LINKBLOG for March 31, 2008

• Does Satisfice Mean Agile? - Max Pool
  Max ponders on the heart of agile


• Book - Cryptonomicon - Steven Smith
  Indeed an inspirational book, and Steven is right: it has a language of it's own which for me as a non-native speaker was... let's say interesting


• NHibernate 2.0 Alpha is out! - Oren Eini
  


• Community Convergence XLII - Charlie Calvert
  Lots of interesting links here this week


• New Team System 2008 Virtual PC to Download - Martin Woodward
  


• Code Cast #6 - Interview Darrel Carver
  podcast on ' (...) minimalism, the role of the architect, and Model Driven Architectures '


• The Winning Essay: What is Elegant Code? - David Starr
  


• Why do I document Code? - Scott Pio
  On everyone's favorite job


• Creating Windows Services - Sergio Pereira
  Showing how handy it can be to also put things like creating a Windows service in a helper library


• The Roots of Best Practices - Christopher Bennage
  I love it when maintainability is stressed as being of vital importance in the software development life cycle, it's just too often easily pushed aside


• Developing a Robust Data Driven UI Using WPF - Stock DataModel Sample - Eran Kampf
  This is a wonderful series for when you're new to WPF and are not afraid about adding a pattern or two in your code base


• Life Coding: 9 Ways to Fight Feature Creep in Our Lives - Glen Stansberry
  Harsh but useful advice in GTD fashion
  ' - Set hard deadlines on Internet usage
  - Only check email a few times each day
  - ... '


• Don't Blame the Compiler - Steve Rowe
  Check your developer-maturity-level by asking yourself if you're inclined to blame the tools


• Two Reasons Why You Now Have Limited Access to TFS - Brent Strange
  tips to restore your TFS connection


• The grass is greener where you water it - Ryan Ternier
  The title inspired me to never use the underlying phrase anymore
  ' a working individual it is your duty, heck it's your God given duty to put 100% into your career / job. It doesn't matter if it's full time, part time, a "stepping stone" (...) '


• Designing Findability - Abhijit Nadgouda
  ' Findability is a cross-cutting aspect in everything design, right from Information Architecture to usability to SEO and can directly impact your users and hence you '


• If you are using a loop, you're doing it wrong - Chuck Jazdzewski
  ' LINQ allows me to write code that communicates what I am trying to do without it being obscured by the details of how it is done '
  via Chris Alcock


• *** What is Elegant Code to me? - Chris Brandsma
  Nice post on how you shouldn't take your own code too serious, and the need to constantly improve
  ' today's elegant code is tomorrow's drivel. Don't feel bad, many writers have the same problems '


• Custom Aggregations In LINQ - K. Scott Allen
  Lambda's, queries and aggregates


• Hanselminutes Podcast 106 - Inside Outsourcing - Scott Hanselman
  


• Taxonomy of Interaction Models - Evan Hoff
  Small (initial?) post to get the the types of communication models straight, in order to have a more clear conversation about them


• 5 Unconventional Places to Scout for Web Work - 'Six Revisions'
  interesting ways to get work via Jason Haley


• Process, Root Cause Analysis and Defect Prevention - Adam Goucher
  ' Once you get a quality infrastructure in place, the net gets tightened earlier around problems and root cause analysis becomes less of a priority and/or need '


• Lazy Instantiation with Unity Application Block - Randy Patterson
  didn't know there was a name for this...
  ' (...) giving your Unit Tests access to private members violates the "Use the Front Door First" Test Automation Principle and should be avoided if possible '


• Breaking Dependencies - James Kovacs
  Found this a wonderful nail-hitting quote
  ' Legacy code is simple code without tests '


• Edit and Continue - Sergio Pereira
  aha, good to know!


