IE9 is here, So.. what's in for you as a Developer

After so many years of developers wishing for a better browser from Microsoft, one that was more consistent with web standards and would allow them to develop cross-browser websites leveraging the same markup, today marks the day that developers finally have that browser; Internet Explorer 9 Beta. It’s an important day because this release, although just a beta, is the culmination of a lot of effort and most importantly, listening, by the Internet Explorer team.
While the Internet Explorer browser has enjoyed widespread adoption by consumers, it hasn’t always been viewed fondly by the development community. The important work of building cross-browser compliant websites has often been cumbersome, due in part to differing interpretations of browser APIs in previous versions of Internet Explorer. The differences forced developers, myself included, to find workarounds for functionality that, in many cases, had a clearly defined standard behavior.

HTML5, CSS3, DOM

With Internet Explorer 9, there’s been a concerted effort by Microsoft to focus on standards-based functionality that will ease cross-browser development while providing the features needed to build rich and immersive websites. Take, for example, IE9’s support for many of the features of HTML5 and CSS3, the specifications which are defining the future of the web. By including support for features such as Canvas, video, @font-face, CSS3 media queries, SVG and many others, we now have a rich base to provide more compelling experiences to end users. In addition, by ensuring that these features are conformant to the defined specifications, the sites we build should work with any browser that also supports those specifications.
To take it a step further, the IE team has enhanced the performance of many of the new HTML5 features by taking advantage of the GPU. This means that text, graphics and video will be substantially smoother and more responsive allowing websites to perform more like true applications.
And at the DOM level, important changes have been made to be consistent with the defined specifications making it easier to whittle down browser-specific code. For example, support for the W3C DOM Events specification (addEventListener & removeEventListener) in place of the proprietary IE model (attacheEvent & detachEvent) has been one of the most welcomed changes to IE9 as has the introduction of getElementsByClassName, supported for some time in the DOM Level 2 specification and now available in IE9.

JavaScript

Equally important is the performance boost provided by the new Chakra JavaScript engine which basically blows away older versions of Internet Explorer and brings IE9 in line with modern browsers such as Chrome, Firefox and Opera. JavaScript development continues to become more complex and intricate so the importance of these performance enhancements can’t be understated. The Chakra engine interprets, compiles, and executes code in parallel and takes advantage of multiple CPU cores when available and the results are obvious by the greatly improved benchmark scores from the Webkit Sunspider JavaScript Benchmarks.

Chakra JavaScript Engine – WebKit SunSpider Benchmarks

Updated Developer Tools

Substantial work has been done to update the Internet Explorer Developer Tools. The built-in tools, usually found by pressing F12, provided quite a bit of capabilities but were missing key components that were essential to effective testing and debugging of client-side source code. With this update, the tools now include a much anticipated network traffic inspector, Console tab, CSS editing, and an improved JavaScript profiler.
The new Console tab is a welcome addition providing the ability to inspect script easily as well as receive important page-specific error and warning messages.

IE Developer Tools – Console Tab
Of the new features, the one that I’m most excited about is the network traffic inspector, mainly because the bulk of my application development involves Ajax-based requests.

IE Developer Tools – Network Performance of Specific Assets

IE Developer Tools – Network Request Information
I can now do such things as determine load times of specific assets or inspect my request/response headers, cookies and return values without the need for breaking out of the browser to a 3rd party application such as Fiddler or Charles.

Get to Using it Today

A lot of effort has gone into making Internet Explorer 9 Beta a better browser. There’s certainly more work to be done but the fact that we now have a version of IE that provides standards-based functionality and allows us to use the same markup across browsers is pretty hot.
To really appreciate what you can build with IE9, though, you need to just start digging into it. Microsoft has created the following sites to give developers the knowledge and inspiration they need to leverage IE9 to its fullest:

• Beauty of the Web – Explore all of the new features of Microsoft’s latest browser and check out the cool demos built using the advanced features of Internet Explorer 9 Beta
• Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive – This site breaks down the new, advanced features of Internet Explorer 9 Beta and lets you get a visual of what’s possible with each bit of functionality
• Internet Explorer Guide for Developers – The developer documentation you’ll need to learn how about the specifics of Internet Explorer 9 Beta

It feels great to know that we’re on a path to being able to build truly feature-rich websites that will be easier to maintain and provide a more exciting experience to users. While we’ll still need to support older browsers for some time, the fact that all the major browser vendors are heading in the same direction is going to allow us to build some truly amazing things. I can’t wait!

