LINKBLOG for February 16 , 2008

• The key difference between developer and architect roles - Simon Brown
  


• What is the trade off with Inversion of Control (IoC) - Nick Malik
  ' One small team was quite religious about using it, while another was, let's say, a bit more circumspect. It made me think about where I would put IoC into the pantheon of silver bullets ... '


• Patterns, it's about teaching people how to fish - Glenn Block
  ' In Software Development we know that the one thing that is constant is change. Some things may stay the same, but as we make new discoveries at the hardware, software language, and methodology level, change occurs '


• Model Checking creators win Turing Award - Andy Oram
  ' Formal proofs looked great for academic exercises, but quickly became untenable when applied to real-life applications because of the explosion of possible states '


• Instilling Quality in Your Teams - Ben Scheirman
  ' Often times (due to lack of quality in some of the other areas), quality can get pushed aside in the interest of getting things done. This is a balance that all of us must deal with '


• Better Surfing by Changing your Host file - Bill Evjen
  Contains link to sample hosts file that will prevent lots of requests to add servers (as opposed to add blockers that download and then block adds


• A C# central logging mechanism using the Observer and Singleton patterns - Codeproject
  ' A very powerful and clean way to add logging of all sorts to an application '


• Fully Customizable Random Password Generator - Keyvan Nayyeri
  in C#


• Coding Challenges - Stumbling Through
  A coding challenge, maybe a good idea to do among colleagues. Not so much to show off your le33t sk1llz but to have an opportunity to learn from each other


• Do You Really Need A Distributed Architecture? - ACE Team
  ' Are you building next Google or Flickr or just building departmental HR system? Do you really achieve the benefits creating your distributed architecture? '


• File System search via LINQ to Objects - Jaycent Drysdale
  Example in code


• Life At Microsoft - The Truth Revealed - Tina Wood
  ' "What is life "really" like at Microsoft"? ... I decided to create a video that would answer that simple yet complex question. '


• Specializing Generalists and the Politics of Agile - Scott Sehlhorst
  ' A successful agile team requires someone on the team to act as the voice of the customer, someone to lead the developers, someone to lead quality assurance, and someone to organize, coordinate, and assure execution '


• Dubious Interview Questions - Adam Barr
  ' A great potential hire might not happen to know much about VB forms; a "no-hire" might by happenstance have recently tried to create a .java file with multiple public classes in it '


• Would you fire a developer if he/she does not follow the coding conventions of the team? - Diego Parrilla
  Ask first if you could afford such a step. Furthermore there's about a gazillion things reqested of a professional dev, so for not adhering to only one this is quite a harsh measure...


• Why your customers will love agile (even if they think they hate it) - Tom Hollander
  Still I find it strange that the people who probably have the most to gain from the benefits of agile are often the least willing to give it a go - the customer.


• A reflection on hate week - Leon Bambrick
  ' Let me repeat that, in case it's new to you: even very intelligent scientists and engineers, like you and me, continually dismiss and disregard important breakthroughs in our fields. '


• The custom MSBuild task cookbook - Bart De Smet
  While not difficult, Bart needs a lot of pages to give a very clear description of the process
  ' Implementing custom MSBuild tasks isn't very difficult - all you need to do is implement the task interface ITask '


• How to Create File Optical Images using IMAPIv2.0 - Decebal Mihailescu
  Create iso files with managed code


• The Meaning of (Software) Quality - Jeff’s Post
  ' Quality is a two sided coin. Quality is about accuracy, but it’s also about emotion. Quality software must work. But it also must give something meaningful to the lives of the people that use it. '