XtraMile, Inc.

ReSharper 5 Beta 2 released, works with VS2010 RC build.

Improvements/Fixes:

• Support for Visual Studio 2010 RC
• Extended ASP.NET MVC functionality
• Stable Structural Search and Replace
• Multiple usability improvements

Learn more and download it.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 RC and .Net Framework 4 RC have been released and available for download. Please click on the link provided below to go to the download page.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=457bab91-5eb2-4b36-b0f4-d6f34683c62a&displaylang=en

Issue:

When deploying your web application to IIS that uses SQL Express database, you get an error stating that “Failed to update database ‘APP_DATA\XXXX.MDF’ because the database is read-only”.

Here’s how you can fix it:

1. Make sure App_Data directory or any contained files does not have file system attribute Read-only set.
2. Give user ASPNET and NETWORK SERVICE Modify control over the App_Data directory.
3. Run IISRESET to restart IIS to refresh its permissions

These are the features that have been introduced in the ASP.NET MVC 2 Release Candidate release.

ASP.NET MVC validation scripts have been moved to their own file

To help reduce conflicts with other Ajax libraries, the built-in ASP.NET MVC validation scripts are now in a separate JavaScript file.

ASP.NET MVC validation scripts can be included at the top or bottom of a page

The server component that renders the client validation metadata now renders the metadata into a JavaScript variable. This allows the validation scripts to be included either at the top of the page or at the bottom, because the scripts will look for the variable and load the metadata when it is available.

ASP.NET MVC validation scripts support globalization

When the required ASP.NET Ajax globalization scripts are included in a page, the validation logic uses the culture-specific data for data types (such as dates and numbers) when it validates input text. The new Html.GlobalizationScript helper method can be used to render a reference to the globalization script for the current culture.

Html.ValidationSummary helper method can display model-level errors

Instead of always displaying all validation errors, the Html.ValidationSummary helper method has a new option to display only model-level errors. This enables model-level errors to be displayed in the validation summary and field-specific errors next to each field.

T4 templates in Visual Studio generate code that is specific to the target version of the .NET Framework

A new property is available to T4 files from the ASP.NET MVC T4 host that specifies the version of the .NET Framework that is used by the application. This allows T4 templates to generate code and markup that is specific to a version of the .NET Framework. In Visual Studio 2008, the value is always .NET 3.5. In Visual Studio 2010, the value is either .NET 3.5 or .NET 4.

Here’s the download link:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3b537c55-0948-4e6a-bf8c-aa1a78878da0

As a business owner, you might be wondering, “Why do I need a website? I already have a good brochure, advertisement spaces in the local newspapers and magazines.”

In this growing world, when everything has been ruled by technology, virtually everyone is craving for a presentable and noticeable web presence. The online market has encouraged business owners to build a quality website and gain in the activities of expanding online dealings. Therefore, developing a customized website that functions is the smartest thing you can do as a business owner.

Websites are quicker, easier and more cost-effective to update than print based media; therefore, you can have pictures, details and prices of your products, the very latest company information, or maps indicating the location of your company’s stores on your web-site.

In addition to reducing marketing costs, websites also reduce support costs. A business owner can save money by using the Web to provide support when staff is not available. For instance, a business owner can integrate a Frequently Asked Questions module into their store which will assists in answering customer questions.

A website can play an integral part of your promotional and marketing strategy. By having a .com and a company email address gives the impression that your business is current and up to date on technology. It also makes a powerful statement about your business by showing that you have planned for the future by securing your on-line presence today.

Once you decide to build a good website, you have to see what particular things you would like to feature on it. Whether it will be a static or dynamic website? Think carefully what kind of information you would like to pass on to your web visitors.

With specific needs on your mind, you can get started by sharing your ideas with us and get the greatest benefits from having a website. Let our experts work for you to help increase your sales by attracting numerous customers through a quality website.

In this growing world, when everything has been ruled by technology, virtually everyone is craving for a presentable and noticeable web presence. The online market has encouraged business owners to build a quality website and gain in the activities of expanding online dealings. Therefore, developing a customized website that functions is the smartest thing you can do as a business owner.

