Arjan`s World

Had a wonderful day at CodeCamp 2008 NL today. Still found some time skimming through the blogosphere

• Lightweight Object to Object Mapper - Stavinski
• Getting rid of strings (3): take your app settings to the next level - Andre Loker
  Don’t be underwhelmed, as this really goes in depth using examples with patterns all over the place, IoC containers, and stuff…
  ‘ In this episode I’ll explain how we can abstract from app settings and leverage the power of the Castle DictionaryAdapter to improve the way our applications access their app settings. ‘
• Fluent NHibernate – NHibernate without configuration files - VusCode - Coding dreams since 1998!
  ‘ I believe that the most important reason why NHibernate is not more widely adopted by general DEV population is exactly the “Java XML configuration” PIA feeling you have while working with it ‘ We are lucky that now there is a more DEV friendly new project
• How to view information in ViewState using ASP.NET 2.0 and 3.5 - Suprotim Agarwal
• Stolen Identity via Password Reset - Jim Duffy
  ‘ Interesting quick read from the Scientific American website ‘ Interesting indeed, but not if you know a bit about social engineering and what you can google these days. It is astonishing what you can achieve with a little bit of ‘data mining’
• TFS Adoption at Microsoft - Grant Holliday
  Grant has the #users, projects, source files etc, indicating the widespread adoption of TFS witihin Microsoft (as it should)
• Firefox, ClickOnce, XBAPs and .NET 3.5 SP1 - Scott Hanselman
• What A Slow Build Might Tell You - Davy Brion
  ‘ apply the technique of Root Cause Analysis to the problem of a slow build of a fictional (yet very common) project ‘
• Five Important Lessons I’ve Learned As An Entrepreneur - Rich Whittle
• One Day of TDD - Devver
  Conclusion: nice, but staying with TDC instead… (What’s TDC you say? read on)
• Clueless UK Government: Might We Have Your PIN Please? - Security Monkey
  See how far ’stupid security’ can go; this one is from the UK, but it happens everywhere…
• Not Everyone Has the Same Definition of “Done” - Steve Rowe
• MvcFutures And ASP.NET MVC Beta - Phil Haacked
  (…) a quick heads up about the MvcFutures assembly within ASP.NET MVC CodePlex Preview 5 ‘
• ASP.NET MVC Application Building: Forums #1 – Create the Perfect Application - Stephen Walther
  Cool new series. Here’s part two and three!
• What’s Up Doc - Karl Seguin
• MEF Making its debut on Codeplex - Glenn Block
  And Greg Duncan has a little roundup

Going to <a href=”http://codecamp.nl/”>CodeCamp</a> tomorrow; might be a little quiet over here the next couple days…

