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Critical Mistakes Freelancers Make

  Seeing as we are all human (well, presumably whoever is reading this post anyway), we should recognize that mistakes happen. They even have that saying, "To err is human.," which goes to show that it is not only commonplace for us to err once
 
Robert Bowen
Nov 29 2009 02:52 AM
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Airtel's Unlimited Internet Plan is a LIE!

When you get an unlimited internet connection from Airtel don't forget to read the fine print. The plan is not actually unlimited the way you expect it to. Airtel has introduced a 'Fair Usage Policy' which is very unfair to its customers. Under this
 
Cyril Gupta
Oct 31 2009 10:20 PM
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Make apps for Android or iPhone

Smartphones are the big boom in the US and the next big boom in India. With the arrival of 3G there will be compelling reason for mobile users to upgrade to a smartphone. There is a good scope for small players to make little fortunes developing and
 
Cyril Gupta
Oct 31 2009 10:20 PM
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30
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Better CSS for everybody [SASS]

Today I ran into an innovation called SASS. This is a technology that puts CSS on steroids and takes it beyond the designers to programmers. SASS is CSS scripting to allow programmers to write CSS in a more elegant and organized manner. You've got
 
Cyril Gupta
Oct 31 2009 10:20 PM
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4
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Solving Delegate Variance

Delegate variance is a thorny issue, and one seen a lot if you have ever tried writing a general-purpose winform handler (to catch lots of categories in events). Simply, it doesn't really exist. Background Consider the problem between: Noting that
tags: c#
Nov 29 2009 01:51 PM
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Can you hack this out?

I recently had to take a really deep look into how to cheat the CLR, that brought about some interesting discoveries, including the fact that it is, surprisingly, possible to do so. Let us say that you have this code in some 3rd party assembly that you
 
Ayende Rahien
Nov 19 2009 03:06 PM
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3
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Google Analytics goes async

Today’s announcement that Google Analytics Launches Asynchronous Tracking is music to my ears. Not only does it make web sites faster, switching over to this async pattern improves uptime and increases the amount of analytics data gathered.
 
Steve Souders
Dec 02 2009 05:34 AM
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NHProf.com downtime, and using windows as a server system

Yesterday nhprof.com was down, there was a YSOD and when I logged into the server to try to figure out what the problem was, I got this: The server has been running with no issues for over a year, so it is not an issue with not activating after
 
Ayende Rahien
tags: bugs
Nov 30 2009 11:20 PM
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Bye bye Stack Overflow

Last night I decided to stop using Stack Overflow. The reasons have nothing to do with the quality of the system itself. Stack Overflow is a great platform and will serve it's users for a long time. For the past few months I've been using the system less
Nov 30 2009 07:39 PM
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Microsoft AJAX CDN - Now with SSL Support

Back in September I blogged about the new Microsoft AJAX CDN (Content Delivery Network) service that the ASP.NET team is now providing.  The CDN provides edge caching support for AJAX libraries (including jQuery and ASP.NET AJAX).  The service
 
ScottGu
Nov 30 2009 06:52 AM
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Excluding Code from Code Coverage Metrics

I was working on a small application today and it included a very thin wrapper around .NET Framework classes to make my code easier to test (i.e. providing interfaces and adapters for .NET Framework classes so I can mock them out). Because these wrappers
Nov 29 2009 10:27 AM
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DelphiSpeedUp 2.8 testers needed (D6-D2007)

Last week I had to start working with Delphi 7 again. And if you are already used to the speed of Delphi 2009 and 2010 the Delphi 7 IDE seems to be slower than expected. Especially if you have a large project and you want to pause the application or step
 
Andreas Hausladen
tags: delphi
Nov 29 2009 06:18 AM
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XML Literals in VB - Real World Usefulness?

