LINKBLOG for February 7, 2008

• Writing Multithreaded Code Is Like Juggling Chainsaws - Andrew Wulf
  ' In job interviews, a popular question is "what is the major problem you have to solve in writing multithreaded code?"(...) Only the truly experienced in complex threaded coding will say "avoiding doing nothing" '


• Cool Site of the Day - Thom Robbins
  link to site with small .NET related videos


• A Career Path in Pictures, Getting Better Each Day, and That Feeling in Your Gut Before Launch - Rob Wallling
  


• Did you know... You can use Alt+F6 and Alt+Shift+F6 to cycle through opened tool windows - #145 - Sara Ford
  


• Publishing RSS and ATOM Feeds using WCF 3.5 Syndication Libraries - Adnan Masood
  


• Contractors: Here today, gone tomorrow. « Grant Holliday
  ' (...) this is a triple-whammy for the organisation. Not only will they lose valuable corporate knowledge but it will tarnish the great reputation they have built up over the years '
  Me still is amazed with the ease companies just dump contractors


• Out of control -- Sterling Camden
  ' something inside me said “NO”, and I decided to listen to that something this time '
  We should all be doing this more often (goes for me at least)
  


• Detecting Application Idle State in Windows Forms - Ellis Web
  


• Crazy Talk: Inline Scripting Revisited (Or, 2003 Bites Back) - Rob Conery
  ' There’s no way I’m sitting here partying with VS 1999 and .NET 1.1 so I can accomplish a single line of code change. That, my friends, is a maintenance issue (and yes, it’s my fault) '


• Consider using weak references for your custom caching solutions - .NET Tip of The Day
  


• Battling Password Chaos - Russell Ball
  ' Keeping track of my passwords has been a nagging problem for me for a long time, but I only recently got around to doing something about it '
  If you didn't know, there are some good alternatives for keeping passwords safe


• Put IDataRecord.GetOrdinal Method to Good Use - Chinh Do
  Never, ever depend on the order in a stored procedure. This *will* come back to haunt you!


• Long running workflows and the ReceiveActivity - Maurice de Beijer
  ' (...) with this technique all the client has to do is save the workflow instanceId somewhere, perhaps a database table, and it can reconnect to the same workflow at a later point in time '


• Beware the siren of yield return - Fritz Onion
  ' The array allocation function generated a total of 20 lines of IL, but the yield return function, if you included all of the IL instructions for the IEnumerable class generation as well was over 100! '


• TFS Version Detection - Pieter Gheysens
  Contains info to help you out if your TFS trial stops working after the trial period


• How to use delegates to remove duplicated code - Gerhard Stephan
  ' we removed the duplicated exception handling and outsourced it to an new method that takes a Delegate Method as a parameter ' The comments mention an even more concise way to do this in C# 3.0


• 7 ways to do Performance Optimization of an ASP.NET 3.5 Web 2.0 portal
  ' We saw how a Web 2.0 portal's response time was decreased from 90 seconds to 117ms by applying 7 performance tips '
  Really long article with lots of code samples


• Playing with NDepend - Jim Holmes
  ' NDepend is a great metrics/code analysis tool. It generates a wealth of metrics on your software, and it's fairly easy to use '


• C# 4, part 1: Looking back at the past - Jon Skeet
  Don't worry ;-) John only looks back up until C# 3, we don't want to go to version 4 already don't we... btw chech out his Brain Teasers section which got me thinking very hard


• Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - How to Probe Browser History Using Javascript in IE and Firefox
  In order to show on your blog ' which social bookmarking sites a viewer of a Web page actually uses based on their browser history '


• Inversion of Control Pattern
  An implementation. And just to be clear ' Dependency Injection is a "kind of" IoC, but its not the only kind and they are not the same thing '


• Test Supported Development (TSD) is not Test Driven Development (TDD) - Troy DeMonbreun
  Elaborate fully referenced article on why we might need another acronym ' TDD takes the wonderful concept of Test-First Software Design and chains it to a dogmatic mantra of Test-First-ALWAYS '


• How do you pronounce => ? - O'Reilly Windows DevCenter Blog
  via Jason Haley comes this question on how to pronounce the lambda operator