The Advantages of having a web site:

1. Publicize your business, service or products to millions of potential customers. Having a website can increase your sales by making it easier for people to do business with you.
2. You can update your website with your latest news or prices much easier and cheaper than print based media. A website can save you a lot of money in communication and administration costs.
3. You can link your website with other advertising campaigns therefore creating brand awareness.
4. Your business can advertise and publicize on the internet 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year.
5. Your business now has an extra outlet for taking orders, streamlining business processes.
6. Websites are easier and cheaper to change/update, than conventional print based media.
7. Websites make it easier for customers to do business with you. These customers can be nationwide or local.
8. You can compete with other companies in your market area.
9. You can now place your website address on your business card to enhance your image.
10. You can use your website to network with other companies and build better business relationships, locally and around the world.

Step 1 – Getting a Domain Name
The first step is to get your business a domain – this simply means you need to register a “.com”, “.net”, “.org”, “.biz” or other extension for your business if you have not already done so. This will give you a web site and email address. eg. “www.yourbusiness.com” and “yourname@yourbusiness.com”.

Finding a Domain Name can be difficult since there are only so many words, phrases, and business names available that have not been registered. If someone already has your domain, be creative and try and think of variations that are easy to remember, but still reflect your business name.

Step 2 – Define Features for Your Site
Do you want a simple “Who, What, Where” web site? Or are you looking for more integrative features for your site like the following:

• E-commerce
• Content Management (update your content yourself)
• Newsletters
• Product Databases
• Animation
• Custom Applications

Step 3 – Design and Brand Identity
The third step requires that we come up with the design of your web site. This is simply how your web site looks and feels.

Ask yourself the following questions to better isolate your design needs:

• Do you have a logo?
• Do you have peer or competitor sites that you like the look of their web site(s)?
• Do you already have a relationship with a graphic designer?
• Do you want a completely custom designed web site, or are you okay with a pre-designed template?
• What’s your budget?

Custom Designs
Custom designs require our designers (or your designer) to sit down with you, define your needs and goals, likes/dislikes, then send you design ideas for your approval. Design rates are always done hourly, so the better idea you have of what you are looking for, the more cost effective your site will be.

Template Designs for cost conscious customers
Template designs are available for clients who are on a budget. We have thousands of templates to choose from, and we can edit any colors, artwork, photography, or any graphic element to customize the template. We can help you integrate the content and your newly purchased template for a low fee. Please contact us for more information.

Step 4 – Write Your Content
Every web site needs content! The content (or text) for your pages needs to be clear and concise, and must use keywords accurately. No one knows your business better than you – so the writing of you content is a very critical step.

We can help you with this process to make sure your site is better visible in search engines, but the copy should be written by you or your marketing staff/consultant. If you don’t have a marketing copywriter and feel you could use one, contact us and we can help you.

Step 5 – Develop, Test, Deploy!
Once we have your domain, your design, your desired features, and your content finalized, we begin building your site. Using HTML, PHP, ASP, SQL, MySQL, Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and other of the latest proven technologies – we begin building your site. We generally deploy to a test server so you can see your site being built in progress! After testing and a final okay from you – we deploy your site to your web site and you are ready to go!

How Long Does It Take To Get My Site Up – Start To Finish?

Obviously we can’t give you an exact time since all sites have different needs, complexity, and varying levels of people involved. As a general timeframe, over 90% of our sites are turned around within 3-4 weeks or less – much faster than most web firms!

Updating Your Web Site

Web sites are updated one of 2 ways – by us, or by you!

When we update your site, we can guarantee it will be formatted correctly, indexed by search engines, and checked for grammar errors. We charge in 15 minute increments of our current billable rate.

For you to update your web site yourself, we need to develop a Content Management System. This costs more up front, and requires a little learning on your part. If you are comfortable with Microsoft Word or online Email (Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.), you should have no problem.

I just found an interesting comparison in performance of two common ORM frameworks: Microsoft Entity Framework and NHibernate. Here’s a quick summary of the performance comparison:

If you’re interested in the details of the performance measurements, please go to GregDoesIt.com.

In Visual Studio 2008,  all documents/files/designers are hosted within a single top-level window – which unfortunately means that you can’t partition the IDE across multiple monitors.

VS 2010 addresses this by now allowing editors, designers and tool-windows to be moved outside the top-level window and positioned anywhere you want, and on any monitor on your system.  This allows you to significantly improve your use of screen area, and optimize your overall development workflow.

