Arjan`s World

LINKBLOG for November 20, 2008

AZuidhof — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:46:26 +0000

What Hiring Managers Look for in a Resume - Johanna Rothman
Career advice
Bad Interview Question: What is your greatest weakness? - Tim Stall
Using Windows Azure for the continuous integration - Rinat Abdullin
The Only Way To Test Private Methods - Davy Brion
‘ Let’s think about the concept of testing a private method. If you feel the need to test a private method (…), then it often means that the private method is simply doing too muc ‘
An Approximate Measure of Technical Debt - James Shore
‘ Technical debt sucks, and it’s a particularly common problem for the teams I work with. Technical debt affects everything they do. It disrupts plans, kills productivity, and creates defects ‘
Reverse GEO lookup in C# - Mads Kristensen
‘ Google’s maps API now supports reversed GEO lookup which allows you to find an address based on geo coordinates. All you need is a latitude, a longitude and this handy method ‘
This one is for your Utils library
Extending the Team Members feature in the VSTS 2008 TFS Power Tools October 2008 Release - Greg Duncan
‘ For example, adding Skype support… ‘
PTOM: Command and Conquer Your UI Coupling Problems - Derick Bailey
‘ One of the core principles of object oriented software development is the idea of Coupling (…) ‘
Functionally dynamic? - Jimmy Bogard
Serializing and Not Serializing Objects - Amit Raz
Introducing TransitionContentControl - Ruurd Boeke
Silverlight time ‘ This post will show you how to write a very simple contentControl, that allows you to transition your old content with your new content ‘
How to make money using the Internet - Seth Godin
Connect, connect, connect!
IT Must Learn to Bend or Business Will Break - Jason Rothbart
IronPython and WPF Part 4: Background Processing - Harry Pierson
Introducing IronPython - Harry Pierson
‘ IronPython is an easy-to-learn yet surprisingly powerful language for .NET development ‘
10 Ways to Save a Slipping Project - Peterstev
‘ If anyone is looking for proof that agile and waterfall are from different planets, you just need to check out this article ‘ read on…
Developing Speech Grammars That Rock, Part 1: Best Practices - Steve Apiki
‘ Flexible grammars are key to more natural interaction and a more pleasant caller experience. In the first installment of this two-part series on speech grammars, we cover the basics of grammars and outline some grammar development best practices ‘
Why too much Database Normalization can be a Bad Thing - Scott Selikoff
‘ The years of working in the professional software industry has taught me the practical implications of a fully normalized database system: it’s often slow ‘
Is Using Hash Tables a Good Thing? - Carlos Oliveira
Developers Aren’t Gonna Read It - Pbielicki
‘ Developers are the customers - from time to time. They are the customers for product definition/specification team that is preparing technical specification documents ‘
Living Simply: The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Your Clutter - Leo Babauta
‘ What’s the problem with clutter? Well, nothing, if that’s the way you like things. Everyone lives differently, and I’m not saying the decluttered lifestyle is better than the cluttered one.
However ‘ read on…
Cloud Computing == Bubble 2.0? - James Moore
‘ Personally I’m not convinced that The Cloud is the future. The technology might be coming together, but there are still way too many unanswered questions ‘
via Jason Haley
C#/AOP: Elegant tracing with PostSharp and Aspect-Oriented Programming - Saveen Reddy
How to use Procmon to troubleshoot a SQL Server permissions problem in either the filesystem or registry - John Daskalakis
Procmon is useul in lots of situations
Screen Capture Tools: 40+ Free Tools and Techniques - Hongkiat
40 tools must be enough for everybody. OTOH, one will do too

