Convert phrase from english alphabet in to your native language using Google Transliteration

Many of you people have different mother tongue other than English and if those people want to type phrase/text in their native language then they need to learn typing using specific fonts and which key match to which character for their native language and that it too hard job no one like that.

Visual Studio Achievements - Software engineer's glory won't be unnoticed now

Have you faced situation that in your project development you have put lots of efforts in developing, debugging code, bug fixing, testing code and due to that your project has became successful and after all glory of success has been taken by your manager or superior or any other person and you have remained unnoticed??!

Get your website online in Just 4 steps using Site44 & Dropbox

Now a days every peole want to build their business related website and in india most of people need just basic & static site including 4 to 5 static pages and for this people have to face heavy cost domain & hosting. (200/month is not big deal but for Indian people it is costly as startup).

Register your blog for Indian Blogger Listing

In today era more & more people maintain their personal or commercial blog with some unique idea. In india Amit Agrawal recognized as a very professional blogger with his blog Digital Inspiration related about technology. Many blogger inspired by him to start     blog and monetize their content I am also one of them.

He is maintain Indian blogger listing on http://indianbloggers.org and right now he is in process for 2nd version to listing more blogs.If you would like to see your blog there then look at this post for more detail http://www.labnol.org/india/calling-indian-bloggers/21306/

Introduction to GitHub (version control system) and how to use as window user

If you are developer and working in industry then you  might be aware of version control system to manage your project version and synchronize your work between Team.
Generally following version control system are used by industry.

• Visual Source safe by Microsoft with Visual Studio
• SVN
• Github

"Add Deployable Dependencies" option in Visual Studio 2010 When you want to deploy ASP.NET MVC application

I would like to share this option for the developer who are using Visual studio 2010 for development and working on ASP.NET MVC application. When you try to host your application (ASP.NET MVC) on window server and if you server haven't installed MVC then you might be get following type of error.

Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Helpers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified

Press shift + ? and look at shortcuts on web

Today many web applications support hotkey/shortcuts to access particular funcitonality over the web application, you can read my previous post if you want to develop keyboard support for your web application.

Copy your code as HTML In Visual Studio (WYSIWYG)

Have you ever needed to put your code developed in visual studio in your blog or website to share it?
If yes then this blog post is going to share about good  add-on of Visual studio called "Copy As HTML"

How you can make online purchase more safe way with HDFC credit card

I have purchased Samsung Galaxy y from Ebay India without entering my actual credit card information! Yes it look like strange but true, if you would like to know how then continue below reading..

Got New Samsung Galaxy Y - First time purchased from Ebay India

I got Samsung Galaxy Y mobile in last week at my home delivered by Ebay with good and strong packing and very exited to tell about my first experience on Ebay India for online purchase.

Why Samsung?
Samsung has created best and successful galaxy series with comfortable price as compare to Apple IPhone, In India for majority people Samsung galaxy series is best one as it provides comfortable price as well good touch experience like apple IPhone anyway Apple is unbeatable technology. .

Why online?
Many people told me that why you have purchased online in spite of so many retail store available here but most important thing is TIME, because we need to go there and we need select only from whatever available with them, on other side online store can you give you vast listing of products to select as per your choise and different payment option (EMI is better for salaried employee like me)

I have searched lots of sellers on ebay and searched on another online store like FilpKart, Infibeam as well and after that i have selected one power seller on Ebay India (power seller is recommended on Ebay)

The funniest thing is actually i was trying to buy laptop but there were so many models and confused and still confused as per price,features and brand (You can give me suggestion if you want to help me) in between came across Samsung galaxy and read about Androids and it's features and finally bought Mobile :) Now internet is in my hand and i can write and post on this blog at anytime using this android apps.

