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LINKBLOG for May 17, 2008

• What Determines High Quality Code? - Casey Charlton
  


• Writing code that you’re proud of - YTechie
  Challenge yourself by doing a personal code review before the peer review


• Reading Code Over the Telephone - Eric Lippert
  or ' How does one read the => operator? '


• Visual Studio Usability Tip: Highlight Current Line - Steven Harman
  It's the little things that count


• 11 Top Tips for a Successful Technical Presentation - Scott Hanselman
  Some great tips over here, also technical oriented


• Concurrent counting - Joe Duffy
  


• Resolving Side-by-Side Configuration Issues - OJ Reeves
  


• Demand.OpenID.net: A One Click Call to Action - Marshall Kirkpatrick
  


• Punctuality: More Than Showing Up on Time - Jason Harris
  Completely agreed here. If you're consistently too late (in meetings, on deadlines) and not actively acting on this, you're doing something wrong


• Successful Software - James Shore
  Good question, as success is really different things to different people/stakeholders


• The 4 Core Principles of Agile Programming @ XML JOURNAL - Joe Winchester
  Taken from the the Agile Manifesto which you should read right now if you've never done, takes you only 5 minutes


• Beware of saving IAsyncResult in a session variable - Kalyan Krishna
  Oops
  ' It turned out that IASyncResult is *not* serializable and we had to roll back the code '


• Use Visual Studio's Post-Build Events to Automate Unit Testing Running | From C Sharp to C Sharp
  maybe you've forgotten about the usefulness of post-build events. Here's a reminder on the goodness they bring


• Programmatically creating an IIS7 site - Dennis van der Stelt
  


• Chris's Weblog - Drop Dead Simple Podcast Client
  Cool, implement a command-line client using Powershell


• Threads and Thread Synchronization in C# - AKPatra
  

LINKBLOG for May 16, 2008

• Statistics and How They Lie - Casey Charlton
  Industry experience suggests that the design of metrics will encourage certain kinds of behaviour from the people being measured. The common phrase applied is "you get what you measure" '


• Design Principle: Don't Repeat Yourself - Steve Rowe
  


• Why do we Refactor? - Jeremy D. Miller
  Jeremy lists some good reasons to refactor existing code bases and the points you have to keep in mind: don't mindlessly start refactoring just because you can


• Beyond Continuous Integration: Continuous Monitoring with Owen Rogers - Hanselminutes Show #113
  


• Splitting a Generic List into Multiple Chunks - Chinh Do
  


• Microsoft Community DevCast (Netherlands)
  While most Dutch people are reasonably OK with English, it's nice to see some *cast in Dutch every now and then..


• The Technology Cliff: How Time Off From Programming Affects Your Chops - Rob Walling
  The gist is that management might be good for your career, but not for your 133t d3z1gn sk1llz


• Duplicate Code in Your Tests - Jay Fields
  On how to setup your test suite
  ' Duplicate code is a smell. Setup and teardown are deodorant, but they don't fix the underlying issue '


• 10 Practical Tips on Freeing up Mental RAM - Russell Ball
  If you have a daily struggle keeping your Inbox under control *do* read Russell's tip here. After reading the GTD book myself I practice most of them and they work magically, as long as you strictly keep onto the process


• Lesson Learned: Automate Project Evaluations - Jurgen Appelo
  Can't remember having ever had a really effective retrospective. Here's a swell tip: automate the process so you don't have to get all stakeholders together! Guess this way you can do it in... what, 25% of the time it would take otherwise


• Leaving technology out of requirements gathering - Nick Malik
  


• Reader Poll: Do You Still Use Browser Bookmarks? - Gina Trapani
  Never, except for 3 or 4 internal portals which I never bothered to put into del.icio.us


• 2 Easy Steps To Turn Your Blog Into An OpenID Gateway - Nick Berardi
  Way easier than you might think. But isn't the point here that if *I* have a Gateway, that *you* have to trust me to authenticate you - or am I seeing something wrong? I would rather trust Yahoo than me, anyway...


• Enhancing Desktop Computing with the Cloud - Scott Watermasysk
  Scott talks about some cloudy desktop tools


• Using ASP.NET Routing Independent of MVC - Mike Ormond
  


• World Wide Telescope - nice app, shame it isn't WPF - Joseph Cooney
  Ah, so it was not me thinking even Google Earth looks slicker than WWT. At the very least it has an.. unusual interface

LINKBLOG for May 15, 2008

Once again problems with del.icio.us. Hope that I don't loose links, right now there's missing quite a bit... anyone else noticed problems?

