LINKBLOG for April 28, 2008

• Monthly Improvement Sprints - J.D. Meier
  Nice idea to 'continuously improve' yourself


• From zero to logging with System.Diagnostics in 15 minutes - Josh Twist
  


• CHAPTER 4: Learning and adapting - Dan Bunea
  Learning during agile development cycles is going two ways: ' Customers learn how valuable their proposed features really are, while programmers learn how difficult the features really are '


• The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career - Reg Braithwaite
  Short and simple: ' improve your ability to communicate '
  Think I agree completely! Seeing this with myself (to be honest) and my collegues that on averager we have a major gap here with the rest of the business. How about you?


• Living on the Edge of Firefox - Mike Gunderloy
  For the real alpha heroes among us: grab the nightly builds, called "Minefield" builds...


• Keeping Sight of the Bigger Picture - Kelly Waters
  So you're agile, but don't forget to keep the the bigger picture in mind:
  ' an agile development team might break things into small pieces and deliver incrementally, but this makes it even more important to have the overall context always in mind '


• UI Matter: Make the simple things simple and hard things possible - Patrick Smacchia
  Slick UI's in some developer tools: the greatest tools are the ones where you just *smell* that the team is developing its tools with the end user in mind


• Email Insanity & the 0.001 Challenge - Merlin Mann
  From lifehacking guru Merlin Mann comes this post, where the point that most struck me is: thinkg more about the person you're sending your email to: how many mails will he receive and how can yours stand out (hint: not by adding, but by taking away?)


• Immutability and tail recursion - Justin Etheredge
  On why you get a StackOverflowException with n++ in a recursive method on a 32-bit OS, and not on 64-bit: the tricky ways optimization can cause unexpected results


• The Whatchamacallit, Post Recession Phase Transition - Bernard Lunn
  ' So what is wrong with the Web 2.0 picture? When the dust settles, on what issue will we be saying “how could we have been that dumb?" '


• Foundations of Programming - pt 7 - Back to Basics: Memory - Karl Seguin
  Stack, heap, memory leaks, boxing, pinning: all about memor management by the CLR, and a nice conclusion:
  ' If you can't wait for the scope to exit, you likely need to refactor your code '


• A Smarter (or Pure Evil) ToString with Extension Methods - Scott Hanselman
  Scott is on an evil tour...


• Red-black trees (part 5) - Julian M Bucknall
  Next part of a series on the implementation of a Red-black tree which for me as mathematically ignorant person was completely unknown before


• Consolas for your Command Prompt - Greg Duncan
  This is definitely better on the eyes


• Understanding Mock Objects - Mohammad Azam
  


• Understanding Mock Objects: an alternate solution - Jimmy Bogard
  Jimmy responds to Mohammad's post above


• What purpose does the Repository Pattern have? - Fredrik Normén
  


• Q: Is IQueryable the Right Choice for Me? - Bart de Smet
  ' I'd say, if you just implement Where and Select and maybe some others like Take and First, it might not be worth to go all the way with IQueryable<T> '


• Continuous Innovation in the Online Office - Mike Gunderloy
  Mike compares Google and Microsoft
  ' Features shipped by Microsoft Office in March and April:
  ... '


• Pattern for Continuous Builds - Dave