The South Asia Microsoft MVP Award Program

Happy New Year to everyone!!

Time to announce the Most Valuable Professional Award Winners of January award cycle.

Please join me in welcoming them in this elite technical group. We thank them for their past contributions and looking forward for their active participation, in all future engagements.

With the above announcement, unfortunately few of our friends are also moving to the alumni state.

We do respect their contributions but due to limited number of seats in each product area, we had to consider contribution categories as well as the feedback from local subsidiary in terms of their presence (online/offline both) in various activities.

I hope they will take it up positively and work towards coming back in the active group soon.

Thanks and have a great evening!!

It’s a festival time in India so let’s double the celebrations by announcing the winners of the prestigious Most Valuable Professional Award for the October cycle.

Please join me in welcoming them in this elite technical group. We thank them for their past contributions and looking forward for their active participation in all future engagements.

With the above announcement, unfortunately few of our friends are also moving to the alumni state.

We do respect their contributions but due to limited number of seats in each product area, we had to consider not only the numbers but also the contribution categories as well as the feedback from local subsidiary in terms of their presence (online/offline both) in various activities.

Thanks and have a great evening!!

Community is not just a word but an attitude. We, the human race are community focused from the very beginning. We all do a little bit of community work some or the other way.

Someone believes in Environment so does planting…that’s community, someone has a soft corner for animals and pets so saves a street dog…well that’s also community.

A story published on FB and became viral….The story titled “Shila Ghosh is young at 83”.

Her fingers don't tire; her eyes don't water, as her grandson helps her put together her day's work. Every day she travels to Kolkata to sell homemade fries.

A girl named Soofiya Khatoon met her one day and she was so much impressed with the hard work that she published the story. Now people know this 83 years lady. What did Soofiya achieve?

Nothing…but she tried to convey what she learnt/felt from her own experience within her friends/family (the community) and indirectly helped this old lady.

My associate keeps throwing some or other videos and concepts to me because he knows that I don’t like them. He actually enjoys when I scold him for watching those techs :)

Few days back he sent me this video of Google Glass. AND I FOR SURE DON’T LIKE GOOGLE. But just to make him feel happy, I was watching this video - http://www.upworthy.com/a-woman-shares-her-day-through-google-glass-it-seems-lovely-and-ordinary-until-the-end?c=ufb3

The video was nicely produced with cool music. I was liking it till the end when suddenly the women was attacked by her partner….I was shocked and felt very bad. Why would you feel bad about another human even though you don’t know him/her….I call it an impact of community. You feel so connected and try to imagine if the same would have happened with you.  

Community is not an alien concept. The smallest form of community is your family itself. What we are saying is come forward…everyone has something to share. We will make a platform for you….join us and make a best use of it.

And keep in mind that the Community doesn’t just mean learning. It means lot more. Making new friends, understanding what is the trend in the industry, looking for new opportunities, may be finding a job ;) showcasing what you know and many more.

You can make your own community of likeminded people or just join one of the existing ones. Communities grow exponentially and have lot of potential. Only thing which we need to be cautious about communities that even though there is a lot of personal benefits being part of community, but that should not supersede the basic essence of community.

In the community, there is no small or big, there is no ego, there is no right or wrong. Community is all about collaboration and making sure your common goals are met. It can’t be one person driving the community…..it’s the whole group.

Today, industry is heading towards Mobile Computing with smaller and more smaller devices coming in to your hands on a daily basis. Storage is getting cheaper day by day and if not physical, you have entire sky to keep your data…and that’s the cloud. Then where is the limit? You just have to explore how far you want to go, set your course and head towards it. And you will find many people are following you. You again got a community :)

We need to make sure that our growing countries in South Asia understand the unlimited possibilities with these technologies. And we are sure that our communities will play a very pivotal role in this. We will give you what you want, it’s your time to leverage it and showcase your skills and your country in the world map.

Our SharePoint Server MVP Destin N Joy wrote this amazing post around Rest API of SharePoint as part of his contributions in Community Day 2014. Let’s read it together:

SharePoint 2013 introduces a Representational State Transfer (REST) service that is comparable to the existing SharePoint client object models. Now, developers can interact remotely with SharePoint data by using any technology that supports REST web requests. This means that developers can perform Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations from their apps for SharePoint, solutions, and client applications, using REST web technologies and standard Open Data Protocol (OData) syntax.

In this article we can see some example of accessing SharePoint list data using REST service

SharePoint 2013 adds the ability for you to remotely interact with SharePoint sites by using REST. Now, you can interact directly with SharePoint objects by using any technology that supports standard REST capabilities.