Post originally taken from Here

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Introduction to using WP7 Accelerometer

This post is about introducing you Windows Phones Accelerometer (I have taken following contents from Charles Petzold's book "Programming Windows Phone 7 - Special Excerpt 2". The contents are Copyright of Microsoft and is used only for informational purpose). You can get more detailed information about using Accelerometer from above mentioned book, complete book is still to be released later this year.

Windows Phones contain an accelerometer — a small hardware device that essentially measures force, which elementary physics tells us is proportional to acceleration. When the phone is held still, the accelerometer responds to the force of gravity, so the accelerometer can tell your application the direction of the Earth relative to the phone. It is convenient to represent the accelerometer output as a vector in three-dimensional space. Vectors are commonly written in boldface, so the acceleration vector can be symbolized as (x, y, z). XNA defines a three-dimensional vector type; Silverlight does not.

While a three-dimensional point (x, y, z) indicates a particular location in space, the vector (x, y, z) encapsulates instead a direction and a magnitude. Obviously the point and the vector are related: The direction of the vector (x, y, z) is the direction from the point (0, 0, 0) to the point(x, y, z). But the vector (x, y, z) is definitely not the line from (0, 0, 0) to (x, y, z). It’s only the direction of that line. The magnitude of the vector (x, y, z) is calculable from the three-dimensional form of the Pythagorean Theorem:

Magnitude = Math.sqrt( Math.pow(x,2), Math.pow(y,2), Math.pow(z,2) )
where:
Math.sqrt() function returns the square root of a number
Math.pow() function returns a number raised to a power
For working with the accelerometer, you can imagine the phone as defining a threedimensional coordinate system. No matter how the phone is oriented, the positive Y axis points from the bottom of the phone (with the buttons) to the top, the positive X axis points from left to right.

When the phone is still, the accelerometer vector points towards the Earth. The magnitude is 1, meaning 1 g, which is the force of gravity on the earth's surface. When holding your phone in the upright position, the acceleration vector is (0, –1, 0), that is, straight down.

So lets start, To use the accelerometer, you’ll need a reference to the Microsoft.Devices.Sensors library, and a using directive for the Microsoft.Devices.Sensors namespace. In WMAppManifest.xml, you need

<Capability Name="ID_CAP_SENSORS">

You create an instance of the Accelerometer class, set an event handler for the
ReadingChanging event, and call Start. And then it gets a little tricky. Let’s take a look at a project named SilverlightAccelerometer project that simply displays the current reading in its content grid. A centered TextBlock is defined in the XAML.

<Grid x:Name="ContentGrid" Grid.Row="1">
    <TextBlock Name="txtblk"
     HorizontalAlignment="Center"
     VerticalAlignment="Center" />
</Grid>

This is a program that will display the accelerometer vector throughout its lifetime, so it creates the Accelerometer class in its constructor and calls Start:

public MainPage()
{
    InitializeComponent();
    Accelerometer acc = new Accelerometer();
    acc.ReadingChanged += OnAccelerometerReadingChanged;
    try
    {
        acc.Start();
    }
    catch (Exception exc)
    {
        txtblk.Text = exc.Message;
    }
}

The documentation warns that calling Start might raise an exception, so the program protects itself against that eventuality. These user-interface objects are not thread safe; they are not built to be accessed simultaneously from multiple threads. For this reason, Silverlight will not allow you to access a user-interface object from a non-UI thread.

This means that the OnAccelerometerReadingChanged method cannot directly access the TextBlock element to set a new value to its Text property. Fortunately, there’s a solution involving a class named Dispatcher defined in the System.Windows.Threading namespace. Through the Dispatcher class, you can post jobs from
a non-UI thread on a queue where they are later executed by the UI thread.

The Dispatcher class defines a method named CheckAccess that returns true if you can access a particular user interface object from the current thread. (The CheckAccess method is also duplicated by DependencyObject itself.) If an object can’t be accessed from the current thread, then Dispatcher provides two versions of a method named Invoke that you use to post the job to the UI thread.