• Testing Windows Form using TypeMock - Soon Hui
  ‘ Here I am going to demonstrate how to use TypeMock to test some of the GUI actions ‘
  Very helpful and clear explanation of how to use TypeMock in testing your code. Using a simplified example makes it easier to drive the lessons of this post home
• What to do When Your Work is Criticized Publicly - Celine Roque
  ‘ Criticism doesn’t always have to feel so negative. When we filter out the clutter and choose to learn from our mistakes, what seems like a bad day at work can become an important stepping stone in our careers ‘
• Testing Lists with Typemock Isolator - Travis Illig
  Travis sees this question pop up different time in the forums, so is kind enough to provide an asnwer in blog format
  ‘ How do you mock a list using Typemock Isolator? ‘
• Book review: Ajax Design Patterns - Luisabreu
• How to Split a Text into Words - Keyvan Nayyeri
  This is the first part of a series of a few blog posts that I’m going to write about common string manipulation problems in .NET (especially C#) with some code snippets
• How to make your staff more productive - Dave Campbell
• Favor small and frequent checkin over big ones - Alkampfer
• ASP.NET 3.5 URL Routing - Kalyan Bandarupall
• Martin Fowler on Avoiding Common Scrum Pitfalls - Jacky Li
  Interesting InfoWorld interview with Martin Fowler, via Abhijit Nadgouda
• Contest: Cory Doctorow’s Cipher Wheel Rings - Bruce Schneier
• Becoming a remote developer - Kyle Baley
  As a normal worker drone I’m always attracted to the world of the free agents, able to take on only interesting work
• DataGridView in Windows Forms – Tips, Tricks and Frequently Asked Questions(FAQ) - Suprotim Agarwal
• Using Generic Extension Methods - Samer Abu Rabie
• The Open-Closed Principle for Languages with Open Classes - Dean Wampler
• “One Hen”: How one person can make a Big Difference - Friday Reflections
  Inspiring story on how micro financing and micro lending can make a huge difference
• I love fluent interfaces - Alkampfer
  ‘ Fluent interfaces like these fully benefit from intellisense and are really simple to use ‘
• What Is Design? - Frank La Vigne
  via Alvin Ashcraft
• Retrieving values from an IDataReader - Andre Loker
  ‘ espite the undoubted advantages of ORM you probably need to fetch data directly from an IDataReader from time to time ‘
• Seven Principles of Lean Software Development - Respect People - P Bielicki
  ‘ Working in a team means not only solving technical problems, designing stuff and make decisions together. One of the most important factor that makes teams successful is Respect. ‘
• Whip IE6 Now - Andrew Wulf
  ‘ So far I’ve only worked with CSS issues (JavaScript is next) and it’s making me tear my hair out (which is hard since it’s cut very short)
  …
  Whip IE6 Now! ‘
• Identifing Waste, the Lean Way - Raymond Lewallen
  ‘ This ties a bit into over-processing, but production is a result of processing, so when you have over-production, you’ve already over-processed ‘
• Generating VSTS 2008 Coverage statistics - Mark Flory

Quiet day today, apart from …well, you know, of course!

• Custom Collections with NHibernate, Part IV: Extensions! - Billy McCafferty
• Nasty “Gotcha” with ASP.NET MVC and Views - Casey Charlton
  ‘ So if you get an odd problem in ASP.NET MVC relating to Views … just make sure you haven’t got old files in your directory structure! ‘
• ReSharper 4.1 Released - Casey Charlton
• WPF in LOB - Rudi Grobler
  Not to overflow you with too many TLA (Three Letter Acronyms) but one of the most talked about things in the WPF world is, is it ready for Line-of-Business?
• VS 2008 SP1 – the worst user experience ever - Igor Moochnick
  Glad my strategy still works: wait a while when new bits come from Redmond, to see if people think it’s either or
• How is VB.NET Doing? - Kathleen Dollard
  ‘ I recently touched base with someone from the good old VB6 days. They were good old days, but I’m not going to talk about them. He asked where VB.NET went (…) ‘
• On passion - Jimmy Bogard
  ‘ One pattern I’ve started to notice lately is that continued success requires passion. Without passion comes little sustained success ‘
• 9 Ways to Enjoy Freelancing More - Steven Snell
  ‘ Freelancers are always facing the need to find new work and keep moving forward in their business. (…) But it’s also important to enjoy the work that you do ‘
• Mock Object Frameworks: NMock, RhinoMock, TypeMock - Mark Michaelis
  via Steve Pietrek
• Successful Software - James Shore
  ‘ One of the big myths of agile development is that agile teams don’t document their work ‘ Maybe even the biggest one?
• Last Call: Top 100 Software Development Blogs! - Jurgen Appelo
  This is interesting even for the fact that it lists a big number of wellknown and lesser wellknown software development blogs. Glad to see that my feedlist already contains a bit chunk of them, and it gives me (and you) an opportunity to discover some good new content
• Your Creative Genius Mindset: The Essential Qualities for “Outside the Box” Thinking - Adam Sicinski
  ‘ To be creative, is to have the capacity to think freely, openly, without limitations or constraints about problems and challenges confronting our life reality ‘ Nice graphical representation of the “Creative Genius Mindset”
• A tip on using ASP.NET validation controls - Keith Brown
  ‘ In the future when I use validation controls I’ll always provide a summary-friendly message in the ErrorMessage field, and if I need something different (typically shorter) to display inline, I’ll put it in the body of the validation control element ‘
• Documents 2.0 - Consumable Documents - Sidar Ok
  Rethinking your documentation is a very good idea, after all you don’t want to get into the situation that your collegue leaves and ‘ (…) you’ll face the hungry monster of 200 pages, which hasn’t been maintained like 10 years ago ‘
• Easy way to improve your image gallery using jQuery - Janko Jovanovic
  CSS hackery

