Nav tag in HTML5

HTML5 is great new version of HTML with great features. I am exploring that in great details for our forthcoming projects. I found a great tag that can be used in all websites for the navigation. <nav> tag defines a area for navigation in whole HTML markup.

The HTML5 specification for nav tag is like following. You can find all the HTML 5 specification here.

The nav element represents a section of a page that links to other pages or to parts within the page: a section with navigation links. Not all groups of links on a page need to be in a nav element only sections that consist of major navigation blocks are appropriate for the nav element. In particular, it is common for footers to have a list of links to various key parts of a site, but the footer element is more appropriate in such cases, and no nav element is necessary for those links.

<nav> tags can be used as navigation area and under it you can put the group of links that will use for navigation of area. For example if you have downloaded the ASP.NET MVC3 tool update with HTML5 then you can see they have defined the navigation area with nav tags like following.

<nav>
   <ul id="menu">
       <li>@Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")</li>
       <li>@Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")</li>
   </ul>
</nav>

As you can see in above they putted Home and About link in the navigation. So now its with the nag tag the html mark-up is more readable. Once its loaded in browser it and if you view source it will be populate as groups of link in nav tag like following.

<nav>
               <ul id="menu">
                   <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
                   <li><a href="/Home/About">About</a></li>
               </ul>
</nav>

So that’s it You can see its very easy to use and now we have very readable and clear markup with HTML5. Stay tuned for more.. Happy Programming.

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HTML5 Intellisense in Visual Studio 2010/2008

Recently I was playing with HTML5 and I was in need of the HTML5 intellisense in Visual Studio 2010. I found a great extension which will provide me a great intellisense for HTML5. I thought its great to share with you all.  You can download that tool from following link.

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/d771cbc8-d60a-40b0-a1d8-f19fc393127d

Once you download install it. You need to change your validation to HTML5 in your Visual Studio 2010 configuration. For that you have to go to Tools->Options->Text Editor->HTML->Validation and there you need to select the HTML5 like following.



That’s it now your visual studio 2010 or 2008 will have intellisense for HTM5. Just like following.



That’s it. Hope you like it. Stay tuned for more..Happy programming.

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What’s new in SQL Server ‘Denali’ Management Studio.

Before sometime Microsoft has launched SQL Server Denali CTP a new version of SQL Server. I have downloaded it and install it on my machine. I have found variety of new features in SQL Server. Today I am going to explore some of the new features in SQL Server Denali Management Studio. Following are some of the new features of SQL Server Denali Management Studio.

New Font and New Colour Scheme:

First thing you notice when you start SQL Server Management Studio is the colour scheme it has nice blue theme just like Visual Studio 2010. Also if you see that now the default font is ‘Consolas’. Just like following.

Multi monitor Support:

Now SQL Server management Studio also can be work in multi monitor also. You can drag each window and set it for another monitor.Now you can each window can appeared out of shell of SSMS and You can drag with each window in different monitor like following.

Code Snippets:

Now there are lots of code snippets are available and you can that code snippets via right Click Query window-> Insert snippets like following.



Once you click Insert snippets it will open lots of built in snippets and create syntax for you directly.

Zoom Functionality:

Now you can zoom the query editor window. There is a dropdown given in left bottom corner of the window and you can zoom the query editor windows as you need like following.



There are many more features in SQL Server Denali Management studio. I have just explore few of them. For more details please visit following link which contains lots of list of new features.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174219(v=sql.110).aspx

That’s it. Hope you like it.. Stay tuned for more.. Happy programming.

 

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Task list window in Visual Studio 2010

Task list is a great feature of visual studio and I think its most unappreciated features of Visual Studio 2010 and most of developers are not aware of it or don’t know about it and that’s why they are not using it. So I decided to write blog post about it.

As .NET Developer we spend lots of time writing code with Microsoft Visual Studio and sometimes we need to write comments for future reference like for debugging we need to some code undone or we need to write some code in future at that time this Task List feature of Microsoft Visual Studio comes very handy .

Let’s first see how we can configure Task List Window in Visual Studio to help us better in coding. You can configure Task List window options via Tools-> options then go to Environment and then click Task list then a window will appear like following.



Here you can see the Standard Token of Visual Studio Also you can add your own Tokens also..You can see task list window via View-> Task List window like following. or you can use short cut like Ctrl +\,T.



and Task list window will appear like below.



