So the new year is coming and what better way to start the year than by learning something new? There’s a Technet MSDN technology summit that’ll be happening on 15th January 2009 over at the KL Convention center. And there’ll be demos of the MS Virtualization platform, and more interesting to me would be that there’ll be sessions on AZURE, yum yum indeed.

Oh there’ll also be a demo of Windows 7 for those of you who like me haven’t bothered to acquire the preview released during PDC.

And maybe… just maybe.. and this is just ME saying this.

We *might* actually get a new Beta of Windows 7.

Just remember.. operative word here is *MIGHT*… with asterisks too!

Well.. that was relatively painless. As mentioned previous the DeepZoom Composer now comes with a DLL to handle generation of images so there’s no need to shell to a command line to create DeepZoom Images.

It’s really simple to use, if all you needed was to generate a DeepZoom’ed image all you have to do is add a reference to the DeepZoomTools.dll that’s sitting in the program directory of the DeepZoom Composer, then you write code like this.

Dim dzObj As New Microsoft.DeepZoomTools.ImageCreator
dzObj.Create("D:\inputimage.JPG", "d:\outputfolder\car.xml")

And poof.. you get a Deep Zoom image in outputfolder, this opens up the door to a lot of interesting developements, not to mention the fact that I have better control over the generation process means I can now fine tune my Deep Zoom album creator even more!

So after fiddling with JQuery for a while, I REALLY REALLY LIKE IT A LOT!!! I like how the whole library is built around the basis of the programmer basically saying "I like to find a bunch of tags which fall under these parameters and do something with it"

And that's pretty much what you do in a majority of clientside Javascript scenarios, either you'll be using Javascript to make some effects to alert the user to something (ie, change color, change size) or you'll just be using it to make your page look spiffier!

And basically that's what I have done in order to test out JQuery, I wrote a simple script and attached it onto my blog, now when the page finishes loading. The script will, using JQuery

• Run through all A tags with a HREF that contains the words "/binary/WindowsLiveWriter" these are basically links to the full sized versions of images on my blog.
• Replace the default behavior of clicking on those links so that clicking on them doesn't open a new window but instead.
• Loads the full size image into a hidden image tag, then display it in place on the actual page itself so the user doesn't have to go through another window to see the full image.
• And of course when the user clicks on the full image or anywhere in the void they get returned to the normal page.

And now of course.. for a sample.

Could I have done this without JQuery? ABSOLUTELY! Would it have been fun to do without JQuery? No. Would I have even considered doing it without JQuery? ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!

JQuery is definitely a library worth your time to check out and I wish I found out about it earlier!

My colleague pointed me at a Javascript library called JQuery today, he was tellling me that it was a neat library to do client side animations. I was a bit skeptical at first cause I didn't like how some of the libraries worked.

But after running through some tests just now I'm impressed, it's nice, simple and clean. Very straightforward to use and doesn't seem like it'll get in the way of our other scripting methods, including the ASP.Net Ajax Extensions. But I guess to be sure I'll need to go through it a bit more.

I guess it doesn't hurt that Microsoft feels it's pretty good too!

Hmmm.. ok… have to try out something one of these days.

Is so that you don't have to ask someone if a particular element is needed or not.

I finally had an opportunity to make a real life application with Linq, and I must sure the experience has been GREEEAAAAATT!!!

It's really something to go from using table adapters, TSQL code, to do all your queries to a simple syntax like

query=from authors in ctx.authors where authors.name.startswith("john") select authors

directly in my code to do selection. Why is it easier and how different is this from using typed data adapters? well the main difference is the speed at which you can make a new query.

With a typed data adapter you'd have to fiddle around with a designer to create your queries, slowing down developement time. With Linq, you just keep pounding away on the keyboard to build your data layer and queries, so the time for code to go "from brain to actual code" has decreased, thus improving developement time.

Either great, there are some developement choice changes that come with using Linq, and I'm still fiddling with it to see if it can be as flexible as a dataconnection in a pinch.

The Internet is a great resource, when you hit a brick wall when coding you can just post a question up on the various forums and hopefully someone will answer your queries.

But one thing to remember when posting your queries!!

NEVER REVEAL PRODUCTION SERVER ADDRESSES AND PASSWORDS!!

For example, let's say you need to call a web service which is sitting on an internet accesible server. If you need help asking about how to call the service in the language and how to fit something on the SOAP headers. When posting a query in the forums, do not use the REAL IP ADDRESS, and AUTHENTICATION DETAILS!

One of the partners we were working with did such a mistake and god was there a party (a bad party!) of hurt that went to them after that!

Please read and write XML using the proper XML read/write functions. Every major language should now already have proper classes or utilities to read and write XML. Therefore an XML chunk of.

<root>
      <branch>some node</branch>
</root>

should be no different to

<root><branch>some node</branch></root>

since they're exactly the same XML, but if you weren't using a proper XML reader function to read it, but instead waited for a new line, then obviously you wouldn't get the value you wanted in the 2nd chunk.

so please, use the proper functions when you're dealing with XML!

My colleague came across an interesting problem with a mobile web portal he was working on. It was the typical problem description that you'd get when you work on mobile web portals, something that worked on other phones weren't working on another phone. Only thing was, the phones that failed weren't dumb low end phones, but a Nokia Series 60 N73 smartphone. I wrote down my little adventure finding the solution.. it's a full page of text so only continue if you're interested.

I interviewed a guy with 12 years of programming experience already, he lead multiple developement teams, and has been in charge of designing frameworks for various sites.

Yet he didn't see a problem when given a SQL Injection scenario, and when asked why didn't he verify user input on the server side in addition to the client verification that he's already doing. He kept stressing that the websites he creates are for consumers, normal users, they don't have the time or need to add in all the data verification.

But, as I mentioned in a previous post. It costs almost NOTHING to protect against SQL Injection so there really isn't any excuse for NOT doing it!