Technological Guide.

Download & Try Microsoft Windows 7 RC Free

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Microsoft has released Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) recently. You can download now which is avaialble to download free for MSDN Technet subscribers. Windows 7 is in final phase of development for which other software partners are getting ready to develop new applications, decice drivers and services to run on the Windows 7 Platform.

 

Check out here whats new in Windows 7 RC

 

Some new features which are cool:

1. Remote Media Streaming - You can access digital media content located at home from another Windows 7 enabled PC outside.

2. Windows Xp Mode - Windows 7 users can launch windows Xp productivity applications from the windows 7 desktop which utilizes Windows Vitual PC.

3. Windows Touch - Windows 7 PC can be operated using Touch Sense enabled Screen or Monitor.

 

System Requirements:

  • 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor
  • 1 Gb of System Memory
  • 16 Gb of available free Disk space
  • Support for DiretX 9 graphics with 128 MB memory (to enable the Aero theme)

 

If you are not a TechNet or MSDN subcriber, but still interested in previewing Windows 7, can be publicly available at Microsoft Windows 7.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 tips - Part II

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Microsoft Outlook 2007 is very widely used now-a-days in offices pcs and personal pcs. Some people often feel hard to use Outlook. Here are some tips to enhance handling Outlook 2007. Some tips are discussed already in my Previuos Post.

7. Color Code to Identify Key Messages: Often we feel how to identify mails when all mails are shown at a time many in number. We can easily differentiate the mail messages using color code for the important messages which will make difference from other mails. Follow the steps below to achieve this easy function to work out. Our aim is to identify messages in different color related to a particular sender / from.

  • In Microsoft Outlook 2007, select a mail message item, then goto Tools menu and click Organize.
  • A window opens on the top portion of the Inbox window (the mail grid).
  • In the Organize window, you can find “Using Colors” on the left hand side menu.
  • Select the “Using Colors” which will be shown as follows

  • in the Color Messages option, select the color from the drop down which will be bound to the particular “From” or “Sender” and click “Apply Color”.
  • There is another option “Show messages sent only to me” in special color. This option is used to highlight the color for mail coming from the particular sender which is not a group mail

8. Send a read receipt: Inorder to get notified whether the recipient for the mail, has read the mail or not, you can use the option to “Send a Response”. Follow the steps to use this option.

  • In Microsoft Outlook 2007, Select Tools menu and Click Options.
  • Select the Preferences tab from the dialog box and clikc the button e-mail options.
  • Click the Tracking Options button and select either “Always send a response” or “Never Send a response” or “Ask me before sending a response”. Click ok and finish the steps to achieve sending a response to the mail.

Google Chrome - Free Open Source Web Browser

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Google Chrome is an open source Web Browser. Google Chrome is a web browser developed and released by Google which uses the WebKit Layout Engine and Application Framework. Explore its features in the video provided below.

Google Chrome is now available in 48 different languages which includes 8 major Indian languages published by The Hindu news paper on May 31 2009.

Arabic

Bengali

Brazilian

Portuguese

Bulgarian

Catalan

Chinese (Simplified & Traditional)

Croatian

Czech

Danish

Dutch

English (UK/US)

Estonian

Filipino

Finnish

French

German

Greek

Gujarati

Hebrew

Hindi

Hungarian

Indonesian

Italian

Japanese

Kannada

Korean

Latvian

Lithuanian

Malayalam

Marathi

Norwegian

Oriya

Polish

Portuguese

Romanian

Russian

Serbian

Slovakian

Slovenian

Spanish

Spanish for Latin America

Swedish

Tamil

Telugu

Thai

Turkish

Ukrainian

Vietnamese

You can download Google Chrome web browser from here by selecting your language.

World eBook Fair is offering Free PDF eBooks

Monday, July 6th, 2009

World eBook Fair is offering 2 million free PDF ebooks from 4th July 2009 to 4th August 2009 on behalf of their Fourth Annual World eBook Fair.

World eBook Fair offers eBooks from Project Gutenberg, The World Public Library, The Internet Archive, eBooks About Everything etc. for one month free access to download from the huge eBook collections which contains 2 million eBooks.

You can download selection of 500,000 PDF eBooks by Joining the World Public Library at an Annual Membership of $8.95 per year. This is really a very good chance for you to download eBooks for free from the huge collections.

Editions of Windows 7 Operating System

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Six editions were announced by Microsoft as Starter, Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Ultimate and Enterprise. Windows 7 is designed to run easily with compatibility on more harddware components on small notebooks as power packed gaming desktops.

WINDOWS 7 EDITIONS


Windows 7 Starter Edition - This edition is offered only in the OEM channel on new PC limited to specific types of hardware which can’t be sold directly in the market.

 

Windows 7 Home Basic Edition - is available only in emergin markets, for customers looking for an entry-point experience in windows on a full-size value pc.

 

Windows 7 Home Premium Edition - This edition is recommended for all categories of consumers inluding us which gives full-functioned PC experience and a visually rich environment from entertainment to the handling of devices.

 

Windows 7 Professional Edition - This edition is reocmmended for small businesses and people who work at home by operating an IT-managed business environment. Most Vista Business users will prefer this version.

 

Windows 7 Ultimate Edition - designed for PC explorers who interests on security feature such as BitLocker. This is really boosted with lots of features.