LINKBLOG for November 19, 2008

AZuidhof — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:04:49 +0000

An easy and efficient way to improve .NET code performances - Patrick Smacchia
Implementing value objects - Sander Hoogendoorn
‘ A value object is a small and simple object, such as Isbn or Email that is meaningful to the customer domain, and is used for validation, often as type of properties of domain objects ‘
Dynamic Linq expression generator - Alkampfer
Encouraging .NET Reflector Add-ins - Chris Massey
Interview with Jason Haley, fellow link blogger
Microsoft Sues to Defend Visual Studio Users - Tim M
‘ This is scary, folks. If you use Microsoft Visual Studio to create web services, you could be subject to lawsuits for patent infringement ‘
Etherpad Shows Google Docs How Itâ€™s Done - Michael Arrington
‘ This instantly became a must-use application for me. It makes phone calls a lot more productive - just open up a workspace and take notes together, in real time ‘
Amazon Cloudfront: Here to Make Downloads Fast and Cheap - Zee M Kane
More clouds coming towards you
Own the Crowd With Better Speaking - Chris Brogan
The Art of Laying People Off - Guy Kawasaki
‘ I hope that you never have to lay off or fire people, but the reality is that you will as you advance in your career ‘
Testing WCF Service Apps (Part 0 of 4) - Brian Genisio
Create Affinity Diagrams with Microsoft Sticky Sorter - Amit Agarwal
Wow, think I’m gonna try this one!
The Visual Studio Tech Roadmap — Starring Visual Studio 2010 - Rico Mariani
Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory - Mark Russinovich
Anecdotes - Joel Spolsky
‘ This review captures what’s been driving me crazy over the last year… an unbelievable proliferation of anecdotes disguised as science ‘
Programmers are not typists first - Jimmy Bogard
It couldn’t be long before a rebuttal to Jeff’s most recent post showed up
Digital Identity, Privacy, and the Internet’s Missing Identity Layer - Kim Cameron
Ah, so lots of folks were eluded into handing over their Twitter credentials, just because someone asked. And they did. I can’t believe someone would do something like that, actually. Every service that asks for credentials of another service should be a FAIL. I mean, how often do you read about some website storing passwords as cleartext. A lot if you’re on top of the news. It doesn’t apply when it’s the same company howeverf. But in that case, if they have set up things correctly, it wouldn’t be neccessary to ask for other service’s credentials
My Unified Theory of Bugs - Misko Hevery
On bugs, the different types, and how unittesting is one of your friends to root them out
Article: The Limits of Code Optimization: a new Singleton Pattern Implementation - Jean-Jacques Dubray
Is IT work true engineering or just plumbing? - Bruce F. Webster
‘ And I mean no disrespect to plumbers for that comment. Many states require plumbers to be licensed, unlike software engineers ‘
Useful Logparser scripts - Rakkimk
Logparser brings back memories from the past; good ones, mind you!
via Twitter / Elijah Manor
Misconceptions with Test Driven Development - Mark Levison
‘ If we accept that TDD isn’t entirely sufficient for design, then the question becomes how much architecture is required and what would a good project designed with TDD look like? ‘
Specialize in Something Relevant - Jay Fields
‘ business software developers seem to have created their own definition of generalist:
(…) I know how to do the simplest tasks with many different languages/tools, but I can not be considered competent with any of them ‘
Doc Scrubber Removes Hidden Metadata from Your Word Docs - Adam Pash
Handy tool if you publish Word docs online, might want to clean them up first
“Subsonic” for Services found: Subsonic 3 + ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) - Jay Kimble
How to serialize Lambda Expressions - Onur Gumus
‘ Normally this wasn’t possible but I realized the MetaLinq project allows it ‘
It’s a .NET Life - David Yancey
‘ I want to encourage all developers to really look into what Agile has to offer and then take it to your business and challenge them to implement Agile as your new methodology ‘
good article, via Twitter / Dana Coffey
Don’t get fooled again… - Seth Godin
‘ Online, rely on direct, personal interactions to be sure you’re seeing what you think you’re seeing. Trust, but verify ‘
Thoughts on (J / Iron)Ruby - Björn Rochel
Singularity: Microsoft’s Open Source Operating System - Jonathan Allen
‘ The first 2.0 release includes the full source code tree and a bootable CD image. A Virtual PC file is also available in this release ‘
Extension Methods, Fluent Interfaces, and the evils of API Pollution - Steve Bohlen
‘ I am going to propose a guideline for the use of C# 3.0 Extension Methods: Don’t Use Them to Rename Existing Functionality in an API Just Because You Don’t Like A Function’s Name ‘
Barcode Decoding with the .NET Micro Framework - Jens Kühner
Encoding / decoding these new barcode formats. Nice stuff
Think Web Colors in Hexadecimal Numbers - Amit Agarwal
This is a to-the-point explanation if you want to change the template of your blog/site. Admittedly, it’s been a long time since I bothered about colors for the web