• Interesting Map of Web 2.0 - Mike Walker
  Web2.0 - London subway style


• Coding Koan: the power of one - Leon Bambrick
  in here, there is truth


• The Narcissism of Small Code Differences - Reg Braithwaite
  the Agnostic, the Ascetic, the Purist and the Librarian: all subtypes of the strange species of Developer, known for their weird opinions of 'good code'


• Did you know… You can mark methods and types as Hidden, so they don’t appear in Intellisense or in the Object Browser? - #216 -Sara Ford
  Attributes to the rescue, you can do more with them than you might think (i.e. is I underestimate you)


• ASP.NET MVC custom ActionResult (ImageResult) - Maarten Balliauw
  


• Elegant Code Cast #8 is Online - David Starr
  


• ALT.NET Podcast - Management Crisis! - Andrew Tokeley
  As a dev you get great benefits if you understand how managers work (yours for example). That's why you should read these manager's thoughts on.... well, you! Learn how to get the OK of the rest of your company on your world-changing and alt.* ideas


• Regex and WPF - Will
  mainly about getting a slick styled WPF design, resulting in a small regex parser


• The Only Certainty is Change - Casey Charlton
  Understanding change and the tradeoffs we as developers have to make


• Application Security Model - Michał Kosmala
  


• .NET Internals and Code Injection - Daniel Pistelli
  Long article showing more C++ than is good for me...


• On a Quest to find a better ORM Framework - Mohammad Azam
  


• Workflow Services Limitations: Part 5 - A Couple of Updates - Sasha Goldshtein
  


• ASP.NET MVC Controller Action Precondition Filter - Troy DeMonbreun
  Troy has automated his page input validation


• Play the News: Data Portability's Future - Josh Catone
  Access to your "social data" is hot in the news these days. You can decide on the future by taking the role of one of the stakeholders in this game


• Beyond functionality for enterprise apps - Tim Stall
  Thoughts on what exactly means "getting the job done"


• Successful Software - James Shore
  ' Stand-up meetings are a neat tool, but they're hardly the core of agile development. Beware Cargo Cult Agile '

LINKBLOG for May 14, 2008

• Developer Usability - Michael Stal
  ' In contrast to common belief, architecture is not only about functional requirements and operational qualities. It is also about usability '


• Can Subversion and Live Mesh Play Together? - Mike Hall
  Mike investigates unknown territories in combining a great OS tool with the latest and greatest from Microsoft. The conclusion might disappoint you a bit, but the lessons learned are worth reading


• Guest Post: The Case of the FrontPage Error - Troy Wolbrink
  guest post on Mark Russinovich's Case File blog


• Top Time-wasters for Web Workers (And How to Cure Them) - Celine Roque
  not only for web workers...


• Choosing an agile process - Summary - Ade Miller
  


• Software Developers Never Change - Nick Berardi
  ' (...) they need a scape goat and it is usually that their co-workers are slacking off, or they aren’t “smart enough” to keep up with their brilliance '
  Funny how this seems so specific to our craft; are we still just not mature enough a bunch of apes running around in circles, maybe?


• MVC Storefront, Part 10: Shopping Cart Refactoring and Membership - Rob Conery
  


• ALT.DayOf.Net? - Steven Harman
  ' Not one coming to a town near you...? Organize one! '
  Someone going to take ALT.NET to the Netherlands?


• Doug Finke's Amazing 7 Minute C# => PowerShell Demo - PowerShell Team blog
  from the description it looks like an interesting to view


• Whiteboard Wednesday: The Probability of Getting Tasks Done - Max Pool
  


• Microsoft Data Centres - it's staggering - Craig Bailey
  


• Architect Team Blog Roll - Charles Sterling
  pointers to VS Team Architect bloggers


• Beyond Mocks - the Partial - Karl Seguin
  Learned something new here: partial mocks


• Simulated Agile Team Rooms - Peter Provost
  Some extreme (what's in a word) measures to simulate agility if the circumstances are not 100% optimal; which they never are...
  '(...) actually have everyone go into their individual offices and dial-in to the meeting so everyone is on an equal footing '


• 101 ways to "Pump you (Visual Studio) Up - Brian Schroer
  via Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day"


• Software's Classic Mistakes--2008 - Steve McConnell
  Steve notes that we make the same mistakes over and over again, but people: remember the famous quote from [...mmm, lemme just Google that, tadaaaa] George Santayana(who's that?!?) ' Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it '


• ALT.NET Podcast on Continuous Improvement - Chad Myers
  putting this one in to 'tolisten' folder


• b# - Screencast - Test Driving an Inventory Screen
  Watching the screencast right now.. full of small side tips and explanations while Ben and Chad are coding away. You can just see they've done this before together


• Podcast #5 - stackoverflow.com
  


• Make a Binding Agreement with Yourself for the Life of Your Dreams - Travis Wright
  It's striking how this contrasts with the book I'm currently reading (4-hr workweek), where Tim Ferriss says that you can start living your dream right now, instead of getting to it step by step. I tend still to the previous version of getting there...


