If my previous post about Chrome has you thinking about it, but you are still unsure whether you would want a BETA software installed on your computer, following blog posts explains pretty much all of the features of the Chrome browser:

http://blogoscoped.com/google-chrome/ 

And it is all packaged in a nice visual story.

Enjoy! 

So what is Google Chrome?  It is a new Web Browser. But before you say: "Enough, I can't keep track of IE7/8, Mozilla, Safari, now I have to take a look at yet another browser!!!", there is something interesting and different about this one.

 It appears that the Google team has been writing a browser from scratch, not worrying about baggage like what is found in IE or Mozilla.  It is Open Source so they have been able to take existing bits and pieces from other projects as needed - shortening development time, and at the same time adding a ton of completely new stuff.

First reason to take a look at this browser would be:

- How many times do you deal with IE that fails to load one of the tabs, end up locking the whole browser process, and there is nothing you can do about it but kill the process.  Mozilla is a bit better, but to me it seems that it is "allergic" to Flash.  

Chrome's Solution:  Each Page loads in its own Process.  There is no way that JavaScript failing on one page can hang the whole browser - you just get what they call "Unhappy Tab".  Each Tab manages its own memory and garbage collection, assuring that once the tab is closed all of its memory is released, which is not the case with the other 2 browsers.

Talking about JavaScript - they have build a brand new Virtual Machine for their JavaScript that besides supporting objects also adds support for classes in JavaScript.  Not just that but all of the existing JavaScript objects are assigned to "hidden" JavaScript classes, allowing categorization, and caching.  In addition, there is a built-in performance advantage of VM where JavaScript is compiled and then binary is re-used instead of re-interpreted each time JavaScript is re-executed is priceless.  Google site points to huge performance increases.  I have not run a numbers, but just a visual rendering part of UI components that are generated by JavaScript looks awesome.  I have run Chrome against the ExtJs.com demos - ExtJs being most JavaScript intensive UI/Ajax library, and have not seen yet such a performance out of those components.

From that we move onto rendering engine.  Used with dozen or so web sites - it is flawless.  Smoothest page rendering, and there are no visual differences when compared to IE.  It appears that google.com cached searches help Chrome folks in their automated testing of the layout engine - they virtually have whole of the web at their fingertips.

and finally some typical Google touches:

- if I type "news." in my url bar, I get news.google.com, and news.yahoo.com in the dropdown below it and not 500 articles I have previously visited on those 2 web sites

- when I open a new tab in Chrome, by default I get a sidebar with my most used bookmarks, as well as thumbnails of my most visited pages, allowing me to open one with a single click (image below)

All in all this product has left an excellent first impression and even though it is still beta I would recommend everyone to check it out. 

 http://www.google.com/chrome

Working with CodePlex on one of the projects I was faced with dilemma – download TFS explorer to get the latest source code from their TFS server, or…
I was about to give up and download/run a 300 TFS Explorer on my latest development VPC image (project required some beta MS tools; hence the VPC as a development platform, but that is story for some other time).  But then I noticed following text:

!! Warning !! - If you use the Team Explorer client then it will add source control binding information into your project files. When users download your source code and try to open it in Visual Studio they will get error messages because of the source control bindings. You can use any of the other available source control clients as an alternative.

So the Codeplex folks do not recommend using Team Explorer?!  Other options included several console tools, and one mentioned TortoiseSVN – which I am using anyways on a daily basis.  It appeared that you can use TortoiseSVN for any of your CodePlex source control operations, as long as you install and sun this SVN Bridge service on your local computer.

So I gave it a try - It is truly simple.  You download the executable from the Codeplex’s site, and run it – that creates a service that runs and can be seen in your windows trey. This service runs as a “fake” SVN server that runs on port 8081 by default and does nothing but translate SVN API calls to remote TFS.

You might wonder how does a call to the “local” SVN repository gets directed to correct CodePlex TFS server.  It is simple:
1)    You create a folder which will contain your project source from TFS.
2)    Right click on the folder in Win Explorer, and using SVN Checkout command of your Tortoise client, bring up the Checkout dialog.
3)    The format for your checkout URI is then:
http://localhost:8081/<CodePlex TFS Server domain>/<CodePlex Project Name>

And that is it.  I have tried a number of TortoiseSVN commands including “Repo-browser”.  Everything seems to work fine.  In the weeks and months ahead I will continue to use and evaluate this tool, but as it stands now, it was extremely easy to configure and use.  I highly recommend it.

If you see this post it means that BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5 is running and the hard part of creating your own blog is done. There is only a few things left to do.

Write Permissions

To be able to log in to the blog and writing posts, you need to enable write permissions on the App_Data folder. If you’re blog is hosted at a hosting provider, you can either log into your account’s admin page or call the support. You need write permissions on the App_Data folder because all posts, comments, and blog attachments are saved as XML files and placed in the App_Data folder. 

If you wish to use a database to to store your blog data, we still encourage you to enable this write access for an images you may wish to store for your blog posts.  If you are interested in using Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, VistaDB, or other databases, please see the BlogEngine wiki to get started.

Security

When you've got write permissions to the App_Data folder, you need to change the username and password. Find the sign-in link located either at the bottom or top of the page depending on your current theme and click it. Now enter "admin" in both the username and password fields and click the button. You will now see an admin menu appear. It has a link to the "Users" admin page. From there you can change the username and password.  Passwords are hashed by default so if you lose your password, please see the BlogEngine wiki for information on recovery.

Configuration and Profile

Now that you have your blog secured, take a look through the settings and give your new blog a title.  BlogEngine.NET 1.4 is set up to take full advantage of of many semantic formats and technologies such as FOAF, SIOC and APML. It means that the content stored in your BlogEngine.NET installation will be fully portable and auto-discoverable.  Be sure to fill in your author profile to take better advantage of this.

Themes and Widgets

One last thing to consider is customizing the look of your blog.  We have a few themes available right out of the box including two fully setup to use our new widget framework.  The widget framework allows drop and drag placement on your side bar as well as editing and configuration right in the widget while you are logged in.  Be sure to check out our home page for more theme choices and downloadable widgets to add to your blog.

On the web

You can find BlogEngine.NET on the official website. Here you'll find tutorials, documentation, tips and tricks and much more. The ongoing development of BlogEngine.NET can be followed at CodePlex where the daily builds will be published for anyone to download.

Good luck and happy writing.

The BlogEngine.NET team