also be applicable in all or some the copy/paste instances of code.

Considering the frequency of these scenarios, we've introduced Code Clone Analysis in Visual Studio 2012. What is does it search a solution and looks for similar code.

From the Analyze menu in Visual Studio 2012, we select "Analyze Solution for Code Clones"

..

So, when you get a chance, like a couple of minutes, check out the tool and see how much copying and pasting has been going on in your team ;)

Speaking of CTRL-V love, I thought this post a great kind of counter-point to my last post, If CTRL-V is your coding friend (admitted or not), Check out Paste FixR.

So maybe feel you do paste in a little much? Or that maybe a team member does? Or you both do? This Visual Studio feature will help you find and fix those [code] clones.

 

Related Past Post XRef:
If CTRL-V is your coding friend (admitted or not), Check out Paste FixR

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If CTRL-V is your coding friend (admitted or not), Check out Paste FixR

Visual Studio Gallery - Paste FixR

Fixes the issue where copied text from IE or Word introduces new blank lines when pasted into Visual Studio.

Open source and pull requests accepted https://github.com/madskristensen/PasteR

How it works

Just paste any copied code into VS as you normally would. Paste FixR takes care of the rest.

Paste FixR fixes the issue where copied text from IE or Word introduces new blank lines when pasted into Visual Studio. It works by injected itself just before the actual Paste command it executed. From here, it analyses the copied text and removes the extra inserted blank lines.

Typically, the extra blank lines occur on every second line and only in this case is the copied text modified.

..."

I never Bing for Code and paste it it... um.... no... never...

OKAY! Fine! Hell, why code it when I can paste it! Fine!  LOL

Anyway... Who doesn't paste code now and then? And while this extension isn't a must have, it does help solve a nagging behavior...

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Exchange Online getting serious about helping with eDiscovery

The Exchange Blog - Preserve mailbox data for eDiscovery using inactive mailboxes in Exchange Online

In Exchange Online and Exchange Server 2013, you can use In-Place Hold to preserve mailbox content for litigation or investigations. Many organizations also need to preserve mailbox data for users who are no longer in the organization.

In on-premises Exchange deployments, this has typically been done by disabling the Active Directory user account and performing actions such as removing it from distribution groups, preventing inbound/outbound email to and from the mailbox (including setting delivery restrictions and configuring message size limits), hiding the mailbox from the Global Address List (GAL), and also setting an account expiration date on the user account in Active Direcory. Licensing costs are not a concern in this scenario, because you do not need a Client Access License (CAL) for a mailbox that’s no longer active.

In Exchange Online, admins remove mailboxes for departed users. However, once you remove a mailbox, it can no longer be included in eDiscovery searches (using Multi-Mailbox Search in the previous version). Additionally, 30 days after you remove a mailbox, it is permanently deleted from Exchange Online and can no longer be recovered. Multi-Mailbox Search requires that the mailbox be active, which means an Exchange Online or Office 365 plan is required for the mailbox for as long as you want to preserve data for eDiscovery.

Note: You can preserve mailbox data offline by exporting it to a PST file using Microsoft Outlook and then remove the mailbox. However, if you need to perform an eDiscovery search, you would need to inject it back to an Exchange Online mailbox.

Inactive Mailboxes

In the new Exchange Online, we’ve introduced the concept of inactive mailboxes to handle departed users. When a user leaves the organization and you need to retain their mailbox data for some time to facilitate eDiscovery (or meet retention or business requirements), you can place the mailbox on In-Place Hold before removing it. This preserves the mailbox, but prevents it from sending/receiving messages, hides it from users so it's no longer visible in the GAL and other recipient lists. You can add inactive mailboxes to In-Place eDiscovery searches. Inactive mailboxes do not require an Exchange Online or Office 365 plan.

When your eDiscovery, retention or other business requirements are met and you no longer need to preserve the mailbox content, you can remove the mailbox from In-Place Hold...