It was a difficult effort to bring you a chromeless entry today, but I succeeded

• Make It Work, Make It Clean? - Davy Brion
  Davy talks on trade offs to make when we write our new code: with the end result in mind from the start, or just start out writing what comes to mind, refactor later, but be able to show working code faster. Interesting question to think about a bit more…
• Using Spring.Net, SQLite and NHibernate- Benny Michielsen
  Starting a new project from scratch, and how these tools come into play there
• ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios - Scott Guthrie
  And Scott is back with his usual big post accompanying a new MVC drop
• Prognostication.NET - Devprime
  “What are Microsoft technologies that should have died by now?”
• Becoming a Visual Studio Jedi Part 1 - Peter Ritchie
  ‘ In much the same grain as James’ Resharper Jedi posts, I’m beginning a series of posts on becoming a Visual Studio Jedi ‘ Good idea, there’s still a lot to discover in the “raw” product
• What’s Wrong With This Code? (#20) - K. Scott Allen
  Exercising the refactoring skills
• Saving/Exporting your XAML Canvas to an Image/Bitmap/PNG - Greg Duncan
  ‘ This is one of those “I know I’ll need but never be able to find again in the future” code snips… ‘
• Developer Humping or Extreme Programming - Mike Dopp
  ‘ Too Many cooks in the kitchen. When is too many developers one project a bad idea? ‘
• XAML Power Toys - Rudi Grobler
  VS add-in
• Prevent IIS from Binding to all Assigned IP Addresses - Billy McCafferty
• Is It Just Me…or Did This Blog Used to Be More Fun? - Russell Ball
  Russell looks for a new focus on his blog, which is apparently in need for more humor… ‘ In the future, I’m going to experiment with striking a better balance between these two sides of my personality ‘
• The Big Development Project: How much should it cost? - Peter Stev
• Passionate, Not Dogmatic - Jay Fields
  ‘ The difference between passionate and dogmatic is slim, but the result is dramatic ‘
• Staying Sane as a Technical Manager - Aaron Lerch
  Three words are required: ‘ Know your limits ‘
• Testing with Opinionated ASP.NET MVC - Joshua Flanagan
  ‘ the concepts of “opinionated frameworks” and “convention over configuration” have gained a large following from people rejecting the tedious and noisy declarative code typically associated with shaping a one-size-fits-all framework ‘
• 5 Easy Questions for Mary Poppendieck - Jurgen Appelo
• Using WCF Callback Services Throttling - Cameron Hanchey
  ‘ When using callbacks with transient subscribers, you must leave the channel open. This is how to manage and use service throttling to open up your service to more than 10 subscribers ‘
• Patterns in Real life - Boby Thomas P
  ‘ Design patterns played out with people instead of objects ‘ Actually a funny idea: comparing the abstract world of patterns to real life objects
• 5 Hacks Just For Writers - Thursday Bram
  ‘ It seems like all of us have intensive writing projects going on at any given time. Considering how much creative power such a project can require, it just makes sense to minimize the efforts we have to make ‘
• Talking Security with Microsoft’s Misfit Geek Joe Stagner - Deep Fried Bytes Episode 11
  another episode of DFB. Seems to get itself a place alongside the other .NET/Microsoft tech blogs
• *** Security: How to Set Up a Laptop Security System - Adam Pash
  Cool high tech and less high tech ways to frustrate laptop thiefs

Very late edition because yesterday evening (my time) our provider was unable to give us connectivity…