If you work on a system that has multiple monitors connected to it, you will find the new multi-monitor support feature within VS2010 a big productivity boost. But if you don’t already have multiple monitors connected to your computer, this might be a good excuse to get some…

For more information, please see the original post at:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/08/31/multi-monitor-support-vs-2010-and-net-4-series.aspx

jQuery is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks, with powerful tools that can significantly improve the user’s interaction with Web applications. It has an additional advantage in that it allows developers to select elements on a page using CSS-like syntax which make it very easy to understand.

To help you improve your skills, We’ve collected 30 useful jQuery techniques and tutorials that have been created recently and that could make the development of your next website an easier and more interesting experience than the last.

1. Current Field Highlighting
   As a matter of usability and aesthetics, it is a good thing to add some kind of visual feedback on web forms to indicate the currently active (or “focused“) field. In this tutorial, we’ll improve our current field highlighting, using jQuery.
2. Accessible Charts & Graphs from Table Elements using HTML 5 Canvas and jQuery
   This technique provides a simple method for generating bar, line, area, and pie charts from an HTML table, and allows you to configure them in a variety of ways.
3. Moving Boxes Carousel with jQuery
   Many of the concepts presented in classic carousel tutorials are the same, so this tutorial will not throw a lot of source code at you. The big difference here is that there are buttons to change panels and the panels zoom in and out.
4. Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery
   All of these sliding box animations work on the same basic idea. There is a div tag that essentially acts as a window where two other items of your choosing “peek” through.
5. Make a Mega Drop-Down Menu with jQuery
   So how would we go about implementing Mega drop down menus? While it’d be great to do all of this in pure HTML and CSS, it’s impossible at the moment to get those nice half-second delays — and of course there’s a pesky problem with Internet Explorer 6, which only supports :hover on anchor elements. Instead, we’ve found whipped up a solution using jQuery and a very nifty plugin called hoverIntent.
6. A fancy Apple.com-style search suggestion
   “This example makes use of several techniques: MySQL (for the database), HTML/CSS for styling, PHP for retrieving the data and jQuery for the AJAX request. How about that for some nice way of combining powerful techniques to create something nice like this. You do need some basic knowledge about these techniques to fully understand this tutorial.”
7. Creating a Dynamic Poll with jQuery and PHP
   “When you combine some neat functionality courtesy of PHP with the cleverness of jQuery you can produce some pretty cool results. In this tutorial we’ll create a poll using PHP and XHTML, then make use of some jQuery Ajax effects to eliminate the need for a page refresh, and to give it a nice little bit of animation.”
8. jQuery Infinite Carousel
   This screen cast explains how you can create a simple and nice scrolling carousel and how you can also make it automatically loop round by itself. For the latter see also Automatic Infinite Carousel.
9. Creating a Filterable Portfolio with jQuery
   If you have worked in your field for a while, there is a pretty good chance that you have a rather extensive portfolio. To make it a little easier to navigate, you will probably be tempted to break them into different categories. In this tutorial, I will show you how to make “filtering by category” a little more interesting with just a little bit of jQuery.
10. De-Constructing Accordion and Hover Effects with jQuery
    This video tutorial explains how the hover and accordeon effects on Tim Van Damme’s site can be achieved using jQuery.
11. Better form submission feedback with jQuery
    Browsers fail to give users effective feedback when the user submits a form. Users respond by clicking the submit button over and over. The problem compounds when users find out they’ve been charged 5 times or when you receive 5 contact submissions. The solution is to replace the submit button with a friendly message letting the user know the form is working.
12. How to Make a Threadless Style T-Shirt Gallery
    There’s a thumbnail which is a full sized image in a container div, which is smaller than the full sized image. The image is centered within it, but doesn’t show entirely because overflow:hidden is turned on. When the mouse hovers over the thumbnail, overflow:hidden gets turned off, and the entire image is displayed.
13. Create a gallery by using z-index and jQuery
    In this tutorial you will learn to combine the CSS property ‘z-index’ and the power of jQuery to create a unique gallery which have a appearance of a pile of pictures. Also check out Enhancing the z-index Gallery with a Preloader.
14. Add a favicon near external links with jQuery
    External links should always be marked distinctly in order to make it easy for readers to see them easily. You cann add a CSS class to all outgoing links using the pseudo-class

    1	a[href^=http]

    . A more dynamic solution is using the favicon.ico of the external site, if it is available of course.