For more details, see Managing Inactive Mailboxes (short url: aka.ms/inactivembx) in Exchange Online documentation.

Given the business I've been in for the last 1.5 decades (Lit Support/EDD/ESI/eDiscovery/etc), I think it's great to see a big name email vendor get serious about eDiscovery and help solve real world problems like this . Now I want to see this feature become part of on-premise Exchange too (being in the Legal biz space, "cloud" = "No way in hell")

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DID you see Dean's Icons for Dev's Round-up?

Dean Hume - Free icon packs for developers

Over the years, I have started to hoard a collection of links to various free icons that I find on the net. Often, I use these icons to spruce up simple prototypes or just make my web pages look livelier. Unfortunately, I've been collecting these links to icon packs and never get the chance to use half of them! If you are a web developer that has need for free icons, then this might be for you.

This article will hopefully provide you with a list of free icons that you can use in your day to day development. This list features five great icons packs that are available to download today.

You can never have too many icons to choose from, can you? There's a number in Dean's list that are new to me, which makes his list++...

 

Related Past Post XRef:
I HAZ ICONZ MONSTRZ- 1309+ Free icons from iconmonstr (PNG, SVG)

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BUILD Lumia 920's Get Protico

WPCentral - Portico update finally available to Lumia 920s from BUILD

About 2000 people attended the //BUILD/ developer conference this past fall in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft attracted attendees from all over the globe in an event that sold out in less than an hour when tickets went on sale in August. You were given a Surface RT, Lumia 920, and 100GB of SkyDrive as part of your $1600+ registration fee. Unfortunately for folks with those Lumia 920’s, you haven’t had early or timely access for the Portico update. At least until today.

If you find yourself in possession of a Lumia 920 from Build, you can check for an update to get Portico on the device. ...

I know this is a limited audience kind of post, but hey, there's at least 2000 of you that might find this good news... :)

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Making a cloudy Windows Phone 8 Lockscreen with the Coding4Fun Lockscreen project

Coding4Fun Lockscreen

Coding4Fun Lockscreen is an application for Windows Phone 8 that is built around a ASP.NET and Azure Mobile Services infrastructure. It enables the user to have his lockscreen image cycle through a pre-defined set of custom images, or through a custom, self-created image set.

Follow these steps to try the project after the download:

1. Download and install the Azure Mobile Services SDK
2. In Coding4Fun.Lockscreen.Core, insert your personal AMS URL and key in the AuthConstants class
3. Run the self-hosted web application (Coding4Fun.Lockscreen.Web) in order to create custom categories and add images.
4. Run the Windows Phone 8 application in order to have the wallpapers cycled.

..."

The one and only Dennis Delimarsky is at it again. Damn that guy makes me look lame (not that that's hard, but you know). He's just a coding maniac... :)

Anyway...

Besides being a Coding4Fun project (go C4F!) but I just thought this cool how it meshed with WAMS (Windows Azure Mobile Services)...

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Caliburn.Micro v1.5.0 released (CM gets Tasks, Async/Await and Share/Setting for RT... and bug fixes of course)

Caliburn.Micro - Caliburn.Micro v1.5.0

"Release Notes

This release fixes many bugs. It also adds support for Task and async/await functionality, including integration with co-routines. For WinRT, we now have built-in support for the Share and Settings charms.

Packages Available on Nuget

• Caliburn.Micro – The full framework compiled into an assembly.
• Caliburn.Micro.Start - Includes Caliburn.Micro plus a starting bootstrapper, view model and view.
• Caliburn.Micro.Container – The Caliburn.Micro inversion of control container (IoC); source code drop-in.
• Caliburn.Micro.EventAggregator – The Caliburn.Micro event aggregator; source drop-in.
• Caliburn.Micro.INPC – The Caliburn.Micro INPC infrastructure: PropertyChangedBase, BindableCollection, Execute.OnUIThread and InDesignMode checking; source drop-in.

..."

Caliburn.Micro is one of my MVVM Frameworks of choice, so a new release is good news for me... In some cases CM is just magic and makes MVVM pretty darn easy and seamless.