• StackOverflow - The Answer to “-site:ExpertsExchange”? - Sara Chipps
  Sara walks around in the new land of stackoverflow, checking what all the buzz is about‘ The UI is welcoming, and I say that as a developer. Well, maybe not so much a developer as much as just someone who likes a “no frills” UI ‘
• Breaking out of my ReSharper Rut - Russell Ball
  ‘ I’ve been using ReSharper for over a year, but it recently occurred to me that I’m still only using about 1/4 of the functionality ‘ So Russell stepped forward to become a ReSharper Jedi
• Schneier on Security: Security ROI
  ‘ It’s become a big deal in IT security, too. Many corporate customers are demanding ROI models to demonstrate that a particular security investment pays off
  (…)
  It’s a good idea in theory, but it’s mostly bunk in practice ‘
• .NET Rocks! #373 - Randall and Woodward on TFS 2008 and Beyond!
  ‘ Brian Randall and Martin Woodward talk about Team Foundation Server 2008, and all the goodness within ‘ Looks like an interesting episode
• Agile Project Status Reporting - Kelly Waters
  ‘ The burndown chart gives a really clear indication of status. Particularly if the team is very disciplined about the definition of done ‘
• ASP.NET MVC Diary #2 WHAT? - Stanford Kennedy
• Upfront Analysis Saves Time - Bill Miller
  ‘ Two weeks later, he was still working on it, and the performance improvement was only marginal. I said, ‘Ravi, it’s time to profile the code.’ Top gun programmers sometimes need a soft push back into reality to regain the pragmatic approach
• Confidence in the Cloud - Pat Helland
  ‘ Most of the time, customers really want availability at the expense of classic consistency! New means of expressing looser consistencies are emerging to provide availability even when failures occur! ‘
• Google’s Dream Browser, Chrome: Coming soon to your computer - Greg Hughes
  Details on Google’s newest upcoming project “Chrome”, which is supposed to be the web browser of the future. Greg has more details in a followup post
• My First Agile Project, Part 1: Doing 80% - Matt Grommes
  ‘ I’m calling this part of the story Doing 80% because the problem was we were doing 80% of Scrum ‘/i> Another warning that cherry picking is dangerous if you start out working Agile
• Finally some pair programming research - Siddharta
  ‘ Convincing management has generally been a common problem with pair programming, but if more than 60% say that its working well, then I wonder why management won’t listen to them ‘ You know why: well, ask yourself - why would they? It’s because they (and people in general too, I guess) don’t know about this specific piece of research. Iif they did, they would distrust it, find some pointers saying exactly the opposite. And if that doesn’t help, they will just follow their gut feeling. It is not easy to convince people of some idea completely strange to their way of thinking
• Four books to pre-order - Bart de Smet
  “Books are not dead yet” section
• Why I still read technical books - Tim Stall
• How to Write Your Own IM Bot in Less Than 5 Minutes - Amit Agarwal
  Use your IM client in a slightly different way than you are used to
• My Dev Kit - Alvin Ashcraft
  Alvin got some inspiration and blogs his development hardware/softwrae environment
• 11 Free Mind Mapping Applications & Web Services - Joel Falconer
  One of those tools that you know might be helpful, but you never came about trying them. Now you could

• Code Metrics in Minutes - Meera Subbarao
• I would estimate - I. M. Wright
  nice opinion, it’s not estimation that is hard, but acceptance‘ Estimation is among the most trivial tasks an engineer has to perform on a regular basis. Get over yourself, it is ‘
• User Interface That Works - The Microwave With Only 4 Buttons - Thomas Williams
  Simplest interface you’ve seen in a long time. While this is about a microwave, it is equally applicable to software
• FireFox 3 and Static File Caching Problems - Rick Strahl’s Web Log
  Rick explains, has not really a good solution, merely a CSS hack to temporarily solve his problem
  ‘ While this is good for performance in many situations I’ve noticed that this is seriously becoming a problem in some of my applications (…) ‘
• Recycle Bin - Joaquin Jares
  A perfectly average user find ways to Windows in a way that would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious. Makes you think about your own apps, doesn’t it?
• Transitioning - part II - oh, the expectation - Sergio Pereira
  ‘ The phases of a new job
  a.k.a.: From “what the..?” to “yuck” to “a-ha!” to “this is great” to “this can be better” ‘
• Which is faster? Flash or Silverlight? - Simone Chiaretta
  As always: it depends…. ‘ Flash/Flex is faster when it comes to graphic rendering, but Silverlight is faster when it comes to pure computation speed ‘
• Factory Method + Reflection : Achieving better extensibility in applications - Caio Kinzel Filho
  ‘ This article shows how to take advantage of the Factory Method design pattern and Reflection, to add more extensibility to your applications ‘
• An Engineering Mantra: Architectural Shelf Life - Adding Simplicity
  ‘ if you have the chance to start over, complete green field, what architectural patterns and technology do you use ‘
• Obligatory Utility Roundup Post - Matt Hinze
  Matt provides a handy list of all steps and tools he currently does for a new Windows (XP) install
• Use the DebuggerDisplayAttribute for your types - Daniel Moth
  ‘ The DebuggerDisplayAttribute overrides what you see for a Type in the expression windows, similar to what ToString does (except the attribute takes precedence ‘
• Custom Enumerators - Jaime Olivares
  ‘ Modify the behaviour of any enumerator to make it circular, reversible, constrained or stepped ‘
• Weekend Watching: David Levy on Having No Time to Think - Gina Trapani
  ‘ (…) our fast-paced world doesn’t allow for time to think deeply, the time when we come up with our best ideas and most important insights ‘ My idea Ideas are cheap, they require some serious mulling over to triage their worth…

