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Mirrored Weblogs
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This is going to be the sixth post in a series of posts regarding HTML 5. You can find the other posts here , here , here , here and here . In this post I will provide a hands-on example on how to use rounded corners (rounded corners in CSS3) in your website. I think this is the feature that is most required in the new modern websites. Most websites look great with their lovely round panels and rounded corner tab style menus. We could achieve that effect earlier but we should resort to complex CSS rules and images. I will show you how to accomplish this great feature with the power of CSS 3.We will not use Javascript. Javascript is required for IE 7, IE 8 and the notorious IE 6. The best solution for implementing corners using CSS and Javascript without using images is Nifty corners cube . There are detailed information how to achieve this in the link I provided. This solution is tested in earlier vesrions of IE (IE 6,IE 7,IE 8) and Opera,Firefox,Safari. In order to be absolutely clear this is not (and could not...
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This is going to be the fifth post in a series of posts regarding HTML 5. You can find the other posts here , here , here and here . In this post I will provide a hands-on example on how to use real fonts in HTML 5 pages with the use of CSS 3. Font issues have been appearing in all websites and caused all sorts of problems for web designers.The real problem with fonts for web developers until now was that they were forced to use only a handful of fonts. CSS 3 allows web designers not to use only web-safe fonts. These fonts are in wide use in most user's operating systems. Some designers (when they wanted to make their site stand out) resorted in various techniques like using images instead of fonts. That solution is not very accessible-friendly and definitely less SEO friendly. CSS (through CSS3's Fonts module) 3 allows web developers to embed fonts directly on a web page.First we need to define the font and then attach the font to elements. Obviously we have various formats for fonts. Some are supported by all...
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This is going to be the fourth post in a series of posts regarding HTML 5. You can find the other posts here , here and here . In this post I will provide a hands-on example with HTML 5 and CSS 3 on how to create a page with multiple columns and proper layout. I will show you how to use CSS 3 to create columns much easier than relying on DIV elements and the float CSS rule. I will also show you how to use browser-specific prefix rules ( -ms for Internet Explorer and -moz for Firefox ) for browsers that do not fully support CSS 3. In order to be absolutely clear this is not (and could not be) a detailed tutorial on HTML 5. There are other great resources for that.Navigate to the excellent interactive tutorials of W3School. Another excellent resource is HTML 5 Doctor . Two very nice sites that show you what features and specifications are implemented by various browsers and their versions are http://caniuse.com/ and http://html5test.com/ . At this times Chrome seems to support most of HTML 5 specifications.Another...
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I know it has been a while since I blogged about HTML 5. I have two posts in this blog about HTML 5. You can find them here and here . I am creating a small content website (only text,images and a contact form) for a friend of mine.He wanted to create a rollover gallery.The whole concept is that we have some small thumbnails on a page, the user hovers over them and they appear enlarged on a designated container/placeholder on a page. I am trying not to use Javascript scripts when I am using effects on a web page and this is what I will be doing in this post. Well some people will say that HTML 5 is not supported in all browsers. That is true but most of the modern browsers support most of its recommendations. For people who still use IE6 some hacks must be devised. Well to be totally honest I cannot understand why anyone at this day and time is using IE 6.0.That really is beyond me.Well, the point of having a web browser is to be able to ENJOY the great experience that the WEΒ offers today. Two very nice sites...
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In this post I will be looking into a new feature that has been added to theVS 2012 IDE. I am talking about Page Inspector that gives developers a very good/handy way to identify layout issues and to find out which part of server side code is responsible for that HTML snippet of code. If you are interested in reading other posts about VS 2012 and .Net 4.5 please have a look here and here . This tool is integrated into the VS 2012 IDE.We can launch it in different ways. 1) We will create a new ASP.Net MVC application (an Internet application). I will not add any code. 2) In the Solution Explorer I choose my project and right-click. From the available options select View in Page Inspector Have a look at the picture below. 3) We can launch Page Inspector from the Standard Toolbar. Please have a look at the picture below. 4) Let's view our application with Page Inspector. First I inspect the About link-menu.I can see very quickly the HTML that is rendering for that link to appear. I also see the server side code (the...
