Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Instant jQuery Drag-and-Drop Grids How-to is a beginner level book by Marcos Placona on getting started with the Gridster jQuery plugin.

Gridster is a MIT licensed jQuery plugin that allows building intuitive draggable layouts from elements spanning multiple columns. You can even dynamically add and remove elements from the grid. It has an active following on GitHub. The minified version (jquery.gridster.min.js) of this powerful plugin  measures just 33KB. Gridster supports Internet Explorer 9+, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera.

jQuery plugins like these make building compelling website user experiences a simple task.

The plugin does come with online documentation but if you need some hand-holding and have to get up to speed quickly, this book can guide you through. The book should be read while you're trying out the six download-able code samples that come along. It is just 48 pages long and is more like a long article. This book could have been longer and clubbed as a chapter of a bigger book on useful, liberally-licensed jQuery plugins.

It is interesting to know and commendable that the publisher of this book, Packt, pays a royalty to open source projects on which the books it sells are based.

This review is based on a complimentary ebook that Packt offered me.

Labels: Book Review

I like keeping definitions of  keywords used in Microsoft technologies handy. This is a placeholder for links to online resources that have definitions.

• SharePoint 2010 Glossary - MSDN
• SharePoint 2013 Glossary - MSDN
• Azure Glossary (including SQL Database) - MSDN, Technet
• WCF Glossary - MSDN
• C# Reference - MSDN

work in progress...

Labels: Microsoft, Programming

This Week I Learned:

Programming:

• IE10 for the phone and the PC are built on the same engine and use the same renderer which means that what you see on your desktop (or tablet) is what you'll see on your phone. Additionally, the web browser control in Windows Phone apps is a full instance of IE10, with the same speed and power as the native phone browser.
• An analysis of the world’s top 1000 URLs reveals that page weight increased 28% from March 2012 (822 K) to March 2013 (1053 KB). The median page load time on desktops got ~3.5% faster, and on mobile was ~18% ~30% faster.

General:

• To quickly watch YouTube screencasts: open video in HTML5 mode > cog > set speed to 1.5
• Standalone SWF, PDF files can be viewed with Chrome
• Samsung's cost of materials and manufacturing to produce the U.S. version of the S 4 is slightly above $237 a unit. This is higher than Apple's $217 production cost for a 32-gigabyte iPhone 5, which has a smaller and less-costly display screen.
• Windows has less than 5% of the global smartphone market and less than 8% of the tablet market 
• In India, where one-in-six people are undernourished, an unlikely business is booming: obesity surgery. India is one of the fastest-growing centers in the $1.2 billion global market for bariatric devices.

Labels: TWIL

The simplest though not the most convenient way to view a .NET DLL's dependencies is to use the ildasm.exe tool

Click on the Manifest node to view names of dependent assemblies

The manifest lists the names and versions of all other assemblies that the current assembly depends upon.

If you're adding a reference via NuGet, you can find the dependencies from the information provided for each Package in the Package listing -

Labels: C#, HOWTO

This Week I Learned:

Programming-related

• Windows Azure SDK for .NET v2.0 has some nice updates. Windows Azure SDK for .NET is a fully open source project (Apache 2 license) hosted on GitHub.
• ProgrammableWeb maintains a directory of  programmable Web APIs. As per their recent count, there are 9,000 APIs!
• I like tracking the weather these days. When I'm not connected to the Internet, I use Google's SMS feature to get weather info. Send a text message with the command weather {your-city-name}  to 9773300000 and you'll get a response with the weather conditions in seconds. This week, I learnt about SkyMetWeather which focuses on weather in India pretty comprehensively. They currently don't appear to provide an API to extend their service for developers. The graphics & presentation of weather data by Forecast, the new global weather service, is impressive. The Forecast API looks easy to use.
• There are a bunch of alternatives for .NET Reflector - that brilliant tool which was initially free
• Twitter is extending API v1 Retirement until June 11, 2013
• Words representing objects can be best remembered if you can visualize the object. I like the paper-version of the Oxford Dictionary as it makes liberal use of illustrations to explain the meaning of words. Among online dictionaries, TheFreeDictionary (best viewed in the printer-friendly mode without ads) has pictures. This week I ran into EZeeDictionary which is a picture dictionary of reportedly 2.5 lakhs word definitions. 
• Trello, the free web-based project management tool uses MongoDB

General

• Sockpuppeting means using a fake identity for deceptive purposes. It refers to an account made on an internet message board, by a person who already has an account, for the purpose of posting more-or-less anonymously
• F4 and Ctrl-Y in Word will "Repeat the last action". This feature is useful when you have to scale large images to fit the width of your document. 
• You can selective color parts of an image using Paint.NET 
• Some companies are designing their offices in ways that employees who work in seperate divisions bump into each other. The hope is that these casual face-to-face chats among people with different skills might spark new ideas, lead to new solutions or at the least, increase workplace camaraderie. Gmail and Street View are said to have started off from casual employee conversations. 

Labels: India, TWIL