GuruStop.NET

Today I was supposed to deploy some changes on company static website made by web designer. The website source is hosted using SubVersion (SVN). I thought it’ll be great if I can export just the changes he did with their folder structure and without asking him to do anything extra, and deploy that.

Here are the steps using TortoiseSVN:

1. Right Click The working, choose TortoiseSVN => Show Log
   
2. Since he used multiple revisions, I selected the those revisions, right clicked, and chose “Compare revisions”
   
3. Selected all files, right click, and choose “Export selection to…”
   
4. Simply choose the destination folder from the folder selection dialog that comes up, and here we go.

That was very quick hint, but hopefully helpful to someone. I’m sure there must be other ways to do it also BTW, but this was the quickest to try with an empty head.

Just a hour ago, I got an interesting question via the contacts page in this blog, about search engine optimization, and I wanted to share the answer with you…

The question is:

I’m a software engineer and SE Optimizer. I’m currently assigned a project that needs general information of the mini sites and blogs regarding their SEO strategy and daily revenue. I read your blog a lot in my .net related problems and thought of finding the details about your blog.
I found out that there are daily ~900 page views of your blog and your page rank is 3.

Mohamed what I wanna know is that whether you have employed any SEO strategy on your blog or this is just the good will traffic that comes to view your blog.

Also what is the daily ads revenue of your blog and what kinda ads you have deployed on your blog.

Although my Google Analytics statistics tell me slightly better results than mentioned in this message,, this is an interesting question I’d love an answer indeed. Scott Hanselman taught us though it’s better to reply to those in public and share the benefit with everyone, let’s see:…

SitePoint, a well-known publisher of nice easy-but-deep books in web design and web related stuff, has celebrated the end of the world cup (and the fact that Spain has won) by putting an ebook of one of their titles for FREE (“jQuery: Novice to Ninja”, 407 pages) – only for 24 hours (which I don’t know starting what hour, so, go quick!)

Get the book by putting your email here (you receive the PDF link by email):
http://sale.sitepoint.com/

Thanks Scott Hanselman (@SHanselman) for spreading on twitter, hence getting me to know about the book!

Have fun,

This is something I have posted to a private mailing list before, and thought since I have only fixed number of keyboard strokes to death, I should be sharing it with larger audience…

Before Beginning

I know some of the audience of this blog may have not even tried ASP.NET MVC, so, you may need to bare with me for a while ((and those familiar with it just bypass this section please).

In ASP.NET MVC, the request goes to a specific method (commonly known as Controller Action) to handle it (choosing which method/action is based on something called Routing, we don’t care about that for now).

Once the method is executed, typically it ends with calling a page or user control (commonly called a View) to send some markup to the browser. Usually this is an ASPX or ASCX file without code behind. It has some special properties to interact with the data coming from the controller action, and some special shortcut methods to write HTML markup (called HTML helpers).

http://www.101ftb.com/T80G10C780

Five days ago I got a great email from 101 Free Tech Books. Seems the drawing I wrote about is real!!

Yes, I won a FREE print book. Filled in my shipping information yesterday and got the post that confirms my order was being processed. Feels so real! I’m even asked to give testimonials after receiving the book, which I will…

Which Book?

The book I have chosen is “Professional WCF 4: Windows Communication Foundation with .NET 4”. Sounded like a great title!

There is a trick in here. The option for books is only available from my wish list prior to the random drawing. I didn’t pay enough attention to this earlier, so, had a very small wish list of just “sample” books in it. Some of them I already had as ebooks. This was not very right.

I also tried to choose another book, add to my wish list, and go back to choosing again, but, as mentioned, only the books added prior to wining were there. Makes sense though!

You Can Win Too!

Now, I can recommend those people even more! They emphasize completely on showing how real this is, and I seem to believe them so far.

The SVN News

Today I was hanging around GitHub when realized a relatively old news, dated to April 1, 2010, saying they do support SVN.

Announcing SVN Support

Yes, it’s April Fools day. Very funny date to announce anything serious as they admit themselves in an update to the news post, but it DOES work.

Use the same Git clone HTTP URL, just add “svn.” between “http://” and “github.com”:

http://svn.github.com/[user]/[repository]

It even allows you to write changes back to the repository, as announced in the more recent news post, dated May 4, 2010, check it out for the “cavets” (known issues):

Subversion Write Support

That uses the same URL but with HTTPS:

https://svn.github.com/[user]/[repository]

This should work best when you want to get some project for read-only access or very few commits from your side, when this project has a very long history you are not really interested in. Of course you wouldn’t want to use that if you are leading (or a main committer to) a project hosted at GitHub.

