Well it's strange, I've been sick for the past few days and popping up Tablets and up comes my friend from Microsoft Raj Chaudhri requesting I work on a session based on the Tablet PC :-)
Strange and funny I find it. Well he ran me thru some of the important things he wanted to get covered and it was a healthy introduction for me to the world of tablets. We explored the Tablet PC SDK. The transition to it was pretty easy. I'm getting my hands dirty with it, will post more on it as I play around with it further.
Tuesday, July 22, 2003
More on Word
One more thing which my friend(Dr. Nitin Paranjpe) taught me was to pay attention to what I type in word.
Whenever you type anything in word. Click anywhere in the text don't select anything then choose the "Tools" menu and in it "Spelling and Grammar". A dialog box called Readability Statistics pops up. In it check the readability section. The reading ease number indicates how easy it is to read this document and the grade level tells you how high a person in terms of grade is easily able to read this document. The higher the reading ease figure(highest is 100) and lower the grade level, the more readable is your document. Now is this a wow feature or what ? I was quite amazed at the little nuggets the word developers have put into word. Btw these features are supposedly there in MS Word since Word 97. It's just most of us don't event know about it. Sad but true.
One more thing which my friend(Dr. Nitin Paranjpe) taught me was to pay attention to what I type in word.
Whenever you type anything in word. Click anywhere in the text don't select anything then choose the "Tools" menu and in it "Spelling and Grammar". A dialog box called Readability Statistics pops up. In it check the readability section. The reading ease number indicates how easy it is to read this document and the grade level tells you how high a person in terms of grade is easily able to read this document. The higher the reading ease figure(highest is 100) and lower the grade level, the more readable is your document. Now is this a wow feature or what ? I was quite amazed at the little nuggets the word developers have put into word. Btw these features are supposedly there in MS Word since Word 97. It's just most of us don't event know about it. Sad but true.
Word the wonder tool
I was speaking to a friend of mine, a prominent expert(Dr. Nitin Paranjpe) on various tech topics, he'd come down home to down a few drinks and it was amazing, the number of tricks he showed me. One could teach an old dog like me :-)
One of them I just couldn't forget. Type the following statement and hit enter at the end of it in word.
=rand()
You get a statement which is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
The default is you will get 3 paragraphs of 5 sentances each. Incidentally these cover all the letters in the english alphabet
play around with the numbers
=rand(1) gives you one paragraph of 5 sentances.
=rand(1,4) gives you one paragraph of 4 sentances.
now who would want a function like this is what you're thinking, well in the old days you wanted to test if you old printer is capable of printing all characters then this was a quick way of testing all the alphabets see if they are working fine.
Also for instructors they could get a page full for demo purposes right away to showcase formatting etc. etc. basically to enable them to teach better... I'm sure there are many more such gems lying around not just in word but in each and every tool which one uses.
I was speaking to a friend of mine, a prominent expert(Dr. Nitin Paranjpe) on various tech topics, he'd come down home to down a few drinks and it was amazing, the number of tricks he showed me. One could teach an old dog like me :-)
One of them I just couldn't forget. Type the following statement and hit enter at the end of it in word.
=rand()
You get a statement which is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
The default is you will get 3 paragraphs of 5 sentances each. Incidentally these cover all the letters in the english alphabet
play around with the numbers
=rand(1) gives you one paragraph of 5 sentances.
=rand(1,4) gives you one paragraph of 4 sentances.
now who would want a function like this is what you're thinking, well in the old days you wanted to test if you old printer is capable of printing all characters then this was a quick way of testing all the alphabets see if they are working fine.
Also for instructors they could get a page full for demo purposes right away to showcase formatting etc. etc. basically to enable them to teach better... I'm sure there are many more such gems lying around not just in word but in each and every tool which one uses.
Friday, June 27, 2003
Connection String
First there was the connection then came the data. The string to many an application
I went back to the basics on this one...
the connection string is the very first things I decided I should play with.
connection strings come in so many flavors it is amazing.
In any connection string you need to specify a couple of things, the source place where the database resides, the database name itself, authorization credentials. These are the basic things you need to provide. The fun part is when you realise that each can be provided in so many different ways...
take this simple connection string
connstring = "Data Source=local; database=Northwind;user id=sa; password=;"
Lets examine this one...
Data source tells us where the data resides, which server.
Database: Tells us the name of the database
User id & password: provides the ceredentials for accessing that data.
Another connection string
connstring="Server=local; Initial Catalog=Northwind; uid=sa;pwd=;"
Now here we've replaced our initial "local" keyword with "Server", "database" with Initial Catalog, and "user id" with "uid", "password" with "pwd"
You think thats all ... wait till you see this one ...
connstring ="Addr=10.0.0.1"; Initial Catalog=Northwind;Trusted_Connection=True;"
hey what happened to the user id password... and what happened to the server name.... and would you believe it there are a couple more combinations in which you can specify the basic constructs of your connection string. So initially when people learn it one way confuse them with another and another.. Oh yes you say all the stuff about backward compatibility and more options to the developer... but to those writing articles and books out there... they should reference a particular topic "SqlConnection.ConnectionString Property" present in the MSDN documentation. This shows the numerous options out there to connect. Can you think of how many options are possible ? keep guessing or read the documentation :-)
First there was the connection then came the data. The string to many an application
I went back to the basics on this one...
the connection string is the very first things I decided I should play with.
connection strings come in so many flavors it is amazing.
In any connection string you need to specify a couple of things, the source place where the database resides, the database name itself, authorization credentials. These are the basic things you need to provide. The fun part is when you realise that each can be provided in so many different ways...
take this simple connection string
connstring = "Data Source=local; database=Northwind;user id=sa; password=;"
Lets examine this one...
Data source tells us where the data resides, which server.
Database: Tells us the name of the database
User id & password: provides the ceredentials for accessing that data.
Another connection string
connstring="Server=local; Initial Catalog=Northwind; uid=sa;pwd=;"
Now here we've replaced our initial "local" keyword with "Server", "database" with Initial Catalog, and "user id" with "uid", "password" with "pwd"
You think thats all ... wait till you see this one ...
connstring ="Addr=10.0.0.1"; Initial Catalog=Northwind;Trusted_Connection=True;"
hey what happened to the user id password... and what happened to the server name.... and would you believe it there are a couple more combinations in which you can specify the basic constructs of your connection string. So initially when people learn it one way confuse them with another and another.. Oh yes you say all the stuff about backward compatibility and more options to the developer... but to those writing articles and books out there... they should reference a particular topic "SqlConnection.ConnectionString Property" present in the MSDN documentation. This shows the numerous options out there to connect. Can you think of how many options are possible ? keep guessing or read the documentation :-)
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