5 ASP.NET Tutorials

ASP.NET is the Web’s best application framework. If you’re looking for ASP.NET tutorials, look no further. Here are 5 ASP.NET tutorials to sink your teeth into as you begin your journey into learning the Web’s best development framework.

1. Installing AJAX Control Toolkit in Visual Studio 2008 – You don’t get the AJAX control toolkit with Visual Studio 2008. It’s a separate download. But you’ll want it anyway. This tutorial will teach you how to install the toolkit so that you can use it with Visual Studio 2008.
2. Using Button Events in a Repeater with ASP.NET 4.0 C# – Simple tutorial to follow, and very useful. If you are using ASP.NET 4.0 and C#, then you can’t live without this one.
3. Using CSS and Changing them Dynamically ASP.NET & VB – You might as well just get used to using CSS. And since you’re going to be using it, you’d better learn to change them dynamically. It will save you a ton of time.
4. Using Role Based Permissions with ASP.NET 4.0 – This tutorial will teach you how to create users, manage roles, and perform essential administrative functions.
5. ASP.NET Web Site Debugging Part 1 Enabling Debugging – This is an eight part tutorial. You’ll want to start with this one and don’t forget to pick up the other seven.

ASP.NET is easy to use. You’ve got to learn how from the right sources. Try these tutorials to get you started.

What Google, Facebook, And Amazon Have In Common

What do Google, Facebook, and Amazon have in common? I mean, besides being the three largest Internet companies in the world? And all being U.S.-based.

Answer: They all are involved in cloud computing at some level.

Google, of course, is the largest search engine online. It’s easy to see how Google is involved in cloud computing. If you use Google Docs or some of Google’s other free online services, then you are a consumer of cloud computing services. Google is the provider.

Amazon is famous for its cloud computing services. However, unlike Google, it does not provide those services for free. The service Amazon is most famous for in its cloud computing niche is hosting.

Facebook is a user of cloud computing in a different way. Rather than providing cloud services to customers – either free or paid – Facebook owns its own datacenter, allowing it to provide its core services utilizing the benefits of cloud computing – scalability, redundancy, security, etc.

If the largest companies on the Web run their businesses using the cloud computing model, do you think it would benefit you as well? I certainly do. And while Google and Amazon are in the cloud services provider category, they are also consumers of cloud computing. They use their own resources themselves. Let them inspire you to figure out how you can use cloud computing to your company’s advantage.

Why Redundancy Will Save Cloud Computing

Cloud computing isn’t in any danger. Redundancy is really just one reason why. Others include scalability, flexibility, cost efficiency, and security. But redundancy is a powerful benefit and you are soon to know why.

First, what is redundancy? This is a fancy term that is used to describe the benefit of copying the data on one server onto another server as a back up procedure. The reason this is done is to prevent any future loss of data or downtime.

Hosting companies have learned the hard way that one server going down can cause a loss of data to several clients at once over a long period of time while they work to get that server back into operation. And when it’s time to perform maintenance on a server, you don’t want to have to take down all of your clients’ websites and affect their businesses in a negative way. Redundancy saves all that.

Redundancy allows your cloud host to duplicate all of your data on a backup server. If the primary server goes down for any reason, then resources are reallocated to the backup server and no loss of data occurs. No downtime to your website is experienced either.

Also, if you do have to perform maintenance on a server, you can transfer resources to the backup machine and do your maintenance, then reverse those resources when the maintenance is completed. No downtime, no data loss, and no fuss.

Learn HTML The Easy Way

Are you ready to learn HTML? Looking for a place to go? HTML Atoms is a great tutorials website that will give you all the tools you need to learn HTML and build a great website. It’s the perfect website for beginners and advanced HTML programmers alike.

Here is a sampling of some of the great tutorials you can take at HTML Atoms while you are learning to program websites:

• Proper nesting of elements in HTML
• Using elements in HTML
• Adding a favicon to your website
• Using forms in HTML
• How to create a tooltip for a hyperlink
• Mixed hierarchical website structures
• Using augmented linear web structure
• Using the horizontal rule tag
• Adding images to your site
• Creating HTML tables
• Creating credit card payment forms with HTML 5

And that’s not all. There are tons of tutorials on HTML at HTML Atoms. There are tutorials for beginners and advanced programmers alike.

HTML is the basic programming language of the World Wide Web. If you have a desire to build and design websites, then you’ll need more than a basic level understanding of HTML. You’ll need to understand it well enough to build websites, design them properly, and communicate with your clients.

Learn all about HTML today at HTML Atoms.

Why A Honeypot Is Essential

If you are using or planning to use cloud computing resources, then I highly recommend that you set up a honeypot to capture spam and malicious malware attacks. A honeypot is a lure for hackers. It contains no useful information, but it appears that it does. To be really useful, you’ve got to separate your honeypot from the rest of your network and put a firewall around it so that hackers cannot access your network through the honeypot.

Honeypots are an essential aspect for cloud computing because you are doing business in a virtual location that is accessible to anyone Even if you put firewalls and use anti-virus software, a honeypot can lure hackers away from your real networks and get trapped so that they can’t do you any damage.

Ask your cloud computing provider if they utilize honeypots. If not, find out why. They are relatively easy to set up and are very effective in capturing the nasties before they can hurt you.

Reputable cloud computing providers use honeypots, honeynets, and honeyfarms as a security measure against all security threats.

Don’t take chances with your computing resources. Make sure you are protected with a honeypot today and every day.