Anyway I recommended Ebay to purchase online beacuse it will give following benefits

1) You can search same product with different sellers and can compare price between them.
2) You can choose reliable seller by their feedback and ratings.
3) Ebay gives facility to select various options for pyament including EMI (I have buy it thorugh 6 months EMI) so you will pay it in installments.
4) Ebay will give gurentee on each product and systematic process to deliver product to end user.
5) Ebay will create deadlines for shipment and delivery for product which you have purchased from any seller,if sellere will fail to do that then you will get your money back.

In india FilpKart is also very good store to buy items online mostly for books.

Now Arun Rana's Lab with power of Samsung Galaxy and Android :)

Microsoft announced ASP.NET MVC,web API and Razor as Open Source

I have read today scottgu's blog entry about announcement of release the source code of ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor under an open source license (Apache 2.0).
Now you can download source code from codeplex and if you want contribute in that then you can do it there.
Hope that making it open source will improve ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor to better level because now it is open to every people. (Power of Open Source!)

Read more about this

• ScottHanselman : ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages v2 (Razor) now all open source with contributions 
• http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com
• http://asp.net/open-source
  

Have you checked Meta Tags of your website or blog?

If you are running your blog or website then it is important to know about Meta Tags.

Meta Tags provide information of your website/blog to search engine like google, bing, yahoo for how to display your website or blog to their search engine.

look at this link what is Meta tags? by W3schools.

Let's take case study of my blog, before putting meta data my blog display in google search result as per below.



then i came across google webmaster link about meta data they are using for crawling and add some of Meta tags for my blog and after one day google has change descrption as per my meta data as per below. (you can type my name "arun rana" to google to see in live)



You can also control of your web pages from displaying in google search by below meta tag.
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex,nofollow">

After putting Meta data if you want to test your site/blog for meta data then there is very good tool available online  called Meta Tag Analyzer which will give you very deep research and review of meta data.

Useful Reading about Meta Tags

• Wikipedia - Meta tag
• How To Use HTML Meta Tags

Google can tell you that what the world want? Really!

I was so boring in night yesterday and playing with Google and found some interesting queries you want to google it! it can really tell you what is people requirement all over the world (you can make profit if you are businessman!)

Just open Google try to type following queries

Microsoft has released Visual-Studio 2011 beta and Window 8 Consumer preview

Microsoft has released 2 great new version of it's products which includes visual stuido 2011 beta which is development environment (IDE) for .net programmer and new version of OS Window8-consumer preview.

Visual Studio 2011 Beta

Jason Zander has first announced regarding release of Visual Studio 11 Beta & .NET 4.5 Beta on his blog post.
Download it from here + Download Visual Studio 2011 Beta 

This time Visual Studio lunched with totally new look combine with many new feathers as below.

•     Project Compatibility
•     IDE Productivity Improvements
•     Search Everywhere
•     Toolbar Improvements
•     Additional Tooling
•     Multiple-Monitor Support
•     Performance Enhancements
•     New Project Types
•     Extensibility    

You can read each & every fether on Visual studio magazine's post about "Inside Visual Studio 11: A Guided Tour".

Scott Hanselman has also written about overview of features available with Visual Studio 2011 beta in his blog post.

Window-8 Consumer Preview

Steven Sinofsky has first made announcement on his blog post of  "Windows 8 – The Consumer Preview" availability for download.if you are in hurry to look inside it then visit this and starting now at http://preview.windows.com.

Read this guidelines before installation

• How To Guide to Installing and Booting Windows 8 Consumer Preview off a VHD by Scott Hanselman
• Windows 8 Installation Guides by Amit Agrawal.

There are lots of post (i think many people rushed out to write about that to be a first blogger to write on this topic!) available on internet about Window 8 features so i don't want to talk about it here.
just google it - Window 8 features :)

ASP.NET Web API - Great collection of learning resources

ASP.NET team launched MVC4 Beta with new asp.net web API template and all .net peoples looking for good resources to learn more about that and build application on that.

I was also searching for that and found good links here with all tutorials, videos and samples.

Tugberk Ugurlu lists a bunch of great resources for getting started with ASP.NET Web API in his blog post, follow below link.

