Jay's Blog

How Often Should I Charge My Gadget’s Battery to Prolong Its Lifespan?

2012-01-23T22:02:00.001+05:30

Referred URL

http://lifehacker.com/5875162/how-often-should-i-charge-my-gadgets-battery-to-prolong-its-lifespan

Most lithium batteries should last you a few years, but improper care can decrease that lifespan, meaning that your battery will be unable to hold a charge—or unable to hold as big a charge as it used to—quicker. So, to clear things up, here's how to actually extend your battery's health as much as possible.

Full size
Perform shallow discharges. Instead of discharging to 0% all the time, lithium-ion batteries do best when you discharge them for a little bit, then charge them for a little bit. The table at the right, from Battery University, shows that discharges to 50% are better for your battery's long-term life than, say, small discharges to 90% or large discharges to 0% (since the 50% discharges provide the best number of cycles-to-usage ratio).
Don't leave it fully charged. Similarly, lithium-ion batteries don't need to be charged all the way to 100%. In fact, they'd prefer not to be—so the 40%-80% rule you heard is a good guideline. When possible, keep it in that range to prolong its life as long as you can. And, if you do charge it to 100%, don't leave it plugged in. This is something most of us do, but it's another thing that will degrade your battery's health. If you need to charge it overnight, use something like the Belkin Conserve Socket to stop it from charging after it's full.
Fully discharge it once a month. This may seem contradictory, but hear us out. While lithium-ion batteries shouldn't be discharged regularly, most modern batteries are what's known as "smart batteries", which means that they can tell you how long you have until your battery dies (e.g. "2 hours, 15 minutes remaining"). This feature can get miscalibrated after a lot of shallow discharges. So, manufacturers recommend fully discharging your battery once a month to make sure this stays accurate.

‘Damaged UDisk’ error message in Android Tablet

2012-01-18T15:53:00.001+05:30

Folks recently i purchased a Android 7inch Zync tablet and tried for connecting with 3G data card. When I insert my Huawei 3G data card it was showing the ‘Damaged UDisk’. I was bit confused and then i found the solution.

Problem is

Since the 3G data card is USB type, It search for memory card or storage area, Where 3G data card by default doesn’t have a memory card.

Steps to Connect

1) Leave about that error part and continue these steps for 3g Connection.

2) Goto 3G settings and enter connection details

3) Click submit

Connection Details for all Network

BRAND / Profile Name	APN	DIAL NO.	USER NAME	PASSWORD
Reliance 2G & 3G	RCOMNET OR SMARTNET	*99#	Blank	Blank
Airtel 2G & 3G	airtelgprs.com	*99#	Blank	Blank
Tata Docomo 2G	tata.docomo.internet	*99#	Blank	Blank
Tata Docomo 3G	tatadocomo3g	*99#	Blank	Blank
Vodafone 2G & 3G	www	*99#	Blank	Blank
Aircel 2G & 3G	aircelgprs or aircelgprs.co	*99#	Blank	Blank
Videocon 2G & 3G	vgprs or vinternet	*99#	Blank	Blank
Uninor	uninor	*99#	Blank	Blank
BSNL	bsnlnet	*99#	Blank	Blank
IDEA	internet	*99#	Blank	Blank

Need to Combine E-Learning with Mentoring? Here’s a Simple Solution.

2012-01-11T17:29:00.001+05:30

Referred URL

http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/need-to-combine-e-learning-with-mentoring-heres-a-simple-solution/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+RapidElearningBlog+%28The+Rapid+E-Learning+Blog%29

Recently someone asked how to combine their mentoring program with elearning courses. This is something I’ve worked on a few times over the years. It usually involved a production environment where peer coaches were tasked with training new employees on the floor. But the ideas in this post could work in any type of training program that includes some sort of mentoring or peer coaching.

A Common Case

A person’s hired to a new position and often assigned a peer coach who walks beside him until he’s up-to-speed. Not only is this an effective way to teach new employees, it’s also a great way to help build a social connection to the work and organization.

However, there are a few challenges with this type of training and many are overcome by blending elearning content with the peer coaching.

Here are a few of the challenges I’ve encountered:

Pulling people from real production. The peer coach also has her own job to do. So there’s pressure to help the new person but then get back to work. Because of this, the peer coach may take short cuts, not present complete information, or neglect the needs of the new person.
Inconsistent training process. Much of the new person’s learning is dictated by the peer coach’s own work flow. This can make it a challenge if the new person doesn’t fully understand what’s going on and jumps from one thing to the next without understanding the proper context or work process.
Assign the wrong tasks to new learners. It’s common to pawn off the easiest or less desired tasks to the new person. Sometimes there’s too much focus on putting people on the simplest work until “they get it” and then advance them to more challenging work later on.
Learning can be intimidating. People can be intimidated by new tasks, especially in a real work environment where mistakes impact production.

The Value of E-Learning

There should be some consistency in the training process. However, peer coaching programs are notorious for inconsistency. Even if the peer coach is really good, things like work requirements or personal areas of emphasis tend to make each training event a bit different. That’s where elearning proves valuable.

E-learning courses are effective in dealing with these challenges. Elearning courses allow you to remove the person from the time and resource pressures of the real world. This can ensure consistent delivery of critical information as well as compress the time to learn.

Doesn’t interfere with production: the learner is not constrained by real work processes.
Asynchronous access: The information can be accessed anywhere and at any time.
Less demand on peer coach: The peer coach can spend less time with the learner for some of the training.
Consistent messaging & delivery: Information structure and delivery is consistent regardless of peer coach’s personal style or emphasis.
Intentional training design: Allows you to present a more holistic and complete training program rather than sticking people on the easy tasks or boring work until some later date.

Elearning modules are excellent for delivering key information that may missed during on-the-job training that’s focused on very specific tasks. For example, in a real production environment while showing someone how to use a machine you may focus on the actual steps required for performance but lose out on explaining the upstream and downstream effects of the workflow. In addition, production environments tend to be loud, which makes it difficult to have good conversation.

This can be solved with a simple orientation module where you provide a brief overview of the production process and workflow. This allows you to maintain consistent messaging and it frees the peer coach from that part of the training. You can also structure the module to review and assess the learner’s understanding, something that may be missed on the floor.

I worked on a production course once where we found the new hires were intimidated by the large machines. So instead of putting them to work right away, we spend time teaching them the parts of the machine and how to do preventive maintenance. We used a series of small elearning courses to go through the technical information and combined them with hands-on preventive maintenance.

By the time they started working on the machine they were very familiar and comfortable with what was going on. We cut the training time dramatically. The elearning courses also allowed us to control the information and practice activities. Something that may have varied based on the peer coach.

The Learning Journal

Part of the training happens during the elearning module and part during the face-to-face time. To create a bridge, I like to add a learning journal. I see it as a way to instigate some note-taking and create a resource that becomes personal and something the learner always has access to. The note-taking in the learning also helps with knowledge transfer.

What’s included in the learning journal?

Training calendar. Give the person a schedule that lets them know what they will be learning. They can check off what they’ve learned as they advance. This provides a progress report to the learner, the peer coach, and supervisor.
Self-assessment. List the things they need to know or do to be proficient. They can review it and determine how well they’re doing. Include information on finding additional resources. I like this approach because it gives the learner some freedom and confidence as they assess their skills.
Peer coach guides. Each elearning module should be coupled with a real-world activity. The peer coach guide tells the learner and peer coach what that is. This helps move the training forward. The peer coach is obligated to this process so they take fewer short cuts. And the learner is able to determine if something’s been skipped. I also include some quick review questions that cover the essential points of the module. After each module, the peer coach uses the questions as a way to review what was learned and assess the new person’s understanding.

The Peer Coach

A mentored training program is an effective way to train new employees. But it’s also a great way train existing employees who are being groomed for greater management responsibilities. You can use the peer coaching process as a way to teach giving feedback and supervising others. It’s a great way to model the expectations you would have for supervisors or managers.

The key to success is consistency and commitment to the process. At the same time, the peer coaching needs to work in a real environment.

Get peer coaches involved. When building this type of training it’s critical to connect with the peer coaches to craft the right types of activities and how to schedule them. Otherwise the training program becomes burdensome and creates extra work as people circumvent the official training to get things done quickly.
Teach them how to review progress and fill gaps. We combined the elearning module with a real-world activity. The peer coaches reviews what’s learned online to get a sense of how the person is progressing and to fill any gaps. The learning journal’s structure facilitates assessing the learner’s understanding.
Empower the peer coach. The objective is to create a good training program. People learn in different ways so the peer coach has to have some flexibility in how they work through the training with the new employee. Break the content into smaller modules so that you have more freedom to work with them.

Beware of Bureaucracy

The training program is a solution that helps meet your objective of training people. The goal is that people are able to meet a specific level of proficiency. It’s not that they go through training. Often we focus too intently on the process that we lose sight of the real objectives.

While you want to design a good training program that is consistent and effective, it has to include a way to work with the learner as an individual and how she learns. The last thing you want is a burdensome process that is also so rigid that doesn’t account for how the trainee is actually doing and able to demonstrate understanding.

The peer coach plays a critical role in assessing the person’s progress and understanding of the key points of the training. You can alleviate the bureaucratic elements by having clear metrics for proficiency.

To sum it all up:

Determine what content can be taught electronically and what needs to be done in the real world.
Break the content into smaller modules with each module combining elearning and real world learning.
Use a learning journal as a means to bridge the two parts of the module and facilitate the conversation between learner and peer coach.
Get the peer coach involved in the training design.
Use the peer coaching experience as a way to develop that person’s management skills.
Avoid bureaucracy.

Self Massage

2012-01-10T19:19:00.001+05:30

Organs connected with Leg

2012-01-10T19:18:00.001+05:30

Ten Things To Do to Secure an Important Person's Computer

2012-01-07T15:55:00.001+05:30

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TenThingsToDoToSecureAnImportantPersonsComputerOrEvenAshtonsOrAKardashians.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScottHanselman+%28Scott+Hanselman+-+ComputerZen.com%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

1. Find Your Phone - Make your cell phone "findable"

It flat sucks to lose your phone.

If you have a Windows Phone, you can go to http://windowsphone.com/my to locate, ring, lock or even torch your phone. It just works and it's on when you setup your phone for the first time.
If you have an iPhone (or any iDevice, in fact) you can go to http://icloud.com, sign in and locate, run, lock or wipe your phone as well. For offline phones, you can have it email you when the phone is found (turned on). You'll want to update your iPhone to iOS 5 and run through the initial wizard in order to confirm this is working for you.
There's a dozen or more choices for Android phones, but I suggest you check out either Plan B or Where's My Droid. A third good option that you could use on all your devices is Prey. Each of these will do what they need to. Find your phone.

Test your chosen Find My Phone technique before you go off losing it! Make sure all your stuff is backed up occasionally so you won't feel bad at all about a Remote Wipe (erasing your phone so the bad guys don't get it).

Add a Pin Number and Lock Your Phone

Next, DO Add at a Pin Number or password to your Phone. Having a phone that's unlocked already is just asking for trouble. You can always pick a simple 4 digit pin but pick SOMETHING.

Make an "If Found" Wallpaper

However, if you do use a password or pin and lock your phone by default, be sure to update your wallpaper to include contact info. I highly recommend the application If Found+ for the iPhone. It'll take your existing WallPaper and stamp a "If found, call..." or "Reward if found, email..." on your phone. Sometimes $50 and a phone number will get you your phone back quickly.

2. Don't be Trackable - Turn of Location Settings for specific apps on your Phone, Twitter and Facebook

You want to be able to find your phone, but you shouldn't give away your location when you talk online. Ever heard of http://pleaserobme.com? They'll look at your Twitter account and see if you're giving away your location via FourSquare checkins and the like. The bad guys would love to break into your house when they can be sure you're not there. Broadcasting your location is a great way to make it easy for them.

There are many ways you can accidentally give away your location. First, in your Twitter profile. Early iPhone Twitter clients would update this field automatically with your exact latitude and longitude.

For example, here's a parody account that indicates it's not a real person. However, I can still tell where they are in the world...down to 6 decimal points.

Another way is to tweet and include your location, either on purpose or accidentally. Most Twitter clients have a "geotag" button now, but you may just want to turn that feature off completely by denying the twitter application access to your Location Services.

Also, don't be the mayor of your house. Foursquare recently started "blurring" the locations of what it believes are residences, but you can still give your location in general terms when you check into a home or residence.

3. Lock your Laptop - Secure your computer (desktop OR laptop)

I amazed at how few people even bother to put a password on their laptops. Yes, there's always a way to break a password or get information off a hard drive, but why make it easy for them? The main concern is that if you allow anyone to boot up your computer and run a web browser, chances are that you've clicked "Save Password" on your Facebook or Twitter or, even worse, your email. At that point you're dead.

Consider installing PreyProject on your machine. It can make it possible to track your laptop or desktop if it's stolen. There's been a number of times where folks have been able to track a thief in real-time and secure their belongings - while live-tweeting the whole event!

4. Encrypt it ALL - Secure your personal files and external hard drives

Here's an experiment that will scare the crap out of you. Use your computer's search function (upper-right corner on a Mac and lower-left on a PC) and type in your Social Security number. Go ahead, it's not going to the internet. See if you find some PDFs from your accountant or an old Excel file. Freaked out now? Now either delete it or put it somewhere secure.

If you have files with information you don't want falling into the wrong hands, consider using a tool like TrueCrypt to make an "encrypted volume."This is a single file that you can access as if it were a disk itself. You can make a "personal.dat" file of any size and keep your personal information inside that "disk inside a file." You can then keep that file in DropBox or another cloud storage system. With a strong password, these TrueCrypt files are VERY VERY secure.

If you have a technical friend with you, you can even encrypt your entire disk with TrueCrypt. Or, if you have Windows 7 Ultimate, you can "bitlocker" it, as I do all my drives. This way, even if a bad guy gets your laptop, they can't do anything with your drives. They are bricks without passwords and pins.

5. Don't Carry Your Life in Your Pocket - Encrypt USB Keys and "Jump Drives"

Some folks will take precautions with laptops and computers but then copy their whole life to a portable USB stick and put in their pocket.

If you can, encrypt your files on your portable drive - again, with TrueCrypt or BitLocker.

6. Use Better Passwords - Make it harder, or use Pass Phrases

Using the name of your last movie or the street that you grew up on may seem like a clever password but it's not. A lot has been said online about password strength, so I won't belittle the point.

If you can, use a passphrase that's longer than a password, but easier for you to remember.

7. Super Secure your Email - Turn on 2-factor auth in Gmail

After you have a great password, if you've got a Gmail account for example that you REALLY can't have compromised, consider turning on "two factor authentication."

Hang in there, Kim. Sounds scary, but isn't. Two factor means, two things that you have or remember. A password is just one thing you have to remember. It's one factor. But two factors means a password plus something else. The second thing will be something you have.

You always have your phone, right? So why not make it so your Gmail account requires a password (that you know) and your phone (that you have).

To set this up in Gmail you go to using 2-step verification.
- You can turn it on and give it your cell phone number. You can then install a small application that will give you a code that you'll use as yoursecond factor when you log in. "But, wait, that sucks! I don't want to do that every time I log in!" Don't worry, darling. You don't have to. You can tell Gmail to only require this code every 30 days.
- If you have other services, apps, or maybe your phone's email that use your Gmail password these will suddenly think the password has changed because they don't understand two-factor auth. For these applications, you'll just give them their own custom password.
  - You go to manage application-specific passwords and get a password or two for your phone's mail or other apps that need Gmail access. The nice thing is that each app gets its own password so you can revoke them at anytime!

You can also tighten up your Facebook security by turning on Login Approvals. This is effectively two factor authentication as well. Facebook can SMS (text) you when you log in and then you type in the number they send you to confirm that not only do you know your password, you also have your phone.

8. Hide Where You Live - Make sure None of your Domains have your Home Address visible

Make sure if you own a domain that you've turned on Privacy or use DomainsByProxy or some other "WhoIs Privacy Protection." You don't want a fan showing up for dinner.

9. Secure Your Login - Turn on SSL/HTTPS for Twitter, Gmail and Facebook

If you find yourself in a Starbucks or on location a lot using strange Wi-Fi, you should probably make sure that your Twitter and Facebook accounts are using https (the S is for more Secure) by default. That's the same kind of encryption your bank uses. Just check your Twitter and Facebook accounts. You only need to do it once.

Here's Twitter:

And Facebook:

You can also Google more securely at https://encrypted.google.com or https://duckduckgo.com.

10. If it starts with HTTP, it's probably public - BTW, TwitPics are Public

If you use a tool like TwitPic or any online photo sharing, or - let's just be straight here - anything online...it's likely public. If it has a URL, someone can get to it. Assume everything you do online is public.

I've personally watched a number of celebrities have conversations between each other on Twitter as if Twitter were a private chat. Just last month Charlie Sheen tweeted his phone number to Justin Bieber. So, he got a new phone. http://3109547277.com

Also, just an FYI. Don't take a picture of your pee-pee. There's just no reason for that.

Life’s Secret Tips

2012-01-04T07:56:00.001+05:30

Microsoft outlook - Exchange server unavailable

2012-01-04T07:25:00.001+05:30

If you get error as ‘Exchange server unavailable. Contact System Administrator’ When opening Microsoft Office Outlook for first time for configuration.

Goto

Control Panel -> Mail -> Profile -> New -> Enter login user name –> Next.

Devotional Q&A

2011-12-28T10:23:00.001+05:30

Hanuman Slogam

2011-12-28T10:21:00.001+05:30

Unlock Hidden Options In Reliance NetConnect Broadband Plus UI Interface

2011-12-23T17:55:00.001+05:30

Referred from : http://www.technixupdate.com/unlock-hidden-options-in-reliance-netconnect-broadband-plus-ui-interface/

When you install reliance netconnect software on your computer, it hides some of the useful options by default and these options are statistics, sms, conenction history and lot more. The default interface of the Netconnect Broadband Plus software looks like as shown in the image below.

After tweaking the interface by replacing the file called PluginsConfig.xml it reveals the following hidden options as shown in the image below.

It have some useful options like Statistics which lets you see a detailed graph of upload and download speed of your connection, sms option, connection history which lets you about session history and time per session and lot more other options which you may found useful.

Here is how you can replace the file required to reveal all the above shown options in the image above.

Tip by Tony222

Replace the PluginsConfig.xml file at the following path “C:\Program Files\Reliance Netconnect – Broadband+\config\PluginsConfig.xml” with file you download from the following links

http://www.easy-share.com/1909041491/PluginsConfig.xml
or
http://uploading.com/files/cc6338c7/PluginsConfig.xml/

In order to see all the options completely you will need to modify the value in another file at the following path

C:\Program Files\Reliance Netconnect – Broadband+\SysSetting.xml”

Set the value 16:9 where you found 4:3 in the above file

This way you can add more options to the reliance USB data card interface, its actually works.

சனிதோஷம் நீங்க நளன் கதை

2011-12-23T17:39:00.001+05:30

ஆகுகன், ஆகுகி என்ற வேட தம்பதியர் காட்டிலுள்ள குகை ஒன்றில் வசித்தனர். அவ்வழியே வந்த துறவி ஒருவரை அவர்கள் உபசரித்தனர். இரவாகி விட்டதால், குகைக்குள் துறவியும், ஆகுகியும் தங்கினர். அதில் இருவர் தான் தங்க முடியும் என்பதால் வேடன் வெளியில் தூங்கினான். தன் மனைவி ஒரு ஆணுடன் தங்கியிருக்கிறாள் என்ற எண்ணம் அவனுக்கு இல்லை. தன் மீது நம்பிக்கை வைத்த வேடனை முனிவர் பாராட்டினார். அயர்ந்து உறங்கிய வேடனை ஒரு மிருகம் கொன்று விட்டது. விஷயமறிந்த ஆகுகியும் உயிர் துறந்தாள். சுயநலமில்லாத இத்தம்பதியர் மறுபிறவியில் நள தமயந்தியாகப் பிறந்தனர். துறவி அன்னப்பறவையாக பிறந்தார். நளன் நிடதநாட்டின் மன்னராக இருந்தான். ஒருநாள் அன்னப்பறவையைக் கண்டான். நளனின் அழகைக் கண்ட பறவை, "உனது அழகுக்கேற்றவள் விதர்ப்ப நாட்டு மன்னன் வீமனின் மகள் தமயந்தி தான். அவளை திருமணம் செய்து கொள். உனக்காக தூது சென்று வருகிறேன்,'' என்றது. அன்னத்தின் பேச்சைக் கேட்ட தமயந்தி காதல் கொண்டாள்.

இதனிடையே சனீஸ்வரர் உள்ளிட்ட தேவர்கள் தமயந்தியை விரும்பினர். அவளின் சுயம்வரத்தில் அனைவரும் பங்கேற்றனர். எல்லாருமே நளனைப் போல் உருமாறி வந்தனர். நிஜ நளனும் வந்திருந்தான். புத்திசாலியான தமயந்தி உண்மையான நளனுக்கே மாலையிட்டாள். அவர்களுக்கு இந்திரசேனன், இந்திரசேனை என்ற குழந்தைகள் பிறந்தனர். தமயந்தியை பெற முடியாத தேவர்கள், சனீஸ்வரரிடம், நளனைப் பிடிக்கும்படி கூறினர். கடமை உணர்வு மிக்கவர்களை சனீஸ்வரர் ஏதும் செய்யமாட்டார். அதே நேரம், கடமையில் சிறுகுற்றம் இருந்தாலும் பொறுக்க மாட்டார். நளனோ நல்லாட்சி செய்தான். இப்படிப்பட்ட ஒருவனை அவரால் பிடிக்க முடியவில்லை. ஒருமுறை பூஜைக்கு தயாரான போது, சரியாகக் கால் கழுவவில்லை. "இதைக் கூட சரியாக செய்யாத மன்னன் நாட்டை எப்படி ஆளமுடியும்?'' என கருதிய சனி, அவனைப் பிடித்து விட்டார்.

இதன் பின், புட்கரன் என்பவனிடம் சூதாடி பொன், பொருளை இழந்தான். குடும்பத்துடன் நாட்டை விட்டு வெளியேறினான். காட்டில் மனைவி,குழந்தைகள் படும் துன்பத்தைக் கண்ட நளன், ஒரு அந்தணர் மூலம் குழந்தைகளை தன் மாமனார் வீட்டுக்கு அனுப்பினான். பின், மனைவியையும் பிரிந்தான். நடுக்காட்டில் தவித்த அவளை, ஒரு மலைப்பாம்பு சுற்றியது. ஒரு வேடன் அவளைக் காப்பாற்றினான். ஆனால், அவள் மீது ஆசை கொண்டு விரட்டினான். தப்பித்த அவள், சேதிநாட்டை அடைந்து பணிப்பெண்ணாக இருந்தாள். ஒரு வழியாக அவளை, தமயந்தியின் தந்தை கண்டுபிடித்து வீட்டிற்கு அழைத்துச் சென்றார்.

தமயந்தியை பிரிந்த நளன், காட்டில் கார்கோடன் என்னும் பாம்பு கடித்து கருப்பாக மாறினான். அப்பாம்பு ஒரு அற்புத ஆடையை வழங்கிச் சென்றது. அழகு இழந்த அவன், அயோத்தி மன்னன் ரிதுபன்னனின் தேரோட்டியாக வேலை செய்தான். அவன் அங்கிருப்பதை அறிந்த தமயந்தி, நளனை வரவழைக்க தனக்கு மறுசுயம்வரம் நடப்பதாக அறிவித்தாள். ரிதுபன்னன் அதற்கு புறப்படவே, நளனும் வருத்தத்துடன் தேரோட்டியாக உடன் வந்தான். அப்போது, நளனைப் பிடித்த சனி நீங்கியது. தேரோட்டியாக இருந்த நளனையும், தமயந்தி அடையாளம் கண்டாள். நளன், கார்கோடன் அளித்த ஆடையை அணிந்து தன் அழகான சுயஉருவை மீண்டும் பெற்றான். திருநள்ளாறு என்னும் தலத்தை அடைந்தபோது, ஏழரைச்சனி நீங்கியது. சனீஸ்வரர் நளன் முன் தோன்றி, தன்னால் ஏற்பட்ட கஷ்டத்திற்குப் பரிகாரமாக வரம் தருவதாகக் கூறினார். "சனீஸ்வரரே! நான் பட்ட கஷ்டம் யாருக்கும் நேரக்கூடாது. என் மனைவி பட்ட துன்பம் எந்தப் பெண்ணுக்கும் ஏற்படக் கூடாது. என் கதையை படிப்பவர்களை துன்புறுத்தக் கூடாது'' என வரம் கேட்டான். சனிபகவானும் அருள் புரிந்தார். நளன் கதை படித்த நீங்கள், உங்கள் கடமையைச் சரிவரச் செய்தால், சனி தோஷத்தில் இருந்து விடுபட்டு நல்வாழ்வு பெறுவீர்கள்

God Saturn Temples

2011-12-19T18:30:00.001+05:30

Using Silverlight Bing Map Controls

2011-12-15T17:25:00.001+05:30

Referred URL

http://cm-bloggers.blogspot.com/2010/01/first-steps-with-silverlight-bing-maps.html

-> To use the Silverlight Bing Maps control, you need to sign up at the Bing Maps Account Center and obtain a key.

-> Download and install the Bing Maps control.

-> Then create a new Silverlight application and add a reference to the assemblies provided with the control as shown here:

XAML File

<UserControl x:Class="BingMaps.MainPage"

xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"

xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"

xmlns:m="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Maps.MapControl;assembly=Microsoft.Maps.MapControl"

mc:Ignorable="d"

d:DesignHeight="750" d:DesignWidth="700" Width="Auto" Height="Auto">

<m:Map Name="map" CredentialsProvider="Place your Bing Key" Width="700" Height="700" />

</UserControl>

CS File

private void b1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

Uri url = new Uri("../Feed.xml", UriKind.Relative);

WebClient client = new WebClient();

client.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(client_DownloadStringCompleted);

client.DownloadStringAsync(url);

}

void client_DownloadStringCompleted(object sender, DownloadStringCompletedEventArgs e)

{

if (e.Error == null)

{

//Reads XML and Populates the Pushpins in Map

StringReader stream = new StringReader(e.Result);

XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(stream);

reader.MoveToContent();

while (reader.Read())

{

if (reader.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Element && reader.Name == "entry")

{

//Adds Tooltip

var tooltipText = "Unkown";

tooltipText = reader.GetAttribute("title");

tooltipText = tooltipText + Environment.NewLine + reader.GetAttribute("description");

//Adds Pushpin pertaining to Longitude and Latitude

string[] loc = reader.ReadInnerXml().Split(" ".ToCharArray());

double lat = Double.Parse(loc[0]);

double lon = double.Parse(loc[1]);

Pushpin p = new Pushpin();

p.Location = new Location(lat, lon);

tooltipText = tooltipText + Environment.NewLine + "Latitude - " + lat + Environment.NewLine +"Longitude - " + lon;

System.Windows.Controls.ToolTipService.SetToolTip(p, tooltipText);

p.Cursor = Cursors.Hand;

map.Children.Add(p);

}

if (reader.NodeType == XmlNodeType.EndElement && reader.Name == "entries")

{

break;

}

reader.Close();

}

Note - If map is not showing and throwing ‘Unable to connect server’ error. In Internet options check the proxy settings and enable‘Automatically detect settings’

To solve problem between Couples.