15. Automatically generate table of contents using jQuery
    “Some time ago, I was debating with my friends on the topic: is there any use of generating table of contents automatically. The conclusion was that it can be useful in cases when the reading material is long enough and table of contents (TOC) has a fixed position on the screen. This tutorial will show you how to create such TOC in just a few lines of code.”
16. Reddit-style Voting With PHP, MySQL And jQuery
    If you are a regular at Reddit, you must have noticed the way people vote there. You can either vote up or vote down. This tutorial will show you how to create such a voting system with jQuery, PHP and MySQL.
17. Making a Content Slider with jQuery UI
    In this tutorial we’re going to be using the jQuery UI slider widget to create an attractive and functional content slider. We’ll have a container, which has a series of elements each containing different blocks of content. There will be too many of these elements to display at once, so we can use the slider to move the different content blocks in and out of view.
18. Scrollable Timelines
    Making use of the overflow and scrollLeft DOM property to scroll elements is a much more effective use of the CPU, over animating using CSS top/left. This tutorial demonstrates the same effect used in two completely different ways.
19. BBC Radio 1 Zoom Tabs
    This tutorial explains how to achieve the effect on the latest BBC Radio 1 website, where the mouse rolls over the image block, tabs slide up and the image zooms a little to reveal more of the picture.
20. Creating A Slick Ajaxed Add-To-Basket With jQuery And PHP
    This is a detailed tutorial which shows creating an unobtrusive Ajaxed shopping cart using jQuery & PHP and can guide you to Ajaxify any e-commerce software you may already be using or coding.
21. Create a Digg-style post sharing tool with jQuery
    We are going to make a digg-style post sharing toolbox. It’s all pretty straight forward and need a little bit of planning. The way it works is different with digg’s. If you view the html source code of Digg’s, it has the sharebox html code in every single post. But, in this tutorial we have only one sharebox, and all the links are sharing the same template.
22. Using jQuery to play Media Files (MP3,WMA,etc,etc)
    I’m going to show you the most productive way (I guess you could say that) of playing a MP3 ( You can also use WMA, and you file of choice) on your website.
23. Easy Retweet Button
    The script itself is completely standalone (no dependencies) and can be included in any page relatively painlessly. Additionally, since it’s just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, it’s completely themeable and customizable to the style of your site.
24. Create an amazing music player using mouse gestures & hotkeys in jQuery
    We will create an amazing music player coded in xHTML & jQuery that made use of mouse gestures and hotkeys. You can Click & Drag with mouse to interact with interface’s music player or use directional keys & spacebar instead of mouse.
25. Creating a Virtual jQuery Keyboard
    This tutorial will explain how we can implement a simple virtual keyboard with some (well, okay, lots of!) help from jQuery.
26. Quick Tip: Resizing Images Based On Browser Window Size
    In fluid layouts it is easy to format the text to adjust nicely when the window is resized, but the images are not as fluid-friendly. This Quick Tip shows you how to swap between two image sizes based on the current size of the browser, div, or whatever you decide to make the deciding factor. For those looking for a real life example, Last.fm uses this technique on their artist pages.
27. Using Form Labels as Input Values with jQuery and CSS
    A nice little additive to web forms is to put the input labels inside of the inputs box as the starting value. By using jQuery to bring the label in as the value we can archive the desired effect without impacting accessibility, since the label elements are still there. Then we can take it a step further by dynamically adding a class to the input and use CSS to style the form only if JavaScript is enabled. The search box at the top of this page is an example of this technique.
28. A jQuery inline form validation, because validation is a mess Të Position Absolute
    When it comes to form validation, it’s hard to have a versatile solution that works with every form. Figuring out how to display errors is not a simple task.  When an error needs to be displayed, the script creates a div and positions it in the top right corner of the input. This way you don’t have to worry about your HTML form structure. The rounded corner and shadow are done with CSS3 and degrade well in non compliant browsers. There is no images needed.
29. jQuery File Tree
    jQuery File Tree is a configurable, AJAX file browser plugin for jQuery. You can create a customized, fully-interactive file tree with as little as one line of JavaScript code.
30. Using jQuery To Manipulate and Filter Data
    When a webpage is designed to display large tables of data, a great amount of consideration should be dedicated to allowing the user to sort through the data in a structured manner. In this article, it will go over four techniques: hover effects, zebra rows, filtering, and sorting.