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Are you smarter than... a C# Rookie?

CodeGuru - Tech IQ: Are You Better than a C# Rookie?

Are you smarter than a C# Rookie? Test your knowledge against some basic questions about programming with C# to see if you are better than a C# Rookie! Do you have the Tech IQ to get a perfect score?

..."

I won't tell you my score... :/

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Image Tools Extension for Visual Studio - Quick image thumbnails, resize, rotation and conversion right in Visual Studio

Visual Studio Gallery - Image Tools

A Visual Studio extension that offers image manipulation options. You can resize, optimize and rotate your images easily from your VS Solution Explorer. Also conversion support for PNG, GIF and JPG files.

CREATED BY: Guus Beltman

SUPPORTS: Visual Studio 2012

LAST UPDATED: 3/18/2013

VERSION: 1.0

Adds useful image resizing features to Visual Studio for web developers. Also capable to convert, compress, thumbnail images just by right clicking on a image in your solution explorer. It's easy to rotate images and recompress images with a lower quality level. It can save you a lot of time opening your paint application. So hope your having fun using it, let me know if something is missing. Than I am glad to see if I can add it. Enjoy!

Saw this and thought it cool and something I'll be able to use. Now you mix in the Ico conversion sample I mentioned the other day (From Images to Icons, a simple C# example ;)

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Congratulations you can become a Microsoft Licensing Expert and earn MS Licensing Accreditation (no lie)

Microsoft Volume Licensing Blog - New Customer Microsoft Volume Licensing Training Classes Now in Session

Join the more than 5,000 IT and procurement professionals who have already gained Microsoft licensing Expert accreditation; Take the new licensing SQL Server 2012 and Licensing Office 2013 and Office 365 classes and become an expert

In the past year, more than 5,000 students have passed the Customer Licensing Expert program launched last summer at Tech Ed North America. In celebration of the program’s success, Microsoft Volume Licensing has adding two more accreditation classes for IT pros and procurement professionals through the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA):

• Licensing Office 2013 & Office 365: Learn how to license Office 2013 and Office 365, determine which edition is the right solution for your organization, and migrate from earlier editions.
• Register for Microsoft’s Virtual Academy, or check out the Microsoft Licensing program fundamentals video for an overview of Microsoft’s licensing programs and models.

The more courses you take the more MVA points you are eligible for, which will determine your membership level. Levels are classified as Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum and give students the chance to take a spot on the MVA leader board. Students also have the option to choose the pace, courses, and products of which they may gain accreditation.

For those who pass a course, a personalized certificate will be available for download. Congratulations, Licensing Expert!

..."

If you need a Licensing Accreditation program, then you might be a .... :/

I just found this oddly hilarious (in a sigh, it's Monday, kind of way). I mean "Licensing Expert?" Really?

But then again, for anyone, and I mean anyone, who's tried to figure out how to help their company be properly MS licensed...yeah... double :/

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NHunspell v1.1.0 released (Think "Hunspell for .Net" or "That spell check engine that's used all over, in a .Net version, has been updated")

NHunspell

News

2013/03/18

NHunspell 1.1.0 RTM

• Releasing NHunspell 1.1.0 RTM
• Hunspell 1.3.2, Hyphen 2.8.6
• Patches till 2013-03-14

Spell Checker, Hyphenation and Thesaurus: NHunspell

NHunspell brings the spell checking, hyphenation and thesaurus to the Microsoft® .NET Framework. NHunspell is C# library and wraps native libraries for Hunspell, Hyphen and MyThes. One design goal of this library and wrapper is to keep the source code of the included libraries as unmodified as possible. New versions of the base libraries can therefore easily adopted to NHunspell.

The integrated libraries are used in OpenOffice and they work with the dictionaries published on OpenOffice.org.

License

NHunspell is licensed under: GPL/LGPL/MPL. Free use in commercial applications is permitted according to the LGPL and MPL licenses. Your commercial application can link against the NHunspell DLLs.

