Well, to be honest, it was not really dragging myself..I still like to make roundups of what’s new in the blogosphere, but as you’ve noticed, the daily schedule is history for some months now. A couple things have changed, let me explain:

for years I keep an eye on all kinds of software development related blogs. Adding more new blogs than removing others led to an accumulation of hundreds of feeds to follow. At a certain moment I thought “well, since I’m covering a big part of what’s essential in software development out there, maybe other people can benefit too. And that how I started to share links (originally on blogspot.com, and since May 18, 2008) here on my own domain.

While I do this with pleasure, I noticed two things

1. keeping up costs a considerable amount of time (duh!) and
2. my interests started to change: programming no longer is my deepest passion. Oops.

Already for years I’m practicing the art of working as productive as possible (as most of you probably do, too!) but more and more I saw I kept up with blogs in this domain rather that the programming realm.
Added to this came the realization that my long term goal is not staying a software developer. While it’s good to know *what* your goals are, working towards new goals means loosing interest in the old ones, in my case programming related stuff. Like errr, the blogs that were linked to in the Linkblog on a daily basis.

What does this mean? Well, I’m investing a lot of time now in getting towards my new goals. It’s not clear now how it will turn out exactly. What it certainly means is I’m heavily interested in other stuff these days: lifehacking, working smarter, new developments in web2.0 and social networks. What intrigues me is how individual professionals and businesses alike can use tools and practices to their own advantage in a smart way. Add to that the implications this stuff has on our economy and society. Believe me, things are changing. More than a lot of people and companies  realize. But enough on this. For the moment.

Man, cut to the chase and tell us what’s happening to your blog!

Fair enough, you want to know what’s happening, and you’re completely right! I’m wasting your precious time.
Well, to keep it short: my intention here is to keep on posting Linkblogs and other tidbits related to all that lifehacking stuff. While I’m doing my best, it will not be possible to keep up with daily updates, how much I would like that. Time available to me is not evenly distributed, so updates probably will be a bit irregular.

Still I think it’s an exciting world where a lot is happening that defines our future. If you’re not convinced, why don’t you let me show you, by serving you those productive links…in 2010!

Wishing you a great New Year, and be careful with those fire crackers, if lighting them is a habit where you live. It certainly is here in the Netherlands.

Hope to see you all back next year! And do let me know what you think! In a strange way it’s soothing to see I’m not the only one with a Link Blog Problem

Me? Been using Twitter on and off for about nine months now.  It is nice new way of connecting with other like minded developers, architects and whomever tends to share my geeky interests. On the other hand it didn’t give a real holy shit moment when I started using it. I remember I did get that feeling when I first started to use GMail, or started to program web pages with dynamic updates / AJAX goodness.

But people: today even Scott Hanselman blogs about it, giving us (them?) a handy user manual on How-To-Twitter. Which raises the question:  is Twitter finally going mainstream? Well, I thought a little about this, but then realized that even lots of developers around me would say:  “Scott Hanselman, who is that guy?”  So maybe it just needs a little more time. In time, I will even be able to tweet with my neighbors and family… well, probably not me.

Currently I only use Twitter for keeping up with tech stuff. Not really interested in the social part, mostly using email or IM for that. I mean: it’s cool to have some fun on Twitter every now and then, but chit-chat is just not my thing. Talking about the weather, of how many push-ups I did today (none!), I save that for real life.

Not wanting to give you long and unwanted elaborations of Twitter, I just want to pass the mic to you:  does Twitter work for you? Do you use it for social chat with family and friends. Us it for extending your technical network and keeping up with fellow nerds. Or  is it just a waste of time, only good for procrastination?

1. jQuery - this JavaScript framework that’s literally all over the place. This is especially true since Microsoft is starting to integrate it into Visual Studio, but of course outside Redmond world it was also really taking of with some major vendor’s adopting it
2. Having looked in ASP.NET MVC superficially, it seems like a good idea to also dive into this other major MVC framework, Ruby-on-Rails. Haven’t really given it another look after seeing the famous DHH video where he shows off RoR’s capabilities and subsequently convincing myself that I could really have a website up and running within the hour. It’s that scaffolding thingie, if I remember correctly
3. this might make Ruby my language for the year 2009
4. Domain Driven Design (DDD). Read the InfoQ Domain Driven Design quickly book at the end of last year, but to get your head around it you definitely need more books and, above all, practice.
5. Mocking frameworks. I know they are there, and I can even explain how and why they have their use . But it’s still difficult to put them into practice. Hmmm, a case of practice more, indeed.
6. Git. This is one that I have second thoughts about. Distributed source control systems might be all the rage for some, but up until now  they seem like overkill to me, needlessly over complicating keeping track of your code. Please convince me otherwise.
7. web development. Ehh? At the moment development is mostly non-web for me, but the web is still a secret love. ASP.NET MVC just has that magical twist that makes me want to go deeper here.
8. the obligatory WPF; On the other hand: strike that! Too far outside the zone-of-responsibilities. Me is not a designer, ya know?
9. take a look at all the new stuff coming out of Microsoft: Azure, cloud computing, Unity, VSTS 2010, Hyper-V, etc.etc.  ( there’s definitely no time to thouroughly look into them all, so decided to put them all into one bullet)
10. Tell me, what did I miss that should definitely be here…?

