Archive for June, 2009

Linkedin,WordPress, Twitter and Facebook

Imagine that you have completed a degree course and waiting for a job. Spending alone at home. Don’t waste your time. You can spend your spare moments by visiting various websites which will ultimately expose you to the outside world.

Linkedin

It is a popular site to record your professional achievements, awards and projects. You will get an unique link like www.linkedin.com/in/anandnswamy which you can provide to potential employers. You can include your past and current employment positions along with other achievements and recongnitions.

WordPress

You can now create blogs for free using WordPress hosted platform. This means that you need not have to buy a domain to host your blog. Instead, you will be provided with a unique sub domain URL like http://<Your_User_Name>.wordpress.com. You just need to register at www.wordpress.com and start your blogging life in style with predefined themes.

However, if you would like to customize your site then you can buy a hosting plan from a reliable provider and host your WordPress site by uploading the required files. You have to follow certain steps to install the blog and also you have access to thousands of free themes which can downloaded from various websites.

Twitter

It is a very popular micro blogging platform. You need not have to write a long blog post. Instead you can simply record your hourly/daily/weekly activities. I would suggest you not to include your twitter link in your resume as it will look less professional. You can however exchange links during informal meetings, conversations and in business cards.

FaceBook

FaceBook is a popular site using which you can build friendships. You have to either manually add friends or can search after registration. Over the period of time, your network will grow rapidly if you make use of all the features on the site by following their terms and conditions. Please do not add strangers as friends as you never know of their identity and also don’t share your personal details over the social networking sites.

NOTE: Please note that your username will be banned if you fail to follow the rules as laid down by the above sites.

You can reap rich benefits if you make maximum use of all the features on the above mentioned websites. Your name and professional status will be exposed to the outside world which will ultimately benefit you in long run.

linkedin, wordpress, twitter, facebook, social media, blogs, blog

Technorati Tags: linkedin, wordpress, twitter, facebook, social media, blogs, blog

Even Faster Web Sites

Sebastopol, CA – Performance is critical to the success of any web site, and yet today’s web applications push browsers to their limits with increasing amounts of rich content and heavy use of Ajax. In his newest book, Even Faster Web Sites, (O’Reilly, US $34.99), Steve Souders, web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, provides valuable techniques to help you optimize your site’s performance.

Souders’ previous book, the bestselling High Performance Web Sites, shocked the web development world by revealing that 80% of the time it takes for a web page to load is on the client side. In Even Faster Web Sites, Souders and eight expert contributors provide best practices and pragmatic advice for improving your site’s performance in three critical categories:

JavaScript: Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more.
Network: Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster.
Browser: Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques.

Speed is essential for today’s rich media web sites and Web 2.0 applications. With Even Faster Web Sites, you’ll learn how to shave precious seconds off your sites’ load times and make them respond even faster.

The book contains six guest chapters contributed by Dion Almaer, Doug Crockford, Ben Galbraith, Tony Gentilcore, Dylan Schiemann, Stoyan Stefanov, Nicole Sullivan, and Nicholas C. Zakas.

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His books High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites explain his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug with more than 1 million downloads. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference sponsored by O’Reilly. He frequently speaks at such conferences as OSCON, Rich Web Experience, Web 2.0 Expo, and The Ajax Experience.

Additional Resources:

For more information about the book, including table of contents, index, author bios, and cover graphic, see: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596522308

Even Faster Web Sites
Steve Souders
ISBN: 9780596522308, 254 pages,
Book Price: $34.99 USD, £26.99 GBP
Ebook Price: $27.99 USD
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000

About O’Reilly

O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O’Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.

How do I build a C# application using Command Line Compiler?

Microsoft’s .NET SDK ships with a command line compiler called csc.exe. It can be executed from within the DOS prompt. In this article, I will show you how to build a simple C# program using this compiler with Notepad as the editor.

Open your editor and enter the code as given in listing 1

Listing 1

001: // HelloWorld.cs

002: // -------------

003: using System;

004: class HelloWorld

005: {

006: public static void Main()

007: {

008: Console.WriteLine("Hello World");

009: }

010: } 

The line numbers are given only for the sake of explanation and does not form part of the source code.

In the above listing, Line 3 defines the namespace System. Line 4 declares our class named HelloWorld. Line 6 defines the Main() method, which is considered as a entry point for all C# programs. Line 8 calls the WriteLine() method of the Console class and prints "Hello World" as output.

