Treasures of Windows Explorer

Any one using Windows, getting in and out of Windows Explorer (WinKey + E) is common task.  But how many of us use the full power of Windows Explorer.  Here are some cool features of Explorer exposed.

• Navigation Pane: You have complete control over the left side folder tree structure.  You can hide / show to get more room. 
• Expand to open folder: You can Keep expanding the tree as you explore
• Show all folders: shows arrows indicating the availability of sub folders
• Show favorites: Get your most used folders in one click

Sort

 

• You can sort the folders in any of the attributes of the file.  You can toggle the sort order by simply clicking on the header
  

Grouping

• You can group the files in a folder based on any of the attribute of the file.

Filter

• You can access the filter by using the down arrow at end of each column header.

Multi select

• Multi select become simple now, no more you are required to hold Shift or control keys, Make sure you switched on this feature by using “Item check boxes”

Also you have

• Recent locations, by accessing Previous, Next, Down Arrow to list all previous locations

• Enabling Preview can show Word, Excel documents

Windows Push Button Reset / Refresh

Windows 8.1 is capable of PBR!!

At any time you can reset the machine to factory condition!  This feature is available from Windows 8.0, At any time you can Reset or Refresh the OS.

Refresh: Refresh you PC without affecting your files.  If you PC isn't running well you can refresh it without losing your photos, music, videos and other personal files.

Reset:If you want to recycle your PC or start over completely, you can reset it to its factory settings.

In both the cases (Refresh / Reset), you need to have the original setup disk used to install the PC which you used to install.  If is Surface it is preserved in the image, you don't need the original setup desk.

In Windows 8 Charms Bar (Ctrl + I)> Change PC Settings > General

In Windows 8.1: Charms Bar (Ctrl + I) > Change PC Settings > Update and Recovery

 

For more details refer http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/restore-refresh-reset-pc

When you are upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1, you can use this feature to go back to Windows 8.  (Except in Surface device)

More Personalization with Windows 8

From Windows 8, you have Two Start Screen

1. Metro Start Screen
2. Desktop Start Screen

Both you can customize and personalize independently,

For Metro UI from the charms bar (You can hit WinKey + I) > Change PC Settings > Personalize > Start Screen, to change the color theme

Windows 8	Windows 8.1

You can use Ease of Access to make the Metro Tiles bigger.

For Desktop from the charms bar (You can hit WinKey + I) > Personalize or Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization, to change the Desktop color theme, background.

Windows 8	Windows 8.1
	Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Personalization

 

Windows 8 Alphabets

B - System Tray
C - Charms Bar
E - Explorer
F - Files Search
H - Share
I - Settings
K - Devices
L - Lock
M - Minimize
N - (One) Note
P - Project
Q - App Search
R - Run
T - Task Bar
U - Ease of Access
W - Setting Search
X - Smart Start Menu

Try using WinKey + [Alphabet]

Fore more info

Windows Safe Mode Boot

Win 8 Safe Mode is not simple F8 any more.  The following are the options you have

Option I: Before login

1. Hold Shift and press restart
2. After login will be presented with options
3. Choice Troubleshoot
4. Select Advanced options
5. Choose Startup Settings
6. Click Restart to login to Safe Mode

Option II: Using MS Config

1. You can use MSConfig from rum prompt
2. By changing the boot option you can boot from safe mode

Option III: Automatic Repair

If the OS is not booted properly on last attempt, it is will go into Automatic Repair mode and presented with Troubleshooting screen.

Reference

Why I have Pause key in keyboard

Go to command prompt move to C: by typing CD\, now hit DIR, while it showing info hit the Pause key!!  This the real use of the key specially in DOS world.  In Windows GUI world there is no role except we I know of. 

Windows Key + Pause – System Properties

Ctrl + Alt + Pause – Restore / Full screen Remote Desk top

Please add comments if you know any other use of Pause key!

See also

Store Reset

Windows Store, a new way to get apps to Windows.  These store apps, uses cache techniques to improve performance.  But some time these cache are the problem for the users specially developer, who experiment with the system.  The tribal knowledge is restart the system, of course it may help to reset the local cache, what about the server cache if any.

For Windows 8 Store, if you are in such situation, the good news is wsreset.exe helps to reset the cache both client and server side!!