• Alvin Ashcraft – Morning Dew
• Jason Haley – Interesting Finds
• Rhonda Tipton – Weekly Link posts
• Sterling Camden – Chip’s Quips
• New and Notable – Sam Gentile
• Reflective Perspective – Chris Alcock
• Christopher Steen – Learning .NET
• David Vidmar – Bite my bytes
• Sam Buchanan – afongen
• Steve Pietrek – A Continuous Learner’s Weblog
• Morning Coffee – Harry Pierson

Recently I have been trying to set up an initial Alt.NET meeting here in the Netherlands. You probably have heard about Alt.NET by now. If not, you should definitely check out the wealth of available sources. Start for example by looking into Del.icio.us items tagged alt.net, or read the unofficial coining of the term alt.net as done by Dave Laribee’s in April 2007, for starters.

Last week there was supposed to be a meeting where a couple of us would gather, have a drink, and have an agile chat about the form we want to continue our meetings in the future. Our southern neighbors in Belgium have started earlier this year, see the Dutchaltdotnet googleGroup. As far as I can judge they already have quite a big group of people that gathers regularly.

Never assume!
A couple of reasons (illness, my assumption that people would subscribe to the Google group) lead to an initial meeting date, but no further communication on location etc. ensued. Alt.NET is all about community, interaction, fun and learning. Since the Netherlands are twice as big as Belgium and I see no reason why there would be less  .NET developers and architects here with a passion for their craft, my deduction is that there is a big market for Alt.NET here.
So here goes my plea: get involved if you’re only the least interested. Even if you don’t know jack about all this Alt-stuff, but you have a keen eye for improving the way you work and are just eager to learn new stuff.  And don’t worry: if I don’t underestimate you, there is more to learn than you realize!

What to do now?
Of course it doesn’t hurt if you drop a comment here or send me an email. I have gathered emails of all people that showed an interest so far. My intention is to send a reminder to them and point to the Google group that is in use so far.

But more important: it would not be wise if one person is the sole connector in this chain, so go out and subscribe to the dutchaltdotnet Google group!. You will be notified if something happens, you can start your own discussion, or whatever you like. Well, you know how newsgroups work, don’t you

See you soon!

Cool interface
Flexibility and ease of use is key in NDepend. And this is absolutely necessary, as initially you will be blown away by the overwhelming amount of things to see.

See what I mean? Were this a hard-to-use interface, that would definitely scare you off, wouldn’t it? Fortunately, the developers have done a great job to prevent this, going to lengths to make everything ‘just work’ to an amount I seldom see. And – while not a complete tool-freak like Scott H -I’ve seen a lot of tools passing by. Look at the clean interface just after having created a new project:

NDepend is the number one must-have tool that should be in every developer’s toolbox (OK, maybe apart from ReSharper). It is really a pleasure to use, everything works smoothly out of the box. You can see a lot of thought was given to the flow of the application: load project/solution, press [F5], wait a couple secs, and the results appear instantly, both as an HTML report, and from right within the NDepend Viewer.

Metrics
Personally I like the Metrics window the most: it’s a zoomable graphical display of all classes/methods, with the ability to instantly check code (again, by calling Reflector). Code is shown using adjecent cubes, where size of cube is proportional to LOC. This immediately shows you where the big chunks of code live. Doubleclicking the cubes takes you straight to the code. You see which pieces of other code are used by this code and the other way around (”who uses me”, “who do I use”). Overall – after an initial warming up period – metrics is a very easy and convenient way to drill down to the deapest detail, or zoom out to get a view on your whole solution at once.

CQL
Another big thing in NDepend is the query language, called Code Query Language (CQL). Look at what the Help has to say about this

Basically, NDepend considers your code as a database and you can write some CQL statements to query and check some assertions on this database

This means you can literally write things like

SELECT ASSEMBLIES WHERE IsDirectlyUsing "BabySmash.InterceptKeys.WM_KEYDOWN"

which is generated by clicking “who is using me” somewhere in the Metrics interface.

Other good things NDepend offers:

• go to Reflector from everywhere, to review the current underlying source code
• everything can be exported to any of HTML, Excel, XML, Text, meaning you get the data in the format you want
• make a boxes-and-arrows dependency graph in one click
• you can do build comparisons, and have NDepend keep track of historical data. This way you can see how your project evolves in time
• slick ‘reset views’ when you accidentally have lost your way
• it has add-ins for both Reflector and Visual Studio, so that you can use NDepend right from within those applications
• another handy thing is the “Info panel” showing continuously updated information on the part of the code you have currently selected
• and many, many more good things that are like candy for any serious developer!

The only gripe is I was forced to do the test run on a 15” monitor. Given the abundance of information NDepend has to show, this is by far not an ideal situation.

OK, that leaves you with only one thing to do: quickly head over to the NDepend download page and learn more about your app than you ever knew!

Use NDepend yourself? Let us know your opinion in the comments!

• all things xDD: T/B/DDD
• DSL
• Unittesting
• Mocking frameworks
• OR/M
• Continuous Integration
• C# 3.0, .NET 3.5
• LINQ everywhere
• ASP.NET MVC
• EnterpriseLibrary
• Tools-tools-tools (every trick having it’s own tool)
• OK, to mention one of them: the indispensable ReSharper - actually a no-brainer as it saves you time -
• Team Foundation Server / VSTS
• Agile
• Alt.Net
• Dependency Injection
• Refactoring to patterns
• Patterns in general, for that matter
• ….?

So much to know, so little time: how do you keep up? Or do you specialize in winnowing out the chaff? What are the must-have tools/methodologies/stuff from the list?

Have upgraded WordPress to the latest version, to be safe from the latest security breaks etc. For the rest, well, to you it shouldn’t matter when you’re used to just reading the feed. Let me know if something doesn’t work as it should however…