LINKBLOG for November 18, 2008

AZuidhof — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:01:09 +0000

.NET Development Perf Testing in a Cloud VM (EC2) - Jason Young
Jason took the step of testing performance of Amazon’s cloud VM’s by doing a heavy build using VS2008. Amazon is faster, and has a lot of advantages. Also disadvantages though, so you have to weigh your options to see if it’s something for you ‘ Having virtual, dedicated computers available on-demand for pennies per hour is very exciting. This is half of the cloud computing equation ‘
The Software Product Myth - Rob Walling
‘ At long last, after months of working nights and weekends, spending every waking moment poring over your code, marketing, selling, and burning the midnight oil, you’re living the dream of a MicroISV
Except for one thing ‘ (read on…)
Constructors and Inheritance – Why is this still so painful? - Tom Hollander
‘ (…) why isn’t it possible to specify constructors as a part of a class (or interface) contract? ‘
Configurable indentation for NHaml - Simone Chiaretta
‘ NHaml, an alternative view engine for ASP.NET MVC written by Andrew Peters, uses indentation instead of opening and closing tags to identify code blocks ‘ OK, nice, but I never really got languages where whitespace and indentation have a semantic meaning
Emergent Complexity - Justin Etheredge
Justin shares some insight on how to avoid your code ending having 2.98023224 × 10^17 possible interactions
New Release: patterns & practices App Arch Guide 2.0 Beta 2 - J.D. Meier
PTOM: The Composite Design Pattern - Ray Houston
When Will the Floppy Disk Die as a Save Icon? - Pete Brown
Funny when you think about it ‘ Even online applications like Google Docs fall victim to the classic imagery ‘
via Alvin Ashcraft
Unit Testing, TDD and the Shuttle Disaster - Stephan Schmidt
Let’s call this one “waterfall vs. agile in the Space Shuttle”
Where TDD fails for me - Jimmy Bogard
Man, it’s really confession time these days!
Spackle.NET is Published - Jason Bock
This is what Jason got when he packed all his utility code together, and made it available for your perusal.
via Chris Alcock
Design Pattern Code Generator - Codeplex project
Tool time: So far this one supports Provider Model and Singleton; me guesses this number will go up soon, or it won’t really work.
via Twitter / Elijah Manor
Spike Code and Source Control - K. Scott Allen
‘ The rule of thumb is to throw away code you write for a spike, but all code can be valuable, even if it isn’t production worthy ‘ It’s good to keep those two separated. When working on production code, you’re not bothered by throw-away code, when learning new stuff, you can do anything you like, and have version control as a bonus (well, not exactly bonus, but OK)
Autumn of Agile Iteration 1 Part B Primer Notes - Steve Bohlen
Couple of nice resources/webcasts
Recommend clients using FTP switch to SSL or SSH - Susan Harkins
How Many Cores does Windows Support? - Daniel Moth
A lot (see a cool screenshot of Task Manager showing 64 cores)
First Steps with .Net Reflector - Jason Crease
If after reading this intro you’re still not convinced of Reflector’s power, you will never be
If you cannot afford to test it, you cannot afford to sell it - Jeffrey Palermo
‘ In the above case, this salesman was not given operating system details. Sales staff were told that only the browser mattered ‘
A clear message: why testing matters, why misunderstandings happen all the time, and what you can and should do about it
We Are Typists First, Programmers Second - Jeff Atwood
‘ There’s precious little a programmer can do without touching the keyboard; it is the primary tool of our trade. I believe in practicing the fundamentals, and typing skills are as fundamental as it gets for programmers ‘
Not sure if I agree. Typing fast is nice when you’re documenting, but when in programming mode I’d say time might be better spent doing a little thinking before just blurting out pieces of crap code that you need to refactor immediately. But again, maybe I need to chew on this for a while
A New Beginning: Staying Agile by Going off “Agile” - Shane Duan
the gist being: stop mentioning “agile” as a word and instead explain what you mean. Good idea, but maybe it depends a bit on who you’re talking to - when talking to fellow agilists there is no harm using the word, but in trying to convince skeptics, it might help avoiding it
via FriendFeed / Matt Hinze
*** Announcing: ALT.NET Online Open Meeting - Chad Myers
Cool stuff, having an online (live)meeting instead of the cumbersome planning of seeing each other IRL. While that’s also neccessary from time to time, this is a low profile option to meet and still stay in our favorite spot: behind our computers
Spicing Up Your Standup - Dave Laribee
cool daily standup video. Come on, click, it’s only 2 minutes
Estimating factors - Graig Brown
some factors influencing the efficacy of estimation
Management Improvement Carnival #47 - John Hunter
Overview of recent management articles with an Agile/lean focus
What Toyota knows that GM doesn’t - Chris Spagnuolo
‘ (…) the message for you in all of this: Really commit to upholding the value that your people, let me repeat that, your PEOPLE are your greatest asset. Treat them with respect and dignity ‘