Save the file as HelloWorld.cs and compile the code using a C# compiler. I assume you are using the compiler which ship with .NET SDK. For this purpose, you have to give the following command at the DOS prompt as shown in the figure given below

csc HelloWorld.cs 

Figure 1

If you have installed Visual Studio 2008, you can compile a C# program using Visual Studio Command Prompt. You can launch it from Start | All Programs | Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 | Visual Studio Tools

If you have installed Mono C# Compiler then you should compile the above program using the following command:

mcs HelloWorld.cs 

If there are any errors and warnings, the compiler will display them during the above process. You have to go through all those messages and correct them preferably by going back to the source code. As explained earlier, C# is a case sensitive language and hence even if you miss a semicolon or a comma, the compiler will throw error messages. If there are no errors and warnings your screen would look like as shown in the figure given above.

To view the output of the above program, you have to supply the name of the assembly (HelloWorld.exe) at the DOS prompt.

For example, you have to give the following command for executing the above program.

HelloWorld 

The output will be as shown in the figure given below

Figure 2

For mono compiler, the execution statement will be as shown below:

mono HelloWorld.exe 

An Assembly is a file which is created by the compiler upon successful compilation of every C# application.

Commenting the Code

If you look at line numbers 1 and 2 in the above code, you would see two slash lines at the beginning. In programming terminology, these lines are called as comments. C# compiler won’t compile the statements inside these comments and they are given only for documentation and reference purposes. It is a best practice to give comments while coding as it will help you to study the code at a later stage or for others who look at your code.

There are three ways by which you can give comments in C#. The first two will be already familiar to you if you had worked with C++ and Java. They are single-line and multiline comments.

Single-line comments are given with the symbol //, while Multiline comments are applied with /*…..*/ symbols and can spread more than one line (See Listing 2)

Listing 2

// this is a single line comment

/*

This is a

Multiline

Comment

*/

The third type of comment which is given with “///” is a new one introduced by the .NET Framework. It is used to generate documentation for your C# program and they are denoted by using the relevant XML tags as shown in listing 3:

Listing 3

/// <summary>

/// this is a new comment system

/// <summary>


 

microsoft, c#, java

Technorati Tags: microsoft, c#, java

What are the different editors that are available for C# programming?

Once you have installed a C# compiler, the next process is to choose an editor to enter source codes. There are different types of editors such as Notepad and Visual C#. In addition to these two, many third party vendors have also developed editors for programming with C#. This FAQ briefly discusses each one of these editors.

Notepad is a commonly used editor among many programmers. It comes with Windows and it is very easy to use as well. But there are lots of disadvantages with this editor like it doesn’t supports syntax coloring and other features such as intellisense. Moreover, you cannot directly compile and execute a C# program from within the editor. Although it doesn’t support features such as line numbering, you can jump to a specific line of the code by using the CTRL+G shortcut.

Microsoft Visual Studio is a full featured development tool and it includes project templates for all .NET languages in an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Other than C#, the IDE supports the development of major .NET languages such as Visual Basic , Visual J#  and Visual C++. In other words, it provides a single development environment for all these languages. You need to master the various elements found on the IDE such as Toolbox, Properties window apart from learning the C# language.

Will I get Visual C# as a separate product?

Yes. Microsoft sells a standard version of the product named “Visual C# .NET Standard Edition” at a reduced price. It comes with four CD’s along with a printed manual. This product doesn’t supports advanced features such as Crystal Reports which is available with Visual Studio. This product is a big boon for developers with limited budget.
Visual C# .NET provides you with the required templates and wizards for building applications. It also supports features such as Intellisense and Dynamic Help. Dynamic Help is a new functionality which will provide you help according to the relevant situation while developing a project. It will be available only if you have installed MSDN Library collection. Moreover, it ships with powerful debugging capabilities and automatic syntax/clause completion features. For instance, if you enter the keyword “try”, remaining clauses like catch and finally will be automatically get listed on the code editor.

What do you mean by IntelliSense?

IntelliSense refers to popping up of methods and properties according to the context. For instance, if you enter Console followed by a dot, a menu automatically pops up, which gives you all the methods and properties of the Console class. You should already be aware of this useful feature, if you had used any of the languages in Visual Studio 6.0.

Where will I get MSDN Library?

MSDN Library ships with all editions of Visual Studio. You will be automatically prompted to install the same after the installation of Visual Studio. You will get periodic updates of the library if you have subscribed to MSDN. Alternatively, you can access the library online at any time. The biggest advantage of using Visual C# is that it significantly reduces the development time of projects by integrating all parts of a project under a single roof. Even though there are lots of benefits, Visual C# is not compulsorily required for programming with C#.