The verbose version requires a delegate and a method defined in accordance with that delegate. The delegate (and method) should have no return value, but as many arguments as you need to do the job, in this case setting a string to the Text property of a TextBlock:

delegate void SetTextBlockTextDelegate(TextBlock txtblk, string text);
void SetTextBlockText(TextBlock txtblk, string text)
{
    txtblk.Text = text;
}

The OnAccelerometerReadingChanged is responsible for calling SetTextBlockText. It first makes use of CheckAccess to see if it can just call the SetTextBlockText method directly. If not, then the handler calls the BeginInvoke method. The first argument is an instantiation of the delegate with the SetTextBlockText method; this is followed by all the arguments that SetTextBlockText requires:

void OnAccelerometerReadingChanged(object sender, AccelerometerReadingEventArgs args)
{
    string str = String.Format("X = {0:F2}\n" +
    "Y = {1:F2}\n" +
    "Z = {2:F2}\n\n" +
    "Magnitude = {3:F2}\n\n" +
    "{4}",
    args.X, args.Y, args.Z,
    Math.Sqrt(args.X * args.X + args.Y * args.Y +
    args.Z * args.Z),
    args.Timestamp);
    if (txtblk.CheckAccess())
    {
        SetTextBlockText(txtblk, str);
    }
    else
    {
        txtblk.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(new
        SetTextBlockTextDelegate(SetTextBlockText),
        txtblk, str);
    }
}

This is not too bad, but the need for the code to jump across threads has necessitated an additional method and a delegate. Is there a way to do the whole job right in the event handler?
Yes! The BeginInvoke method has an overload that accepts an Action delegate, which defines a method that has no return value and no arguments. You can create an anonymous method right in the BeginInvoke call. The complete code following the creation of the string object looks like this:

if (txtblk.CheckAccess())
{
    txtblk.Text = str;
}
else
{
    txtblk.Dispatcher.BeginInvoke(delegate()
        {
            txtblk.Text = str;
        });
}

The anonymous method begins with the keyword delegate and concludes with the curly
brace following the method body. The empty parentheses following the delegate keyword are not required.

The Windows Phone 7 emulator doesn’t contain any actual accelerometer, so it always reports a value of (0, 0, –1), which indicates the phone is lying on a flat surface:

READ MORE - Introduction to using WP7 Accelerometer

Invoking C# Compiler from your Code

Imagine you have just generated some code using a code generation technique, wouldn’t it be really cool to then programmatically call the C# language compiler and generate assemblies from the generated code?
Let’s imagine we used an Xslt transformation to generate some code:

XslCompiledTransform transform = new XslCompiledTransform();
transform.Load("Program.xslt");
transform.Transform("Program.xml", "Program.cs");

Using the CSharpCodeProvider class we can now programmatically call the C# compiler to generate the executable assembly. We’ll begin by advising the compiler of some options we’d like it to use when compiling our code using the CompilerParameters class.

CompilerParameters parameters = new CompilerParameters();

We’ll specify that the assembly to be created should be an executable and we’ll also specify such things as whether debug information should be included, the warning level, whether warnings should be treated as errors etc.

parameters.GenerateExecutable = true;
parameters.IncludeDebugInformation = true;
parameters.GenerateInMemory = false;
parameters.TreatWarningsAsErrors = true;
parameters.WarningLevel = 3;
parameters.CompilerOptions = "/optimize";
parameters.OutputAssembly = "Program.exe";

Using the compiler parameters we can now compile the C# code using the CSharpCodeProvider class and get the results of the compilation as an instance of the CompilerResults class.

CSharpCodeProvider codeProvider = new CSharpCodeProvider();
CompilerResults results = codeProvider.CompileAssemblyFromFile(parameters, new string[] { "Program.cs" });

While the code you generated is unlikely to have any compiler warnings or errors, other developers may be less fortunate and therefore they can access the Errors property of the CompilerResults class to determine what went wrong. Actually the Errors property contains both compiler errors and warnings although the following simple LINQ queries allow you to examine the warnings and errors in isolation.

var warnings = from e in results.Errors.Cast()
      where e.IsWarning
      select e;
var errors = from e in results.Errors.Cast()
    where !e.IsWarning
    select e;

While code generation is very cool, we generate code to ultimately create assemblies that we can either execute or reference from other code. If you’re programmatically generating code why not next time also programmatically generate the assemblies too!