2011-12-12T21:32:00.001+05:30

PHP and MySQL 24-Hour Trainer

2011-12-12T21:28:00.001+05:30

http://libproject.net/programming/php-and-mysql-24-hour-trainer.html

Lamping Procedures on Hindu Mythology

2011-12-08T18:42:00.001+05:30

SharePoint 2010 interview questions

2011-11-26T13:24:00.001+05:30

Reference Links

http://www.learningsharepoint.com/2010/07/02/sharepoint-2010-developer-interview-questions/ (Part-1)

http://www.learningsharepoint.com/2010/07/21/sharepoint-2010-developer-interview-questions-ii/ (Part-2)

http://www.learningsharepoint.com/2010/06/19/sharepoint-2010-interview-questions/

http://www.learningsharepoint.com/2010/06/05/interview-questions-sharepoint-2010/

http://www.learningsharepoint.com/2010/07/26/sharepoint-2010-workflow-interview-questions/

SharePoint 2010 developer interview questions

Q. How does Client object model works?

Ans. When we use SharePoint client API’s to perform a specific task, the SharePoint Foundation 2010 managed client object model bundles up these uses of the API into XML and sends it to the server that runs SharePoint Foundation. The server receives this request, and makes appropriate calls into the object model on the server, collects the responses, forms them into JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and sends that JSON back to the SharePoint Foundation 2010 managed client object model. The client object model parses the JSON and presents the results to the application as .NET Framework objects (or ECMAScript objects for ECMAScript).

Q. How many types of Client Object model extension are available in 2010 and when would you use one or the other.

Ans. To develop rich client side solutions, three set of client-side APIs has been introduced in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Client namespace. The three APIs are targeted for three different types of clients.
1. .net Managed applications – These are used when we have to create console applications or window applications, web applications which are not running inside SharePoint Contex.
2. For Silverlight applications
3. ECMAScript – It is a client object model extension for using with JavaScript or JScript. This is used for creating applications which are hosted inside SharePoint. For example, web part deployed in SharePoint site can use this JavaScript API for accessing SharePoint from browser using JavaScript.

Q. What is difference between Load() and LoadQuery() methods ?

Ans. Load method populates the client object directly with what it gets data from the server i.e. a collection object like ListItemCollection etc. but LoadQuery returns the data as a completely new collection in IEnumerable format. Other major difference is that the Collections that you load using the Load() method are eligible for garbage collection only when the client context variable itself goes out of scope where as, in these collections go out of scope at the end of IEnumerable<List> list.

Q. How can you write efficient and better performing client object applications ?

Ans. You can always use Lambda expressions in your queries to return only specific properties that will be used in your block. You can also use LoadQuery() method and specify multiple levels of properties to load for e.g. while returning specific properties of the lists using LoadQuery(), you can also specify the fields to return from each list to optimize the data access.

Q. What are the Authentication methods for your client object model application ?

Ans. Basically there are three (3) authentication options you can use when you’re working with the Client Object Model in SharePoint 2010:

* Anonymous
* Default
* FormsAuthentication

You can specify clientContext.Authentication = Anonymous\Default\FormsAuthentication, If you do not choose an authentication method in your code, the application will default to using the client’s Windows Credentials (DefaultCredentials).

Q. How do you access ECMAScript object model API’s ?

Ans. The ECMAScript library is available in a number of JS files in the LAYOUTS folder. The main file among number of .js files is SP.js. When you include this file in the APSX page using a ScriptLink control, all other required JS files are loaded automatically. By linking SP.js to your page, the SP namespace gets registered. SP is the SharePoint namespace that contains all objects. For debugging purposes every js file also has a ‘debug’ equivalent in the same folder.

Q. What is the purpose of calling clientContext.ExecuteQuery() ?

Ans. ExecuteQuery gives you the option to minimize the number of roundtrips to the server from your client code. All the components loaded into the clientcontext are executed in one go.

Q. Why would you use LINQ over CAML for data retrieval?

Ans. Unlike CAML, with LINQ to SharePoint provider, you are working with strongly typed list item objects. For example, an item in the Announcements list is an object of type Announcement and an item on a Tasks list is an object of type Task. You can then enumerate the objects and get the properties for your use. Also, you can use LINQ syntax and the LINQ keywords built into C# and VB for LINQ queries.

Q. Can we use our custom master page with the application pages in SharePoint 2010 ?

Ans. With 2010, you can now set whether the pages under _Layouts use the same Master Page as the rest of your site. You can enable or disable this functionality through the web application settings in Central Administration. This however, is not applicable to your custom application pages. If you want your custom applictaion page to inherit the site master page you must derive it from Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.LayoutsPageBase class.

Q. What are WebTemplates and Site Definitions ?

Ans. Site definitions consist primarily of multiple XML and ASPX files stored on a front-end Web server in folders under the %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\14\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates directory.
Custom Web templates on the other hand, are stored in the database, and are created using an existing site, with or without its specific content, as a model. This provides a means for reusing sites that you have customized.In some ways, Web templates continue to depend, throughout their lifecycle, on the site definition that is their ultimate foundation.

Q. How do you write to SharePoint ULS logs in 2010 ?

Ans. In SharePoint Foundation, ULS exposes configurable settings in two ways, through the – Object model and Windows PowerShell cmdlets. For writing to SharePoint ULS logs developers can can use Diagnostics Service, which will make the customized categories viewable in the administrative UI for our errors.
or they can use the number of cmdlets available for accessing ULS logs using powershell. Some of the cmdlets are Get-SPDiagnosticConfig ,Get-SPLogEvent etc.

Q. What does CMDUI.XML contain?

Ans. The definitions for the out-of-the-box ribbon elements are split across several files in the SharePoint root, with TEMPLATE\GLOBAL\XML\CMDUI.XML being the main one.

Q. What has Changed in SharePoint 2010 Object model?

Ans. Microsoft has replaced the “12 hive” structure that we had in SharePoint 2007 with “14 Hive” structure in 2010.

It has apparently added four new folders to its hive.

The Folders are :
* Policy
* UserCode
* WebClients
* WebServices

Q. How would you deploy WebPart Using Windows PowerShell?

Ans. At the Windows PowerShell command prompt (PS C:\>), type the below command :

Install -SPWebPartPack -LiteralPath “FullPathofCabFile” -Name “Nameof WebPart”

Q. How would you re-deploy the old custom solutions in SharePoint 2010.What Changes are needed to the old Solution files.

Ans. SharePoint 2010 object model contains many changes and enhancements, but our custom code will still compile and, will run as expected. You should however, rewrite and recompile any code that refers to files and resources in “12 hive”.
For Details See :
SharePoint Object Model – Backward Compatibility

Q. How would you add a link in the Ribbon?

Ans. You can add any link or Custom Action under any of the existing tabs of the ribbon or can create a new a new tab and place your links under it.

Q. What does CMDUI.XML contain?

Ans. The definitions for the out-of-the-box ribbon elements are split across several files in the SharePoint root, with TEMPLATE\GLOBAL\XML\CMDUI.XML being the main one.

Q. What are the Disadvantages of Using LINQ in your Code?

Ans. LINQ translates the LINQ queries into Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) queries thus adding an extra step for retrieving the items.

Q. What is different with SharePoint 2010 workflows ?

Ans. Some of the additions in workflow model are :

1. SharePoint 2010 workflows are build upon the the workflow engine provide .Net Framework 3.5.

2. In addition to the SharePoint lists we can now create workflows for SharePoint sites as well.

3. SharePoint Designer 2010 also has a new graphical workflow designer for designing workflows and deploying them directly to SharePoint.

4. Another Improvement in SharePoint Designer 2010 is that it now allows you to edit the out-of-the-box workflows that come with SharePoint.

Q. How does Ribbon works ?

Ans. A file called CMDUI.XML stays at the web front end which contains the Out-of-Box site wide Ribbon implementation i.e. all the Ribbon UI for the entire site. In addition to this you have a CustomAction for each ribbon component. These CustomActions have CommandUIExtentions block which has CommandUIDefinitions and CommandUIHandlers which make up the activity of the ribbon component. So, when the ribbon is loaded the CommandUIDefinition merges with Out-of-Box definition in the CMDUI.XML

Q. How will you use WebParts or other solutions Created in SharePoint 2007 in SharePoint 2010 ?

Ans. In SharePoint 2010 the 12 hive is now replaced by 14 hive, So we will rewrite and recompile any code that refers to files and resources in “12″ hive. In addition to we must recompile custom code written for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 that does not run on IIS.

Q. What is the advantage in using Windows PowerShell over stsadm in SharePoint 2010 ?

Ans. Unlike stsadm, which accept and return text, Windows PowerShell is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and accepts and returns .NET Framework objects.Windows PowerShell also gives you access to the file system on the computer and enables you to access other data stores, such as the registry and the digital signature certificate stores etc..

Q. What is REST ? How is it used in SharePoint 2010 ?

Ans. REST (Representational State transfer) is a protocol (powered by ADO.NET services) which is used for getting data out of sharepoint via Url. It is mostly used to access data from sharepoint even when you are not in the sharepoint context.

Q. What datatype is retured by REST ?

Ans. REST does not return an object of type SharePoint Site\List. Instead, it returns an XML output.

Q. What is a workflow?

Ans. Workflows are the way an organization functions, a series of actions that correspond to a work process, such as the process for purchase orders.SharePoint 2010 helps you automate these workflows, thereby increasing the efficiency and productivity of the organization.

Q. What are the types of workflow that you can design in SharePoint 2010.

Ans. you can design List Workflows, Reusable List Workflows and Site workflows using SharePoint designer 2010.

Q. What Reusable List Workflows and Site workflows ?

Ans.

Reusable List Workflows -

You can create a reusable list workflow (reusable workflow) in the top-level site in the site collection, and that workflow can be made globally reusable — meaning that the workflow can be associated to any list, library, or content type in the site collection. You can also create a reusable workflow in any subsite in the site collection; this workflow is available for reuse in that particular subsite.

Site workflows - A site workflow is associated to a site — not to a list, library, or content type. So unlike most workflows, a site workflow is not running on a specific list item. Because of this, many of the actions that are available for items not available for site workflows.

Q. Can you modify the Out-of-Box workflows in SharePoint 2010 ?

Ans. In SharePoint 2010, you have an option to customize the Out-of-Box workflows. The four most popular workflows in SharePoint Server 2007 — the Approval, Collect Feedback, Collect Signatures, Publishing Approval workflows — have been completely rebuilt as declarative reusable workflows, meaning that they are now fully customizable in SharePoint Designer 2010.

Q. What are events, actions, conditions and steps?

Ans. Lets look at this one by one.

Events - An event is what starts or initiates a workflow. Events can also be used to manage the timing of actions within a workflow, such as waiting for the status of an item to change. There are three events that can start a workflow:

* An item is created.
* An item is changed.
* A workflow participant clicks a start button on the SharePoint site.

Actions – An action is the most basic unit of work in a workflow. SharePoint Designer 2010 provides a set of ready-made, reusable actions for you to incorporate into your workflow.

For example, your workflow can:

* Create, copy, change, or delete list items (including documents).
* Check items in or out.
* Send an e-mail message.

Conditions - When you design a workflow, you can use the workflow editor to create rules that apply conditional logic to SharePoint sites, lists, items and content types. A rule establishes a condition where the workflow performs the associated action only if that condition is true. For example, you can create a rule where the workflow sends a reviewer an e-mail message only if an item is created by a specific person.

Q. What are Parallel and Serial actions ?

Ans. When you have more than one action associated with a condition, the actions can be set up to run at the same time (parallel) or one after another (serial), the default.

Q. What are the Types of forms associated with the workflow ?

Ans. With SharePoint Designer 2010, you can create three types of workflow forms:

Initiation form – An initiation form gathers information from the workflow participant when they start the workflow. It is automatically generated when you create the workflow in SharePoint Designer 2010. Initiation forms are displayed to users when they manually start a workflow on a given SharePoint item. With an initiation form, users can specify additional parameters or information about the workflow as it applies to the given SharePoint item.

Task form – A custom task form allows workflow participants to interact with tasks in the Tasks list specified for the workflow. With the Custom Task Wizard, you can easily create custom form fields and add them to a custom task form. When you finish designing the workflow, SharePoint Designer 2010 automatically generates the InfoPath or ASP.NET forms for your custom tasks.

Reusable workflow – association form – A reusable workflow, by default, only provides the fields common to all items, such as Created and Modified by. This is because a reusable workflow isn’t by default associated with a list, library, or content type. An association form enables you to associate fields with a reusable workflow so that the fields will be available when you design and run the workflow.

Q. When are these forms get created ? And how do you customize it ?

Ans. SharePoint Designer 2010 automatically generates the forms, but you can customize them by going to the settings page for the workflow, in the Forms section, click the form you want to customize. Workflow forms are either InfoPath or ASP.NET pages. They are stored on the SharePoint site with the workflow source files.

SharePoint 2010 Interview Questions – IT Pro / Architect

Basic Intro SharePoint Architecture Questions

1) What are Web Applications in SharePoint?

An IIS Web site created and used by SharePoint 2010. Saying an IIS virtual server is also an acceptable answer.

2) What is an application pool?

A group of one or more URLs that are served by a particular worker process or set of worker processes.

3) Why are application pools important?

They provide a way for multiple sites to run on the same server but still have their own worker processes and identity.

4) What are zones?

Different logical paths (URLs meaning) of gaining access to the same SharePoint Web application.

5) What are Web Application Policies?

Enables security policy for users at the Web application level, rather than at the site collection or site level. Importantly, they override all other security settings.

6) What is a site collection?

A site collection contains a top-level website and can contain one or more sub-sites web sites that have the same owner and share administration settings.

7) What are content databases?

A content database can hold all the content for one or more site collections.

8) What is a site?

A site in SharePoint contains Web pages and related assets such as lists, all hosted within a site collection.

9) What are My Sites?

Specialized SharePoint sites personalized and targeted for each user.

10) What is the difference between Classic mode authentication and Claims-based authentication?

As the name implies, classic authentication supports NT authentication types like Kerberos, NTLM, Basic, Digest, and anonymous. Claims based authentication uses claims identities against a against a trusted identity provider.

11) When would you use claims, and when would you use classic?

Classic is more commonly seen in upgraded 2007 environments whereas claims are the recommended path for new deployments.

12) Describe the potential components for both a single server, and multiple servers, potentially several tiered farms:

A single-server SharePoint Server 2010 environment leverages a built-in SQL Server 2008 Express database. The problems with this environment is scalability, not being able to install the with built-in database on a domain controller, the database cannot be larger than 4 GB, and you cannot use User Profile Synchronization in a single server with built-in database installation.

An example of a multiple tier farm would be a three-tier topology, considered one of the more efficient physical and logical layouts to supports scaling out or scaling up and provides better distribution of services across the member servers of the farm. This is considered a good architecture since one can add Web servers to the Web tier, add app servers to the application tier, and add database servers to the database tier.

SharePoint Backup and Restore Questions

13) What are some of the tools that can be used when backing up a SharePoint 2010 environment?

· SharePoint farm backup and recovery

· SQL Server

· System Center Data Protection Manager

14) What Microsoft tool can be used for incremental backups?

System Center Data Protection Manager

Managed Metadata Questions

15) What is Managed Metadata?

Managed metadata is a hierarchical collection of centrally managed terms that you can define, and then use as attributes for items.

16) What are Terms and Term Sets?

A term is a word or a phrase that can be associated with an item. A term set is a collection of related terms.

17) How do Terms And Term Sets relate to Managed Metadata?

Managed metadata is a way of referring to the fact that terms and term sets can be created and managed independently from the columns themselves.

18) Are there different types of Term Sets?

There are Local Term Sets and Global Term Sets, one created within the context of a site collection and the other created outside the context of a site collection, respectively.

19) How are terms created and used?

There are several ways; however the most common is to use the Term Store Management Tool.

20) How is Managed Metadata, and the related Term technology used?

Through the UI, the most common use is through the managed metadata list column which allows you to specify the term set to use. It also related to searching and enhancing the user search experience.

Sandbox Solutions Questions

21) What is a sandboxed solution?

Components that are deployed to run within the sandboxed process rather than running in the production Internet Information Services (IIS) worker process.

22) What are some examples of things that might run within the SharePoint sandbox?

Any of the following are acceptable answers:

Web Parts
Event receivers
Feature receivers
Custom Microsoft SharePoint Designer workflow activities
Microsoft InfoPath business logic

others….

23) Why are sandboxed solutions used?

Primarily because they promote high layers of isolation. By default they run within a rights-restricted, isolated process based around Code Access Security (CAS). Isolation is possible to increase with activities like running the sandboxing service on only specific SharePoint 2010 servers.

SharePoint Search Questions

24) What is a content source in relation to SharePoint search? What’s the minimum amount of content sources?

A content source is a set of options that you can use to specify what type of content is crawled, what URLs to crawl, and how deep and when to crawl. You must create at least one content source before a crawl can occur.

25) What is a search scope?

A search scope defines a subset of information in the search index. Users can select a search scope when performing a search.

26) What is a federated location with SharePoint search?

Federated locations provide information that exists outside of your internal network to your end-users.

27) How does managed metadata affect search?

Enhances the end-user search experience by mapping crawled properties to managed properties. Managed properties show up in search results and help users perform more successful queries.

28) What is query logging in SharePoint 2010?

Collects information about user search queries and search results that users select on their computers to improve the relevancy of search results and to improve query suggestions.

29) What authentication type does the SharePoint crawler use?

The crawl component requires access to content using NTLM authentication.

Services Architecture Questions

30) Please describe what a Service Application is in SharePoint 2010.

Service applications in SharePoint 2010 are a set of services that can possibly be shared across Web applications. Some of these services may or may not be shared across the SharePoint 2010 farm. The reason these applications are shared is the overall reduction of resources required to supply the functionality these services cultivate.

31) Please provide an example of one of these service applications.

Any of the below are acceptable answers:

Access Services
Business Data Connectivity service
Excel Services Application
Managed Metadata service
PerformancePoint Service Application
Search service
Secure Store Service
State service
Usage and Health Data Collection service
User Profile service
Visio Graphics Service
Web Analytics service
Word Automation Services
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription Settings Service

32) What are Service Application Groups used for?

Just provides a logical grouping of services that are scoped to a particular Web Application.

33) How are Service Applications deployed in terms of IIS (Internet Information Services)?

They are provisioned as a single Internet Information Services (IIS) Web site.

34) Explain how connections are managed with Service Applications.

A virtual entity is used that is referred to as a proxy, due to label in PowerShell.

35) What are some common examples of SharePoint 2010 services architectures, and what are the advantages of each design?

The three most popular designs are single farms with either a single service application group or multiple service application groups, or Enterprise services farms.

Single farms with a single service application group are generally the most common, and have the advantages of easy deployment, simple service application allocation, effective resource utilization and cohesive management.

Single farms with multiple service application groups is less common, and have the advantage of potential individual management of service applications as well as allowing data isolation, and while being more complex to deploy and maintain allows targeting of sites to particular service applications.

Enterprise Service Farms is pretty uncommon as it is a complete farm dedicated to Service Applications but promotes autonomous management and high levels of data isolation.

36) Are there any other type of relevant service architectures?

Depending on the environment requirements, a specialized farm can also be used in order to deploy specific services tailored to the organizational requirements which can aid in scaling out and conservation of resources.

37) What is the User Profile service?

Allows configuring and managing User profile properties, Audiences, Profile synchronization settings, organization browsing and management settings, and My Site settings.

38) What are User Profiles?

Aggregates properties from diverse identity content sources together to create unified and consistent profiles across an organization, used throughout the SharePoint environment.

39) What is Excel Services?

Allows sharing, securing, managing, and using Excel 2010 workbooks in a SharePoint Server Web site or document library. Excel Services consists of the Excel Calculation Services (ECS), Microsoft Excel Web Access (EWA), and Excel Web Services (EWS) components.

40) What is PerformancePoint Services?

Allows users to monitor and analyze a business by building dashboards, scorecards, and key performance indicators (KPIs).

41) What is Visio Services?

Allows users to share and view Microsoft Visio Web drawings. The service also enables data-connected Microsoft Visio 2010 Web drawings to be refreshed and updated from various data sources.

42) What is Access Services?

Allows users to edit, update, and create linked Microsoft Access 2010 databases that can be viewed and manipulated by using an internet browser, the Access client, or a linked HTML page.

43) What is the Secure Store Service (SSS)?

A secure database for storing credentials that are associated with application IDs

44) What is Content Deployment?

Content deployment enables you to copy content from a source site collection to a destination site collection.

Backup / DR Questions

45) Describe how redundancy can be built into a SharePoint environment. Please be specific in regards to any auxiliary components.

Multiple front-end web servers (WFE’s) can be deployed and correlated through Windows NLB or anything approach. Application servers can be deployed into the farm for a variety of purposes, depending on organizational requirements. Databases can be clustered or mirrored, again depending on requirements and environment.

46) From a basic standpoint, what is the difference between SQL clustering and mirroring?

Clustering provides a failover scenario whereby one or more nodes can be swapped as active depending on whether a node goes down. In mirroring, transactions are sent directly from a principal database and server to a mirror database to establish essentially a replica of the database.

Governance Questions

47) What Is Governance in terms of SharePoint 2010?

Governance is the set of policies, roles, responsibilities, and processes that guide, direct, and control how an organization’s business divisions and IT teams cooperate to achieve business goals.

48) What are some useful, OOB features of SharePoint that aid with governance of an environment?

Any of the below are acceptable answers. There are some others but these are the major ones that I generally look for from a candidate:

Site templates – consistent branding, site structure, and layout can be enforce a set of customizations that are applied to a site definition.

Quotas – limits to the amount of storage a site collection can use.

Locks - prevent users from either adding content to a site collection or using the site collection.

Web application permissions and policies – comprehensive security settings that apply to all users and groups for all site collections within a Web application.

Self-service site creation - enables users to create their own site collections, thus must be incorporated into a governance scheme.

Monitoring Questions

49) Describe the monitoring features that are baked into SharePoint 2010.

Diagnostic logging captures data about the state of the system, whereas health and usage data collection uses specific timer jobs to perform monitoring tasks, collecting information about:

· Performance Counter Fata

· Event Log Data

· Timer Service Data

· Metrics For Site Collections and Sites

· Search Usage Data

General Workflow Questions

50) What is a declarative workflow? Can non-authenticated users participate in workflows?

Workflows created by using Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010, the default setting enables deployment of declarative workflows. Yes, however you do not give non-authorized users access to the site. The e-mail message and attachments sent from notifications might contain sensitive information

Q. What is 14 hive in SharePoint?
Ans. See SharePoint 2010 Object Model

Q. How would you re-deploy the old custom solutions in SharePoint 2010.What Changes are needed to the old Solution files.
Ans. SharePoint 2010 object model contains many changes and enhancements, but our custom code will still compile and, will run as expected. You should however, rewrite and recompile any code that refers to files and resources in "12 hive".
For Details See :
See SharePoint 2010 Object Model - Backward Compatibility

Q. How many types of Client Object model extension are available in 2010 and when would you use one or the other.
Ans. To develop rich client side solutions, three set of client-side APIs has been introduced in the Microsoft.SharePoint.Client namespace. The three APIs are targeted for three different types of clients.
1. .net Managed applications – These are used when we have to create console applications or window applications, web applications which are not running inside SharePoint Contex.
2. For Silverlight applications
3. ECMAScript – It is a client object model extension for using with JavaScript or JScript. This is used for creating applications which are hosted inside SharePoint. For example, web part deployed in SharePoint site can use this JavaScript API for accessing SharePoint from browser using JavaScript.
Q. What are the security improvements in SharePoint 2010 ?
Ans. In SharePoint 2010 a variety of security methods have been introduced.
Claims-Based Authentication - Claims based authentication is based on identity. and trust.
Code Access Security - in which you can specify your own code access
security (CAS) policy for your web parts.
Sandbox Solutions - Sandbox Solutions which when deployed to the server, SharePoint runs in a special process that has limited permissions.
Cross-Site Scripting - Introduced to prevent Cross - Site Scripting (XSS) attacks.

Q. Whats New with SharePoint WebParts?
A developer can create two types of webparts using Visual Studio 2010.
1. Visual Webparts - Allows you to Drag and Drop the controls from the Toolbox to WebPart Design surface. You can of course write your custom code in the code file. You can also package and deploy your webparts directly to Sharepoint from VS by pressing Clt+F5. Visual studio 2010 also provides you with three different views for developing webparts. The views are split view, design view and Source view(as we have in designer 2007).
Note : The Visual Webpart project Item basically loads a User Control as a WebPart.

2. ASP.Net WebParts - Where a developer can build up User Interface and logic in a class file. You do not have designer for drag and drop of controls. This webpart inherits from standard ASP.Net webpart. For Deployment we can again use ctrl+f5 to deploy this webpart.

Q. What are the Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint.
Ans. Visual Studio 2010 includes SharePoint-specific project types and project item types, and includes powerful packaging, deployment, and debugging features that help increase your efficiency as a SharePoint 2010 developer.
Some of the Templates avaiable are :
1.Visual Web Part project template.
2. List defination template.
3. Content Type template.
4. Empty Project template.
5. Event Receiver template.
6. some workflow template.
7. the Site Definition template
and many more....

Q. What are SharePoint Sandboxed soultions ?
Ans. SharePoint 2010 provides a new sandboxed environment that enables you to run user solutions without affecting the rest of the SharePoint farm. This environment means that users can upload their own custom solutions without requiring intervention from administrators, and without putting the rest of the farm at risk. This means that the existing sites\pages or components will not be effected by the newly added soultion.
Users can deploy the below four things as sandboxed soultions :
1. WebParts.
2. Event Receivers.
3. List Definations.
4. Workflows.

Q. What are Requirenments for SharePoint 2010.
Ans. SharePoint Server 2010 will support only 64 - bit. It will require 64 bit Windows Server 2008 or 64 bit Windows Server 2008 R2. In addition to this, it will require 64 bit version of SQL Server 2008 or 64-bit version of SQL Server 2005.

Q. What is LINQ. How is it used in Sharepoint ?
Ans. LINQ is a feature of the programming languages C# 3.0 and Visual Basic .NET. LINQ allows you to query in an object-oriented way, supports compile-time check, gives you intellisense support in Visual Studio and defines a unified, SQL like syntax to query any data source. But unlike other languages and query syntaxes which vary from one type of data source to another, LINQ can be used to query, in principle, any data source whatsoever. It is commonly used to query objects collections, XML and SQL server data sources.
The LINQ to SharePoint Provider is defined in theMicrosoft.SharePoint.Linq namespace. It translates LINQ queries into Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML) queries.

Q. What Changes are made in SharePoint 2010 to enforce Referential Integrity?
Ans. In SharePoint 2010, Referential Integrity is enforced using two options, available with Look-up columns.
While creating a Look-up column, you can either choose a) Restrict Delete or b) Cascade Delete to define a relationship between the Look-up list and the list containing the look-up Column. Read Details at SharePoint 2010 Referential integrity - Using LookUp Column

Q. Whats Ribbon in SharePoint 2010?
Ans. See the Post Ribbon in SharePoint 2010

Q . Whats New in SPALerts ?
Ans. In SharePoint 2007, alerts were send only through e-mails, but in SP2010 users can also send an alert to mobile devices as SMS Message. A New property DeliveryChannels is introduced to indicate, whether the alert is delivered as E-mail or as an SMS Message.

