Gil Fink's Blog : TECH

IE9 Site Pinning

Gil Fink — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 13:45:23 GMT

IE9 Site Pinning

One of the new features that will come with IE9 is the pinned sites ability. In this post I’m going to explain what is site pinning and show an example for how to do this stuff. If you want to read about this new feature in Hebrew you can read my Newsgeek article.

Site Pinning

IE9 Beta was released last week with a lot of browser improvements and features. One of the new features it includes is site pinning. In this feature we can drag a tab from the browser and pin it to the windows taskbar.
I’ve build a simple site to demonstrate how to do that:

This is the template that you get when you create a new web application in VS2010.

Lets pin the site. First drag it:

Then pin it to the taskbar:

Then it is pinned:

Now you can run the site from the taskbar:

Pay attention that the favicon of the pinned site is located left to the back button of the browser. Also the buttons are colored in brown to resemble the icon itself. This is part of the feature and you can change the colors if you like.

How to Enable Site Pinning?

This is the easy part.
You don’t have to anything.
If you have Windows 7 then install IE9 and you can start pinning. It is very recommended to add some meta tags like application-name to the site in order to add some information about your site. Here is an example of how to add the tags to a master page head element:

     <head>

        <title>My application</title>

        <link href="~/Styles/Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

        <link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />    

        <meta name="application-name" content="My Application" />

        <meta name="msapplication-tooltip" content="My Application" />

        <meta name="msapplication-starturl" content="./" />

    </head>

Summary

The ability to pin sites to the taskbar is a very nice feature of IE9. It shows that there is a shift in Microsoft direction in regard to the web and web operations systems. Think about it, when you pin sites you are pinning web applications/sites as you do with desktop applications. In a following post I’ll explain how to create jump lists for the pinned site.

IE9 Beta is Out

Gil Fink — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 23:40:00 GMT

IE9 Beta is Out

Internet Explorer 9 beta was released a few minutes ago.
If you want to try it out you can go to this link and download it.
IE9 is going to include a lot of changes in compare to the previous versions of IE. The main issues and changes that it includes are in performance (new Javascript engine called Chakra for example), in standards compatibility (CSS3, HTML5 ECMAScrpit 5 and more) and of course a new clean UI.
Here is a screen shot of the new IE9 beta which include very minimal and clean UI and this blogging system:

This new release brings us closer to the RTM release of IE9 which will increase the browser wars that will probably end with no winners but with better browsers.

Web Platform Installer – Web Installation on Steroids

Gil Fink — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 13:16:00 GMT

Web Platform Installer – Web Installation on Steroids

One of the most annoying things that I’m sometimes
get stuck with is to install my machine with the latest
components. Trying to grab all the installation packages
for every application or library that I need can be a
very painful thing and also consumes a lot of time.
This is the reason that a tool like Web Platform
Installer was very welcome to my arsenal of tools.
In the post I’ll describe what is the Web Platform Installer and show a scenario of installation.

Web Platform Installer

As I wrote at the beginning of the post, installation can be a very painful thing. The Web Platform Installer is a tool provided by Microsoft to ease this process when we install Microsoft Web Platform. You can download it from here.
So what is this tool?
Taken from Microsoft’s site - “The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. The Web PI also makes it easy to install and run the most popular free web applications for blogging, content management and more with the built-in Windows Web Application Gallery.”. The current version of the tool is 2.0.

Using the Web Platform Installer

After you install the Web Platform Installer you can run it and install your desired components. You should have a connection to the internet in order to use the installer. When first started the Web Platform Installer will go to the web and check for the latest Web Platform products. Then the main screen will be opened:

In the screen you can choose the relevant components that you like. You can use the following tabs to choose components by categories:

What’s New? – shows all the new components available.
Web Platform – enables the installation of web servers, frameworks and runtime, databases and tools.
Web Applications – enables the installation of web applications such as DotNetNuke, WordPress, BlogEngine.Net and many more web applications.

