LINKBLOG for February 20 , 2008

• Cockburn Affirms: Use Cases Rule for Agile! - Scott Sehlhorst
  ' We’ve been promoting use cases as the right way to approach agile requirements, and in a recent article, Alistair Cockburn stresses the importance of use cases '


• Which Is The Must-Have Skill For A Software Developer? Abhijit Nadgouda
  ' I personally think it is a problem solving approach '


• .NET 3.5 Client Product Roadmap - Scott Guthrie
  'nuff said. Scott summs it all up


• Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes - Jakob Nielsen
  So good old Jacob is still around


• Expert Texture » Dan’s Worst .NET Bug
  Tricky business over here, or: how threading can get immenely complex' Loop this code on one or more threads and you may eventually get a System.IO.IOException. I say may because I can’t reproduce it, but Dan can and so can one of our customers '


• Visual Studio Gallery - Microsoft
  New Microsoft tools/software site, not yet announced but already live (in beta)
  via Dennis van der Stelt


• P/Invoke Libary - VS2005 & 2008 Add-in - Ernest Laurentin
  ' This tool will help you organize P/Invoke signatures that you use regularly in your application ' (P/InvokeLib Visual Studio Add-in)


• Providing Multiple Views to the Same Collection - Jeremy Jarrell
  


• How to not get a question answered - Eric Lippert
  A brief reminder ' The people you are sending email to about your technical problems are people. It would be smart to briefly introduce yourself, describe your problem (...) '


• Exception Handling in Software Development- Reg Braithwaite
  ' Exceptions to the process should be reserved for exceptional circumstances '


• 15 Minutes with Rhino.Mocks - Steven Harman
  Which is just too short ' Even if I spewed out words at a rate comparable with a world-class auctioneer I still couldn't cover everything I wanted to '


• Using IoC TDD To Design Tomorrow’s Car - Rob Conery
  Rob asks his friend, the master mechanic, a question leading to a discussion on similarities (?) with building software: ' If you could design a car from the ground up - how would you do it? '


• Virtual PC and Ubuntu - Rhonda Tipton
  I'm not really into Ubuntu and Linux these days (was in the past, so I'm in-the-know) but this whole Virtualization stuff is just really taking off. And don't forget: it can be really useful for development also!


• Simple Principle, Big Dividends - Mike Nichols
  


• Organizational Tools for different scope and time - Leon Bambrick
  Leon finds an old table leading to the following question
  ' the idea is that different tools are used depending if we're interested in big things or little things, and whether we're looking forward, looking back, or living in the moment '


• Running classic ASP on IIS 7 - Alex Thissen
  ' It's not really difficult to run classic ASP on Internet Information Server 7, but there are some bumps down the road '


• If it feels good, do it - Kyle Baley
  ' In the end, a little confidence goes a long way. You're smart people. Like the title says, if it feels good, do it. But make sure you are always questioning what feels good '


• 5 Keys to Improving Your Reading Speed - J.D. Meier
  ' Simply put, I don't focus on reading faster. I focus on learning faster '


• Last XML serializer I'll ever write - Jim Bogard
  small piece of code, the deeper thought here is how much difficulty we as developers can have to reuse our old pieces of art


• Breaking Change in Linq Queries Using Explicitly-Typed Range Variables - Ed Maurer
  ' There's a change coming in .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 that will affect some programs containing queries that explicitly specify the type of the range variable '


• Writing Better Code -- Keepin' it Cohesive - Matthew Cochran
  


• There Ain't No Such Thing as the Fastest Code - Jeff Atwood
  ' Abrash is a world class coder and technical writer, but he's also not shy about explaining the perils and dangers of our craft, including the biggest problem of all-- the one that sits behind the keyboard '