sorry if this comes out a bit garbled. Had to wrestle the HTML today for some unknown reason

• Revisiting the onion - Kyle Baley
  The architectural version of the Onion, that is… ‘ Can the UI talk to the Infrastructure? Does the Infrastructure even use the Application Services? In my experience, not really. It interacts directly with the Domain ‘
• TIP: How to be an annoying presenter #1 – the ZoomIt virus - Craig Bailey
  ‘ Tip #1 : Using Zoomit != Great presentation ‘
• Developers, Using Libraries is not a Sign of Weakness - Dare Obasanjo
  ‘ I’m often surprised by how common it is for developers to prefer reinventing the wheel to using off-the-shelf libraries when solving problems tasks ‘
• What’s Wrong with a Data-Driven Approach? - Jan van Ryswyk
  In this regard, check out Jeffrey Palermo’s series on the new concept of Onion Architecture (starting there with part 1), explaining a refreshing look on how to keep data (and other infrastructure details) outside the main body of your app
• Document Map Margin in Visual Studio - Scott Dorman
  ‘ What RockScroll does is to extend the Visual Studio scroll bar to show a thumbnail view of your code ‘ Cool! Wonder what it does to the VS responsiveness, though
• Team Foundation Server – How Does Microsoft Uses It? - Scott Dorman
  ‘ If you’re looking at implementing Team Foundation Server, looking for ways to improve your deployment, or just want to know how one of the world’s largest software companies manages their day-to-day development, check out this “series” of blog posts ‘
• Book Review of Team Foundation Server 2008 in Action - Grant Holliday
• Svchost, why do you mock me so? Here’s a project to help you see what its doing… Svchost Viewer - Greg Duncan
  ‘ Sometimes a little GUI is all you need… ‘I know I wondered more than once what which svchost is doing, and why there is so many. Apart from this tool there is of course Process Explorer from SysInternals, showing this info, but in a more succint form
• Null Strings in ASP.NET Declarative DataSource Updates - Keith Brown
• Working With Linq’s Expression Trees Visually - Rob Conery
  I linked to the Expression Tree Visualizer before (I think). It’s a cool app showing … well, actually just what it says. Worth giving a try if you are new to LINQ and stuff
• Handling Passwords - Dev Prime
  If you have at least half an hour, it seems you can pick up a lot of basic knowledge around passwords and their management. Skimming through it there’s background on salt, keyed hashes, rainbow table attacks, and much more.
  ‘ You are the Weakest Link. Goodbye ‘
• The Fable of the Perfect ORM - Shawn Wildermuth
  ‘ ORM is a good thing. But ORM is about data access, not business rules. Its a important distinction that needs to be understood ‘
• 10 tips to build your network - Michael Specht
  It all comes down to: go out and make sure the rest of the world (whatever your ‘world’ is) gets to know you
• ASP.NET MVC Tip #40 - Don’t Cache Pages that Require Authorization - Stephen Walther
• Agile 2008 - Conway’s Law and Distributed Teams - Ade Miller
  ‘ Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it ‘ Very insigtful law this, can relate
• Top 10 Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) Articles You Must Read - Suprotim Agarwal
• MVC (Model View Controller) for Real World Development - Payton Byrd
  ‘ There’s tons of hype around from Microsoft’s ASP.Net MVC framework, but the fact is that it’s not a true MVC, it DOES care about the presentation technology and that’s a real problem ‘
• C# 3.0 Query Expression Translation Cheat Sheet - Bart de Smet
  As a reference for some planned and unplanned future posts, I wanted to share out my “cheat sheet” for the C# 3.0 translation carried out for query expressions
• Secretaries Make the Best ScrumMasters - Mcottmeyer
• Unit testing is doomed when it’s an elephant - Andrew Glover
  Opinion article arguing that unit testing is not automatically the shining star in coding that some keep it for
• Try-Catch-FAIL - How to run a software development company (INTO THE GROUND) - Part 4 - ‘Matt’
  Another crash course in crashing your project, apparently ‘ Dragon Management is a brand new approach to managing your peons that is guaranteed to bring you riches while keeping the office a barren wasteland of productivity and sorrow ‘
• Book Review: LINQ In Action - Rhonda Tipton
• “Secret” Questions - Sam Buchanan
  Sam has a good plea against those security breakers. It amazes me that “we” still accept them. Ma always tries to bypass them, or at least give a ridiculous answer to them, as to not have my account’s security completely thwarted from the beginning. They are something like a poor man’s password, but if you cannot even afford to have a good system around your password management, you’re not worth your salt (pardon the superfluous pun, it is intended. Hope you got it)
• Web Scraping, HTML/XML Parsing, and Firebug’s Copy XPath Feature - Chinh Do
  ‘ You should now have this XPath expression in the clipboard, ready to be pasted into your web scrapper application ‘
• Kanban Applied to Software Development: from Agile to Lean - Kenji Hiranabe
  Looks like the article you need ik you want a thorough intro in that Lean and Kanban thing
  via Twitter / Glenn Block

