Holiday...

...starts NOW! Don't expect something new before Aug 12.

In the mean-time keep yourselves busy on everything new via:

• Christopher Steen
  


• Jason Haley - Interesting Finds- always wonder how he can come up with so much interesting things, maybe he has clones of himself all working their way through the subscription pool on different threads :-)
  


• Mike Gunderloy - The Daily Grind
  


• Steve Pietrek - A Continuous Learner Weblog
  


• Raganwald not linkblog only, and not heavy in quantity, but has interesting contributions
  

Or just procrastinate around on DZone (who have by the way dramatically ajaxified their site since the last time I checked (long ago)

LINKBLOG for July 20, 2007

• Learning from Dave Winer - Joel on Software
  


• Sony: Anatomy of a good web interaction - Scott Hanselman
  


• *** The Code Less Traveled: Thinking Different In A Uniform World - the.codist{}
  ' The one constant in this industry is that change never goes away. I'd rather go away from programming than ever admit that everything is just good enough. '
  


• GOTO - xkcd by Randall Munroe
  Still considered harmful
  


• The Principle of Least Power - Coding Horror
  Jeff is the next one to come up with his own law. Hmm, maybe I also need to dream up one....
  


• Marc Andreessen on Venture Capital - how it works, VC investment rules - Don Dodge
  


• Code Critique as an Interview Tool - rococo - then rubble
  ' One of a software engineer’s most critical skills is the ability to read code. '
  


• Reality check: Planning is everything - Zac Belado
  


• *** Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex - Friday Reflections
  Small but very insightful storyline
  


• Is estimation at your company like this? - Silver Stripe Blog
  ' DEV MANAGER: We cant have that date, the board wants to have it done by the end of the year. Lets just cut the estimate to fit it in. '
  
• 
  The MakingITclear® Newsletter - 10 Rules for IT Job Success
  ' ...the people with the most experience are the ones who have made (or observed) the most mistakes in the past; making mistakes is how they got the experience in the first place. '
  


• Why You Should Polish Your Code - Basil Vandegriend
  ' Anything longer than about one screen warrants a closer look to see if it can be simplified, usually via an extract method refactoring. ' uh..uh...
  


• Why an average career can be a great career « Angry 365 Days a Year
  ' ...who exactly is served if we set ourselves goals that are so far beyond what is realistically achievable we spend our lives feeling like miserable failures? '
  


• Microsoft patents the mother of all adware systems - Joh McBride
  


• Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo - A List Apart
  Haven't looked at A List Apart in 1-2 years because of shifting interest, but this is one we all can learn from
  

LINKBLOG for July 19, 2007

Light day, Visual Studio related. Holiday coming up after tomorrow. Good for me, bad for you :-)

• Tips and Tricks for VS20005 and VS2008 - Karen's Space
  


• Startup Visual Studio with DotNetKicks.com - Brennan’s Blog
  more goody tips, via 'Some small ways....' (below)
  


• Some Small Ways to Reduce Daily Development Friction - Steven Harman
  Small, but good ones
  


• Making your assemblies visible to Visual Studio
  


• Powerful log file analysis for everyone [Releasing TextAnalysisTool.NET!] - Delay's Blog
  

LINKBLOG for July 18, 2007

• *** A Day in the Life of an Information Security Investigator
  Maybe you know the guy, maybe not. Anyway, SecurityMonkey has been around for a couple years delivering a huge amount of case files on Computer Forensics. Really reads like a thriller or detective! Like it, and spend half a weekend browsing around, consuming all the cases. Although not programming related, I still find very valuable lessons there, from which every PC-savvy person can learn.
  
  And by the way, he is so popular that last week the ITTToolbox Blogs to a grinding halt: writing Im In Your Leenucks Box Changing Your Password and generating 150,000 pageviews on that article by being digg'ed, redditt'ed etc. was just too much apparently :-)


• Tools I use as a .Net Developer - Derik Whittaker
  


• Note to Software Vendors, the World is Collaborative and Loosely Coupled - Dare Obasanjo
  ' This change was crashing the applications that were invoking our service because they weren’t expecting us to return bananas. '
  


• Utility Methods - Are They The Devil? - Palermo4
  Via Jeffrey Palermo (see below)
  


• Utility methods, utility classes, common classes - a blob is not an abstraction - Jeffrey Palermo
  Somehow posts like these always attract me on a certain level. But I haven't adopted the underling principles of TDD/DDD and what have you, so it's something else toput it into use in my own situation.
  


