See a better scoop here

Yea browsers are powerful than ever! Long live C++

Image Courtesy – http://flipboard.com/

Apple has learned this and introduced the full screen mode in Mac OS X Lion for most of their native applications. The developers can also leverage full screen mode to make their applications beautiful. But I am not so sure how this can impact the experience except few applications like iPhoto etc. 

Image Courtesy – http://apple.com

What I am talking is slightly different. It’s a browser’s perspective. Most of the browsers are already has full screen mode. But the web programmers are unable to make use of this change to present things in pretty good way. I’d really love to see my facebook updates in a full scape landscape without the help of any third  party applications. The photos, updates etc can be presented so well without the annoying left and right sidebars plus, the vacant area left on both sides meet the standard resolution requirements.

Even it’s not in full screen mode,  the best example would be NYTimes Google Chrome App. It’s simply brilliant and make use of the space available in any resolution. And they’ve a great amount of content to spread across the screens. When I am working with 1920×1280 resolution monitor, I really can’t appreciate the too much vacant space on maximize or turn in to full screen mode.

Another example could be the Skype updates on Facebook. Though they’re limited their updates to a 3 column, but still it’s nice treat for the eyes and can get things so easily. This is practically impossible with the current rendering view of facebook.

The browsers must provide and option for the web developers to leverage the full screen mode for their applications. Even this would be quite helpful for future touch based screen and the websites with Rich content to present it well to the user.

Cloud is something which I am fascinated for long time. Even I feel a bit difficult to explain the real concept and infrastructure behind cloud, the mix of Software, Virtualization and hardware in a new paradigm entirely taken away the industry.

Most of the services we’re daily using here are already embraced cloud. When I started my career back  I started hearing new things like POP and Exchange for emails. It was hardly difficult to understand why really do we need  an exchange mail. I realized it later when I travelled abroad and started working from both home and office. I found exchange is really fast, useful when we’re mobile. It’s an old story but again there are several cloud services which I am really making out in daily life. I simply can’t live without them.

Gmail - The cloud based email and the best web based email I ever have seen. I never felt to install a client for Gmail as it rocks well in the web version. Instead of downloading message down the system we’re using, simply a data render happens when deal with GMail. None of the things are really stored our system. It works well across platforms including mobile, desktops and tablets.

DropBox - I am loving it. One of the best natively integrated file storage and handling services I have seen. There are many replicas and services came to online file storage but DropBox remained strong and still gaining more users. The service currently hosts more then 100 billion files. As per the survey, peopel are storing files more in dropbox than tweeting. The clients are available at all platforms like iPhone, iPad, Android, Desktop (Linux, Mac and Windows). I never will have to bother carrying the files around. Also the client allow you to partially sync with the required folders under DropBox.

Evernote – The best desktop application I have seen in my professional life. The notes taking application comes in all form. From Bookmarklet to brilliant desktop and mobile clients. The software is simply an art. The premium versions are even better than the free version. Even you can used your evernote storage stpace onlnie to save your documents. I am sure you will love it.

Google Docs - I am almost left the office suite in my personal computers. Most of the things I wanted from office suite is available for free at Google Docs. I have prepared several documents and drawings with it. It’s getting matured day by day. I am loving it.

Google Calendar - It tracks all my events and appointments without fail. Even I am using Google Calendar Sync to sync my exchange calendar information back to the Google Calendar. It works in mobile and dekstop platforms so well.
Remember The Milk - The best task organizing tool I ever have seen. It has got Gmail Plugins, Android and iPhone (Free but lot of limitations). But whatever we’re getting in the desktop is simply awesome. It supports the quick add of events like “Meeting my friend on Saturday 10.00 AM. This may simply create even called “meeting my friend” and the time and other information will be parsed from the input text given. Simply implemented similar to Google Calendar Quick Add Features.

Android - Some of the apps like Gmail and Google Maps are simply awesome in Android platform and most of the cloud based apps are available in this platform and keep evolving

What  I am missing. I need a perfect cloud based image editor similar to Photoshop. The concepts of Tablets and Chrome netbooks are exceptionally promoting cloud centric softwares. I hope we will be handsfree soon.

Why are you maintaining a blog?

I started blogging 4-5 years back just for improving my writing skills. When I started blogging, I realized that it’s not merely a technical thing for a non-native English speaker to write something in a good way.

I was active in several forums few years back. Some of the questions being asked in the community were the common problems faced by developers. We might have experienced or fixed it. So I started concentrating on writing something reusable and simple.

Most of the forums has explained, “How to ask a technical question?”. The first and foremost thing is, google! Otherwise raising the questions and getting perfect answer will surely eat up your time. And trust me, for most of the questions, you may not be the first one facing it unless you’re doing some rocket science.

The problem with the forums are mostly we’re getting answers from novice developers. One of the main reason people active under forums on eyeing some kind of recognition like MVP award. But realize the fact that MVP award is given for quality not really for quantity. Such kind of people also will maintain the blogs and stops blogging once the receive their goal. Seriously my policy of blogging is about sharing (I don’t mind if I get award for the same reason) may be it’s the core reason I maintained the blog for last 5 years. But the posts are less in these days!

