LINKBLOG for March 3, 2008

• How Super Mario Bros Made Me a Better Software Engineer - J Kealey
  Playing games while becoming a better developer at the same time, great!


• Skyscrapr - Your Introduction to Architecture
  On the first looks there seems to be some interesting information in this new Microsoft portal aimed at (aspiring) architects
  via Simon Guest


• Nullables with Reflection quickref - Philippe Leybaert
  


• *** Iterators, iterator blocks, data pipelines and LINQ - Jon Skeet
  Very clear in explaining the mentioned topics


• What Does It Take To Become A Grandmaster Developer? - Jeff Moser
  


• Why I Love F#: Lists - The Basics - Dustin Campbel
  


• XML-RPC ping endpoint in C# and ASP.NET - Mads Kristensen
  Implementation of an endpoint able to handle your blog pings


• Focusing on Design - James Avery
  ' I can only imagine the benefit to the application and the company if we had taken the time to re-think the problems we were solving and come up with a simpler and easier to use design '


• Windows Vista Controls for .NET 2.0 - Give your .Net applications on Vista the "Vista look"... - Greg Duncan
  


• StovellMocks - Paul Stovell
  Paul starts and finds out how RhinoMocks works, but:
  ' When you want to learn something, looking at someone else’s code first is like reading the last page of a book first - it spoils all the fun '


• Did you know... You can press Ctrl+/ to reach the Visual Studio command line? - #163 - Sara Ford
  


• How to Serialize a MailMessage - Keyvan Nayyeri
  via Chris Alcock


• Circular references with WCF: solved a different way - Ruurd Boeke
  ' In this post I present a solution that will create a more beautiful XML representation of your object graph than ever before! '


• Coding Standards: The Real Importance - Isaac Rodriguez
  Good article. Maybe even the most important thing with regard to coding standards is to have your whole team feel OK with them. You can force a standard onto them, but if noone is buying it, you'll have a hard time making people follow 'the rules'


• What is the ROI on EA? - Harry Pierson
  Have *you* ever thought about these questions?
  ' 2. What do you think your organization's EA ROI is? '


• Archive Sandwich Pause Trick When Talking to Real People - Pete Johnson
  Nice social trick buying you some time thinking on the answer to a question


• Actual Performance, Perceived Performance - Jeff Atwood
  ' As with so many things in life, perception is reality: if users see file copying as slower, it is slower... '


• The key to improving your agile process is the Retrospective - Steve Eichert
  


• Great SQL Server Blogs - Rhonda Tipton
  


• The February 2008 Caffeinated Codey Winners Are… - Russell Ball
  Maybe no real surprises here, but all these guys (yeah, I knoww...) have definitely earned their statuses


• High Performance TCP/IP Server using C#.NET - Artur Sharipov
  


• Easy XML Parsing in C# - Joseph Armbruster
  Nice code sample showing how to read XML by using a schema


• Why do good programmers produce bad software? - Justin Etheredge
  ' So, just remember that you can use BDD, TDD, DDD, MVC, ORM, (enough?) all you want, but if you are not writing what your customer wants and needs then you are just wasting time ' Justin writes about a four year old but highly relevant article...


• Trivia: when is a no-op not a no-op? - Jon Skeet
  ' Can anyone think of a situation where a yield break; directly before the closing brace of a method cannot be removed without breaking the code? '


• DotSVN - The .Net port of Subversion -
  This project has to earn its tracks, we'll wait and see how it evolves
  via David Vidmar