Mauro Pirrone | Blog

A four-day event related to technology, creativity and business is coming up this week, between 3rd July and 6th July 2008. It’s going to take place at the Hilton Conference Centre.

There are various workshops and seminars about different topics including:

• Photography
• Graphic Design
• 3D Animation
• Audio
• Video
• Lighting
• Business
• Business Administration
• Business and Business Applications
• Business Supply Chains
• Careers and Opportunities
• Design and Business Administration
• Design and Marketing
• Marketing
• Mobile Technology
• Network Administration

The workshops are free for all and there are the last few seats available! Click the link below for more info and to book your seat!

http://www.digitalartsexpo.com/

TAT2Clinic.com has been a successful website with constant traffic and frequent updates where being done. It now includes a new zoom feature in the portfolio section. This allows the user to see tattoos in detail. Additional updates were also carried out including the newly designed background image, background music and some minor tweaks. More updates also coming soon!

Firefox 3 uses a new bar for displaying browser history URLs. It is designed to make it easier to browse websites. Personally I love it, but some people simply hate it! Here’s how you can replace the awesome bar with the old one

Click here to download Firefox 3.0 by not later than 18th June 2008, 8:16pm

Mozilla hopes to successfully complete 5 million downloads of the Web browser in 24 hours and set a Guinness World Record.

Mozilla’s record-breaking attempt to massively release Firefox 3.0, the latest version of the only Web browser to compete with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, unfortunately broke some of its servers as well.

Mozilla said it aimed to set a world record with the official release out of beta Tuesday. The latest version offers additional features, faster speeds, and enhanced security.

Mozilla encouraged users to host download parties so it could set a Guinness World Record for the number of downloads in one day. Currently, Guinness does not hold recorded information on the number of downloads in a single day.

Nevertheless, Mozilla has generated plenty of excitement about the launch, with nearly 2 million people saying they would download the latest version. In fact, so many people tried to access the site that the servers appeared to crash. Attempts to reach the site for the latest version of Firefox were unsuccessful at least 20 minutes after the 1 p.m. Eastern time zone launch. Mozilla hopes to successfully complete 5 million downloads of the browser in 24 hours.

(read more)

I’m back from the Microsoft’s DevDays 2008 Conference which was held here in Malta at the St. James Cavalier. I was simply amazed by some hot new Microsoft technologies and in fact I am highly enthusiastic to write this blog post and try something from what I’ve learnt. Here’s a breakdown of what was covered in the conference.

Lap Around VS2008 & .NET 3.5

The speaker showed the difference between .NET framework version 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5. The idea behind the latest .NET Framework is simply an upgrade. Therefore, there is only added functionality to the .NET Framework 2.0 and no alterations. For this reason, Visual Studio 2008 supports multiple versions of the .NET Framework from version 2.0 and up. The latter is referred to as multi-targeting. One of the hot new features of VS2008 is that it allows you to create different solutions with a different framework version. You may also easily upgrade a solution to a new framework version (from example from 2.0 to 3.5). VS also enables / disables the framework features in the toolbox, project types, references, intellisense, and so on.

Note that you can easily upgrade to .NET Framework 3.5 by simply doing a windows update.

Building Windows Presentation Foundation Applications with VS2008

WPF is a technology which allows you to create rich users interfaces with media. All this is possible by the integration of Expression Blend with VS2008. Blend should be used to create a non-functional user interface by a simple drag and drop. There is support for colour gradients, animations, and much more! Although Blend may seem like a design tool, it’s more targeted to developers. The job of the designer should be to assist in colour schemes, layouts, graphics, and so on

VS should then be used to plug in the functionality and debug the user interface created using Expression Blend. The solution is synchronised between Blend and VS; therefore, a change in VS will be reflected in Expression Blend, and vice versa.

WPF works by using an XML technology called XAML and requires .NET Framework 3.x

WCF/WF

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) allows you to create services with a few lines of code! All you have to worry about is simply the business logic of service. Windows Workflow (WF) allows you to create the logic of a service much like creating a flowchart using Visio. This way, there is no need for documentations and it is more intuitive to non-technical people such as business analysts.

Introduction to Silverlight

Basically Silverlight is a cut-down version of WPF but runs in a web browser. It is completely independent from the .NET framework and runs by installing the Silverlight browser plugin. Silverlight has support for 2D graphics, animations, I/O, media, imaging, text, http downloader, XAML parser and JavaScript DOM. Silverlight is one of the hottest new Microsoft technologies.

Here’s a showcase of some Silverlight projects: http://silverlight.net/showcase/

Building Web Applications with VS2008

There is nothing much to say about this one. It is basically the traditional ASP.NET web pages with HTML, master pages, JavaScript, CSS and so on. VS2008 now has full support of colour coding, intellisense and debugging for JavaScript! In addition, it also shares the same CSS engine used in Expression Web.

The speaker here introduced how you can use the Linq technology in your web app. Linq may be used to access relational schemes or XML files in an object oriented fashion. This allows efficient paging and sorting as well as optional editing and deleting. Linq may also be used to do business validation.