Who was your inspiration?

When I started blogging, The Old New Thing and Coding Horror were the blogs I regularly read. Jeff Atwood of coding horror rarely posts something in these days but his posts are golden and talking about timeless concepts.

Where did you start?

I initially started blogging with Blogger which is the first choice of many amateur bloggers. Also it has a credit of being a google products. Blogger also provides monetization options for bloggers through Google Adsense. Later I moved to WordPress.com . I liked wordpress better because I enjoyed cleaner GUI and really a good bunch of themes and plugins to organize and navigate the content better.

What’s your policy for blogging?

I have decided not to make the blog something like twitter (only to share the links) and make some traffic.I fundamentally blog about following tips

• Windows Programming Tips
• Software Engineering
• Tools & Productivity tips
• Really like to hum

What I do not blog? I refrain blogging other topics but especially would like to mention

• Posts with mere linking
• Copy/Paste posts form someone else and give credit at end
• Financial topics and entertainment topics can drive more traffics but I realized it’s not for my blog

The interesting things we can watch in the forums is, people needs credit and they’d like to turn it to some recognition like MVP stuffs. Later they stops forums activity/blogging. So my focus was to write something in my blog which is fundamental, reusable solutions to the problem. I never attempted to write a big open source projects and talk about in the blog.

How frequent you blog?

For me the blogging still happens, I used to have daily posts in my blog (sometimes 2 or more). At that time I was not really busy with work and I used get enough time. Later my resposibilities had grown, I stopped being there in the forums. Later the learning turned staginated. I used to read books a lot then but seldom blogs. Also when we get in to serious blogging, we’ve lot of effort to make a good content. I’m still having lot of spelling and grammar mistakes in my posts. To make a blog post in to a shape, it’s more than a technical contribution.

Give me few words about RSS and feedburner

RSS was a trend 7 years back and slowly gained the pace, The blogs are mainly accessed using the RSS readers like Google Reader etc. The website won’t get much traffic if the users are reading the blog posts using their favorite RSS readers. Products like feedburner helps the authors to monetize their content but putting ads in the RSS feeds. When the social networking websites like twitter, facebook started affecting people’s life, they care more about accessing and sharing the contents using social medias. The twitter is the best source for sharing and resharing information.

From your experience, how can I start blogging

I’ve the following opinion on blogging.

• Sharing knowledge must be the first priority not any awards or monetization
• Once you’ve the best contents, the search engines will drive more traffic to your website, which will give more inspiration for blogging.
• If you’re consistently growing your audience (watch for your page views), then you’re doing well and push your efforts to the maximum

How many blogs you’ve?

I had given strict policy for my main blogging site http://codereflect.com/ . But I also have feelings to write something else which I don’t want to mix up with my main writing. So I’m maintaining blogs on various blogging platforms other websites like novembersky.tumblr.com. sarathc.blogspot.com , sarat.posterous.com , passionate.posterous.com etc. I seldom care about the quality of contents in casual blogs.

Why you decided to move to your own identity and space?

I moved to my own space because I found that wordpress.com started inserting ads in to my post because they’re providing the space and address at free of cost. So we can’t blame them either. This had happened when I found more traffics in my popular posts. Once I felt the quality of the content and consistent audience, I decided to move my own space under own identity. Also I really wanted to play with web programming stuffs.

It’s question when to move your own space to host the blog. That’s authors discretion. People may not be really cared of making money or take the burdens of server management

What’s the difference between domain and hosting space?

Suppose if you brought http://someaddress.com/ it doesn’t mean that you can start blogging. It’s merely an address. You’ve to buy server space from any reliable hosting company and configure your domain name towards the IP address provided by the hosting company. GoDaddy.com is one of the best choice to buy domains but I brought domain from Google (a bit more expensive). You can also transfer your domain name to some other DNS provider.

How was the transition period?

My blogging rate was reduced. The search engines stopped redirecting to my new home. The links provided by Google was broken as I deleted my old blog (http://sarathc.wordpress.com) Later I found a way in Google Webmaster toolkit to manage the domain changes but it was a bit late.

I failed to make proper backups after importing blog from my old wordpres blog. The servers were notorious. I opted for a low cost plan from ZnetIndia.com. The servers used to crash very frequently and I spent nights for restoring my blog. Now the servers running somewhat OK. But still I used to get server errors. I spent 1-2 months for learning and managing the hostspace and my blog content. I was spammed with wrong categories and tags somehow.

Why did you decide to put ads in the site?

It’s not really making revenue. I’m not a professional writer and I’m not earning a penny for my articles blogs or code snippet. But I need to find the money to own my address and server space. That’s why I’m putting ads.

Which Blogging platform I should opt?

WordPress.org is the most popular blogging platform. There are other CMS like Drupal, Joomla etc.

Which server platform should I opt? Windows or Linux?

Seriously I don’t know. I run on top of a Windows server. The server management is easy!
What should I take care before buying space?
Ensure that your hosting provider supports web programming technologies like PHP, MySQL etc. You should cross check the supported technologies against your blogging platform.