Q. What Has Changed with SSP in SharePoint 2010.
Ans. In SharePoint 2010 Shared Service Providers (SSP's) are replaced by Service Applications. Services are no longer combined into a SSP. They are running independent as a service application. The service application architecture is now also built into Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010, in contrast to the Shared Services Provider (SSP) architecture that was only part of Office SharePoint Server 2007.
A key benefit here is that all services are installed by default and there is no SSP setup.

Explanation Of Cross Domain And Client Access Policy Files For Silverlight

2011-11-25T19:28:00.001+05:30

Referred URL

http://www.devtoolshed.com/explanation-cross-domain-and-client-access-policy-files-silverlight

Taking some of the good ideas from Adobe Flash in regards to security policy, Silverlight has implemented a similar security model to block unauthorized cross domain network calls. This plugs a potential security hole where a malicious Silverlight application could run on a page the user is viewing and make API and network calls to domains that the user is not on without his or her knowledge. Microsoft has a quick write-up on some of the security issues this solves here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc197955(VS.95).aspx.

Commonly, this issue is usually encountered in Silverlight when you see an exception like this:

An error occurred while trying to make a request to URI "http://localhost/myservice.asmx". This could be due to attempting to access a service in a cross-domain way without a proper cross-domain policy in place, or a policy that is unsuitable for SOAP services.

In order for Silverlight to call a remote resource on a different domain from where the XAP file was served such as a Web Service or RSS feed, the domain where the service or feed resides must grant access to the Silverlight application. The way this is done is using an XML file with the name "clientaccesspolicy.xml" or "crossdomain.xml".

As the above diagram illustrates, when your Silverlight application communicates with the server that served the application, the communication here is allowed because this is on the same domain from where your app was served. But when your Silverlight application attempts to communicate with a 3rd party remote server, a policy must exist (which is defined in either the "clientaccesspolicy.xml" or "crossdomain.xml" file) that allows this communication. If not policy exists on the domain different from the domain from where your Silverlight app was served, the communication is not allowed (hence the name "cross domain script attacks" because it is communication a-"cross" domains).

Difference between Cross Domain and Client Access Policy files

"crossdomain.xml" was created originally for use with Flash applications. But Silverlight also supports this file. "clientaccesspolicy.xml" is specific to Silverlight and allows you to configure specific access rules for HTTP/HTTPS communication and allowable domains.

To enable communication to a server for a specific Silverlight application, both files do not need to be present. You can choose either one depending on your preference but at least one of the files must be there with the correct rules configured. If you want to enable access for both Silverlight and Flash applications, then you might consider just having a "crossdomain.xml" file (or you could still have both this case).

Both the Cross Domain and the Client Access Policy files are XML but have different elements and format.

Example of Client Access Policy file

Client Access Policy files give you more granular controls over traffic types, access to resources, and specific HTTP header information. The following example will allow any and all request to this web server from Silverlight:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<access-policy>
  <cross-domain-access>
    <!-- Silverlight 3 or higher requires the http-request-headers attribute. -->
    <policy>
      <allow-from http-request-headers="*">
          <domain uri="http://*" />
          <domain uri="https://*" />
      </allow-from>
      <grant-to>
        <resource path="/" include-subpaths="true"/>
      </grant-to>
    </policy>
  </cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>

You can specify that only a specific file can be accessed. For instance, here we only allow HTTP traffic from any domain and we only allow these requests to serve the "myfile.xml" file:

<access-policy>
  <cross-domain-access>
    <policy>
      <allow-from http-request-headers="*">
        <domain uri="http://*" />
      </allow-from>
      <grant-to>
        <resource path="myfile.xml" include-subpaths="false" />
      </grant-to>
    </policy>
  </cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>

Here we only allow the domains microsoft.com and repeatsys.com access:

<access-policy>
  <cross-domain-access>
    <policy>
      <allow-from http-request-headers="*">
        <domain uri="http://www.microsoft.com" />
        <domain uri="http://www.repeatsys.com" />
      </allow-from>
      <grant-to>
        <resource path="/" include-subpaths="true" />
      </grant-to>
    </policy>
  </cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>

This example shows how to use the wildcard (*) to allow any sub-domain of a specific domain access. Here we are allowing all requests from any sub-domain of devtoolshed.com access:

<access-policy>
  <cross-domain-access>
    <policy>
      <allow-from http-request-headers="*">
        <domain uri="http://*.devtoolshed.com" />
      </allow-from>
      <grant-to>
        <resource path="/" include-subpaths="true" />
      </grant-to>
    </policy>
  </cross-domain-access>
</access-policy>

Example of Cross Domain file

The following example will allow any and all requests to this web server from Flash or Silverlight:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy 
  SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
  <allow-access-from domain="*" />
</cross-domain-policy>

Technically, this completely eliminates any security from the cross domain policy so although this is really convenient for development purposes, it should probably not be used in production in most cases.

If you wanted to only allow certain domains to access the system, your file could be configured like this:

<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy 
SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
  <allow-access-from domain="www.microsoft.com" />
  <allow-access-from domain="www.devtoolshed.com" />
</cross-domain-policy>

If you wanted to block all access to your server from any Silverlight or Flash application, you could use this code:

<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy 
  SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
</cross-domain-policy>

Also note, you can use the wildcard (*) character to handle the situation of multiple sub-domains on a specific domain. For instance, this file shows how to allow all sub-domains from devtoolshed.com to communicate with the server:

<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy 
  SYSTEM "http://www.macromedia.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
  <allow-access-from domain="*.devtoolshed.com"/>
</cross-domain-policy>

Where do I put the crossdomain.xml or clientaccesspolicy.xml file?

The crossdomain.xml or clientaccesspolicy.xml MUST be located at the root of your web server. If you put the file(s) in a sub-directory where your website files might be, they don’t count and won’t work. The file(s) need to be in the root of your web server so if your domain is www.devtoolshed.com, then the file(s) should be located at:www.devtoolshed.com/crossdomain.xml or www.devtoolshed.com/clientaccesspolicy.xml respectively.

What is the order that Silverlight requests these files?

When a Silverlight app communicates to a remote server, it first requests the "clientaccesspolicy.xml" file and then if that is not found, it falls back on the "crossdomain.xml" file to check if it exists. If neither does, communication will fail if this request is to a different domain than the one from which the Silverlight app was served from.

A great diagram of the process to request the file is available at:https://community.dynamics.com/blogs/cesardalatorre/comments/9579.aspx

It is a bit confusing at first thought because Silverlight is actually the one that deciphers the policy even though the policy is set and maintained at the web server where the resources that are being requested reside. Once you get over that mental hurdle, the rest is pretty easy to understand.

Domains and sub-domains are different

Also note that when we say "domain" this does not include sub domains. To a Silverlight app, the domains "www.devtoolshed.com" and "fudge.devtoolshed.com" are completely different. They must both be allowed separately. Sub-domains on a specific domain are treated as different domains to cross domain policies.

HTTP and HTTPS are different

HTTP and HTTPS are treated as separate types of requests and must be specifically allowed. Even after doing this, you may still have problems in your Silverlight app if you are running HTTPS and try to make an HTTP call or vice versa so watch out for cross SSL communication (this is kind of a separate issue from the cross domain security issues but worth noting here).

Around the world on 14 scholarships

2011-11-16T22:26:00.001+05:30

http://campus.yahoo.com/news/yeducareers360/around-world-14-scholarships-20111115

You have more reasons to cheer up as studying abroad can now be not that expensive. If you are willing to travel abroad for higher education or pursue your postdoctoral research, a number of foreign universities are keen on offering various scholarships. Along with a complete tuition fee waiver, a scholarship-holder is also awarded grants for travel and stay. In some cases, it also includes health insurance and other personal expenses. However, a little planning is recommended.

There is a tough competition for such scholarships as thousands of aspirants try their luck every day to avail of them. You should start early with your research. Read very carefully the instructions regarding the scholarship you opt for, especially the eligibility criteria as it differs from course to course. Moreover, all institutes have their own plans so application time may vary.

Also note that there is a difference between a bursary and a scholarship as the former is provided on the basis of financial need of an applicant while the latter is based on academic excellence. Scholarships are also categorised as merit-based, need-based, institutional-based, general and sociological. Experts recommend that a student should ideally apply for more than one scholarship at a time to increase chances of at least one of them working out.

So, choose your options with caution and fulfill your dream of being a part of the world’s best institutions.

SMART 2012 Scholars Programme

Synopsis:

The Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) provides fellowships to PhD graduates interested in conducting research in four different Interdisciplinary Research Groups (IRGs).

Subjects

Biosystems and Micromechanics
Center for Environmental Sensing and Modeling
Future Urban Mobility
Infectious Diseases

Fellowship covers the following:

The recipient is provided an annual salary of up to 85,000 Singapore dollars (Rs. 3,245, 000), a research grant of up to 40,000 Singapore dollars (Rs. 1, 527, 000), and a travel allowance of up to 5,000 Singapore dollars (Rs. 191, 000).

Number of Scholarships: 4

Duration:

One year beginning September, 2011

Eligibility:

Scholarship is awarded to those who have less than three years postdoctoral experience and have received their doctoral degree by September 1, 2012.

Selection criteria: The applicant would be judged on the basis of his/her Curriculum Vitae, publications and an application form consisting of a description of the proposed research project, reason for choosing SMART and a brief on the career goals and future plans.

Application deadline: December

Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme

Synopsis: The Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS), established by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC) in 2009, calls for best students from around the world to pursue full-time doctoral studies in five different schools (31 subjects) and three interdisciplinary programmes.

Disciplines:

School of Science
School of Engineering
School of Business and Management
School of Humanities and Social Science
Atmospheric Environmental Science
Bioengineering
Marine Environmental Science

The fellowship covers the following:

Provides the awardee with a monthly stipend of 20,000 Hong Kong dollars (Rs. 120,000) and a conference travel allowance of 10,000 Hong Kong dollars (Rs. 60,000) per year for a maximum period of three years.

Number of Scholarships: 135

Duration: Three years if a relevant research Master’s degree is earned prior to entering the programme or four years with a first degree.

Eligibility: Students who are seeking admission as new full-time PhD research candidates in government-funded institutions in Hong Kong irrespective of their country of origin and ethnic background are eligible for the fellowship.

Selection criteria: As PhD programmes require a combination of coursework and independent research, review panels will consider academic excellence on a priority followed by research ability and potential, communication and interpersonal skills, and leadership abilities and societal responsibility.

Felix Scholarship

Synopsis:

The Felix Scholarship is provided to underprivileged students, who get an opportunity to further their PG education at either of the universities of Oxford, Reading and Lodon’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

Disciplines:

All subjects offered by the participating universities, except medicine.

The fellowship covers the following: 100 percent of university and college fees, a grant for living expenses, and flight (India-UK or UK-India) at the start and end of your course.

Number of Scholarships:

20 by each university

Duration:

Up to 3 years depending on eligibility

Eligibility:

Candidates must be under 30 years of age on 31 January 2011.
They must demonstrate financial need. They must also possess at least a first-class Honours Degree from a University or comparable institution.
Candidates are expected by the Trust to return to work in their home country following their study.

Selection criteria: The Scholarship is awarded on the basis of outstanding academic merit and financial need. The chosen university draws up a shortlist of candidates and sends it to the Selection Committee which in turn calls individuals for an interview.

Application deadline: The application deadline is different for all the universities and they are as follow.
Oxford: January 6, 2012 for Medical Sciences and Philosophy, January 20, 2012 for all other subjects
Reading: February 10, 2012
SOAS: January 31, 2012

International Fellowships Program (IFP)

Synopsis:

Scholarships under International Fellowships Program are offered for postgraduate study through a grant from the Ford Foundation in 12 grant-making areas.

Disciplines:

Arts & Culture, Civil Society, Community Development, Finance and Economic Security, Education and Scholarship, Environment and Development, Governance, Human Rights, Media, Religion, Society and Culture, Public Health and Workforce Development.

The fellowship covers the following:

A fellowship award amount, determined by IFP, covering the cost of the study plan
Assistance in making all logistical arrangements related to visas, travel and insurance
Short-term pre-fellowship (6 to 9-month) training, including language study and courses in research and computer skills, after selection
One round trip on air to the point of destination and return to India.

Duration: Determined as part of the placement process.

Eligibility:

Indian nationals currently residing and working in the States of Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Jammu & Kashmir, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh or Uttarakhand.
Candidate should hold a Bachelor’s or a Master’s degree from a recognised Indian university with at least 55% marks. Those who already have postgraduate degrees or equivalent will be given lower preference.
He should have at least three years’ full-time work experience in the proposed area of study along with experience in leadership and community service or related activities.
Meet necessary admission requirements and language proficiency standards of the foreign or Indian university.

Selection criteria:

Fellows are chosen on the basis of their leadership potential, commitment to community and academic achievements. The candidates have to present a plan specifying how they will apply their studies to social problems in their own countries which, along with written applications, is judged by a selection panel.

Application deadline: January 2012

Commonwealth Scholarship 2012

Synopsis: Union Ministry of Human Resource Development nominates Indian students for award of this scholarship every year for higher studies, research and specialized training in various subjects in the United Kingdom.

The Award:

Six months of clinical training in either of Cancer Research, Cardiology, Gynaecology, Medicine, Dentistry, Orthopaedics, Neurology, ENTOne-year Master’s/equivalent degree or three-year doctoral degree in either of Engineering and Technology, Science (Pure and Applied), Agriculture, Humanities and Social Sciences.

The fellowship covers the following:

Student concessionary or other approved airfare to the UK and return on expiry of the scholarship

Approved tuition and examination fees.

Personal maintenance allowance at the rate of 882 Euros per month

Grant towards the expenses of preparing a thesis or dissertation, where applicable; initial arrival allowance, incorporating in initial clothing grant for scholars from tropical countries; grant for expenses for approved travel within the UK or overseas; grant towards fieldwork costs for those Scholars undertaking doctoral studies for whom a case has been made for fieldwork outside the UK.A paid mid-term fare to their home country for Scholars on three years doctoral awards.

For married Scholars selected by the Commission for awards exceeding 18 months, a marriage allowance of 220 euros per month payable provided that the husband and wife are residing together at the same address in the UK. Number of Scholarships: Up to 60 nominations containing maximum 25 for doctoral studies are sent by the ministry to Commonwealth Scholarship Commission for final selection.

Duration:

Six months for clinical training
One year for Master’s course
Three years for PhD course

Eligibility:

The candidate should not be more than 40 years of age as on October 12, 2011
He should have completed tertiary education in English medium. Those whose native language is not English will be required to provide evidence of sufficient competency in the language.
He should hold a Bachelor’s degree or Master’s degree from a recognised university with at least 60% marks in case of Humanities and Social Science while 65% in Medical, Engineering and Technology, Science and Agriculture.
For PG scholarship in Business and/or Management, the candidate must have taken Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT).
For scholarship in Economics and related subjects, he should have passed Graduate Record Examination (GRE)
For clinical training, the candidate must have qualified MBBS/BDS between October 1, 2002 and September 30, 2007
Applicants in Medicine and Dentistry should be eligible for registration with the General Medical Council or the General Dental Council

Selection criteria: Applicant has to give one page academic justification for pursuing the course in UK. In addition, he has to appear for IELTS test between October 1, 2011 and March 6, 2012

Application deadline: October 7, 2011 for downloading application form October 12, 2011 for receiving completed application in the Ministry by post/hand

CCAPS Pre-Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship

Synopsis: The Strauss Center’s Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS) fellowship programme aims at development of researchers and thought leaders on the topic of climate change and political stability in Africa. It is offered at the University of Texas at Austin.

Research areas:

Investigate where and how climate change poses threats to stability in Africa
Identify strategies to support accountable and effective governance in Africa
Evaluate the effectiveness of international aid to help African societies adapt to climate change.

The fellowship covers the following: A nine-month stipend of 24,000 dollars and one round-trip airline ticket.

Duration: One-year

Eligibility: Applicants must be registered in a PhD programme in any discipline including both the social and natural sciences. They so not have to be attending a US university or have US citizenship to apply. Preference will be given to those working on topics related to climate change, political stability, and security in Africa.

Application deadline: February 15, 2012

Cambridge University Research Career Development Fellowships

Synopsis: The University of Cambridge provides these fellowships at its Sainsbury Laboratory, giving an opportunity to junior investigators to develop their own research programme and become creative leaders in the field of plant science.

The fellowship covers the following: Successful candidates will receive an initial three years of funding, with extension for a further two years contingent on a successful scientific review, and will hold an appointment with the University of Cambridge. Funds include full salary, benefits and 40,000 pounds per annum of unrestricted research support.

Duration: Five-years

Eligibility: Applicants, of any nationality, should have between 3 and 6 years of postdoctoral experience in a field related to the overall scientific focus of the laboratory in plant development and its computational modelling. They should be able to provide strong evidence of their potential to develop independent research programmes.

Application deadline: Not fixed. Applications are peer reviewed at least three times annually.

Guest Scholarship Program for PhD and post-doctoral studies in Sweden

Synopsis: The programme provides PhD students and researchers with an opportunity to conduct a study or research visit to a Swedish university within all fields of study.

No. of scholarships: 50

The fellowship covers the following: The scholarship amounts to 12,000 Swedish Krona (Rs. 85,554) per month for PhD students and 15,000 Swedish Krona (Rs. 106,942) for postdoctoral researchers. Scholarship holders will receive travel support of 10,000 Swedish Krona (Rs. 71, 295) in lump-sum. They are also insured by the Swedish State Group Insurance against illness and accident during the scholarship period (no grants will be given for family members of the holder).

Duration: 6, 12 or 18 months

Eligibility:

Candidates, belonging to any age group, opting for PhD- level scholarship must be enrolled in ongoing PhD studies at home university while those for post-doctoral level must be holder of a PhD degree, preferably from 2006 or later.
The candidate must have not lived in Sweden for two years or more when the scholarship period is due to begin.
He must not have a Swedish permanent residence permit.
He must not have a Swedish work permit.
He must not be an EU citizen.

ICRAR Postgraduate Scholarship

Synopsis: International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) provides this scholarship to support PhD research in radio astronomy and radio astronomy engineering at the Curtin University node of ICRAR, based in Perth, Western Australia.

Research areas:

Global signature Epoch of Re-ionization science and instrument development
Low frequency phased array development for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA)
Fast radio transients science and engineering (for example, development and use of high speed digital instrumentation
Pulsar science and instrumentation development; and
Galactic X-ray binary systems

The fellowship covers the following: The scholarship will provide a living allowance of 25,000 dollars per annum and tuition fees for the duration of the course up to a maximum period of 3.5 years. A relocation allowance is available and support for travel is also available.

No. of Scholarships: One

Duration: 3 years extendable up to 6 months

Eligibility: The applicants, preferably engineer or physicist, must have completed four years of higher education studies with good marks and hold or expect to obtain First Class Honours or equivalent results. They should be eligible for admission to a higher degree by research at Curtin University and have interest in antennas, RF systems and DSP, with the emphasis between topics being adjustable.

International PhD Projects Programme (MPD) at University of Warsaw

Synopsis: The scholarship is provided by the University of Warsaw, Poland in the field of Fundamental Problems of Quantum Gravity and Quantum Field Theory in support with the Foundation for Polish Science and co-financed by the European Union within the European Regional Development Fund.

The fellowship covers the following: The scholarship holder is provided with 3500 Polish Zloty (Rs. 53,006) during stays in Poland and 5000 Polish Zloty (Rs. 75, 722) if it is outside Poland. He would receive supervision by tutors from the University of Warsaw, the University of Wrocław and the Polish Academy of Sciences Center for Theoretical Physics in collaboration with foreign partners. Long-term visits in partner institutions will also be organised.

Duration: 4 years

Eligibility: The candidate must be a Postgraduate in domains of Physics, technical Physics or Mathematics. His MSc diploma must be with the grade “Very Good” (or equivalent). He should be fluent in English language. Applicants who successfully passed an entry examination to a PhD programme in the mentioned domains during last two years and completed no more than one year of the studies may also apply.

International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) in Australia

Synopsis: International Postgraduate Research Scholarships are funded by the Australian Government to encourage exceptional students to undertake research higher degrees in Australia.

The fellowship covers the following: The candidate will receive grants for full tuition fees and health-cover for both him and his dependents. He may also be considered for an Australian Postgraduate Award living allowance scholarship. The scholarship will be tax-free if the candidate is studying full-time.

Duration: Depending on the course opted

Eligibility: The candidate must be applying to study a PhD, Master’s by research, or professional doctorate and have a minimum first class Honours or equivalent. He or she should not have previously held an Australian Government-funded research scholarship for more than 6 months. The scholarship will be tax-free if you’re studying full-time. He must not hold another scholarship worth more than 75 percent of the IPRS.

Selection criteria: Fellows are called in the month of December and if their applications are successful, they have to accept the fellowship within three weeks. The research then should be initiated by them in the first month of the next year.

Westminster International Scholarships

Synopsis: The scholarship award is provided to candidates from developing countries to study a full-time Master’s degree at the University of Forward Thinking at Westminister.

The fellowship covers the following: The scholarship-holder will get full tuition fee waivers, accommodation, living expenses and flights to and from London.

Duration: Depending on the course opted

Eligibility: The candidate must be an international student from a developing country and hold an offer for a full-time Master’s degree. Particular preference will be given to those who can demonstrate how the knowledge acquired from studies will aid the development of their own country.

Endeavour Awards

Synopsis: Endeavour Awards is the Australian Government’s merit-based scholarship programme administered by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) providing opportunities to students to undertake postgraduate study, research and professional development or PhD in any field of study in the country.

The fellowship covers the following: The award-holder will receive 23,500 dollars as award value consisting of 4500 dollars as travel allowance, 4000 dollars as establishment allowance, 2500 dollars as monthly stipend up to 6 months and health and travel insurance coverage for full period of award.

Up to 2 years for a Master’s and up to 4 years for a PhD

Eligibility:

Candidates must be aged 18 years minimum at the commencement of their Award. There is no maximum age limit.
Candidates must not hold dual citizenship with Australia.
They must be enrolled in a Master’s or PhD course in a participating country or have had their PhD conferred and received their final results prior to the commencement of their Award.
Those applying for Master’s must have completed an undergraduate degree at the time of application, demonstrating high academic achievement.
Applicants must be nominated by their host organisation and provide a completed nomination form it with their application.

Selection criteria: The candidate will be judged on his academic achievement so far in the chosen field of study, He would have to submit a proposal that is relevant to the needs and interests of the applicant’s home and host country, and evidence of participation in community service outside of the applicant’s regular studies and/or employment duties.

Fulbright-Nehru-CII Fellowships for Leadership in Management at the US

Synopsis: The Fulbright-Nehru-CII Fellowships for Leadership in Management are given to Indian business managers jointly by the United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF) and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). The programme is attended at the Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

The fellowship covers the following: The scholarship holder will receive J-1 visa support, round-trip economy class air ticket between the executive’s home town/city of work in India and Pittsburgh, total tuition fees, maintenance allowance in the US, settling-in allowance and accident and sickness coverage as per the US Government guidelines.

Duration:

Two-months

Eligibility:

The applicant should have a graduate degree and at least five years of managerial experience in an industry.
He should preferably be 45 years of age or under and in good health.
He should be present in India at the time of submitting the application and interview and if not, the authorities should be informed.
The applicant must not be residing in the US or must not have applied for or holding permanent residence (green card) in the country.
He should not have been in the US during the past three years on a teaching, research, study or professional assignment for a continuous period of three months or more, at the time of submitting the application or during the application cycle (November 2011 to May 2012).
The applicant will have to produce his employer’s undertaking to bear 50 percent of the total cost i.e 18,400 dollars.

SharePoint Silverlight Client Object Model

2011-11-04T21:50:00.001+05:30

Referred URL

http://praveenbattula.blogspot.com/2010/03/sharepoint-2010-silverlight-client.html

In this article we will go through Silverlight Client Object Model. If you want to know the other client object model types go here.ECMAScript and Managed client object models.
To communicate with the SharePoint server in Silverlight context we need to give two client SharePoint DLL references to the silver light project.

DLL's Needed:

Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.Runtime.dll.

They can be found at

C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\ClientBin.

Open Visual Studio 2010.
File -> New -> Project -> Visual C# -> Silverlight -> Select Silverlight Application project template as shown below.
Give some name to the project. In my example, I have given some meaningful name like "SP2010Silverlight_HelloWorld" and create the project.
Now, you see the below screen.
What this meaning is "Do you want to create an ASP.NET web site and host the XAP file generated to the web site". For our example, it's really not needed. But, there is no problem by using that.
Now next step is getting the SharePoint Silverlight Client Dll's reference to our project. So, for this get the SharePoint dll's to the client machine [Where we created project] and paste the DLL's in some safe location. I copied them to C:\SP2010_ClientDLL\.
Now, go to Visual Studio 2010 project right click on project -> select References and browse to location where client dll's copied and select both dll's and hit ok as shown in below figure.
After you added all references the references folder should look like this.
Now we are ready with all prerequisites and part left is with writing code. I will show you simple code on how to write the code for getting web site title and description using Silverlight Client OM.
Before start coding, we need to add reference to the namespace in page by declaring using keyword as shown below.
using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client;
This is the code to get data from a SharePoint server, in this example we are retrieving Title and Description of a web site.

It is necessary to add some code in the StartUp event handler to initialize the Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ApplicationContext with the same initialization parameters and the synchronization context for the current thread (the UI thread). This way, it is also possible to pass initialization parameters from the page to the Silverlight application.

private void Application_Startup(object sender, StartupEventArgs e)
{
this.RootVisual = new MainPage();
// Initialize the ApplicationContext
ApplicationContext.Init(e.InitParams, System.Threading.
SynchronizationContext.Current);
}

Add Name Space in Project

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client;

Add the following four private variables:

private ClientContext _context;

Now, it is necessary to add code to execute the following tasks:
1. Connect to the SharePoint server using the Connect method.
2. Connect to the lists available in the SharePoint server using the ConnectLists method.
3. Retrieve data from the ProjectsList2010 list, GetListData method.
4. Load all the available items for the ProjectsList2010 list, LoadItems method.
5. Store a local variable in a list of project instances, one for each item in the ProjectsList2010 list, fill its properties, and then bind the results list to the dataGridProjects DataGrid to display the retrieved data, using the ShowItems method.

private void LayoutRoot_Loaded(Object sender, EventArgs args)
{
_context = new SP.ClientContext
(SP.ApplicationContext.Current.Url);
_context = new SP.ClientContext("http://xpsgaston");
_context.Load(_context.Web);
//_context.Load(_context.Web, website => website.Title);
_context.ExecuteQueryAsync(OnConnectSucceeded, null);
}

private void OnConnectSucceeded(Object sender, SP.ClientRequestSucceededEventArgs args)
{
// This callback isn't called on the UI thread
Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(ConnectLists);
}

Second ASync Thread
private void ConnectLists()
{

_context.Load(_context.Web.Lists);

}

Microsoft Silverlight 4 Books

2011-11-04T20:50:00.001+05:30

http://libproject.net/programming/microsoft-silverlight-4-and-sharepoint-2010-integration.html

http://libproject.net/programming/microsoft-silverlight-business-application-development-beginners-guide.html

http://libproject.net/programming/pro-silverlight-in-vb.html

http://libproject.net/programming/microsoft-silverlight-business-application-development-beginners-guide.html

http://libproject.net/programming/pro-silverlight-in-c-2.html

http://libproject.net/programming/professional-silverlight.html

http://libproject.net/programming/foundation-expression-blend-with-silverlight.html

http://libproject.net/programming/microsoft-silverlight-data-and-services-cookbook.html

Microsoft-sharepoint-foundation-2010-inside-out

2011-10-29T22:47:00.001+05:30

http://libproject.net/programming/microsoft-sharepoint-foundation-2010-inside-out.html

Sharepoint 2010 Books

2011-10-24T20:26:00.001+05:30

Microsoft SharePoint solutions to the cloud

http://libproject.net/programming/deploying-cloud-based-microsoft-sharepoint-2010-solutions-learn-ways-to-increase-your-organizations-roi-using-cloud-technology-it-professional.html

SharePoint 2010 as a platform for Enterprise Content Management

http://libproject.net/programming/sharepoint-server-2010-enterprise-content-management.html

Sharepoint and Six Sigma E-Books

2011-10-21T21:21:00.001+05:30

Six Sigma Tools and Best Practices

http://libproject.net/business/treasure-chest-of-six-sigma-growth-methods-tools-and-best-practices.html

Customize your implementation of My Site in Microsoft® SharePoint 2010

http://libproject.net/programming/microsoft-sharepoint-2010-customizing-my-site-harness-the-power-of-social-computing-in-microsoft-sharepoint.html

SharePoint 2010: The Client Object Model

2011-09-19T20:57:00.001+05:30

Referred URLs:

http://www.chakkaradeep.com/post/SharePoint-2010-Introducing-the-Client-Object-Model.aspx

If you want to access SharePoint Server 2007 Data today, you have two ways of doing it (based on your needs):

1. Writing a Server Application

o This application resides in server

2. Writing a Client Application

o This client application can run from any other server or a desktop

How are we building these Server and Client applications today?

