Microsoft is continuing to broaden the pool of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) testers beyond the fairly small, select group who’ve been working with test builds for the past few months.

I know you already hate internet explorer, but there is never enough reason to hate it. Here are some more you can tell your internet explorer friends about. Ad Block Plus - I have no clue how I lived without this. It has changed the way I look at the internet. Its hard to browse without this. The extension will remove 90% of the ads on the net, and those of which that get through the filter can be blocked manually. Now that companies like comcast are adding bandwidth limit’s, this can help you take the useless load off.

Rich-text editors, also known as online rich-text editors, are web components that allow users to edit and enter text within a web browser. Rich-text editors are used in numerous ways such as in enhancing your comment input form or as part of a web application that allows entry of user-generated and formatted content. Rich-text editors are essentially web-based WYSIWYG (”what you see is what you get”) editors.

Within Project Management we use a lot of metrics. The metrics will provide some relatively objective "description" on how the project is doing. They are the Project Managers' seismometer, they record if your project world is rocking, and how hard. Traditionally our metrics are focused on time and money. But how about that all important resource, the developer?

There are so many undiscovered web services we have not heard of, so i decided to make a list of all the services i think are worth trying out. [they are categorized] I have not used all of these, even though i have tried some so let me know what you think of these in your comments and if you have any that i have missed please mention those too.

What is Magnolia Based in Basel (Switzerland), Magnolia International Ltd. is the developer of Magnolia, the first commercial open-source enterprise content management (ECM) system to seamlessly integrate web content management and document management through one intuitive, web-based, AJAX-powered user interface.

If conferences like JavaOne are a High School Pep Rally, then “No Fluff, Just Stuff” is skipping out on the rally, and smoking in the parking lot with the Cool Kids. While at the J1 keynote Rich Green envisions “Java on all the screens of your life”, at NFJS, Stuart Halloway declares without ceremony that “Java is dead”.

There are many untold stories in the world today. From saving lives to sacrificing your self for the greater good. Stories are past down from generation to generation and I want to make sure there is another story that is told to every programmer in the world. It is the story of those who write perfect code.

During the weekend, I tried out NetBeans 6.5 and its new PHP related functionality. I had earlier seen some quick shots of how the support was, and it seemed like a good contender for big names like Zend Studio.

Social media is the way to go now-a-days. After Orkut, Facebook and My Space we saw hundreds of social networking site making their mark in the market. However now a days socialness is not only restricted to social networking sites. Now every company wants to include some amount of socialness into their website, product or whatever it is. However the features which any of the social networking site provide are same and restricted to a certain extent. 3 of the sites which I have developed so far, all have socialness as a base component. (Gtalkbots, Altertunes, IITG Alumni) However after I saw Elgg a few days back, I was just wondering how much time I wasted in building social features in all the 3 sites. I just wish I could have found this before.

Last month I was interviewed by Yahoo-Inc! for a job as software engineer. Here I would like to point out the discussions and various question/answer sessions I went through before I got my confirmation letter :) Probably someone looking to join yahoo can take some tips from here. In total I went through 7 rounds of interview (1 telephonic, 1 HR, 1 with Manager, 3 technical, 1 general aptitude). I will try my best to recall and summarize all of them for you all. But before I go ahead, I would like to thank my good friend Rajib Das for forwarding my resume in Yahoo and providing me with an opportunity to have a crack at it. Here I go:

C# Coding Guidelines and Best Practices

A LinkButton in a GridView and my attempt to change the "Text" property of the control !

I often get asked by other developers at work or during presentations about various tools that I use. Most of the tools I use are relatively well known, but I'm going to create this post so that I have a single point where you can download everything without a bunch of Googling. Almost all of the tools on this list are free. My only disclaimer is that this is simply my personal list of the tools I use most often. If you're looking for a *real* list that is extremely comprehensive, then I recommended checking out Scott Hanselman's Tools List.

A lot of organizations I’ve worked with have said that they think adopting agile practices requires a tremendous amount of discipline for teams to be successful. I’ve thought about that a lot and I’m not sure I agree. Actually, it’s more that I don’t like the word discipline. Usually, when people refer to discipline in terms of successfully implementing agile practices, they mean the self-discipline of team members. Looking up self-discipline on Wikipedia, here’s what I found:

At Xebia India we were having training on Flex, and this gave me an opportunity to look deeper and around this new eye catching technology. During this learning period I came across a free online tool provided by Adobe Flex to create CSS for your flex application. It is not a full fledged application covering all the components present in flex, but with the minimal stuff on board it gives you enough knowledge to extend the CSS for all other components.

All from google interviews: questions, answers, puzzles, algorithms and real interview stories including phone interviews. If you want to be hired by google read this frist!

Task, Time and Project Management Software was always an important prerequisite for successful projects and not only in the software industry. Recently a lot of software was written using AJAX (guilty :-) making collaboration a lot easier. I have created a Google Table comparing 42 of them: Task, Time and Project Management Software http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pNzDN2mIRqnb81JK1LRxdFA

Have you ever wondered how PHP echo’s a “Hello World” for you on the browser? Even I didn’t until I read about the PHP internals and extensions. I thought may be a few out there will be interested in exploring the other side of PHP, so here we go.

Good typography on a website is an important part of the overall design of the website. The layout of the content, the choice of the fonts and the use of several CSS methods can improve the readability of the website and furthermore its whole design.

This is part 2 of the “jQuery From Scratch” series of tutorials. If you have not read part 1, you can have a quick read. This tutorial will deal with writing and executing functions in JavaScript.

Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong! is an eye-opening exposé on CSS as we know it today. You’ll discover a fresh approach to coding Cascading Style Sheets where old hacks and workarounds are just a distant memory. You’ll learn how to start taking full advantage of the very latest CSS techniques while still catering for older browsers and discover what’s put the final nail in the HTML table-based layout coffin.

Blue Ocean Strategy is book that presents a series of proven practices that help making companies so successful that their competitors become practically irrelevant. This book can provide great insight, whether you dream of building the next Google or Apple-like company, or you just want to understand how companies like that became so successful.

A comparison of two open source UML modeling applications starUML and argoUML.

iPhone and Adobe Air developers (as well as any others that use SQLite 3) Menial has just released an excellent little app for creating, managing and running queries against SQLite 3 databases called Bases.