LINKBLOG for January 4, 2008

• Why You Care About System.AddIn - Kathleen Dollard
  ' (...) Bill McCarthy said “Hey did you look at System.AddIn” and I said “No, silly I’m not writing add-ins” '


• Dijkstra:Shortest Route Calculation - Object Oriented - Michael Demeersseman
  Implementation of this algorithm in C#


• Appending nodes in XML files with xmlpeek and xmlpoke using NAnt - Bil Simser
  


• Installation testing - Adam Goucher
  good tips like
  ' Refresh your OS often. This typically means you want to invest in something like ghost if you are on windows and not using virtualization or if you are, then just copy over a clean virtual image '


• The Value of Consistency - Hamlet D'Arcy
  Some interesting thoughts on consistency in development


• The Secret (Correct) Implementation of Equals - Michael Feathers
  ' Often, people implement equals on speculation. They feel that it will be useful at some point, but the times when equals is useful are surprisingly rare '


• So just what does synchronized do? - Brett Schuchert
  Let's start the year with some techy threading goodness


• The Case of the Missing AutoPlay - Mark Russinovich
  Mark is back with an interesting case file... you *want* to follow his cases if you want to know more about the internals of Windows. There's no-one who makes these more interesting then he!


• Did you know... use Ctrl+Tab to bring up the IDE Navigator to get a bird's eye view and navigation of all open files and tool windows in Visual Studio? - Sara Ford
  


• OOP and Interviews - Rob Teixeira
  ' I look for a few tell-tale warning signs. For example, I don't want to hear "we did X" and "we implemented Y". I'm not hiring your entire team. I'm trying to hire you '


• Monitoring code coverage, or "How to descend into madness" - Kyle Baley
  ' I've become a code coverage Nazi '


• My Code Sucks - Oren Eini
  ' (...) I wrote an ETL tool to handle that in a few hours.
  Why is this relevant? Because I have already build an ETL tool. Rhino ETL '
  If you invented it yourself, it probably is not called NIH...


• Gotchas: Visual Studio debugging and stepping through source - Ade Miller
  Explanation of some weird Visual Studio behavior: ' It gives you no indication as to why the source is unavailable - room for some UI improvement here I feel '


• The Trouble with PDFs - Jeff Atwood
  ' # Every time I link to a PDF, I have to tag the link (pdf) to indicate that the hyperlink will whisk you away, not to another web page as you might expect, but to a strange, otherworldly out-of-browser experience '


• The Problem with Problems with Patterns - Keith Braithwaite
  via Reg Braithwaite
  This has the words Lisp and Smalltalk in it but still is a worthwile read <grin/>