LINKBLOG for February 29, 2008

In case you miss some crucial post here: I'm indeed a bit behind because of a very busy week (I know, I know: don't give excuses on your blog. But just so you know... have a good weekend!

• Six Principles for Making New Things - Scott Watermasysk
  great quote


• Did you know... A lot of tips go back to Visual C++ 2.0? - #162 - Sara Ford
  Sarah's leap year edition leaps a giant step back in history


• Dynamic IP and OpenDNS? Watch out - Robert W. Anderson
  


• (Some) Computer Technicians Are Creepy - Leon Bambrick
  So it shows that being paranoid is not always a bad feature
  ' The bit where they deleted the recent documents list happened extremely quickly '


• Building the transaction protocol documents - Jim Johnson
  A look behind the scenes from someone involved in creating the Protocol documents Microsoft released on MSDN last week


• Unit testing benefits programmers who are already good - Ben Watson
  ' (...) being a good programmer must come from within you. Becoming a better programmer can be done with the help of education, tools, and processes '


• The art of technical interviewing. - Mitch Denny
  ' The devil is in the detail though. Rather than having a list of cute questions draw upon your own experience to guide the discussion '


• How Hard Could It Be?: Lessons I Learned in the Army, Corporate Culture Article - Joel Spolsky
  ' A general's pep talk taught me that a leader can't lose sight of what it means to be a grunt '


• Implementing deferred execution, and a potential trap to avoid - Jon Skeet
  ' The moral of the story? (...) Be careful when implementing iterators! '


• PowerGUI is now officially RTM - Greg Duncan
  ' It's gives you the easy point-and-click UI, while also letting you see what's really going on behind the curtains '


• Running an Interactive Team Build 2008 agent - Grant Holliday
  ' (...) allows it to interact with the desktop. This is essential for running things like automated UI tests'


• Immediate Window - A forgotten tool - Oh Null!
  


• Google Lets You “Chatback” With Your Visitors - Nick Berardi
  Cool feature!
  ' It now allows me to have direct conversations with my visitors with a simple click of the mouse on the chat bubble '


• Do you compile XML to IL? - Mike Stall
  On behalf of the VS008 team, Mike wants your input


• 5 Reasons to Quit Complaining - Jim Glass
  Good reasons; however, the feed of this post shows some partially dizziying pictures that the website seems to lack?


• Blame Game - Adam Goucher
  ' The only thing I can guarantee to you about your career in testing is that at some point (likely lots of points) you will miss something '

LINKBLOG for February 28, 2008

• C# Algorithms Book Review - Julian M Bucknall
  


• Reality-Driven Development - Gustavo Duarte
  Philospohy, Agile principles and John Locke


• The Seven Demands of Leadership- Cultivate Greatness
  Inspiration for leaders


• No surprise here - offshoring losing popularity - Frank Kelly
  ' More than ever these experiences taught me that keeping development teams close together (...) helps get to success quickly '


• Ask A Good Product Manager - Scott Sehlhorst
  Interview series with Q&A for product managers


• Judging You By Your Tools - Abhijit Nadgouda
  ' (...) assuming a programmer’s practice and expertise by looking at his/her tools is a blunder '


• What made me cry: Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope - Robert Scoble
  So this is what made Robert cry


• So, you think you know Regex-fu? - Reg Braithwaite
  If you answer yes to that question, then definitely go to the challenge Reg points to


• The Inline SQL application - Six Months Later - Paul Stovell
  


• Parsing custom dates using ParseExact - Peter van Ooijen
  ' Far easier to use is the ParseExact method which takes a custom format as parameter '


• To close or not to close, that is the question - Justin Etheredge
  ' I see no problem with giving developers powerful tools with which they can wreak havoc, but why would you want to litter your object with public methods that may not be needed '


• Injected objects should not be disposed be the class that receives the instance - Ramon Smits
  