LINKBLOG for November 17, 2008

AZuidhof — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:27:14 +0000

XML Documentation File For Your .Net Project - It’s Important - Shahar Y
A reminder to have those XML doc files created for your project
Drinking from the Fire Hose – How to Stay Informed Without Drowning - Dana Coffey
Dana teaches you how to be social++ without getting crazy
PTOM: The Decorator Pattern - Sean Chambers
Pattern time, Sean explains this one clearly: ‘ As you can see the Decorator Pattern is a powerful, easy to use/implement, flexible design pattern that should be in everyones arsenal ‘
Cuyahoga - Oren Eini
Ayende/Oren recommends… ‘ Now I suggest people should look at this as a great sample app in general, not just for NHibernate patterns ‘
Being Joe the Software Plumber - Nick Maiorano
Single Letter Variable Names Still Considered Harmful - K. Scott Allen
‘ For the time being I’m going to avoid one letter variable names in all but the simplest lambda expressions ‘
SVN-Monitor – Better, Faster, Stronger - Adrian Aisemberg
21 Extensions to Make Firefox Work For You - Zee M Kane
Seeing that I really missed a couple cool new extensions, it’s time for some procrastination!
The 3 Musketeers: - Model, View and Controller using ASP.NET MVC – Part 2 - Shivprasad Koirala
Be Heard. Speak Plainly - Dustin Wax
‘ (…) the gibberish that many business people write and speak, leveraging their synergistic solution platforms in order to maximize the extraction of secondary revenues in the blah blah blah ‘
Scared Of Technology? You’re Old! - Sarah Perez
‘ Apparently, growing up digital doesn’t just mean being used to technology - it means not being scared of it when things go wrong, either ‘
WWD Roundup: Surviving the Coming Shakeout - Mike Gunderloy
10 Steps to Take Action and Eliminate Bureaucracy - Leo Babauta
Focus on action, not on bureaucracy
Rendering A Single View Using Multiple ViewEngines - Phil Haack
‘ One of the relatively obscure features of ASP.NET view rendering is that you can render a single view using multiple view engines ‘
Thoughts on the Decline and Fall of Agile - Jeremy D. Miller
James Shore has really stirred things up in the Agile world with his piece on the demise of Agile as a methodology
Update on Silverlight 2 - and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 - Scot Guthrie
The marketing machine keeps on spinning
The 2nd Law of Software Development - Jurgen Appelo
Empowering people and finding the right balance between total ordering and complete chaos in the organization
Compiler Enforced Disposal? - Davy Brion
‘ I don’t know about you guys, but the thought of Base Class Library developers not being sure on when Dispose should be called is something that makes me quite uncomfortable ‘
What Does that .NET Namespace Mean: System.* and Microsoft.* - Brad Abrams
Brad asks for your input on the difference between these root namespaces. Lot’s of people already chiming in. One of the scenario’s is “putting stuff in System.* or Microsoft.* doesn’t matter at all”, which worries me a bit: making this distinction assumes that some thought has been put in to the underlying reasons why. One would hope that it *does* matter
A Compilation of Euphemisms for Layoffs - Bob Sutton
Showing all the ways managers try to avoid coming to the point. What about “fitness plan” (!?)
Weekend Project: Make Your Own Custom Gummy Candies - Jason Fitzpatrick
Might be dangerous to report this just after the weekend, but I trust you guys have enough responsibility not to dive into jelly stuff immediately
Repetitive Calls to Find the Same Element Using document.getElementById and Performance - Mohammad Azam
‘ As, you can see that moving the value of the TextBox into a variable and then referring the variable is little faster then searching for the element in the complete DOM tree ‘
Chain of Responsibility Using Castle Windsor and a First Experience With StructureMap - Part 1 - Jan van Ryswyck
” I’m using Castle Windsor to chain together the different processors in the particular order that I want ‘
and part 2