Server Application

We interact with the Server Object Model, which are nothing but SharePoint APIs and build applications.

For example:

List<Announcement> announcements = new List<Announcement>();

SPSite site = SPContext.GetContext(HttpContext.Current).Site;

using (SPWeb curWeb = site.OpenWeb())

{

SPList lstAnnouncements = curWeb.Lists[new Guid(LibraryName)];

//rest of the code

}

Client Application

We use the SharePoint Web Services which then interacts with the SharePoint API. Usually, developers either build their own set of web services which exposes only certain methods/functions they want to expose to the application or consume the default out of the box SharePoint web services. This becomes difficult if you are going write rich client applications such as Silverlight, or Javascript applications and most of the time accessing SharePoint data via web services is complicated. That is why, I am not going to show you an example code!

The Future of SharePoint Client Applications

SharePoint 2010 introduces the new Client Object Model. From the sneak peak videos:

“The Client Object Model (OM) is a new programming interface for SharePoint 2010 where code runs on a user’s client machine against a local object model and interacts with data on the SharePoint Server. Client OM methods can be called from JavaScript, .NET code or Silverlight code and makes building rich client applications for SharePoint easy.”

So, how things are going to change?

One API to rule them all – Yep, whether its WPF or Windows Forms or Silverlight or Javascript – your code uses Client Object Model to interact with the SharePoint site to access the data. Now, there is something common that everybody can use instead of creating their own wrapper services to access SharePoint data!

Any code sample?

The only source of information available for now is the Developer Sneak Peak Video.

In the video, a Silverlight application is built using the Client Object Model.

The assemblies added to the project are:

Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll
Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.Runtime.dll

And also there is a using statement added in the code behind:

using Microsoft.SharePoint.Client;

And the code showcasing this new Client Object Model:

You can explore the Microsoft.SharePoint.Client namespace in the SharePoint 2010 Technical Preview Documentation

What are the different Client OM supporting in the SharePoint 2010 API? [Client API]

.NET Managed Client - Implemented in .NET CLR. I mean we use this in Web, Windows and Console applications.
Silverlight Client - You can use the SharePoint objects in Silver light coding. Wow, this is going to be a huge advantage to the Silverlight applications which can be integrated into SharePoint. Before we don't have access to SharePoint objects inside Silverlight context.
ECMAScript Client - Through javascript too, we can get context and do manipulations to SharePoint objects. Do you think it's possible? Yes, its a brilliant way of thinking from Microsoft SharePoint team and this will help in great scenarios. Will explain later in this article.

Why Client Object Model comes into the picture? Are there any specialties of them?

The main started point to think by SharePoint team are as follows.

Is it really necessary to have SharePoint installed on server for SharePoint development? - Yes, in SharePoint 2007 you have to install SharePoint on the server to write code and test it.
What is the advantage of writing more web services to serve what the clients are looking for? - This is completely not a feasible solution to give or expose web services for each and every single requirement to get and manipulate data. It has plenty of limitations and if Microsoft exposes 500 web services and you didn't find what you really need and they are just waste. Instead write whatever you want and use them.
The great thinking and beautiful solution to the people who don't allow server side coding in the SharePoint sites is ECMAscript client OM. You can create a simple javascript file and deploy into the server to get what you needed. As we know, most of the clients don't allow server side coding but they want something to be developed. In SharePoint 2007 it's very difficult to get this job done. But now in SP 2010 very easy.

So, these things take into high priority and makes them to come up with a great solution in the form of Client Object Model. The great advantage of it is completely looks [Syntax] like the SharePoint Object Model. So, nothing new for developers and no confusion. Infact very simple to manage and write code.

SharePoint object model syntax:

Server side syntax	Client side syntax
SPContext	ClientContext
SPSite	Site
SPWeb	Web
SPList	List

Now, I believe you have understood the Client OM concept. Now, we will discuss a little bit about technical implementation.
SharePoint 2010 provides the client support files to refer the SharePoint objects and communicate with the SharePoint server. Below are the details.

ForManaged Client	DLL's needed : Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll, Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll. Find these files in the 14/ISAPI folder. Usually, the location would be at "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ISAPI".
Silverlight	Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll and Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.Runtime.dll. They find at "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\ClientBin".
ECMAScript	SP.js file - The file fund at "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS".

.NET Managed Deployment

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 installs Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll and Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll in %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\14\ISAPI for easy access in development. You must have both Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.dll and Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Runtime.dll to develop a solution remotely with the .NET managed object model. For a Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), or other application that calls the .NET managed SharePoint Foundation client APIs, to function, the client computer must have the SharePoint Foundation client DLLs installed. The client DLLs must be distributed with the application by using Microsoft's SharePoint Foundation 2010 Client Object Model Redistributable.

For an example that shows how to create a console application that uses the .NET managed object model, see Creating a Basic SharePoint Foundation Client Application.

Silverlight Deployment

For Silverlight client installations, Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 deploys Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll and Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.Runtime.dll into the special scripts-only folder %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\ClientBin. This folder is designed to be a standard place for hosting assemblies that are used in Silverlight. You must have both Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.dll and Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.Silverlight.Runtime.dll to develop a solution remotely with the Silverlight object model. The author of a Silverlight application can package the client-side DLLs together in the .xap file for download. It is also possible to cache the Silverlight DLLs.

For information about how to implement the SharePoint Foundation 2010 Silverlight object model in a Silverlight application, see Using the Silverlight Object Model.

8 important manners you should teach your little ones

2011-09-15T20:13:00.001+05:30

http://in.lifestyle.yahoo.com/8-important-manners-you-teach-your-little-ones-144050926.html

We all want to raise our little ones to be polite and well behaved, and learning those lessons starts at home. It's never too early to teach your little ones basic manners! Here are eight of the most important manners you should try to teach your little ones before they go to school. They won't remember them all, or get them right every time, but patience and perseverance should get you through:

1. Always say please and thank you.

Whether they're activities as small as giving your little one a snack, or them asking if they can play in the garden, always reinforce the importance of saying please and thank you. No matter how young your children are, you can't start enforcing this rule too early!

2. Table manners

When your tiny tots are just learning to eat at the table, start teaching them the manners you'd like them to have for the rest of their lives! Rules like not eating with their mouths open, or not putting their elbows on the table, are good life lessons for your children to learn as soon as possible.

3. Play dates

When you're little ones go on play dates, or to birthday parties, remind them to thank their friends parents for having them over. If you aren't going to be attending the play date or event with your little one, ensure your little ones know they should treat their friends parents (and all grown-ups) with the same respect they treat you.

4. Birthday party etiquette

It's often said that kids go wild at birthday parties - all the sweet snacks and fun can make little ones get excited, and sometimes forget their manners. But no matter how excited your little one is on their birthday, there are some manners they shouldn't forget: to open their presents thoughtfully (not ripping off the paper, or tossing the present to one side as soon as they've seen it) and to say thank you for every gift, and to every attendee.

5. Mind the language

There will come a moment every parent dreads: the moment your little one swears. And then finds it funny! The worst thing you can do in this scenario is laugh. Let them know that you already know that word, you think it's unpleasant, not funny, and ask your little one not to use it again!

6. Don't be mean

Kids tease each other, and they find it funny. But this can sometimes go a step too far and lead to bullying. Make sure your little ones don't call others mean names, and don't make fun of anyone for any reason. Ganging up on someone else is cruel, not clever.

7. Excuse me!

Once your little ones have mastered saying please and thank you, teach them to say excuse me. It's the polite thing to say when you have to interrupt someone, or bump into somebody.

8. TMI!

There are some things that are too much information, and that your little ones shouldn't talk about in public! These include genitals, poo, nose picking, and all the other gory things that amuse kids!

How can you detect Browser Information in Silverlight?

2011-08-16T15:25:00.001+05:30

Referred URL

http://www.kunal-chowdhury.com/2011/08/how-can-you-detect-browser-information.html

Detecting browser information is not much difficult. You can use the inbuilt HtmlPage class available in the namespace called System.Windows.Browser. The class has static property called BrowserInformation of typeBrowserInformation. This returns the following properties:

public sealed class BrowserInformation

    public string ProductName { get; }

    public string ProductVersion { get; }

    public string Name { get; }

    public Version BrowserVersion { get; }

    public bool CookiesEnabled { get; }

    public string Platform { get; }

    public string UserAgent { get; }

BrowserInformation class is a sealed class which returns browser name, product name, product version, browser version, platform, user agent and whether the browser has cookies enabled.

Implementing Code

Let us start with the code implementation. Let's create two properties in code behind of the page. We will create string properties called "Platform" and "BrowserInformation". Here is the code for your reference:

public string Platform

    get { return (string)GetValue(PlatformProperty); }

    set { SetValue(PlatformProperty, value); }

public static readonly DependencyProperty PlatformProperty =

    DependencyProperty.Register("Platform", typeof(string), typeof(MainPage), new PropertyMetadata(string.Empty));

public string BrowserInformation

    get { return (string)GetValue(BrowserInformationProperty); }

    set { SetValue(BrowserInformationProperty, value); }

public static readonly DependencyProperty BrowserInformationProperty =

    DependencyProperty.Register("BrowserInformation", typeof(string), typeof(MainPage), new PropertyMetadata(string.Empty));

Now populate this properties from the code behind by extracting the proper property values from the HtmlPage.BrowserInformation property.

Here is the code that we are going to use for the demonstration:

var browserInfo = HtmlPage.BrowserInformation;

BrowserInformation = "You are using " + browserInfo.Name + " (Product Name: " + browserInfo.ProductName +

                     " - " + browserInfo.ProductVersion + ") Version: " +

                     browserInfo.BrowserVersion;

Platform = "You are on " + browserInfo.Platform + " platform and using User Agent: " + browserInfo.UserAgent;

Now design our XAML page with two TextBlocks binded with proper properties as shown below:

<StackPanel x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White" Width="400"

            HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center">

    <TextBlock Text="{Binding BrowserInformation, ElementName=userControl}"

               TextWrapping="Wrap" Margin="5"/>

    <TextBlock Text="{Binding Platform, ElementName=userControl}"

               TextWrapping="Wrap" Margin="5"/>

</StackPanel>

That's all about our code implementation.

See it in Action

Build your project and run it in various browsers and you will see different information based on the running browser. I tested in various browsers, various versions and here is the report for each:

Capgemini – Renault Nissan Completed Projects

2011-08-12T20:23:00.001+05:30

Project name: Microsoft Project Task Force (MPTF)
Client : Renault Nissan Technology & Business Centre India, Chennai
Functional : Automotive
Technology : ASP.Net 3.5, MOSS 2007, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008.

Project Description:
MPTF is a customized intranet SharePoint portal with role based accessibility for Renault Headquartered in France. It contains three streams named Branding, Publishing and Search. Branding stream contains Themes, Master Pages, Banner, Header and footer menus. Publishing stream contains creation of article, Service and listing pages with Search Capability.
MPTF Search built on top of SharePoint search center functionality and it plays a vital role in MPTF project for searching inside document library and inside the site collections which is mapped under various search scopes. Search Results are configured with search facets web parts for filtering results on better way for the end user.

Role description:
* Independently setup Farm Configuration, Taxonomy, Content Types, Search Center Customization.
* Developed Event Handlers, Workflows, Feature Creation and Deployment, Independently customized advanced search center scopes consuming Sharepoint default services, filtering and output
* Integrated third party solutions like Sharepoint Shared Services Search Provider Property Creation (SSSPPC on CodePlex - managed properties migration), Logviewer (CodePlex)
* Prepared design documents and technical papers explaining development and design approach.

Cognizant Completed Projects

2011-08-12T20:21:00.001+05:30

Project name : Customer Data Repository (CDR)
Client : Lexis Nexis, OHIO, US
Horizontal : Advanced Solutions Group (ASG)
Technology : Windows Server 2008, MOSS 2007, Silverlight 3, ASP.Net 3.0, WCF Services.

Project Description:
Lexis Nexis provides solutions to professionals in law firms, corporations, government, law enforcement, tax, accounting, academic institutions and risk and compliance assessment.
The Customer Data Repository is internal information repository for Lexis Nexis. This application plays vital role in Lexis Nexis in maintaining customers information like their personal information, Workflows, Mind maps, Their Quotes, etc, Apart from that this application captures Lexis Nexis’s Concepts, Ongoing Research, Products available in their company and Internal Teams and their key contacts. The main functionality of the application provides search with wild card characters like Google and related search like Amazon.

Role description:
* Designed architecture based on end user size and independently created project solution with Business, Data and Application layers and setup TFS versioning control.
* Developed code for consumption of data from Sharepoint and exposing as WCF services, Implemented the Search Criteria Pattern in the Service Messages and Log4Net logging mechanism for better traceability.
* Created tools for data verification and project deployment.
* Coordinating to offshore team from Ohio and took responsibility for delivering Iteration 1 tasks.

Honeywell Completed Projects

2011-08-12T20:19:00.001+05:30

Project name: Honeywell Manufacturing Execution System (Honeywell MES)
Client : Honeywell International, US
Functional : Automation Control Systems
Technology : Windows Server 2008, Sharepoint 3.0, Silverlight 3, ADO.net Data Services.

Project Description:
Honeywell MES is a Service Oriented Architecture based framework for developing projects to verticals like Petro Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals and Paper industries. This framework identifies some of the general functionality, controls to display the data visualization, Workflows, etc. This projects plays as middle tier application between ERP and Dynamic Control Systems.
This Project shows entire production plant in Silverlight visual representation like plant equipments, flows, input and ports, operations, etc. The optimized solution for a production program can be planned by this application based on calculations.

Honeywell MES Information portal
Honeywell MES Information Portal helps product marketing and developer help website, It is Independently designed and developed in Silverlight consuming ASTORIA on top of Sharepoint. This website helps Honeywell MES consumers for periodic release of controls and updated information on Honeywell MES product. The controls and data services developed in Honeywell MES like Product Gallery, Gantt, Hero Bar has been used in portal.

Role description:
*MES Portal Server Setup and configuration of Sharepoint application.

* Independently developed MES Information portal consuming MES framework components and developed visualization controls like Gantt Chart, FAQ Populator, Hero Bar, Program Banner, Carousel Filmstrip Control, Carousel Rotation Control, Petrol Plant Flow sheet Simulation, MES Control Gallery and Program Status Control.
* Traveled to Oslo and Implemented MES framework setup for Honeywell Automation, Norway.
* Prepared design documents and technical papers explaining development and design approach.

HCL-CODC Completed Projects

2011-08-12T20:18:00.001+05:30

Project Name : Corporate Intranet Quality Portal & automated tools development
Technology : MS ASP.Net 2.0, Flash MX, JavaScript 2, Fusion Charts, AJAX.Net, MS SQL Server 2005

Role description:
* Independently designed, developed and managed Intranet Quality portal in MOSS 2007 technologies and web applications in ASP.net 2.0, users, access permissions integrating with windows share point technologies 2003 with technical content documents.
* Concentrating on enhancing the organizational technical expertise by
* Analyzing and tuning application performance.
* Preparing a detailed User Guide and flash based demos for the application.
Automated applications and tools description:

1. Project : “Operational review” (Opsreview)
Project Description:
A web based repository application, which helps quality analyst to get project operational details from engineering project folks. It has modules like Opsreview projects-Business groups setup, initiate Opsreview for Business groups on every month, schedule Opsreview meeting to understand operational works in their projects and to assign operational action items, upload engineering project’s version based operational review reports in quality server with project - people mappings, Shows the uploaded reports depending upon the project-people mapping, With the help of Opsreview application wizard module, quality analyst Produce summary reports for each month Opsreview on Business group level by quality analysts.
The additional features like user based application color themes, Application error log, automated workflow mail for Opsreview Initiation, scheduled meetings, uploading reports, escalation to people who were not responding to operational review AI, Business group summary report creation.

2. Project : “ASTRA”
Project Description:
A web based automated audit tracking tool that provides a centralized Web-based repository for all audit documentation that makes search and retrieval easy. It provides advanced tracking capability every step of the way, from scheduling and planning to execution to completion. The main flow of application includes quality analyst to assign auditors, schedule/ change audits on each projects, to track audit findings like non conformity action, best practices and observations has been submitted by auditors. Provision for auditee to respond the non conformity and observation provision for auditor to verify and close the audit.
The other added features of the web application includes flash graphs, User based color theme settings using style sheets , Application error log, Analysis reports on cycle wise, Audit wise, Business group wise based on project, audit findings, audit status, audit summary and audits by auditor.
Sends remainder mails to concerned stake holders regarding escalation for not submitting audit report, responding NCR, Observations and audit closure.

3. Project : “Metrics Automation”
Project Description:
A web based application which computes the metrics data computation depends upon the raw data uploaded in excel file, imported into database and computes the Bug closure rate, Bug Validity rate by each engineers in project.
The other added features of the web application includes flash graphs for BCR and BVR on individual engineers/ each project, User based color theme settings using style sheets, Application error log, etc.,

4. Project : “Automated Q-Portal backup & Database updater”
Technology : MS Windows 2003 server, MS VB.Net 2.0, Share point services 2003, MS SQL Server 2005
Project Description:
A VB.Net 2003 based scheduled task application which takes care backing up of quality portal and database and updates user permission for project managers, leads, etc, inside share point site with project-people mapping and sends automated intimation mail on daily basis.

How to Prepare Your Class Library to Support Application Library Caching?

2011-08-08T17:29:00.001+05:30

Referred URL

http://www.kunal-chowdhury.com/2011/08/how-to-prepare-your-class-library-to.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+kunal-chowdhury/Silverlight+(Kunal's+Blog+-+Silverlight)

What is Application Library Caching?

First of all, let us discuss on "Application Library Caching". Assembly caching is not a new thing in Silverlight 4. It was present since Silverlight 3. Already we all know about the on demand download of XAP. To do this, we need to write code for downloading the external xap files using the WebClient.

And this Application Library caching does the similar thing for you very. Suppose, if you have a bigger application and used a huge external libraries, either 3rd part or your own, this easy step will help you make a separate zip file for them which can be downloaded on demand without writing any additional code.

Read more about the feature in this blog post: Application Library Caching in Silverlight 4.

Prepare Project

Before starting let us create our own Silverlight application solution, where we will have a Class library project too. It is not require to put the class library project in the same solution but for the demo purpose, we will use the same solution here.

Below is our project structure where we have our own custom library called "ExtensionLibrary", one Silverlight application named "LibraryCachingDemo" and the hosting web project called "LibraryCachingDemo.Web":

Once we are done with the project creation, we will build the project which will generate the dll file for the class library project. Just add the Assembly Reference of this DLL to the main application project and build it once again. This will create the application XAP with the assembly added inside that.

Now it's the time to split out the library out of the XAP and use the feature of Application Library Caching.

Signing the Class Library

Before implementing the same in our application, it is require to sign the assembly of the library. To do this, right click on the library project and click Properties from the context menu. This will open up the properties page. As shown below, go to the "Signing" tab and create a Strong name key file and sign the assembly with that:

After signing the assembly, build the project to recreate the assembly which is signed with a strong key. Now you need to extract the "Public Key Token" out of the dll. To do this, the easiest process is installing the dll in the GAC by giving the command "gacutil -i <DLL_FILE_PATH>" from the Visual Studio Command Prompt. This will register it in GAC. Make sure to open the Visual Studio Command Prompt as an Administrator.

Here is the screenshot of the same:

After this step, go to the GAC and extract the public key token from the installed assembly. Note down the key as it will be require in the next step. After you get the key, you can remove the assembly from the GAC as it is not required in next steps.

Generate the Manifest

Once you have a signed copy of the assembly with a Public Key Token, go to the original dll file path (in our case, the Bin\Debug folder) and create a new file called "ExtensionLibrary.extmap.xml". Make sure that, this file has the same name of the dll assembly.

Now open the said file and add the following XML code into that:

This actually adds the manifest for the dll. Make sure that, you entered the name of the assembly, version, public key token, relative path and the name of the ZIP file properly as shown above.

Here is the complete XML code for your reference:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<manifest xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

          xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

  <assembly>

    <name>ExtensionLibrary</name>

    <version>1.0.0.0</version>

    <publickeytoken>38955262d53ca29f</publickeytoken>

    <relpath>ExtensionLibrary.dll</relpath>

    <extension downloadUri="ExtensionLibrary.zip" />

  </assembly>

</manifest>

This step will ask the compiler to not include the dll inside the XAP and create a separate ZIP file for the said assembly if application library caching is set for the application.

Adding Support for Application Library Caching

This is the final step. Right click on the Silverlight Application project and go to it's properties panel. In the "Silverlight" tab, just check the "Reduce XAP size by using application library caching" option as shown below:

Now build your application once again and this time you will notice that one ZIP file named "ExtensionLibrary.zip" has been created in the "ClientBin" folder of the application project. Also open the XAP file and this time you will notice that the dll file is not present in the XAP.

Download

You can download the complete Source Code of the article from here:

Application Library Caching - Source Code (28 KB)

10 Unprofessional Behaviors to Avoid - Subroto Bagchi

2011-08-08T17:20:00.001+05:30

Referred URL:

http://monster.typepad.com/monsterblog/2011/08/10-unprofessional-behaviors-to-avoid.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+MonsterBlog+(The+Monster+Blog)

In his new book "The Professional," Subroto Bagchi, the vice chairman and cofounder of MindTree Ltd. and a columnist for "Forbes India," lays out a clear-cut set of criteria that can guide the modern worker in truly and consistently professional behavior. By exploring a variety of professional dilemmas in a broad spectrum of industries, he answers some of the tough questions that workers face.

He also describes ten behaviors that are clearly unprofessional -- his "top ten markers of unprofessional conduct." If you're not sure how to respond to a situation at work, let this list be a guide for what not to do:

1. Missing a Deadline
You know how much you hate it when other people miss their deadlines to you. Bagchi says you should keep this feeling in mind when it comes to your own deadlines.

2. Failing to Be Forthright
Bagchi points out that missed deadlines -- whether due to poor estimation of how much time it will take to get a job done or due to unavoidable circumstances -- usually "announce their arrival in advance," but that people ignore warning signs (or hope the problem will solve itself.)

"If communicated proactively to the right person," Bagchi says, "most problems not only get addressed, but they can also be converted into an opportunity."

He also advises delivering bad news in person (or at least via telephone).

3. Withholding Information
Bagchi describes not disclosing conflicts of interest as one area where this is likely to happen.

4. Not Respecting Privacy of Information
"Consent should never be assumed," says Bagchi. "However close and long-standing the relationship may be, consent has to be formally sought and formally recorded each time there is a transaction."

5. Not Respecting "Need to Know"
Here, Bagchi uses the example of spouses who work and says, "It is important to avoid what is known as 'pillow talk' -- sharing official informaiton at home."

6. Plagiarizing
Bagchi outlines three steps for citing sources: "state why you have chosen to pull ... [the] information, acknowledge the source and, most important, state your own reasoned conclusion."

7. Passing the Blame
"Just as we say a poor workman blames his tools," Bagchi says, "a bad professional blames his associates."

8. Overstating Qualifications and Experience
"Unfortunately," says Bagchi, "job seekers sometimes trivialize the difference between exposure and expertise when it comes to writing resumes.... I have often received resumes of young engineers who have done just an internship of short duration in an organization, but who claimed to have designed an entire enterprise application while being there."

"While it may be easy to bluff one's way into a job or assignment, it becomes a complete loss of face at the time of execution and leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth," he adds.

9. Frequently Changing Jobs
Of course, not all job changes are voluntary, but Bagchi objects to "mindless job changes." He says, "Failed job changes have as much to do with the individual as with the organization, and ... people who pass off the blame simply demonstrate an opportunistic mind-set."

10. Not Taking Care of Your Appearance
"Your attire must inspire credibility," says Bagchi. He adds that it should follow written (and unwritten) rules for your organization and profession, and that dressing in a way that distracts is not a good idea.

Best of Big FM - Cross-Talk Program

2011-07-20T20:11:00.001+05:30

You can enjoy this comedy if you know Tamil. :)

http://soundcloud.com/balajipatturaj

List vs ObservableCollection vs INotifyPropertyChanged in Silverlight

2011-07-12T20:28:00.001+05:30

Referred URL

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/silverlight/SLListVsOCollections.aspx

Difference between List<T>, ObservableCollection<T> and INotifyPropertyChanged

List<T>

It represents a strongly typed list of objects that can be accessed by index. It provides methods to search, sort, and manipulate lists. The List<T> class is the generic equivalent of the ArrayList class. It implements the IList<T>generic interface using an array whose size is dynamically increased as required.

Drawbacks

In ASP.NET, we simply use DataSource and DataBind() to bind the data, but in Silverlight it is slightly different. Databinding in ASP.NET is done in a stateless way - once that binding operation is completed, it's a done deal and if you want to change anything, you have to manipulate the underlying controls that were created as a result of the data binding, or else change the underlying data objects and call DataBind() again. That’s what we are used to – but it’s not a good practice.

In the sample application, the values in the list are added, removed and changed during runtime in the code behind. The changes in the list will not be updated to the UI (Datagrid).

ObservableCollection<T>

ObservableCollection is a generic dynamic data collection that provides notifications (using an interface "INotifyCollectionChanged") when items get added, removed, or when the whole collection is refreshed.

Note: WCF service proxy class in Silverlight will use this type of collection by default.

Drawbacks

It does not provide any notifications when any property in the collection is changed.

In the sample application, the values in the observable collection are added, removed and changed during runtime in the code behind. The operations (adding and removing an item) in the observable collection will be updated to the UI (Datagrid). But any change in the existing item will not be updated to the UI.

INotifyPropertyChanged

INotifyPropertyChanged is not a collection, it’s an interface used in the data object classes to providePropertyChanged notification to clients when any property value gets changed. This will allow you to raisePropertyChanged event whenever the state of the object changes (Added, Removed, and Modified) to the point where you want to notify the underlying collection or container that the state has changed.