• Nice New Features in Firefox Beta 3 - Yaakov Ellis
  review

LINKBLOG for May 13, 2008

• How RSS Feeds Affect My Life & Work - Aliza Sherman
  Thoughts of an RSS newbie, which seems a species on the brink of extinction these days (in our spheres at least)


• Is Formal Project Management Necessary? - Bill Miller
  ' Successful project management is the process of managing change and taking corrective actions when change is identified ' So no change in the plan == no management


• Behavior Driven Development: As Human As Possible - Leon Bambrick
  Explaining BDD, being the latest(?) xDD around ' BDD = Test Driven Development Plus "natural sentence style test naming" '


• Continuous Integration resources - Ade Miller
  


• Trivial Projections Are (Usually) Optimized Away - Eric Lippert
  Nice one on decision making in the C# teams. Freely quoting from the C# specs


• The Value of Specializing Generalists - Jim Holmes
  ' Our industry's grown too broad for us to be experts at everything, even if clients expect us to be '
  Far too many devs still think they can keep up with everything - with me is a living example trying to get rid if that stupid idea :-)


• Who writes a blog post? - Maurice de Beijer
  Maurice point to an interesting article by Joe Wilcox regarding the question if some blog posts are nothing more than pre-written PR stuff, thus replacing the traditional press release (topic is pointing to Microsoft's newley released 3.5 beta bits


• A Programming Job Interview Challenge #3 - Shahar Y
  


• Use ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem With Anonymous Types - Matt Valerio
  


• Thinking in Concurrently in .NET - Matthew Podwysocki
  


• Write Active Conventions on your Code Base - Patrick Smacchia [MVP C#]
  Using NDepend's Code Query Language (if you know SQL, you know CQL) you gain insight in your project's problem areas in an automated manner, and with stunningly beautiful graphics


• Validation Across Class Hierarchies and Interface Implementations - Jahmani
  ' Dependency injection of validation rules and their application across class Hierarchies and interface Implementations '


• TLS: An exercise in concurrent programming - Nick Butler
  ' A walkthrough about multi-threading an app and a useful helper class '


• We are pleased to bring you new features in .NET 3.5 SP1 - Steve Maine
  New beta bits available (beta, mind you)


• Wrestling with WCF - Michael Eeaton
  O, the blessings of XML, or: why we wrongly use XML a a programming language these days, but without the goodies that accompany a *real* language (see Jeff's link in today's LINKBLOG btw)


• Quick Case: Case Of The Oddball Officer - Security Monkey
  Complete case file on SecurityMonkey's home today, so no need to await new episodes, which unfortunately are not too regular these days (S.M.: if it's still your paws playing up: good luck!)


• Management of Software Development: Top Five Reasons Why Prince2 Sucks - Jurgen Appelo
  Only the flowchart shown in the article - hopefully - gives you the shivers


• WorldWide Telescope- Microsoft Research
  The whole Twittersphere is blazing about something called WWT so it must be interesting. right?


• Your Problem Statement is The Problem - Scott Sehlhorst
  Problems, the way they manifest, and why you should distinguish the two


• Change the Font of Command Prompt Window to Consolas For More Comfortable Reading - Amit Agarwal
  


• XML: The Angle Bracket Tax - Jeff Atwood
  On the noise around data in XML, and some of the alternatives for XML


• Twenty Five Year Old Unix Bug Finally Fixed - Jason Chen
  Motto: it's never too late to fix a bug
  via Twitter/Marc Brooks


• Microsoft Meandering - Guy Smith
  Vista an Yahoo mentioned as two recent crucial mistakes in a compelling address to Microsoft
  thanks Jason

LINKBLOG for May 11, 2008

• Throw out your Automated Tests - Adam Goucher
  ' (...) test automation needs to be reclassified as a technique which aides in the exploratory testing of an application at a technological level '