To access SharePoint resources using REST, construct a RESTful HTTP request, using the Open Data Protocol (OData) standard, which corresponds to the desired client object model API. For example:

Client object model method:

List.GetByTitle(listname)

REST endpoint:

http://server/site/_api/lists/getbytitle('listname')

The client.svc web service in SharePoint handles the HTTP request, and serves the appropriate response in either Atom or JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format. Your client application must then parse that response. The figure below shows a high-level view of the SharePoint REST architecture.

Create a console application

From the Visual Studio IDE select a console application to start our project. Please provide a location and other details before you create the project

How to install JSON.NET

From the Solution explorer click on Manage NuGet Packages.You will get below screen

Select on Json.Net and click install

In this article, I am explaining you two approaches for Accessing REST service one using JSON.Net and another method using XML.

Code to Access REST Using JSON

REST USING XML

Our second guest blog on Community Day 2014 is from our ASP.net/IIS MVP Abhishek Sur. He writes about one of the most favorite features of Windows Phone 8.1, Cortana which makes your phone your personal assistant.  

The Windows Phone 8.1 comes up with a lot of interesting features, some of which are really interesting while some are just for eye candy. Among all the features that has been released, one of the most interesting and eye catching feature that people are awaited of is Cortana.

Cortana is a special app that is installed by default with Windows Phone 8.1 and automatically configures itself to run on the hardware search button. This special application invokes a Personal assistant which not just capable of helping you through various settings and invoking various tasks, it can also go beyond the boundaries of the Windows phone. Cortana is your guide, which stores all the settings that you do with your phone, creates a list of your personal choices, create alarms, and remind you something which interests you automatically. The best thing with Cortana is it understands natural language commands.

Here are some of the interesting things that Cortana can do:

1. Phone : Cortana is capable of understanding relationships and can allow you to say commands to call your friends and family. For instance, if you want you can say either “Call my wife” or “Call Riya” to do the same thing, where Riya is the contact saved in my contact list. It will prompt you if it does not know, or otherwise it will go ahead and call that person.

2. Messaging : Cortana can literally send text messages to the contacts. For instance, you can say “Text Abhijit I am busy will be calling you in short while”. This will automatically find “Abhijit” from my contact list and send this message.

3. Calendar: One of the most common issues with people is to deal with Calendar. For a very busy person, adding a calendar entry and reminding on time is quite a big deal. Cortana handles it very good. You can say “Add an appointment to Kunal tomorrow at 3 pm”, and Cortana will do just that. Also you can say, “What do I need to do next?”, and it will tell you the next calendar entry.

4. Reminders: Well, reminders are another interesting problem that people face daily. You can simply say something to remind later, and your Cortana will do just that. For instance, you can say “Remind me tomorrow to call Abhijit on his birthday”, it will add the reminder and work accordingly.

5. Notes : Cortana as it deals with natural language can also add notes. Say “Take notes: Me and Cortana is best friend”, and it takes it on its note book.

6. Alarms: Just like reminders, you can also set Alarms with Cortana. For instance, you can say “Wake me up at 6 O’clock in the morning” or “Set alarm for 6 AM”, and Cortana understands it and add an alarm.

7. Music: Oho, You can start, pause, and change music simply by saying it to Cortana. You can say “Play my music” to start music you recently played, or you can also play a specific song by saying just that.

8. Places: You can also use Places, distance between your locations with the place you say very easily with Cortana. Just say “How much is the distance to Northern Avenue” and it will get you the info.

9. Search: Cortana integrates Bing search engine. Anything and everything, it doesn’t pick up from the list will automatically go to Search. You can say anything to Cortana like “How is today’s weather” or “show me today’s headlines” and Cortana shows it from Bing.

10. App Integration: Not only dealing with Phone features, Cortana can also invoke the Apps that have been installed in your phone and do something it supports. For instance, you can say “Twitter new Tweet Today it could hashtag rain here in hashtag Kolkata need to get an umbrella quick”. Cortana will understand this, open Twitter and add “Today it could #rain here in #Kolkata, need to get an umbrella quick”.

The above image shows the Cortana APP. When you open, you will see something very similar to above. The very right side bottom of the screen is the mike which you can press once and interact with Cortana. The initial screen also allows you to change different settings which can be accessed by the button on the top right section and in the centre, Cortana greeted you with a nice message and also you can click on “see more” link to know more about it.

This is all that exists with Cortana.

Integrating your .NET App with Cortana

Now that you know that Cortana is getting popularity within the Windows Phone ecosystem, it would not be a bad idea to integrate your app with Cortana. Integrating means dealing with voice commands that is passed to your application and do something that your app is capable of. As I gave the example already, Twitter can recognise the command “new tweet” and create the new tweet after opening the Twitter app, it also replaces the hashtag with actual #.