Happy coding!

Hello Hyper-V – Network Boot installation

Windows server provides Hyper-V environment to create virtual machines.  There are some settings we need to aware while using Hyper-V first time.  The Hyper-V feature is not enabled by default, if you try to get connect to Hyper-V Manager to managed local Hyper-V, you will get following error.

You need to switch on the Hyper-V feature using Windows Features On Off screen.  Make sure the BIOS level Enable Hyper-v feature is enable otherwise you cannot enable Hyper-V platform feature

If you need to install operating system from network boot, that is the default for most of the corporate IT world, you need to configured the virtual network for the VM.

You can select the External,  If you want to know details of other options check this link.  This is Virtual machine setting needs to be done Hyper-V level.

Also make sure when you boot from network you have, Integration Services Desk installed in the VM.

Thanks to Rafael who helped me keep going in Hyper-V.

.Net Interview

Interviewing candidate for a mid level requires lot of scrutiny to get right candidate.  I had always had list of areas I would like to cover the depth in the area is depends on the candidates interest and experience, but I would like always make sure to know his breadth.  Here is my notes (Crude copy paste from One Note)

1. OOPs
   1. Delegates / Extended Methods
   2. Threading (Pool / TPL / Native) 
   3. Could not differentiate Static and Dynamic poly
   4. Abstract and Interface
   5. Abstract Factory
   6. Virtual, Override
   7. Partial class
2. .Net basics
   1. Reference type, value type
   2. Call by value and call by reference
   3. Why Reflections / Why Garbage Collection & How
3. Collections
1. Stack, Queue
2. Array, Array List
3. Hash table, Dictionary
4. Build & Deployment

Debugging

1. When ASP.Net page is slow how do you respond?

Technology Area

1. ASP.Net (Single sign-on)
   • Cache, Paging
   • Session
   • Application - Global.asax
   • Tracing
   • Error handling
   • Profiling
   • AJAX
   • Configuration
   • HTTPModule & HTTPHandler
   • ASP.Net Pipeline
   • User control, Customer control
   • Authentication, Authorization
   • Member provider
   • Data Binding
2. MVC / MVVM
3. Entity Framework / ORM / LINQ
4. WCF (RIA, OData) / WPF / WF / SL (MEF, Prism)
5. Design Patterns
6. SQL (SSRS, SSIS, SSAS, TSQL)
7. SharePoint (Customization, Performance Point, Power View, Power Pivot)

Designing Skills

• Consider you are building simple Reporting solution to where you need to show data from DB to an UI page.  What are you primary question to estimate & design this app?
• Number of Reports
• Size of data
• Number of users
• Authentication
• Performance needs, Frequency of data change and Caching
• SP vs Dynamic SQL
• AJAX & Pagination

Technical Leadership

• Code Review
• Readability
• Each method one action
• Input validation
• Error Handling
• Performance & Caching
• View State
• Estimation
• Task allocation and tracking

Tools

• Fiddler
• FxCop
• Beyond Compare

Logical Thinking

• Designing lift logic
• Designing Railway platform logic
• Representing hierarchy using Array
• Thread Synchronization
• Tic-Tac -To who to create next move based on current state
• How to you store the state
• Compare two sets
• Process communication

Scenario Interview Questions

I like the interviews with some scenario, and keep increasing the complexity of the problem to judge the persons knowledge level and how he maps problem to solution space.  The following are the basic problem to start and keep adding more complex scenario.

