November 27th, 2008
While recently migrating hosting servers, I got an opportunity to re-examine my choice of a blogging engine. I had stopped blogging for a while, and hence was tempted to start anew, however had some good past content which I wanted to preserve for myself.
I initially started blogging with Wordpress, and went thru a painful process to migrate all content to Community Server a few years ago. It was a good system. It still is, but it is meant for very large blogging networks, and not very suitable for a single blog. They do have a new product called Grafitti, however, both suffer from one major problem. A lack of free plugins, themes and tools available from the community. Wordpress on the other has is a fantastic blogging platform, very easy to use and has an abundance of free support to a small blogger like me.
One more major turning point towards Wordpress was the launch of Windows 2008 and IIS7. It now supports URL Rewriting, and hence via Fast CGI it can use mod rewrite to create pretty URL’s 
Have a look at this post URL. Am a .NET developer and hence I always host on Windows servers. This was one of the reasons why I had left Wordpress in the first place. So it’s great to be back with Wordpress.
Lookout for more regular posts soon.
Posted in Blogging, General | No Comments »
November 12th, 2008
In my previous blog entry, I showed how to configure ASP.NET to output XHTML to the browsers. However, when the W3C Validator checks the page, ASP.NET does not know the W3C user agent and hence sends out non compliant code. The trick is in the w3cvalidator.browser file available on idunno.org. Just drop the file in your App_Browsers folder and ASP.NET will send out XHTML compliant code to the Validator.
Posted in dotNet | No Comments »
November 12th, 2008
ASP.NET by default does not emit XHTML compliant code. Consider this scenario. You have carefully created an XHTML compliant design. Created your pages using ASP.NET and when you try to validate your page, it fails with the error :
Line x, Column y: there is no attribute “name”.
<form name="aspnetForm" method="post" action="Default.aspx" id="aspnetForm">
This leaves you a bit stunned, as ASP.NET adds the name tag to the form on compile and you don’t have any control over it. However, don’t worry. There is a solution.
Just add to following under system.web in your web.config file.
<
xhtmlConformance mode=“Strict” />
ASP.NET should generate compliant code now, and you should see the following in your rendered output.
<form method="post" action="default.aspx" id="aspnetForm">
As you see, it does not render the name tag anymore. Problem solved. Time to display the W3C Validated icons on your page with pride
Posted in dotNet | No Comments »
November 10th, 2008
Just came across this page from Microsoft about an announcement for the availability of a free version of CodeRush called CodeRush Xpress. Might be worth looking into for faster development and refactoring. Definitely worth having a look if you have never used CodeRush before. Good news for those who have been in the sidelines due to the cost involved. Now you get a chance to use some functionality of CodeRush for free.
Posted in General | No Comments »
November 9th, 2008
This is definitley old news, however I have using the steps outlined on this site to configure my Windows Server 2008 x64 environment to run as a workstation. It’s been over 2 months since I have been running it and it is just fantastic. Everything works beautifully.
Definitely a great resource in you want to use Windows Server 2008 on your development laptop. Recommended.
Posted in Windows Server 2008 | No Comments »
November 8th, 2008
One of the pains I have with Hyper-V is that evertime I want to launch my VM, I have to open the Hyper-V Manager ( accept the UAC prompt ) and then launch my VM. I found a very nice gadget called the Hyper-V Monitor Gadget for Windows Sidebar written by Tore Lervik. It resides on the Windows Sidebar and shows the satus of all the VM’s. Also provides single click interfaces ( with any UAC prompt ) to start / stop / pause VM’s and also to open the Virtual Machine Connection for quick connection to the VM with just a double click.
For those who are wondering how to get Windows Sidebar running with Windows Server 2008, check out this article.
Posted in Windows, Windows Server 2008 | No Comments »
November 3rd, 2008
During last month, I have been playing with a lot of open source / free CMS systems. I particularly liked Umbraco a lot and am really impressed at their approach. If you are looking for a CMS system to base your next website on, I would definitely suggest you to have a look at Umbraco.
Posted in Umbraco CMS | No Comments »
October 2nd, 2008
It’s been a while since I posted. I have been involved in bringing my dream to reality. For a quick update, I have left my job to start my own company Toolagen Limited. Currently keeping very busy in giving shape to this organisation while working on several consulting projects on SharePoint / MOSS. Working for myself will enable me to work on even more engaging and complex SharePoint / MOSS projects while creating a service delivery team to develop and deploy complex MOSS solutions.
We are also working on some SharePoint tools which will soon be released to everyone. Hopefully we will be making it to Beta before Christmas.
Posted in General, SharePoint | No Comments »
July 31st, 2008
One of the features of Windows 2008 I really wanted to try was HyperV. It’s good, faster than Virtual Server, supports HyperVisor etc. etc. However, I have removed the Hyper V Role from my system. The reason being loss of sleep. I just can’t live with it. I know the Hyper V team has given some explaination about the technical problems etc. but to me those are more like excuses. Why will a laptop with Hyper V not go in sleep mode when there are no VM’s running? I can understand that they have kept the priorities of enterprise servers while designing this product, but one of the biggest users of Virtualization are developers, and they don’t have servers which are on 24×7. I would like my laptop to sleep, save power when I put the lid down and myself go to sleep at night. Don’t have the patience to wait for boot up and shutdown times everytime I leave my laptop. At least enable sleep on lid down, so that my hard disks don’t keep spinning and heating up all thru the night.
I tried VMWare Server which was the free version out recently. However, found it a bit of mess with no help file for a first time VMWare user and I was really in no mood to dig up documents to find out how to connect to the VM. I may be tired and sleepy but definitely not very impressed by VMWare Server considering the amount of stuff I have heard about it.
Well, to cut the long story short, I have decided to stick to Virtual PC for a little while, and alternatively go navite. I do have a blazing fast laptop, and a blazing fast server OS, so will try and work without VM’s. Will develop like old school before VM’s came into picture. Will load WSS on my Windows 2008 install and start developing. For MOSS, I will bear the pain of VPC for now till I make up my mind for a nice virtualization software to use.
Posted in Windows Server 2008 | No Comments »
July 31st, 2008
I recently installed Windows Server 2008 64 bit edition to my laptop. I agree getting all drivers were a little bit of effort, and I still have a driver missing for an unknown device which keeps prompting me, but I will say the effort and pain was well worth it. The installation process was really smooth. I did format my hard drive and make a clean install. It was nice to finally make a move to 64 bit and what better than Server 2008. It’s a fantastic OS. Possibly one of the best Microsoft has produced till date.
I configured my system to use it as a workstation using many of the tutorials and guides available on the net. I may write up everything in one concise post if people want, but the information is pretty widely available. I can say one thing. It’s fast. Oh did I mention that I now have 4 GB of RAM and being 64 bit, I can finally use all of it.
It was an interesting experience hunting for 64 bit applications. True that most of the 32 bit apps work fine, but being a perfectionist that I am, I will still keep looking for pure 64 bit version of every software I use. Goal is to be fully 64 bit in the near future.
Even Lord of the Rings Online works fine after updating my graphics driver and updating Windows. Next step was to setup the ultimate development rig over this base OS install. Will describe my experience in a seperate post. However I will recommend every developer to try it over Vista. It rocks.
Posted in Windows Server 2008 | No Comments »