LINKBLOG for November 16, 2008

AZuidhof — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:42:44 +0000

The fallacy of IRepository - Oren Eini
Controlling authentication with the WF 3.5 SendActivity - Jon Flanders
Book Review: Essential WCF For .NET 3.5 - Jim Holmes
‘ This book’s very well written and does a great job of explaining a lot of the features around WCF. (…) right off the bat they do a solid job of showing a service hosted entirely in code, then do a comparable service hosted in IIS ‘
Common Interfaces for Tool Families - Colin Ramsay
‘ What I’d like to see is a community effort to publish an ILogger interface to which various logging libraries can adhere, and an IContainer interface for IoC libraries, and other interfaces for various tool families which have enough common features ‘
Internal DSL Workshop Videos Posted - Chad Myers
Software [In]security: Web Applications and Software Security - Gary McGraw
‘ Is Web application security commanding too much attention at the expense of other security issues? ‘
Keeping those users in line - Ethan Vizitei
‘ Users are fickle, impatient, self-important, cantankerous, destructive monsters who will rape your software if you give them the chance ‘ … to be exact, from *our* position as developers who LOVE our product, not in the literal sense
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta - Lee Brandt
‘ We complain about work, bills, co-workers and spouses and sometimes forget to look at how awesome our lives really are ‘
How to close a multi-threaded .NET Windows Forms application and prevent the ObjectDisposedException from getting thrown - N Humbad
Your Favorite NP-Complete Cheat - Jeff Atwood
Not being much of mathematicion, Jeff bluffs his way into science ‘ What do expert programmers do when faced by an intractable problem? They cheat. And so should you! Indeed, some of the modern approximations for the Travelling Salesman Problem are remarkably effective ‘
Lean and Kanban for Software Developers - John Hunter
‘ Time-boxing allows us to employ a very powerful aspect of Kanban. The cards in each column represent capacity for each stage of the value stream ‘
John Shook on pull-based authority - Jason Yip
‘ I’ve encountered a common perception, even amongst people in the Agile or Lean community, that positional authority is required in order to change anything ‘
Jason points to a very interesting article, claiming that you should take leadership as required, creating it on-the-fly, so to speak
Do you know enough? - Seth Godin
‘ If not, what are you doing about it?
If so, who do you think you’re kidding? ‘
Chew on this for a while today
Large XML Files Processing and Indexing - Slava K
DevHawk - IronPython and WPF Part 2: Loading XAML
‘ If we’re going to build a WPF app, we’re going to want to be able to load some XAML (…) Luckily, loading XAML is fairly easy ‘
jQuery + Rails or NO? - William
‘ While I really like the way how unobstructive jQuery is, there are some issues I kinda feel its complicating things ‘
Update for the ActiveRecord “Mock” Framework - Brian Genisio

LINKBLOG for November 15, 2008

AZuidhof — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 22:58:03 +0000

Clean Code - A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship - Sean Feldman
Using PostgreSQL in your C# (.NET) application (An introduction) - Adrian Pasik
Early thoughts on MEntity - Alex Thissen
Stories Too Big – Vertical Slices - Steve Smith
‘ How Do You Break Up an Epic into Stories? ‘
Giving IT consulting clients realistic estimations - Chip Camden
‘ The first rule of estimating time requirements for an IT consulting job is: Don’t do it ‘ Of course there is a slightly more subtle reasoning than this, as Chip wil tell you
In These Dark Times, We Turn To Lolcats For Comfort - Jason Kincaid
‘ Times are tough, but Pet Holdings, the company behind ICanHasCheezburger, isn’t complaining (…)’
Growing your Career: Do at GUT Check - Jeremiah Owyang
Grow Your Network Before You Need Them (G)
Uncomfortable, Leads to Growth (U)
Tout Your Successes (T)
7 Ways to Talk Your Way To the Top in a Down Market - Abigail Johnson
SoftMaker Office Is a Fast and Lightweight Office Suite - Adam Pash
If you want something more lightweight than MSOffice. Or OpenOffice for that matter (which is also consuming 315MB of my harddisk)
Pressure and Performance – The CTO’s Dilemma - Abel Avram
webcast
.NET Code Contracts and TDD Are Complementary - Matthew Podwysocki
Implementing the MVCA Pattern - The Controller - Payton Byrd
‘ (…) we will learn about the Controller classes and how they are used to centralize the business rules of the application ‘
Testing is hard but debugging just sucks A$$ - Derik Whittaker
ASP.NET MVC In The Clouds - Phil Haack
XmlSerializerFactory caching issues and leaks - Daniel Cazzulino
‘ You’d think that after the serious leaks people was hitting with the XmlSerializer, the “new” (in .NET 2.0!!! … ) XmlSerializerFactory would do away with those ‘
SEO starting guide for ASP.NET - Simone Chiaretta
‘ (…) the main point is:
have the full url (without the query’s parameters) of the page, the page title and the H1 all with the same keywords ‘
Good info if you’re interesting in SEO, especially with regard to ASP.NET. Simone has a couple more pointers you might want to check out
Live Search API “Silk Road” - Scott Watermasysk
HighOnCoding Gets You High! - Mohammad Azam
‘ Check out www.HighOnCoding.com and get high in valuable information ‘
It’s common sense, stupid: Software Developers In a Rush - Soon Hui
Some Reading on Essence vs. Ceremony - Jeremy D. Miller
How I use multiple desktops to get things done - Eric Wendelin
Just use a bunch of virtual ones if you cannot afford of get more physical ones
‘ The advantage I see here is that I never have to think to get to any window, I can seamlessly move between exactly what I want all the time ‘
The Decline and Fall of Agile - James Shore
James, being someone who wrote an infuential book on Agile, has enough explanations in this post ‘ eople look at agile methods as a chinese menu of practices, choose the few that look cool, and ditch the rest. Unfortunately, the parts they leave out are the parts that make Agile work ‘
Sigh… Why Must Microsoft Keep Disappointing Me - Davy Brion
This is one thing I never understood: instead of the license scheme Microsoft has on it’s Windows OS’es, why didn’t they choose something like InstallShield’s scheme: the application checks on the local network (or wherever you want it to) if an app/os with the same key is already active: in that case it refuses to run. Much more fair toward us, the customers
Why is the maximum boot.ini delay 11 million seconds? - Raymond Chen
Trivia via Jason Haley So, Raymond is still putting out more blog posts on more or less weird Windows stuff than there are days, a quick look in his archives shows. And this since 2003!
Shoulder Surfing a Malicious PDF Author - Didier Stevens
‘ I’ve been patiently waiting for a malicious PDF document with incremental updates to come my way. Thanks to Bojan, that day has finally arrived ‘
Intriguing stuff, I mean from a learner’s standpoint
via Bruce Schneier

