PDF (Portable Document Format) is a common choice for e-books, big manuals comprising of several hundred pages and other documents. At a first glance, it seems to be a reasonable choice. PDF is a really cross-platform format, the most popular PDF viewer – Adobe Acrobat – is freely available in all popular operating systems – Windows, Mac OS and Linux. But what is wrong with it?

Well, the first of all, it tends to be slow, of course, it might depend on an application you are viewing your document with, but still opening large files in Adobe Acrobat doesn’t seem to be an easy walk. Of course, it’s not the only reason why I think this format is a poor choice for e-books. More...

Recently I have been working on a project where I needed to make use of some geographical data and I decided to use Google Maps for that. So, in this particular tutorial I will explain how one can start working with the Google Maps API in ASP.NET.

Basically, the following topic will be covered:

• How to find a place on the map by address
• How to let a user choose a place on the map and retrieve its coordinates and save them in a database. 

Recently I was looking for a free backup tool that would keep my important documents online and in case any problems with my laptop, I could easily recover them.

I could use my own hosting space, but I thought it wasn’t convenient to manually upload the documents I was constantly working on. So, I decided to look for some automatic solution. Basically, I need the following things:

• Ability to save the data online
• Ability to perform automatic synchronization, i.e. when I change a file on my local computer it should get automatically updated on the remote storage and vice versa.