SQL Server AZURE code-named "Denali" is ready for Download

Microsoft SQL Server code-named “Denali” empowers organizations to be more agile in today’s competitive market. Customers can efficiently deliver mission-critical solutions through a highly scalable and available platform. Industry-leading tools help developers quickly build innovative applications while data integration and management tools help deliver credible data reliably to the right users and new user experiences expand the reach of BI to enable meaningful insights. It provides a highly available and scalable platform with greater flexibility, ease of use, lower TCO, and the performance required by the most mission-critical applications.

Top SQL Azure Features:

• No software to install or hardware to set up.
• High availability and fault tolerance.
• Simple provisioning and deployment.
• Frictionless application development.
• Scalable databases based on business needs.
• Multitenant support.
• Integration with Microsoft Visual Studio.
• Transact-SQL development support.
• Familiar, relational database model.
• ADO.NET, OBDC, JBDC, PHP, and OData support.

Download free trail from here.

New Year Eve : 2011

Wish you happy new year to you and your family. Hope you all have a wonderful and loving year. Welcome to Year 2011.

Skype Adds Video Calling to iPhones, iPad, iPod touch

Skype today announced that the new version of its iPhone application adds video call support, allowing users to make video calls over 3G and Wi-Fi networks. This means that users of the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch are now able to make and/or receive free video calls with one another, as well as with anyone else running Skype software that supports video calling.

Silverlight Programming: RadComboBox Virtualization

Telerik RadControls' API gives you the ability to configure the RadComboBox to support virtualization, which reduces the memory footprint of the application and speeds up the loading time thus enhancing additionally the UI performance. Some times its required to load thousands of items in a RadComboBox. By default the control creates RadComboBoxItem containers for each data item, so it might take some time to open the drop-down. To resolve the problem you just have to change the RadComboBox's ItemsPanel with VirtualizingStackPanel:

Here is the snippet of code block

<telerik:RadComboBox HorizontalAlignment="Left" TextSearchMode="StartsWith"
IsFilteringEnabled="True" OpenDropDownOnFocus="True" Width="200" 
IsEditable="True" IsDropDownOpen="False" Name="AccountDropDownList" 
SelectedValuePath="customer_number" DisplayMemberPath="customer_name" >
  <telerik:RadComboBox.ItemsPanel>
       <ItemsPanelTemplate>
        <VirtualizingStackPanel />
      </ItemsPanelTemplate>
  </telerik:RadComboBox.ItemsPanel>
</telerik:RadComboBox>

Hope this is useful

Silverlight Programming : “Operation not supported on read-only collection”

Recently when I was trying to bind data to a Combo box conditionally I got this message saying "Operation not supported on read-only collection". Though I am clearing items in the collection and binding the ItemsSource I got this error. So I have set ItemSource to null before I clear the items. It worked well for me. Here is the sample snippet for doing this.

CarrierAccountDropDownList.ItemsSource = null;
CarrierAccountDropDownList.Items.Clear();
CarrierAccountDropDownList.ItemsSource = e.Result;

Happy Coding