To integrate your application with Cortana, you need to understand three things:

1. Create Voice Command Definitions.

2. Register the VCD file on Start-up.

3. Handle Voice commands when the page is navigated with it as argument.

How to do it…

To do these steps, let us first open Visual Studio 2013 and create a Blank Windows Phone App. Let’s name it as Integrating Cortana Sample. It will prompt the Target OS version, choose it and click Ok.

1. Open WMAppManifest.xml from Properties node of Solution Explorer and double click to open. Add ID_CAP_SPEECH_RECOGNITION, ID_CAP_MICROPHONE, and ID_CAP_NETWORKING as Capabilities, save the file and Close.

2. Once this is done, Right click on the Project node in Solution Explorer, and Add è New Item. Select Voice Command Definition file, name it as “CortanaCommands.vcd”, and add it to the project.

The figure shows the exact item that you need to select to add a VCD template to the solution. The Voice Command Definition is just an XML file which has a schema that Cortana can understand.

3. After the file is added to the Solution, Right click on the file (CortanaCommands.xml) è Select Properties. Choose “Build Action” to Content and choose Copy if newer for” Copy to Output Directory” property.

4. Once this is done, open the file. We will now try to understand each nodes defined inside the VCD file. Let’s see how we change the VCD file.

Let us know see individual elements of the VCD file.

a. Command Prefix: It defines a nick name through which we can call the app. For instance my APP can be named as “Great MVP Dictation Lists” while I can put a nickname as “MVP” such that I can say “MVP” then some series of content and Cortana will pass the content to the app after opening it.

b. Example: This is the example which is shown when you open the List of all apps that is supported.

c. Command: From each sentence you speak, Cortana identifies Command. For instance, in case of Twitter “Twitter new tweet …” the new tweet is the command. In our case we can just say “Text” after “MVP”.

d. Example: This is the example which is shown while opening the App.

e. Listen For: You can say some keywords in forms of square braces which would be ignored and in curly braces which is the command label which is identified when passed to the Application as text. That means whatever I say after “MVP text” goes to the variable {dictation} ignoring the create word.

f. Feedback: This is what Cortana is going to reply.

g. Navigate: This is the target page where Cortana will navigate to when app is opened.

h. Phase Topic: You can improve the experience by defining phase topic for each variable you pass to. The Phase topic could be a Dictation, Commands, Short Message, Natural Language, Search etc. It should be worth noting that “PhaseTopic” are recognised in cloud, not in the device itself. This is an optional key.

While defining each of the elements, don’t forget to hover over the element directly inside Visual Studio. The editor also provides great info as tooltip.

5. Now after the VCD file is created correctly, let us see the step to register the VCD file. The VCD file needs to be registered only once when the Application is first run. We Open App.xaml and go to Application_Launcing event to write this step.

The above code registers the VCD file hence created such that it could be identified by Cortana.

6. Finally let us add some code on MainPage.xaml to do things in real time. We add three TextBlocks on the Content area.

In the above code, the UI creates three TextBlock to show text stacked vertically.

7. As we specified Navigate to “MainPage.xaml”, the page gets automatically opened when Cortana opens the app and a command is identified. Let’s override OnNavigatedTo command with the following code:

8. In the above code, three commands need to be noticed.

a. The reco is the entire recorded Text that you say after your command.

b. The voiceCommandName is the name of the command identified by the app.

c. The {dictation} is the identified key defined on the VCD file at element ListenFor.

9. You can also notice, the text would be displayed on the nodes created on the UI.

10. Run the code, open Cortana and Say “MVP Text I love being an MVP” and see that gets displayed on the screen.

In the above figure it demonstrates how Cortana identifies the command correctly and shows in the App. The three lines define each command identified from the QueryString.

Download Source code

http://1drv.ms/1q5zDVW  

Conclusion

As it is open framework to integrate your app with Cortana, it is very easy to expose each and every feature of your app through Natural language, thus giving great user experience of the app to the users.

More References …

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/jj206959(v=vs.105).aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj721592.aspx

I hope you like my post, do comment, and keep in touch.

It’s time to announce the names of newly awarded and re-awarded individuals for the prestigious Most Valuable Professional Award. Please join me in congratulating following individuals for their recent achievement and welcome them in this vibrant group of professionals, the MVPs. We thank them for their past contributions and looking forward for their active participation in all future engagements.

But now here is the sad part With the above announcement, there are few of our friends retiring and moving to the alumni state (six in total).

