Arjan’s World

Last linkblog for 2008 obviously. Everyone a happy new year and best wishes!

• Are Programmers Spoiled? – Justin Etheredge
  ‘ when it really comes down to it, do I know any developers who are very successful and don’t pour their heart and soul into their work ‘
• Productivity: It Comes from Software Design Rather than Software Tools – Scott Bellware
  ‘ There was a time when big challenges in software development were mostly solvable by tools. It was a simpler time ‘
• Model-View-ViewModel and Animation – Josh Twist
• Reflections on coding style – Kirill Osenkov
  ‘ I’ve been monitoring my coding style for quite a while and I noticed that I often prefer chaining method calls to normal control flow. Now I think it might not always be such a good idea ‘
• Microsoft – The Talent Killer – Keyvan Nayyeri
  ‘ Ok, year is going to end, so let’s criticize Microsoft!! ‘
• Programming with the Microsoft Business Rules Framework – Rick Garibay
• ASP.NET Performance Tips – Sanjay U
  ‘ (…) I am going to run down a short-list of some of the less-popular performance tips and the reasoning behind them ‘
• Hello LINQ in .NET 2.0 – Jan van Ryswyck
  ‘ When using Visual Studio 2008, it is possible to use most of the new language additions of C# 3.0 in a .NET 2.0 project. This because the C# 3.0 compiler is used for both .NET 2.0, .NET 3.0 as well as for .NET 3.5 projects in Visual Studio ‘
• Merge Sort – Ethan Vizitei
• Howto: Make Your Own Cert With OpenSSL – Didier Stevens
  ‘ Ever wanted to make your own public key certificate for digital signatures? There are many recipes and tools on the net ‘
  Yeah, and follow the next link to see how some other guys managed to even create a fake certificate, tricking you into believing that you’re dealing with a legitimate site
• Emergent Chaos: Now will you believe MD5 is broken? – Mordaxus
  ‘ At the CCC congress, a number of people did something dramatic — they created a forged SSL certificate. It’s dramatic, but nothing special ‘
• Performance Appraisals (The Easiest Way to Fail) – Jurgen Appelo
• Don’t Sell Out on the Context, Dude – Jan van Ryswyck
• Establishing Career Requirements – Bill Miller
  Freelance, consulting, steady job. Everything is possible, but you need to think and plan
• Most Useful Web Applications for 2008 – Amit Agarwal
• Microsoft Forum – Creating a new community anti-pattern – Colin Jack
  (…) instead of the person asking the question getting a chance to decide if the answer was suitable, or whether they wanted more information (in both cases I did), a higher authority decided (presumably the person providing the answer) ‘
• Teaching someone to test using an Isolation Framework – Derik Whittaker
  ‘ The first thing you should do when teaching something how to do anything is SLOWDOWN. You have to remember that if you are talking/teaching to someone who is new to this (…)’
• Introducing the new Task type – Daniel Moth
• Unmanaged arrays in C# – No problem – AnonX
• Debugging With Tracepoints – Shahar Y
• Best-Selling .NET Books of 2008 – DevTopics
  We’ve seen a lot of new .NET development books this year, and lots of reviews. But it is interesting to see exactly *which* of those books sold the most copies
• Rely on your experience and knowledge over some tools’ recommendations – Brian di Croce
  ‘ Whenever .NET developers tell me they know C# really well, I can’t help myself but to wonder whether they mean 1) the programming language itself (…), 2) the compiler or 3) both ‘
• Xrump – Rick van der Arend
  Rick (fellow AltDotNetherlands partner in crime) is looking for the best combination of Agile methodologies like XP and Scrum, and how to to both introduce and continue using them in real life. This often has it’s difficulties, as lots of us have personally experienced
  Btw, the post contains a warm welcome to our AltDotNetherlands meetings. Head over to see what we’re up to, when the next meeting takes place, and become part of a new movement
• Ten things to retire in 2009 – Jimmy Bogard
  ‘ This year, 2008, was a year that saw many a new term or expression get ingrained in the minds of us .NET developers. Quite a few I’d rather not see in the next year ‘
  A healthy rant