• Twitter this, Twitter that... - Rick Strahl
  I get strangely attracted to Twitter related stuff this week...
  via Alvin Ashcraft


• #6 - delete vs destroy in TFS - Pieter Gheysens
  TFS handles delete actions different than you might think


• Exception Handling - Do's and Dont's - Misbah Arefin
  


• NullObject.For<T> - As simple as it gets, but no simpler - Roy Osherove
  


• Slightly Different Way To Assert That Exceptions Are Thrown - Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo
  Heavy exception wizardry


• We've Turned XML Into A Crappy Programming Language - Matt Blodgett
  And this is wrong: XML is *not* a programming language but a means to display (be it maybe in a clever) data, IMHO


• 11 Biz Dev 1.0 Tips - Bernard Lunn
  


• Why Filtering is the Next Step for Social Media - Corvida
  Social media tools don't interact, that's why filters are needed to regain control over them (if we want to keep using them that is)


• Cage Match: Gantt Charts vs. Burndowns - Ben Scheirman
  Ben just explained my problem with Gantt charts: they are waterfall and therefor can never fit in agile / incremental software development


• Writing A Custom File Download Action Result For ASP.NET MVC - Phil Haack
  


• 100 Simple Ways to Change Your Life for the Better - Travis Wright
  


• TypeConverters: There's not enough TypeDescripter.GetConverter in the world - Scott Hanselman
  Do away with all that switch/if/else stuff and use the built-in Converters, or make your own TypeConverter. Nice tip to improve readability of your code


• Ever wondered what a diagram of the TFS 2008 Team Build Process would look like? Wonder no more... - Greg Duncan
  Cool, this will go to the color printer


• Computers are dumb - Eric Lippert
  


• Set up a Windows SSH tunnel in 10 minutes or less - Ytechie
  Pretty handy and quick way to get complete access to a remote machine over a single port


• Unlearn - Rod Paddock
  ' I have become convinced that we are entering a new dawn of software development and we must take time to unlearn that which we know '


• Why use WPF if it is not RAD yet? - Josh Smith
  ' Why are people leaving RAD for MAD (manual application development) '
  thanks Christopher Steen


• Two New Features to www.RefactorCode.com - Azam Sharp
  

LINKBLOG for May 10, 2008

Partial listing, with del.icio.us having some serious issues at the moment...

• Talks Abstracts - Oren Eini
  Oren lists all of his talks


• The 300 Page Ideal - Charles Petzold
  New book coming up: The Annotated Turing


• Project Failures - Blame the Process, or the People? - Casey Charlton
  food for thought


• Exposing Windows WorkFlow as Web services - Prabhjot Bakhsi
  


• Introduction to using XPathDocument, XPathNodeIterator, XPathNavigator and XPathExpression Objects - Usman M Khan
  


• The Joy of Freeing Up Mental RAM - Russell Ball
  GTD. Having read the book a couple weeks ago, I can attest that it works: my Inbox is really empty, and so my mind can work on other things than keeping track of all emails and things-to-do that still must be done...


• Hi, my name is Resource. I am seventy-five percent billable - Brian Reindel
  ' Ultimately, there is no real statistical evidence that being called a resource is damaging to the psyche, but it is certainly worth considering the possibility '
  Always thought 'resource' was a given, but maybe we should just object more...


• SECURITY: BlogEngine.NET Security update - Craig Bailey
  


• The Weekly Source Code 26 - LINQ to Regular Expressions and Processing in Javascript - Scott Hanselman
  

LINKBLOG for May 9, 2008

• Innovation Notes: May 09, 2008 - Jason Haley
  


• Why Does Crystal Reports ALWAYS kick my Axx - Part VII -- Merge Modules/GAC
  via Alvin Ashcraft
  Wanna see your devs jump under the table: ask if anyone knows Crystal :-)


• Algorithms in C#: Connected Component Labeling - Kirill Osenkov
  ' The goal is, given a 2D-matrix of colors, to find all adjacent areas of the same color, similar to the flood-fill algorithm used in Paint '


• Don't forget the BOM! - Tomas Restropo
  Of the many ways encodings in one of it's manifestations will try to bite you


• Having fun with project managers! (or: why you should lock your desktop) - Maarten Balliauw
  You can definitely have fun with more people than PM's this way...