Integrating Office and Line of Business Applications using VSTO

There is no need to re-invent the wheel! .NET 3.0 allows you to easily create office applications. All this is fully integrated in Visual Studio.

Introduction to Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio Team System

Visual Studio Team system allows you manage your software development, ensure software quality, and to have better collaboration among the team members.

Click here to download the conference presentations

Silverlight is a new “Flash-killer” technology from Microsoft which is likely to gain popularity among businesses and developers. Silverlight provides support for animation, vector graphics and audio. The nice thing about Silverlight is that it is a cross-platform browser plugin.

A conference is going to be held here in Malta about Silverlight. Here are the conference details:

Audience: Developer
Presenter: Tomislav Bronzin
Date: Tuesday, June 17
Time: 8:00 - 17.30
Location: St. James Cavalier, Centre for Creativity, Music Room Valletta, Malta
Cost: Free

Click here for more info and to book your ticket online for free

After having over 50 shortcuts on my desktop, 80% disk usage, 70 processes running in the background, and a 10 minute Windows start-up, I’ve decided to clean up my PC. I could have easily solved this problem by formatting my PC, but for me this is a big headache having to back-up all my documents, websites and creating a backup of all my databases, contacts, bookmarks…endless list…besides having to re-install everything from scratch, reconfigure my network and re-apply any settings and preferences in the applications which I use.

To cut a long story short, I’ve done a cleanup of my PC by applying certain Windows settings and by using third-party tools. If your PC is dying, I would suggest trying them out. Here they are:

The first attempt

Disable services which you don’t use.
Start Menu > Run … > Type “msconfig" > Startup Tab

• Background Intelligent Transfer Service
• Computer Browser
• Error Reporting Service
• Fast User Switching
• Fax
• Help and Support
• Indexing Service
• NetMeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
• Performance Logs and Alerts
• Portable Media Serial Number Service
• Remote Desktop Help Session Manager
• SSDP Discovery Service
• Secondary Logon
• Smart Card
• System Restore Service
• TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
• Window Media Player Network Sharing Service
• Windows Time

Remove applications from your startup.
Start Menu > Run … > Type “msconfig > Startup Tab

If you do not use the Windows Search, you may disable file indexing. Access to files and folders will be faster, but searching using Windows search will take longer.
My Computer > Right-click on a drive such as C: > Uncheck “Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching”.
If you are serious with file searching, I suggest trying out Launchy!

If you can do without some fancy staff, you may tweak Windows for optimal performance by removing some user interface elements such as shadows, fading effects, and many others.
Right-click on My Computer > Properties > Advanced Tab > Settings Button under Performance category > De-select any unwanted visual effects.

Disable beeps and unwanted sounds!
Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices > Sounds Tab

Remove wallpaper and screensaver
Right-click on desktop > Properties

You may find more Windows tips and hacks here:

• http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2005/12/03/10-simple-ways-to-speed-up-windows-xp/
• http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/2005/12/05/10-intermediate-ways-to-speed-up-windows/

The second attempt

• Remove unwanted applications. I’ve being using a portable application called Revo Uninstall. It successfully manages to uninstall all applications even those which for some reason could not be installed from the normal Add/Remove Software tool. After uninstalling the software it also scans the registry for any leftovers, and files and folders which were not deleted.
• Remove unwanted files. I suggest analyzing you hard disk and see where the bulk is located. I’ve used a portable application called WinDirStat.
• Scan you PC for any spyware. I suggest Spyware Doctor.
• Scan your PC for viruses. You may use AVG, NOD, any many others for this one.
• Clean-up your registry. For this one I suggest Uniblue’s Registry Booster.
• And one last thing…defragment your hard disk! I suggest O&O Defrag.

Special thanks to Brian who contributed in my PC clean-up Feel free to send your comments or tips!

A web service is a software program identified by a URI which can be accessed through internet. It consists of well-defined, re-usable, software components that perform specific, encapsulated tasks via standardised web-oriented mechanisms.

Web services can be used with any programming language such as PHP or ASP.NET. With little code and some XML, you can include some of Google’s or Yahoo’s functionality in your own website!

But what’s exactly XML? XML is simply a mark-up language that defines other languages and protocols:

• WSDL - Web Service Description Language
• UDDI - Universal Description, Discovery and Integration
• SOAP – Simple Object Access Protocol

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

If you are new to XML, I suggest taking a tutorial here.

In PHP it is very easy to use a web service. It’s a matter of few lines of code!
http://www.php.net/soap_soapclient_soapcall

And one last thing…here are a list of web services which you might use in your website or web app.
http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory/1?sort=mashups

In the near future I will be publishing an article how you can create an ajaxed site search using a web service. As always, feel free to send your comments!

ShrinkSafe is a JavaScript compression utility which can practically reduce file size by a third or more. The idea behind this is very simple…faster web page download!

Start shrinking your JavaScript files:
http://shrinksafe.dojotoolkit.org/