Installing Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu

So finally, after having waited in my to-do list for reasonably long time, Ruby and Rails is installed on my Ubuntu 12.04 (the proven, practical and precise OS). Yes, I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 12 after the upgrade from Ubuntu 11 rendered the OS respond slow (Ubuntu team, are you reading this?). But, I am more excited about Ruby on Rails. If you haven't heard of it yet, you need to catch up. Visit its homepage here. This post is going to talk about installing Ruby on Rails (I will call it Rails henceforth going by the common term) which...

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Install Windows 8 Consumer Preview on Oracle VirtualBox

With Microsoft releasing Windows 8 Consumer Preview at MWC in Barcelona a few days back, I could not wait to give it a try. And as you might have expected, my best bet is to get it installed on Oracle VM VirtualBox. So, lets get started. If you do not have the VirtualBox installed, you can get it from here. I have Oracle VM VirtualBox version 4.1.8 on my machine. Next, I have downloaded the consumer preview of Windows 8 from here, and you should...

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ASP.NET MVC Framework

This is the first post of ASP.NET MVC series, as promised a while earlier. There is enough information on the Internet already by now, that ASP.NET MVC 3 is already released. The posts will contain links to the required sites and of course a step by step guide to develop applications using MVC. ASP.NET MVC Framework site is the central place where (mostly) all the information regarding installing and using MVC framework is available. The current...

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Code Metrics

Well, back again. Microsoft has been using FxCop for its own code analysis purposes for long. With Visual Studio 2008, the code analysis rules were integrated into the IDE itself under the new "Analyze" menu. I will leave static code analysis for some other day. Right now, I am interested in the "Code Metrics" option under Analyze. Code metrics is a set of measures that helps you to analyze your code and indicates the complexity or maintainability...

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WebP on Google Code

Right now, I am looking at WebP, a new image format that is set as a competitor to JPEG format which is so widely on the web. We know JPEG is a lossy compression that tends to reproduce image as close as the original, and due to its ability to render closer to original images in less number of bytes, it is the widely used image (compression) format. According to Google, they tried to reproduce an image with WebP and found that the file size reduced by upto 40%, keeping the image quality same. Now, to replace JPEG by WebP is a Herculean task and...

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Keyboard shortcuts poster

Just found that the team at Microsoft has published a printable list of keyboard shortcuts for Visual Studio 2010. I have downloaded my copy for C#, and it will be on my desk by the morning. Don't doubt, this is a must have no matter how much time you spend with Visual Studio IDE. You can download them here. Choose the file and format for your favorite language. If you are using Visual Studio 2008 and missed the poster, you can download the keyboard shortcuts poster for C# here and VB here. Don't miss ...

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Null-coalescing operator in C#

This is the first time I seriously took an opportunity to look at null-coalescing operator in C#. Introduced in C# 2.0, this is one cool operator that I have hardly put into practice. Well, until now but not anymore. :) Null-coalescing operator is used to define a default value for nullable types as well as reference types. Let's look at an example. loginName = loginName ?? "guest"; What we are doing here is using the null-coalescing operator to check whether "loginName" is null. If it is null, the default value "guest" is assigned to it. This...

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Consuming Web Services

This is a continuation from the post on Web Services. To read the first part, click here. In the last post, I introduced Web Services to you. We created a service named ForexService that has one operation that accepts two input currencies as strings and returns the exchange rate as double. To consume the web service, let’s create a separate application (note that it can be any type of application, windows or web). This application will act as a...

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Introducing Web Services

I talked about WCF in brief in one of my earlier postings, but that brought forward a need for a posting on the basics of web services. So, today I am going to talk about web services at a simpler level using a scenario about foreign exchange rates. I am not talking about forex process and it’s just for example’s sake…so don’t post back saying forex rates are not decided that way! ;-) The central bank in the country decides the forex rate for every...

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Microsoft is going the jQuery way

With jQuery gaining popularity day by day and Microsoft extending support towards it through its Visual Studio IDE, it looks like the future in ASP.NET is going to rely heavily on jQuery. Before I move forward with the integration part which is the actual topic of this blog, let me give you an idea on what jQuery is. If you don't know about jQuery yet or have not followed it recently, you must now. Use of jQuery is getting serious not only with .NET...

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