Hunspell

The spell checker library Hunspell is a state of the art spell checker for languages with complex word compunding and rich morphology. It was written by László Németh for spell checking of the Hungarian language and can be used with utf8 encoded unicode directories. Hunspell is based on MySpell and can use MySpell directories too.

Hunspell is the default spell checker of OpenOffice, Mozilla Thunderbird and Firefox, Google Chrome and the Apple MAC OS/X operating system since version 10.6 "Snow Leopard". ...

Good to see this project is alive and kicking. You caught you can get it via NuGet too, right?

 

Related Past Post XRef:
NHunspell - 0.9.2 released and two cool C# & VB.Net Code Projects too
Hunspell (Open Office’s Spell Checker) wrapped for .Net = NHunspell – Your LGPL spell checker, hyphenation library for .Net

Read More

Stupid Feed Tricks to amaze your producers, consumers, readers and parsers [not!]

inessential - Brian’s Stupid Feed Tricks

At NewsGator and Sepia Labs I worked with Brian Reischl, one of the server-side guys. Among other things, he worked on NewsGator’s RSS content service, which reads n million feeds once an hour.

(I don’t know if I can say what n is. It surprised me when I heard it. The system is still running, by the way.)

Brian is intimately acquainted with the the different ways feeds can be screwed up. So he posted Stupid Feed Tricks on Google Docs...

Stupid Feed Tricks

Stupid HTTP Tricks

1. When the feed is gone/errored, publisher may still return a 200 OK but send an HTML page instead.

2. Using permanent redirects for temporary errors. In one instance, all the Microsoft blogs had a temporary system error. All the feeds did a permanent redirect to the same system error page, and we updated all 40,000 feeds to point to that one URL. Whoops.

...

Stupid XML Tricks

1. Any sort of XML well-formedness error you can think of. Missing closing tags, mismatched tags, bad escaping, not quoting attributes, missing root elements.

2. Including unescaped HTML content inside a tag - which sort of works, except that most HTML isn’t XML-compliant.

3. ...

Stupid RSS/Atom Tricks

1. Missing any element you can think of.

2. Adding custom elements without namespaces.

3. ...

Other Stupid Tricks

1. Updating posts very frequently. Newspapers are very fond of this. In 4 hours they might change a post 12 times, by the end it might have nothing in common with the original article (completely different title, completely different body). Sometimes combined with not using lastUpdated, or just not changing lastUpdate.
2. Publishing updated posts as new posts, so you have 12 versions of the same post in the feed.
3. ....

Random Notes

1. You should think hard about canonicalization of URLs. Some parts of the URL can be case-sensitive (path and query) other parts can’t (protocol, host and port). Users (and webmasters) will absolutely use different upper/lower casing in different places.
2. If you build a database index on FeedUrl, consider that 99% of them start with “http://”, which makes for a shitty index. Consider separating the protocol into its own column, and then indexing on the remainder of the URL. Alternatively, you could index on a hashed value of the URL. Theoretically you could have collisions, but in practice there are not that many feeds.

Since we're all about RSS this past week'ish and the fact that many might again play in the RSS space, I thought this document great, from someone who's really been there, done that...

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Prism? Infragistics? Dock and Ribbon? Oh my...

<xaml:Blog x:Name="Brian Lagunas" /> - XamDockManager–An Updated Prism Region Adapter

Last September, I wrote what has become a very popular Prism region adapter for the Infragistics XamDockManager control.  As pointed out in the post, this original XamDockManager Prism region adapter didn’t support all scenarios.  Frankly, it’s difficult to write a custom region adapter without knowing every usage of the control.  After receiving tons of requests for features and questions on how to implement certain scenarios, I have updated and refactored the XamDockManager Prism region adapter to support the most common requests.

So what was added?