What Is The Open Cloud Consortium?

The Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) has only been around since 2008. That’s not very long, but they’ve done some good work. One of the things they’ve done, which I think is quite interesting, is establish a testbed that keeps growing every year.

The first phase of the testbed consisted of getting it into operation. It consisted of 240 cores in four U.S. data centers. Those data centers are located at University of Illinois at Chicago, StarLight in Chicago, Calit2 in LaJolla, and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. All the racks were connected to a wide area 10 gb/s network. Before the end of its first year, the testbed was upgraded to 480 cores.

In its second year of operation, the OCC conducted phase 2 of operations. In this phase, the number of racks was increased to 9 and the number of nodes to over 250. The number of cores went to over 1,000.

Phase 3 began last year and is currently underway. The goal is to increase some of the 10G network connections to 100G.

The Open Cloud Consortium testbed is an experiment with a lot of potential. Future cloud operations could hinge on what takes place in this testbed. Policy and best practices could be implemented based on their testing. What do you think?

The Benefits Of Virtualization Software

Virtualization software is a special type of software that allows a business to set up a virtual machine or virtual network in their organization. All your computers can use the same physical resources through a guest operating system, which the virtualization software creates for you.

Essentially, you dedicate one computer to run the virtualization software. What you gain from that is multiple operating systems – all on one computer.

When you set up a computer this way using virtualization software, each additional operating system you load on that computer causes that computer to operate as a separate computer. So if you have a computer with 5 operating systems loaded onto it, then you have 5 computers. It’s like you’ve multiplied your computing assets.

The benefits to doing this are numerous:

• It allows you to consolidate servers and operate more efficiently
• It conserves energy and turns your office or business into a “green” business
• It’s easier to manage several virtual machines than several real machines
• You can reduce your backup and recovery time
• Testing software configurations is more streamlined
• You can use old software applications that may not be compatible with new operating systems by setting up a virtual machine just for them
• You can run cross-platform applications easier and more efficiently

Now that you know the benefits of using virtualization software, which one is right for you? Well, now, that’s a different story.

6 Web Tutorials Sites Worth Getting To Know

Web programmers are notorious for learning new skills between projects. That’s what we do. We finish one job then prepare for the next one by picking up a new skill that we learned on a tutorials website. Here are 6 great Web tutorials websites to bookmark so that you can learn your next skill before the project begins.

1. AJAX Tutorials – AJAX is an essential skill in a Web 2.0 world. Learn AJAX at this popular AJAX tutorials website.
2. DB Tutorials – Learning to work with databases takes time and patience. The folks at DB Tutorials have lots of both, and they are willing to share their experience and knowledge with you for free. This is a particularly useful site for working with SQL.
3. Programming Help – The best programming help often comes from unexpected places. In this case, you get a lot of help for just a little effort and time commitment.
4. The Web Made Easy – Ever wonder why some programming tutorials are hard to follow? You won’t have that problem at The Web Made Easy. They really do simplify the tutorials. Even an elementary student can do them.
5. CSS Atoms – I wouldn’t go anywhere else for CSS help. They really know what they’re doing here.
6. JavaScript Atoms – JavaScript is the programming language of the 21st century. No website can live without it. Learn all you can with these fantastic JavaScript tutorials.

Stop Slashdotting With Cloud Computing

In the early days of social bookmarking, when Slashdot was one of the most popular websites on the Web, a phenomenon started occurring when small websites were bookmarked at the very popular site Slashdot. This resulted in huge traffic spikes to the smaller websites, which were usually hosted on shared hosting plans, and those sites would meet their host’s bandwidth requirements and temporarily be shut down. This came to be known as the Slashdot Effect, or Slashdotting.

It still happens today, but these days it is typically done from other very popular websites like Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Twitter.

The surest way to prevent the Slashdot Effect from overwhelming your website and your web host is to not have any bandwidth limits. Of course, there is no shared hosting plan in the world with unlimited bandwidth. Technically, there aren’t any cloud hosting plans with unlimited bandwidth either.

However, if you are with a cloud host and you start to see your traffic increase by greater numbers in a short period of time, then you can request more bandwidth. If it looks like you are on the Slashdotting course, contact your cloud host and request more bandwidth. When the traffic has died down and your bandwidth usage has gone down to normal levels, you can request that your bandwidth limit be decreased back to normal size.

This allows you to handle traffic spikes on a short term basis without losing your website. You’ll have to pay for the extra bandwidth, but since it is short term, any profits you realize from the increased traffic should help you pay for it.

The Ease Of Server Customization

What would happen if you called up your traditional hosting company and asked them to change the configuration on your server? Do you think they would do it? Not if you have that old stale, cheap, shared hosting that is so popular.

Even if you have a dedicated server, chances are your hosting company will laugh you off the planet if you asked for a customized server configuration. After all, they have an interest in the game. They want to protect that server for future clients.

With cloud hosting, server customization is easy. You just call your hosting company and tell them to make the changes. Done. No fuss, no hassle.

Why is it so much easier with a cloud host? Because cloud hosting is designed to be customized by its nature. Every client has different needs, therefore, cloud hosts are more readily capable of responding to those needs.

Your cloud host should be comfortable with you calling them up any time you have a desire to discuss your server. Traditional hosts typically do not want you to call. Since cloud hosting is more about the needs of the client than the needs of the hosting company, you can have the server configuration you want. It’s easier to customize your server settings when you host in the cloud.