Task list windows show two kind of task list one 1) User Task 2) Token Comments.
User Task are like general comment or general task that developer need to remember during development of project. You can see the the in above picture I have added one task for login code.

As we already know we can configure various token comments via configuration area and that comments will listed in Task list window. Let’s write some like below which contains TODO Token and then we will list that stuff with Task list Window.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;

namespace Blogging
{
public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

    }
    public void DoSomething()
    {
        //TODO : I have to write code for do something
    }

    public void DoAnotherThing()
    {
        //TODO : I have also wirte code for Do another thing.
    }
}
}

As you can see in above code there are two TODO events and let’s see how it it list in task list windows so let’s open task list window and select comments from dropdown and here you go its appearing in TaskList window as following.



That’s it. You can see Task list window is making developers life more easy. Hope you liked it. Stay tuned for more.

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What’s new in Internet Explorer 9?

Microsoft has recently launched the Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 and I have just installed it on it in my machine and I am quite amazed with the features its providing so I thought its worth to right a blog post about it.

The first and foremost thing you will notice about IE9 is a new slick interface. It has very nice user interface with address bar and tab are both on the same line. You can also enable old view like IE via right click->Show tabs on a separate Row. Like following.



You can change tab via like following.



and You can achieve same look like IE8 like following.



Additionally clicking on the new tab it will present you a layout where you can see the most visited sites with the popular list popular stuff.



Another use full feature will search enhancement where you can directly find the things with Bing search engine in your address bar just like below.



You can turn off search suggestions via clicking on Turn off Suggestions. Also you can pin sites in IE9 just like you can pin the other things in windows 7. There are still lots of more features are there you can see all from the following sites.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff974378(v=vs.85).aspx
http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/

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Windows Azure Camp at Ahmedabad Overview- A Great Event

Recently Microsoft and Ahmedabad .NET User Group has organized a great event and opportunity to learn Microsoft Windows Azure. Each session was great and I quite enjoyed all the session through out the day.

First two session was from Gaurav Mantri-(Owner of Cerebrata Software - a very well-known company in world of Windows Azure Platform ISVs). Both sessions were great in First Session was about Introduction to Cloud Computing and Windows Azure in this session he has explained basics of cloud computing and also explained features of Windows Azure. He also explained all the scenario when we need to move our application to cloud. In the second session he has explained the Windows Azure compute and Storages available on windows Azure. He explained All the storage like tables,Blob etc. and also explained the advantages and disadvantages of the various available storage options on window azure.

After that we had a heavy lunch and in post lunch sessions Ahmedabad .NET User Group president Mahesh Dhola take deep dives to various tools available to develop Windows Azure application. He explained features of Windows Azure portal as well desktop tools available for the development Tools. In second session he has given real time demo via creating sample application called “Ahmedabad Khau Ghar “ A sample shopping cart developed in ASP.NET MVC2 and uses various features like Session State provider for Windows Azure etc.

At the end of the day we had Tea/Coffee and we had great discussion about the Windows Azure. Following is some of the pictures of Event.











It was a great event and Thanks Microsoft and Ahmedabad .NET User group for organizing such events. It a great to learn new things and Also great way to networking with other great guys.

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Installing SQL Server 2011(Denali) CTP Step by Step overview

Today I have downloaded the SQL Server 2011 CTP and I am very excited about the new features provided by it. I am going to post new features of the SQL Server 2011(Denali) CTP in future post. Today I am going to post about how install SQL Server 2011(Denali) CTP on Windows7 machine.

First you need to download the SQL Server 2001(Denali) CTP setup from the following URL. You need download the setup as per your operating system version 32bit or 64 bit version.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=6a04f16f-f6be-4f92-9c92-f7e5677d91f9

After once you download the setup. You need to extract files to a location and from that you have to click setup.exe.  After clicking on setup.exe first screen will appear like following.



Once this screen appear you need to click on installation. Once you click the Installation following screen will appear.



Above screen will give you few options about installing SQL Server. As I want to install Stand Alone installation I have clicked on Stand alone installation. After that it will perform several test like system requirement and other stuff and then if successfully passed all the test then following screen will appear.



Then Click OK to continue to setup. Then following screen will appear.



As I want to install the express edition I have selected the express with advance service. After that terms and conditions screen Like following will appear.



Accept the licence terms and then click Next and Install. It will start installing the it. After that it will checked about rules and will bring following screen.



