Background images for Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 beta

According to statistics about 45% of people use Microsoft Outlook as email client. About 10% of people use Outlook 2007. So it is a big deal for marketing departments to create and implement attractive HTML emails using Outlook 2007 email client. And it was pretty easy to do using any version of Microsoft email client released earlier Outlook 2007.

Why?

The problem is that both Outlook 2007 and 2010 beta do not support background images for any element except body. So which difference between these two versions leads to this issue? Outlook 2003 uses Internet Explorer to render HTML emails. Unfortunately Outlook 2007 uses Microsoft Office for this purpose.

How to learn any new programming language faster then ever

It’s always difficult to learn something new. Nevertheless, there are some techniques and tricks that can be very helpful for beginners who want to become Java, .Net, php, flash programmers, etc. So using them you can learn any new language easier, faster and more efficiently:

Set your time commitments

Don’t think that you can learn a new language, giving it only half an hour every day. It’s much better (more productive) to read textbooks devoting the whole day to this activity (better 1-2 days a week then 30 min a day).

Use cribs
Cribs may be more valuable than it might seem at the first glance. Writing cribs is one of the most useful methods of learning (they are not only reminders, but also your samples and tips).

Collect all the necessary material
There are many resources for any programming language: Flash and Flex, AJAX, coding for mobile applications and others. Some of them are very good, others are not. Collection of numerous textbooks and internet-sources will allow you to choose the best authors and the easiest approaches. So, use Google and collect guides and manuals for programmers, articles in different media, post in popular blogs and respected forums.
And the last point: make sure that you understand the basis of language, before you will begin to work with examples. You wont be able to built a house without foundation.

Help to understand bugs with CamStudio

Sometimes it is necessary to write a sequence of operations with the program for describing a bug. It helps software developers to increase the quality level as they spend much less time to understand a bug, and one clip can substitute a page of text. For such cases there is a program CamStudio.

Its installation is simple and should not call any questions. The main program features: Region – it is possible to select an area which will be captured in a video clip. Accessible values – region, fixed region, full screen. If select the option ‘Region’ the size of the recorded area will be necessary to set each time anew. ‘Fixed region’ – the fixed size of the area, before the recording begins it is necessary to specify only where it will be located on the screen. ‘Full screen’ means a full-screen mode.

Option-> Enabled Autopan. If you set this mode, the capture area will follow the cursor. At the same time it will be possible to expose the speed of frame moving.

Tools-> Screen Annotations. In this case it is possible to add various notes on the screen in the form of nice images. The image with the text can be placed in the necessary part of the screen and can be recorded.

And finally, in the menu ‘Options’-> Keyboard shortcuts – It’s possible to customize “hot” keys for various operations with the program.

Average Salary of Developers in various countries

The question of the “Salary” is one of the most interesting and also mysterious question that almost every person is taking an active interest in discussion when pertinent time was come. And almost every person wants to know the great secret – salary of his colleagues to compare with own salary (may be boss underestimated his skills and the time to do meeting with boss is come), but how can he ask them?

Salary is also a very private theme to have a talk about. We try to lift the veil of mystery from this question and you will know not only about the salary of your colleagues but will have a possibility to compare your own salary with salary of developers in various countries. I hope you will take a good time while reading this
article.

First of all, let’s gossip about the salary of our neighbours, then will travel to America and the sweetest information about the salary in our country will leave in the end.:)

Microsoft DevDays in Minsk. Visual Studio Team System 2010

My expectations were justified – it was the most interesting part of conference “Microsoft DevDays“: the presentation of the first demo of Visual Studio Team System 2010.

Approximately in a year we’ll be able to see all new features ourselves, but now only announcements and demos. According to the company official information it will be the largest release in the history. All graphic interfaces will be rewritten using WPF. That will allow to accelerate work of visual editors and to reduce the size of required free space. By the way, rumors that the installation will require 75 Gb of disk space, are just rumors.

