codegeeks

Yesterday I received the following email from Microsoft.

Dear Shoban Kumar,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Client App Dev technical communities during the past year.

This is great news for me and July 1st has become a very important date for me. Suprotim, one of the Authors of  http://www.dotnetcurry.com/ has renewed his MVP award. Subodh, who is also an author for http://www.dotnetcurry.com/, has also been awarded with MVP title.

Hello there! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feeds . which is, of course, FREE :). You can also Subscribe via Email. Are you a Twitter user? then you can also follow me on Twitter. Thank you you for reading!

Shoban Misc

Silverlight Deep Zoom provides the ability to view high resolution images rapidly without affecting the performance of your applications.

According to Silverlight documentation

Deep Zoom provides the ability to zoom almost arbitrarily large images in Silverlight in a performant manner. Images can be displayed at very small and very large scale without affecting performance of the application displaying the image. The only property affecting performance is the number of pixels to be displayed on screen.

This page from silverlight.net has some quick start tutorials for Silverlight Deep Zoom.

http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ has the best example for Silverlight Deep Zoom implementation.

Above page has hundreds of high resolution images of Rock Bands. Below are screenshots of Silverlight Deep Zoom in action.

I dont need to tell you who the guys are

A little bit of zoom out!!!

Some more…

more….

Some more…

Can you find the guys in the above picture? Let us zoom out some more..

more…

some more???

hmmm!! some more??

This is the beauty of Silverlight Deep Zoom. So next time when you send your large collection og your last picnic photos you dont have to send large attachments. Create a simple Silverlight site with Deep Zoom and send it with Style.

Shoban Misc, Silverlight, links

In this article, we will see 10 useful Outlook Plug-ins and Tricks that can be used with Outlook 2007. Some of them should even work in previous versions of Outlook.

Tip 1: Defer Email in Outlook: Sometimes we send an email and then realize that we missed an important part of the message. I always wished we had Ctrl + Z (Undo) in Outlook. But here is an easy trick to delay email messages even after you press the “Send” button. We achieve this by creating rules in Outlook. Here is how to do it.

Read the rest of my article in dotnetcurry.

Shoban Tips, dotnetcurry

Microsoft Web Platform Installer is a must tool for every developer out there. No matter what programming language you use if you are using iis as a web serber then Microsoft Web Platform Installer is the right tool for you.

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes it simple to download, install and keep up-to-date with the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer. In addition, install popular open source ASP.NET and PHP web apps with the Web PI.

Download The Microsoft Web Platform Installer from Microsoft website. Its just a 1MB download and takes few seconds to download.

Run the downloaded file and it will start downloading the latest Web Platform products.

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer has three tabs

1. What’s New? : This tab lists new web platform extensions. You can select the required extensions and start installing them. Below screenshot show What’s new tab with ASP.net MVC, PHP and some other extensions.

2. Web Platform: The second tab allows you to manage your Web server, Frameworks and Runtimes, Database installations. This tab also allows you to install tools like Silverlight and Visual Web developer.

3. Web Applications : This is the most useful feature of The Microsoft Web Platform Installer. This tab has a list of useful Web applications which you install directly from your The Microsoft Web Platform Installer. Some of the Apps include BlogEngine.net, Acquia Drupal, Wordpress and lots more

Shoban Misc, Tips, links

Have 2 minutes to spend? then participate this simple survey and get a chance to win Windows 7 ultimate and Windows 7 T-Shrts.

It took me only few seconds. You dont have anythig to lose

Thanks : devcurry

Shoban Misc, links

Telerik, a leading vendor of .NET UI components and tools, has a special offer for all active MSDN subscribers - free Developer License for RadControls for WPF ($799 in value), with community support only. Take advantage of the offer and enjoy a powerful grid, scheduler, animated 3D charts and gauges, and everything you need to build rich and visually stunning WPF line-of-business applications. The offer is valid through July 31st, 2009.

To download the control login to your MSDN subscription page. Click “Special Offer” tab and then choose “Exclusive deal by Telerik: RadControls for WPF – FREE Developer License“.

Shoban links

MSDN is one of the best source for Technical Information in the internet but I always had difficulty in finding the right topic. Its menus were very cofusing and most of the times it takes long time to load an MSDN page. But Scott recently wrote about the changes which we will be seeing shortly in MSDN. I am eagerly waiting for the change. Read about the changes here.

If you are having a slow internet and finding it hard to open an MSDN page then dont forget to read about the Low Bandwidth MSDN version.

Shoban links

Kerala Microsoft user’s group is organising a 1 day mini TechEd in Trivandrum for all those developers who couldn’t attend TechEd 2009 in Hyderabad.

Date : 27th June 2009

Venue : Technopark, Trivandrum

Dont miss this Free opportunity to learn about Windows 7,  Visual Studio 2010 features, WPF, What is new in ASP.NET 4.0, SQL server best practices,SQL logical query execution and optimization tips,Hidden Gems in SQL Server.

Know more and Register for Free

Related links :

1. http://blog.ninethsense.com/mini-teched-in-trivandrum/
2. http://kidoos.net/blogs/kidoos/archive/2009/06/15/mini_2D00_teched_2D00_in_2D00_trivandrum.aspx
3. http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/2009/06/15/mini-teched-in-trivandrum.aspx
4. http://blogs.windowsclient.net/vsdev/archive/2009/06/11/mini-teched-in-trivandrum.aspx

Shoban Misc, links

TweetMyPC v 2.0 is available for download. Lot of new commands. You can view the details about all the new commands in one of my previous posts. You can get the latest version from product home page at codeplex. As usual the source code can also be downloaded from the Releases section. I have used Vb.net to develop TweetMyPC. If you are looking for a c# version then source code for v1.0 is also available in the releases section.

TweetMyPC v 1.0 crossed 4k downloads today and hope you will find the new version useful.

Note: TweetMyPC was developed for my personal use and for educational purposes only. Please do not use if you are worried about Security. Do not use TweetMyPC to deal with confidential information.

Shoban NET, vb.net

Last week my stackoverflow rep crossed 3000 Now I can vote to close and reopen questions.

For those who don’t know what stackoverflow if all about then stackoverflow ‘about’ page has the best definition.

Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that’s free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML, no fake rot13 text on the home page, no scammy google-cloaking tactics, no salespeople, no JavaScript windows dropping down in front of the answer asking for $12.95 to go away. You can register if you want to collect karma and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it’s just free. And fast. Very, very fast.

Shoban Misc