Search results matching tag 'Miscellaneous'

Build your own activities for Internet Explorer 8.

Mike Glaser — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:37:00 GMT

The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is an online database of information related to movies, actors, television shows, production crew personnel, and video games. IMDb launched on October 17, 1990, and in 1998 was acquired by Amazon.com. Since I'm a big fan of this site and still loves to use Internet Explorer, why can't I combine these two.

Activities
With Activities, you can access your services from any webpage. Activities simplify the common task of copying, navigating, and pasting into a single action. Users can access an Activity on selection simply by selecting content and opening the context menu. For example, users can select an address on a webpage and the Activity button appears. Alternatively, you can access selection Activities from the context menu. Activities are also available for the current webpage in the Page menu on the Command bar and for links within a page in the context menu for the link.

The XML namespace for Activities is: http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0 The main components to the format are:

homepageUrl
display (Name, Icon, Description)
activity (Category)
- activityAction (Context ["selection", "document", or "link"])
  - preview
    - parameter
  - execute
    - parameter

This is my activity for IMDb. I added it to same category as all Search activities. Save the file as SearchIMDb.xml.

    1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    2   <openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
    3   <homepageUrl>http://www.imdb.com</homepageUrl>
    4   <display>
    5     <name>Search with IMDb</name>
    6     <icon>http://www.imdb.com/favicon.ico</icon>
    7   </display>
    8   <activity category="Search">
    9     <activityAction context="selection">
 
   10      <execute action="http://www.imdb.com/find">
   11         <parameter name="s" value="all"/>
   12         <parameter name="q" value="{selection}"/>
   13       </execute>
   14     </activityAction>
   15   </activity>
   20 </openServiceDescription>

Click the link below to add this activity to your IE.

Add IMDb Activity

Update: Community Server won't allow me to add javascript to my blog posts. This is the link you should add to an html file.

    1 <a onclick="java script:window.external.addService('SearchIMDb.xml')" href="#">Add IMDb Activity</a>

After installing the activity you can also change it to a default activity.

This will result in the following possibilities

Summary
I created a simple activity for IMDb, but you easily create some activities for Torrent sites (especially if your from Italy), MSDN, Wikipedia etc. To install a activity the installer must be run from a Web Server, this can't be from a local hard drive. Here are some interesting links:

Activities white paper
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=ie8whitepapers&ReleaseId=566

Activities Hands-On Lab
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ProjectName=iemix08labs&ReleaseId=583

Technorati tags: Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 8.0 Beta 1

The new pc

Dennis van der Stelt — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:41:31 GMT

How about this, a pc in/on a napkin to use, read, write, collaborate with and more…

As you see in the picture on the left, there are enough in the holder and you can grab one to work with. Or each member of the team grabs one and start drawing out ideas and exchange napkins to share ideas and work them out more.

When you combine napkins you can create larger surfaces and present something to the team. The idea sounds awesome and I can only hope something like this will become reality. For now, it’s just an idea from a contest. Unfortunately.

Office Live Workspace

Dennis van der Stelt — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:01:49 GMT

You might know that I’m quite the Microsoft addict. While a lot of people are very sceptic with everything Microsoft releases, I tend to have a positive feeling for everything Microsoft releases, at first. After some experience, I might hate or love it, or just don’t use it because I don’t feel the need for it. Microsoft Sync, Parallel extensions and many more products and frameworks; after I get my hands dirty with it I’ll decide if it does any good for me or not.

About Office Live Workspace, I know there are many alternatives to it but I really want to give this a change. Everything looks good (I almost always like Microsoft GUI's), looks familiar, has a nice Office plugin and some other benefits. And hey, it’s a Microsoft product! ;-)

I just read they released new languages and that May was a very hectic month for them. But I seriously can’t believe why they don’t introduce folders. Everyone is crying out for folders but instead of folders, we get more languages and other stuff. So I thought, let’s see when they’ll introduce folders and went to their blogs. Of course (?) you have to login to place a comment. So I click the little Passport (or Windows Live ID) login icon at the top-right corner. But I get presented a login/registration screen. First thing I thought was that this was some phising attempt for my Windows Live ID username and password. Why use the icon and have a different registration system. Heck, why a different registration system at all? So I left the blogs and decided to write a long and boring post on my own weblog. And guess what, anonymous comments are enabled! :)

Anyway, I’ve registered for a workspace months ago and would really like to use it, but haven’t done so yet. Simply because of the lack of folders. I’m not even going to upload a small amount of folders to later find out I have to move every single one of them via a web interface.

