Thank you!!!

I was surprised to see this report generated by WordPress. Thank you for all your valuable feedback and making the year 2014 a wonderful one. Wish you all a very sweet and prosperous Happy New Year 2015!

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,200 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 20 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Manage multiple environment settings using Web.config Transformation

Managing multiple environment settings is always a hassle, especially when you need to deploy your applications on multiple environments. You might have different connection strings and various other settings in your Web.config that you would like to turn on based on the environment.

Using Web.Config Transformation you can easily deploy your Web.config depending upon the environment. Visual Studio 2013 by default has this option for your Web.config. However, in Visual Studio 2010, you need to add the Config Transforms manually using the option as shown below

By default you get Transforms for Debug and Release solution configurations. Let’s say you want to add a Transform for a new environment, say, Staging. You can do this by adding this in your Configuration Manager. Select New option and add the new environment. I’ve already added Staging as you can see in the screenshot below.

Once Staging is there in your Configuration Manager then use the Add Config Transform option by right clicking the Web.config. The Transform for Staging gets added as shown below

Now let’s see how we can use different connection strings based on different environments. What happens internally is that the connection string specified in Web.confg will be replaced by the one in Web.Staging.config.

Let’s edit the Web.Staging.config. Uncomment the “connectionString” section. Here the value of “name” in Web.Staging.config will be matched with the “name” value in your Web.config and then the value of “connectionString” is replaced accordingly. This is because you have mentioned the value of xdt:Locator as Match(name). Hence it matches the name value “SQLConnection”

Once this is done, just select your required environment as shown below and your good to go.

Big data like teenage sex

Waterworld on earth

Recently I came across this website by KeralaTourism.org. Unlike any other tourism websites, this one is a bit different and I like the concept. It’s simple and lively. Below is a preview of the website you can check it out at http://greatbackwaters.com

My X’mas gift from Google!

Since these are very rare from Google, I’m treating it as a gift. 🙂

Dr. Phil’s Test

I found this interesting, so sharing 🙂

Will Google “crawl” to keep users?

Nearly all of Google’s revenues and profits are generated by its most popular service, Google Search. Over the years we have noticed how Google’s search results have transformed from mere blue links and descriptions to more meaningful results like, showing ratings and map locations within the search result itself. I myself had been analyzing and studying its content way back from 2003 onwards while I was building Kedrix.com, and at one point I was by heart with all the keywords using which I could get Google to show various formats of content. Ahh…those were one of the most exciting moments of my life.

Of late, I’ve been noticing some drastic change in the format of the content that is being displayed by Google. Compared to sites like Yahoo and Facebook, the search results provided by Google are not something very colorful. I mean the content is not very interesting or pleasing enough for you to remain on the site. The moment you’ve found what you’re looking for, you would click the link and you are on a different website. I guess this has been worrying Google, since the “Time Spend” on Google’s search result page by a user would be very less as compared to websites like Facebook.

Take a look at the sample search results below.

Notice the areas marked red in the above screenshot. The top section of the page tempts you to click through each one of them and know their details. Also, see the left side just below the top section, it shows complete details of Larry Page and I need not visit Wikipedia to get that information.

Here are couple more samples.

You never got such kind of results few years back. So after seeing all these different types of search results what do you think Google is up to? Any bells ringing? Well, let me ask you one more thing. When was the last time that you had to go to the second or third page of the search results because you didn’t find your result in the first page itself? I don’t think this has ever happened to me in the past one year, the first page of the search result has always given me what I needed.

So is Google building its own content and gradually remove all the unwanted blue links and pages because the user always found what they needed in the first page itself? I strongly feel so. See the screenshots once again; Google is trying to display its own content first followed by its usual set of links. If this is the case, then the content area can be utilized in a much efficient way rather than showing some boring blue links and then it would eventually get its users to spend more time on its page and thereby get a bit more of the “Time Spent” slice from competitors like Facebook.

Interestingly, with the advent of the “Graph Search” feature on Facebook, Facebook is now capable of showing search results similar to Google. Don’t believe me? See the screenshot below. So is Facebook going to give Google a run for its money? Hmm…let’s wait and watch.

SQL query to update multiple records simultaneously

Here I’m going to show you a SQL query by which you can update multiple records at the same time. The snapshot below shows the data that is currently available in the table.

The query below would update two records with different value for the Location field. You can also see the data in the table after the update.

All you need to know about Marketing :)

A Professor explained Marketing to MBA students

1. You see gorgeous girl in party, you go to her & say I am rich marry me That’s Direct Marketing.
2. You attend party & your friend goes to a girl & pointing at you tells her. He’ is very rich, marry him – That’s Advertising.
3. Girl walks to you & says u are rich, ca…n u marry me? “That’s Brand Recognition”
4. You say I m very rich marry me & she slaps u “That’s Customer Feedback”
5. You say I m very rich marry me & she introduces you to her husband “That’s Demand & Supply Gap”
6. Before you say I m rich, marry me, your wife arrives, That’s Restriction from Entering New Market.

Guess now you got what it takes to Market something. You need to be rich. 😛

SQL to get duplicate records

Here I’m going to show you the query to get all the duplicate records from a table. Below is a sample table Employee which has the duplicate data “Bangalore” in the Location column.

You can use the query mentioned below in order to get the duplicate records.