• Support for Activation – Before, there region adaptor supported IActiveAware from the View and ViewModel perspective.  Whenever a View or ViewModel was activated, the IActiveAware interface members would be invoked.  Unfortunately, the activated View would not become the active docking tab.  Now when you use the Region.Activate method within your code, the view being activated will now become the active docking tab.
• Support for Remove – Before, when you would call the Region.Remove method, the view would be removed from the region, but the docking pane would still be visible.  The view would not be removed from the XamDockManager control itself.  This was because initially the requirements specifically didn’t support this.  I assumed closing of the panes would occur by the user clicking on the close button of the pane.  Now, whenever you invoke the Region.Remove method, the view will be removed from the region as well as the XamDockManager.  This was a highly request feature.
• Support for floating panes – Before, the adapter didn’t have any support for floating panes.  Basically everything would work fine until you started tearing off panes and placing them in a floating state, or started to create complex nesting and stacking of panes.  Now, no matter how you have your panes organized, Region.Activate and Region.Remove will properly activate or remove the View form the region as well as the XamDockManager control.  This was by far the most requested feature.

...

CodePlex - WPF PRISM 4.0 and Ribbons

Project Description
Using Infragistics XamRibbon with WPF PRISM for building rich UI

Prism is the great Framework and sometimes some of the default .NET UI components doesn't quite work for certain scenarios (like RibbonBar and DockManager).
This project is about using Infragistics RibbonBar and later on if time permits Microsoft's Ribbon for WPF (which is provided separately) with Prism. So that we can utilize RibbonBar functionality quite smoothly with PRISM (without breaking MVVM and PRISM Extensiblity).

See Documentation for more information about concept and step by step guide.

If you have a look at SourceCode, it is quite easy to adapt this into another Ribbon Control.

xaml.tv - Building IG Outlook Part 7 – Adding the Contacts Module

This is the seventh video in a series that will take you step-by-step on building a Prism application that mimics Microsoft Outlook.  In this video, we added a new Contacts module to the application.  We went through the necessary steps to add this module to both the Silverlight and the WPF applications.  We created a new module, and added views, OutlookBar groups, and Ribbon tabs to the new module.  Along the way, we ran into some common issues that you may face when adding modules to a fully featured application framework and how you would resolve those issues

In the past week I've kicked off my first Prism project and have been climbing the learning curve bit by bit. We've also invested in Infragistics, so using the two together only seems smart.

Brian Lagunas (@BrianLagunas, http://brianlagunas.com/) has a number of cool examples and I found the WPF PRISM 4.0 and Ribbons project, which looks cool, as well.

What do I think about Prism? It's pretty cool and looks like its going to let me build my complex application without tight coupling and a nice separation of concerns. I've been describing it as Lego for WPF app building...

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From Images to Icons, a simple C# example

Software By Default - C# How to: Generating Icons from Images

This article illustrates the process of generating icon files (*.ico) from user specified input images. The accompanying sample source code implements a Windows Forms application, allowing for easily testing the icon generation process.

Sample source code

This article is accompanied by a sample source code Visual Studio project which is available for download here.

...

..."

This is a pretty targeted sample code, but something I need for a project... Also I like this as a starting point really simple means to convert an image into an icon. Right now my method is, well, lame...

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Using Google Docs to find a Google Reader replacement - the community project

Mobility Digest - Using Google Docs to Combat Google Reader Situation

Was reading an MIT article (I’m super smart), found an impressive spreadsheet detailing all the alternatives to Google Reader should they indeed pull the plug. People around the world are currently collaborating on it but it’s already helpful, you might want to take a gander here, http://goo.gl/CvcBo, or if you’re super smart too (not likely), here’s the MIT article: http://goo.gl/FFI1H [GD: Post Leached in Full]

Alternatives to Google Reader - OJB comment call

 

What better way to find a Reader replacement than using the community and cloud? There's currently 50'ish listed (there's a couple dupes that I noticed)

My current replacement reader of choice? NewsBlur

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Web Feed Reader Wish List - My Must Have/Should Have/Would Be Nice Feature List
And so dies my desktop feedreader of choice too, Google Reader's shutdown also kills FeedDemon
Google Reader Bytes the Dust - Google Reader is being turned out to pasture on July 1, 2013

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Web Feed Reader Wish List - My Must Have/Should Have/Would Be Nice Feature List

With Google Reader and my client reader of choice both dead, and given my complete reliance on consuming feeds, I, like so many of you, have started shopping for a replacement. This is my thinking out loud list of stuff I must have/should have/would be nice if it had feature list.