Click on Next and then you select the checkbox for SQL Server features and then following screen will appear.



Select the features you wan to install then click next then following screen will appear.



As I have to install default instance I have selected default instance and then click next. Then again one validation screen will appear you need to click next on that and then service account screen will appear you need to select the account via clicking on Use the same service account for SQL Server services like following.



Once you are done click next and then SQL Server Authentication mode screen will appear like following.



As I have to select mixed mode which will allow both windows authentication as well normal sql server account. Click on Next there will be several screens which are there for validation once you click next next and then Install it will start installing the SQL Server. Once you are dong with installing SQL Server following screen will appear.



That’s it You have installed SQL Serve 2011 Denali!!. Hope you liked it. Stay tuned for more..

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Visual Studio 2010 and UML(Unified Modeling Language) Part-I

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 comes with great UML Features I will explain them in details in future post. But In this post I am going to explain the UML concepts because its necessary to understand UML concepts before moving to Visual Studio 2010 part. I know this post may sound very basic to some of people but its necessary to understand visual studio 2010 UML Features. So let’s start first basic question.

What is UML?

UML means Unified Modeling Language its a standard language for specifying, visualizing, and documenting the artifacts of software systems as well as for business modelling . UML provide a set of engineering practice that has proven successful modeling of large complex and complex systems. In UML mostly graphical notations are used for expressing design concepts of software. Using UML software development team communicate,explore and architectural design of large scale projects.

Goals and Advantages of UML

1. Provide user a visually appealing modelling language
2. Its provides extensibility and specialization mechanism to extend the software.
3. Its independent of any programming language
4. Its works better with Object Oriented Design concepts
5. It integrates best practices

Why we need to use UML?

As you know software is now key part of any company production life cycle. Companies want to enhance their production life cycle with the help of software. So software industries are looking towards to automate the best practices,frameworks and patterns. UML language is defined to use this kind of things.

Different Type of UML Diagrams

1) Class Diagram

This diagram displays contains classes,packages and structures. It displays the relationship between them and Inheritance also.

2) Sequence Diagram

This diagram displays sequences of object and classes participating in the particular operation.

3) Use Case Diagram

This diagram displays the relationship between the actors and user cases.

4) Activity Diagram

This diagram displays the flow of the iteration. Here it describes the actions that are taken on particular objects

5) Component Diagram

This diagram displays the code component of system. It displays high level structure of code itself. It also shows dependencies among the components.

6) Layer Diagram

This diagram visualizes the logical architecture of the system.
We will explore this each Diagram in great details in forthcoming posts.

Visual Studio 2010 and UML

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 supports the Modelling Projects from where you can create different diagrams. Like following.



After that You can add any diagrams and other components of the UML via right click project->add new item.



That’s it. We will explore all the features in great details in forthcoming posts. Stay tuned for more.. Hope this will help you..

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ExpandoObject class in C# 4.0

As you know till now in c# everything was static and known at design time. But with the C# 4.0 language Microsoft have enabled new dynamic data type which is belongs to Dynamic Language Runtime on top of CLR(Common language Runtime). As you know that dynamic object will know their behaviour at run time. Here Microsoft has given one new class called ExpandoObject class. ExpandoObject class is a member of System.Dynamic namespace and is defined in the System.Core assembly. This class object members can be dynamically added and removed at runtime. This is class is a sealed class and implements number of interfaces like below.

public sealed class ExpandoObject :
IDynamicMetaObjectProvider,
IDictionary<string, object>,
ICollection<KeyValuePair<string, object>>,
IEnumerable<KeyValuePair<string, object>>,
IEnumerable,
INotifyPropertyChanged;

Now let’s take a simple example of console application. Where we will create a object of expandoobject class and manipulate that class at run time. Let’s create a simple code like below.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace ExpandoObject
{
class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        dynamic users = new System.Dynamic.ExpandoObject();
        users.UserName = "Jalpesh";
        users.Password = "Password";

        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0}:{1}","UserName:",users.UserName));
        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0}:{1}","Password:",users.Password));

        Console.ReadKey();
    }
}
}

Here in the above code I have added a new memeber called UserName and Password for the new dynamic user type and then print their value. Now let’s run the application and see its output as below



That’s it. You can add valid type of member to ExpandoOjbect class. Isn’t interesting.. Hope you liked it.. Stay tuned for more..

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