Which plug-in you’re using to put ads in your website

I’m perfectly OK with PHP programming stuffs and I’ve manually edited the theme code to insert ads in my blog. My blog contains only two ads at consistent places (header and sidebar). I’m inserting ads per post. If you’re keen in to that, you can see lot of plugins.
I used a false plugin and ran adsense for 3 months. The clever guy inserted adsense code of his adsense account. I wasn’t aware that he’s gaining money from my posts! So please check the source code of your pluging and ensure that you’re not running a false plugin.

Is social integration necessary?

Yes very much. The social media is the best place for announcing and sharing the content in these days. Trust me! Currently I integrated only twitter with my blog. I believe facebook is a place for friends. They may not like technical stuffs that much! Check back the social networking website for further assistance.

Is there anything else?

No. Just want to conclude the point

• Choose quality over quantity
• Establish a good name and drive more traffic to your website. The quality posts can consistently drive traffic to your website. You event don’t have to blog
• Adhere to a policy for blogging. Make your priorities well.
• Just have a try with free blogging platforms instead of throwing money at domain address and space.
• Monetize your blogs when it reach a good shape. Seriously people hate ads. Avoid if you can.
• Keep proper back up of your database and files. Otherwise it will be tedious to restore. Make it as a habit and use tools like MySql Workbench etc. to create backup.
• Make writing as a habit. Enjoy the happiness of sharing!

See a list of popular magic debug values (retrieved from Wikipedia)

See Wikipedia for more details – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0xDEADBEEF#Magic_debug_values

Visual Studio IDE is consistently getting improved over the versions but still some of the feature are missing like Symbol Search, file search within the IDE until Visual Studio 2010. It’s really important while managing large projects. The best thing in the Visual Studio 2010, is the extensibility SDK. It’s far more flexible and prominent comparing to it’s predecessors.

Microsoft has created a really helpful site to host the useful tools for Visual Studio created by developers across the world. Even Microsoft has created some really cool tools for Visual Studio which is freely available in Visual Studio Gallery.

Productivity tools are one of best extensions available. It contains a bunch of features to improve your Visual Studio 2010 experience. You can download it from Visual Studio Gallery. The features can be simply enabled and disabled through Tools->Option menu.

Let’s have a quick look into the features. Each options are described well in their home page itself. Let’s skim through the features anyway. This contains only the features I handpicked from the whole features available. You can see the entire features the home page itself. The descriptions and screenshots are given same as the extension’s homepage.

Solution Navigator  (More Info)

This is one of the best feature.

• Expand code files to navigate to its classes, expand classes to navigate to their members, and so on (C# and VB only)
• Search your solution, all the way down to class members
• Filter your solution or projects to see just opened files, unsaved files, and so on
• View related information about classes and members (such as references or callers/callees for C#)
• Preview images by hovering over them, or preview rich information by hovering over code item

Solution Navigator also provides interactive tooltips in C# and VB code (replacing the default “quick info” tooltips) that give you the same kind of data, but right at your fingertips.  In addition to getting the tooltips on hover, you can:

• Press Ctrl+1 to open a relevant tooltip at the current cursor location
• Press Ctrl+2 to quickly navigate to any class/member in the current source file

Ctrl + Click Go To Definition
This extension gives the editor a web browser by adding clickable hyperlinks to symbols in your code as you hold down the Ctrl key.

Align Assignments
This extension is useful for making your code a little more readable by aligning the assignments when you type Ctrl+Alt+] such that it takes this:

And turns it into this:

Please note: This may conflict with your formatting settings. E.g. in C# you will need to disable: Tools->Options->Text Editor->C#->Formatting->Spacing->"Ignore spaces in declaration statements"

Triple Click
It’s never been easier to select a line of code from the mouse by simple triple-clicking anywhere on the line.

Highlight Current Line
As the resolution of monitors increases, it’s becoming more difficult to find the caret in the code editor.  The highlight current line extension makes it easy to find the caret by highlighting the line that the caret is on in the editor.  You can even configure the default colour by changing the setting for “Current Line (Extension)” and “Current Line Inactive (Extension)” in Tools Options Fonts & Colors.

HTML Copy (More Info)
This extension provides support for the HTML Clipboard format when cutting or copying code from the editor.  This means that you’ll no longer have to go fix up the formatting of your code when you paste it into a TFS bug form or any other HTML based control.

Colorized Parameter Help
This extension improves consistency with the editor by applying syntax highlighting to the contents of the Parameter Help window for C# &VB.
Please note: Syntax highlighting colors can be customized using the display items prefixed with “Signature Help” in the “Fonts and Colors” menu.

Tab Well UI
This extension allows you to completely customize the behavior of your document tabs from the Productivity Power Tools Options: See More Info

Auto Brace Completion
Automatic Brace Completion improves the productivity of writing code by automatically inserting the closing code construct when the opening construct is typed for VB & C#.  More specifically, this extension:

• Supports the following constructs: (), {}, [], <>, “”, and ‘’. 
• Allows you to press <TAB> to navigate past the next enclosing brace
• Allows you to automatically complete a statement in C# by inserting the closing semi-colon and moving you to the next line with SHIFT + ENTER