INotifyPropertyChanged is compatible on all type of collections like List<T>, ObservableCollection<T>, etc. The code snippet which uses INotifyPropertyChanged is shown below:

Collapse

public class UserNPC:INotifyPropertyChanged
{
    private string name;
    public string Name { 
        get { return name; } 
        set { name = value; onPropertyChanged(this, "Name"); } 
    }
    public int grade;
    public int Grade { 
        get { return grade; } 
        set { grade = value; onPropertyChanged(this, "Grade"); } 
    }

    // Declare the PropertyChanged event
    public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;

    // OnPropertyChanged will raise the PropertyChanged event passing the
    // source property that is being updated.
    private void onPropertyChanged(object sender, string propertyName)
    {
        if (this.PropertyChanged != null)
        {
            PropertyChanged(sender, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName));
        }
    }
}

In the above code snippet, whenever a value is set to a property, the method “onPropertyChanged” will be called which in turn raises the PropertyChanged event.

How to Create a Circular Loader using XAML?

2011-07-08T18:41:00.001+05:30

Referred URL : http://www.kunal-chowdhury.com/2011/07/how-to-create-circular-loader-using.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+kunal-chowdhury/Silverlight+(Kunal's+Blog+-+Silverlight)

Sometime we need to show a circular loader in WPF and/or Silverlight. We may need it in Windows Phone 7 too. In simple statement, we need to show a circular loader in various XAML applications like Silverlight, WP7 and WPF.

In this article, we will learn how to create a Circular Loader as shown in the screenshot. I will not use a single line of C# code to create this loader. Everything will be in the XAML file itself to keep the code behind file clean. Read to know more about it step-by-step and after reading this article, you will be able to create and use a circular loader like this. Source code is also available for download at the end of the page. Feel free to use it.

Setup the Project

First, we need to create a Silverlight project. Here we will create a Silverlight 4 Application project. Once you are done with the project creation, right click on the Silverlight project and add a new UserControl. We will use this as the circular loader. As shown in the below screenshot, select the "Silverlight User Control" template and provide a name "CircularLoader.xaml" and hit "Add" to continue.

This will create a new UserControl in your solution project. Once done with this step, it's time to create the UI of the loader control. Then we will integrate it to the MainPage.xaml and see how it looks.

Create the UI of the Circular Loader

Now time to create the XAML of the loader. Remember that, we will not have a single line of C# code. Everything will be done in the XAML. If you are expert with Expression Blend, you can create it very easily. But here we will use direct XAML code to demonstrate the same. It will be helpful for you to understand properly.

Let's open the usercontrol xaml file and replace the original Grid control with a ViewBox control. You may ask one question here: Why should I use a ViewBox? Yes my friend, a very good question. ViewBox will allow you to resize the content of the panel with respect to parent container. This means if you explicitly increase or decrease the size of the user control, the inner content will proportionally resize as per the container size.

Now we will add a Canvas inside the ViewBox, so that, we can properly place the circles inside it in proper (x, y) coordinates.

After this step, we need to add some Ellipse control inside the Canvas panel to create a Circle. We will fill the color of the Ellipse with the Foreground color of the UserControl. We will use proper binding to do this, as shown below:

<Ellipse Fill="{Binding Foreground, ElementName=userControl}"

         Height="71" Canvas.Left="121" Canvas.Top="21" Width="69" Opacity="0.3"/>

In the above code snippet, you can see that, we added Canvas.Left and Canvas.Top to position the circle. Similarly, we will add some more circles using the Ellipse control and position them properly to create a circular path.

Setting the Opacity of the Circles

We need to set the opacity of the circles to create the similar look as we wanted to develop. Opacity will ensure that, we will use the same color but different transparency to create the UI.

Find the below XAML code for reference:

Have a look into the above XAML code. You will see there how we placed the circles in proper coordinate positions. Also check the opacity that we set for each individual circles.

Adding RenderTransform to the Canvas

Once you are done with the UI, you need to set the RenderTransform to the canvas. This step is require to keep the circle rotating in the orbit. We will add a composite transform to the canvas as shown below:

Our animation that we will create in the next step will use the same transform of the canvas to rotate the circles in the circular orbit.

Find the complete code of the UI here, in case you need proper visibility on the code that we created just now:

<Viewbox x:Name="LayoutRoot" HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top">

    <Canvas x:Name="canvas" Height="323" Width="308" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5">

        <Canvas.RenderTransform>

            <CompositeTransform/>

        </Canvas.RenderTransform>

        <Ellipse Fill="{Binding Foreground, ElementName=userControl}"

                 Height="71" Canvas.Left="121" Canvas.Top="21" Width="69" Opacity="0.3"/>

        <Ellipse Fill="{Binding Foreground, ElementName=userControl}"

                 Height="71" Width="69" Canvas.Left="194" Canvas.Top="52" Opacity="0.4"/>

        <Ellipse Fill="{Binding Foreground, ElementName=userControl}"

                 Width="69" Height="71" Canvas.Left="221" Canvas.Top="123" Opacity="0.5"/>

        <Ellipse Fill="{Binding Foreground, ElementName=userControl}"

                 Width="69" Height="71" Canvas.Left="190" Canvas.Top="198" Opacity="0.6"/>

        <Ellipse Fill="{Binding Foreground, ElementName=userControl}"

                 Height="71" Canvas.Left="121" Canvas.Top="226" Width="69" Opacity="0.7"/>

        <Ellipse Fill="{Binding Foreground, ElementName=userControl}"

                 Width="69" Height="71" Canvas.Left="48" Canvas.Top="194" Opacity="0.8"/>

        <Ellipse Fill="{Binding Foreground, ElementName=userControl}"

                 Height="71" Width="69" Canvas.Left="17" Canvas.Top="123" Opacity="0.9"/>

        <Ellipse Fill="{Binding Foreground, ElementName=userControl}"

                 Height="71" Width="69" Canvas.Left="48" Canvas.Top="52" Opacity="1.0"/>

    </Canvas>

</Viewbox>

Create the Storyboard

Now what we need in this step? We need to create a smooth animation which we can achieve using the StoryBoard. We will create a Storyboard now to rotate the circles in the orbit. You can use the Expression Blend to create the animation easily. As this is a simpler code, I am just sharing the code for you here:

<UserControl.Resources>

    <Storyboard x:Name="LoaderAnimation">

        <DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.RenderTransform).(CompositeTransform.Rotation)"

                                       Storyboard.TargetName="canvas"

                                       RepeatBehavior="Forever">

            <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="0" Value="0"/>

            <EasingDoubleKeyFrame KeyTime="0:0:3" Value="360"/>

        </DoubleAnimationUsingKeyFrames>

    </Storyboard>

</UserControl.Resources>

The storyboard will rotate the canvas to 360 degree to give a circular motion to the circles. Also we will set the RepeatBehavior to indefinite by setting the value "Forever". Here the storyboard will be available as a Resource to the UserControl. Hence we can easily access it whenever require.

Once the storyboard has been created, we need to run it on load. The simplest approach here will be calling the Begin() method of the storyboard from code behind class. As I told, we will not write a single line in the code behind, we need to do something from the XAML which will cause the storyboard to run.

We can achieve this functionality be using the Microsoft.Expression.Interactions and System.Windows.Interactivity dll assemblies. They provides interfaces to call a storyboard on some event. To do this, we need to add the assembly references of those dlls. Add them from the "Add Reference" dialog as shown below:

Once you added the assembly references, we will add the following xmlns namespaces in the xaml file. Those two namespace will help us to call the storyboard easily from the xaml without writing any code behind file.

Just after the resource declaration, add the below code:

<i:Interaction.Triggers>

    <i:EventTrigger EventName="Loaded">

        <ei:ControlStoryboardAction Storyboard="{StaticResource LoaderAnimation}"/>

    </i:EventTrigger>

</i:Interaction.Triggers>

This will run the storyboard from the loaded event. That means, once the usercontrol has been loaded in the UI, it will call the Storyboard to start executing the animation.

See it in Action

Upto this, our code is ready. Now, add the said CurcularLoader.xaml UserControl in the MainPage.xaml file. We will place it inside the LayoutRoot. Make sure to set a Foreground color for the circles. Build the solution and check if there are any error. If so, fix them and run the project. You will see the following UI inside the browser window:

If you resize the browser, it will change the size of the circular loader in proportion to the parent panel. Now we will do a little change here. While adding the user control in the main page, we will specify it's height and width. For our example, we will use 50 x 50 as the dimension of the loader control.

Find the complete source code of the MainPage.xaml where we added the loader control:

<UserControl x:Class="LoaderDemo.MainPage"

             xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

             xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

             xmlns:LoaderDemo="clr-namespace:LoaderDemo">

    <Grid>

        <LoaderDemo:CircularLoader Foreground="Black"

                                   HorizontalAlignment="Center"

                                   VerticalAlignment="Center"

                                   Height="50" Width="50"/>

    </Grid>

</UserControl>

Now once you run the application again, you will see the following UI where the loader control has a fixed size:

In this case, if you resize the browser, it will not change it's size because now it has a proper dimension. Hope, you enjoyed reading the article. This helped you to understand the same in depth. Now you will be able to modify the same code and implement additional behavior. You can also expose some APIs on need basis.

Download Source Code

Do you need the source code of the project for your reference? Yes, you can download it from here:

Circular Loader Demo (Source Code - 23KB)

Can Agile Fix Bad Project Management?

2011-06-25T20:30:00.001+05:30

Post From:

http://herdingcats.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/06/can-agile-fix-bad-project-management-1.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+typepad/HerdingCats+(Herding+Cats)

Vin, has a post that outlines sources problems for project failure. I read this that each topic is the source of the project's problem. And then there is the suggestion that Agile can "fix" these problems. Like many suggestions around agile, there needs to be a seperation between "bad program management," actual benefical outcomes of agile, and the measureable outcomes from applying agile to specific problem domain and context in that domain.

Requirements: (there are) Unclear (requirements), (they) lack of agreement, lack of priority, contradictory, ambiguous, imprecise.
Resources: (there is a) Lack of resources, resource conflicts, turnover of key resources, poor planning.
Schedules: (are) Too tight, unrealistic, overly optimistic.
Planning: (is) Based on insufficient data, missing items, insufficient details, poor estimates.
Risks: (are) Unidentified or assumed, not managed.

Each of these can be traced to much simpler source than just the red herring of WaterFall.It is suggested Agile can address these issues. So let's look at that conjecture a bit more.

Requirements

A Requirement is ... "A statement identifying a capability, a physical characteristic, or a quality factor that bounds a product or process need for which a solution will be pursued." - IEEE Standard 1220-2005.

Along with requirements successful projects need to define what capabilities are to be provided by the solution.

A Capability is ...“the result of a method involves a functional analysis of operational requirements. Capabilities are identified based on the tasks required… Once the required capability inventory is defined, the most cost effective and efficient options to satisfy the requirements are sought.”

So when it is said "forget requirements, tell stories instead," what does this really mean? Because a story is a requirement. A requiremment told trough the narrative of the stiry. But it's missing several things good requirements need:

Traceability of the Requirements to the Business (or mission) Capabilities. Why is this requirement here? What other requirements are related to this requirement? What are the dependencies between this requirement and other requirements? If I drop this requirement to hold the iteration completion time, what's the impact on other requirement in the release.
Requirements can be represented in many ways. Scenarios are common in our domain. sysML process flows, systems engineering Concept of Operations, and other "story like" narratives can be found in defense

Resources

Resource management is a critical success factor for any project. The estimating, acquisition, management, and forecasting resource demand is the role of program management. The notion that Waterfall is somehow the source of the problem is a big stretch. Bad Project Management will ignore the resource management role. Resource Management is Chapter 9 in PMBOK and other chapter in other PM guides. This is NOT a waterfall isseu, it can just as easily be an agile issue too if not looked after.

Bring in resources as needed including using temporary workers to cover peak demand.

Really, how many resources, what kinds of resources, skills, capabilities, cost, fit with team?How far ahead do we need to start recruiting these resources? Our HR department has 3 full time recruiters just scrambling everyday for PM's, Program Managers, PP&C staff, testing, cost, and all other skill sets needed on our programs.

Agile provides no unique solution here.

Schedules

If your schedule is overly optimistic, then you've got a bad schedule. Period. You're a bad project manager if you sign up for this schedule. You've violated your obligation as a PM for provide a credible probability of success. You've probably violated the ethics code of your PMP.

Either allow schedules to flex or fix them and allow features to flex. You can’t have it all.

Here's some advice we apply and provide to our clients:

A schedule without margin is late and over budget before you start.
How much margin needs to be determined analytically. Either through past performance analysis on one end and Monte Carlo Simulation on the other. Either way, or all ways in between mean that you have some understanding of the probabilistic nature of the durations, cost, and technical performance.
Schedule have show the order of development at some level to maximize the value stream to the customer. This is done on multi-billion weapons systems and done in agile projects.

Planning

A Plan is a Strategy for the successful completion of the project. It's the Plan that describes the sequence of activities needed to maximize this value. Be the value autonomous landing of an F-18 on the deck of a carrier, the delivery of telecommunications services to clients, or some type business capability to customer. The notion of exchanging planning for deliverables requires very careful consideration. With a credible Plan, you cannot know what to deliver. A pile of story cards stuck to the wall is not a plan. It's a pile of story card stuck to the wall.

Plan less, deliver more. Let the deliverables guide the planning.

Which deliverables? What order are needed to minimize the duration of the project? What are the dependencies between these deliverables? Are there deliverables that depend on other deliverables? Who decides what order the deliverables appear? Is there oversight around these deliverables, their connection with the Capabilities needed for business success.

This has nothing to do with Waterfall and is not solved by Agile. Here's a sample of a Plan used for a Scrum based very large insurance program.

Risk Management

Let's start with the seminal quote:

Risk Management is how adults manage projects - Tim Lister

Vin suggests

Evaluate, prioritize and mitigate risks on every project.

Well close, here's some guidance

But the process actually is:

Creating a Currency Masked TextBox with On-the-Fly Currency Formatting

2011-06-25T20:26:00.001+05:30

Referred URL :

http://scottonwriting.net/sowblog/archive/2011/06/25/creating-a-currency-masked-textbox-with-on-the-fly-currency-formatting.aspx?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+ScottOnWriting+(Scott+on+Writing)

Allowing Only Currency-Related Characters In a TextBox

There are a number of existing masked input plugins for jQuery. After trying some out I decided to roll my own JavaScript functions. I intend to come back to these and turn them into jQuery plugins, but for now they’re just JavaScript functions. As you can see in the script below, I created four functions:

numbersOnly – allows just number inputs, whether they are from the letters at the top of the keyboard or from the number pad.
numbersAndCommasOnly – allows number inputs and commas.
decimalsOnly – allows numbers, commas, and periods (either from the main keyboard or the number pad).
currenciesOnly – allows numbers, commas, periods, and the dollar sign.

In addition to the allowed characters discussed above, the functions also permit “special character key codes,” namely Delete, Backspace, left arrow, right arrow, Home, End and Tab. What keycodes are valid are listed in the variables at the top of the script; see Javascript Char Codes for a table listing the keys and their corresponding key codes.

Here is the script of interest:

// JavaScript I wrote to limit what types of input are allowed to be keyed into a textbox 
var allowedSpecialCharKeyCodes = [46,8,37,39,35,36,9];
var numberKeyCodes = [44, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105];
var commaKeyCode = [188];
var decimalKeyCode = [190,110];

function numbersOnly(event) {
    var legalKeyCode =
        (!event.shiftKey && !event.ctrlKey && !event.altKey)
            &&
        (jQuery.inArray(event.keyCode, allowedSpecialCharKeyCodes) >= 0
            ||
        jQuery.inArray(event.keyCode, numberKeyCodes) >= 0);

    if (legalKeyCode === false)
        event.preventDefault();
}

function numbersAndCommasOnly(event) {
    var legalKeyCode =
        (!event.shiftKey && !event.ctrlKey && !event.altKey)
            &&
        (jQuery.inArray(event.keyCode, allowedSpecialCharKeyCodes) >= 0
            ||
        jQuery.inArray(event.keyCode, numberKeyCodes) >= 0
            ||
        jQuery.inArray(event.keyCode, commaKeyCode) >= 0);

    if (legalKeyCode === false)
        event.preventDefault();
}

function decimalsOnly(event) {
    var legalKeyCode =
        (!event.shiftKey && !event.ctrlKey && !event.altKey)
            &&
        (jQuery.inArray(event.keyCode, allowedSpecialCharKeyCodes) >= 0
            ||
        jQuery.inArray(event.keyCode, numberKeyCodes) >= 0
            ||
        jQuery.inArray(event.keyCode, commaKeyCode) >= 0
            ||
        jQuery.inArray(event.keyCode, decimalKeyCode) >= 0);

    if (legalKeyCode === false)
        event.preventDefault();
}

function currenciesOnly(event) {
    var legalKeyCode =
        (!event.shiftKey && !event.ctrlKey && !event.altKey)
            &&
        (jQuery.inArray(event.keyCode, allowedSpecialCharKeyCodes) >= 0
            ||
        jQuery.inArray(event.keyCode, numberKeyCodes) >= 0
            ||
        jQuery.inArray(event.keyCode, commaKeyCode) >= 0
            ||
        jQuery.inArray(event.keyCode, decimalKeyCode) >= 0);

    // Allow for $
    if (!legalKeyCode && event.shiftKey && event.keyCode == 52)
        legalKeyCode = true;

    if (legalKeyCode === false)
        event.preventDefault();
}

My script is, admittedly, very US-centric. I have not tested the key codes with a non-English keyboard and for currencies I only allow a dollar sign. For the project I wrote this script for this is (currently) a non-issue since it is used within the corporate firewall and all sales are domestic, but clearly the above script would not work as well for international settings.

Applying the Currency Masking Script to a TextBox on the Page

With the above script in place you can have a textbox on the page mask its input by having the appropriate function called in response to the keydown event. The following jQuery syntax wires up this logic to all single-line textboxes that have the CSS class currenciesOnly.

$(document).ready(function () {
    $("input[type=text].currenciesOnly").live('keydown', currenciesOnly);
});

That’s it!

Formatting the Just-Entered Currency

Another requirement my client had was to format the just-entered number as a currency. That is, to change the user’s input – say, 45000 – to a formatted value like $45,000.00 immediately after their tabbed out of the textbox. To accomplish this I used Ben Dewey’s jQuery Format Currency Plugin, which you can see a demo of athttp://www.bendewey.com/code/formatcurrency/demo/. This plugin adds a formatCurrency function that you can call on a set of elements returned by a jQuery selector.

To use this plugin I updated the $(document).ready event handler shown above to also call theformatCurrency function on blur:

$(document).ready(function () {
    $("input[type=text].currenciesOnly").live('keydown', currenciesOnly)
                        .live('blur', 
                                 function () { 
                                     $(this).formatCurrency(); 
                                 }
                              );
});

In short, whenever a textbox with a CSS class of currenciesOnly is blurred, the just-blurred textbox’s inputs are formatted as a currency thanks to the formatCurrency function.

Microsoft Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 Integration

2011-06-16T21:32:00.001+05:30

http://libproject.net/programming/microsoft-silverlight-4-and-sharepoint-2010-integration.html

The Six Sigma Handbook, Third Edition

2011-06-16T21:31:00.001+05:30

http://libproject.net/business/the-six-sigma-handbook-third-edition-2.html

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration: Real World Skills for MCITP Certification and Beyond (Exam 70-668)

2011-06-16T21:30:00.001+05:30

http://libproject.net/programming/microsoft-sharepoint-2010-administration-real-world-skills-for-mcitp-certification-and-beyond-exam-70-668.html

Designing Forms for SharePoint and InfoPath: Using InfoPath Designer 2010, 2nd Edition

2011-06-16T21:29:00.003+05:30

http://libproject.net/office/designing-forms-for-sharepoint-and-infopath-using-infopath-designer-2010-2nd-edition.html

Beginning SharePoint 2010: Building Business Solutions with SharePoint (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

2011-06-16T21:29:00.001+05:30

http://libproject.net/programming/beginning-sharepoint-2010-building-business-solutions-with-sharepoint-wrox-programmer-to-programmer.html

Mastering Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010

2011-06-16T21:25:00.001+05:30

http://libproject.net/programming/mastering-microsoft-sharepoint-foundation-2010.html

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer Reference

2011-06-16T21:24:00.003+05:30

http://libproject.net/programming/microsoft-sharepoint-2010-developer-reference.html

Beginning C# Object-Oriented Programming

2011-06-16T21:24:00.001+05:30

http://libproject.net/programming/beginning-c-object-oriented-programming.html

Applied WPF 4 in Context

2011-06-16T21:23:00.003+05:30

http://libproject.net/programming/applied-wpf-4-in-context.html

Business Intelligence in Microsoft SharePoint 2010

2011-06-16T21:23:00.001+05:30

http://libproject.net/programming/business-intelligence-in-microsoft-sharepoint-2010.html

Develop Your Leadership Skills: Develop Yourself as a Leader; Lead at a Strategic Level; Grow Leaders in Your Organisation

2011-06-16T21:22:00.001+05:30

http://libproject.net/business/develop-your-leadership-skills-develop-yourself-as-a-leader-lead-at-a-strategic-level-grow-leaders-in-your-organisation.html

Silverlight Interview Questions

2011-06-16T19:09:00.001+05:30

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

Go here for more Silverlight related interview questions

1.) What features are missing from Silverlight presentation markup that will be supported in WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation)?

Some high-end Windows specific features of WPF, such as real 3D, hardware-based video acceleration, and full document support, will not be supported in Silverlight. This is by design in order to serve Silverlight’s cross-browser, cross-platform reach scenario that demands a light weight plug-in. That being said, Silverlight will offer a uniform runtime that can render identical experiences across browsers on both Mac OS and Windows.

2.) Will Silverlight-based applications and content run on any Web Server? What are the benefits to running it on servers running Windows?
Silverlight works with any web server just like HTML. Video and audio content can also be progressively downloaded and played back from any Web server platform. Benefits of Windows server-based distribution of Silverlight applications include Windows Media Services with Fast Stream (instant playback) and Fast reconnect technologies, lower distribution costs (streaming users only download what they watch), and tap into the full Windows server ecosystem of platform components and partner solutions. Those benefits will be enhanced in the future version of Windows Server (code name “Longhorn”) and with Internet Information Server 7 (IIS).

3.) Is Silverlight supported on various locales?
Silverlight installs on localized versions of Macintosh computers and Windows. At this time, the installation is available in an international English format. Final releases will render international text (using double-byte characters) and support the full 64K Unicode character set. Silverlight uses simple input mechanism that treats all the languages in the same way.

4.) What are the different ways to display text with Silverlight?
Silverlight supports displaying static preformatted text that is comprised out of glyph elements and also dynamic text that uses TextBlock. With glyphs, one needs to position the characters individually while TextBlock supports simple layout.

5.) What kinds of fonts are supported with Silverlight?
Beyond standard and western fonts, Silverlight also supports East Asian characters, double-byte characters, and can work with any East Asian font or Middle Eastern font by using the glyphs element and a supporting TrueType font file that supports the requested glyph.

6.) What is Microsoft® Silverlight Streaming by Windows LiveTM?
Microsoft® SilverlightTM Streaming by Windows LiveTM offers a free cloud-based hosting and streaming solution for quickly delivering high-quality, high-scale, cross-platform, cross-browser, media-enabled RIAs.

7.) How much does Silverlight Streaming cost?
While the product is in Beta, hosting is free of charge. Up to 4 GB of data and streaming is free of charge up to 700 kilobit/s. At the conclusion of the Beta program, the developer can chose to enable Microsoft-sponsored advertising in the application for continued free use of the service to or subscribe to a pay-for-use service that is free of advertisements.

8.) What video encoding formats are supported?
The designer or developer is free to use any encoding format for their video supported by the Windows Media Video codec. This includes Variable Bit Rate (VBR) encoding for DVD-quality video and the use of the VC-1 codec for high-definition content. However, for HD content, be aware that the maximum output rate from the service is 700 kilobit/s, which means the client will not receive real-time delivery of HD video.

9.) Do you support digital rights management to protect my videos?
In the future, Silverlight Streaming will provide support for DRM-encoded video as an optional paid turnkey offering.

10.) What applications will Microsoft provide to make hosting easy?
Microsoft is building a simple uploading tool and working to add publishing support directly to SilverlightTM Streaming via ExpressionTM Media Encoder, a feature of ExpressionTM Media. In addition, third-party companies are adding support to their own applications for SilverlightTM Streaming.

11.) How is my content secured from unauthorized access?
You will have to be signed into the SilverlightTM Streaming service to manage your account and your Silverlight applications. Your SilverlightTM Streaming ID and secret key, associated to your Windows Live ID, will authenticate you as the unique and legitimate owner of the applications and content you upload to the service. You will also need this information to manage your Silverlight applications using the API. The SilverlightTM Streaming ID is public. However, the secret key should be kept confidential.

12.)How do I get started?
To sign up for your free account, visit streaming.live.com. Anyone with a Windows Live ID can participate.

1.) Is Silverlight the official name for “WPF/E”?
Yes. Silverlight was formerly code-named “WPF/E.”

2.) Does silverlight web application work with all browsers ?
Yes, A web application developed by silverlight technology can work with any browser

3.)What are the main features and benefits of Silverlight?
-Compelling cross-platform user experiences.
-Flexible Programming Model with Collaboration Tools.
-High-quality media, low-cost delivery
-Connected to data, servers, and services

4.) How can I build experiences and applications with Silverlight?
Silverlight development tools include role-specific productivity tools for both designers and developers:
* Expression Studio empowers designers to create interactive UI and media-rich experiences, prepare media for encoding and distribution, and create W3C standards-compliant sites using modern XHTML, XML, XSLT, CSS, and ASP.NET. Expression Design includes support for exporting XAML for Silverlight. At MIX 07, Microsoft released Expression Blend 2 May Preview and Expression Media Encoder Preview to enable designers to build media experiences and RIAs.
* Visual Studio empowers developers to develop client and server code using full IntelliSense, powerful debugging, rich language support, and more.
By using Expression Studio and Visual Studio, designers and developers can collaborate more effectively using the skills they have today. Additionally, Silverlight supports a consistent subset of XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) for declarative programming, the same format found in .NET 3.0. Because XAML is toolable, there is always the potential for third-parties to provide additional XAML-based Silverlight tools in the future.

5.) How does Silverlight make the Microsoft development system better?
Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. Examples include:
* For ASP.NET-based Web applications, Silverlight provides a rich UI front-end that, with a consistent programming model, adds support for richer interactivity, media, and audio.
* For Microsoft SharePoint–based content, Silverlight offers the ability to create rich Web parts.
* For Windows Live services, Silverlight offers the ability to consume services and APIs more effectively.

6.) What audio or video formats are supported in Silverlight?
Silverlight supports Windows Media Audio and Video (WMA, WMV7–9) and VC-1, as well as MP3 audio. Additional formats may be available by the final release based on customer feedback.

7.) Will Silverlight support all the codecs Windows Media Player supports?
Since Silverlight is a lightweight cross-platform technology, it only carries the most common codecs that are needed for Web playback. However, we are gathering information from customers about the needed codecs and can update Silverlight when necessary.

8.) Will Silverlight support digital rights management?
For content providers, Silverlight will support digital rights management (DRM) built on the recently announced Microsoft PlayReady content access technology on Windows-based computers and Macintosh computers.
Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. By using Silverlight’s support for .NET, High Definition video, cost-effective advanced streaming, unparalleled high-resolution interactivity with Deep Zoom technology, and controls, businesses can reach out to new markets across the Web, desktop, and devices(Fig. source : MS Site).
Silverlight provides a retained mode graphics system similar to WPF and integrates multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment. In Silverlight applications, user interfaces are declared in XAML and programmed using a subset of the .Net framework. XAML can be used for making up the vector graphics and animations.