Microsoft DevDays in Minsk. Introduction

Microsoft DevDays is one of the largest developer conferences in Europe. It is visited by thousands of developers and becomes more popular each year. Today it was held in Minsk. There were reported several topics naturally related to Microsoft solutions:

• Usage of SilverLight 2;
• Introduction to Windows 7 for developers;
• Development of applications using Live Services;
• Visual Studio Team System 2010: first view.

High qualified specialists announced their products and answered our questions. It is very pleasant that such conferences become a good tradition. Thank to Microsoft for the provided information and for sure, thanks to us, developers, their products become even more popular, and customers will have no doubts in a platform choice.

More details about conference topics in next posts…

The peculiarities of .NET and C# programming language

Visualstudio2008 and language C# on the .NET platform is often used for software development. The .NET absorbed all advantages that were available in the market of software development. The .Net platform uses the opportunities of XML and Web in full. It can be called one of the best platforms for development, especially when web-services are concerned.

The sight into web development is completely revised in .NET programming, powerful and suitable in use is given to our attention technology of ASP.NET, that noticeably avoids developments of rivals. To write code on ASP.NET is simpler , much quicker, and decision is got excellent on productivity.

C# is an object oriented language of programming for the .NET platform. It was developed by a group of developers under the aegis of Microsoft Research (SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH INSTITUTE at the Microsoft company).

Using jQuery with ASP.NET MVC

ASP.NET MVC is an upcoming framework that enables you to build Model View Controller (MVC) applications by using the ASP.NET Framework. ASP.NET MVC is not a replacement for ASP.NET Web Forms. It is an alternative that offers the following benefits:
• Testability – support for Test-Driven Development (TDD)
• Clear separation of concerns
• Fine-grained control over HTML and JavaScript
• Intuitive REST URLs

The flexibility and power of ASP.NET MVC allows for developers to use libraries other than those include in the box. And the popular JavaScript framework, jQuery, is no exception.

The popularity of jQuery as an easy-to-use JavaScript library used from any web development platform makes the ability to be used with the ASP.NET MVC Framework especially attractive. One of the reasons on which developers can use libraries like jQuery is designed-in extensibility of ASP.NET MVC.
And in the end great news for web developers: Microsoft announces about distributing jQuery with Visual Studio. It will help to build easier rich internet applications (RIAs) for Microsoft’s .NET Framework with Visual Studio.

Using .NET for Software Testing Automation

Nowadays software testing is a rapidly growing up sphere. And software testing engineers may be found employed in different sectors. Lots of methodologies are widely known:
-Agile testing;
-Extreme testing;
-Scrum testing;
-White Box testing;
-Traditional Black Box testing and others.

The Black Box testing is the most popular and called for in many companies around the world. For years experts had been developing different costly commercial tools to lessen testing efforts and to increase the efficiency and quality of software testing, but lots of them were nonviable in practice. Later in 2001, some testing experts offered to create the software utilities for their manual-and tool-automated testing efforts.

.NET programming

Microsoft.NET – is a concept of fast and qualitative program development. The .NET concept is created according to the new world situation which requires more high-quality and secure programs.

You need to setup .NET Framework Redistributable Package for executing the .NET program. It has only 25MB and you can download it from www.microsoft.com site. Usually .NET applications are small programs (.exe or .dll).

But in future .NET will be in all computers all over the world. The .NET will change web-sites. It will be an application which can be accessed via any device by the net.

You need Visual Studio for .net applications, web-applications, web-services development. Also you need some components from .NET Framework SDK. You can see the .NET applications code using C# or Delphi with the help of Reflector for the .NET tool. You can create a .NET program using any language which has a compiler. It’s possible to create your own compiler and add it to Visual Studio. Such compilers exist now: The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework, Delphi for .NET compiler and others.

.NET applications simplify the System Administrators’ life. They are small and secure and don’t break servers. They control a computer memory and access failures.