• Getting Started With ASP.NET Web API - Tutorials, Videos, Samples

REST call using json in asp.net with Basic authentication

REST (Representational state transfer) is very popular architecture to transfer resource on web. Using HTTP methods (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE),the Internet media type of the data supported by the web service(JSON, XML or YAM etc.) and principles of REST we can build RESTful web service.
 
Today many service provided as restful web service which can easily accessed by any browser on any system with any language.
I would like to give you Example with code here to make post call using json data in asp.net.
we need to add below namespcae for that

• using System.Net;
• using System.IO;

WebResponse: Responsible to provide response from URI
WebRequest: Responsible to make request to URI

In above code i made request with basic authentication (In my words: if you'll request service URI with browser and if it will prompt with login box then that service requires basic authentication to access resources ) and try to get response.

you can test your rest call using Fiddler as well before implementation of code to test that web service working is as per expectation.

Important Note :
As per stackoverflow's answer take care about this header Expect: 100-Continue.

"By default, .NET will tag outgoing POST requests with the header Expect: 100-Continue. If the server doesn't support this, it will fail with a 417 error.
To get .NET to not do this, execute the following before creating your WebRequest object:

System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false;
"

Hope it will be helpful to you!

Extend the built-in ASP.NET DataAnnotations using DataAnnotations Extensions

If you have worked with development of web service, silverlight application or mvc applicaiton then you know about DataAnnotations class to validate DTO client side as well as server side.

DataAnnotations contains mostly Required, Range, RegularExpression and StringLength and to see full list of attributes it contains visit this msdn link "Using Data Annotations to Customize Data Classes" .

In my mvc application there is person class (Model) and validation for email as per below (by regular expression)



Scott Kirkland has extended this and created excellent DataAnnotations Extensions pacakge for .net to allow more validation attributes, also he has explained about this in his blog post with examples.

so after installing DataAnnotations Extensions Nuget package i can write email validation as per below





Following are list of more validation attributes available in  DataAnnotations Extensions

•     CreditCardAttribute
•     CuitAttribute
•     DateAttribute
•     DigitsAttribute
•     EmailAttribute
•     EqualToAttribute
•     FileExtensionsAttribute
•     IntegerAttribute
•     MaxAttribute
•     MinAttribute
•     NumericAttribute
•     UrlAttribute
•     YearAttribute

You can see demo of each & every attributes here.

Auto detect user's timezone through javascript

In this post i would like to describe how to detect user's timezone and auto set in dropdown. In C# there is class called TimeZoneInfo through which you can get system Timezone.

First of all get system timezone info and bind it to dropdown list.(In my case i am using mvc application that's why IEnumerable<SelectListItem> return type of object )



Now to to auto select timezone as per user's location there is very simple solution is read offset value using date object using javacript as per below




This offset will be in minutes and you need to store it somewhere (cookie is one option)


Now in above code in GetTimezone() function you need to read that value and set it selected value as per below.


Here i haven't consider  daylight savings time (DST), you can refer his link for more detail about that

HTML5 target schema for visual studio

If you are web developer then you know that every web application is build on stack of html controls, when you say we are building asp.net application using asp.net controls, then you need to understand that asp.net controls have higher level of abstraction.

An output of an ASP.NET server control can be the result of many HTML tags that combine together to produce that control and its events.

If you want to read more about difference between HTML controls and ASP.NET server control then visit this link.

When you are designing aspx/html/cshtml page inside visual studio you need to specify target schema for validation as per below (By default it is selected so some people don't aware of this!)

Today HTML5 is in demand and it is supported by most of browsers, some people says that HTML5 will remove flash from web!
Anyway if you want to know more about HTML5 and it's features then following are good links.

• what is HTML5?
• What's new in HTML5?

If you want to take benefit of Intelisense and validation of html5 controls in visual studio then you need to install target schema for html5 from here first,then you can see it in that list and select that schema for your application as per below.