• Log table summarization: If you have big log table, you need to analyze and summarize, how to do it?  How do you search on a log table for a pattern? (Generate Hash table /Leaner search)
• Searching missing number (Leaner / Binary) (Increase complexity by saying, if need to read from file, db, multiple sources, using webservice, …)
• You have a screen with a master record and a grid with multiple detail records, such as "Order" and "Order Line Items". The user can "scroll" from one master record to the next, or back again. How will you guarantee that the detail grid records being displayed always match the master record being displayed?
• You have a high volume transaction system. You have a slowly changing product list. How can you optimize database disk access to get the product list for all the various programs that make use of it? How can you make sure that the optimized product list is always up-to-date (or very nearly so)?
• You have a multi-record grid that needs to display a bunch of records. Most of the fields are short, but one is very big, it will take up most of the height available to the entire grid, not just one of the 10 records in the grid. We want to show nine records worth of short fields in the grid, but also show the "selected" record's big field in a shared, overflow area. As the user selects a different row in the grid, the overflow area should be synchronized with the selected row. How would you go about doing this?
• View State "automatically" saves and restores values stored in some objects. What kinds of objects does it automatically save, and what kind does it always ignore?
• Design a STOCK value display site
• Consider a scenario in which user is complaining that an ASP.Net page is performing very slow, which was working properly for few months. How do you approach the problem? Detail various aspects of the application you look into. (Key: Isolating problem boundary / View State information /Database Tuning /Data volume check / IIS issue / IIS Log diagnostic)
• Consider a scenario, where you need to develop a one page web application which has only one report. The report data is stored in database in single table. The table has lot of data and the size of the table is 500 GB. You need to develop a highly scalable and high performing solution for this scenario. Detail your design and highlight various technical decisions which you make in the process of the design. Also list your question to the user to complete your design. (Key: ASP.Net Performance(Paging in ASP.net / Caching / Minimize of View State info), DB: Partitioning in Tables / Indexing in DB / Database based paging) Functional: (Usage of report / Number of users / Number of concurrent users), Technology:  Azure / Azure table storage / AJAX /Silverlight)

SharePoint document cache

If you are opening SharePoint document from Office App, it may open the file from cache and miss to get the updated version document from SharePoint, this is due to the fact Microsoft cache the SharePoint documents.

You can see icon in system tray

In the Upload Center, you can select Settings, Click on Delete cached files to remove the cached files.

More information here.

Self Service BI–Excel Rocks!!

Microsoft is coming with lot of Self Service BI tools the recent addition is Data Explorer.

In Excel now you have the following component for Data Analysis

• PowerView: You can same experience as SharePoint integrated PowerView inside excel for the data in Excel Sheet
• PowerPivot with powerful DAX Support: There are lot of content on Web on this.
• Data Explorer Download

Data Explorer try to standardize and customize data consumption experience.  There are many new data sources added, For example “Folder”, SharePoint List, Hadoop file, SQL Azure, Facebook.

Query on Active Directory are really an interesting new way of getting data

Facebook Graph API support

• GeoFlow Download | Getting Started Document.

7 years back I have worked on POC called Mappy with HCL Technologies, the fundamentals are exactly same.  Great to see it is a product now from Microsoft.

Azure Training

There are really rick training material in Channel9 to ramp up in Azure.

Introduction Trainings

1. Windows Azure Overview
2. Introduction to Compute
3. Windows Azure Lifecycle, Part 1
4. Windows Azure Lifecycle, Part 2
5. Windows Azure Storage, Part 1
6. Windows Azure Storage, Part 2
7. Introduction to SQL Azure
8. Windows Azure Diagnostics
9. Windows Azure Security, Part 1
10. Windows Azure Security, Part 2
11. Scalability, Caching & Elasticity, Part 1
12. Scalability, Caching & Elasticity, Part 2, and Q&A

Intermediate Trainings

• SharePoint on Windows Azure
• Azure Service Bus
• Mobile Services (27 Parts)
• Web Sites (7 Parts)
• Windows Azure Active Directory (4 parts)
• Getting Started with HDInsight (3 Parts)
• Media Services (4 Parts)
• Cloud Services (8 parts)
• Storage and SQL DB (9 Parts)

Advanced Trainings

• Cloud Patterns (3 Parts)
• VM & Networking (4 parts)
• Customer Success Stories (4 Parts)

Visual Studio 2012 Treasures

Recently got an opportunity to talk about Visual Studio 2012 features to one of the reputed IT division head.  The wealth of features VS2012 provides are amazing, making use of the at right time helps the organization and individuals.  Here is quick summary.

• TFS Features
  • Agile Template: One of the must try feature, helps to manage product backlog, capacity planning, Employee Task list view, Drag & drop status update.

• Code Review: A productive, quality improvement which nice code review workflow, contextual comment, tight integration with TFS.  Amazing feature.

• My Workspace

• VS2012
• IDE Search capabilities

• Code Visualization

• Code Analysis

• IntelliTrace

To get the complete list of new feature check out the Visual Studio Ultimate 2012 Overview videos.