Just a quick recent thought. As I am watching the PDC09 videos made available free online by Microsoft, I got me thinking more about the changes/improvements in VB. A new feature for VB 9 was XML Literals. You know, writing/pasting plain old XML into
Nov 29 2009 12:14 AM
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Silverlight RIA Services Code Gallery

Microsoft WCF RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms using WCF. You can find a bunch of useful resources via the RIA Services Code Gallery.
 
admin
Nov 28 2009 10:59 PM
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Custom value types are like buses

You wait years to write one. and then six of them come along at once. (Cross-posted to the Noda Time blog and my coding blog as it's relevant to both.) When we started converting Joda Time to .NET, there was always going to be the possibility of
Nov 28 2009 02:52 PM
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How would you learn a new platform?

Here is an interesting problem that I am facing. I have a pretty good working knowledge of computing, and while I can usually manage to get the gist of a new technology in a short amount of time, that is only useful for talking about it, not actually
 
Ayende Rahien
Nov 23 2009 03:00 PM
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Open Source Revolution

As we close out a decade, I was reflecting on what it was like to write code 10 years ago. I had just started at a startup then called Quadrian (later MetaMatrix) and working with five other developers in the frontage space of a steel mill (super cheap
Nov 23 2009 08:27 AM
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SQL SERVER - A Common Design Problem - Should the Primary Key Always be a Clustered Index

In SQL Server, whenever we create any key, a Primary Key automatically creates clustered index on the same. I like this feature and I use this feature every now and then. The question is does the change of any column as Primary Key should also create a
Nov 23 2009 06:43 AM
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Does history matters?

In Gmail, right now, I have 65,290 (non spam) messages, stretching back over 3 years. I routinely (once a week or so) need to refer to something that is at least six months old. I just had to dug in old backups to find an instant message log from 2006,
 
Ayende Rahien
Nov 20 2009 02:42 PM
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ASP.NET MVC 2 Custom Validation

This is the third post in my series ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta and its new features. ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta Released (Release Announcement) Html.RenderAction and Html.Action ASP.NET MVC 2 Custom Validation In this post I will cover validation. No, not that kind of
Nov 20 2009 11:24 AM
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An Early Look At IE9 for Developers

We're just about a month after the Windows 7 launch, and wanted to show an early look at some of the work underway on Internet Explorer 9.  At the PDC today, in addition to demonstrating some of the progress on performance and interoperable
 
ieblog
Nov 20 2009 10:23 AM
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19 Sites with Attractive Headers and Footers

Hi all, J000 here to present to new inspirational post. More and more designers are taking advantage of every space in the a website layout. We now see beautiful and unique headers as well as incredible deliciously well designed footers. I wanted to show
Nov 19 2009 03:32 PM
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scripty2 - A new Javascript framework

Scripty2 is a new javascript framework aimed at creating great user interfaces and being able to pull off fancy animations with ease. It has been made by the same people who made the other popular framework script.aculo.us. The documentation is great, it
 
Ben Shelock
Nov 03 2009 08:45 PM
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Justifying Limitations on Copyright...

In this ongoing digital debate, there are those who believe that the idea of copyright is sacrosanct, and that copyrighted material can never be used without the author's permission. Of course, those individuals are completely clueless about actual
 
Rob Domanski
Apr 30 2010 11:44 AM
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Advanced jQuery techniques

Talk by John Resig about jquery advanced techniques.See also Slides from Talk and jQuery site.
 
Salvador Gascon
Mar 14 2010 03:37 AM
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Don’t let document ready slow you down.