 

Windows 7 Enterprise Edition - This edition is most advanced with competitive price can be said as low cost with advanced data protection and got more tools to streamline PC management. This edition enables access to information for business users from anywhere.

Microsoft Outlook 2007 tips - Part I

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Microsoft Outlook 2007 is very widely used now-a-days in offices pcs and personal pcs. Some people often feel hard to use Outlook. Here are some tips to enhance handling Outlook 2007.

 

1. How to create and use an e-mail signature

 

e-mail signature is a very good feature provided by Outlook which is used frequently in replying emails. Instead of retyping what you want to add at the end of the mail, you can create an e-mail signature and add it to the mail. Follow the below steps and create your own e-mail signatures.

 

  • In Microsoft Outlook 2007, Goto Tools –> Goto Options–>Click Mail Format tab
  • Click on the button labelled “Signatures…”, which will open a window to manage Signatures. Here click New button to add a new signature and type the name for your signature and click “Ok”
  • Edit the content of your signature in the below box and format it according to your needs(with hyperlinks also if you need like site links), and click Save in the above pane to save. You can add another signature if you want.
  • In the right side of the window you can find a section “Choose default signature” which provides options setting up e-mail signature for New Message and Replies / Forwards. Select the email-signature you wish to use for either of these and click “OK” to exit and use e-mail signatures.

 

2. Categorize the e-mails in Outlook to differentiate mails easily

 

  • In Microsoft Outlook 2007, Goto Menu Edit –>Goto Categorize –> Select “All Categories” which will open a window to maintain categories associated with business mails or personal mails or work mails etc.,
  • Add Categories of your preference and click “Ok” to save the categories.
  • In Outlook select the mails you want to categorize –>Right Mouse Click –>Choose category and click to apply the category for the selected mails.
  • You can categorize the e-mails, calendars, tasks, etc.,

 

3. sort emails easily: Sorting is a trick that we use rarely with Outlook 2007. Outlook is an advanced gridview showing all the mails. We can apply sorting feature on this outlook grid also.

 

  • The Outlook grid shows mail details in columns with column headings such as “From”, “Subject”, “Received”, “Size”, etc.,
  • Click once on these column headings to sort by either column “From” or “Sender” or “Subject” or “Received”  (to see mails order by received date / time)
  • In order to reverse the sort, just click again on the particular column which will give in reverse sort order (from Z-A to A-Z / from A-Z to Z-A).

 

4. Formatting Column names: The columns like “From”, “Received”, etc., which are defaultly named in Outlook, can be formatted to our needs like “Sender”, “Mail Subject”.

 

  • Right click on the Column header–>Select Format Columns
  • Select each field and change the label, width & alignment too.

 

5. Enable Spell Check: We can have spell checker for Outlook which is built-in to check while we type and an option to enable checking mail for spelling mistakes before sending.

 

  • In Microsoft Outlook, Goto Tools –> Click Options.
  • In options window click “Spelling” tab.
  • check the option “Always check before sending”
  • Click “Ok”

 

6. Use Advanced Find: In Outlook 2007 we need to wait too long to search messages in the normal Search provided above the Outlook mail grid. Its annoying to scroll throught he search results to the search criteria. We can use the advanced Find option available in Outlook 2007.

 

  • Click key combinations of Ctrl + Shift + F to bring up a dialog to give the search criteria.
  • Choose options like searching only in the related fields of mails and search which saves a lot of time.

Windows 7 - Next Microsoft Operating System

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

The next operating system going to come out from Microsoft is the Windows 7 which will be released by October 22, 2009. Windows 7 will be having many more features obviously as its the lattest emerged. Windows 7 is the next stage of Windows Operating system. It looks like Vista operating system but there are a lot of differences.

Windows 7 First Look

Windows 7 Review

Now already available in Beta version.

ASP.Net connect to database using HttpHandler ASHX file

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
 
Another alternative way to connect to database in ASP.Net is using ASHX file. The example we use is the same Customer information application given in my Previous Post  which connects to the Northwind database and shows the available customers in dropdownlist of an aspx web page. Upon selecting each customer the Customer details will be displayed. Inorder to make AJAX calls, the latest version of the jQuery library should be referenced which can be downloaded from here.
The design code of Customers.aspx

The codebehind in which data is retrieved from customers table of Northwind database and bound to a dropdownlist showing company name and having CustomerID as value field.

 
ASHX files are convenient ways to deliver partial content to a web page. They are actually HttpHandlers and responsible for processing incoming HTTP requests and providing the appropriate response. They are often used to deliver binary content such as images or files that are stored in database or outside of the web application file system. For delivering small amounts of html to be plugged into a particular position on a web page, they are extremely useful. Add New Item and choose Generic Handler file type and give the file name as “FetchCustomer.ashx”. A template for a class that inherits from IHttpHandler will be opened which contain one method-ProcessRequest( ) and a property-IsReusable( ). The entire FetchCustomer.aspx which generates a response to the Ajax call and creates output onto the caller page itself using context.Response object from the data retrieved to DataReader object which is from Customer table related to the particular CustomerID passed as Request.QueryString Parameter.

 
Now to call the HttpHandler of ASHX file, use the JQuery load function with QueryString parameter (exactly same as $.load( ) approach which was written in Previous Post) as shown below.