2014 was a mixed year

2014 was a mixed year. I lost my brother Dr. Vijaya Raghavan Krishnaswamy, a neuro-surgeon by profession. He left a void that cannot be filled.

I did not complete the book I was writing.

Regarding the blogs I did quite well with a record number of posts.
                                                 Year   Posts
Hodentek.blogspot.com           2013   94
                                                 2014   246

HodentekHelp.blogspot.com.  2013.  17
                                                 2014   56

HodentekMsss.blogspot.com   2013   34
                                                  2014  48
 
HoentekMobile.blogspot.com  2013   13
                                                  2014  

I started a new blog in 2014- http://hodentekPlus.blogspot.com.

I also found that a certain person was pilfering (http://hodentek.blogspot.in/2014/12/domain-name-service-dns-and-dns-changer.html) entire content from blog, my hardwork of about 10 years. I complained to Google without any success. I suppose this is not on Google's priority. Google wants every post that is stolen with proof of content stolen. There were over 900 posts in my blog and you can imagine the work involved.
 

What is LINQ?

We know that a query is a question we pose to the database to retrieve some information that we would like to know. For example, in a database that consists of men and women, you may want to know how many men and how many women. Let us go a step further and say that there are people of all nationalities in the database of men and women. You may want to know how many women who hail from Europe are there. This is only filtering of the information but a query can much more complex. This is of course querying a database, let us say a relational database such as the SQL Server where you use the Structured Query Language(SQL), a special language you have to learn.

All data are not in relational databases and they could be in some kind of an XML document, a web service or something else. For example, in order to find some filtered content in an XML document you would use a language called XQuery which is not the same as SQL. This means there is need to learn another query language.

Beginning with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Microsoft introduced LINQ which stands for Language-Integrated Query an innovation that made it possible to query a SQL Server database, an XML document, Web Services etc with a single lanugage and it is a first class query language.

In Visual Studio you can write LINQ in both VB and C# for any collection that supports IEnumerable or the generic IEnumerable interface (or to put it simply a collection in which one can go through the collection item by item).

For example you may have a list  of names ("John", "Tom", "June", "Diana") etc.  or  the number of rows in a database table , etc. and they can be queried using LINQ.

Need to query SQL Server with LinqPad, review the following posts:

http://hodentekmsss.blogspot.com/2014/12/learn-querying-sql-server-using-linq.html
http://hodentekmsss.blogspot.com/2014/12/learn-querying-sql-server-2012-using.html

What are the different frameworks you can use with Intel XDK App Designer project?

In the latest version of Intel XDK you can create one of four frameworks to work with. They are,

• App Framework
• BootStrap 3
• jQuery Mobile
• TopCoat

App Framework
Basically used for mobile devices and supports native OS such as Googl Android, Apple iOS, RIMBlackberry and Microsffot Windows 8. It has no outside dependencies and optimized for speed. It is Javascript library for mobile HTML5 apps.
http://app-framework-software.intel.com/

Bootstrap 3
It is an open source UI library mostly used for web. Although not meant for mobile devices it still works OK. It is heavy on CSS3 and uses jQuery
http://getbootstrap.com/

jQuery Mobile
Uses JQuery and meant for mobile and optimized for touch. Use HTML5 for UI design for rsponsive weeb and apps (smartphone, tablet and desktop).
http://jquerymobile.com/

Topcoat
Pure Open source CSS for clean mobile and web apps. Optimized for performance with no other dependencies. It has its origins in Adobe design.
http://topcoat.io/