Please introduce folders into Office Live Workspace! Thanks.

Programmatically creating an IIS7 site

Dennis van der Stelt — Fri, 16 May 2008 13:52:46 GMT

I'm using FinalBuilder to build and deploy websites on our test server. FinalBuilder is a great product, but our client is using Windows Server 2008 and FinalBuilder does not have actions for IIS7. I might add the actions to my weblog, but here's some code to create a new IIS7 website using C#.

Create a new solution and add a reference to C:\Windows\System32\InetServ\Microsoft.Web.Administration.dll. Paste the following code and you've got yourself a website on port 82 using the default application pool. In IIS it's named MyCoolWebsite.

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

using Microsoft.Web.Administration;

namespace TestApp

{

class Program

{

static void Main(string[] args)

{

string siteName = "MyCoolWebsite";

string applicationPoolName = "DefaultAppPool";

string virtualDirectoryPath = "/";

string virtualDirectoryPhysicalPath = "C:\\temp\\";

string ipAddress = "*";

string tcpPort = "81";

string hostHeader = "";

string applicationPath = "/";

long highestId = 1;

using (ServerManager mgr = new ServerManager())

{

Site site = mgr.Sites["siteName"];

if (site != null)

return; // Site bestaat al

ApplicationPool appPool = mgr.ApplicationPools[applicationPoolName];

if (appPool == null)

throw new Exception(String.Format("Application Pool: {0} does not exist.", applicationPoolName));

foreach (Site mysite in mgr.Sites)

{

if (mysite.Id > highestId)

highestId = mysite.Id;

}

highestId++;

site = mgr.Sites.CreateElement();

site.SetAttributeValue("name", siteName);

site.Id = highestId;

site.Bindings.Clear();

string bind = ipAddress + ":" + tcpPort + ":" + hostHeader;

Binding binding = site.Bindings.CreateElement();

binding.Protocol = "http";

binding.BindingInformation = bind;

site.Bindings.Add(binding);

//site.Bindings.Add(bind, "http");

Application app = site.Applications.CreateElement();

app.Path = applicationPath;

app.ApplicationPoolName = applicationPoolName;

VirtualDirectory vdir = app.VirtualDirectories.CreateElement();

vdir.Path = virtualDirectoryPath;

vdir.PhysicalPath = virtualDirectoryPhysicalPath;

app.VirtualDirectories.Add(vdir);

site.Applications.Add(app);

mgr.Sites.Add(site);

mgr.CommitChanges();

}

SQL Injection still works

Dennis van der Stelt — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:46:07 GMT

When talking about security, one of the easiest examples to show is something with [wikipedia:SQL Injection]. It's so easy, that most people laugh at these examples, because no one ever uses this anymore.

It seems, not everyone is aware of SQL Injection yet... The site of the RIAA got hacked a few days ago. As far as I know, one of the first reports were on TorrentFreak. They also have some screenshots of it, like the one below.

What is a good way to specify requirements?

Dennis van der Stelt — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:03:19 GMT

What is a good way to specify requirements? I actually have no idea... I come across many different companies and a lot of them all have the same problem. The customer wants some problem to be solved and multiple people start thinking of a solution. Sometimes the technology is already chosen before the problem is fully specified, but that's something for another post. :-)

Although I wouldn't know what the best solution for your company or product is to specify requirements, I know a good document when I come across one. I used to work with Use Cases at my previous employer, which worked quite well. It probably wasn't even the Use Case, but more the writer(s) of them.

But I've found some nice examples that Microsoft is using for specifying their requirements for Team Foundation Server (TFS). There's a somewhat older document that can be found via Buck Hodges (pronounce : Buck Rogers) his weblog. It's about the Continues Integration (CI)features in TFS 2008. You can also find three new documents on Rosario, the next version of TFS & Visual Studio. You can find all three here and probably more will appear in the future.

