Silverlight vs. HTML5

Here are some points to consider:

• HTML5 has not been developed enough yet – lots of features has been promised for Internet Explorer 10
• Silverlight offers some features that HTML5 does not offer or it is not as advanced as Silverlight such as:
  • Video streaming
  • Hardware-accelerated graphics
  • Deep networking support
  • File access
  • Out-of-browser applications
  • Ability to call windows system components
  • PivotViewer  control
  • Data binding
  • Templates
• Silverlight has tools that allow creating web applications easily. In addition, Expression Blend can be used to develop rich graphical effects
• Silverlight through web service allows easily access to database   

What platforms Silverlight support?

Silverlight supports the following platforms:

• Windows – Internet Explorer 6 or later, Firefox 1.5 or later, and Google Chrome 4.0 or later
• MAC – safari 3 or later
• Linux – Currently Silverlight 5 does not work on Linux, but there is an open source named Moonlight that supports Silverlight 2
• Windows Phone – supports Windows Phone 7

Silverlight vs. Flash

Here are advantages and disadvantages of Flash:

Advantages of Flash:

• Most successful plug-in adobe flash
• Is installed on over 90% of web browsers
• Flash has long history
• Flash is straightforward tool for adding animated graphics

Disadvantages of Flash:

• Flash requires separate design tool, programming language, and programming environment
• No straightforward way to integrate flash with server-side .net code

What Silverlight can offer compared to Flash:

Silverlight’s goal is to combine power and cross-platform support of Flash with .NET. Therefore, client-side code and server-side code is in the same language. Hence, for .NET developers Silverlight is more convenient and powerful for internet applications. However the clients’ need to download a onetime plug-in to be able to view Silverlight based websites.

Expression Family

Expression Family:

• Expression Web – is a tool that allows users to create production-ready web sites. This tool allows you to integrate page designers and source code editors to construct web sites using, ASP.NET, AJAX, PHP, HTML/XHTML, etc. It also has a SuperPreview that tests websites across several web browsers.   
• Expression Encoder – is a tool that provides a platform to import, edit, and enhance video media in different formats such as AVI, WMV, WMA, QuickTime MOV, MPEG, VC-1, and H.264. It also allows you to create professional training video.
• Expression Design – is a tool that allows graphical artists to generate rich, vector-based graphics and save their work in different standard image formats and also in WPF or Silverlight XAML.
• Expression Blend – is a graphical design tool for XAML apps.

Calculating Standard Deviation for Return Distribution

The following power point explains how to calculate standard deviation in excel.

Instructions on calculating Standard Deviation in Excel

What Process is using a specific Port

Recently I had to find out what process is using a specific port number on a machine. Here are the steps and commands I used:

• Open a command window
• Machine’s IP address – use ipconfig command to find machine’s IP address
• Port’s process ID – to find the process id for a specific port number use this command: NetStat –o –n –a | findstr <machine’s IP Address>:<port number>

The last number is the process number which is going to be used in finding the application

• Application’s name – to find out the application’s name from last step’s process ID, use the following command: TaskList  /FI “PID eq <processID from last step>” /FO LIST /V

AccessViolationException in .NET 4.0

In .NET 4, managed code does not catch exceptions raised by corrupted process such as Access Violation. There is a configuration setting that could be set in application’s config file to change this behavior. This configuration is legacyCorruptedStateExceptionPolicy; by setting it to true it allows these exceptions to be caught. Here is how to set legacyCorruptedStateExceptionPolicy configuration in config file:

 

This link contains more information in this regard:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd638517.aspx