• 101 Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed
  


• The Waterfall Manifesto for Realistic Software Development
  The Waterfall guys strike back:' While the principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development may look appealing for inexperienced developers, serious professionals know that the real world is not similar to the "Little House on the Prairie" '
  Take that :-)
  


• 19 Eponymous Laws Of Software Development - Haacked
  In which you learn the meaning of...eponymous (didn't have a clue!)
  



• Where did my MSDN go? - telerik blogs
  One of those seemingly completely unrelated issues making software development so hard.
  


• Vesting - Joel on Software
  Release your software AEAP (as-early-as-possible) or only after some good old bugfixing: it depends.
  

LINKBLOG for July 17, 2007

• Understanding Engineers: Feasibility - The Fishbowl
  


• Better exception syntax - Norman Richards
  It's on java, but applies to .NET
  


• DateTime.ToString() Patterns
  all of them
  


• Anonymous Methods vs Threads - Vault of Thoughts
  


• What does it take to be a great Software Architect? - Frank Kelly
  


• Displaying progress updates when hashing large files - InfiniTec.de
  


• Krzysztof Cwalina : Generic Methods as Casts
  Especially like this advice: ' If neither of these benefits applies in your case, I would use a simple cast. ... The users of a generic method might wonder what kind of “magic” is being done with the generic type parameter. '
  
  Bottom line: never complicate things if you don't have to!
  


• *** New to management: Two Learning Hit Lists - Talking Story
  


• Getting Clever Together: Building Team Collaboration - Stephen James Joyce
  ' Think of the years of life experience represented in a room of 15 people with an average age of 35. It represents over 500 years of life experience. That’s a lot of wisdom to tap into. '
  


• Visual SVN: Another Zero Friction Tool In The Toolbox
  I know SVN and Tortoise, and knew about Ankh, the Visual Studio addin for SVN, but Visual SVN is new to me. Apparently can even get better
  


• Digital Digressions: The 5 Rules of Growth
  Are *your* ideas (1) Sustainable (2) Profitable (3) Capital Efficient (4) Differentiated from Competition and (5) Innovative ?
  

LINKBLOG for July 16, 2007

• Customers of different industries were asked: "Why did you stop trading with a company?" - Friday Reflections
  Answered by 68% of respondents: ' An employee of the company showed an attitude of indifference towards us '(research originating from 1987 but true today)
  


• Withdrawing From The Echo Chamber, 2 Weeks Later - Christopher Hawkins
  Christopher deleted all his feed subscriptions and bookmarks:' It's wonderful.
  ' Of course, one cannot stay on top of everything, so there is a point. But in this case a bit too drastic to my opinion. Or maybe I'm too info-addicted to see the light.
  


• You should see the post-mortems - Bug Bash (humor)
  
  


• *** Focus on the core: the most important part of the application - Jeffrey Palermo
  


• Interfaces vs Abstract Classes - DotNetJohn
  Almost 4 year old but nice overview telling the two apart
  


• Bat file compiler - The Code Project
  


• Have ever had trouble remembering the Keyboard Shortcuts to some application? - Public Sector Developer Weblog
  I'm no Keyboard Jedi but still using it as much as I can: it really saves you time in the end
  


• Intensional Interop - Scott Bellware [MVP]
  

LINKBLOG for July 15, 2007

• Enforcing Coding Standards using Resharper - Derik Whittaker
  Coding Standards I like, now the trouble is having the same one as the collegues. But Derik is right, that's what Resharper is for
  


• Marquee de Sells: Chris's insight outlet
  ' if they ask you something potentially scope-less, e.g. "Tell me about yourself," feel free to ask for a scope, e.g. "I'm 38 years old and a lot of stuff has happened. : ) '
  


• Lost in translation - brian will . net
  Assemblers, compilers, linkers, for a lot of us only working in framework that's actually just a bit of history. Still it's worthwile to know what's underneath the IDE
  


• Is raganwald leasing space in Blogger's walled garden? - raganwald
  


• Integrating version control and issue tracking - cysquatch.net
  


• Five Principles to Design By - Bokardo
  ' Great Design is Invisible ' Guess if you reach that level as designer your a real craftsman
  


• Testing your code
  ' ... ambivalent about unit testing ... ' I admit: me too, I know what it is, that it's a good thing, but still something holds me back
  


• How To: Obtain Method Name Programmatically For Tracing - Palermo4
  


• Write Articles, Not Blog Postings (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
  Jacob message that it's better to write articles than blogs get really a lot of attention among others from Ayende to Larry O'Brien. One of the most compelling arguments in favor of the blog post I saw was from Ayende: look at the investment in time (article: huge, blog post: small) versus exposure (article: always limited audience, blog post: potentially huge), and also the flexibility blogging gives