Finally I made up my mind and have started using the free trial of Office365. The setup is a breeze. I choose the P1 plan. Basically I am interested in Sharepoint Online part of the Office365. But it also come up with Exchange online and Lync Online. Additionally we get Office Webapps and Calendar apps.

The admin page is clean and intuitive. Calendar and Exchange reminds me of the Hotmail UI except everything has tint of orange instead of blue. Office Webapp reminds me of the Skydrive product. In future I hope Microsoft integrates all these into one. I dont have  office Mac so couldnt try the offline document management part.

Coming to the Sharepoint Online side, after setup it creates a Teamsite (Intranet) and an external facing Website. The external facing website home page looks lame and I might need to create my own home page. The Site features and Site Collection Features available are very less compared to an on-premise Sharepoint installation. I was expecting to have Publishing feature available but its not. But I think I can live with that.

I was able to connect to the external site using Sharepoint Designer 2010 which was seamless(surprisingly). Haven’t tried modifying existing pages or Master pages yet. But creation of new Webpart page and Blog subsite worked!!. As expected creation of Publishing subsite failed.

So far I am impressed. Will keep testing the various Sharepoint and other office features of office365.

I was totally unhappy with the Windows 2008 R2′s classic windows desktop.  After following the steps  at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/What-is-the-Aero-desktop-experience

I was able to get Aero experience on my Windows 2k8 R2 machine.

But, what if you have a local SQL server instance instead of SQLExpress or your instance name is not SQLExpress? EF won’t connect automatically to the Instance in either of these cases,unless you explicitly provide your connection string.  How can you use the local SQL Instance without specifiying the connection string?

It is possible. Here is where we need to see what exactly EF looks for connecting to a SQL instance. To be precise EF looks for .\SQLExpress instance  in your local system. To make EF connect to any SQL instance just create an alias named “.\SQLExpress” for your SQL Instance. This can be done via SQL Server Configuration Manager tool as shown below.

Now EF connects to the SQL instance just fine as if it were local .\SQLExpress instance.

Starting up with EF 4.1  can be found here and resources found here.

Walkthru video can be found here.

In conjunction with Asp.net MVC3 EF Code First in EF 4.1 is the robust platform to develop Web applications.

<td> Will Accept?</td>

 <td>

@Html.RadioButtonFor(x => x.WillAccept, true)

@Html.RadioButtonFor(x => x.WillAccept, false)

</td>

Now how can we show one radio button selected by default? There are two ways of doing it.

The first option is to pass the “checked” html attribute as a parameter to the Html helper method by creating an anonymous object as below

<td> Will Accept?</td>

<td>

@Html.RadioButtonFor(x => x.WillAccept, true, new { @checked = “checked” })

@Html.RadioButtonFor(x => x.WillAccept, false)

</td>

The Second option is to set the value of the corresponding model property in the controller itself

public ActionResult Feedback()

{

UserResponse usr= new UserResponse();

usr.WillAccept = false;

return View(“Feedback”,usr);

}

Both work perfectly, but note that, setting the value via model overrides passing via html parameter. So if both of the above options are used the default value of the radio button will be false.

Leave a reply if you find it useful

http://www.discountasp.net/tfs/tfs-hosting-features-pricing.aspx

Nice RT @spolsky Digg: 200MM page views, 500 servers. Stack Overflow: 60MM page views, 5 servers. What am I missing?

then goes on to retweet the reason too

RT @spolsky (nb Stack Overflow is ASP.NET MVC + SQL Server, Digg was LAMP)

now that is very bold to claim isnt it..? Is PHP on Linux that bad in terms of performance..? I did some search and it seems the claim might be indeed valid at least as per the below link

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9017778/How_Digg.com_uses_the_LAMP_stack_to_scale_upward_

I will try to post some ASP.net MVC related stuff in coming weeks.

• C#1 was all about delivering a new language for a new platform.
• C#2 was all about providing generics to improve strong typing, especially in collection handling situations.
• C#3 was all about letting write strongly typed queries abstracted from the date source. As a consequence C#3 fosters a more declarative way of programming.
• C#4 was mainly about dynamic programming to inter-operate with dynamic programming environment.
• C#5 will be concerned with meta-programming.