1.) Is Silverlight free?
Yes, Microsoft has made the Silverlight browser plug-in freely available for all supported platforms and browsers.

2.)What is the long-term goal or vision for Silverlight?
Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, IronPython, and IronRuby, and integrates with existing Web applications. By using Expression Studio and Visual Studio, designers and developers can collaborate more effectively using the skills they have today to light up the Web of tomorrow. By leveraging Silverlight’s support for .NET, High Definition video, cost-effective advanced streaming, unparalleled high-resolution interactivity with Deep Zoom technology, and controls, businesses can reach out to new markets across the Web, desktop, and devices.

3.) When would a customer use Silverlight instead of ASP.NET AJAX?
Silverlight integrates with existing Web applications, including ASP.NET AJAX applications. Consequently, ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight are designed to be complementary technologies. In the broader sense, Silverlight can talk to any AJAX application, both client-side and server-side. ASP.NET AJAX can additionally be used to control Silverlight-based visualization of data or delivery of rich experiences. Examples might include mapping applications or video playback with rich presentation.

4.) Will Silverlight support live streaming events as well as downloading media?
Yes. Silverlight together with Windows Media Services enable live streaming experiences.

5.) When would a customer use Silverlight versus Windows Presentation Foundation? Is Silverlight for a certain type of application?
For ASP.NET-based Web applications, Silverlight provides a rich UI front-end that, with a consistent programming model, adds support for richer interactivity, media, and audio.
For Microsoft SharePoint–based content, Silverlight offers the ability to create rich Web parts. For Windows Live services, Silverlight offers the ability to consume services and APIs more effectively.

6.) Will Silverlight work with my new or existing Windows Media services platform for streaming?
Silverlight takes advantage of Windows Server features for streaming.

7.) What features are missing from Silverlight presentation markup that will be supported in the Windows Presentation Foundation?
Microsoft recommends the Windows Presentation Foundation for building rich immersive applications and experiences that can take full advantage of the Windows platform, including UI, Media, offline communication, OS integration, Office integration, peripheral access, Document support and more. Silverlight will be used for broad reach interactive media content and browser-based rich interactive and high-performance applications and experiences.

8.) Is Silverlight a new media player?
No. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering media experiences and RIAs. It is not a desktop application or stand-alone media player.

Business Data Catalog (BDC) VS Business Connectivity Services (BCS)

2011-06-16T19:07:00.001+05:30

What is Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint ?
SharePoint 2010 provides a new set of technologies known as Business Connectivity Services for retrieving, editing, updating, and deleting data from external systems(for e.g. data from ERP or CRM database). BCS enhances the SharePoint platform’s capabilities with out-of-box features, services and tools that streamline development of solutions with deep integration of external data and services.

How is BCS Different from BDC in SharePoint 2007 ?
Even though the BDC made it relatively easy to create read-only solutions that display data in the Business Data List Web Part, it was not so simple to create a solution that enabled users to make changes and write that data back to the external store.
BCS, on the other hand, provides you with Read-Write capable connectivity from Client and Server to Database, WCF/Web Services and .Net Sources.
A Developer can now use SharePoint Designer 2010 and VS 2010 rapid development tools to access external data. For e.g. you can now create read-write connections to external database from SharePoint designer and then can create webpart\other solutions to surface that data.
The BCS data can further be used in other SharePoint Fetaures such as Business Intelligence,Collaboration and in Enterprise Search.

SSP Vs Service Applications

Differences between SSP and Service Application are:
What are:
SSP : A Web application that contain all the services proived by sharepoint, and can be shared by various web applications. Some of the services are Search, Infopath,User Profiles etc.
Service Application : The Services that use to be together in SSP, now run independently as a Service Application.
Build -In:
SSP : Shared Services Provider (SSP) was only a part of Office SharePoint Server 2007.
Service Applications : The service application architecture is however, built into Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 itself.
SSP Administration Site:
SSP : They require a SSP administration site to configure the associations with web applications.
Service Application : They are running independently and can be individually associated with the one or more web applications.
Web application's Burden :
SSP : Any Web application associated with the SSP has to take the burden of all the shared services in that SSP.
Service Application : Each web application now have a "Service application group" where they can just add the Services that they need.
Replication :
SSP : The Services where configured in SSP itself and were not replicated. All web applications will use one set of srevices.
Service Application : If the service is needed to be shared between few web applications, the service is re-configured and added into each web application's custom service connection group.

Get list items with Silverlight in Sharepoint 2010

In SharePoint 2010 we use three types of Client Object model extenstions. To get all items using .Net managed client Object model see -
.Net managed client Object model -

To get all items using ECMASCRIPT\Javascript object model see -
Using ECMAScript
In this post however, we will see an example of retrieving list items using Silverlight Client object model in SharePoint 2010.
using SP = Microsoft.SharePoint.Client;
namespace SPSilverlight
{
public partial class MainPage : UserControl
{
IEnumerable < SP.List > listItems = null;
public MainPage()
{
InitializeComponent();
}
private void getItemsSucceeded(object sender,
Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequestSucceededEventArgs e)
{
Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() = >
{
listBox1.ItemsSource = listItems;
listBox1.DisplayMemberPath = "Title";
});
}
private void getItemsRequestFailed(object sender,
Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientRequestFailedEventArgs e)
{
Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(() = >
{
MessageBox.Show("Error: " + e.ErrorCode + " " + e.ErrorDetails + "
" + e.Message + " " + e.StackTrace.ToString());
});
}
private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
ClientContext context = null;
if (App.Current.IsRunningOutOfBrowser)
{
context = new ClientContext(
"http://SP2010Site");
}
else
{
context = ClientContext.Current;
}
var query = from listCollection
in context.Web.Lists
where listCollection.Title != null
select listCollection;
listItems = context.LoadQuery(query);
ClientRequestSucceededEventHandler success = new
ClientRequestSucceededEventHandler(getItemsSucceeded);
ClientRequestFailedEventHandler failure = new
ClientRequestFailedEventHandler(getItemsRequestFailed);
context.ExecuteQueryAsync(success, failure);
}
}

Asp.net Webparts vs Sharepoint Webparts and SP 2007 Object Model Vs SP 2010

2011-06-16T19:06:00.001+05:30

Choosing Between ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Web Parts

Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are built on top of the ASP.NET 2.0 Framework. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 uses the ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part infrastructure to take advantage of features such as master pages and custom Web Part development while providing a complete set of Windows SharePoint Services features, such as document services, events, workflow, search, site columns, content types and more.
You can build Web Parts for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 in two ways:
* Create custom ASP.NET 2.0 Web Parts.
* Create SharePoint-based Web Parts.
Decision matrix for creating Web Parts
Create a custom ASP.NET 2.0 Web Part

· For most business needs.

· To distribute your Web Part to sites that run ASP.NET 2.0 or SharePoint sites.

· When you want to reuse one or more Web Parts created for ASP.NET 2.0 sites on SharePoint sites.

· To use data or functionality provided by Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. For example, you are creating a a Web Part that works with site or list data.

Create a SharePoint-based Web Part

· When you want to migrate a set of Web Parts using the SharePoint-based Web Part infrastructure to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0.

· To create cross page connections.

· To create connections between Web Parts that are outside of a Web Part zone.

· To work with client-side connections (Web Part Page Services Component).

· To use a data-caching infrastructure that allows caching to the content database.

SharePoint 2007 Lookup Column vs SharePoint 2010

Cascade Delete
SharePoint 2007: The Lookup column in SharePoint 2007 does not support cascade delete. i.e. if If an Item\Value in the the look-up list is deleted, then all those items referencing that value (as look-up value) will not be delete. This will rather present you with various errors and can also cause errors on the Site page if your are using one of them as filters.
SharePoint 2010: If an Item\Value in the the look-up list is deleted, then all those items referencing that value (as look-up value) in other lists will also be deleted.

Restrict Delete
SharePoint 2007: Does not have option to restrict deleting of lookup list items\values.
SharePoint 2010: Choosing this option would restrict the users from deleting an item in the column in the Look-up list, if the value is being used in some other lists.

Number of columns displayed
SharePoint 2007: This will only display the chosen lookup column in the referencing list.
SharePoint 2010: You can now display additional columns from the look-up list, along with the chosen lookup field.

SP 2007 Object Model Vs SP 2010

In Sharepoint Object model there are two Important namespaces.
In SharePoint 2007 - The Microsoft.Office.Server namespace is the root namespace of all Office Server objects and Microsoft.SharePoint is the root namespace for all WSS objects.
Hive:
In SharePoint 2007 - It has "12 hive" structure where all SharePoint resources are deployed.
In SharePoint 2010 - Microsoft has apparently added three new folders to its hive and calling it as "14 Hive"
* UserCode – files used to support sandboxed solutions
* WebClients – used for the client Object Model
* WebServices – New .svc files

Foundation :
SharePoint 2007 : Wss 3.0 was required for accessing all common SharePoint API's
SharePoint 2010 : SharePoint Foundation 2010 is required to provide base API's.

API's :
SharePoint 2007 : No API was available for Code to Interact with SharePoint site through Client side scripts (side Note : You can do it by calling Sharepoint web services using javascript )
SharePoint 2010 : MS has introduced Microsoft.SharePoint.Client namespace that enable you to interact with SharePoint sites through scripts that run in the browser from Microsoft .NET Framework managed code, and inside Microsoft Silverlight applications.

SharePoint Foundation 2010 VS SharePoint Server 2010

2011-06-16T19:05:00.003+05:30

Used For :
SharePoint Foundation 2010: Is is for smaller organizations or departments looking for a low-cost entry-level or pilot solution for secure, Web-based collaboration.
SharePoint Server 2010: SharePoint Server 2010 builds on the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 infrastructure to provide a true enterprise portal platform.Any features that are available in SharePoint Foundation 2010 are also available in SharePoint Server 2010.
Features :
SharePoint Foundation 2010: Coordinate schedules, organize documents, and participate in discussions through team workspaces, blogs, wikis, and document libraries on the platform that is the underlying infrastructure for SharePoint Server.
SharePoint Server 2010: In addition to all the Features in SharePoint Foundation 2010, the server includes some additional features for every component available in Foundation 2010. Like Along with the BCS, sharePoint 2010 server also includes External data in search, Secure Store service,External Data Web Parts,Profile pages,External data in workflow,Rich client integration and lot more...

Stsadm Vs Windows PowerShell

2011-06-16T19:05:00.001+05:30

Def :
Stsadm Tool: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes the Stsadm tool for command-line administration of Office SharePoint Server 2007 servers and sites.

Stsadm is located at the following path on the drive where SharePoint Products and Technologies is installed: %COMMONPROGRAMFILES%\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\bin. You must be an administrator on the local computer to use Stsadm.
Windows PowerShell: Windows PowerShell command-line interface is a new command-line tool and supporting scripting language from Microsoft that complements Cmd.exe in the Windows administration context. In the SharePoint administration context, Windows PowerShell supersedes the Stsadm.exe administration tool.
Return Parameter :
Windows PowerShell:Unlike most command-line tools, which accept and return text, Windows PowerShell is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and accepts and returns .NET Framework objects.

Access to File System :
Stsadm : It does not allow you to access file system,registry ans so on..
Windows PowerShell :Like many shells, Windows PowerShell gives you access to the file system on the computer. In addition, Windows PowerShell providers enable you to access other data stores, such as the registry and the digital signature certificate stores etc..

SharePoint 2010 Object Model - Backward Compatibility

2011-06-16T19:04:00.001+05:30

Some Important things about SharePoint 2010 Object model and its backward compatibility.

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 contain object model upgrades that are designed to be compatible with existing solutions developed for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Some namespaces, classes, and methods are now obsolete, but they are still available and will continue to work as expected in your custom code.

You can synchronize your customizations and applications with the upgraded versions of Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 after you have redeployed them.

The object model contains many changes and enhancements, but your custom code will still compile and, with one potential exception, it will run as expected. If in case, any of your customizations rely on list queries that can generate result sets in excess of 5,000 items or that scan all rows of lists that consist of more than 5,000 items, you must change the query size threshold.(See Later in the Post)..

Note: You must Re-compile or re-write your code in below conditions:
* You should rewrite and recompile any code that refers to files and resources in "12" hive.For example, if you have redeployed all of your files into the "14" folder and emptied your "12" folder, any references to files under the "12" folder will not work. You will need to rewrite your code to refer the files in "14 Hive" instead of "12 Hive" to make it work.

* You must recompile custom code written for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 that does not run on IIS (such as console applications and services).

* You should recompile custom code written for Office SharePoint Server 2007 if your solution includes a feature receiver that implements the FeatureInstalled, FeatureUninstalling, FeatureActivated, or FeatureDeactivating methods and you are deploying by using either the Stsadm command-line tool or the timer service.

Lets Look at some of the custom solutions that you would be moving to SharePoint 2010.

Moving Using Solution Packages (.wsp Files)
You can simply deploy them as we did in SharePoint 2007. You dont need to recompile them(unless, your code has references to 12 hive). If however, you want to start upgrading your applications so that they use the most current classes and methods, you should recompile your code. The compiler warnings will tell you which elements of the object model are obsolete, and which newer alternatives you should use.

Moving Using Windows Installer Files
If you deploy your custom solutions by using Windows Installer (.msi) packages, be sure to change them so that your custom files are deployed to their correct locations in the "14" folder. This is especially true if you are deploying files to locations other than the TEMPLATE\FEATURES folder.

Moving Site templates
Site templates: are deprecated. If you need to redeploy a site template to either SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010, follow these steps:
1. Create a site from the site template.
2. Install SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010 on your existing server farm or on a new server farm. If you install the upgrades on a new server farm, attach the content database that contains the site that you created to the new farm.
3. On the new installation, choose Save Site as Template from the Site Settings page. This creates a solution package with a .wsp file name extension.

CSS Changes:
When you upgrade to either SharePoint Foundation 2010 or SharePoint Server 2010, you are able to choose either backward compatibility mode or the upgraded user interface. You can however, switch between backward compatibility mode and the new interface at the site-collection level or site level.

Since, the UI has changed significantly in both SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010, any customizations(made to SharePoint 2007 CSS) that rely on specific CSS classes and UI elements will work only in backward compatibility mode.

A property SPWeb.UIVersion is also available for developers, to programmatically get or set the UI version (3 for backward compatibility mode and 4 for the new interface).

Themes:
Themes no longer exist in SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010, so any customizations and design work that you have done with themes will not be imported into the new interface.

Custom Actions and Toolbar Additions:
Most custom actions, including those targeted at links and edit control block (ECB) menus, continue to work as expected in the upgraded interface. Because the toolbar is replaced by the ribbon, most custom actions that add buttons to a toolbar will be placed in the Custom Commands tab of the ribbon.

Note: Any Custom Action Element that uses the ControlAssembly attribute, the ControlClass attribute, or the ControlSrc attribute, however, will not appear in the new interface.

Site definition:Migrate sites to a supported, predefined site definition, then apply custom features by using solution deployment. You can also continue to use a custom site definition. You do not have to create a new site definition based on SharePoint Server 2010.

Event handler : Rewrite and redeploy as a feature.
JavaScript : In some cases, you might have to adjust the scripts to work with the new page model. Verify that it works on an upgraded site, and in both Visual Upgrade modes.

Solution packages in Sharepoint 2010

2011-06-16T19:03:00.001+05:30

First of all if you do not know what is this solution package then here is a simple definition : A solution package is a distribution package or a container that is use to deploy your custom SharePoint Server 2010 development work to the SharePoint Web servers.
In SharePoint 2010, user have many options to create and deploy solution packages for their custom development work, let me start with the most used method to create a solution package

1. Create Package using Visual Studio 2010 - Developers can build their SharePoint solutions in Visual Studio 2010 and produce .wsp files by using the automated build process. After you build your thing in VS 2010 using the SharePoint related templates available, you can just hit ctrl + F5. This will create a .wsp file and will also deploy it to the SharePoint server you are developing on.
Create a package - To Create a package in VS 2010, In Solution Explorer, click the project that you want to package. Then, on the Build menu, click Package.
Where is the .wsp - In Solution Explorer, click the Show All Files button. This shows all project items, including excluded and hidden items.Expand the bin node and
Expand the Debug or Release node to get your .wsp file.
Modify solution Package - When you create a SharePoint solution, Visual Studio adds the default SharePoint Features (or items) to the solution package. Before final deployment, you can add and remove SharePoint project items and Features using the SharePoint package. To open Package Designer In your Solution Explorer, right-click Package and then click View Designer.
Use Add\Remove (>) or(<) button to add the items into the solution package.
In addition to select files for packaging, the Package designer allows you to set various properties for the deployment. Some of the properties that you can set are :
1. Name - It is a Required Property. The default name of the package is set to ProjectName.
2. Reset WebServer - Optional. Select if you want to restart the Web server after the .wsp file is installed on the SharePoint server.
3. Deployment Server Type - This is a Required Field. By default, the scope is set to ApplicationServer.
4. Items in the Solution - All SharePoint project items and Features that can be added to the package.
5. Items in the Package - Optional. All SharePoint items and Features that you want to deploy in your package.
After, VS 2010 lets see at other options to create a solution Package in SharePoint 2010.
2. Solution Package by Using MSBuild - Using MSbuild you can build, clean, and validate a SharePoint package (.wsp) using command-line MSBuild tasks on a development computer.

For this you need to Open a Visual Studio command prompt window

-> Cd to your Project folder

-> Type the command

"msbuild /t:Package ProjectName.csproj" to create a package for the project. ProjectName is a name for the solution Package.

Sharepoint 2010 WebPart Tutorial

2011-06-16T19:02:00.003+05:30

Webparts as you know are Reusable components that can be deployed and added to many different sharepoint site pages. In this post we will talk about custom and Out-of-box webparts in SharePoint 2010.

In sharePoint 2010 we can create two kind of custom WebParts :

1. Visual WebPart - While creating a Visual webpart you will have a design interface available with you, where you can simply drag and drop checkboxes, labels or your own custom controls to make up the webpart UI. To add the business logic, a code behind file is also attached to the webpart.
Technically, a Visual webpart in SharePoint 2010 is a ascx User Control that is hosted inside a standard asp.net webpart. If you notice that the webpart class does not now inherit form a Microsoft.SharePoint.webpartpages.webparts or System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts instead it inherits from UserControl namespace.

2. Standard AsP.NET WbeParts - Here you will have to build uo your user interface and logic in a class file. Unlike, visual webpart standad asp.net webparts in SharePoint 2010 does not gives you any drag and drop design surface for developing WebPart UI. This type of webpart Inherits from Standard ASP.Net webpart instead of UserControl or SharePoint.webpart.

WebPart Packaging - Visual Studio 2010 package and deploy webparts when you press Clt + F5. It has a packaging and deployment processor which will create the needed solution package for your webpart and will deploy it in your sharepoint site. You can then add the webparts on any sharepoint site page from webpart gallery.

SharePoint 2010 – Interview Questions

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Q. Can we use our custom master page with the application pages in SharePoint 2010 ?
Ans. With 2010, you can now set whether the pages under _Layouts use the same Master Page as the rest of your site. You can enable or disable this functionality through the web application settings in Central Administration. This however, is not applicable to your custom application pages. If you want your custom applictaion page to inherit the site master page you must derive it from Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls.LayoutsPageBase class.

Q. What does CMDUI.XML contain?
Ans. The definitions for the out-of-the-box ribbon elements are split across several files in the SharePoint root, with TEMPLATE\GLOBAL\XML\CMDUI.XML being the main one.

Q. Why would you use LINQ over CAML for data retrieval?
Ans. Unlike CAML, with LINQ to SharePoint provider, you are working with strongly typed list item objects. For example, an item in the Announcements list is an object of type Announcement and an item on a Tasks list is an object of type Task. You can then enumerate the objects and get the properties for your use. Also, you can use LINQ syntax and the LINQ keywords built into C# and VB for LINQ queries.

Q. How do you write to SharePoint ULS logs in 2010 ?
Ans. In SharePoint Foundation, ULS exposes configurable settings in two ways, through the – Object model and Windows PowerShell cmdlets. For writing to SharePoint ULS logs developers can can use Diagnostics Service, which will make the customized categories viewable in the administrative UI for our errors.
or they can use the number of cmdlets available for accessing ULS logs using powershell. Some of the cmdlets are Get-SPDiagnosticConfig ,Get-SPLogEvent etc.

Q. How does Client object model works ?
Ans. When we use SharePoint client API’s to perform a specific task, the SharePoint Foundation 2010 managed client object model bundles up these uses of the API into XML and sends it to the server that runs SharePoint Foundation. The server receives this request, and makes appropriate calls into the object model on the server, collects the responses, forms them into JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), and sends that JSON back to the SharePoint Foundation 2010 managed client object model. The client object model parses the JSON and presents the results to the application as .NET Framework objects (or ECMAScript objects for ECMAScript).

Q. What is difference between Load() and LoadQuery() methods ?
Ans. Load method populates the client object directly with what it gets data from the server i.e. a collection object like ListItemCollection etc. but LoadQuery returns the data as a completely new collection in IEnumerable format. Other major difference is that the Collections that you load using the Load() method are eligible for garbage collection only when the client context variable itself goes out of scope where as, in these collections go out of scope at the end of IEnumerable list.

Q. How do you access ECMAScript object model API’s ?
Ans. The ECMAScript library is available in a number of JS files in the LAYOUTS folder. The main file among number of .js files is SP.js. When you include this file in the APSX page using a ScriptLink control, all other required JS files are loaded automatically. By linking SP.js to your page, the SP namespace gets registered. SP is the SharePoint namespace that contains all objects. For debugging purposes every js file also has a ‘debug’ equivalent in the same folder.

Q. What is the purpose of calling clientContext.ExecuteQuery() ?
Ans. ExecuteQuery gives you the option to minimize the number of roundtrips to the server from your client code. All the components loaded into the clientcontext are executed in one go.

SharePoint 2010

2011-06-16T19:00:00.001+05:30

Some simple and understandable diagrams from microsoft documentations for SharePoint 2010.
Overview of SharePoint 2010 platform.

SharePoint 2010 Object Model options :

SharePoint sandboxed solution execution :

Architecture of Business Connectivity Services :

SharePoint 2010 Object Model

Microsoft has replaced the "12 hive" structure that we had in SharePoint 2007 with "14 Hive" structure in 2010.
It has apparently added four new folders to its hive.
The Folders are :
* Policy
* UserCode
* WebClients
* WebServices
14 hive and other SharePoint 2010 directories

In this post I will list out some important directories or folders used with SharePoint 2010 server. Lets Start with some directories that are related to SharePoint 2010 installation,Configration and its files, later in the post we will discuss about other 14 hive directories.

C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\wss - This directory (or the corresponding directory under the Inetpub root on the server) is used as the default location for IIS Web sites.

C:\ProgramFiles\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0 - This directory is the installation location for SharePoint Server 2010 binaries and data. The directory can be changed during installation.

C:\ProgramFiles\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\WebServices - This directory is the root directory where SharePoint back-end Web services are hosted, for example, Excel and Search.

C:\ProgramFiles\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Data - This directory is the root location where local data is stored, including search indexes.

C:\ProgramFiles\Microsoft Office Servers\14.0\Logs – This directory is the location where the run-time diagnostic logging is generated.

14 hive folders :

Program Files\Common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14 -
This directory is the installation directory for core SharePoint Server files.

Program Files\Common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\ADMISAPI -
This directory contains the soap services for Central Administration. If this directory is altered, remote site creation and other methods exposed in the service will not function correctly.

Program Files\Common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\CONFIG -
This directory contains files used to extend IIS Web sites with SharePoint Server. If this directory or its contents are altered, Web application provisioning will not function correctly.

Program Files\Common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\LOGS -
This directory contains setup and run-time tracing logs.

Program Files\Common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\Policy -

Program Files\Common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\UserCode -
This directory contains files used to support your sandboxed solutions.

Program Files\Common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\WebClients -
This directory contains files related to the new Client Object Model.

Program Files\Common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\WebServices -
This directory contains new wcf or .svc related files.

