LINKBLOG for March 11, 2008

• Line Length, Volume, and Density - Paul M. Jones
  ' Developers with good style balance all the considerations of line length, volume, and density '


• Bonuses in an agile organization? - Chris Spagnuolo
  ' Since agile practices don't encourage heroism or the individual developer but instead focus on team accomplishments, we thought that bonuses needed to be dished out on a team-wide basis '


• Be proficient in one programming language - Joan Planas
  ' Every single step you decide [in your career, ed.] to do will shape the final result so I prefer those to be stable and concrete '


• How Not to Read New Code - Soon Hui
  ' Don't ring up the original coders for help, if they have left for a long time already '
  Good tip! Someone adviced me recently to call such a former dev. Problem is: if the code is *really* complicated, how can they explain you what it means?


• Coding vs. Configuration - Tim Stall
  Me agrees with the article insofar that sometimes this code monkey feels more than a configuration guru than he likes


• Productivity Guru SMACKDOWN: Tim Ferriss v. Dave Allen - The Growing Life
  ' DingDingDing '
  Just started reading Getting Things Done, and already feeling extremely inspired and committed
  via lifehacking.nl (Dutch)


• WSJ: Larger Monitors Make You More Productive - Jason Harris
  ' According to the Wall Street Journal, workers who have larger monitors complete tasks much faster ' And now hope that the boss reads this...
  O, read the disclaimer: ' However, it should be pointed out that the sponsor of the study was NEC'


• Archive Build Your Own Office with Bloxes - Mike Gunderloy
  For a bit of fun on the workfloor


• Work Tunnel Vision - Why It’s Bad For Your Mind
  ' I will admit to being a workaholic, but reminding yourself that work is not everything needs to be a constant reminder to better mental health '
  Ahhhh yes, the miracles of self-ridicule can help tremendously here...


• Binary vs. Source compatibility - Mike Stall
  


• First Forays into F# - Andrew Matthews
  ' (...) my first impressions: what it felt like to program in F#, what seemed nice, what could do with improvement, that sort of thing '


• Funny Little Logic Errors - Anthony Trudeau
  Wouldn't call that one funny, but if Anthony can laugh about it, who am I :-)
  via Trumpi


• NTFS Data Streams and .NET - Tomas Restrepo
  Tomas wonders why Alternate Data Streams are not supported natively in .NET and has some thoughts


• SubSonic: 2.1 Beta 2 Available Now - Rob Conery
  


• Did you know... You can have VS automatically do a rename within the entire project when you do a file rename in Solution Explorer? - #169 - Sara Ford
  


• Fitting Linq To Sql into a real world datalayer - Justin Etheredge
  ' Linq To Sql is not perfect, and yes I know that it isn't the only OR/M solution out there, but they have done an excellent job in v1 ... '


• Parse IP addresses out of a web server log file - Jeffrey Palermo
  C# code sample


• Auto-generated vs. human-generated IDs - Kyle Baley
  ' as I start working, the inevitable question arises: Why are we still using this archaic process of generating job numbers manually? Computers *love* generating IDs automatically '


• Wanna extend Visual Studio? Read Keyvan book - Simone Chiaretta
  Simone Chiaretta


• You can watch and influence the future of VB and C# - Julia Lerman
  via Alvin Ashcraft


• Field Expedients, or why "I don't have the tools" is not an acceptable answer - Oren Eini
  Fake reasons for not using good tools
  ' It would take me too long to get approval to buy this tool”, or “I have to go through the Proper Channels to use that tool'


• Plumbers at Work - Episode 13 - Hyperspatial Bypass - James Kovacs
  Didn't know this podcast! You have to know a certain book to understand the titles of the shows, but I'm sure you're geek enough to know it


• Exploring Lamda Expression in C# - Zeeshan Jafar Hirani
  Lamda expressions for beginners


• A Multi-Threaded WPF TreeView Explorer - Kavan Shaban
  


• Ten UI Lessons from the Real World - Hugo Vidal Teixeira
  Hugo has some very vivid example pictures here that I hadn't seen before
  via Chinh Do


• Can a Notebook be *Too* Thin? - Charles Petzold
  Yes, someone lost his MacBook Air, and ' ... it was probably stuck in a stack of newspapers on his coffee table that were then moved to the recycling bin! '


• (Single-Entry, ) Single-Exit, my 2 cents - Rick van den Bosch
  ' I do think there is no real reason to hold on to creating methods with a single exit point other than personal favoritism '