Vijay's blog

If you have a very decent internet connection (equal to or more than 4 mbps) but still not able to stream YouTube video’s without it waiting for buffering a lot, it maybe because your local ISP could be using a CDN for caching YouTube instead of loading from the main site. There is an easy way to bypass this throttling by asking your OS to block traffic from the caching CDN and loading the content directly from YouTube by simply providing the following command at elevated command prompt [Read More]

March 31st is world backup day! Signup for a cloud based backup service and save yourself a lot of regret later. I am singing up for Backblaze since they are providing an option for unlimited space and unlimited individual file size for $5/month (AED 19/month), which is a small amount to preserve all my important stuff. You can also check out Crashplan who have some really attractive annual and biannual plan. [Read More]

Tried exporting my links through Google Takeout, but was stuck with the following screen for a long time

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As part of the second spring cleaning Google is retiring Google Reader from July 1, 2013. We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months. [Read More]

Somethings that are straight forward in MS-SQL and .NET are bit convoluted when using Oracle and .NET. A good example for this case is when trying to map a database Boolean field to a .NET POCO. With MS-SQL we can straight away use bit which has a possible values of 1 or `, but with Oracle since it does not have a built in Boolean type we would normally go with a single character field with a value of‘Y’or‘N’`.

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The below are few points that we learned during a recent application developed using WinForms and deployed using ClickOnce.

Refracting to use native PC/SC interface

The core functionality of the application was to provide proximity card based attendance system for students in a classroom. For this we were previously using the API provided by HID Global. This caused various dependency issues between Windows operating systems and architectures (32bit vs 64bit), so as part of the refactoring we have removed the dependency and using the PC/SC interface exposed by Windows natively. Of course, this means mucking around a bit in the P/Invoke world (for accessing WinScard.dll related functions), but it provides elegance to the application by eradicating extra baggage of dependency.

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Update: After viewing the fiasco by Microsoft at E3, I am moving towards the PS4 camp. I am especially very critical about arcane DRM, regional restrictions and phone home feature along with the restriction in unplugging the Kinect. So, yea now I am more or less finalized on buying PS4. — Original content — Saw the abridged version even this isn’t very exciting. I feel the struggle to come up with a new controller interface by all console makers after MS’s Kinect, but failing to be make anything impressive. [Read More]

With the help of System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement (available from .NET Framework 4.0) authenticating users against Microsoft Active Directory has become a lot simpler. Compare the below code public static bool IsAuthenticated( string domain, string username, string pwd ) { using ( PrincipalContext pc = new PrincipalContext( ContextType.Domain, domain) ) { return pc.ValidateCredentials( username, pwd ); } } to what you have to do previously public static bool IsAuthenticated(string domain, string username, string pwd) { string domainAndUsername = username + " [Read More]

Came down with fever, and this reminded me of this documentary … go defense go!

Don’t wait, head over to VS extensions gallery and grab hold of Web Essentials 2012 by Mads Kristensen. The extension offers good amount of features for VS based developers, of all of them the one I am going to talk about is the Zen Coding style introduced by Sergey Chikuyonok (as mentioned in JohnPapa.net).

Before I proceed further Zen Coding style has been implemented across various text editors, and if you are a full time or regular web developer you should have a look into it. For all the supported text editors check out the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Coding#Text_editors.

Once you have installed Web Essentials 2012, you will have support for coding in Zen Coding style development inside of Visual Studio 2012. The main idea behind the coding style is to reduce the manual typing process of creating the mundane html code for your web application. It is kind of text expansion mechanism, but it is much more than that.

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