Microsoft Bing goes live
I suddenly noticed that Bing.com, Microsoft’s new revolutionary search engine, was now up. It is showing a beta logo, but the search engine is up and running. Have heard lots of good things about it, so going to give it a try for a few days.
Do we have a Google killer here? What do you think?
Typemock ASP.NET Bundle
Hi everyone. After using Typemock on one of my projects, I can definitely say that it is a fantastic product for your unit testing. Have just heard about a promotion which Typemock is running currently to promote their new produt and giving away licences. See the details below:
Unit Testing ASP.NET? ASP.NET unit testing has never been this easy.
Typemock is launching a new product for ASP.NET developers – the ASP.NET Bundle – and for the launch will be giving out FREE licenses to bloggers and their readers.
The ASP.NET Bundle is the ultimate ASP.NET unit testing solution, and offers both Typemock Isolator, a unit test tool and Ivonna, the Isolator add-on for ASP.NET unit testing, for a bargain price.
Typemock Isolator is a leading .NET unit testing tool (C# and VB.NET) for many ‘hard to test’ technologies such as SharePoint, ASP.NET, MVC, WCF, WPF, Silverlight and more. Note that for unit testing Silverlight there is an open source Isolator add-on called SilverUnit.
The first 60 bloggers who will blog this text in their blog and tell us about it, will get a Free Isolator ASP.NET Bundle license (Typemock Isolator + Ivonna). If you post this in an ASP.NET dedicated blog, you’ll get a license automatically (even if more than 60 submit) during the first week of this announcement.
Also 8 bloggers will get an additional 2 licenses (each) to give away to their readers / friends.
Go ahead, click the following link for more information on how to get your free license.
Getting all XML Key Value pairs in XSL
May times when I try to design a XSL against an unknown data stream, I would like to know what all values are available. Here is a nifty XSL which I have been using for a while. ( I am sure there are many versions out there ).
<xsl:for-each select="@*">
<br/> Name: <xsl:value-of select="name()" /> Value:<xsl:value-of select="." />
</xsl:for-each>
It gives a list of all elements with their values. Quite handy to check if you have got the element name wrong etc.
SharePoint developer introduction
Just came across a nice site to introduce SharePoint to .NET developers. A nice resource area for existing .NET developers who want to get up to speed with SharePoint.
Happy New Year
Finally 2008 is over. What a year it has been. Hoping that 2009 brings lots of hope, prosperity, happiness and joy to everyone. Wishing everyone a very happy 2009 
SharePoint RTM Support Going Away
Just heard it over at Spence Harbar’s blog that from January 13th 2009, no support will be provided for SharePoint systems which are not SP1 patched. If you have not already applied SP1, don’t delay and be caught out with an unsupported system.
See: Microsoft Support Lifecycle for their products
Blog Changes
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.
Configure ASP.NET Websites to output XHTML to W3C Validator
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.
Making ASP.NET XHTML Compliant
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
Free CodeRush Xpress
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.