We do respect their contributions but due to limited number of seats in each product area, we had to consider not only the numbers but also the contribution categories as well as the feedback from local subsidiary in terms of their presence (online/offline both) in various activities.

I hope they will take it up positively and work towards coming back in the active group soon.

Thanks and have a great evening!!

1^st April, we don’t celebrate the way it supposed to be in rest of the world  

We celebrate it by announcing the names of newly awarded & re-awarded individuals for the prestigious Most Valuable Professional Award.

Please join me in welcoming them in this elite technical group. We thank them for their past contributions and looking forward for their active participation in all future engagements.

Thanks and have a great evening!!

Regards,

Biplab Paul, PMP

Community Program Manager, MVP Award Program – South Asia

In this Guest Blog, our ASP.net/IIS MVP, Brij Bhushan Mishra is elaborating FriendlyURLs which is one of the features of ASP.net.

Being an ASP.NET developer, you must have worked on ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. One of the things in MVC, most of us like that is pretty and elegant URL. But this is not in the case of using ASP.NET web forms.

These URLs include crappy extensions like aspx. Many developers have written their custom URL writer or used some third party libraries to achieve it. And here we either end up paying some extra bucks for the third party library or writing custom URL writer which is itself painful task.

FriendlyURLs was introduced with ASP.NET 4.5 release 2 as a NUGET package and can be used with ASP.Net 4.0+.

Working with FriendlyURLs  

To start working with the friendly URLs, we need to install it via NuGet in our project and require to add some code in various files and make the change. First let’s set up the environment.

Setting up FriendlyURLs in your application

To install using user interface, go to Tools -> Library Package Manager -> Manage NuGet Package for Solutions and search ‘FriendlyURLs’ and click on install as:

Once you have the NUGET package installed then we need to call a method RegisterRoutes from Application_Start method in Global.asax as

protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

           RouteConfig.RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);

}

Now our application is set up with friendly URL when we’ll run our application, the URL will not contain file extension. Let’s run and check it.

The above URL does not contain the extension aspx.

There are many other scenarios where we need to play with URL’s, let’s discuss how the FriendlyURLs works in those scenarios.

1. Redirect to other pages – This works in the similar way as earlier. We can either use Response.Redirect or Server.Transfer or any other way to go to other page i.e.: Reposne.Redirect (“~\second.”)
2. Query string – Query string also works in the similar way as earlier. Like we can have an URL i.e.: http://localhost:57353/Home/Product?Id=1001  and the query string can be read as Request.QueryString["Id"] as string; it can contain many query string variable as earlier.
3. If we access a URL and there is no page available then what would take place? Say if we have URL like http://localhost:57353/Home/Products/NewProduct and there is no page available with the name NewProduct then it looks the next segment Products. If products.aspx available then it opens this page. Similarly if this is also not available and it would like to search Home.aspx and display. It does the same until it finds any page or throw an error if no match is found. There are some other useful method provided by this feature. Let’s discuss some of the key items briefly.

Other useful Methods

To use these features, make sure you have added namespace Microsoft.AspNet.FriendlyUrls in your aspx.cs page.

• Request.GetFriendlyUrlFileVirtualPath() - This method is available with the request returns the virtual path of the requested page. Here in my application, Home.aspx is under folder personal. Let’s have a look, here the requested URL is http://localhost:53252/Personal/Home then

• Request.GetFriendlyUrlFileExtension() - It returns the file extension of the friendly URL of the page. Keep in mind that this return the file extension of the URL, not the extension of asp.net files like .master.ascx etc. As here also the accessed URL is same as in above section and

• Request.GetFriendlyUrlSegments() - This is another method that got added with the request and returns the URL segment in a list of strings. First let’s understand what is the URL segment?

URL segments here are the additional values in the URL that are not part of the path or the page. If I have an URL as http://localhost:53252/Personal/Home/Users/User/3; the path of the page is /Personal/Home.aspx. Rest are additional values that are passed with the URL and available as URL segments. Let’s see what does it return when we access it.

Here as we see that there are three values in URL segments. In the same way, we can pass multiple additional values through URL without using query string. And obviously, it makes URL pretty, cleaner and SEO friendly.

The above methods works only in case of the requested URL is of type of FriendlyUrl.

Leveraging some useful Classes

There are some classes that are very useful while working with this feature. Let’s us take FriendlyURL first.

Using FriendlyURL Class

This is a static class which is very useful in several scenarios such as:

• FriendlyUrl.Href – This is another method that generates the friendly URL based on the parameters. This is a very useful methods and can be used at several scenarios in code behind and in aspx mark-up as well. The parameters are:
  • First parameter is virtual path of the page
  • And then as many parameters that will be used as URL segments as

So here we first pass the virtual path of the page and rest three parameters are passed as Url segments, we can pass as many as segments as we need.

