Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Web Applications
Straight from the Horse’s Mouth – Microsoft Code Samples
Feb 4th
Microsoft has recently started providing a series of websites to help with adoption of their development tools. We’re all familiar with the ASP.NET and IIS.NET but there’s a couple other new sites I thought I’d point out, MSDN Code Gallery and CodePlex.
The MSDN Code Gallery
The MSDN Code Gallery is a brand new resource and it’s goal is to provide a portal for snippets, samples and other code resources. You can find code gallery at:
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com
and on code gallery you can find articles on all the latest topics, Sharepoint, LINQ, MVC, WPF, etc.
CodePlex
CodePlex is Microsoft’s donation to the development of opensource projects on the Microsoft family of development tools. You can learn more about it:
The nice thing about codeplex is that it’s all open-source (FREE) projects and has everything from project homepages and downloads to discussions and bug reporting. Projects are tagged and searchable.
Today we say good bye to Netscape
Feb 1st
It was announced back in December that Netscape would be officially no longer supported as of February 1st 2008, for many they see it as just another forgotten software program but for many others it was much more than that. For me, Netscape is part of the events that got me hooked on the Internet and that eventually led to the start of Applied Innovations (it seems fitting that in the same month Netscape retires, AppliedI turns 9).
In 1994, I was just starting a career in Electrical Engineering at Motorola and had been using the Internet via gopher, FTP and USENET for a while already. I had been using NCSA’s Mosaic browser and HTTP Daemon running on SunOS and already building webpages and applications around it. NCSA’s tools were nice but simply unpolished. Then I read this USENET posting:
Mosaic Communications Corporation is a making a public version of Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta available for anonymous FTP. Mosaic Netscape is a built-from-scratch Internet navigator featuring performance optimized for 14.4 modems, native JPEG support, and more.
You can FTP Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta from the following locations:
ftp.mcom.com in /netscape
gatekeeper.dec.com in /pub/net/infosys/Mosaic-Comm
lark.cc.ukans.edu in /Netscape
ftp.meer.net in /Netscape
doc.ic.ac.uk in /packages/Netscape
archie.au in /pub/misc/netscape
ftp.cica.indiana.edu in /pub/pc/win3/winsock/nscape09.zip (PC only)
mac.archive.umich.edu in /mac (Mac only)Please make sure to read the README and LICENSE files.
An up-to-date listing of mirror sites can be obtained at any time
by sending email to rele…@mcom.com.Subject to the timing and results of this beta cycle, Mosaic Communications will release Mosaic Netscape 1.0, also available free for personal use via the Internet. It will be subject to license terms; please review them when and if you obtain Mosaic Netscape 1.0.
A commercial version of Mosaic Netscape 1.0, including technical support from Mosaic Communications, will be available upon completion of the beta cycle. Contact us at i…@mcom.com for more information.
Have fun!
Marc and the gang
i…@mcom.com, http://mosaic.mcom.com/
That post was dated October 13th 1994, 8:51am and the archived message pulled from google groups.
I quickly downloaded, installed and was AMAZED by this new web browser and I wasn’t alone. Here’s a few of the follow up posts from USENET that give you an idea of just how the Internet community accepted the Netscape Beta back then:
As blown away as you may have been by seeing the original Mosaic
for the first time, Netscape is even more impressive.Besides being faster, easier to use and more rubust than Mosaic,
it elegantly handles news and mail.It’s terribly, terrible impressive.
Looks great so far! (Windows version.)
- Transparent GIFs are nice!
- Delayed inline-image loading a-la MacMosaic.
- Scrollbars on TextAreas
- Copy to clipboard from text.
- Multiple windows a-la XMosaic.
- THREADED news!- AND…I’m POSTING this from Netscape!
Cool!
Let’s think of some of the things Netscape did that helped change the Internet:
- 1. They created a web server application with a easy to use management interface (no need to edit nasty .conf files)
- 2. They said F-U to the man time and time again and set their own standards for HTML and extended the Hypertext Markup Language.
- 3. They created the first commercial web browser (then free, then commercial, then free … )
- 4. IPO! Here’s a company that when it IPO’d it signaled the start of the DOT COM bubble!
- 5. It simply made the Internet more accessible to all, it went from a tool used only by scientists and geeks to a key component of everyone’s daily life. You no longer needed to know secret geek-speak like GOPHER, FTP, USENET or TCPIP you could just point and click your way around the web.
For many the passing of Netscape is just another antiquated piece of software taking it’s place in history but it’s much more than that and because of all it’s done and changed for myself, my company, and society as a whole, I say raise your cup of coffee this morning and give thanks to Andreessen and the guys that started Mosaic Communications Corporation and released that very first beta version of Netscape, they truly changed our world!
(image from Peter Coffee’s 24 Killer Apps of All Time).
