If you have a high speed internet connection why not make use of it to the max to get a better performance when you browse using Firefox. Follow these simple steps at DemoGeek.com to speed up Firefox.

If you’ve ever felt that your internet connection is slow even though you have a high-speed internet connection? Even if you think you are browsing the internet on high speed you might want to read this article on how to make a simple change to Windows to get a faster and safer internet browsing experience and make this little change to your Windows machine to get amazing speeds when you browse.

I’ve tried this trick and I could really feel the difference. Give it a try and let us know in comments.

How to make a simple change to Windows to get a faster and safer internet browsing experience

DemoGeek.com has an in-depth and interesting article on how to add a right click menu shortcut to turn on or off Windows Vista’s Aero effect. The article is in-depth in detail and has a lot of screenshots to explain the concept better. It’s an interesting hack for Windows Vista.

Read the full article on how to add a right click menu shortcut to turn on or off Windows Vista’s Aero effect.

Microsoft announced the big news at Microsoft Sales Training Conference in Orlando, FL. The big news was what was previously been called as “Vienna”, the next major version of Windows, will now be called “Windows 7″ and would be due in the next 3 years time frame.

Source: Engadget

Tags: Windows, Windows Vista, Windows Vienna, Windows 7, Microsoft, News

Google just released a new feature to its Google Maps called Mapplets. Mapplets are simple/small gadgets that can be embedded into the Google Maps. Mapplets can be found under “My Maps” if you are signed-in to Google network. There are bunch of Mapplets that Google has put out to begin with including, Real Estate Search, Photos, Gas Prices, Distance Measurement Tool, Earth as Art, and Crop Circles. But when you click the “Add Content” button you get a much bigger list of all the available Mapplets and I’m sure if you don’t find the one you are looking for it would be available soon.

To check out Google Mapplets you would, obviously, have to visit Google Maps.

Tags: Google, Google Maps, Mapplets, Google Mapplets, Breaking News, New Features

The consumer version of Office 2007, which launched only four weeks ago, is designed to withstand higher scrutiny by malicious code writers, as Microsoft subjected the software to code auditors as part of its security development lifecycle.

But researchers at eEye Digital Security found a file format vulnerability in Microsoft Office Publisher 2007, which could be exploited to let an outsider run code on a compromised PC.

“We were surprised we could find a flaw so quickly (after Office 2007 launched) and one that was part of their core products,” said Ross Brown, eEye’s chief executive.

An attacker could create a malicious publisher file, he said. Once the recipient opens the file, he or she could find the system infected and susceptible to a remote attack.

Researchers at eEye used a standard process of code auditing in discovering the vulnerabilities, Brown added. He noted that Microsoft either did not do a “good job” with its code auditing, or it may not have had enough people working on such a task.

Microsoft, meanwhile, said it is investigating eEye’s report of a possible vulnerability in Publisher 2007 and will provide users with additional guidance if necessary.

Executives at the software giant have recently said they expect security challenges to keep emerging, as an increasing number of devices connect to the Internet.

No public exploits have been reported in circulation for Publisher 2007 and, given Office 2007’s recent release, the flaw may hold little attraction for attackers who may wish to concentrate on software that is in greater distribution, eEye said.

Source

tags: Office, Microsoft, Microsoft Office 2007, Bug in Office 2007, Error, Bug

Take a look at the way the “Messenger Relay” system relays your Windows Live messages from one end to the other. (Click on the image to see the full view)

Here is how the whole thing flies around,

1. The user starts the session by double clicking a contact.
2. The user’s Windows Live ID credentials are sent across to the Windows Live ID Credentials server for further verification
3. The information is passed through a incoming only firewall to the dispatch server. This is the first point of connection for the message being sent.
4. Depending where the user is in the world, a connection will be made to the local notification server. There are main ones in Singapore, Dublin, Redmond and Reading. This keeps the connection between the two users alive, and keeps things updated such as user status, chat requests and email notifications from Windows Live Mail/Hotmail.
5. The message itself doesn’t go near the notification servers – it is passed onto the switchboard server which is the where all the messages and files are exchanged. The user starting the chat can talk to one user, whilst using another switchboard session to talk to someone else, and another switchboard session for someone else still – without even knowing it. Invitations, file transfers and video/voice chat are also sent through here.
6. The information is then relayed back through an outgoing firewall and checks the user is still online. If the user is offline by the time the message is ready to be received, then it’ll bounce back and be saved on the switchboard session until the user logs back on again. If they are online, they will receive the message.