You only need to select the components and then press the Install button in order to install them. You also have the ability to customize your installation. For example go to the Web Platform tab:

In the Web Server press the Customize link:

Now you can customize the server that will be installed.
After Choosing the components press the Install button and that is it the products will be installed.

In some components you will need to configure things. For example I installed the BlogEngine.Net and after the installation inside the Web Platform Installer I had to configure the web site for the BlogEngine.Net. So you get the help from the platform even in these parts.

Summary

If you haven’t installed the Web Platform Installer go and grab it from here. This tool is very useful and helpful and it can help you to save a lot of time and headaches.

Consuming OData Feed using Microsoft PowerPivot

Gil Fink — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 12:41:57 GMT

Consuming OData Feed using Microsoft PowerPivot

PowerPivot is a data analysis
add-in for excel that brings to
it computational power.
It also helps “to create compelling
self-service BI solutions, facilitates
sharing and collaboration
on user-generated BI solutions”
(taken from the PowerPivot site).
This post will help you to understand how to consume OData feed
from PowerPivot in order to use the data the OData exposes.

The OData Feed

OData exposed feeds can be found in the http://www.odata.org/ site.
Under the Producers tab you will find OData producers which expose
their data using the OData protocol. In my example I’ll use the
Netflix’s feed that can be found here: http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/.

Consuming Netflix OData Feed using PowerPivot

In order to use PowerPivot for excel you first need to download it.
There are some prerequisites for doing that including having Office
2010 installed on your machine. After installing PowerPivot open your
excel and go to the PowerPivot tab and open PowerPivot window.
One of the options in the PowerPivot window is to get data from
data feeds (you will see the OData protocol logo beside it):

Use the From Data Feeds menu item in order to open the Table
Import Wizard:

In the Data Feed Url textbox insert the relevant OData feed (in my
case the Netflix’s feed Url). Press Next to import the data definition
and then you will see the entity sets the feed exposes as tables:

Choose the tables you want to import and press Finish to end the
process and import the tables. This can take some time depending
on the size of the exposed data set.
I chose the Genres set and this is the result:

Now I can use the PowerPivot’s features to build my relevant report
or to manipulate the data I’ve received.

Summary

Let sum up, I showed how to consume OData feed using Microsoft’s
PowerPivot. The OData ecosystem is growing very fast and as you
could see from this example it consumers can also be BI tools like
PowerPivot and many more. This is one of the reasons to start
learning this protocol now.

How to Add Silverlight Installation to IE8 Installation Package using IEAK8

Gil Fink — Sun, 09 May 2010 17:58:00 GMT

How to Add Silverlight Installation to IE8 Installation Package using IEAK8

During the last
weeks I’m helping
Microsoft customers
to create custom
installation packages
to Internet Explorer 8.
In this post I’ll explain
how to add Silverlight
installation to the
generated installation
package of IE8.

Using IEAK8

In order to create custom installation packages for Internet Explorer 8
you first need to download the Internet Explorer Administration Kit 8
or IEAK8. You can download the tool from here.

How to Add Custom Component?

When running IEAK8 we can add custom components such as Silverlight
installation to the generated installation package.

How to do that?
During the IEAK8 Wizard you use the Custom Component step and add
your custom components:

Press the Add button in order to open the Add a Custom Component step.
In the opened Add a Custom Component window you browse for the location
of the custom component installation. You need to fill the Name of the
component and then choose when the component will be installed
(Before or after the IE installation occurs).
You can use the “Only install if Internet Explorer is installed successfully”
checkbox in order to enable the installation of the component if
IE installation succeeded or not.

One other thing to notice in the supplied figure is the /q parameter.
This parameter will enable silent installation on the Silverlight installation.
Pressing the Add button at the bottom of the window will add the Silverlight
component to your to the list of components which will be installed by the
custom IE8 installation.

Pay attention that the custom components will be installed only in the full
generated version of the installation packages and not as
part of configuration installations (brand installation).

Summary

It is very simple and intuitive to add custom components to IE8 installation
packages using the IEAK8 tool.