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