Xbox 360: Turn Your Xbox 360 into a Streaming Netflix Player

 

Xbox 360: Turn Your Xbox 360 into a Streaming Netflix Player

MySQL ASP.NET Tutorial

 

A Step-by-Step Guide To Using MySQL with ASP.NET

• Part 1
• Part 2

 

MySQL 5 C# sample code using ObjectDataSources

Consolas Font Pack Download from Microsoft

 

Download details: Consolas Font Pack

Share MotionBased activities on Facebook with MyMotionBased - Garmin Developer

 

We were quite impressed when we heard about the MyMotionBased application (requires login to view) for Facebook written by Matthew Underwood.

This application allows Facebook users to integrate their recent MotionBased activities into their Facebook profile and see their friends’ activities.

Here’s what the application looks like in my Facebook profile view:

Share MotionBased activities on Facebook with MyMotionBased - Garmin Developer

Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Web Services

 

Amazon SimpleDB

Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity.  Amazon SimpleDB requires no schema, automatically indexes your data and provides a simple API for storage and access.  This eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning. Developers gain access to this functionality within Amazon’s proven computing environment, are able to scale instantly, and pay only for what they use.

Amazon SimpleDB Functionality

Amazon SimpleDB provides a simple web services interface to create and store multiple data sets, query your data easily, and return the results.

You organize your structured data into domains and can run queries across all of the data stored in a particular domain.  Domains are comprised of items, and items are described by attribute-value pairs.  To understand these elements, consider the metaphor of data stored in a spreadsheet table. An Amazon SimpleDB domain is like a worksheet, items are like rows of data, attributes are like column headers, and values are the data entered in each of the cells.

However unlike a spreadsheet, Amazon SimpleDB allows for multiple values to be associated with each “cell” (e.g., for item “123,” the attribute “color” can have both value “blue” and value “red”).  Additionally, in Amazon SimpleDB, each item can have its own unique set of associated attributes (e.g., item “123″ might have attributes “description” and “color” whereas item “789″ has attributes “description,” “color” and “material”).  Amazon SimpleDB automatically indexes your data, making it easy to quickly find the information that you need.  There is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later.

To use Amazon SimpleDB you:

• CREATE a new domain to house your unique set of structured data.
• GET, PUT or DELETE items in your domain, along with the attribute-value pairs that you associate with each item.  Amazon SimpleDB automatically indexes data as it is added to your domain so that it can be quickly retrieved; there is no need to pre-define a schema or change a schema if new data is added later.  Each item can have up to 256 attribute values.  Each attribute value can range from 1 to 1,024 bytes.
• QUERY your data set using this simple set of operators: =, !=, <, > <=, >=, STARTS-WITH,  AND, OR, NOT, INTERSECTION AND UNION.  Query execution time is currently limited to 5 seconds.  Amazon SimpleDB is designed for real-time applications and is optimized for those use cases.
• Pay only for the resources that you consume.

Amazon.com: Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Web Services

Free Camtasia download

TechSmith is now offering Camtasia 3 as a free download. (Camtasia 5 is their latest version and has many nice improvements, but Camtasia 3 is still very capable.)

You can download the setup file from http://download.techsmith.com/camtasiastudio/enu/312/camtasiaf.exe.

One of the places to get the license file is http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia/pcpls.asp.

Detecting USB Drive Removal in a C# Program

Excerpt from article:

“

Introduction

This article describes my C# class called DriveDetector which will allow your program to receive a notification when a removable drive (such as a flash drive) is inserted or removed. It also supports notifications about pending removal of such a device and cancelling this removal.

This is an updated version of the article first published in March 2007. The class is now easier to use — there is no need to specify a file to open on the flash drive or override WndProc in your code. For details please see the What’s new section at the bottom of this page.

Note that this class uses .NET Framework 2.0. It will not work with older versions. Also, it will only work in applications which have a window (not in console applications).

Recently, I wrote a program which allows the user to encrypt data on his/her flash drive. The program should decrypt and encrypt the data transparently when flash drive is inserted/removed. For this I needed to be informed when a flash drive is plugged in and when the user decides to remove it. I am quite new to C# so I started searching the internet for some solution. It didn’t take me long to find out how to detect when a removable drive is inserted or removed, but I had a hard time trying to figure out how to get notified when the drive is about to be removed (when user clicks the remove hardware icon in system notification area). After making it all work I decided to put the code into a simple-to-use class and make it available to everyone. I hope you will find it useful. It’s far from perfect but it works.

“

Read more…

Via Detecting USB Drive Removal in a C# Program - The Code Project - System Programming

favicon.ico Generator

 

How does it work ?

• Choose a color
• Click on the squares and paint your logo
• Download when you are finished
• Put the favicon.ico file into your webserver directory
• Optionally publish it under the CC (Creative Commons) license

favicon.ico Generator

Http Sniffer

Fiddler is a tool that “sniffs” all HTTP traffic by inserting a proxy between the WinInet stack your web calls. The proxy then outputs its results to a very cool windows application that will display your traffic real time. The following screen shows the output of the current version of fiddler.