Event Details: Windows 7 for Geeks

Yesterday, 20th March 2010, I organized and participated as speaker, “Windows 7 For Geeks” event. The overall objective was to introduce the Windows 7 API for managed developers so that they, as a third party application developer, know how to utilize the capabilities and design experience of Windows 7 in their applications.

I’m very glad to see the growing interest of the technical community and students in such events. For me speaking in community is not all about sharing! It’s about interacting and having an in-person relation with community. So thank you all for coming to the show. For details about the event, please click here to read blog post on Emerging .NET Devs site.

Speaking at Windows 7 for Geeks

For last few months, I was quite busy with my responsibilities at work and post graduation studies and due to that I was unable to make any community engagement. I’m glad to announce that this week I will be speaking in the event “Windows 7 for Geeks” organized by Emerging .NET Devs.

The event is re-scheduled on 20th March, 2010. To read further details or attend the event, click here.

Microsoft Courier : Digital Journal

Around 12 hours back, Engadget shared exclusive pictures and video of upcoming Microsoft Courier (tablet/digital journal/ebook device), which they came to know from an “extremely trusted source” :)

The device seems spectacular to me and personally I think seems better than iPad ;) As per the Engagdet “it's under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn't much bigger than a 5x7 photo when closed”. Check out the leaked video below:

To read more, you may check out on one of the following sites:

• Engagdet
• RedmondPie

Pretty exciting stuff!

Microsoft Ajax Minifier

One good thing I came across at the Microsoft MVP Summit is that Microsoft released Ajax Minifier, a tool to compress the size of Javascript (.JS) and Cascading Style Sheets (.CSS) files. Later I found a Scott Gu post on it.

The Microsoft Ajax Minifier is a small tool to remove unnecessary content from your js or css file. It can bring down the size of js file by 60%. You can download the Ajax Minifier from here.

After installing the tool, you will get a command prompt

and let’s say I have a js file with name “Validations.js” Let’s try minifying the file using this tool

A point to note here is:
Original Size: 7710 bytes; reduced size: 4918 bytes (36.2% minification)
Gzip of output approximately 1586 bytes (67.8% compression)

Currently the Ajax Minifier ships with two modes of

1. Normal Crunching
2. Hyper Crunching

With normal mode, it removes extra whitespace, all comments etc. When you use Hyper crunching mode it takes some more additional steps that includes shorting the name of local variables etc.

In order to use hyper crunching mode you need to add –hc switch in the command line. For instance:

ajaxmin validations.js –hc –o validations.min.js

So go ahead and try it out. Another great thing is that Ajax Minifier can be integrated with Visual Studio as well, which I will cover in the next post.