Look at Cloud Storage available on internet

Toady every IT industry taking benefit of cloud technology to reduce their infrastructure cost to company.cloud technology is very vast topic not possible describe in this post, however here I would like to talk about different cloud storage providers available on Internet where you can store your data,files,video, photo etc and access that data from anywhere without any software, it only requires browser with Internet connection!

Amazon Cloud Drive
Free storage            : 5 GB
Max File Upload size  : 2 GB
Sync to desktop       : No
Pricing details           : https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/learnmore

Google Docs
Free storage            : 1 GB
Max File Upload size  : 1 GB
Sync to desktop       : Yes (Windows only)
Pricing details           :http://support.google.com/docs/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=37371

Microsoft SkyDrive

Free storage            : 25 GB
Max File Upload size  : 50 MB
Sync to desktop       : Yes (Windows and Mac)
Pricing details           : http://explore.live.com/skydrive

DropBox
Free storage             : 2 GB
Max File Upload size   : 300mb via web, unlimited using client:www.dropbox.com/install
Sync to desktop        : Yes http://www.dropbox.com/help/4

Pricing details            : http://www.dropbox.com/pricing

Box.net
Free storage             : 50 GB
Max File Upload size   : 25 MB to 1 GB
Sync to desktop        : http://www.box.com/business/features/box-sync/
Pricing details            : http://www.box.com/pricing/

My blog reached to 1000 unique visitors

I have started this blog before 1 year to just share my knowledge among people who are new in programing or geek person, and step by step i have improve this blog to make more useful to help people.

Today i am happy that flag counter display 1000 unique visit to my blog and 59 country visited this blog! 


  

Also Google has approved my blog's authorship so user can see my google+ profile pics in Google search result as per below.



Also till now more successful posts as per below

Paypal Integration in MVC and razor collected great comments
why Mark zukerberg is great IT leader got appreciation from Mark Zukerberg himself

I hope that my blog is contributing in technology field very well and hope that it will be!
Welcome your comments on this! Have a nice day!

Knol will be moving to Annotum on May 1, 2012

Google has lunched knol in 2007 to improve web content by expert's collaboration in that content, and many expert created their account and made efforts to improve web contents.
Now as per Google announcement of shutting down some of it's products, knol is part of that.

What will be the alternative of knol?
As per google's official blog they will replace this service with Annotum (opern source wordpress based product)


"Knol—We launched Knol in 2007 to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles. In order to continue this work, we’ve been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress. Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible."
So transfer our knol content to Annotum today.

• Get staretd with Annotum (knol users ot not Knol users )
• FAQ

Google is in process of shutting number of it's products

The web based giant company google had announced that they will discontinue some of it's product in 2012.

"we’re in the process of shutting a number of products which haven’t had the impact we’d hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward. Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience." said on their blog.

Following are list of product/service which are going to be shutting down.

• Google Bookmarks Lists
• Google Friend Connect
• Google Gears
• Google Search Timeline
• Google Wave
• Knol
• Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C)
  

So if you are using any services from above list then please keep in touch with Google's official blog for update.

Bundling and Minification in ASP.NET 4.5 and MVC4

In MVC4 Beta release from Microsoft last week, have a look with series of blog and would like to talk about one feature called Bundling and Minification which is also available to ASP.NET 4.5

Bundling: As per name suggest it bundle or combine multiple javascript, css requests to fewer Http request means bundle by type of file
Minifying: will remove white space form css and javascript which cause to reduce download size of that files

Let's if we have project with 3 javascript and 3 css files




Bundling and minifying the .css files
If you want to add css file as per listed above in fig then  you need to add refernce of all 3 files as per below which will result in to 3 separate http requests but this feature allow you to bundle and minify in to styles folder and call it in only one http request as per below.


Same way it will apply to javascript files as well
This is simple overview of this feature you can read about it in more details on scottgu's blog.