Short edition, today. Blame the weather, not the blogosphere…

• Announcing New C# 4.0 LINQ Features and Book - Omer van Kloeten
• How to Find the Intersection of Multiple Lists - Keyvan Nayyeri
• Lessons learned from Protocol Buffers, part 4: static interfaces - Jon Skeet
• Lessons learned from Protocol Buffers, part 3: generic type relationships - Jon Skeet
• Herding Code #14 and TFS/VS Phantom Checkouts - Rhonda Tipton
• Sorting Algorithms: The Cocktail Sort - OJ Reeves
  The latest in OJ’s ‘back to school’ sorting saga
• There will be code - Uncle Bob
• Breaking Free of Legacy Projects - Johanna Rothman
• The Greatest Chalk Talk Known To Man: ‘Better than a license to print money: Build Your Own Tiny Software Company’ - Leon Bambrick
• Dear Alt.Net Developers: Stop blaming Microsoft and WebForms for creating bad developers - Joe Brinkman
  Joe shares his thoughts, explaining that there will never be that silver bullet that will magically make all problems disappear, *not even* ASP.NET MVC
  ‘ I wish that Keith would have pushed developers to learn how to properly use their chosen framework/language/tool, rather than promoting one more tool, as if MVC will be the panacea for the cross browser issues he despises ‘
• F# Releases September 2008 CTP! - Matthew Podwysocki
• Asynchronously Execute PowerShell Scripts from C# - Jean-Paul Mikkers
  nice sample app showing off the coolness of Poweshell combined with C#
• Thoughts on MVP and WebForms - Chad Myers
• ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 is now available - Ben Scheirman
  And we finish off today with the new MVC drop, this one contains the download location
• Form validation with ASP.NET MVC preview 5 - Maarten Balliauw
  ‘ Since the new ASP.NET MVC preview 5, form validation has become more handy. Let me show you how you can add validation in such a ridiculously easy manner ‘
• Partial Rendering View Engines in ASP.NET MVC - Brad Wilson