In Sharepoint 2010 This is a step-by-step tutorial to learn using sharepoint 2010′s Server and client object model.
Server Object Model – Here we will look at how to use SharePoint API’s, LINQ, REST and SharePoint web service to extract data from sharepoint server.
Lets Start with using the API’s in Microsoft.SharePoint and Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities namespaces.
Firstly, to work with SharePoint 2010 components, your code must first establish the site context or site collection context for requests that are made to the server.
Please Note : In SharePoint, the SPsite object also refered to as Site is actually a “Site Collection” object, not a website
and the SPweb object also refered to as “web” is a single site in the site collection.(It can be a top-level site collection site).
also, object of type SPWebApplication is a big boss object which has reference to the web applictaion that contains the site collection.
To get the reference to site context in your code use the recommended Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContext class and its members.
Lets look at how it is used
To get a reference to the site collection -
SPSite oSiteCollection = SPContext.Current.Site;
To get a reference to the current web site or web in the site collection -
SPWeb oWebSite = SPContext.Current.Web;
or
SPWeb oWebSite = SPControl.GetContextWeb(Context);
Note : if your are using Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContext class, you should not dispose any SPSite or SPWeb object obtained by any of the above methods. The SharePoint Foundation runtime will dispose of them after page completion.
To get a reference to all the webs or sites in a site collection -
SPWeb oWebSite = SPContext.Current.Site.AllWebs["mySite1"];
oWebSite.Dispose();
Note : You should explicitly dispose of references to objects that are obtained through the AllWebs() or Openweb() property. You can also use using clause
like below to avoid calling the dispose off method and let sharepoint do this for you.
using can be something like
using (SPWeb oWebSite = SPContext.Current.Site.AllWebs["mySite1"]);
{
…
}
You can also use the Openweb() as below
using (SPWeb oWebSite = mySiteCollection.OpenWeb(“mySite1″))
{
…
}
Lets look at some other components of the SharePoint farm that you can get using SPContext
To get a reference to the current top-level server farm object -
SPFarm myFarm = SPContext.Current.Site.WebApplication.Farm;
To get a reference to the site collection database -
SPSite oSiteCollection = SPContext.Current.Site.CurrentDatabase
Lets look at some of the general code snippets
To return the collection of site collections in a SharePoint Web application -
SPWebApplication webApplication = SPContext.Current.Site.WebApplication;
using (SPSiteCollection siteCollections = webApplication.Sites)
{
foreach (SPSite siteCollection in siteCollections)
{
Label1.Text += siteCollection.Url + “
”;
siteCollection.Close();
}
}
Note : To runthe above code reference the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication assembly in your code.
To return the collection of The all the Webs or sites within a site collection, including the top-level site and all subsites.
SPSite oSiteCollection = SPContext.Current.Site;
using(SPWebCollection collWebsite = oSiteCollection.AllWebs);
{
for (int i = 0; i < collWebsite.Count; i++)
{
using (SPWeb oWebsite = collWebsite[i])
{
SPListCollection collList = oWebsite.Lists;
for (int j = 0; j < collList.Count; j++)
{
Label1.Text += SPEncode.HtmlEncode(collWebsite[i].Title) + ” ”
+ SPEncode.HtmlEncode(collList[j].Title) + “
”;
}
}}}
To return the all the subsites and lists of the current site
using (SPWeb oWebSite = mySiteCollection.OpenWeb())
{
using(SPWebCollection subSites = oWebsite.Webs)
{
foreach (SPWeb subSite in subSites)
{
Label1.Text += SPEncode.HtmlEncode(subSite.Title) + “
”;
SPListCollection collList = subSite.Lists;
foreach (SPList oList in collList)
{
Label1.Text += SPEncode.HtmlEncode(oList.Title) + ” ” +
oList.ItemCount.ToString() + “
”;
}subSite.Close();
} } }

Sharepoint interview questions

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Q. What are WebParts?
Ans. Web Parts are self-contained packages of user interface that can be dropped onto a SharePoint Web Part page to provide discrete set of functionality to the users. They can simply be described as re-usable Code units.
Q. What are Features?
Ans. Features represent a set of functionality (code) that can be activated and de-activated at various levels in SharePoint. Using Features, you can do everything from adding a link to the Site Settings page to creating a complete fully functioning Project suite that can be added to any SharePoint site. Developers can scope feature to the following level -

. Web
. Site
. WebApplication
. Farm

Q. What are Solutions?
Ans. Solutions are the container packages for Features. Solution basically, is a cabinet (.cab) file with extension .wsp which contains various components needed to be deployed(features, webparts, custom forms etc) along with files that describe some important metadata about those Components. Once a Solution is installed on a server in the farm, you can deploy it to any webapplication from your Solution Management.
Q. What is a .ddf file and what does it have to do with SharePoint Solution creation?
Ans. A .ddf file is a data directive file which describes the files need to be deployed and their destination (in SharePoint). .ddf is used when building the SharePoint solution. This file is a parameter to makecab.exe which outputs the wsp file.
Q. What is the difference between a site and a web in SharePoint?
Ans. A site in sharePoint is a site collection. It is an object of SPsite class in sharepoint. A Web however, is simply a blank site within that site collection. Web is a Part of SPweb class, thus represents a site within a site collection.
Q. What is CAML?
Ans. CAML stands for Collaborative Application Markup Language and is an XML-based language that is used in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services to define sites and lists for E.g. fields, views, or forms etc. Developers mostly use CAML to write Queries to retrieve data from Lists\libraries.
Q. What is Custom action?
Ans. Represents a link, toolbar button, menu item, or any control that can be added to a toolbar or menu that appears in the UI. For e.g. "New Folder" button in your document library is a custom action or "View All Site Content" in your Site Settings is a custom action.
Q. What are Master pages in SharePoint?
Ans. These are the pages that provide a consistent layout and appearance (look and feel) for SharePoint sites. A master Page consist of a Site logo, Top navigation, left navigation(some cases) and a footer. In SharePoint Master Pages are stored in _catalogs folder or Master Page Gallery from UI.
Q. What are Layout Pages in SharePoint?
Ans. A Layout page defines the Layouts(structure including Webpart zones) of a content page in SharePoint. Layout pages are not same as Master Page. A Layout Page is contained inside the content area surrounded by mater Page.
Q. What is a SharePoint Theme?
Ans. A Theme is a group of files (CSS, images) that allow you to define the appearance (look and feel) of content pages in SharePoint. A Theme defines the design of various components for e.g. Content Page background-color,button color,webpart title color etc to give a different look and feel to your site.
Q. What is a web part zone?
Ans. Web part zones are what your web parts reside in. Each webpart zone can contain number of webparts and can be positioned in a specific way to create a webpart Layout Page.
Q. What is Business Data Catalog or BDC ?
Ans. It is a shared service that enables Office SharePoint Server 2007 to display business data from various back-end servers into a SharePoint page. Business Data Catalog or BDC provides built-in support for displaying data with various webparts and list\list columns that can help in easy creation of dashboards with data from your SQL, web services, SAP, Siebel, or any other line-of-business (LOB) applications.
Q What is a Site definition?
Ans. A Site definition is a collection of Files such as ONET.XML which defines the Site template for e.g. Team Sites used to create a Site in SharePoit. All the out-of-box site Templates like Blog,Wiki,Team Site etc can be found in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\
Q What is a Site Template?
Ans. Any Site along with the content can be saved as a template. If a site is saved as a Template it is stored in Site templates folder as a .stp file. This template is then re-used to create a new site which will have the pre-saved settings.
Q. What are content types?
Ans. A content type is a flexible and reusable template of type list item or document that defines the columns and behavior for an item in a list or a document in a document library. For example, you can create a content type for a Requirement document with a columns such LOE,Version,Approver,Date Created,Date Revised etc and this can be re-used in various document libraries.
Q. what is Central administration?
Ans. This is a site used by admins to mange and configure settings for SharePoint web applications or the whole farm.

Q. What are event receivers or event Handlers in SharePoint?
Ans. Event Receivers or Event handlers are created to handle the basic actions or events against an item,list\library, a web or a site. There are two kinds of events in sharepoint.
Synchronous Events: Like Itemadding (not added yet), Uploading (document not uploaded yet) etc.
Asynchronous Events: ItemAdded (after item is added), Uploaded(after a document is uploaded)
Events receivers can be written to override an event for e.g. ItemAdded event to change the name of an Item once it is added.
Q. What is stsadm?
Ans. It is a Command-line tool used for administration of Office SharePoint 2007 (or MOSS 2007) servers and sites. Basic operations like adding a solution or installing activating and feature is usually done by stsadm.
Q. What permissions are required to perform stsadm operations?
Ans. You need to be a member of WSS_ADMIN_WPG group to perform deployments for sharepoint server. Also, you need to be added into administrators group on a computer on which SharePoint Server or WSS 3.0 is installed. In addition to this you definitely need access to the required sharepoint databases so that you should not get errors while deploying sharepoint solutions.
Q. Where is it located?
Ans. You will normally, find it under C:\Program Files\Common Files\ shared\web server extensions\12\bin.

Q What is a DWP?
Ans. Its a webpart file extension.
Q What is the GAC?
Ans. Global Assembly Cache folder (or assembly) stores the strongly typed signed assemblies for webparts or other sharepoint components(which require full trust) for services to share them.

Q. What are Application Pages, Site Pages and Content Pages?
Ans.
Application Pages - An application page is deployed once per Web server and cannot be customized on a site-by-site basis. They stay in 12 hive folder structure, mostly under layouts folder.
Site Pages - These are pages that make up the site interface and are specific to one site or site collection.They mostly get stored in the content database of the site collection.
Content Pages - Site Page which contains webpart or other custom components. This Page is stored in database. They mostly get stored in the content database of the site collection.
Q.What are the Permission levels in SharePoint?
Ans. Permission levels in SharePoint are -
* Limited Access - They can view Application Pages, Browse User Information, Use Remote Interfaces, Use Client Integration Features etc.
* Reader - Limited Access permissions plus: View Items, Open Items, View Versions, Create Alerts, Use Self-Service Site Creation, View Pages.
* Contributor - Read permissions plus: Add Items, Edit Items, Delete Items, Delete Versions, Browse Directories, Edit Personal User Information, Manage Personal Views, Add/Remove Personal Web Parts, Update Personal Web Parts.
* Design - Contribute permissions plus: Manage Lists, Override Check Out, Approve Items, Add and Customize Pages, Apply Themes and Borders, Apply Style Sheets.
* Administrator - Has full control of the Web site.
* Full Control - All permissions.
Q. What are Site Columns?
Ans. Site columns are pre-defined data columns(along with default values) which are re-used in various content types. A Content type is usually a collection of site columns. For e.g. you can create a site column "Category" with a choice datatype along with the pre-defined values "It","Hr". This column then can be added to any content type in your list or library.
Q. What does each individual Site collection offers?
Ans. An Individual Site collection offers following :
For the Users:
Dedicated Recycle bins
Dedicated usage Reports
Distributed administration (site collection administrators)
Dedicated search scopes, keywords, and best-bets
Custom feature deployments
Dedicated language translation maintenance
Dedicated galleries for web parts, master pages, content types, site columns, site templates, and list templates
Dedicated shared libraries, such as site collection images and site collection styles
Dedicated real estate (Self Containment)
For the IT Administrators:
Site quota templates
Distributed administration
Site locking
Database maintenance options
Backup / Restore abilities
Content Deployments
InfoPath forms services global template targeting
Q. When would you use a Different Site Collection for you new site?.
Ans. We would prefer to make our new site in a seprate site collection for the following are the reasons:
1. Site quotas is one of the reasons. The issue is the recycle bin is based on site collections and the quota for a site collection. If everyone shares a site collection, then they share the recycle bins storage size.
2. Delegated Security and distributed administration is the next big thing. For eg, you have a IT department that doesn't know who should be able to see what content, besides how it should be organized. This is the job of the content owners and users. SharePoint site collections offers IT the ability to create a site collection for a project, team, department, document, or whatever the needs are, then assign an owner and hand it off to them.
3. In addition to these two if you need to separate the content between databases because of space issue.

Q. What is a Field Control?
Ans. Field controls are server controls that provide the basic field functionality of SharePoint. For example a Inputbox (single line text) to enter the title of the item. You can create your own FieldControl by inheriting classes from BaseFieldControl namespace.
Q. How do you develop webparts in SharePoint?
Ans. You can either develop a simple asp.net webpart with C# class library project or can use various tools available in the market. VSeWSS is an extension provided by Microsoft that consist of a webpart template for easy webpart creation and deployment. Other tools are wspbuilder, stsdev etc.
Q. Explain webpart life cycle.
Ans. protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e)
protected override void OnLoad(EventArgs e)
protected override void CreateChildControls()
protected override void LoadViewState(object savedState) //Only at Postback
protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)
protected override void Render(System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter writer)
protected override void OnUnload(EventArgs e)
public override void Dispose()
Q. While creating a Web part, which is the ideal location to Initialize my new controls?
Ans. CreateChildControls is the method where we initialize all the child controls.
Q. Do we always need to override Is Render() method.
Ans. We override render only in case if we need to define the rendering of our controls in the webpart.
Q. What is the WebPartManager sealed class?
Ans. The WebPartManager sealed class is responsible for managing everything occurring on a WebPart page, such as the WebParts (controls), events, and misc. functionality that will occur in WebPartZones. Each Page will have only one WebPartManager reference on the page.
Q. What are WebPart Properties?
Ans. WebPart Properties are properties defined from the right toolpane of the webpart. These are settings or values set by the end user and are used within your webpart. For e.g. WebPart title, Description etc. Some of the attributes which you can define for your custom property are WebDescription, WebDisplayName, Category, Personalizable, and WebBrowsable.

Q. How does Windows SharePoint Services help render the Webapplictaion in ShrePoint?
Ans. When a new web applictaion is created via Central Admin, Windows SharePoint Services creates a new Web application in IIS. Then the WSS, loads the custom HTTP application and replaces all installed HTTP handlers and modules with Windows SharePoint Services–specific ones. These handlers and modules essentially tell IIS to route all file requests through the ASP.NET 2.0 pipeline. This is because most files in a SharePoint site are stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database.
Q. What files gets created on a file system, when a Site collection is created ?
Ans. Windows SharePoint Services does not create any files or folders on the file system when the site collection or sites are created; everything is created in the content database. The Pages for the site collection are created as instances in the content database. These instances refer to the actual file on the file system.
Q.How Does SharePoint work?
Ans. The browser sends a DAV packet to IIS asking to perform a document check in. PKMDASL.DLL, an ISAPI DLL, parses the packet and sees that it has the proprietary INVOKE command. Because of the existence of this command, the packet is passed off to msdmserv.exe, who in turn processes the packet and uses EXOLEDB to access the WSS, perform the operation and send the results back to the user in the form of XML.
Q. What is Authentication and Authorization.
Ans. An authentication system is how you identify yourself to the computer. The goal behind an authentication system is to verify that the user is actually who they say they are.
Once the system knows who the user is through authentication, authorization is how the system decides what the user can do.

Q. What are Security methods(Authentication methods) available in sharepoint
Ans. "Out of the box", SharePoint 2007 supports nine authentication methods. But NTLM (Windows authentication) and Kerberos (Windows "standard" authentication) are offered during installation.
Q. Workflow can be applied to what all elements of SharePoint ?
Ans. Workflow associations can be created directly on lists\libraries and content types.
Q. What are the types of input forms that can be created for a workflow ?
Ans. You can create four different types of input forms including
1. An association form
2. An initiation form
3. A modification form
4. A task edit form
Q. What is the difference between method activity and event activity in WorkFlow ?
Ans. A method activity is one that performs an action, such as creating or updating a task. An event activity is one that runs in response to an action occurring.
Q. What does SPWeb.EnsureUser() do?
Ans. This method Checks whether the specified login name is a valid user of the SharePoint web.
Q. What does AllowUnsafeUpdates do ?
Ans. If you need to modify some data in you SharePoint site for e.g. update a list item or list properties you may need to allow unsafe updates on the Web site. you can set it to we.AllowUnsafeUpdates = false once your done.
Q. What is the webservice used to retrieve or add list items in sharepoint?
Ans. List.asmx is a Out-of-box webservice provided to add\update\delete and retrieve list items. It can be accessed from "http://SPSite/_vti_bin/lists.asmx" path.

Q. What Do you know about SharePoint Object Model?
Ans. In Sharepoint Object model there are two Important namespaces.
The Microsoft.Office.Server namespace is the root namespace of all Office Server objects and Microsoft.SharePoint is the root namespace for all WSS objects.
Read More at SharePoint 2007 Object Model
Q. Can you develop webparts and other SharePoint solutions at your local machine?
Ans. In order to run and debug sharePoint solutions, the project must reside on the server which has Windows sharePoint services installed. However, you can reference the Microsoft.SharePoint dll in your project at your local, but you won’t be able to run it.
Q. How do you debug SharePoint Webparts?
Ans. To debug SharePoint webpart (or any solution) you can simply drag and drop your complied .dll in GAC and recycle the app pool. You can also run upgrade solution command from stsadm.

Q. How would you retrieve large number of Items form the list ?
Ans. To retrieve large number of items with a better performance we can either use SPQuery or PortalSiteMapProvider Class. Read More with Examples
Retrieving large number of Items from sharepoint list
Q. How Do you implement Impersonation in ShrePoint.
Ans. By Using RunWithElevatedPrivileges method provided by SPSecurity class.
See e.g Impersonation in Sharepoint
Q: What is the performance impact of RunWithElevatedPrivileges?
Ans. RunWithElevatedPrivileges creates a new thread with the App Pool's credentials, blocking your current thread until it finishes.

Q. How will you add Code behind to a Custom Applictaion Page or a Layout Page in SharePoint?
Ans. You do not deploy a code behind file with your custom Layouts page. Instead, you can have the page inherit from the complied dll of the solution to access the code behind.
Q. What is the difference between a Site Definition and a Site Template?
Ans. Site Definitions are stored on the hard drive of the SharePoint front end servers. They are used by the SharePoint application to generate the sites users can create. Site Templates are created by users as a copy of a site they have configured and modified so that they do not have to recreate lists, libraries, views and columns every time they need a new instance of a site.
Q. Why do you use Feature Receivers ?
Ans. Feature Receivers are used to execute any code on Activation\Deactivation of a Feature. You can use it for various purposes.
Q. Can you give a example where feature receivers are used.
Ans. You can use it to assign an event receiver feature to a specific type of list or can write a code in a feature receivers Deactivate method to remove a webpart from webpart gallery.
Q. Where do you deploy the additional files used in your webpart, like css or javascript files, and how do you use them in your WebPart?
Ans. You can deploy the css or javascript files in _layouts folder in SharePoint's 12 hive. To use them in your webpart, you need to first register them to your webpart page and then specify a virtual path for the file for e.g. _layouts\MyCSS.css See Code examples at Using External Javascript, CSS or Image File in a WebPart.
Q: When should you dispose SPWeb and SPSite objects?
Ans. According to the best Practices you should always dispose them if you have created them in your code. You can dispose them in Finally block or you can use the "Using" clause, so that they gets disposed when not required. If you are using SPContext then you need not dispose the spsite or spweb objects.
Q. What are the best practices for SharePoint development.
Ans. Some of the best practices are:
1. You should always dispose SPsite and SPWeb objects, once you refer them in your code. Using the "Using" clause is recommended.
2. Use RunwithelevatePrivilages to avoid errors for end users.
3. Try writing your errors to SharePoint error logs (ULS Logs). Since it’s a bad idea to fill-up event log for your production environment.
4. Use SPQuery instead of foreach loop while retrieving Items from the list.
5. Deploy additional files used in your webpart to 12 hive. Use your solution package to drop the files in 12 hive. Also, make sure that all the references (for e.g. Css or .js files) get removed when the solution is retracted.
Also See : Best Practices to Improve Site Performance
Q.What is the main difference between using SPListItem.Update() and SPListItem.SystemUpdate()?
Ans. Using SystemUpdate() will not create a new version and will also retain timestamps.

Q. When do you use SPSiteDataQuery ?
Ans. You can use SPSiteDataQuery when you need to extract data from more than one list\library in your site colletcion. The data is extracted on the basis of the query you write and is
returened as a Datatable. You can also specify the GUID for the lists\libraries you want to query against.
Q. How do you create a Custom action for an item in a list ?
Ans. This can be done by adding a new feature into SharePoint. You would need to use customaction tag in your elements.xml file and will have to set various properties like imageurl or UrlAction for your customaction. You can later add this feature into sharepoint using stsadm install feature command.
Q. How would you bind this CustomAction to a specific list ?
Ans. To do this you can either create a new list type(again a feature) and use the listtype number for the new list in your RegistrationType property of the Customaction. The CustomAction will then show up only for the items of this list type. or You can create a new content type and then use that content type's id in your cutsomaction to bind the custom action to items of just that content type. Add the new content type to the list where you need this customaction.
Q. How will you deploy an existing asp.net webapplication or website in SharePoint?
Ans. You would need to wrap the web application in a solution package in order to deploy it in 12 hive or say ShraePoint. It is recommended to create a feature first, and then wrap everything in a Solution package. See example Depoly a Custom aspx Page in SharePoint
Q. How will you cancel a deployment from central admin -> solution managment, if its stuck at “deploying” or “Error”.
Ans. You can either try to force execute timer jobs using execadmsvcjobs command or can cancel the dpeloyment using stsadm command stsadm –o cancaldeployment –id {GUID} command. The Id here would be GUID of the timer or deployment job. You can get the Id from stsadm enumdeployment command. This will display all the deployments which are process or are stuck with Error.
Q. How do make an existing non-publishing site Publishing?
Ans. You can simply activate the SharePoint Publishing Feature for the Site, you want to make publishing.
Q. Can you name some of the tools used for SharePoint Administration?
Ans. Tools Used for SharePoint Administration

Q. What are Application Pages in SharePoint?
Ans. Unlike site pages (for example, default.aspx), a custom application page is deployed once per Web server and cannot be customized on a site-by-site basis. Application pages are based in the virtual _layouts directory. In addition, they are compiled into a single assembly DLL.
A good example of an Application Page is the default Site Settings page: every site has one, and it's not customizable on a per site basis (although the contents can be different for sites).
With application pages, you can also add inline code. With site pages, you cannot add inline code.
Q. What is Authentication and Authorization?
Ans . An authentication system is how you identify yourself to the computer. The goal behind an authentication system is to verify that the user is actually who they say they are.
Once the system knows who the user is through authentication, authorization is how the system decides what the user can do.
Q. How do you deploy a User Control in SharePoint ?
Ans. You deploy your User Control either by a Custom webpart, which will simply load the control on the page or can use tools like SmartPart, which is again a webpart to load user control on the page. User Control can be deployed using a custom solution package for the webapplication or you can also the control in the webpart solution package so that it gets deployed in _controlstemplate folder.
Q. Which is faster a WebPart or a User Control?
Ans. A WebPart renders faster than a User Control. A User Control in SharePoint is usually loaded by a webpart which adds an overhead. User Controls however, gives you an Interface to add controls and styles.
Q. What SharePoint Databases are Created during the standard Install?
Ans. During standard install, the following databases are created :
SharePoint_AdminContent
SharePoint_Config
WWS_Search_SERVERNAME%_%GUID_3%
SharedServicesContent_%GUID_4%
SharedServices1_DB_%GUID_5%
SharedServices1_Search_DB_%
GUID_6%WSS_Content_%GUID_7%

Q. What are content types?
Ans. A content type is a flexible and reusable WSS type definition (or we can a template) that defines the columns and behavior for an item in a list or a document in a document library. For example, you can create a content type for a leave approval document with a unique set of columns, an event handler, and its own document template and attach it with a document library/libraries.
Q. Can a content type have receivers associated with it?
Ans. Yes, a content type can have an event receiver associated with it, either inheriting from the SPListEventReciever base class for list level events, or inheriting from the SPItemEventReciever base class. Whenever the content type is instantiated, it will be subject to the event receivers that are associated with it.
Q. Can you add a Cutsom Http Handler in SharePoint ?
Ans. Yes, a Custom httphandler can be deployed in _layouts folder in SharePoint. Also, we need to be register the handler in the webapp's webconfig file.
Q. While creating a Web part, which is the ideal location to Initialize my new controls?
Override the CreateChildControls method to include your new controls. You can control the exact rendering of your controls by calling the .Render method in the web parts Render method.
Q. How do you return SharePoint List items using SharePoint web services?
Ans.
In order to retrieve list items from a SharePoint list through Web Services, you should use the lists.asmx web service by establishing a web reference in Visual Studio. The lists.asmx exposes the GetListItems method, which will allow the return of the full content of the list in an XML node. It will take parameters like the GUID of the name of the list you are querying against, the GUID of the view you are going to query, etc.
Q. How Do you deploy Files in 12 hive when using wspbuilder or vsewss?
Ans. Typically, you can add these files in the 12 hive folder structure in your project. In Vsewss however, you will have to create this structure manually.

Q. What files gets created on a file system, when a Site collection is created ?
Ans. Windows SharePoint Services does not create any files or folders on the file system when the site collection or sites are created; everything is created in the content database. The Pages for the site collection are created as instances in the content database. These instances refer to the actual file on the file system.
Q. What are Customized and Uncustomized Files in SharePoint ?
Ans. There are two types of Pages in SharePoint; site pages (also known as content pages) and application pages.
Uncustomized :
When you create a new SharePoint site in a site collection, Windows SharePoint Services provisions instances of files into the content database that resides on the file system. That means if you create a new Site "xyz" of type Team Site(or Team sIte Definition), an instance of the Team Site Definition( Which resides on the File System), i.e. "xyz" gets created in the Content database. So, When ASP.NET receives a request for the file, it first finds the file in the content database. This entry in the content database tells ASP.NET that the file is actually based on a file on the file system and therefore, ASP.NET retrieves the source of the file on the file system when it constructs the page.
Customized :
A customized file is one in which the source of the file lives exclusively in the site collection's content database. This happens When you modify the file in any way through the SharePoint API, or by SharePoint Designer 2007,which uses the SharePoint API via RPC and Web service calls to change files in sites. So, When the file is requested, ASP.NET first finds the file in the content database. The entry in the database tells ASP.NET whether the file is customized or uncustomized. If it is customized, it contains the source of the file, which is used by ASP.NET in the page contraction phase.
Q. What are event receivers?
Ans. Event receivers are classes that inherit from the SpItemEventReciever or SPListEventReciever base class (both of which derive out of the abstract base class SPEventRecieverBase), and provide the option of responding to events as they occur within SharePoint, such as adding an item or deleting an item.

Q. When would you use an event receiver?
Ans. Since event receivers respond to events, you could use a receiver for something as simple as canceling an action, such as deleting a document library by using the Cancel property. This would essentially prevent users from deleting any documents if you wanted to maintain retention of stored data.

Q. If I wanted to restrict the deletion of the documents from a document library, how would I go about it?
Ans. You would create a event receiver for that list/library and implement the ItemDeleting method. Simply, set: properties.Cancel= true and display a friendly message using Properties.Message("How can u delete this... Its not your stuff!");

Q. What is the difference between an asynchronous and synchronous event receivers?
Ans. An asynchronous event occurs after an action has taken place, and a synchronous event occurs before an action has take place. For example, an asynchronous event is ItemAdded, and its sister synchronous event is ItemAdding

Q. How do you Increase trust level for a single WebPart in the WebConfig file.
Ans. To list a Web Part with Full Permissions within your Web Application while still retaining a WSS_Minimal permission set for all other Web Parts, You need to create a Custom policy file. This file will be then referenced in SharePoint Web.config file and will allow your specific webpart to be of Full trust.
Steps :
1. Make a copy of the WSS_Minimal.Config file from the 12\Config folder and paste it into the same folder renaming it to Custom_WSS_Minimal.Config. Now, edit the Custom_WSS_Minimal.Config file using NotePad. Obtain the Public Key Token for the Web Part assembly that you want to deploy, using the following command: sn –Tp filename.dll. Create a new entry in your Custom_WSS_Minimal.Config file for your WebPart. Save the File.
Finally, Create a new TrustLevel element for your config file in the Web.Config called Custom_WSS_Minimal that points to your custom file in the 12\config folder. Recycle the Application Pool and You’re Done.
Q. How does Windows SharePoint Services help render the Webapplictaion in ShrePoint?
Ans. When a new web applictaion is created via Central Admin, Windows SharePoint Services creates a new Web application in IIS. Then the WSS, loads the custom HTTP application and replaces all installed HTTP handlers and modules with Windows SharePoint Services–specific ones. These handlers and modules essentially tell IIS to route all file requests through the ASP.NET 2.0 pipeline. This is because most files in a SharePoint site are stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database.

Q. How would you pass user credentials while using SharePoint WebService from your Web Part or application.
Ans. The web service needs credentials to be set before making calls.
Examples:
listService.UseDefaultCredentials = true; // use currently logged on user
listService.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("user", "pass", "domain"); // use specified user
Q. How would you remove a webapart from the WebPart gallery? Does it get removed with Webpart retraction?
Ans. No, Webpart does not get removed from the WebPart gallery on retraction. You can write a feature receiver on Featuredeactivating method to remove the empty webpart from the gallery.
Q. What is a SharePoint Feature? Features are installed at what scope
Ans. A SharePoint Feature is a functional component that can be activated and deactivate at various scopes throughout a SharePoint instances, scope of which are defined as
1. Farm level 2. Web Application level 3. Site level 4. Web level
Features have their own receiver architecture, which allow you to trap events such as when a feature is Installing, Uninstalling, Activated, or Deactivated.
Q. What type of components can be created or deployed as a feature?
Ans. We can create menu commands, Custom Actions,page templates, page instances, list definitions, list instances,event handlers,webparts and workflows as feature.
Q. How Do you bind a Drop-Down Listbox with a Column in SharePoint List ?
Ans.
Method 1 : You can get a datatable for all items in the list and add that table to a data set. Finally, specify the dataset table as datasource for dropdown listbox.
Method 2 : You can also use SPDatasource in your aspx or design page.
See Code example Binding Drop-Down with Sharepoint List data
Q. How Does SharePoint work?
Ans. The browser sends a DAV packet to IIS asking to perform a document check in. PKMDASL.DLL, an ISAPI DLL, parses the packet and sees that it has the proprietary INVOKE command. Because of the existence of this command, the packet is passed off to msdmserv.exe, who in turn processes the packet and uses EXOLEDB to access the WSS, perform the operation and send the results back to the user in the form of XML.
Q. What is CAML?
Ans. CAML stands for Collaborative Application Markup Language and is an XML-based languagethat is used in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services to define sites and lists, including, for Eg, fields, views, or forms, but CAML is also used to define tables in the Windows SharePoint Servies database during site provisioning. Developers mostly use CAML Queries to retrieve data from Lists\libraries.
Q. Can you display\add a Custom aspx or WebApplication Page in SharePoint Context ?
Ans. You need to make some modification in the aspx file to display it in SharePoint Context. Firstly, add the references for various sharepoint assemblies on the Page. Then wrap the Code in PlaceHolderMain contentPlaceholder, so that it gets displayed as a content page. Lastly, add a reference to SharePoint Master Page in aspx file and swicth it in Code behind if needed. See Code Example at Display aspx Page in SharePoint context

In Sharepoint Object model there are two Important namespaces.

