Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb.com published his list of 2009 Web Predictions just before the new year. Here are the predictions that I like from the list published:

1. iTunes adds social networking features.
2. Microsoft releases a cool online version of Office, but then Google releases an amazing new version of Google Docs.
3. Professional twitterer becomes a real job.


4. Google will finally offer a comprehensive online storage solution and some kind of travel product.
5. Exciting new open source projects will emerge and grow due to a growing number of un/under employed engineers.
6. Under pressure from iPhone, Android, Symbian, and RIM; Windows Mobile will attempt to reinvent itself. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it will be about as successful as Vista and the Zune.

To add to the list, here are my own predictions:

1. iPhone will rise the ranks in mobile gaming to compete with Nintendo DS and PSP.
2. More PC and Windows enthusiasts switch camp and move to use Mac Book and OSX.
3. Google Chrome gains more browser market share.
4. TV advertising and viewers reduce as streaming of live events increases on YouTube.

What are your predictions?

Google included an Easter Egg in its Google Mobile Application. I discovered it yesterday after receiving a tweet from a friend. The Easter Egg is found in the Settings page and it is called Bells and Whistles. The Easter Egg does exactly that. It allows you to change the Theme Color, Sound and other settings in your Google Mobile App.

How to uncover the Easter Egg?
On your iPhone or iPod Touch, go to Google Mobile App and click/touch on Settings which is at the bottom right of your iPhone/iPod Touch screen.

Then scroll to the bottom of the page. The last menu displayed is the About menu. Continue to move your finger upwards rapidly as though you are scrolling to the bottom of the page even though it is already the bottom of the page. After a few seconds, the Easter Egg is uncovered and you will see a Bells and Whistles menu.

Click on Bells and Whistles. This will uncover the Bells and Whistles settings. You can change the Theme Color, Sounds, Live Waveform and Open Links in App.

Enjoy uncovering the Easter Egg!

I wrote this post months ago but didn’t get around to publish it. I know that SQL Server 2008 is now an available product but many of us are still using SQL Server 2005 and have created a lot Data Transformation Services (DTS) in the past.

In SQL Server 2005, Microsoft replaced DTS with SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS). The common work flow IDE that I am familiar with in SQL Server 2000 is now called SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio. It is a Visual Studio 2005 development environment which allows the creation of Analysis projects, Integration Services projects and Reporting Services projects.

However, all is not lost for SQL Server 2000 DTS packages. SQL Server 2005 provides backward compatibility. You can import existing DTS packages into SQL Server 2005 and run them like how you would in SQL Server 2000. If you look at the SQL Server Management Studio (the replacement for Enterprise Manager), you will see that SQL Server 2005 provides legacy support for Maintenance Plans, DTS and SQL Mail.

If SQL Server 2005 supports legacy DTS then it means you can edit and make changes to existing DTS packages in SQL Server 2005. To do that you have to download SQL Server 2000 DTS Designer Components and install it first.

The DTS Designer Component has the familiar DTS interface you see in SQL Server 2000. You can edit, run now or schedule the DTS to run as a scheduled job using the DTS Designer Component. Migration of DTS to SSIS project is also catered for. SQL 2005 provides a migration wizard. Since the design of DTS is very different from SSIS, migration may not always be 100% successful. Chances are the migration may not migrate all tasks successfully. For tasks that fail to migrate properly, the suggestion is to create them in SSIS using the SSIS objects.

I came back from a long walk around Kingston-upon-Thames earlier and thought about the performance of my Mac and said to myself I have never defragged the hard drive since I bought the machine a few years back. I thought should I attempt to do a defrag on a Saturday afternoon.

If I want to defrag then which reliable utility should I use. As usual when in doubt, the best thing to do is to Google and guess what. Defragging your Mac hard drive is a thing of the past, like shoulder pads and hair mousse! That is because of the way the OS X operating system manages files.

The system optimizes itself after a system update of installation of a new application but you can still run a defrag utility to defrag your Mac’s hard drive if you wish to. It could take up to several hours and you may not see any significant performance improvements.

Here are some useful tips I learnt about OS X.

1) OS X automatically defrags files that are less than 20 megabytes.
2) If you make it a habit to periodically clear your Mac’s various caches, including those associated with your Internet browser, it can also help speed up your machine.

Are there other option besides defragging?

Yes, you can reformat our hard drive. That’s a crude method but remember to backup all your documents and files before you attempt anything that involves the word format!

In Part II of ASP.NET AJAX Extenders, I will continue by showing the PopUpExtender example. Below is an example of a PopUpExtender. In the PopUpExtender example, you will see the web page Ajaxified when the magnify image is clicked. The PopUpExtender will return details about the row item. This is achieved by a Web Service that we will examine further in the code-behind of the ASP.NET page. Before we do that, we will first learn how to add a PopUpExtender control to an ASP.NET page.

How to add the PopUpExtender control.

In the Visual Studio design mode, click on the Toolbox to see a list of AJAX controls available. The PopUExtender control is one of the controls in the list below.

Drag the PopupExtender control onto the ASP.NET page in design mode. You have to also add a Panel control onto the same ASP.NET page. Let’s examine the page.

The PopUpExtender properties:

DynamicServiceMethod=”GetDynamicContent”
This assigns the Web Service method that will be called when you click on the magnify image. GetDynamicMethod will contain code that will fetch the data from a database and display it in the yellow panel in browser like the first screenshot above.