First off, I'm an edge case. Probably close to a worse case edge case. I subscribe to, as of this morning, 2,536 feeds. Many of these feeds are aggregate feeds, like blogs.msdn.com, etc. While many of those feeds might not be active (my philosophy has been, when in doubt subscribe) many are. I scan 4k+ posts a day. This list is with all that in mind.

Must Have

• Must support thousands of feeds
• Must support folders
• Must be server/cloud based
• Must support fast scanning (i.e visual review of title)
• Must have HTML5 interface
• Must support OPML import
• Must support OMPL export
• Must support large OPML Import (> 500k file size)
• Must have well performing UI
• Must allow for scanning/marking as read by folder
• Must honor my privacy, be private by default
• Must be able to handle wonky feeds
• Must not be a vector for web based infection
• Must check for updated feeds at least every 30 minutes
• Must be able to handle very active feeds (or at least have option to "turn on" highly active feed support)
• Must support RSS 1+ and ATOM
• Must have a solid business plan/revenue stream

Should Have

• Should have a two way API (not just pull from client, but push back, such as read status, as well)
• Should have Folder filtering to show only those folder with unread articles
• Should be smart enough that feeds use single instance storage, but read status is personal (i.e. if two or more people subscribe to the same feed, it's only grabbed from the given site and stored once, using the same update period)
• Should provide bandwidth limited features (even when using HTML5 version). I use a hotspot on my train ride to/from work, I don't want a bandwidth hog site/service. So option to filter out images/video/etc
• Should work in IE
• List/title view by All/Folder
• Bulk option settings. I want to apply a view setting for all feeds, feeds by folder, etc. For example, change to a List/Title View for ALL folders, not have to do so, folder by folder.
• Should have a clean and simple UI

Would Be Nice If

• Windows Desktop/Windows Phone 8/Windows RT (in that order) client
• Staring/favoriting/saving posts
• Would be nice if the service were to somehow allow of better post providing tracking, i.e. support individual recoding/reporting to the producer of the feed. So if two people subscribe to the same feed, instead of being a single consumer, the producing site would see it as two.
• Statics

Things I don't currently care about

• Sharing articles
• Social service integration
• Magazine views

 

That's enough for now... Will update as more come to mind. :)

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And so dies my desktop feedreader of choice too, Google Reader's shutdown also kills FeedDemon

Nick Bradbury - The End of FeedDemon

"This is a hard post for me to write.

I've used FeedDemon every day since I created it back in 2003 - it's part of my daily workflow, the first thing I turn to after pouring myself a cup of coffee in the morning.

I've thoroughly enjoyed working on it and I'm grateful for all of the people who paid for it over the years despite free alternatives.

But it's time for FeedDemon to die.

If you're an avid FeedDemon user, you probably know that I've struggled to keep it updated. FeedDemon stopped "paying the bills" a while ago, so I took a full-time job elsewhere and haven't been able to give FeedDemon the attention it deserves.

Then today came the news that Google Reader is shutting down on July 1. FeedDemon relies on Google Reader for synchronization, and there's no decent alternative (and even if there were, it's doubtful I'd have time to integrate with it, at least not without trading time away from my family - which I won't do).

That was the nail in the coffin for me. I hate to say goodbye to FeedDemon after a decade of working on it, but it's time to say goodbye. When Google Reader shuts down on July 1, FeedDemon will also disappear.

..."