• The managed MMC 3.0 snap-in cookbook - Bart de Smet
  


• Creating objects - Perf implications - Oren Eini
  ' Now, what does this long and arcane post tells us?
  Creating instances, no matter how many, is really cheap '


• TFS Performance & Excel 2007 Heat Map - Grant Holliday
  Use Excel 2007 to answer these questions:
  ' - Is TFS slow today compared to yesterday or last week?
  - Is the current hardware up to the job? '


• Private builds (Gated Checkins) with Team Foundation Server - Roy Osherove
  Roy shares a cool TFS tip


• TestDriven.NET keyboard shortcut - Jimmy Bogard
  


• Douchebaggery - Jeff Atwood
  Indeed DHH even thinks that *all* Windows developers already have gotten irrelevant' David Heinemeier Hansson has a problem with Windows as a programming platform '


• Agile For Customers - Steven Smith
  ' the truth is, agile development (...) does require programmers to do things they don't necessarily enjoy (...), but the difference is that the things being done have value even to the one writing them '


• News: Microsoft Launches Key 2008 Products in Los Angeles - Becky Nagel
  OK, this must be linked from somewhere...


• 12 Essential Free Tools for .NET Developers - Boyan Kostadinov
  Indeed lots of must have tools mentioned here


• Building trees from lists in .NET - Daniel Flower
  ' An interface to simplify creating trees from lists of database rows or objects '

LINKBLOG for February 27, 2008

• Dependency Problem - Input Desired - Scott Reynolds
  


• VON# - Quick and Dirty Memory Utility Methods
  Neat way to get the total memory size for objects of all sizes


• The Diminishing Return on Code Uniformity
  ' I have see religious wars break out over stupid standards such as:
  * { on new line or same line
  * _ or m_ in front of private variables '


• Software Quality and the QA Engineer Team - D. P. Bullington
  ' A good QA team encompasses the following basic traits '


• Did you know... You can create temp or "throw away" projects - #158 - Sara Ford
  Or you 'just' grab Snippet Compiler which makes this process even easier...


• Be Careful of Your Passion - David Starr
  ' there is a degree of professionalism needed at all levels. Let’s care about the system as a whole and be good stewards to the craft, not just the shiny bits '


• Adobe AIR vs Microsoft Silverlight: A developer's perspective - ImpressionSoft
  


• MSDN Reader!! A Must Have Application! - Aneef Fashir
  ' The MSDN Reader allows you to browse through MSDN Magazine articles like never before '


• Wiki as Text Adventure Game - Leon Bambrick
  ' Here's my current idea: write a wiki-style site where contributors don't just write webpages, they construct text adventure games '


• XML Pathfinder – A C# Utility - salysle
  ' This article discusses the construction of a simple utility that may be used to locate and evaluate paths within an XML document, and to test queries against those paths '


• .NET 3.5 Brings Major (Undocumented) Changes to ThreadPool - Michael C. Kennedy
  


• Your own Lolcats widget (I Can Has Cheezburger?) - Gath Adams
  Not for everyone...


• Sandcastle and API Documentation - Brian Peek
  A simple introduction to create your own documentation with Sandcastle
  via Christopher Steen


• Real World Development is still very much .NET 2.0. - Nathan J Pledger
  


• Using List Generic in your data layer - Wilson Kutegeka
  


• Visualising the Mandelbrot set with LINQ - yet again - Jon Skeet
  


• Cacheman - a fast distributed hashtable for Windows - Sriram Krishnan
  Complex but interesting stuff
  via Chris Alcock


• Try/Catch Blocks Can Hurt Performance Significantly - Chinh Do
  ... when put in a repeating block of code


• Windows parallel programming datasheet - Microsoft.com
  PDF explaining the concept behind modern parallel programming according to Microsoft


• The Weekly Source Code 17 - ASP.NET MVC Community Code Edition - Scott Hanselman
  


• Application Portfolio Management - Mike Walker
  On EA and APM, lots of referals if you like