• FriendlyUrl.Resolve – This is a static method and used to resolve any URL into friendly URL. This does not check whether that URL exists or not and it does not has to do anything about the requested URL.

Here we can see that the URL returned by the method is a Friendly URL.

• FriendlyUrl.Segments – This is static property of the FriendlyUrl class and returns the URL segments of the URL similar as Request.GetFriendlyUrlSegments().

Here we have just accessed this property and it returned the URL segments for that page. Even we did not require to pass any information about the page.

Using FriendlyUrlResolver

FriendlyUrlResolver is a class that provides another set of good features that can be used at various scenarios. To use it, first we need to create the instance of FriendlyUrlResolver. Here the constructor requires one parameter that is the extension of URL that need to take care while working on friendly URL: FriendlyUrlResolver friendlyUrl = new FriendlyUrlResolver(".aspx")

It provides many methods such as:

• ConvertToFriendlyUrl – It takes the normal URL as parameter and return the friendly URL based on the extension provided while creating the FriendlyUrlResolver instance as

Here we have created the instance FriendlyUrlResolver with the parameter .aspx then we used ConvertToFriendlyUrl that returns the friendly URL. Here if we have provided some other extension while creating the instance then this method returns null so be careful while using it.

• GetExtensions - This is another method which returns the list of extensions that is configured for that instance. This method takes a parameter which is type HTTPContextBase. But we need to keep in mind that HttpContext.Current is not of type HTTPContextBase. To get the instance this type we can do:

HttpContextWrapper wrapper = new HttpContextWrapper(HttpContext.Current);

HttpContextWrapper inherits from HTTPContextBase so we can get the extensions as

• PreprocessRequest – This is a virtual method and should be override at derived classes. This method takes two parameters an instance of HTTPContextBase and a handler instance. It executes once friendly URL is resolved and before executing the handler.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed about FriendlyUrls and its various other components. It can be used with ASP.NET 4.0+ and easily configurable with the solutions. It provides a rich API to handle various scenarios. FriendlyUrlResolver class provides us capability to extend this feature based on our requirement.

About Guest Blogging

South Asia MVP Award Program introduces Guest Posts by the MVPs from the region. These posts would help readers to be in touch with the recent trends in technology and be up-to-date with knowledge on Microsoft products.

Author

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SSD Trim issue

By Soumitra Sengupta publlished on 02-15-2014

Many users who are using Surface or latest laptops which comes with SSD ask regarding TRIM command for optimization….(more)

Best Practices SQL Server Transaction Log

By Jugal Shah published on 02-10-2014

In SQL Server Database Recovery model will decide how the transaction log will be logged in transaction log file. Transaction log file….(more)

List or Library shows blank pages

By Pratik Vyas published on 02-12-2014

This is very common issue when user closes out list web part on any of the list or library pages….(more)

Server-Side Synchronization for Dynamics CRM with POP3 Enabled Mail Server

By Roohi Shaikh published on 02-12-2014

Using Microsoft Outlook Client allowed users to send emails from Dynamics CRM using their Microsoft Outlook client. If the Outlook client was closed….(more)

Prepare Forest Active Directory settings execution failed on an unrecoverable error

By Balasaheb Ilag published on 02-13-2014

When you start preparing forest it will start after few second it will complete with error….(more)

Install and Configure Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 R2

By Satheshwaran Manoharan published on 02-13-2014

Let see how to install Hyper V….(more)

SQL Server: Updating A Column With Random Lookup Values

By Brij Dammani published on 02-13-2014

This article explains how to update a table column with random values from another (lookup) table….(more)

List Definition in SharePoint 2013

By Devendra Velegandla published on 02-15-2014

In this article you will learn how to develop List Definition in SharePoint 2013 using declarative approach with the help of….(more)

Creating Image Sprite in Visual Studio - Web Essential

By Abhimanyu Vatsa published on 02-12-2014

In this article you will learn how to create image sprite using Visual Studio Web Essential Extension. Suppose you have a website that uses lots of images….(more)

ASP.NET MVC Unit Testing using NUnit in Visual Studio

By Suprotim Agarwal published on 02-12-2014

Set up NUnit in ASP.NET MVC and use the integration points in Visual Studio to integrate NUnit Test Cases….(more)

Inheritance in XAML Styles

By Kunal Chowdhury published on 02-14-2014

In this post, we will learn how to use a single piece of style and use it in other place to inherit the common styling. If you are using XAMLs excessively….(more)