Nick's call, I can understand. I've been a paying FeedDemon user for nearly a decade and he's done allot to try to keep FeedDemon relevant. I've moved with it/him from BlogLines to NewsGator to Google Reader. But it looks like it's time to move on to some other client.

Thanks for the past times Nick, and good luck.

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Google Reader Bytes the Dust - Google Reader is being turned out to pasture on July 1, 2013

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Google Reader Bytes the Dust - Google Reader is being turned out to pasture on July 1, 2013

Google Reader Blog - Powering Down Google Reader

"...

We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire Google Reader (the actual date is July 1, 2013). We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too.

There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.

...

Thank you again for using Reader as your RSS platform."

Thank you, but screw you too, I guess. Wow, does this really sour me on Google. I really need a server based RSS sync repository. My feeds are too active and I don't want to leave my feed reading running 24x7 just to keep up. If someone spins up a service, even a fee based one, I'm in. I'd have paid Google too if I had that option...

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I HAZ ICONZ MONSTRZ- 1309+ Free icons from iconmonstr (PNG, SVG)

DesignMichel - A new ressource for your icons…

…is available here : http://iconmonstr.com/

And the icons come in svg format…

iconmonstr

iconmonstr - License Agreement

"...

You are allowed to ...

Use in both personal and commercial projects with no attribution required.
Use in a website or presentation template or application as part of your design with no attribution required.
Modify in shape, color, size or otherwise manipulate for your needs.

You are not allowed to ...

The icons may not be sub-licensed, resold, rented, redistributed or detached from a template, application or web page.
The icons may not be included in any online or offline archive or archived downloadable format.
Embed in a font or regenerate as webfont via 3rd party tools.

Modern UI/Metro like PNG/SVG Icons with a very nice license...

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Now this is the kind of vinyl I can appreciate... Self-adhesive vinyl Star Wars Return of the Jedi decals for living room/office that has everything...

Gizmodo - Re-Enact the Greatest Space Battle of All Time on Your Living Room Wall

Why suffer through all the boring parts of the Star Wars movies when this set of self-adhesive vinyl decals lets you perpetually relive the best part: that epic space battle from Return of the Jedi. For $30 the collection includes a squadron of X-Wings and TIE Fighters ...

And I have this perfect wall in my living room for this! I wonder what my wife will say (like I REALLY have to wonder... lol)

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Pre for free... Microsoft provides a promo code to get free premium services on PreApps.com

Edvangelism, a blog by Edwin Guarin - New Pre-Release Support for Windows App Developers

"As part of our initiatives to support the Windows developer community, we have collaborated with PreApps.com; the exclusive place to preview, rate, and test the best mobile apps coming soon. The site will help our developers market their Windows apps before release. PreApps helps developers improve their app’s chance of success through increased downloads, ranking, and overall quality.

Through the special relationship between Microsoft and PreApps, all Windows app developers will receive FREE premium services on PreApps.com in the “Feedback” section (a $24.99 value). Simply use the promo code “Windows01” in the checkout screen. The promo code expires April 11th. There is no credit card required to take advantage of this offer.

..."

I've not used this service, but free is nice and I while $25 isn't big, every little bit counts and I dig that no credit card is required. Seems like a great offer for budding WinDevs...

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Jean-Sébastien lobs the Windows Phone 8 Company Portal at us (LOB... get it? ;)

Jean-Sébastien Dupuy - Windows Phone 8 - Company Hub Development

Company Hub ?

Since the arrival of Windows Phone 8, Microsoft offers businesses the opportunity to develop enterprise portals (Company Hub) to publish applications for their employees. The aim is to provide business applications, necessary for the needs of a corporation, without validation or publication on the Microsoft Windows Phone Store. In addition to the applications management part, an enterprise portal is also a communication tool: it can relay information to employees (organizational changes, health server status ...). You can use Push Notifications, Live Tiles and Lock Screen to improve the visibility of these communications.

