Bytes and Bites of Internet
Posts tagged Tips
Installing Silverlight Themes for Expression Blend 4
Jun 7th
If you are working with Silverlight and don’t have good “designer’s eye”, or planning to begin new project or simply want to play around with Silverlight then you might want to try these Silverlight navigation themes from Microsoft. Currently there are four standard themes are available for download from MSFT Site JetPack, Accent Color, Windows 7 and Cosmopolitan, they are highly customizable and free for any use. Basically they have all styles defined for all standard controls and Silverlight Toolkit (which is a must requirement for these themes to work)
Installing these themes to VS 2010 is way too easy. All you need to do is just execute VSIX files included in the package and you are all set. But if you want to use these themes in Blend 4, then it is a bit tricky process. First you need to extract those themes and then copy them to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Expression\Blend 4\ProjectTemplates\en\CSharp\Silverlight folder. But if you are using x64 bit OS then this path will be %ProgramFiles (x86)%\Microsoft Expression\Blend 4\ProjectTemplates\en\CSharp\Silverlight for you !!! And wait there is more (
, yes me too watch late night TV commercials … ) apparently all of these files have same structure and same template file names so you can’t just copy all of these themes into one single location, since it will overwrite each other and in the end you will be left with only once theme that you copied last !! And there is no explanation of this in official read me document or any where on the net.
Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010 fails to install
May 9th
Just now due to my “experiments” OS and other stuff, I had to restore system image of my OS installation drive (it is more easy to restore image then formatting drives and reinstalling everything 
). But unfortunately the image I took was a bit newer (or say more older) so it had only essential software installed on it. So I was installing Visual Studio 2010 all again, mean while I also got SP1 for VS 2010 so I updated VS 2010 with SP1 as well.
As my work requires me to work with Silverlight, I was also required to install Silverlight Tools to work with. But with surprise when I tried to download and install Silverlight tools from MSDN, I got really weird error message.
Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 or Visual Phone Developer Express 2010 that matches the language version of Silverlight Tools 4 must be installed before installation of Silverlight Tools can continue.
Peer Block … sucessor of age old Peer Guardian
Apr 24th
If you know what is Peer Guardian, then you are know what I am writing about. Peer Guardian have been used by great number of users in past many years. I think it was the best tool available out there that gives you ability to prevent specific IP or range of IPs from connecting to your machine !! The concept on which this app works is pretty simple, it just prevents any IP that is listed in your blacklist which you can create for your own or you can get it from sites like I-BlockLIst. This tool is specially useful when you are downloading from torrent. For example, many Linux flavors can be downloaded using torrent (for example UBUNTU).
Sharing via torrent is a little risky business. Because common principle on which torrent sharing is based means each downloader share portion of download (called Chunks) from their machine and tracker keeps track of which machine has which chunks. So basically all machines in swarm can actually see each other’s IP. In world where everything is connected with internet, IP is your address. And once someone have it, this can be used for number bad things.
IE 9 Tracking Protection Lists
Apr 16th
If you have used the newest member of Internet Explorer family, aka IE 9 (not anymore after release of IE 10 preview 
). With this newer IE, Microsoft has finally created a browser which can comply with W3C standards. Having web developing as my hobby and profession I had faced really weird issues with IE in past just because it was not following W3C standards for web !! Along with compatibility to web standards MSFT’s new IE is also brought really unique feature called “Tracking Protection”.
Tracking using cookie is a very common method used by any / all advertising agency to track user behavior (like search patterns, website usage, shopping preferences and God Google knows what else). And it have been in debate from past some time that as a consumer we should have some sort of control over these tracking of information. Some people like me just can’t think of some strange 3rd grade company is creating my some sort of cyber profile which will be sold to some other company without even my consent !! And added insult to injury that information will be used to market product to me based on my that cyber profile !! Some suggest to use some sort of national Do Not Track List just like currently used Do Not Call Registry. In fact we already have this list but number of companies that follow this list is limited to only 100 and there is no control over other companies. Also, if you have ever tried to add your self in Do Not Track List, then you know that you simply cant add your self just once. You have to repeat this process for all 100 of them and I guess that defeats the purpose.
More beautiful Visual Studio
Apr 9th
If you have been working around Microsoft domain then you probably have been using Visual Studio. A really great development environment for all Microsoft platforms like .NET, Windows, Mobile, Silverlight, SharePoint etc.. But some people like myself (in other words folks who always gets attracted to shiny things 
) feels that just plain white background and same old fonts and colors make Visual Studio look kind of boring. And time to time, I have few times tried to change the environment settings and make it more attractive but it requires more time in setting things up the way we want.
But recently I stumbled upon a really cool website http://studiostyl.es/schemes which actually has great user created collection of Visual Studio styles. It even lets you create you own and you can share them with other as well. At present it has about 572 Visual Studio styles (which makes me wonder how many people already don’t like default style of VS 
)…
Watermarked textbox in Silverlight
Mar 30th
If you have worked with ASP.NET then you probably already familiar with Watermark control, which is available as a part of Ajax Control toolkit on Codeplex. I think it is one of the greatest tool to have as a control because, it lets you set a text in textbox as a watermark. It gives a little edge to your web application. I think same can be told for Silverlight application.
But few days back when I was practicing my Silverlight skills with ScottGu’s tutorial, at one point he was creating watermarked textbox and from his explanation it looked like Silverlight has built in watermark feature !! But I was surprised to see that there is nothing like that ?? Even though that tutorial was originally written for Silverlight 2 and I am using Silverlight 4 this options is still not implemented. Actually at MSDN you can find a page for this option, but funny thing is this feature is supported in only Silverlight 4 and they are advising to not to use it in Silverlight 4 !!! I was like WTF, you can use but you can’t use ?
PAE … is it enabled ??
Mar 22nd
Last week I was asked by my boss that how do we know that if production server has PAE enabled ?? Since we are using Windows Server 2003 x86 with about 16Gb Ram, we’ve always assumed that we have it enabled because in task manager we can find that OS actually “see” all 16Gb ram. But what is the proof of it ??
Before I tell you how did we find the answer, few things about PAE and 32-bit OS. As we know that 32-bit OSes are bound to max limit of 4Gb RAM. Which means that even if we have more than 4Gb ram, OS will not actually use it since it can’t map that memory with registers (2^32 = 4294967296). The answer to this limitation is use of PAE switch which actually makes OS to behave as a 36-bit system so now it has additional 4 bit which can be used to map more ram (2^36 = 68719476736). But these “extra” mapping requires to use a portion of ram as well, hence for some applications the performance is not as good as compared to 64-bit OS which has practically no limit (2^64 = 18446744073709551616) as of today, SQL Server is one of that applications (but that discussion is for some other time). So, in short using PAE we can actually enable our OS to use more that 4Gb ram.
Ok, so back to discussion… how do we know for sure that PAE is enabled in our OS ? There are few ways to answer this question. First method is to just check for Boot.ini file and see if it has /PAE. Your boot.ini file will look something like this (beware of that it may have different entries.)
[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows Server 2003, Enterprise" /fastdetect /PAE