In addition to Visual C#, many third party vendors have also released editors for C#. They can be downloaded from the websites of the respective vendors. One of the most popular editors is SharpDevelop. It supports syntax coloring, compilation and execution from the IDE apart from other features. With the help of this editor, you can also build Visual Basic, User controls and Web Services applications. You can also create XML and XSL files. Moreover, the developers of SharpDevelop have provided the complete source code for this editor under an Open Source License Agreement. The product and its source code can be downloaded from www.isharpdevelop.com.

Another editor is Antechinus C# editor developed by c-point but it is not as much popular due to its limited capabilities. Some of the other popular editors are given below

Borland C# Builder
CodeWright
EditPlus

Even though there are many editors available on the market its up to you to decide which editor to use. I strongly recommend you to install one editor and learn the language completely.

The Art of Concurrency

If you’re looking to take full advantage of multi-core processors with concurrent programming, The Art of Concurrency (O’Reilly, US $44.99), by Clay Breshears, provides the knowledge and hands-on experience you need. The book is one of the few resources that focuses on implementing algorithms in the shared-memory model of multicore processors, rather than just theoretical models or distributed-memory architectures. The book provides detailed explanations and usable samples to help you transform algorithms from serial to parallel code, along with advice and analysis for avoiding mistakes that programmers typically make when first attempting these computations.

Written by a senior Intel engineer with over two decades of parallel and concurrent programming experience, this book will help you:

1. Explore differences between programming for shared-memory and distributed-memory
2. Learn guidelines for designing multithreaded applications, including testing and tuning
3. Discover how to make best use of different threading libraries, including Windows threads, POSIX threads, OpenMP, and Intel Threading Building Blocks
4. Explore how to implement concurrent algorithms that involve sorting, searching, graphs, and other practical computations

The Art of Concurrency shows you how to keep algorithms scalable to take advantage of new processors with even more cores. For developing parallel code algorithms and for concurrent programming, this book is essential.

Clay Breshears is currently a Course Architect for the Intel Software College, specializing in multi-core and multithreaded programming and training.

The Art of Concurrency
Clay Breshears
ISBN: 9780596521530, 302 pages,
Book Price: $44.99 USD, £34.50 GBP
Ebook Price: $35.99 USD

How do I begin programming with C#?

First of all, you need to install a C# compiler. You can either use a command line compiler available from Microsoft or third party compiler kit developed by Mono. Microsoft’s C# compiler is widely used by many developers as the Mono compiler kit is not yet fully developed. In addition to this you can also build C# applications with Visual C# 2008, which is available with Visual Studio 2008. It is a robust development tool used for developing all kinds of C# applications.

Is it necessary to install Visual Studio 2008 to build C# applications?

Not necessary. A command line compiler is sufficient to learn C#. Visual C# is only used to simplify the development process. Microsoft’s C# compiler is available in the form of a package called Software Development Kit (SDK). A latest version of this kit can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads. You will also find this kit along with many programming magazine CD’s or from popular C# books such as Sams Teach Yourself the C# language in 21 Days by Brad Jones.

After the kit has been downloaded, you have to install it. The installation process normally takes between 15-30 minutes depending upon the speed of your computer and is self explanatory. The setup will automatically register the required environment variables and hence you can straight away start programming with C# after the completion of its installation.

Is it necessary to install .NET SDK and Visual Studio 2008 separately?

If you have installed Visual Studio 2008 on your system, then there is no need to install .NET SDK separately as it will be automatically installed as a prerequisite during the installation of Visual Studio. To test whether .NET Framework has been successfully installed on your system, go to Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt and enter csc. If the system returns a fatal error message with the code CS2008 then the installation is perfect. All C# error messages are documented with codes. These messages will become familiar to you as you gain more experience with C#.

In addition to Microsoft’s C# compiler you also have an option to install Mono C# compiler kit available from http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page. Mono is a project started to create .NET compilers meant for platforms other than Windows, such as Linux. But the project is still under development and with each release of the kit more features and additional support for namespaces are added. The upcoming version of this kit promises to provide support for Windows Forms, ASP.NET and ADO.NET. Moreover, the new compiler will also provide database connectivity support for MySQL databases.

Can I install Mono C# compiler kit under Windows?

Yes. While Microsoft’s .NET SDK has been designed to work with Windows, Mono C# kit can be installed in both Windows and Linux.