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In this post I will be demonstrating a brand new feature which available in ASP.Net 4.5.I will be demonstrating the numerous features added in .Net 4.5 in future posts. Have a a look if you want in my last post that investigates enhancements added to EF 5.0 Designer. I will be demonstrating with a hands-on example on Strongly Typed Data controls and how we can have Intellisense and compile type checking using this new feature. I assume you have downloaded VS 2012 (Express edition will do). I have also downloaded and installed AdventureWorksLT2012 database.You can download this database from the codeplex website. I will be creating a simple website without using this feature. Then I will show you what the problem is without using this feature. 1) Launch VS 2012. Create a new ASP.Net Web Forms Site. Choose C# as the development language.Give an appropriate name to your site. 2) Now we will add a data access layer to our site in order to fetch some data to the user interface.I will use EF database first approach....
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I have downloaded .Net framework 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 since it was released to MSDN subscribers on the 15th of August.For people that do not know about that yet please have a look at Jason Zander's excellent blog post . Since then I have been investigating the many new features that have been introduced in this release.In this post I will be looking into the In order to follow along this post you must have Visual Studio 2012 and .Net Framework 4.5 installed in your machine.Download and install VS 20120 using this link . My machine runs on Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 works just fine. I have also installed in my machine SQL Server 2012 developer edition. I have also downloaded and installed AdventureWorksLT2012 database.You can download this database from the codeplex website. Before I start showcasing the demo I want to say that I strongly believe that Entity Framework is maturing really fast and now at version 5.0 can be used as your data access layer in all your .Net projects. I have posted extensively...
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With the virtual launch of Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 coming up in a few days at September 12, 2012 9:30 AM PDT (UTC -8:00) online and although there are a bunch of awesome new features tools, frameworks and APIs in it, there are still a lot of people who find it really hard to adjust [...]...
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Trying to make CaptionsGridWindow of ClipFlair serve captions editing on-the-fly to SMF (Silverlight Media Framework [now called MMPPF]) player component, I had a real hard time, plagued by a bug at TimedTextElementStyle. It seems to be setting default FontSize for captions using a “Cell” unit instead of using a “Pixel” unit. Currently SMF only supports [...]...
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As you may have noticed by now I’ve changed my blog engine from subtext to wordpress. I’ve been using subtext as my blogging engine since I’ve started blogging and have been very happy with it. The reasons that led me into moving were firstly the fact that I wanted to move to a modern platform [...]...
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Recently we upgraded to .NET4.0. The decision was based on a lib we currently design and will be referenced from the core modules. However it seems that this cause problems to some of you. Therefore we would like to ask you to participate in the quick survey Dima just published in our site http://www.expandframework.com/blog.html...
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In order to use an Xpand module up to now we were forced to derive from XpandWinApplication or XpandWebApplication and then register the module using the toolbox. Along with the module functionality however core modules were activated (eg. controllers, updaters, model extensions). These steps are well described in How to use an eXpand module with an existing XAF application . The process however is not optimal. Many of you already suggested to provide a more flexible and decoupled way. Even if core modules have a huge amount of useful functionality it should be possible to avoid activating them and use only the module that we are interested in. Good news! From version 12.1.6.5 this is possible and for almost all the modules we do not need to derive from Xpand’s XafApplications. All modules are able to operate without the core however the references back to the core remain. This allows the modules to use the API they need. There are a few special cases which I will describe them in this forum thread . P.S.: Those...
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In the context of ClipFlair development, I was recently adding independent scaling (zooming) functionality to its ZUI container’s floating windows (apart from the container zooming functionality) and came across some strange behavior, where the windows seemed to also move apart from getting scaled. After banging my head a bit I decided to take a closer [...]...