• Async Operations in Wcf: Handling Exceptions - Dan Rigsby
• Software Estimation is hard (right)? - Andrew Stopford
• The Importance of Community Driven Events - DevLink - OH WOW !!! - Joe Stagner
• Screencast: Hosting WCF services in ASP.NET/IIS - Aaron Skonnard
  Another screencast in an interesting continuing series on WCF
• LINQ to XSD - Martin Hinshelwood
  ‘ Disappointed that is only works in C#, but having to use C# for a single project out of a solution it is a small price to pay to get the functionality ‘ Won’t take long and we even have LINQ-to-fridge…
• An entry into lean - Raymond Lewallen
  ‘ Today I just want to give a primer into lean so those of you who haven’t done much reading into it have a foundation from which we will build ‘
• How To Increase Your Blog Page Views - Amit Raz
  ‘ This one is for all you bloggers or all you who intend to open a blog ‘ Or if you don’t have plans, let it be a stimulus to start one…you won’t regret it
• The WPF ah-ha Moment - Scott Weinstein
  ‘ The first realization if there is no image - there is only a shape, or more specifically a Path ‘ Cool: “there is no image”. What does this remind me of?
• Self-signed SSL certs on IIS 6 - Matt Hinze
  ‘ Q: How do I install a self-signed SSL certificate on an IIS 6 website?
  A: Use the SelfSSL utility that comes with the IIS Resource kit! ‘
  Until you install two certs on one server… Matt helps out
• Great Design Pattern Resources - Rhonda Tipton
  Rhonda has some nice pointers to pattern resources, both blogs and webcasts
• Workaround for missing “Edit WCF Configuration” menu option in Visual Studio - Alex Thissen
  Tip in case you lost this context menu
• Legacy Driven Development - Oren Eini
  A scenario where TDD does not cut it: continually having to change your tests can reach a certain level that comparing with oldfashioned trial and error might be more appropriate
• Data Structure and Algorithms eBook - Simone Chiaretta
  New book, download the PDF if you want to investigate a fresh contemporary look at algorithms
• Why XAML is Powerful - Patrick Braga
• ASP.NET Myths Busted - Mike Borozdin
  Some of the standard nonsense arguments againt ASP.NET. Good if you need some bullets to shoot at your opponents
• Memory Profiler Eating Up My Memory - Yaakov Ellis
  Not what you expect from a profiler, eating up 1.2 GB’s of your precious RAM
• Why it is time to retire the old cast operator in C#: MyType t= (MyType)o - Tom Fischer
  is, as, typeof. That is why
• Serialization using XElements - Jonathan Dickinson
• Alt.Net Canada – Wish I was there! - Igor Moochnick
  Great effort. As not everyone has the opportunity to visit events like these, we should strive to make more audio/video available for others to learn
• Visual vs. “Executable” Build Configurations - Roy Osherove
  Roy investigates Rake like scripting and visual tools, of which he personally favors the last. It’s a comprehensive post with lot’s if samples and visual comparisons
• Explore Stack Trace in Resharper - Josh Twist
  Josh experiences some serious productivity improvements after a couple weeks of ReSharper
• Mocking and Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC - Emad Ibrahim
  ‘ I am like a kid in a candy store with all these things: mocking, dependency injection, inversion of control, unit testing… I am loving it ‘
• A Look At The ASP.Net MVC Framework - George P. Alexander
  George has a handy overview of all good stuff in the upcoming ASP.NET MVC framework
• Henrik Kniberg and his list of top 10 ways of screwing Scrum - Pawel Pabich
• Changing Table Names in an OR/M - Jacob Proffitt
  Can be done several ways, but ‘ (…) the LINQ to SQL solution is much cleaner because I’m simply not going to use all the other goo that the Enterprise Framework includes ‘
• Not another mapping markup language! - Andrew Matthews
  ‘ (…) what the world needs from an organization like the W3C is the kind of abstract thinking that gave rise to RDF, not another mapping markup language! ‘
• .NET 3.5 SP1 is out…what’s inside - Hanselminutes #145
  ‘ Carl and Scott chat about what’s new in .NET 3.5 SP1. There’s a lot of new additions and improvements…should you care? ‘
• Is that the story of my life? - David Brabant
  I sure hope not… geek video ahead
• Leadership: Do You Believe That Your People Can Learn? - Bob Sutton
  Interesting piece of research looking at the difference between people who think their IQ is fixed vs. those that think it’s changeable
  ‘ (…) I applaud the researchers for not only uncovering a fascinating pattern, but also going through the work to change the people they were studying, apparently for the better ‘
• The No. 1 Lifehack You can Implement Today to Make the World a Better Place - Mark Hayward
  ‘ In a word: Kindness ‘ take that!

