Amazon EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server 2003

Written by jf on October 24, 2008 – 5:20 pm -

Amazon Webservices Logo

This is some really great stuff that amazon has released since the boom towards cloud computing. After Linux based clouds, now Windows based clouds are available and ready to perform. It’s a great opportunity for developers to be able to create application for a cloud. I’ll be definitely trying it out any where soon with a small web application to see the performance achieved over a period of time and give some feedback about this new service.

Amazon EC2 running Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 is a fast and dependable environment for deploying applications using the Microsoft Web Platform, including ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, SilverlightTM, and Internet Information Server (IIS). Amazon EC2 enables you to run any compatible Windows-based solution on AWS’ high-performance, reliable, cost-effective, cloud computing platform. Common Windows use cases include website and web-service hosting, high-performance computing (HPC) and data processing, media transcoding, distributed testing, ASP.NET application hosting, and any other application requiring Windows software. Amazon EC2 also now supports the SQL Server® Express and SQL Server Standard databases, and makes those offerings available to customers on an hourly basis.

Read more: http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

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Task Manager without menu bar

Written by jf on October 14, 2008 – 8:00 pm -

I ran into this Geek mode feature of task manager this week. This feature enables you to make the menu bar of your Task Manager go away. Yes go away :) Here is how it will be shown on your desktop.

To enable/disable this feature hold the CTRL Key and double click on the border of your task manager.

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Merge pdf files using C#

Written by jf on October 3, 2008 – 8:00 pm -

Recently I had to create an assembly component using C# to merge multiple PDF files into one file. The specification was pretty straight forward:
1) Merge two of more PDF document into a single output PDF File.
2) Used on an ASP.NET Page

After a few minutes of GOOG, I came up to this “ITextSharp

iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. iText# is a library that allows you to generate PDF files on the fly. It is implemented as an assembly.

It must be noted that the assembly is coded and compiled using the .NET Framework 1.1. You might want to migrate to the version 2.0 or 3.5 of the .NET Framework.

With a some more research on PDF merging. I was able to create a class that will make use of the ITextSharp assembly and perform as the merge pdf operation as needed.

Here is the code:
Read more »

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