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A big nuissance in Windows Live Writer is that when you try to type in a double-quote character you get some special Unicode character (“ or ”, at the start and end of a string respectively), other than the classic ASCII character used in programming. That way people copy-pasting snippets from your blog can get [...]...
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While refactoring ClipFlair code to use MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern, I came across the XAML error “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”, shown in Visual Studio when trying to bind to my ViewModel (accessed implicitly, being set as the DataContext of the XAML control) for a property named Source. I have settled [...]...
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With Silverlight using a cut-down .NET API, some decisions have been at least ackward, causing Silverlight code to be sometimes unnecesserily more complex than its WPF counterpart and WPF code needing several changes to get ported for Silverlight. In ClipFlair I’ve implemented a WPFCompatibility layer to ease compiling WPF code for Silverlight (and vice-versa too) [...]...
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In this post I will be demonstrating with hands-on examples how to optimise your SQL Server for “ad hoc workloads“. I will be using the view LookIntoPlanCache that I created in this post .Make sure to read this post if you are not familiar with terms like Query Optimiser,execution plans and Plan Cache. ( read more )...
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Just came accross a runtime error message that troubled me a bit to resolve while adding Prezi-like content scaling functionality in ClipFlair‘s FloatingWindowHostZUI (ZUI = Zoomable User Interface) container. I had added the following: /// Identifies the <see cref="FloatingWindow.Scale" /> dependency property. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The identifier for the <see cref="FloatingWindow.Scale" /> dependency [...]...
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In this post I will be demonstrating with hands-on examples how to look into the contents of Plan Cache. I will be explaining what the Plan Cache (Procedure Cache) is, the process of query optimization and the generation of execution plans in detail. Then I will use some DMVs to create a custom view that will return the contents of the plan cache. ( read more )...
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In this rather short post, I would like to talk about a very handy and easy to use tool (SQL Server 2012 Best Practices Analyzer-SBPA) that provides a lot of information about all the SQL Server 2012 components installed on the system and checks if the configurations are setup according to the recommended best practices.( read more )...
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A few weeks back, I received an email from a good colleague of mine that was really puzzled with the execution of a rather simple query.Finally he gave up and draw the conclusion that there was some sort of a bug in SQL Server.I tried this query myself and it did not work.The query was pretty simple and I could not see why it was not working,in the first place.The answer to this “strange” behavior of SQL Server is not strange at all. We write SQL queries using the T-SQL syntax.The way we form a SQL query is not the same way SQL Server logically (internally) executes the query. ( read more )...
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In this post I will be looking into a new feature in SQL Server 2012. Actually this is a T-SQL enhancement and it is called Query Paging.Often in our applications we need to page/select a number of rows (or a range of rows if you prefer) by specifying a row count offset in the results. I will be introducing OFFSET which specifies the number of rows to skip before starting and FETCH which specifies the number of rows after the OFFSET to return.We will use OFFSET/FETCH NEXT in combination with the ORDER BY clause. ( read more )...
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Before HTML5 when it came to creating rich interactive maps where one could hover or click any region and see details about them, Flash was the right tool for the job. Right now, though, it is much easier to create maps with JavaScript and, thanks to JS frameworks, it even gets much simpler and jVectorMap [...]...
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Following up on my post on how to fix CSpeex (http://cspeex.codeplex.com) to compile at Silverlight 5 (see http://zoomicon.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/fix-compile-cspeex-audio-codec-at-silverlight-4-rc-and-silverlight-5/). Initially I thought it was not working correctly, but then I noticed I was running it on Terminal Server and didn’t have an audio device available. Running SLAudioDemo included in the CSpeex distribution (after doing the fix [...]...
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In this post I will be looking into recompilation and stored procedures in SQL Server. More specifically I will show you why it happens,when it happens and the tools to identify recompilation of stored procedures.There are many reasons why a stored procedure will recompile. Some are more obvious than others.( read more )...
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