.NET and web development cheat sheets

With web frameworks, technologies changing and being developed at such a fast pace no developer can remember all the methods, classes, functions etc. in all the frameworks or even in any one of the frameworks. Documentation can be cumbersome most of the times (I think always), thats why I like cheat sheets. They are quick references. You can print them out and hang them on your wall, or just keep them handy in your bookmarks for quick reference.

Here is a list of some of the commonly used cheat sheets, these cheat sheets are collected from different sources across the internet and I have included some that I most commonly use.

.NET Format String Quick Reference - Current Version: 1.1
» Download Now (PDF, 123 KB)

ASP.NET 2.0 Page Life Cycle and Common Events - Current Version: 1.0
» Download Now (PDF, 64KB)

Visual Studio 2005 Built-in Code Snippets (C#) - Current Version: 1.0
» Download Now (PDF, 56 KB)

C# and VB.NET Comparison Cheat Sheet
» Visit Now

What is a cheat sheet?

Ask any student and the answer you would get is - A cheat sheet is used contrary to the rules of an exam that may need to be small enough to conceal in the palm of the hand. In a more technical term - a “cheat sheet” is any short (one or two page) reference to terms, commands, or symbols where the user is expected to understand the use of such terms etc but not necessarily to have memorized all of them.

Some other useful Cheat Sheet Links

• ASP.NET Page Life Cycle Diagram (JPG)
• ASP.NET Runtime Cheat Sheet
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Commonly Uses Types and Namespaces (PDF)
• Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Library
• Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX Client Life Cycle & Events (PDF)
• LINQ
• VB.NET/C# Comparison
• SQL Server
• HTML Character Entities
• RGB Hex Color Chart
• CSS
• jQuery
• JavaScript
• XHTML (PDF)
• Regular Expressions
• Microformats
• ASP/VBScript

Other very good resource for a great list of cheat sheets is - http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/

Adobe Flex can now be easily integrated with Visual Studio and Eclipse

Adobe Systems at its Adobe Max 2008 conference Tuesday heralded a slew of new technologies, including links between its Flex application development platform and Microsoft’s Visual Studio software development platform.
 
Also paraded at the conference was Flash Catalyst, an interactive design tool for building interfaces and interactive content without coding. The planned Bolt release of the ColdFusion IDE, featuring Eclipse capabilities, was touted as well.

[ For additional news from the Adobe Max conference, see "Adobe bolsters streaming Flash" and "Adobe to offer new tools for UI development"]

In addition, two developments pertaining to Flex development support for Microsoft’s .Net software development technology were unveiled.

“A partner of ours, called Ensemble, out of Vancouver, has created a Visual Studio plug-in called Tofino, which gives you Flex and MXML support,” said Ben Forta, director of platform evangelism at Adobe, in an interview after the morning keynote presentation. Also, Adobe itself is working on a project to boost Flex development in .Net, featuring data services capabilities. That project is with Adobe Labs.

Specifically, Adobe is porting BlazeDS, which has been a Java open-source technology for communicating between Java and Flex/AIR clients, to .Net. Thus, .Net developers can use Flash Remoting and messaging, Adobe said.

Wow, I guess I will be able to use Flex from within Visual Studio soon … I am excited :)

YouTube videos go High Definition (HD YouTube), Now watch you favorite video on YouTube in HD

To enjoy a higher quality High Definition resolution and stereo audio mode video clips, users have for some time now used  tricks in assessing YouTube’s URL. They used a hack switch of &fmt=18 or &fmt=6 to view high quality video resolution. However, this trick has become obsolete once the “watch in high quality” feature was introduced. Having said that, now you probably can use the trick again if you want to watch 720p (720 pixels x 1280 pixels) widescreen video clips.

What is High Definition Video?
High-definition (HD) video generally refers to any video system of higher resolution than standard-definition (SD) video, most commonly at display resolutions of 1280×720 (720p) or 1920×1080 (1080i or 1080p).

Google has made available YouTube video play back in High Definition (HD) mode of 720p by just adding &fmt=22 to the video URL or link location.

First off, this “HD version” appears to be only available for videos uploaded in 720p (i.e. 1280×720 resolution). For any video with a resolution lower than that, using “&fmt=22” will simply default you to the normal, low quality stream. The high quality “&fmt=18” version will always be available, but pales in comparison to the newest format.

To embed a HD quality YouTube video with high definition resolution on external website or blog, simply add or append &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 code (instead of &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 to display just higher quality 480×360 video clip) to the end of movie parameter value and embed source in the YouTube embed code.

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

By appending &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 HD hack switch, the embed code will become like the following:

<object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D22“></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowscriptaccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&ap=%2526fmt%3D22” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowscriptaccess=”always” allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>

Convince Your BLOG readers to Upgrade their Web Browsers to the most recent version

Old web browsers are not just insecure, they also pose a problem for web designers as they have to design sites while keeping the older versions in mind.

If you like to help people upgrade their outdated browsers, Pushup has created a script that can be easily integrated in any blog or website.

This JavaScript checks the version of your site visitor’s browser and will show him an upgrade link if a new version is available.

Upgrading has many benefits:

• Pages display the way designers intend them to displaySecurity is improved
• Security is improved
• Style sheet support is improved
• You get more reliable support of dynamic behaviors in Web pages (like pull-down menus) 

Also, Older browsers do not understand the latest versions of HTML and do not have reliable implementations of stylesheets, a powerful feature used by most modern Web designers. By working within the latest standards, Web designers have more control of how a page displays, sites can be more accessible to wider range of devices (including cell phones and accessibility software), and code can be kept much simpler.

So as tech bloggers and also for making our readers online session more secure I think its our responsibility to convince our readers to upgrade to the most recent version.

This site can guess your gender by reading your browser’s history

All major browsers have a habit of maintaining a recent history of your web site visits. And by using the right tools this information can be made available to any webmaster to exploit.

Mike on Ads blog has coded a tool using this privacy shortcoming (http://www.mikeonads.com/2008/07/13/using-your-browser-url-history-estimate-gender/) that tries to predict whether the visitor is male or female. It uses a small piece of Javascript, that exploits a browser’s URL history and then analyzes the sites visited to guess whether the user is a guy or gal.

It’s not clear how accurate the tool is at guessing a visitor’s gender, although it did pronounce there was a 74 percent chance your reporter was male. More importantly, the tool is a reminder of just how easy it is for webmasters to track the browsing history of their visitors. Even when you turn off Javascript, they have other tricks up their sleeves.

We’re waiting for a tool that combines history with other metrics, such as a user’s IP address, geographic location, the operating system and browser model being used. But on another thought may be that is being captured and stored somewhere right this very minute and we are not even aware of it.

Its not far when we will be wishing safe net surfing to our friends just like safe travel and safe driving.

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