Source: http://www.msblog.org

These days we all talk about web standards and pretty much of every web developer knows about XHTML (at least what that means, duh, if you are not). I’m a big fan of Web Standards and the benefits it bring towards the manageability of the code base and the cross browser issues that any web developer has to deal with.

Well, if you are put that “W3C XHTML 1.0″ compliant stamp on to your page you have to validate your page against the W3C Markup Validation Service. There is a huge laundry list of items that you should have to take care of to get your pages stamped but at least you should have to make sure you comply with these 9 of the most important requirements,

1. The page must include a valid XHTML DOCTYPE.

A valid XHTML page must include an XHTML DOCTYPE before any of its content. When you create a new ASP.NET page in Visual Studio 2005 or Microsoft Visual Web Developer, the correct DOCTYPE for XHTML 1.0 Transitional is automatically included in the page. Here are the four standard XHTML DOCTYPES:

XHTML 1.0 Transitional

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

XHTML 1.0 Strict

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

XHTML 1.0 Frameset

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">

XHTML 1.1

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

Adding a DOCTYPE to a page has an impact on how the page is rendered in a browser. See the section below entitled XHTML and DOCTYPE Switching.

2. The root element must refer to the XHTML namespace

The opening <html> tag of an XHTML page must specify a default namespace of http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml. Here’s a sample of a valid opening <html> tag for an XHTML 1.0 Transitional page.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

 

3. All element and attribute names must be lowercase.

XML is case-sensitive. Therefore, there is a difference between the <p> tag and the <P> tag. Only the former is a valid XHTML paragraph tag.

4. Attribute values must always be quoted.

Always wrap attribute values in either double or single quotation marks. For example, the following is invalid XHTML.

<a href=SomePage.aspx>Next</a> 

In this case, the href attribute is missing quotation marks. The following is valid XHTML.

<a href="SomePage.aspx">Next</a> 

You can configure Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Web Developer to automatically quote attribute values, by selecting the menu option Tools, Options, Format.

5. All non-empty elements that have an opening tag must have a matching closing tag.

If you have an opening <p> tag, then you must include a closing </p> tag to mark the end of the paragraph. In the case of tags that never contain any content, such as the <br> tag, you can either supply a both an opening and closing <br></br> tag, or you can use the empty element shorthand <br />.

In order to make your XHTML pages backward-compatible with existing HTML browsers, you need to be careful about how you open and close your tags. For example, existing HTML browsers tend to misinterpret an opening and closing <br></br> tag as two <br> elements. For that reason, you should use the empty element shorthand <br />.

Furthermore, existing HTML browsers have problems with the empty element shorthand <br /> unless you are careful to add a space before the closing slash. So, you should add a <br> element to a page using <br [space] /> and not <br/>.

6. There must be no overlapping tags.

You can nest tags, but you are not allowed to overlap tags. For example, the following XHTML is valid.

<b><i>This is bold and italic</i></b>

However, the following XHTML is invalid.

<i><b>This is bold and italic</i></b>

 

7. There must be no attribute minimization.

All attributes must have a value, even when it looks a little strange. For example, the tag <input type=”checkbox” checked /> is invalid XHTML, because the checked attribute does not have a value. The tag should be written <input type=”checkbox” checked=”checked” />.

8. The id attribute must be used instead of the name attribute.

In HTML, you use the name attribute to identify <a>, <applet>, <form>, <frame>, <iframe>, <img>, and <map> elements. While you can use the name attribute when building XHTML 1.0 Transitional pages, the name attribute has been removed from the XHTML 1.0 Strict and XHTML 1.1 standards. You should use the id attribute to identify these elements instead.