5 Cool Plugins for Windows Live Writer
Dec 20th
One of my favorite applications is Windows Live Writer. It’s a simple to use WYSIWYG blog editor that I’ve wrote about many times. I’ve been using it for probably over a year now and not too long ago it came out of beta. One of the things I truly enjoy with Windows Live Writer is that it’s extensible with a very easy to use plugin system and because of this I’m going to spotlight a few of my favorite Windows Live Writer Plugins.
The Insert Polaroid Plug-in
This plug-in is actually very clever as it makes use of a wordpress plugin (imagine that, I’m blogging about wordpress) called the thumbnail viewer and it’s self. The plugin creates a cool Polaroid style frame around your image, allows you to tilt the image and also display text below the image.
The application has a very thorough set of options available including the ability to define the size of the ‘large’ image displayed in the lightbox, the background color, the tilt, the font, pretty much you name it and you can control it.
The picture above is that of myself with Rob Howard from Telligent so you can see just what it does.
You can learn more about this great plugin from the author’s website: http://www.brettonstuff.com/index.php/tech/polaroid-style-thumbnails
The Insert SnagIt Screen Capture
I absolutely love SnagIt. I’ve used it for years and don’t think I could ever get away with using anything else for my screen captures, it’s a lightweight application that runs in the background and can be called at any time. Using the Insert SnagIt Screen Capture plugin you’re able to add screen captures to your blog posts from SnagIt.
The image here is of my Google Desktop sidebar. What makes SnagIt stand out is that after you capture the piece of your screen you’re able to go into SnagIt and adjust it adding text, highlights, you name it.
You can learn more about the Insert SnagIt plugin from the WLW Gallery: http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=6ba7122b-56aa-4651-a7ab-613359a31986&bt=9&pl=8
The Insert Website Screen Capture
How often have you wanted to take a snapshot of a website and share it with your blog visitors? Okay, probably not very often but when you want to wouldn’t it be cool to have a tool to do so? Well there is.
Unfortunately, there’s little control over the image layout and settings but I think this is a work in progress and we’ll see more before long.
Insert Code
This one is available from: http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=1f57bd9b-a692-4593-9e9e-e2962d9c0eee&bt=9&pl=8 and it’s pretty cool. It allows you to insert formatted source code into your blog entry making it easier to read for your visitors below is a snippet of code I found out on the Internet. It supports C#, VB, HTML, JavaScript, MSH and TSQL. It also allows you to include line numbers, a stylesheet and format alternating colors for the lines.
1: private void menuItem1_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
2: {3: MessageBox.Show("Hello World. This a tray icon application. Bye!");
4: }5: private void menuItem2_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
6: {7: // exits the application
8: Application.Exit(); 9: }Insert Video
This is the top dog of WLW plugins. It allows you to insert a video from all the major video networks:
and you can embed it such that it starts playing immediately. It takes care of all the crazy tags and code, etc so you just click, copy the url and you’re done.
You can learn more about this plugin at: http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=65584500-3bd3-404b-818a-2cdec6304892&pl=8&bt=9
That’s a wrap
Those are some of my favorite Windows Live Writer plugins, there’s over 4 pages full of plugins at the Windows Live Writer Gallery but these are ones that I find especially useful and enjoy using. I’ve love to hear what your favorite plugin is and why. In the meantime be sure to visit the Windows Live Writer Gallery frequently to stay up to date on the available plugins. If you’re interested in writing your own plugins check out the WLW Plugin SDK.
There’s a new database option available for PHP, It’s called SQL2005
Oct 10th
Ever since Bill Staples first blogged about the collaborative work Microsoft was doing with Zend to improve PHP stability and performance on IIS, I’ve been giddy as a school girl. Having run a core component of the AppliedI.net infrastructure that makes use of PHP and MySQL on IIS7 and making use of FastCGI and the new Windows CGI friendly DLLs/builds it’s made me even more giddy, PHP simply zips along these days on our windows servers and I can’t wait to move my blog to a box running FastCGI. This week at ZendCon Bill announced some more good news: SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP.
From the Microsoft Data Blog:
The PHP Driver will deliver an API designed-to-enable reliable, scalable integration with SQL Server for PHP applications deployed on the Windows platform. Zend and Microsoft are working together with the PHP Community to ensure that the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP is a great offering for PHP developers and part of Zend’s core PHP offering.
So that’s the good news, the bad news is we have to wait one more day, because the download won’t be available until October 11th at: http://www.microsoft.com/sql/technologies/php/default.mspx
Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) File Extractor
Aug 21st
We recently needed a way to extract files from a sharepoint site’s document libraries. With sharepoint all the files are stored in a SQL database so it would seem connecting to the database and pulling all the files out manually wouldn’t be such a hard thing to do. After a fair amount of time googling for such a solution I finally found it over at Mark Jen’s blog. Mark’s solution it turns out didn’t work for WSS 3.0 but in the comments a fella by the name of eric writes:
I have modified the code to work with SharePoint 07. Since the Content is stored in a new table with 07, the query piece needs to be a little different. Just replace line 24 with the sting below. It worked perfectly for me after that.
Find
com.CommandText =