I just wanted to quickly post about a common performance hit that I see in pages (including a bit of my old stuff), especially ones that load data on page load. A common pattern for application development loads a page template with the application code
Jan 09 2010 10:56 PM
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Create PHP Classes with Dynamic Functions

As you have probably found out, when I see something interesting I don’t know how to do, my only goal is to figure out how to do it. Thus is the case with PHP classes featuring dynamic methods based on database records (or arrays). I took some time
tags: php
Dec 05 2009 04:20 AM
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Improvements in Intellisense post Beta 2

I've written a couple of posts in the last month or so soliciting performance feedback from you all and talking about our performance efforts.  Since we realized the degree of performance problem that we still had, we have spent a ton of effort
 
bharry
Dec 05 2009 01:13 AM
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2
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Reading Frenzy

I don't usually read non fiction books, I read some tech books, but that is work, more than anything else. I do read a lot, and I thought that I might post what I like, in hope to get recommendations for more stuff. The following list is mixed between
 
Ayende Rahien
tags: books
Dec 04 2009 11:04 PM
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Get those pixels working for you

I just can't say enough about multiple monitors. I've had two monitors since 2003 and three since later that same year and have been hooked ever since. If you're working on a computer I'm convinced you need to fill your field of vision with the work at
Dec 04 2009 01:49 AM
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Why do Swedes count "1, X, 2"?

Occasionally, when an article in Swedish needs to count off three items, they are not labelled "1, 2, 3" but rather "1, X, 2". Why is that? I asked Jesper Holmberg, and he was kind enough to explain. (The entire exchange naturally was
 
oldnewthing
Dec 03 2009 10:34 PM
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Twitter historical database of my tweeps

In my never-ending attempts to distract you from doing real work, I give you something you have absolutely no use for: a SQL Server database backup with about 100k tweets from people I’ve followed over the last couple of months. I use Tweet-SQL to
Dec 03 2009 07:03 PM
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Handling production errors in a messaging environment

So, today I got the first L2S Prof order. As you can imagine, I was pretty excited about that. However, it turned out that I had actually missed something when I built the backend for handling L2S Prof ordering. The details about what actually went wrong
 
Ayende Rahien
Dec 03 2009 02:25 AM
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T4CSS: A T4 Template for .Less CSS With Compression

Pain is often a great motivator for invention, unless you become dull to the pain. I think CSS is one of those cases where there's a lot of pain that we as web developers often take in stride. Fortunately not everyone accepts that pain and efforts such
Dec 03 2009 01:57 AM
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Pushing Your Buttons With Practical CSS3

  Pushing Your Buttons With Practical CSS3 (via @smashingmag) -CSS3 is the partially implemented sequel to the CSS2 spec we all know and love. It's already popping up in new browsers such as Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and Chrome. In this article,
 
Jonathan Smiley, Mark Otto
tags: design
Dec 02 2009 08:02 PM
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Image Reflection with jQuery and MooTools

One subtle detail that can make a big difference on any web design is the use of image reflections. Using them too often can become obnoxious but using reflections on large, “masthead” images is a classy enhancements. Unfortunately creating
tags: jquery
Dec 02 2009 06:48 PM
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Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: December 2009

  Over the last months our readers were complaining about the low quality of wallpapers featured in the Desktop Wallpaper Calendar series here on Smashing Magazine. To keep the very high quality of the competition and motivate artists and
 
Smashing Editorial
Nov 30 2009 11:07 PM
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Introducing MooTools ScrollSidebar

How many times are you putting together a HTML navigation block or utility block of elements that you wish could be seen everywhere on a page? I’ve created a solution that will seamlessly allow you to do so: ScrollSidebar. ScrollSidebar allows you
Nov 30 2009 07:05 PM
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Qizmt: MapReduce Framework in C#

I was recently surprised to find that MySpace had open sourced a distributed “MapReduce Framework” called Qizmt (http://qizmt.myspace.com/). From the site’s description: MySpace Qizmt [kiz-mit] is a mapreduce framework for both
 
Joel Martinez
Nov 29 2009 10:22 PM
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Versioned Data

In about one of two projects the customer comes up with the requirement of ‘historization’ of data. And more often then not this lead to an unholy back and forth of discussions, prototypes and complaining. The reason for this as far as I can
 
Jens Schauder
Nov 29 2009 03:16 PM