LINKBLOG for December 30, 2007

And so the year comes to a close (on this blog at least), including a good rant. And a question:

is a link-blog allowed to be opinionated, or should it just keep it's mouth shut and pass only the interesting stuff under your attention?

Have a good Year Change, or whatever it's called in your place; let's see each other next year!

• Netscape Navigator is dead - Brent Strange
  This news comes from multiple sources. Was obvious that this browser would be EOL'd one day or the next but still it is kind of sad. This guy remembers having used version 4.7 (I think) for a substantial amount of time. Goodbye Navigator!


• Three unexpected weapons in the battle against “blogger’s block” - Blogging Expertise
  For those bloggers that feel blocked every now and then, and who isn't?
  via Trevor Green


• Rituals for Results - J.D. Meier
  ' Routines help build efficiency and effectiveness. Consistent action over time is the key to real results '


• Doug has a dream - Don Box
  plans for an Emacs.NET seem to be on the way, YATE (Yet-Another-Text-Editor) or some cool new stuff?


• Some cool features in Visual Studio 2008 - Mahesh Chand
  


• C# 3.0 - Partial Methods - Scott Dorman
  


• Breaking changes in LINQ to SQL in release version of dot net framework 3.5 - Vikram Lakhotia
  


• The Sad State Of Programmers Part 3: General Tips - SQL Server Code...
  


• Did it with .NET - Twelve Days of Refactor! X-mas, Day Ten: Refactoring in XML Literals
  Day 9: Expand Lambda Expression


• What is a name, besides identity? - Derik Whittaker
  ' Over the past 2-3 days there has been an uproar over at the altnetconf list. Oops, I meant the cli_dev list. This uproar is because of a single action. Changing the name of the list. '
  Yeah. I give up on them. Spent 10 minutes figuring out where this alt.net mailing list had gone to. Seemed they were having dinner in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe or something. The old list 404-ed without any warning.
  So reading Derik's post, we find out they changed from Yahoo over to the Google group alt.net, while introducing a new Yahoo group.
  O well, read more here and here if you're really still interested. Also, it seems they still are not clear on this themselves
  
  The only thing I'd like to add is that they did a good job loosing the people watching from the side, not being actually a member of the group, in not announcing this all over the place (maybe just what they wanted?). But then again that's just me. Maybe should have looked better.
  


• Strongly typed custom configuration sections using XML serialization - Benzi K. Ahamed
  This article demonstrates a simple approach to get strongly typed configuration objects to use in your code using XML serialization


• *** Sandcastle Conceptual Help: Quick Start - Paul Selormey
  Very helpful article explaining how to make a User Manual with conceptual help with Sandcastle (warning: you will need at least the October 2007 CTP for this)