How to receive BNO breaking news alerts for free on your iPhone via Push Notification
Right after Apple upgraded its iPhone OS to v.3.0 and introduced new Push Notification feature many companies and developers started to write new applications or update their existing apps to use this new cool feature. One of them was BNO News which sends out breaking news alerts in four different ways: 1- Twitter, 2- Email, 3- Friendfeed, 4- iPhone. First three services are free but the last one is not free. You have to pay for their application as well as a monthly subscription fee to receive alerts on your iPhone. I was thinking to find a way to receive these alerts for free and I find a tricky way that I want to share with you here. You have to follow these steps to enable BNO alerts on your iPhone without paying them a penny!
- Download and install TextFree Lite on your iPhone. It’s free.
- Create a TextFree account which gives you a unique @textfree.us email address to receive messages.
- Create a new GMail account at http://mail.google.com/mail/signup
- Go to BNO mail subscription page and subscribe using your new GMail address.
- Login to your new GMail account and wait until BNO confirms your subscription then go to GMail Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP
Now put your textfree.us email address in the text box labeled with “email address” (see above) and save your settings. - You’re done! Each time BNO sends an alert to your GMail address it is automatically forwarded to your textfree.us and therefore you receive a Push Notification alert on your iPhone!
Do you know why we used GMail account in the middle of our trick and didn’t use textfree.us address directly? BNO rejects subscription requests from all @textfree.us or similar services email addresses!
Hope you enjoy this trick ;)
ASP.NET MVC Free eBooks
It's about one month that ScottGu and his team have released ASP.NET MVC 1.0 but still there aren’t numerous books on this topic available in the market. As I know by far, these titles are available to purchase: ASP.NET MVC Framework Preview and ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly. I know there are many articles and blog posts containing valuable information and tutorials to start learning ASP.NET MVC but many developers prefer to read books because they are better structured to learn something. From the earlier previews, authors that had been starting to write books on this topic offered some sample chapters to introduce them to the community (and they are still doing) so I decided to list all (or at least most) of them here for a quick access. My list contains both PDF sample chapters as well as link to some authors’ blog posts which contain draft unedited versions of their books:
- Maybe the best and most famous one is Chapter 1 of Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 that is written by Scott Guthrie and can be downloaded here. Scott has wrote a blog post on this too.
- Chapter 13 of Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0: “Best of Both Worlds: Web Forms and MVC Together” can be downloaded from here.
- Chapter 2 of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly: “Your First ASP.NET MVC Application” can be downloaded from here.
- Chapter 9 of ASP.NET MVC in Action: “AJAX in ASP.NET MVC” can be downloaded from here.
- Chapter 2 of Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework: “Your First ASP.NET MVC Application” can be downloaded from here.
- Chapter 9 of Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0: “Testing ASP.NET MVC Applications” can be downloaded found here.
- Chapter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9 from ASP.NET MVC Framework Unleashed as a series of blog posts by Stephen Walther:
- Chapter 1 - An Introduction to ASP.NET MVC
- Chapter 2 - Building a Simple ASP.NET MVC Application
- Chapter 3 - Understanding Controllers
- Chapter 4 - Understanding Views
- Chapter 5 - Understanding Models
- Chapter 6 - Understanding HTML Helpers
- Chapter 9 - Understanding Routing (also a PDF version here, it is a little bit older so it is marked as Chapter 2)
As Wrox has announced, Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is to be published in April and we’re close to see what ASP.NET team have done as a book for ASP.NET MVC developers!
Microsoft Released Anti-XSS 3.0 Beta and CAT.NET CTP
Recently Microsoft released a beta edition of Anti-XSS library V3.0. Here’s a list of some new features which were added in this release:
- An expanded white list that supports more languages
- Performance improvements
- Performance data sheets (in the online help)
- Support for Shift_JIS encoding for mobile browsers
- A sample application
- Security Runtime Engine (SRE) HTTP module
Also as you can read on Microsoft Connected Information Security Group blog they have also released a CTP version of CAT.NET (Microsoft Code Analysis Tool .NET) which is a managed code static analysis tool for finding security vulnerabilities such as Cross Site Scripting - SQL Injection - Process Command Injection - File Canonicalization - Exception Information, etc.
Downloads:
- Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library V3.0 Beta (Kick It!)
- Anti-XSS V3.0 Beta Source Code
- Microsoft Code Analysis Tool .NET (CAT.NET) v1 CTP - 32 bit (Kick It!)
- Microsoft Code Analysis Tool .NET (CAT.NET) v1 CTP - 64 bit
Receive your free 1-year license for McAfee Virus Scan Plus 2009
McAfee, the famous security products vendor, offers a %100 discount on McAfee Virus Scan Plus 2009 + 1 year free subscription (a $40 value). To receive your own free license just go here and enter VSPPROMOCF as coupon code and click on checkout; now you have a $0 shopping card!
Offer is valid through December 31, 2008. You can download your copy for Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista.
+ [via Labnol]
+ It seems that free Anti Virus offers is going to be expanded after Microsoft announced free Anti Virus offer in near future!
Useful HtmlHelpers for ASP.NET MVC
Thanks to ASP.NET MVC and C# Extension Methods, many developers in the community have been creating very useful HtmlHelper extensions and some of them are sharing their works. Today I find this nice one for Gravatar (via Simone’s tweet) and after reading that post this thought came to my mind to gather such Helpers somewhere so that others can access them easily and quickly. This post will be the first step to gather and share such Helpers (If I feel it can be more useful than what I’m thinking now, I may launch a dedicated website for this purpose!).
At this early stage I put some links without any categorization, but after my list grows up I try to update my list and categorize them.
If you have written a nice HtmlHelper for ASP.NET MVC and want to share it with others please send me a message or a reply to mahdi on twitter. I update this post as soon as I find new Helpers so you can check it frequently. This link is shorter to remember: http://tinyurl.com/mvchelper
- MVC HtmlHelper for Gravatar
- Paging HtmlHelper for ASP.NET MVC
- Marquee and GridView HtmlHelpers for ASP.NET MVC
- ReCAPTCHA HtmlHelper (and also a solution to use ReCAPTCHA in ASP.NET MVC)
- ASP.Net MVC Extension method to create a Security Aware Html.ActionLink
- CheckboxList Helper
If you like to promote my list please 
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- Dave Burke
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- Keyvan Nayyeri
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- Roman Buzinov
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- Microsoft Releases EMET 2.0 Security Tool. http://bit.ly/cfDxxX
- Real World Monitoring and Tuning ASP.NET Caching. http://bit.ly/cNv6Tq
- Simple REST API Versioning Using MEF and MVC. http://bit.ly/9z7Q0N
- Free ASP.NET Web CMS v 9.2 released! http://bit.ly/9sRj7B
- The Thinking Tool called Agile. http://bit.ly/cLA5KF (by @henrikkniberg)
- RT @alvinashcraft: 5 tips for using Priority Inbox http://ff.im/-qso11
- Mullas in Iran are looking for the moon to announce the Eid :-P
- Heading to the GYM.
- iOS 4.1 applied; better than nothing!
- @soheilpro What's going on buddy?