• Mozilla's Asa Dotzler on Firefox, Fighting Bloat and the Problem with Democracy - Michael Calore
  Nice wired interview with one of the first Mozilla community developers


• Accidental Properties of Software: Programmer Productivity - Darrell Carver
  

LINKBLOG for March 29, 2008

• Locking Rule #71 - Paul Stovell
  Dangerous code ahead:
  ' Never invoke code you don’t control whilst holding a lock '


• Programming Is All About Passion - Soon Hui
  So be it


• Linq to Xml ,querying the file - 'Donald'
  


• Continuous integration future? - 'Pablo'
  


• It does not take a Superstar - Developer types enumerated - Frank Kelly
  


• Reputation Management: Your Next Social App? - Mike Gunderloy
  Completely unbeknown to me, I got an invitation to some Reputation service a couple days ago, and I'm still pondering whether to accept (i.e. if I really believe in a service like this)


• Expression Trees: Why LINQ to SQL is Better than NHibernate - Lee Richardson
  Going deep in LINQ to SQL


• Sorting List's the .Net 3.5 Way - Derik Whittaker
  


• IE vs. Standards - Jim McKeeth
  Thoughts on the points Joel made last week with his post on Martian Headphones


• RedirectToAction in Filter Attributes - Kyle Baley - The Coding Hillbilly
  ' Alas, my crest has fallen. No way to access RedirectToAction or Url.Action from within a filter attribute. They are protected or internal, I don't care which because neither will help me '


• Anders Hejlsberg Film Festival: The C# and other VS Language Teams at the Movies - Charlie Calvert
  It's video time over at the C# team


• CHAPTER 1: Problems and causes with the way we develop software - Dan Bunea
  Interesting start of a mini book on agile software development


• Domain Objects and Dependencies - Azam Sharp
  


• The problem of over aggressive caching - Oren Eini
  


• Visual Studio Themes - Rhonda Tipton
  Rhonda likes to change her theme depending on mood, which is a really easy thing to do actually


• Put perspective on both short and long term problems - Nick Malik
  No Silver Bullet here....
  ' Lot's of red flags go up when someone tells me: this is the problem and this is how you solve it. Perhaps I'm just that kind of person '


• Why Can't I Access A Protected Member From A Derived Class, Part Two: Why Can I? - Eric Lippert
  Learn that a piece of code only compiled in C# 2.0 because of a compiler error (so it doesn't compile anymore in C# 3.0)


• The Long Road To Rescuing Wally - Sergio Pereira
  ' If one team member is no longer bringing his A-game, the other members will have to pick up the slack, which is not exactly fair '


• Who is a Product Owner? - David Starr
  relevant remarks as to who is a product owner and what are her responsibilities


• Password Field Tip - Jason Haley
  Nice tip, especially where Jason suggests *not* to save passwords at all :-)

LINKBLOG for March 28, 2008

• Did you know... You can view an error's help documentation directly from the Error List? - #182 - Sara Ford
  


• Is agile only for elites? - Hans-Eric Grönlund
  ' I think it’s possible to build rigid software with little upfront design, a readiness for change, rapid feedback and customer collaboration. The problem I see is that it demands a lot more from us developers '


• March 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .NET - Scott Guthrie
  


• Range variables - is it just me that thinks they're different? - Jon Skeet
  


• Discovering Windows PowerShell - Alex Mueller
  


• Automation FTW - Sergio Pereira
  he ' If your work cycle looks like this: Save, Build (wait), Debug (wait), Click, Click, Click, Type, Type, Click, Verify result, OK; someone needs to introduce you to a unit testing tool immediately '


• WPF 3D : Part 1 of n - Sacha Barber
  ' Excursions and deviations into the dark recesses of my mind '


• Design Principles - OO Design
  5 wellknown principles, but it doesn't hurt to review them again


• Anatomy of a Project Failure: Corporate Culture and Lessons Learned - Mike Desjardins
  ' The culture of my former employer was forced to change suddenly to support new business, and it ultimately resulted in failure '
  Follows an wonderful explanation how (as we see time and time again) a business messes up an important project


• Plan For Today, And Plan Correctly For Tomorrow - Scott Sehlhorst
  Also plan for toady and tomorrow cause ' In The Long-Run, We Are All Dead '


• MSBuild 3.5 just made my day - Loren Halvorson
  If you also have trouble copying readonly files around with MSBuild, this is for you


• Add System Menu Items to WPF Window using Win32 API - Chris Pietschmann
  OK, this is a way to have your WPF app look more like a WinForm, but personally I'd rather get rid of all Win32 API calls and just use what's natively available in the Framework


• ReSharper is smarter than me - Oren Eini
  In which it is proven that (the indispensable!) ReSharper suggestions must not always be followed exactly, we have the obligation to keep thinking ourselves too


• I {entity} Unicode - Jeff Atwood
  If you don't get Jeff's joke immediately, you are strongly advised to *at least* read Joel's classic article on Unicode (the first of Jeff's links)