• How to Make Late Software, Even Later - Casey Charlton
  ' if you do nothing else right on a project, get the fundamental architecture and framework right, early '


• A Method Should Do One Thing and One Thing Only - Dave Donaldson
  ' So if you find multi-action methods like CreateUpdateDeleteItem, refactor them appropriately. Your tests will thank you '


• Agile way of documentation!!! - Xebia
  Putting more multimedia in requirements gathering in an Agile setting can help speed thing up considerably


• How To Find the Top Twitterers in Your City - Sarah Perez
  OK, so if I start using it, it might better be efficient...


• Guide to the semantic web - Mads Kristensen
  Mads would like more people to get their semantics straight, so he wrote an extensive introduction


• Hanselminutes Podcast 110 - Microsoft Research: Spec# - Scott Hanselman
  ' What's Spec#? Currently it's a new language that is essentially extensions to C# 2.0 '


• Notifying the Windows Explorer about files in use - Lukasz Swiatkowski
  Neat idea really, have your app communicate with the rest of the OS in a not too complicated way


• Your API Fails, Who is at Fault? - Matthew Podwysocki
  ' Explicit DbC constructs give us a pretty powerful tool in terms of expressing our domain and our behaviors of our components ' And as I understand, the new Spec# might be of help here (maybe we should listen to Scott's podcast on this (above!)


• Enhancing mappers with LINQ - Jimmy Bogard
  translating function programming constructs to LINQ:
  ' Filter = Where
  Map = Select
  Reduce = Aggregate '

LINKBLOG for May 8, 2008

[TWITTERED] Seeing (almost) the whole world having a seemingly good time on Twitter, I today decided to give it a try --> see sidebar, or my Twitter profile. First impressions are: this is overflowing with more and sometimes less interesting content. What's your opinion (via Twitter maybe?): is this Blogging / Communication / Chatting 2.0, or is it completely over the top?

• A .NET Cryptography Primer, Part Four - Will
  


• Consolidating and Version-controlling Development Settings - Terry Thibodeau
  Cool alternative use of SVN ' When all is said and done, you should now have a nice, centralized, version-controlled Visual Studio (and associated application) settings location '


• 3 Places To Keep Your Pocket Code (Besides Your Pocket) - Max Pool
  ' I have seen people attempt to organically grow “reusable” libraries from these snippets in the forms of assemblies and jars. I highly frown upon this practice '


• Mind Streams of Information Security Knowledge: A Chinese DIY Multi-Feature Malware - Dancho Danchev
  The message here is that hackers - just as the rest of the software/IT world - are also evolving, and we should keep an eye on them


• Software Architect 2008 - Simon Brown
  Seems like an interesting set of sessions


• Mock Framework Benchmarks - Aaron Jensen
  


• MVC Storefront, Part 9: The Shopping Cart - Rob Conery
  


• LINQ Gotcha - Bill Ryan
  


• Inbox Hero - Charles Miller
  Inbox Here, Inbox Zero, as long as you keep control over your inbox, things are OK. As soon as I see people with 100+, or even 1000+ (unread!) emails in their inbox, I know they're beyond help...


• Becoming a Jedi - Part 1 of N - James Kovacs
  streaming ReSharper goodness


• What arrays and pointers have in common - or - Why arrays start at zero - Karl Seguin
  


• The Bookshelf - James Kovacs
  Agile book list


• Mythbusting - Collective Code Ownership - Mark Levison
  


• Keep Your Eyes on the True Goal - Steve Rowe
  focus on the destination not on the trip, nice comparison


• Perfectly Solid Learning - The Braidy Tester
  


• London's Cameras Don't Reduce Crime - Bruce Schneier
  What sane people knew all the time (that mounting cameras all over the place doesn't help a bit) is now finally acknowledged by British police themselves


• One encoding to rule them all - Chip
  Seems like Unicode is taking over the web; at least being the no. 1 encoding now


• Did you know… You can add references to your solution directly from the Object Browser - #210 - Sara Ford
  


• Patch Window Shrinking - Semi-Automated Reverse Engineering | Darknet - The Darkside
  via Jason Haley


• Question: How do you stay up to date? - Jason Haley
  Good question, as it becomes more and more a second job to remain relevant in this industry - or am I just getting old :-)


• Social Networks/Blogging and Self-Improvement - Rhonda Tipton
  Yes. Doing nothing with your career leads to knowledge rot (as in "bit rot")


• That Big Project and Your Relationship - Pamela Poole
  ' The moral of the story is that if you’re an entrepreneur or you’re working on a major project, it is essential to keep your partner on the same page you’re on '


• Google Translate Becomes the Best Free Online Translator - Ionut Alex Chitu
  


• Do you really need a data access layer with LINQ? - YTechie