ASP.NET SignalR

What can ASP.NET SignalR do?

ASP.NET SignalR is a library for ASP.NET developers that simplifies the process of adding real-time web functionality to applications. Real-time web functionality is the ability to have server code push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available, rather than having the server wait for a client to request new data.

You may have heard of WebSockets, a new HTML5 API that enables bi-directional communication between the browser and server. SignalR will use WebSockets under the covers when it's available, and gracefully fallback to other techniques and technologies when it isn't, while your application code stays the same.

Platforms

SignalR is supported under a variety of server and client configurations. In addition, each transport option has a set of requirements of its own; if the system requirements for a transport are not available, SignalR will gracefully failover to other transports. For more information on the transports that SignalR supports

Supported server .NET Framework version

SignalR 2 is only supported on .NET Famework 4.5.

Supported server operating systems

Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 2008 r2

Windows 8

Windows 7

Windows Azure

Supported server IIS versions

IIS 8 or IIS 8 Express.

IIS 7 and 7.5. Support for extensionless URLs is required.

IIS must be running in integrated mode; classic mode is not supported. Message delays of up to 30 seconds may be experienced if IIS is run in classic mode using the Server-Sent Events transport.

The hosting application must be running in full trust mode.

What can you do with ASP.NET SignalR?

While chat is often used as an example, you can do a whole lot more. Any time a user refreshes a web page to see new data, or the page implements Ajax long polling to retrieve new data, is candidate for using SignalR.

It also enables completely new types of applications, that require high frequency updates from the server, e.g. real-time gaming.

Packages

All SignalR development packages can be fetched through NuGet. Normally, you just need to fetch Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR (Package ID) which contains most of the components you need, including:

Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Core: server side components used to build SignalR endpoints.

Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Owin: OWIN host for SignalR.

Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.SystemWeb: used to host SignalR in ASP.NET (via OWIN ASP.NET host).

Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Js: JavaScript client for SignalR.

Dependencies are also included: jQuery, Newtonsoft.Json, Microsoft.Owin.Host.SystemWeb, Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure and OWIN.

You could fetch other SignalR packages when you need:

Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Client: .NET client for SignalR (includes WinRT, WP8 and Silverlight5).

Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Redis: Redis messaging backplane for scaling out SignalR in web farm.

Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.ServiceBus: Windows Azure Service Bus messaging backplane for scaling out SignalR in web farm.

Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.SqlServer: SQL Server messaging backplane for scaling out SignalR in web farm.

Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Sample: used to quickly setup a working sample in your application.

Ref : Clickhere..

Keep hitting..
Jidheesh

New Features of Firefox 16!

Incremental GC in Firefox 16!

Firefox 16 will be the first version to support incremental garbage collection. This is a major feature, over a year in the making, that makes Firefox smoother and less laggy. With incremental GC, Firefox responds more quickly to mouse clicks and key presses. Animations and games will also draw more smoothly.

The basic purpose of the garbage collector is to collect memory that JavaScript programs are no longer using. The space that is reclaimed can then be reused for new JavaScript objects. Garbage collections usually happen every five seconds or so. Prior to incremental GC landing, Firefox was unable to do anything else during a collection: it couldn’t respond to mouse clicks or draw animations or run JavaScript code. Most collections were quick, but some took hundreds of milliseconds. This downtime can cause a jerky, frustrating user experience. (On Macs, it causes the dreaded spinning beachball.)

Incremental garbage collection fixes the problem by dividing the work of a GC into smaller pieces. Rather than do a 500 millisecond garbage collection, an incremental collector might divide the work into fifty slices, each taking 10ms to complete. In between the slices, Firefox is free to respond to mouse clicks and draw animations.

At this point, we’re still working heavily on incremental collection. There are still some phases of collection that have not been incrementalized. Most of the time, these phases don’t take very long. But users with many tabs open may still see unacceptable pauses. Firefox 17 and 18 will have additional improvements that will decrease pause times even more.

If you want to explore further, you can install MemChaser, an addon for Firefox that shows garbage collection pauses as they happen. For each collection, the worst pause is displayed in the addon bar at the bottom of the window. It’s important to realize that not all pauses in Firefox are caused by garbage collection. You can use MemChaser to correlate the bumps in the chart with garbage collections reported by MemChaser.

If there is a bump when no garbage collection happened, then something else must have caused the pause. The Snappy project is a larger effort aimed at reducing pauses in Firefox. They have developed tools to figure out the sources of pauses (often called “jank”) in the browser. Probably the most important tool is the SPS profiler. If you can reliably reproduce a pause, then you can profile it and figure out what Firefox code was running that made us slow. Then file a bug!

