GuruStop.NET

For many years, people used to laugh at the World End 2012 prophecy. This year, people’s joke was that we’d be very lucky if we manage to get to the end of 2011 even!
Yeah, 2011 is such a bloody, surprising, rich, optimistic, pessimistic, and loaded year. So many events, so many famous deaths, so much fire, so much energy, and indeed, so much hope.

Seems we are lucky anyway. We’re only less than two weeks close get into 2012, Many have either started their holidays already, or just about to.
Unless you believe that year is the end of the world truly (no, not discussing it even!), that alone should make you optimistic :-)

The title “Year O’clock” is not mine, it’s my colleague, Steven Nagy. I may talk about the origin of the name later, for now, let’s say it’s a friendly internal new year’s resolutions cheer-up message.
Few days after I responded to it, I thought I’d share my response with you too, after removing some customer identifying parts and adding some context to a few parts of course.

The Year O’clock Email:

Just Three Questions

1. Work related highlights for the year

   • Been across 4 different big clients in the same year. Really enjoyed them all

Hey folks, I just removed the default WordPress search widget and a new one using the HTML 5 input search type, a bunch of CSS 3 (and fall back for older browsers like older versions of IE), and a little bit of JavaScript. It’s still based on the same background image used in this blog theme though.

Since some of you might be interested, here is the code that I use to implement it, instead of you trying to hack it with different browser developer tools!
Not the exact code though, but a version that is heavily commented for your convenience

You can skim quick over the the simple HTML, spend some time with the CSS bits (most work is done here), and have a look at the bonus JavaScript, see the result without the context of the blog itself, and if you feel excited, click the "+" icon on the right to start editing it yourself to come with better implementation or fix a bug.!

If you like this post, you may want to share the post or comment below encouraging me to write more similar posts, maybe also check what offers are available by bog partners, or, follow me on twitter (@Meligy).

If you work on a solution that requires multiple startup projects, you can change that in Visual Studio:

One catch though is that sometimes Visual Studio will switch the Startup project to whatever project you select in Solution Explorer (work on one of its files).

If this happens to you, just select one of the projects as a Startup Project.

This seems to "stop" the automatic Startup Project "Feature" from Visual Studio. Click File -> Save All Files to ensure it’s saved, or even restart Visual Studio.

Of course you’ll need to set the multiple startup projects again after that.

Reference

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4434/can-i-configure-visual-studio-not-to-change-startup-project-everytime-i-open-a-f

Recently I started working on some interesting HTML 5, CSS 3 and JavaScript bits (involving jQuery and jQuery UI). I have worked with all of them before, but not as extensively. Most of my work is some reusable stuff that I can develop generic demos out of (from scratch, unrelated to the custom stuff required here), however, the size of each made me always lazy to take the opportunity to share some nice stuff with you via GuruStop.

I decided to encourage myself to stop laziness by sharing a very small part, then hopefully follow with the real interesting stuff.  Today we look at a simple String.Format() function, similar to the one available in .NET / C#, meaning it uses {0}, {1}, etc… as placeholders.

Look at the code, click the “HTML” tab for the sample HTML used for this one(just a div with an ID), and “Result” for trying it out yourself.  You can also click the “+” button at the right and edit it if you like to!

Note that this one is intended for simple scenarios only. If you need complex / flexible templates, use some templates library like JsRender or knouckOutJS templates.

This is copied from one of my replies in WebHostingTalk. Thought it might be useful for GuruStop readers too.

The purpose of the reply was to provide a review to Burst.NET, my budget VPS hosting (with some references to a premium (yet premium) VPS, SoftSys Hosting), but the real value of the reply, is to help give realistic expectations about various differences when deciding to choose a "good" budget VPS Windows hosting.

The Review

Generally speaking as a "current" customer with Burst.NET. Their equation is:
Budget Price = Good Service + Enough Support + Poor SLA

So, most of the time the server is working, most of the time it’s working, it works really fast (compared to my chosen specs, 1.5GB RAM Windows), the network also is really nice especially their West Coast (LA) location.

Given that, sometimes the VPS is slow, sometimes too slow, once it was slow that was unusable.

When the server is just slow, the services hosted on it didn’t seem to be much affected, when the server is too slow or reaches the unusable state, I get between 5 minutes to 2 hours downtime (happened only once).