9. The contents of <script> and <style> elements must be wrapped in CDATA sections.

If you use special characters such as < or &, or entity references such as &lt; or &amp; in a script or style sheet, then you’ll need to mark the contents of your script or style sheet as a CDATA (character data) section, as follows.

<script type="text/javascript">
<![CDATA[

function isLess(a, b) {
  if (a < b)
    return true;
}

]]>
</script>

Notice that the JavaScript function contained in the script includes a < character. If you do not wrap the script in a CDATA section, then the < character would be interpreted as marking the start of an XHTML tag.

Using a CDATA section will not work with all browsers. For example, Internet Explorer considers a CDATA section in a <script> tag a syntax error. You can avoid this problem by adding JavaScript comments, as follows.

<script type="text/javascript">
/* <![CDATA[ */

function isLess(a, b) {
  if (a < b)
    return true;
}

/* ]]> */
</script>

JavaScript uses /* and */ to mark the beginning and end of a comment. Therefore, the CDATA section is hidden from the JavaScript, but not from the browser that parses the page. In general, it is a better idea to place your style rules and scripts in external files and reference the files from your XHTML pages. Using external style sheets and scripts enables you to avoid all of these issues.

After making sure these requirements are met then you can head towards the W3C Markup Validation Service to get your pages stamped as XHTML compliant.

Hope it helps.

Red Gate has released a public beta of a new tool, SQL Doc.

SQL Doc is a simple tool for documenting your SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 databases. You can download this beta from here.

This beta release of SQL Doc includes the following features:
- Document one or many databases
- Produce documentation in HTML, with or without frames
- Includes all cross-database dependencies
- Live preview pane
- Command line access version

Limitations:
As you know, this is a beta release and will probably contain some bugs.

And they claim that the following are the known issues which they claim will be fixed by the final release:
- Menus do not work correctly under Windows Vista
- Connection properties dialog does not always behave correctly when editing an existing project

The picture below will give you an idea of what SQL Doc can do. Click on the picture to view the original size.

(If you don’t see any of the images below please refresh the page a few times until you see the images. WordPress for some reason randomly cuts off some of the images at times. My apologies for the inconvenience.)

I know I’m blogging this a bit late but I just wanted to get this info out to my readers anyway. Microsoft ASP.NET Atlas team has released the renamed framework, which competes with AJAX, with the name “ASP.NET AJAX“. They call the initial release as “ASP.NET AJAX v1.0“.

AJAX is a great infrastructure and a great experience for the web based users without having to mess with page refreshes for small little things. It gives the user an enhanced and rich user experience allowing things to be done in the background without stealing the control of the page from the user. It provides the framework and controls to support/enable this great user experience.

At a glimpse, here is what the ASP.NET team says about AJAX,

Cross browser compatibility…that’s a great news from Microsoft. I love it when things work across the browsers without having to tweak things to make it work across. That’s a great news. I’ve tried this a bit and it looks very promising and cool to me. We even have thought about using this on one of our product functionalities. There are pretty lengthy keyword/attribute names to deal with but hey, as long as it works who cares.

For those of us to get started on this new framework, Scott Guthrie, the General Manager at the .NET Development Platform team, has put forward a videocast that explains pretty much of the basics for anyone to get started. (You might want to watch the video very closely as Scott is fluent enough to do things pretty fast).

There are a bunch of other ASP.NET AJAX resource videos at this location. It’s pretty cool to see Nikhil Kothari, the guy who is the cause of this whole thing from the beginning, has some videos for us to view. Great job Nikhil.

Okay…enough said. Go ahead and get the new framework, read some of the documents, watch few videos and get started.

(Alternate link if you don’t see the “Download Now” image above.)

You might want to download this as well as this toolkit has pretty rich and ready-to-run sample controls and a powerful SDK to simplify creating custom ASP.NET AJAX controllers and extenders.

(Alternate link if you don’t see the “ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit” image above.)

Of course, you should visit the official ASP.NET AJAX site to understand this whole thing. This site is the home site for ASP.NET AJAX and it has pretty extensive help/documents/videos to get started on this new framework.