Fix : Sleep mode not working after upgrading to Windows 8.1

By Shantanu Kaushik published on 02-02-2014

After reading this post you will be able to fix an issue with your Windows PC, where, on upgrading to Windows 8.1 from Windows 8….(more)

Combine pie and xy scatter charts – World Polls chart revisited

By Purnachandra Duggirala published on 02-04-2014

The labels in a doughnut chart are always positioned at the center. By using two series (so two rings) and eliminating the border lines, the two rings seem to be one….(more)

Never delegate work using email: Use Outlook Tasks

By Dr. Nitin Paranjape published on 02-04-2014

This article is specific to Outlook and Exchange. Task delegation may not be available in all messaging platforms….(more)

SyncDriver Another Way to Sync with SkyDrive

By Soumitra Sengupta published on 02-04-2014

I have found a nice tool for syncing my SkyDrive, it’s called syncDriver, it can even sync folders outside the root folder with….(more)

Resize Desktop icons or Change Explorer View type quickly in Windows 8 | 7

By Anand Khanse published on 02-06-2014

Whenever you feel you know all the Windows shortcuts, another just comes along to prove the notion wrong. Here’s another quick tip that will help you quickly resize explorer….(more)

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: Creating Semi-Circles

By Geetesh Bajaj published on 02-06-2014

PowerPoint 2013 provides so many basic shapes within the Shapes gallery. All of these shapes can be used in many ways, and that in itself works….(more)

Format bubble chart using VBA

By Ashish Koul published on 02-08-2014

All you need to create a table with series name mentioned in cells and add color to cells next to it….(more)

Upgrading Exchange 2010 RTM to Exchange 2010 SP3

By Satheshwaran Manoharan published on 02-02-2014

I had to Upgrade a SBS Small Business Server from Exchange 2010 RTM to Exchange 2010 Sp3….(more)

EOP / Office 365: Connect and Use Powershell

By Prabhat Nigam published on 02-03-2014

The blog will explain the steps on how to connect to office 365 or Exchange online protection for the management using PowerShell of your desktop client….(more)

Heat Map representation of Dynamics CRM data in CRM Dashboards

By Roohi Shaikh published on 02-03-2014

Picture speaks more than a thousand words and what better than a graphic representation of CRM data on Bing Map….(more)

Spell check not working in Lync 2013

By Balasaheb Ilag published on 02-05-2014

Spell check was available in Lync 2010 and even early Lync 2013 client….(more)

SSDT Tips: Display Precedence Labels in SSIS 2012 Packages

By Visakh Murukesan published on 02-05-2014

Here's a quick tip regarding SSIS development using SQL Server Data Tools 2012 Couple of days before I heard one of my fellow teammates….(more)

PowerShell Application : Numerology Application created using PowerShell

By Aman Dhally published on 02-06-2014

One of my friend is a numerologist, he was facing some problem and asked me if I am able to help him. The issue which he was facing was to convert….(more)

Customize Newform.aspx using InfoPath

By Pratik Vyas published on 02-06-2014

Last week I was assigned to customize a list page. Here are the steps and some issues I faced during this assignment….(more)

NAV Web Client - Communication with the Server Failed Error

By Mohana Krishna published on 02-07-2014

I have installed NAV2013R2 version and RTC working perfectly but when I run the web client, I am getting standard Cronus message….(more)

ASP.NET MVC Custom Action Filters

By Suprotim Agarwal published on 02-02-2014

Filters in ASP.NET MVC are a way to apply cross-cutting logic at the controller level. Some examples of cross-cutting logic….(more)

Html.EditorFor – Extend for custom type

By Brij Mishra published on 02-04-2014

In this Post, I am going to discuss about ASP.NET MVC and razor view engine. As we know that ASP.NET MVC provides many helper methods….(more)

Windows Phone Enterprise Apps for Sharepoint

By Mayur Tendulkar published on 02-04-2014

A walkthrough of how we can build an enterprise Windows Phone application which can easily integrate with Office 365 SharePoint site….(more)

“Auto History” Extension - Keep track of your code changes in VisualStudio 2013

By Kunal Chowdhury published on 02-05-2014

Have you ever lost in your way while coding in multiple files inside Visual Studio and want to recover some piece of code that you changed but not yet pushed….(more)

Visual Studio 2013 Tips & Tricks – Prevent Closing of IIS Express after stopping debugging of Web Application

By Senthil Kumar published on 02-07-2014

By default in visual studio 2013, you would observe that when you run your web application, the Visual Studio debugger would start your web application….(more)