Keep hitting..
-- Jidheesh Rajan --

Top New Features in Visual Studio 2012

Programmers,

Microsoft is releasing Visual studio 2012 with new features. Here are some of the most important new features in this VS 2012 release. 


REVAMPED UI

The UI is probably the first thing you’ll notice about VS 2012 RC. The monochrome scheme in earlier versions of VS 2012 was met with a bitter backlash as developers took an instant dislike to it. In fairness, the idea was to deemphasize the UI and make the code stand out more. However, that was a bad idea. VS 2012 RC reintroduces color, and once again you can tell the difference between the icons on the toolbars. That said, personally, I prefer the VS 2010 UI and colors (except for the cool game-like installer in VS 2012 RC). 


ABILITY TO BUILD METRO-STYLE APPLICATIONS

VS 2012 lets you build Metro apps using HTML, JavaScript or XAML and VB, C# or C++, and it includes a new set of Metro-style app templates. It also supports building Windows Phone applications.

MICROSOFT.NET FRAMEWORK 4.5

While it’s not technically a part of VS 2012, every new release of Visual Studio is accompanied by a new release of the .NET Framework. In this case, it's the new .NET Framework 4.5. Its big changes include improved support for parallelism and IPv6, support for zip compression, HTML 5, WebSockets, and WPF Ribbon bar support. ASP.NET Web Forms has been updated to support the asynchronous modules and handles, lots more.

LIGHTSWITCH

In earlier releases of Visual Studio, LightSwitch was a separately purchased product. The VS 2012 release includes LightSwitch in the VS 2012 Professional editions and above. I always said LightSwitch was a developer tool and not a user tool, and it seems that Microsoft now agrees. The VS 2012 LightSwitch has a new theme, support for branding, and improved performance.

IIS EXPRESS

Visual Studio used to use its own ASP.NET Development Server as the default web server for locally running and testing web applications. However, that meant you often ran into a variety of differences and incompatibilities when you went to deploy your applications on IIS. VS 2012 solves this problem by using IIS Express as the default local web server. IIS Express is a lightweight, self-contained version of IIS. It has all of the core capabilities of the full-fledged IIS, but it doesn't run as a service.

SUPPORT FOR WINRT

In conjunction with the new support for Windows 8 and Metro, VS 2012 also includes support for the new WinRT subsystem. WinRT (Windows RunTime) is the new programming model used by Metro. VS 2012 supports WinRT development in C++, C#, VB, and JavaScript. Programs written using WinRT should run on both Intel and ARM processors.

NEW SOLUTION EXPLORER

As you begin to use VS 2012, you’ll definitely notice the new Solution Explorer. It's like a cross between the old Object Browser and Class View. You can navigate your project’s objects and drill down into methods and properties. It also enables you to search and preview file, objects and external items.

NEW SQL SERVER OBJECT EXPLORER

Visual Studio has always been weak in the area of SQL Server navigation. VS 2012 improves its SQL Server integration with the new SQL Server Object Explorer, which is more like SQL Server Management Studio than the old Server Explorer. The new SQL Server Object Explorer shows column data types as well as primary and foreign keys.

more: http://www.sqlmag.com/article/visual-studio2/features-visual-studio-2012-143367


-- Jidheesh Rajan --

Kartograph

Kartograph : jQuery Interactive map applications without Google Maps




Kartograph is a new framework for building interactive map applications without Google Maps or any other mapping service. It was created with the needs of designers and data journalists in mind.
The core concept of Kartograph is to separate the mapping process in the map generation and map rendering part. The client-side library kartograph.js renders pre-generated maps stored in SVG files. You can chose among hundreds of ready-to-use maps or simply generate your own using kartograph.py, the open source Python SVG map generator.

The magic behind Kartograph

The core concept of Kartograph is to separate the mapping process in the map generation and map rendering part. The client-side library kartograph.js renders pre-generated maps stored in SVG files. You can chose among hundreds of ready-to-use maps or simply generate your own using kartograph.py, the open source Python SVG map generator.

From ideas to maps

Choose which map you want to display and which projectionshould be used. Currently you can create maps from ESRI shapefiles only, but more formats will be supported in the future. To help you a bit, there now is a visual editor that gives you a JSON configuration for your map.

Generate the map SVG using kartograph.py. Customize the map, filter or join features, add a graticule.

Load the generated SVG into your website using kartograph.js. Specify which layers to add and add some decent styling to them using CSS. You can even add more advanced styling using SVG filters.

Visualize your data using map symbols, choropleth maps or dot grids.

more: http://kartograph.org/

-- Jidheesh Rajan --