Integrate Bing Searchbox in MVC3 with razor application

If you are building MVC3 application with razor view engine then now it is very easy to integrate Bing Searchbox in just 2 steps as per below.

1) Add Microsoft Web Helpers
In your MVC application just add this helper's reference using Nuget Command

2) Add below code to cshtml Page

and output of this will look like as per below

You can also add Twitter Feeds, Facebook Feeds using this helper, to read about how to do this refer this link.
To read more about Microsoft.Web.Helpers refere msdn link.

Add Elamh to ASP.NET MVC application

Elmah is great open source module developed by Atif Aziz to handle error logging for asp.net application and there is nuget pacakge also available to add in to existing application. If you are new to Elmah then visit my previous post to started with it.

Alexander Beletsky has developed Elmah.Mvc for asp.net mvc application it is also available through Nuget package.
You can add it by GUI tool as per below
Go to Reference> Manage Nuget Pacakge > Search Elamh.MVC

OR By Package Manager console as per below

Now Hit admin/elmah with your app's URL,you will get elmah page. That's it!

Please refer Author's blog post about what are the changes in this MVC version of Elmah.

Paging sorting with WebGrid in MVC3 and razor

If you have worked with MVC3 and Razor view engine then you may be aware that when will you create new view for details on bases of IEnumerable Model then it
it will create cshtml code with foreach loop which will cause to render data in Grid Format as per shown in below fig.


Now if you want Paging and sorting to this data then manually you need to make lots of efforts to achieve desired result.
But Microsoft has already built very good helpers called WebGrid, to achieve this so you do not need to do that manually.
So it will look like as per below after replacing above code.


If you notice URL in above fig then you can see that it WebGrid will automatically make sorting request with proper parameter you can also change parameter
name to customize URL,e.g.
var grid = new WebGrid(Model, canSort: true, canPage: true, rowsPerPage: 2,sortFieldName:"S", sortDirectionFieldName:"SD");

You can apply style to particular column by style: attribute. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9357786/apply-specific-width-in-column-of-webgrid-in-mvc3

Look at

• Complete List of Properties
• Apply styles and customize WebGrid
• Details of Webgrid's Properties and how it works
• Inside WebGrid

Look at ASP.NET MVC4 Beta!

Microsoft has released ASP.NET MVC4 Beta officially and Jon Galloway announced regarding of it in his blog with introduction to ASP.NET web API.

Top Most Features

•     ASP.NET Web API
•     Refreshed and modernized default project templates
•     New mobile project template
•     Many new features to support mobile apps
•     Recipes to customize code generation
•     Enhanced support for asynchronous methods

Also you can build ASP.NET MVC project with Nuget Package
For more details and installation tips look at http://www.asp.net/mvc/mvc4

Swap VIP in Window Azure

Swap VIP is very good feature available in Window azure, I would like to described here about that with good reference link.

What is SWAP VIP ?
There are 2 type of environment on which you can deploy on window azure application.

Staging
In other word you can say testing environment, having similar configuration as per production. Before deploying to production (where actual user will use your application) you can deploy to staging to fix bugs, test security issues, configuration problem etc.

Production
It is actual environment where you can move tested staging application which will be used by real users. (you can directly deploy your application if you are confident on your testing!!)

In sort Swap VIP is azure feather to move application from staging to production by just one click!

How to use Swap VIP?
After testing your application just click on Swap VIP as per shown in above fig.and click ok and it will transfer from staging to production with zero downtime of your original application!

What will happen while swapping?
If you have notice DNS when you have created staging would be as per below.
ID + Cloudapp.net

and in production DNS would be actual URL with something like myapp.cloudapp.net
When you going to swap azure will just transfer this DNS entry.

Reference Links

• More info on SWAP VIP on msdn
• Swap VIP with screenshots
• Step by Step: Publishing your application and Swap VIP
• Make sure about your configuration setting when you will swap VIP
• Deploying application using azure management portal