Base64 Encode Image in Website - Web Essential

By Abhimanyu Vatsa published on 02-08-2014

In this article you will learn about Base64 Encode Image, why we encode image and how it can improve website performance. We are going to make use of Web….(more)

301 redirect from http to https with web.config

By Raghav Khunger published on 02-08-2014

If you want to apply 301 (Redirect permanent) for all http requests to https you need to add the….(more)

Get Browser Height and Width on Server Side in ASP.NET

By Brij Dammani published on 02-08-2014

Suppose you are displaying bulk data in desktop environment. But if same data are sent to mobile device, it will make website too slow….(more)

Smart Searching in Outlook

By Dr. Nitin Paranjape published on 01-26-2014

We usually type just the search text and hope to get precise, few results. This is never going to happen. Without any additional information….(more)

Recolor Picture Backgrounds in PowerPoint 2013

By Geetesh Bajaj published on 01-27-2014

One of the worst things that you can do to your PowerPoint presentation is to add a busy, multi-colored picture background….(more)

Restore: Language Bar missing in Windows 8.1

By Anand Khanse published on 01-29-2014

Sometimes, even after enabling language bar in your Windows Control Panel, you may find that the Language bar is missing. It may disappear completely and become visible….(more)

How to select a random sample from all your data

By Purnachandra Duggirala published on 01-31-2014

So today, let us learn a very easy trick to select random sample from your data….(more)

Remove abbreviations appearing before a name

By Ashish Mathur published on 02-01-2014

Assume there is a list of names appearing in range A2:A9.  Before these names, there are abbreviations such as….(more)

Avoid double entry effort in maintaining an Accounting and CRM System simultaneously

By Roohi Shaikh published on 01-27-2014

Do you use Dynamics CRM for your CRM needs and use Intuit QuickBooks to handle your accounts? Should this be the case, you are aware of the difficulties….(more)

SSMS Tips : Customize Record Count Retrieved through Object Explorer

By Visakh Murukesan published on 01-27-2014

In SSMS object explorer you've the option to Edit and Select records from a table….(more)

PowerShell and GUI : Creating a GUI form using PowerShell Studio

By Aman Dhally published on 01-28-2014

Sometimes GUI’s are useful too, sometime for fun and sometime it good to write our own tool for the company users….(more)

Disable IM Archiving and Conversation history in Lync Server 2013

By Balasaheb Ilag published on 01-29-2014

IM archiving is basically using for Compliance purpose however some organization don’t want to archive anything. I mean no Archiving through server….(more)

Step By Step running On-demand workflow for all active records

By Mahender Pal published on 01-30-2014

Did you get a requirement to run your workflow for all active records? If yes then this post going to help you….(more)

Virtual Box VM: No internet in Windows XP virtual image

By Raghav Khunger published on 01-30-2014

I installed Windows XP SP3 image on Virtual Box VM in my machine. Everything worked well in the installation but I was not able to connect….(more)

The file is locked for exclusive use - SharePoint error while editing office document

By Amol Ghuge published on 01-31-2014

One of my users submitted a ticket by mentioning she is facing some problems in editing the word document. Probing further I came to know this problem is restricted….(more)

Understanding click binding in Knockout.js

By Dhananjay Kumar published on 01-28-2014

Click Binding adds click event to element on View. You can do click binding with any function in ViewModel or you can bind to….(more)

How to use two different languages in a .NET Project

By Brij Mishra published on 01-29-2014

As .NET provides us the capability to use multiple languages in same project, even it allows to inherit a VB.NET class in C# Class. If you have not tried earlier….(more)

How a #WPDev can identify whether shutter was pressed Half or Full

By Kunal Chowdhury published on 01-29-2014

If you are a Windows Phone app developer and building a Camera application, you might want to know whether the user pressed the shutter key….(more)

Learn a new language while you work using Word Mini Translator

By Nitin Paranjape published on 01-19-2014

Many of us work in global companies with multi-lingual staff. It is a good idea to know the other language….(more)

Data Execution Prevention or DEP feature in Windows 7 | 8

By Anand Khanse published on 01-19-2014

DEP is a security feature that was introduced in Windows Vista onwards, that can help prevent damage to your computer from viruses and other security….(more)

Puzzle Pictures in PowerPoint 2013

By Geetesh Bajaj published on 01-21-2014

This is actually much easier than it sounds -- and the tutorial on this page will lead you through the entire process step-by-step. By the time you are done….(more)

EOP / Office 365: Block Recipient email address

By Prabhat Nigam published on 01-19-2014

This blog is explaining the steps to block an email address of the Recipient in Exchange Online Protection….(more)