The Microsoft.Office.Server namespace is the root namespace of all Office Server objects and Microsoft.SharePoint is the root namespace for all WSS objects.
The Chart Below illustrates some of the key classes contained in each of these namespaces, as well as to which functional area they belong.
Document Libraries (Microsoft.SharePoint)
SPDocumentLibrary , SPPictureLibrary
Business Data Catalog (Microsoft.Office.Server.ApplicationRegistry.Administration)
EntityCollection , ApplicationRegistry
Features (Microsoft.SharePoint)
SPFeatureDefinition, SPFeatureScope, SPElementDefinition, SPFeature, SPFeatureProperty

Sites (Microsoft.SharePoint)
SPSite, SPSiteAdministration, SPSiteCollection, SPWeb
Meetings (Microsoft.SharePoint.Meetings)
SPMeeting, MtgUtility
User Profiles (Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles)
UserProfile, UserProfileManager
Solutions (Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration)
SPsolution, SPFeatureReceiver, SPSolutionCollection
Lists (Microsoft.SharePoint)
SPList, SPListItem, SPListItemCollection
Notes:
* To use the SharePoint API, your code must reside on one of the machines in a SharePoint application server farm. Your code can still work with other sites in the farm from any other site in the farm, but you cannot, for example, work with the SharePoint API from a machine on which MOSS or WSS is not installed.
* The only practical way to consume SharePoint data and functionality from a remote client is to use the SharePoint web services.
* The object model is not designed to support Remoting.
* To add a reference to a Sharepoint API, Right-click the project(in VS) and select Add Reference. Click the Browse tab and select the
following directory:
C:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\12\isapi

Interview questions for ASP.Net 4

2011-06-16T18:57:00.001+05:30

Q. What is new with ASP.Net 4 WebForms ?
Ans. Some of the Features are:
. Ability to Set Metatags.
. More control over view state.
. Added and Updated browser definition files.
. ASP.Net Routing.
. The ability to Persist Selected rows in data Control.
. More control over rendered HTML in FormView and ListView Controls.
. Filtering Support for datasource Controls.

ASP.Net 4.0 has many improvements from previous versions such as

Web.config File Refactoring
Extensible Output Caching
Auto-Start Web Applications
Permanently Redirecting a Page by introducing a new method RedirectPermanent()
Shrinking Session State to shrink session data
Extensible Request Validation to avoid cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks by adding custom request-validation logic.
Object Caching and Object Caching Extensibility by introducing a new assembly "System.Runtime.Caching.dll"

ASP.Net 4.0 also introduced many new features such as

jQuery Included with Web Forms and MVC: Built in JQuery support
Content Delivery Network Support: Enables you to easily add ASP.NET Ajax and jQuery scripts to your Web applications. We can refence JQuery script over http like <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.2.js" >
New Meta tags under HTML Head tag
Enabling View State for Individual Controls
Extended Browser Capabilities
ASP.NET Chart Control to create visually compelling charts for complex statistical or financial analysis
New Field Templates for URLs and E-mail Addresses

How is Caching extended in asp.Net 4.0?

OutPut Cache in earlier versions of ASP.Net has a limitation - generated content always has to be stored in memory, and on servers that are experiencing heavy traffic, the memory consumed by output caching can compete with memory demands from other portions of a Web application.
ASP.NET 4 adds an extensibility point to output caching that enables you to configure one or more custom output-cache providers. Output-cache providers can use any storage mechanism to persist HTML content. This makes it possible to create custom output-cache providers for diverse persistence mechanisms, which can include local or remote disks, cloud storage, and distributed cache engines.

How do you implement custom output caching?

Create a custom output-cache provider as a class that derives from the new System.Web.Caching.OutputCacheProvider type. You can then configure the provider in the Web.config file by using the new providers subsection of the outputCache element, as shown below:

<add name="DiskCache"

type="Test.OutputCacheEx.DiskOutputCacheProvider, DiskCacheProvider"/>

</providers>

</outputCache>

</caching>

Then specify the newly created and configured custom cache provider as below:

<%@ OutputCache Duration="60" VaryByParam="None" providerName="DiskCache" %>

What is permanent redirecting and how do you implement it?

ASP.Net 4.0 introduced a new URL redirection method RedirectPermanent() which avoids round trips.
You can implement this as shown below:

RedirectPermanent("/newpath/newpage.aspx");

How do you implement ViewState for a control?

In ASP.NET 4, Web server controls include a ViewStateMode property that lets you disable view state by default and then enable it only for the controls that require it in the page.
The ViewStateMode property takes an enumeration that has three values: Enabled, Disabled, and Inherit. Enabled enables view state for that control and for any child controls that are set to Inherit or that have nothing set. Disabled disables view state, and Inherit specifies that the control uses the ViewStateMode setting from the parent control.

<asp:PlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolder1" runat="server" ViewStateMode="Disabled">

Disabled: <asp:Label ID="label1" runat="server" Text="[DeclaredValue]" /><br />

<asp:PlaceHolder ID="PlaceHolder2" runat="server" ViewStateMode="Enabled">

Enabled: <asp:Label ID="label2" runat="server" Text="[DeclaredValue]" />

</asp:PlaceHolder>

How will the IDs for controls be managed in ASP.Net 4.0?

In ASP.Net 4.0 we can specify how to generate control ids using 'ClientIDMode' attribute instead of generating dynamically like container_controlidXXX.

What are the different ClientIDModes we can set and how will they work?

The new ClientIDMode property lets you specify more precisely how the client ID is generated for controls. You can set the ClientIDMode property for any control, including for the page. Possible settings are the following:
AutoID
This is equivalent to the algorithm for generating ClientID property values that was used in earlier versions of ASP.NET.
Static
This specifies that the ClientID value will be the same as the ID without concatenating the IDs of parent naming containers. This can be useful in Web user controls. Because a Web user control can be located on different pages and in different container controls, it can be difficult to write client script for controls that use the AutoID algorithm because you cannot predict what the ID values will be.
Predictable
This option is primarily for use in data controls that use repeating templates. It concatenates the ID properties of the control's naming containers, but generated ClientID values do not contain strings like "ctlxxx". This setting works in conjunction with the ClientIDRowSuffix property of the control. You set the ClientIDRowSuffix property to the name of a data field, and the value of that field is used as the suffix for the generated ClientID value. Typically you would use the primary key of a data record as the ClientIDRowSuffix value.
Inherit
This setting is the default behavior for controls; it specifies that a control's ID generation is the same as its parent.

What is QueryExtender Control?

QueryExtender Control is an add-on to the DataSource Controls: EntityDataSource and LinqDataSource. QueryExtender is used to filter the data returned by these controls. As the QueryExtender control relies on LINQ, the filter is applied on the database server before the data is sent to the page, which results in very efficient operations.
E.g.:

<asp:LinqDataSource ID="dataSource" runat="server"> TableName="Products">

</asp:LinqDataSource>

<asp:QueryExtender TargetControlID="dataSource" runat="server">

<asp:SearchExpression DataFields="ProductName, Supplier.CompanyName"

SearchType="StartsWith">

<asp:ControlParameter ControlID="TextBoxSearch" />

</asp:SearchExpression>

</asp:QueryExtender>

Q. What is machine.config file and how do you use it in ASP.Net 4.0?

Ans. Machine.Config file is found in the "CONFIG" subfolder of your .NET Framework install directory (c:\WINNT\Microsoft.NET\Framework\{Version Number}\CONFIG on Windows 2000 installations). It contains configuration settings for machine-wide assembly binding, built-in remoting channels, and ASP.NET.
In .the NET Framework 4.0, the major configuration elements(that use to be in web.config) have been moved to the machine.config file, and the applications now inherit these settings. This allows the Web.config file in ASP.NET 4 applications either to be empty or to contain just the following lines.
Q. What is RedirectPermanent in ASP.Net 4.0?

Ans. In earlier Versions of .Net, Response.Redirect was used, which issues an HTTP 302 Found or temporary redirect response to the browser (meaning that asked resource is temporarily moved to other location) which inturn results in an extra HTTP round trip. ASP.NET 4.0 however, adds a new RedirectPermanent that Performs a permanent redirection from the requested URL to the specified URL. and returns 301 Moved Permanently responses.
e.g. RedirectPermanent("/newpath/foroldcontent.aspx");

Q. How will you specify what version of the framework your application is targeting?

Ans. In Asp.Net 4 a new element "targetFramework" of compilation tag (in Web.config file) lets you specify the framework version in the webconfig file as
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
<system.web>
<compilation targetFramework="4.0" />
</system.web>
</configuration>
It only lets you target the .NET Framework 4.0 and later verisons.
Q. What is the use of MetaKeywords and MetaDescription properties.

Ans. MetaKeywords and MetaDescription are the new properties added to the Page class of ASP.NET 4.0 Web Forms. The two properties are used to set the keywords and description meta tags in your page.
For e.g.
<meta name="keywords" content="These, are, my, keywords" />
<meta name="description" content="This is the description of my page" />
You can set these properties at run time, which lets you get the content from a database or other source, and which lets you set the tags dynamically to describe what a particular page is for.
You can also set the Keywords and Description properties in the @ Page directive at the top of the Web Forms page markup like,
<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs"
Inherits="_Default" Keywords="ASP,4.0,are keywords" Description="blah blah" %>
Q. What is Microsoft Ajax Library.

Ans. Microsoft Ajax Library is a client-only JavaScript library that is compatible with all modern browsers, including Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox.Because the Microsoft Ajax Library is a client-only JavaScript library, you can use the library with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications. You can also create Ajax pages that consist only of HTML.

Q. What are the Changes in CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList Control ?

Ans. In ASP.NET 4, the CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList controls support two new values for the RepeatLayout property, OrderedList(The content is rendered as li elements within an ol element) and UnorderedList(The content is rendered as li elements within a ul element.)
For more info see : Specify Layout in CheckBoxList and RadioButtonList Control - ASP.Net 4
Q. Whats Application Warm-Up Module?
Ans. We can set-up a Warm-Up module for warming up your applications before they serve their first request.Instead of writing custom code, you specify the URLs of resources to execute before the Web application accepts requests from the network. This warm-up occurs during startup of the IIS service (if you configured the IIS application pool as AlwaysRunning) and when an IIS worker process recycles. During recycle, the old IIS worker process continues to execute requests until the newly spawned worker process is fully warmed up, so that applications experience no interruptions or other issues due to unprimed caches.

Q. How would you Deploy your old applications with .Net Framework 4.0? Are the Old applications compatible?
Ans. .NET Framework 4 is highly compatible with applications that are built with earlier .NET Framework versions. Though Some Changes have been made to improve security, standards compliance, correctness, reliability, and performance.
To run older applications with .NET Framework 4, you will have to re-compile your applications with the target .NET Framework version specified in the properties for your project in Visual Studio Or you can specify the supported runtime with the Element in an application configuration file. .Net Framework 4 does not automatically use its version of the common language runtime to run applications that are built with earlier versions of the .NET Framework.
Q. Whts is Parallel Computing?
Ans. To take advantage of multiple cores (that is, CPUs or processors) you can parallelize your code so that it will be distributed across multiple processors. In the past, parallelization required low-level manipulation of threads and locks, but Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 enhances the support for parallel programming by providing a new runtime, new class library types, and new diagnostic tools. These features simplify parallel development so that you can write efficient, fine-grained, and scalable parallel code in a natural idiom without having to work directly with threads or the thread pool.
The new System.Threading.Tasks namespace and other related types support this new model.
Q. What is BigInteger and When would you use that?

Ans. BigInteger, which is a part of System.Numerics Namespace is a great enhancement over Byte and Int32 datatypes. It is a nonprimitive integral type that supports arbitrarily large signed integers. Unlike Byte and Int32 types, BigInteger does not include a Minvalue and MaxValue property, so can be used to store large integer values.
Q. What other than BigInteger has been introduced in System.Numerics Namespace?

Ans. Complex types,which represents a complex number has been Introduced. a complex number is a number in the form a + bi, where a is the real part, and b is the imaginary part.
Q. How do you assign a Value to a Complex Number.
Ans. You can assign a value to a complex number in few different ways.
1. By passing two Double values to its constructor. The first value represents the real part of the complex number, and the second value represents its imaginary part.
2. By assigning a Byte, SByte, Int16, UInt16, Int32, UInt32, Int64, UInt64, Single, or Double value to a Complex object. The value becomes the real part of the complex number, and its imaginary part equals 0.
E.g Complex c1 = new Complex(12, 6);
Console.WriteLine(c1);
OutPut - (12, 6)
Q. How has exception hand changed in .Net Framework 4.0

Ans. A New Namespace System.Runtime.ExceptionServices has been introduced which provides classes for advanced exception handling. It has introduced the following classes
1. HandleProcessCorruptedStateExceptionsAttribute Class - Enables managed code to handle exceptions that indicate a corrupted process state.So,If you want to compile an application in the .NET Framework 4 and handle corrupted state exceptions, you can apply this attribute to the method that handles the corrupted state exception.
2.FirstChanceExceptionEventArgs Class -Provides data for the notification event that is raised when a managed exception first occurs, before the common language runtime begins searching for event handlers.

common language runtime and the base class libraries?
Ans. Brief about the Improvements -

Diagnostics and Performance - Starting with the .NET Framework 4, you can get processor usage and memory usage estimates per application domain.

Garbage Collection - This feature replaces concurrent garbage collection in previous versions and provides better performance.
Code Contracts - Code contracts let you specify contractual information that is not represented by a method's or type's signature alone. The new System.Diagnostics.Contracts namespace contains classes that provide a language-neutral way to express coding assumptions in the form of preconditions, postconditions, and object invariants.
Design-Time-Only Interop Assemblies - You no longer have to ship primary interop assemblies (PIAs) to deploy applications that interoperate with COM objects. In the .NET Framework 4, compilers can embed type information from interop assemblies, selecting only the types that an application (for example, an add-in) actually uses.
Dynamic Language Runtime - The dynamic language runtime (DLR) is a new runtime environment that adds a set of services for dynamic languages to the CLR. The DLR makes it easier to develop dynamic languages to run on the .NET Framework and to add dynamic features to statically typed languages. To support the DLR, the new System.Dynamic namespace is added to the .NET Framework.

Covariance and Contravariance - Several generic interfaces and delegates now support covariance and contravariance.

BigInteger and Complex Numbers - The new System.Numerics.BigInteger structure is an integer data type that can store fairly large number as it has no upper and lower bound values.Complex types represents a complex number of form a + bi. IT supports arithmetic and trigonometric operations with complex numbers.
Tuples - The .NET Framework 4 provides the System..::.Tuple class for creating tuple objects that contain structured data.
File System Enumeration Improvements - You can now enumerate directories and files by using methods that return an enumerable collection of strings of their names.ou can also use methods that return an enumerable collection of DirectoryInfo, FileInfo, or FileSystemInfo objects.

Memory-Mapped Files - A memory-mapped file contains the contents of a file in virtual memory and is an application’s logical address space. So You can use memory-mapped files to edit very large files and to create shared memory for interprocess communication.

64-Bit Operating Systems and Processes - You can identify 64-bit operating systems and processes with the Environment.Is64BitOperatingSystem and Environment.Is64BitProcess properties

Q. What are the major improvements provided by the common language runtime and the base class libraries?

Ans. Brief about the Improvements -

Diagnostics and Performance - Starting with the .NET Framework 4, you can get processor usage and memory usage estimates per application domain.

Garbage Collection - This feature replaces concurrent garbage collection in previous versions and provides better performance.
Code Contracts - Code contracts let you specify contractual information that is not represented by a method's or type's signature alone. The new System.Diagnostics.Contracts namespace contains classes that provide a language-neutral way to express coding assumptions in the form of preconditions, postconditions, and object invariants.
Design-Time-Only Interop Assemblies - You no longer have to ship primary interop assemblies (PIAs) to deploy applications that interoperate with COM objects. In the .NET Framework 4, compilers can embed type information from interop assemblies, selecting only the types that an application (for example, an add-in) actually uses.
Dynamic Language Runtime - The dynamic language runtime (DLR) is a new runtime environment that adds a set of services for dynamic languages to the CLR. The DLR makes it easier to develop dynamic languages to run on the .NET Framework and to add dynamic features to statically typed languages. To support the DLR, the new System.Dynamic namespace is added to the .NET Framework.

Covariance and Contravariance - Several generic interfaces and delegates now support covariance and contravariance.

BigInteger and Complex Numbers - The new System.Numerics.BigInteger structure is an integer data type that can store fairly large number as it has no upper and lower bound values.Complex types represents a complex number of form a + bi. IT supports arithmetic and trigonometric operations with complex numbers.
Tuples - The .NET Framework 4 provides the System..::.Tuple class for creating tuple objects that contain structured data.
File System Enumeration Improvements - You can now enumerate directories and files by using methods that return an enumerable collection of strings of their names.ou can also use methods that return an enumerable collection of DirectoryInfo, FileInfo, or FileSystemInfo objects.

Memory-Mapped Files - A memory-mapped file contains the contents of a file in virtual memory and is an application’s logical address space. So You can use memory-mapped files to edit very large files and to create shared memory for interprocess communication.

64-Bit Operating Systems and Processes - You can identify 64-bit operating systems and processes with the Environment.Is64BitOperatingSystem and Environment.Is64BitProcess properties

Q. What is Routing in Asp.Net 4.0 ?

Ans. Routing is a feature in ASP.NET 4.0 that enables you to use URLs to map specific resources. These URLs can then become more descriptive and user friendly like http://server/webapp/Customers/View/ID.
In ASP.NET 4.0 all the necessary components to use ASP.NET Routing are inbuilt. These include theIRouteHandler implementation (PageRouteHandler class) that serves up the right IHttpHandler to service the request and a couple of expression builders to help capture parameters from routed requests and also generate route URLs.

Q. Whats Application Warm-Up Module?

Ans. We can set-up a Warm-Up module for warming up your applications before they serve their first request.Instead of writing custom code, you specify the URLs of resources to execute before the Web application accepts requests from the network. This warm-up occurs during startup of the IIS service (if you configured the IIS application pool as AlwaysRunning) and when an IIS worker process recycles. During recycle, the old IIS worker process continues to execute requests until the newly spawned worker process is fully warmed up, so that applications experience no interruptions or other issues due to unprimed caches.

Q. When would you use the ViewStateMode property of a control.

Ans. ViewStateMode is newly introduced in .net 4.0 and can accept Enabled, Disabled and Inherit values. It is mainly used when you have to disable the viewstate of a control. By default it is set to Inherit. Also, If the EnableViewState property is set to be disabled, setting any values for ViewStateMode property will make no difference.

Q What are the SEO Enhancements in .net 4.0

Ans. ASP.NET 4.0 has make it easier to set the Keywords and Description meta tags on a page. The page class in ASP.NET 4.0 now has two new properties, namely, Keywords and Description. These can be set either in markup code or from the code behind so that you can generate the meta tags dynamically.

Q. How do you Monitor the Performance of your asp.net web application ?

Ans. ASP.NET 4.0 provides support for monitoring the performance of individual applications inside a single worker process. This feature provides a more granular view of the resources being consumed by your application. You use the following in your webconfig.

15 Shopping Rules of Thumb

2011-06-16T18:47:00.001+05:30

Referred URL

http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2011/06/14/15-shopping-rules-of-thumb/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+thesimpledollar+(The+Simple+Dollar)&utm_content=Google+Reader

A few of them are outdated. I find I use some of them myself; here are the ones I really find value in:

Pay for RAM, not speed. The speed of the computer chip does not matter; the attention-span or RAM memory does matter.
Pay for components, not cables. Buy the best components, and the cheapest cables.
Pay for speed, not channels. For cable internet, with enough speed you can watch TV channels on the internet for free.
Pay for sensor size, not pixel count. On today’s cameras you’ll have enough megapixels; better quality comes from larger sensors.
Pay for reliability, not mileage. On a car, you’ll spend more of repairs and maintaince over its lifetime than you will on a difference in gas.
Pay for comfort, not weight. A bicycle’s feather weight is moot once you add water bottle, a bag, any extra clothes you wear, while its comfort never disappears.
Pay for glass, not shutters. In professional cameras, great lenses endure, while the camera bodies change and go obsolete.

(I included the two photography ones because I’m related to multiple professional and semi-professional photographers, so I’m at least a bit knowledgeable in the field.)

These simple rules of thumb for purchases can be a great starting point for the research that you do when deciding what products to buy. They don’t point you straight to a product, per se, but they tell you which features are more likely to give you value for your dollar when you do make that purchase.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been accumulating a number of these “rules of thumb” for more common household purchases. Here’s that list – hope it helps.

Pay for location, not square footage. A home in a good location will always retain its value. On the other hand, lots of square footage mostly means room to store stuff you don’t really need, you often have to be far from your job in order to have a huge house, and there are tons of empty McMansions sitting in the suburbs that are unable to be resold due to the housing glut.

Pay for utility, not quantity. If you’re buying kitchen implements, you’re better off buying basic tools that really work for a lot of things rather than tons of tools for specific things. You don’t need more than three knives (a paring knife, a chef’s knife, and a bread knife, along with a honing steel). You don’t need more than two pots, one saucepan, and one skillet – you can make about every dish imaginable in those four things because they’re so flexible.

Pay for hardware, not software. Most of the applications that people need for their home computer have quality free versions online. Need Office? Use OpenOffice or Google Docs. Image editing? FotoFlexer (and other such tools) do almost anything a home user would want to do.

Pay for the beans, not the coffeepot. My wife uses a cheap old coffee pot that she’s had since we were in college. The coffee you put into the pot makes all the difference, not the pot itself, according to her. A $200 coffee pot with bad coffee beans will still make you a poor drink.

Pay for speed, not size. If you’re buying a new computer and are comparing hard drives, get the faster one rather than the bigger one for home use, as it’ll speed up your computer substantially and you don’t really need another 80 GB. The fastest ones are the solid state drives, but if you’re buying a regular hard drive, get the one with the fastest RPMs. Get the smaller drive, too. You can always buy a far less expensive external USB drive for file storage if you manage to fill up your main drive.

Pay for reference, not entertainment. I only buy a book if I know I’m going to return to it again and again. For books that don’t fall into that category, I check them out at the library orswap them online.

Pay for energy efficiency, not features. When you’re buying a large appliance, the energy efficiency of the appliance outweighs virtually every feature because of the enormous amount of energy used by the appliance. For example, an older refrigerator can use as much as 1,400 kWh of energy per year, which adds up (at $0.12 per kWh) to $168 a year. A newer refrigerator may use as little as 200 kWh of energy per year, which adds up to $24 per year, a savings of $144 per year. Over a twenty year lifespan, that’s $2,880 in savings, far more than the cost of the fridge itself. Similar calculations are true for other large appliances, such as washers, dryers, furnaces, and A/C units.

Pay for freshness, not convenience. Paying for convenience with food is usually a very poor bargain and often results in either bland food or food loaded down with so many chemicals and artificial flavorings and preservatives that you don’t even want to imagine what it’s doing to you inside. Buy fresh foods, take them home, wash them, and prepare them simply. Knowing how to use a slow cooker in conjunction with fresh foods is a life changer, because you still have the convenience of coming home to a hot meal that’s ready to serve, only it’s made with fresh and naturally flavorful ingredients, without lots of preservatives and the like, and for a lower cost.

To close, here are two bonus tips that can be used to evaluate even broader choices in your life.

Pay for experiences, not things. A thing is something that takes up space in your house. An experience changes who you are as a person. One cannot be replaced, while the other can easily be replaced. Give me junky furniture and a lifetime of memories.

Pay for what you need, not what you want. This is the best tip of all. Figure out your actual needs before you ever go shopping for any item, then seek out the least expensive option that matches your needs. Your wants mostly just cost you money without giving you anything you need.

When We Say Domain, What's Our Choice?

2011-06-16T18:46:00.001+05:30

Referred URL

http://herdingcats.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/06/when-we-say-domain-whats-our-choice.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+typepad/HerdingCats+(Herding+Cats)&utm_content=Google+Reade

The current issue of Communications of the ACM, 06/2011, Vol. 54 No. 6 has an articled titled The Profession of IT, Who Are We - Now? There is a table of the professional subdivisions.

So where there is discussion of a method, a management processes, some technology, or anything pretty much that requires a domain and a context in that domain, maybe this table would be a start to answer the question - Have you tried your suggestion in one of these? If so, how did it turn out?

The challenge of course is to separate the generalizations - and likely over generalizations - of any suggestion from the specific domain and context processes. For example Earned Value Management (my favorite topic) is applicable in many domains, but a complete waste of time in others. So when there is an over blown statement like "EV is pure hog wash," and there is no domain or context in that domain, it is pretty hard to derive any value from the conjecture.

The same can be said for the over generalized agile process application, although the list of domains is likely much larger than mine - Aerospace Engineering.

ASP.Net Interview Collections

2011-06-16T18:43:00.001+05:30

http://a2zdotnet.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/dotnetadvertising.pdf

Akka Marriage

2011-06-14T21:41:00.001+05:30

https://picasaweb.google.com/jayavelcs/AkkaMarriage?authkey=Gv1sRgCPz6moHJysamygE

Remote sign out and info to help you protect your Gmail account

2011-06-02T18:32:00.001+05:30

URL:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/remote-sign-out-and-info-to-help-you.html

Your email account can contain a lot of personal information, from bank alerts to love letters. Email that, I'm sure, you don't always want other people to see. We understand how important your Gmail accounts are to you, so we're adding a new layer of information and control. With this new feature, you can now track your recent sessions and you can also sign yourself out remotely.

If you are anything like me, you probably sign in to Gmail from multiple computers. I, for example, occasionally sign into my Gmail account from a friend's house when I need to check an important email. Usually I remember to sign out, but every once in a while I wonder if I really did. Now I no longer have to wonder.

At the bottom of your inbox, you'll see information about the time of the last activity on your account and whether it's still open in another location:

Using the above example, a quick glance at the footer while I'm at work shows that my account is indeed open in one other location. But I recognize the IP address - it's my computer at home. Turns out I left my Gmail account open when I left home in a hurry this morning.

Your IP address, or Internet Protocol address, is a number associated with your computer when you connect to the Internet. Some of you might want to know your IP address numbers (more info on finding out your IP address below) for an extra layer of control. For others who don't want to think about IP information, you don't need to.

Continuing with the above example, I can see more details about my recent activity by clicking on the Details link:

The top table, under "Concurrent session information," indicates all open sessions, along with IP address and "access type" -- which refers to how email was retrieved, for example, through iGoogle, POP3 or a mobile phone. The bottom table, under "Recent activity," contains my most recent history along with times of access. I can also view my current IP address at the very bottom of this window, where it says "This computer is using IP address..."

With this information, I can quickly verify that all the Gmail activity was indeed mine. I remember using Gmail at the times and locations listed. Being extra cautious, I can also click on the "Sign out all other sessions" button to sign out of the account I left open at home.

Note: We are in the process of rolling this feature out to the latest version of Gmail, which is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer 7.