DynamicContentKey=Databinder.Eval(Container, “DataItem.name_day”)

This is the key value that will be used by GetDynamicContent to fetch the data from the database.

DynamicControlID=”Panel1″

This tells the PopUpExtender control which is the control ID to use when data is fetched. In this example it is Panel1.

TargetControlID=”Image1″

This sets the magnify image as the TargetControlID. When you click on the TargetControlID in the user interface, it fires the DynamicServiceMethod.

PopupControlID=”Panel1″

The returned data is sent to Panel1.

Position=”Right”

Position to display the returned data in Panel1. You can set either to the left or right. See the first screenshot for example.

Let’s examine the code-behind

Now that we have gone through the design source, we will examine the code-behind for GetDynamicContent.

The code-behind of GetDynamicContent uses System.Web.Services to fetch the data. The contextKey value is passed into GetDynamicContent and data is fetched and we use StringBuilder to build the string that will be returned back to the PopUpExtender control. Essentially you can code anything you want in GetDynamicContent. What I have shown here is just an example. This concludes Part II of Using ASP.NET Extenders.

Other related Ajax: Beginning AJAX with Visual Studio 2005

What is ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit?
The ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit is a shared source project built on top of the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX framework. Microsoft and the ASP.NET AJAX community has made it possible to develop sophisticated AJAX web applications using the AJAX Control Toolkit.

How does ASP.NET AJAX Extenders fit into the ASP.NET AJAX picture?
ASP.NET AJAX extenders are controls that enhance Web UI server controls using AJAX to create an interactive web experience.

Here are two AJAX extender examples to elaborate the point of interactive web experience.

The first example is using the CalendarExtender and the second example is using the PopUpExtender.

CalendarExtender Example

In the CalendarExtender example, the idea is to achieve the above. When a user clicks on the calendar image, the calendar will pop-up. When a date in the calendar is selected, the textbox will be populated with the selected date. You see this type of control a lot on air line reservation websites.

To achieve this, we need to add a TextBox control, a Image control and a CalendarExtender control. To validate the controls, we have also added a RequiredValidator and a CompareValidator as a date checker. In the design view in Visual Studio, the controls will look like this:

Adding the CalendarExtender control.

If you have installed the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, in the Toolbox in Visual Studio, you will see a list of AJAX controls available. The CalendarExtender control is one of the controls in the list below.

Let’s examine the CalendarExtender code

In the CalendarExtender properties from the source code, you will see the following:

ID=”CalendarExtender1″
runat=”Server”
TargetControlID=”TextBox1″
Format=”dd/MM/yyyy”
PopupButtonID=”Image1″

TargetControlID tells the CalendarExtender control that TextBox1 is the target for the value selected from the CalendarExtender control. In this example I have defined the date format as “dd/MM/yyyy” since I am coding in UK date format.

PopupButtonID tells the CalendarExtender control that when Image1 is clicked, the CalendarExtender control should appear/disappear depending on its present state.

You will notice from the source code there is a TextBox control, an Image control and validation controls added. In order for the CalendarExtender control to work, it requires a TextBox control and an Image control and the validation controls were added simply to make the code more robust.

Let’s examine the code-behind

Do you need to add code-behind code in order for the CalendarExtender control to work? The answer is no but I am showing you that you can tell the CalendarExtender control to display today’s date whenever the web page is loaded. So this is an extra. It requires just a single line of code TextBox1.Text = System.DateTime.Now.ToShortDateString(); in Page_Load

Now compile the code and run the example in Visual Studio. This concludes Part I of Using ASP.NET AJAX Extenders. In Part II of Using ASP.NET AJAX, we will examine the PopUpExtender Example.

AJAX related post: Beginning AJAX with Visual Studio 2005

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The Lost Identity by ~NKeo on deviantART

When you publish a post in WordPress, the following error message appears.

The latest Wordbook plug-in fixed the problem. To upgrade to the latest version of the plug-in, simply go to plugins in WordPress and click auto upgrade your Wordbook plug-in.

If you look below, you will see a steady growth between 2004 and now which is as expected considering weblogs become popular in recent years but what is more interesting is to see that the majority of regional interest in WordPress Theme is from the Asian region, mainly Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Singapore, etc. (Take a look at the screenshot no. 2).

The assumption I can make based on the search result is the growth of Broadband usage in the Asian region and the availability of lower cost shared hosting have contributed towards the interest in creating a self-hosted blog, hence the search for WordPress Theme.

Screenshot no. 1

Screenshot no. 2

The rising search terms gives even more interesting insights into my search on WordPress Theme. Clicking on WordPress Magazine Theme reveals that a Western region interest and the interest picked up in 2007.

Screenshot no. 3

Screenshot no. 4

Google Insights has just revealed very useful information for me which I can use strategically if I am planning to advertise WordPress Theme products. The key search phrases reveal a completely different regional audience.

My analysis tells me that the Asian region WordPress users are still searching for “free” themes but in the Western region, users are more interested in magazine style themes and are more likely to pay for these themes.

Another reason could be that the Western region users are using WordPress for business and the magazine theme is more appealing and professional looking while the Asian region users are mostly personal blog users.

The revelation is Google has given another powerful free tool for users and web strategist to learn more about search patterns. It is a tool that should not be overlooked.

Link: http://www.google.com/insights/search/