Sending Email with entity attachment from Notes

By Mahender Pal published on 01-20-2014

If you are looking for sending email with an entity record attachment from Notes then this article is going to help you to implement….(more)

Boot Images and Distribution Point Configuration For OSD In SCCM 2012 R2

By Prajwal Desai published on 01-20-2014

Boot Images and Distribution Point Configuration For OSD In SCCM 2012 R2 – In this post we will look at the steps for boot images and Distribution Point configuration for OSD In SCCM 2012 R2. We will enable the PXE support….(more)

Task Scheduler Error – specified logon session does not exist

By Jugal Shah published on 01-20-2014

Recently I got a task to move windows server 2003 to windows server 2008. Task is designed to execute .CMD file which internally….(more)

Plot any address of any Dynamics CRM entity on Bing Map using Maplytics

By Roohi Shaikh published on 01-21-2014

With CRM 2013, Bing Map control was introduced to allow OOB integration with Bing Maps and include a map for the address provided….(more)

SSIS Tips: Deduping Flat File Data without using Staging Table

By Visakh Murukesan published on 01-21-2014

Recently there was a SSIS challenge that was brought up by one of my fellow colleagues in his project. The project involves importing data….(more)

Exchange Online GAL federation between two Office 365 tenants

By Manu Philip published on 01-22-2014

I have recently tried to establish the GAL Federation between two of my Office 365 Exchange Online tenants to share the Free busy Availability between those domains….(more)

Document properties are clearing out when uploading document to SharePoint site: SharePoint 2010

By Amardeep Singh published on 01-23-2014

There was no clear point which could tell why this issue is occurring, however, the one thing which was very basic to check but ignored. The problem document was a password….(more)

Understanding how ISNUMERIC function works

By Madhivanan JR published on 01-24-2014

Often I hear from people that ISNUMERIC function is not working properly and there is a bug. One example people refer is that both of….(more)

Latest Cumulative Updates for Lync Server 2010 and Lync Server 2013

By Balasaheb Ilag published on 01-25-2014

Recently Microsoft published latest Cumulative Update i.e. CU Lync Server 2010 and 2013….(more)

Visual Studio 2013 Tips & Tricks – Enable / Disable Code Lens

By Senthil Kumar published on 01-20-2014

Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 has a new feature called Code Lens which shows the reference count of the methods along with the other information….(more)

Implementation of TransactionScope on C# Code without Database

By Abhishek Sur published on 01-21-2014

Transaction is one of the common problems that we often use during database operation. While performing a batch data manipulation….(more)

ScriptCs Templating Support

By Anoop Madhusudanan published on 01-21-2014

I just checked in a ScriptCs Templating module to integrate Razor and StringTemplate transformations in ScriptCs workflow. ScrtipCs Templating module….(more)

Passing a reference type using ref keyword

By Brij Mishra published on 01-21-2014

In this post, I am going to talk about ref keyword in C#. You all must be knowing the basic use of this keyword. But for them who are….(more)

Error: `doctype 5` is deprecated, you must now use `doctype html`: Node.js Express App bug solved

By Dhananjay Kumar published on 01-21-2014

I am using Visual Studio to create Node.js application. I created a Node project by selecting Blank Express Application project template from JavaScript….(more)

Prevent ASP.Net Page to load in Cross-domain IFrame

By Rami Vemula published on 01-21-2014

In this short jumpstart, I am going to show how to prevent loading of an ASP.Net MVC page in a cross domain iframe using traditional HttpModules. We use HTTP header….(more)

Better NPM Support in Windows Azure Mobile Services with package.json

By Shiju Varghese published on 01-21-2014

The source control integration lets you easily work as a team for working on Mobile Services scripts. This options lets….(more)

Single File Upload to Multiple File Upload ASP.NET Web Forms

By Abhimanyu Vatsa published on 01-22-2014

With ASP.NET File upload control we can only upload one file at a time while HTML5 has a good notion to upload multiple files….(more)

Learn basic unit testing with VS2012 and Nunit

By Amit Choudhary published on 01-22-2014

This post is a guide for basics of Unit testing. Through this article we’ll go step by step setting up the Environment and few basic test….(more)

Custom Routes in ASP.NET MVC

By Suprotim Agarwal published on 01-22-2014

Learn how to use Custom RouteBase class in ASP.NET MVC to manipulate incoming and outgoing URLs based on specific….(more)

How to check the supported Camera Type in Windows Phone

By Kunal Chowdhury published on 01-23-2014

If you are a WPDev and building Windows Phone app and/or game that uses primary or secondary (front facing camera), you might need to check whether the device supports….(more)