• Agile Development: why it rocks, who it helps, and why it’s failing - Sara Chipps
  ‘ Not because Agile doesn’t work, but because when people aren’t happy they don’t care if your company succeeds or not ‘
  Sara’s problem is not the methodology, but the implementation, if I interpreted correctly
• Reddit Now Fully Customizable: Bring Your Own Design and Domain - Frederic Lardinois
  Seems a nice idea, letting users fully customise your site. Still I cannot imagine this will be a killer feature if you do not already have a big base of loyal followers
• The true meaning of readonly for value types - Andre Loker
  Let me not spoil Andre’s conclusion by quoting it here. I was - as Andre - unaware of this, so a bit amazed as to why the test was failing here
• My Agile Wall (Plus A Few Tricks) - Max Pool
  Max has another video, explaining how his employer uses the wall for Agile purposes. Like the “social hacks” he explains around 10 mins into the webcast
• Revealed: The Internet’s Biggest Security Hole - Kim Zetter
  Seems to evolve into a bigger issue than Dan Kaminsky’s DNS flaws
• NHibernate 2.0: Changes Overview - Patrick Smacchia
  Once again, Patrick takes his favorite tool to investigate changes in a new release; and raises some points, as the big interdependency between the NHibernate namespaces
• Application Profiling Using DotTrace - Mohammad Azam
  Mohammad has a small demo of how to get results from a profiling tool
• Use ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib to write directly to Response.OutputStream in a asp.net application - Alkampfer
  Investigation of some unexpected behavior of this useful 3rd party library, and a pretty solution
• How to respond with code 404 (Not Found) in ASP.NET - .NET Tip of The Day
  code tip
• C# String Assignment Optimization - Ade Miller
  One of those nitty-gritty detail thingies that you can spent a lot of time investigating. Instead you better spend your time thinking about your algorithms than about how the compiler would try and optimize your code, as Ade advises
• ASP.NET MVC Tip #38 – Simplify LINQ to SQL with Extension Methods - Stephen Walther
  ‘ (…) create new LINQ to SQL extension methods that enable you to dramatically reduce the amount of code that you are required to write for typical data access scenarios ‘
• ActionResult method extensions for unit testing - Torkel Ödegaard
• Creativity as the Root of Software Development - Jurgen Appelo
  ‘ (…) with creativity being the root of software development, and people being very effective creative systems, it is clear that software development is all about people ‘
• Completely Scripting a SQL Server Database - Justin Etheredge
  … was not too hard doing it by hand, Justin found out
• So where were you? - Oren Eini
  Oren got triggered reading a Microsoft-basher’s post, and responds
• How Hard Could It Be?: How I Learned to Love Middle Managers - Joel Spolsky
  ‘ (…) unbeknown to us, people were getting grumpy. The staff members would routinely gather in one of the senior programmers’ offices for gripe sessions ‘ Joel shares some experiences on how he learnt management the hard way
• Virus Infects Space Station Laptops (Again) - Ryan Singel
  These days virii have taken the world, and now go for space…
• Personal information can be a toxic liability… - Kim Cameron
  Kim has a wise remark here, reminding that everything is not always what it seems ‘ If you are wondering why Britain seems to experience more “data loss” than anyone else, I suspect you are asking the wrong question. If I were a betting man, I would wager that they just have better reporting -more people paying attention and blowing whistles ‘
• 6 Reasons to Track Your Progress, and 3 To Forget About It - Thursday Bram
  I’d say that there is a point above which tracking starts to work against productvity, that is, it starts hurting more than helping