The first about CI contains just samples for the screens with explanations. The new three contain also a load of text. They might not 100% suit you, but you might probably get an idea to what both customers and developers might fully understand. And that's important, or else you'll get something like this.

Zoom-in on 'watch popup'

Dennis van der Stelt — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:50:00 GMT

During his 'Applied Linq' presentation at the Developer Days 2007, Alex Thisse n tried to zoom-in on some variable. I have no idea how this popup is called, but it's kind of a watch in a popup, therefor a 'watch popup' ? Anyhow, Alex tried to zoom-in on it as you can't (easily) modify its font-size. I've told him a dozen times he should use ZoomIt for this, a tool by SysInternals. Unfortunately, it didn't work.

Alex has his ZoomIt key mapped to alt-1. When pressing alt in Visual Studio it'll immediately think you want to open the menu and close the 'watch popup'. I have the same problem with Media Player Classic, which uses alt-1 to alt-3 for setting the window size. Therefor I ~~remapped my ZoomIt key to ctrl-1~~. The default is actually ctrl-1. Now this does work for the 'watch popup', if it wasn't for another annoying feature of Visual Studio. Pressing the ctrl key will make the 'watch popup' transparent, resulting in the following...

As far as I can tell, there's no solution to this. I've searched in the tons of keyboard mappings in Visual Studio, but can't find anything on the transparency of the 'watch popup'.

There is however another solution. Alex could've pressed SHIFT-F9 for the QuickWatch window, very usable by ZoomIt! ;-)

Technorati tags: DevDays2007, DevDays, ZoomIt, Visual Studio 2008

Firefox its inline search for IE

Dennis van der Stelt — Wed, 30 May 2007 14:03:46 GMT

Wow, I almost lost this little gem after formatting and installing my machine again. After some googling for "search" or "find", "internet explorer" and "firefox" I finally found a link to "inline search" plugin for Internet Explorer.

If you've ever worked with Firefox, you might know the inline search it has, at the bottom of the page after pressing CTRL+F. Instead of some irritating popup box you'll get a great searchbar at the bottom of IE that's very light and extremely useful.

Download here at iefore.com.

Viva Las Vegas

Dennis van der Stelt — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 12:56:13 GMT

So I arrived... Yesterday the plane landed in Las Vegas and the first thing that I saw were... slotmachines! This is Vegas of course.

I'm staying in The Venetian and the hotel is gorgeous. After publishing this, I'll start taking some pictures and publish them on Flickr. You can already see some pictures from my trip to Las Vegas.

This morning I attended an EMEA meeting where they gave away some info that wasn't really useful. They announced that the Expression sweet is officially released tomorrow, but that's not really unexpected, as every attendee gets its own copy. I'll probably be visiting some brainstorm session later today. I think I'll head to bed early, as I'm still suffering from not sleeping for over 24 hours and of course the jetlag.

For all Dutch readers, you can also see a report of my trip to MIX07 and Las Vegas at my personal weblog.

Technorati tags: MIX07, Las Vegas

MIX'07

Dennis van der Stelt — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 01:54:24 GMT

I'll be attending MIX'07 in Las Vegas this year as well as the parallel MDEC conference for Mobile development. One of my goals for this year is to do more with ASP.NET so Alex isn't the only one with all the knowledge ;-)

Some fun things are:

Vegas! Need I say more?!
A lot on ASP.NET, Ajax and WPF/E. I haven't looked into Ajax and WPF/e much yet, so I should learn a lot here.
I'm particularly interested in the success stories behind really large websites.
Rumors that new stuff will be presented at MIX'07, for example still-secret "Technology X"
I'll stay at the Venetian, a great hotel with over 4000 rooms, 70 shops and multiple other facilities. Oh, and a casino as well ;-)
Windows Vista Ultimate and Expression Studio free for all registrants
ASP.NET and PHP head-to-head.
I'll be attending this conversation as I've never looked at PHP and I'm interested on where the discussion will lead to. I'm hoping for both a religious discussion (for the fun) as a serious discussion on pros and cons of both.
Pussycat dolls at Pure? I'm might take a look, but I'm not sure I'm really into that...

I'll keep you informed right here. For all Dutch readers, I'll try and post some stories at my personal weblog.

Technorati tags: MIX, MIX07, MEDC