This article covers the steps prior to the establishment of a Company Hub and the development parts used to make this portal. Deployment is manual and I do not use MDM (Mobile Device Management) solution such as Windows Intune or System Center Configuration Manager 2012. If you opt for a managed deployment, keep in mind that these softwares natively offer a company portal (Windows Phone 8 Company Portal App) ready to use. For more details, I suggest to read the following articles:

• Set up Windows Intune Direct Management for Windows Phone 8 Mobile Devices
• How to Manage Mobile Devices by Using the Windows Intune Connector in Configuration Manager

Let’s go ! Although the procedure can seem a bit long, the idea is relatively simple. To install applications outside of Windows Phone Store, you must obtain a certificate that gives you this privilege and that identifies your company. Once this certificate in hand, you must associate the phones to your company and sign all your applications with the certificate. The Company Hub is an application like any other, it must also be signed.

...

I've whined a little about this feature of Windows Phone 8 in the past, saying it looked like kind of a pain to get running (see below), but Jean-Sébastien makes it look much, much easier.

 

Related Past Post XRef:
"Windows Phone 8 Company Portal App" now available (but only usable by those with System Center Config Manager/Windows Intune)

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55+ Windows 8 App Templates... 55 "Getting Your Win8AppDev Started Kits" now on CodePlex

AspRangers - Free : Win 8 App Design Reference Templates

Now to help you in Designing the Great APP( s). Here are the Design Templates which you can use :

There are total of 55 templates.  Complete list here http://aka.ms/win8templates

Adding few below

CodePlex win8template Search

Windows 8 App Design Reference Template: Recipe

Disclaimer: The template provided in the form of Visual Studio project (C# and JS) is meant to act as a starter kit for Windows 8 Store apps development. You are recommended to change or modify the look and feel to suit the branding that is required for your app. The template by no means restricts you to stick to the layout, navigation or other aspects indicated.

Project Description

Recipe template is an emulation of a Recipe app with placeholders for Recipe List, Recipe details data.

You can leverage this template even if you are not building a Recipe app, but the implementation scenario is closest to the template. Please refer to the “snapshots” folder under the root template folder to get a glimpse of the template look and feel.

Download includes the following

• Source (C# and JS)
• Package
• Snapshots
• Documentation 

I'm not sure if these are related to these, 50! As in 50 "store ready" Windows 8 application templates (in both C#/XAML & HTML/JS)....(and free!), but this time they are all on CodePlex, and there's more, so new post! :)

 

Related Past Post XRef:
50! As in 50 "store ready" Windows 8 application templates (in both C#/XAML & HTML/JS)....(and free!)

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Track the carbon footprint of a hashtag (aka Tweetfart.... I kid you not)

Tweetfarts

Track the carbon footprint of a hashtag.
Simply enter a hashtag below to get its CO2 emissions from today, last 7 days, and all time.

Awesome...

(via A List Apart - Track the carbon footprint of a hashtag.)

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Ignite your web dev with the Infragistics Ignite UI learning series by Craig Shoemaker

Infragistics - Get Started Learning Ignite UI Today!

Anytime you approach a new library or set of controls sometimes it’s nice to get a helping hand. In an effort to make it drop-dead simple for you to learn how to get started with Ignite UI, I am announcing the release of Fundamentals of Ignite UI.

This video series will acquaint you with Ignite UI from some of the high level architectural constructs down to the details a control’s API. The first batch of videos in the series includes 15 videos which introduce Ignite UI as a whole and then moves into working with the particulars of the igGrid control.

Ignite UI Introduction

• Introduction
• Coding Approaches and Server Support
• Browser & Environment Support
• Licensing
• Prerequisites
• Installing & Exploring Ignite UI on Your Machine

igGrid Introduction

• Introduction
• Features
• Architectural Overview
• The Basics
• Basic Options

igGrid Interactive Features

• Filtering
• Sorting
• Selection
• Paging

..."

I swear Craig must have been reading my mind (which is a scary thought... for him... ;) Just last Friday I was looking at their Ignite UI line and trying to wrap my head around it. How did he know I needed something just like this? Weird.... :P

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