Post originally taken from Here

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Enable Built-in Administrator Account in Windows 7

Hi everybody, recently I was exploring features of windows 7 when I found that administrator account can be enabled and listed among other accounts in the logon screen. We all know in XP we could do so by pressing “Ctrl+Alt+Delete” at the logon screen and entering Administrator as the username and entering required password you entered while installing XP (Most people don’t enter anything, and I used to use this a lot to logon as administrator at Cyber cafes). But in Windows 7 by default you don’t have administrator account listed among other accounts. When you need to elevate the permissions for an application, you usually right click an application and select “Run as Administrator”. Windows do this to prevent any application from running with admin permissions until you want or need so. The account in which you are logged in is a Member of Administrator Group, it is not the Built-in account for administering the computer/domain
(Warning: It is not recommended to enable Administrator account and logging in as Administrator)

So to enable admin account you need to follow following steps (you need administrative rights to perform these steps):

1: Switch to Desktop (if not already) and Right click on “My computer” and click on “Manage”.

2: In Computer Management window that will open, select “Local Users and Groups” under “Computer management \ System Tools”.

3: In the right pane two folders will be visible, Double Click on “Users”

4: Then double click on “Administrator”.

5: In the “Administrator Properties” dialogue box there is a check box labeled “Account is disabled”, uncheck that check box and click on apply.

Close that window and any other open window, now to check that it worked, Logoff or Lock your computer (By pressing Windows Key + L) and click on “Switch user”. You will see Administrator account, you can log into it and enjoy full access to computer with complete admin rights. You can also set a  password for this built in Administrator Account (I would strongly recommend doing so).

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Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (Beta)

Microsoft continuously collects feedback on Windows 7 from customers and partners through several channels. This feedback results in enhancements that help improve compatibility, reliability, performance, and user experience. Service Pack integrates all these updates, along with additional enhancements, into a single package and help ensure that your systems are up-to-date.

The beta of SP1 for Windows 7 contains the pre-released 17 security updates and 456 hotfixes. The impact of SP1 on Windows 7 is considered to be minimal since it only includes pre-released hotfixes and security updates. Even though the current SP1 release is a beta, Microsoft has made it clear to not anticipate the SP1 for Windows 7 to be substantial. While SP1 is not intended to be a vehicle for releasing new features, some existing features do gain slightly enhanced functionality in SP1.

The SP1 beta has been released in English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish. This beta will expire on June 30, 2011. You will have to upgrade to a newer build or uninstall and return to the RTM build by that time. Service Pack 1 will be released within the first half of calendar year 2011. You would not be able to upgrade from the beta builds to the final build of SP1 and will have to uninstall the Service Pack or do a clean install of Windows 7.

Download : https://profile.microsoft.com/RegSysProfileCenter/wizard.aspx?wizid=4170964B-FE75-4B27-B2E3-B351FCACEE30&lcid=1033&ci=393&WT.sp=_technet_,dcsjwb9vb00000c932fd0rjc7_5p3t

Setup Prerequisites:

• 
  
  Your current operating system must be the Release to Manufacturing (RTM) version of Windows 7 (build 7600).
• 
  
  Users updating through Windows Update/WSUS must install the Servicing Stack Update (SSU). This update is necessary to successfully install or uninstall the service pack.

Delivery Methods:

• Standalone Package
  Meant for commuters without internet access or system administrators.
  About 297 MB (x86) or 535 MB (x64) of download size.
• Windows Update
  Meant for most home or many business users.
  About 23 MB (x86) or 45 MB (x64) of download size.
• Integrated DVDMeant for new PCs or Vista upgrades

Changes in Windows 7 SP1

• Additional support has been added to allow Windows 7 clients to effectively communicate with third-party identity federation services.
• Improved HDMI audio device performance.
• Corrected behavior when printing mixed-orientation XPS documents using the XPS Viewer.
• Change to behavior of “Restore previous folders at logon” functionality. All folders are restored to their previous positions rather than the cascaded position based on the location of the most recently active folder.
• Enhanced support for additional identities in RRAS and IPsec.
• Support for Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX).

for more information & processes: http://www.thewindowsclub.com/whitepaper-windows-7-service-pack-1

READ MORE - Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (Beta)