Just noticed this great website for free printed technical books, with free shipping included.

Of course as you know, the sky doesn’t rain gold. Simply this is an advertisement based website (you may have expected it), and advertisement sponsor those books.

Every month they make a drawing for all registered users to choose which ones they’ll send free book. You go, register,, and choose your wish list, and hopefully be included in the drawing for a soon month!

Not bad given you don’t have to do much effort for getting in.

This is the registration link, through my reference:

http://www.101freetechbooks.com/T80G10C780 

This is how they express it:

101FreeTechBooks.com gives you 101 chances to win real tech books each month. Simply choose the books of your choice each month and automatically participate in monthly drawings. monthly winners will receive their books, shipped directly to them, for FREE. Even shipping is free. Want to increase your odds of winning? Simply refer your friends. Don’t miss your chance to win! Start browsing book catalog

Go try it out…

http://www.101freetechbooks.com/T80G10C780

Good Luck!

My friend and colleague Ahmed Ebrahim Nasser forwarded a nice email to a set of friends, which I want to share with you. It included some advices from the “Life’s Little Instruction” book. The email is in Arabic:

Life’s Little Instruction Book

جاكسون بروان .. لما جاء ولده يدخل للجامعة قرر يكتب له النصايح اللي يحتاجها من وجهة

نظره كأب .. بزعمه بيكتب ورقة ولا ثنتين تفاجأ انه كتب 1560 نصيحة ..!

ومن كثر ماعجبت أهله وأصحابه طبعها في كتيب (Life’s Little Instruction Book)

وحققت أفضل المبيعات لعدة سنوات بقائمة نيويورك تايمز

هذي أهم ماكتب (حسب ما ذكر الكاتب/فهد الأحمدي ) ..

1.    احذر من عروض البنوك مهما كانت مغرية !

2.    اهدِ حماتك وردا في عيد ميلاد زوجتك !

3.    لا تترك منزلك دون جهاز لكشف الحريق !

4.    توكل على الله ولكن أغلق بابك جيدا !

5.    لا تيأس أبدا واحتفظ بخط للرجعة !

6.    لا تتخذ قرارا وأنت غاضب !

7.    كن شجاعا ، وإن لم تكن كذلك فتظاهر ، فلن يلاحظ أحد الفرق !

8.    حاول فتح السيفون وأبواب الحمام "بكوعك" !

9.    تعلم كيف تستمع فالفرص الخفية تحتاج لأذن قوية !

A great VIDEO series on all the nice effects (and functionality) you can achieve with jQuery JavaScript library for those who know NOTHING about it.

jQuery is a very powerful library. One of the first things I do when creating new project is to include the library in it. Microsoft is going to include it by default in ASP.NET web projects (All ASP.Net projects, not just MVC) starting Visual Studio 2010.

Here are some few examples of what you can do with it (VIDEO):

http://net.tutsplus.com/articles/web-roundups/jquery-for-absolute-beginners-video-series/?awesm=fbshare.me_EIez#

Have fun jQuerying…

If you heard about Microsoft Oxite CMS, this is the new one, created as a different project to avoid previous developer comments.:

From Press:

Microsoft’s open-source CMS platform is (re)born | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=4506

Project Homepage:

http://orchard.codeplex.com

Quote From Press:

The guesses (by me and others) look like they were on target. The “Orchard Project,” which is getting its debut on November 11 at Tech Ed Europe is, indeed, the successor to the Microsoft Oxite content-management system (CMS).

Microsoft made available the first the open-source Oxite CMS bits at the end of 2008. Like Oxite, Orchard will be a free, open-source CMS platform — plus a set of shared components for building ASP.Net applications and extensions. The Orchard code is licensed under an OSI-approved New BSD license.

From the Orchard page on the Microsoft CodePlex code-repository site:

“(T)his core (Orchard) team will use their experience working with ASP.NET and Oxite to deliver a fundamentally new architecture that is the Orchard CMS. We have deliberately chosen to start development, with the guidance and contribution from the community. Over time we expect this project to become a viable successor to Oxite v1 and we know that providing a migration path for users of that existing application will be a high priority.”