LINKBLOG for November 14, 2008

AZuidhof — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 21:13:51 +0000

On Failures Of Agile Projects - Abhijit Nadgouda
(…) usually the non-programming skillset gets overlooked and [as?, ed.] the root cause for failures ‘
MVC troubleshooting: If the controller doesn’t have a controller factory… Tim Stall
6 Stupid Mistakes Companies Make with Their Online Communities - Esther Schindler
Troubles downloading public symbols? - Carlo C
Software Craftsmanship - Craig Bailey
Book review ‘ This has totally changed my outlook on software development. If you haven’t read it then you probably should ‘
TextBoxFor(u => u.Name) - Unleash the power - Karl Seguin
Ayende on Advanced NHibernate - Dave Laribee
‘ (…) he did a 3-hour workshop detailing the advanced features of the tool. If you weren’t there, sorry you missed it ‘
Except for this video embedded in Dave’s post
Being professional - pt. 3 - Pascal Van Cauwenberghe
part 3 in this series ‘ Acceptance criteria #3: A professional acts ethically according to values ‘
Visual Studio Fail — How not to debug .NET exception handling - Shawn Poulson
Drilling down deep into the Visual Studio Debug menu
The Future of WebForms And ASP.NET MVC - Phil Haack
‘ I’ve heard a lot of concerns from people worried that the ASP.NET team will stop sparing resources and support for Web Forms in favor of ASP.NET MVC in the future ‘
Phil says no worries. Read on (…)
RunFast - Dave Donaldson
‘ a free, simple tool that allows you to launch applications using customizable shortcut commands, known as aliases. It’s a perfect example of a simple tool that does it’s job and does it well ‘
Yeah, me likes this. UNIX rulez. Ehh, sorry ’bout that. Just kidding, really
Pattern Matching in C# - Andrew Matthews
Using Crowdsourcing for Expanding Localization of Products - Scott Hanselman
‘ How can we make English interfaces easier to use for non-English speakers who want to learn English? ‘
Scott explains how the MSDN team does this
Styling a Silverlight Twitter Application with Expression Blend 2 - Scott Guthrie
The Gu is at it again, this time convinvcing me that I *really* need to start spending some time with Expression Blend and become a better designer automagically. And don’t forget the cool video showing off how all the graphs in the blog post came to be
Strongly typed links for ASP.NET MVC through the power of LINQ expressions - Garry Shutler
‘ Wouldn’t it be nice if you could have strongly typed links in your ASP.NET MVC views rather than a having to use floaty strings? ‘
So of course Gary set out to write some code: takingLINQ, generics and extension methods to create a helper class to do exactly this
New ASP.NET Web Deployment Options in Visual Studio : Rachel Appel
‘ In VS 2010, we are going to see some major changes with deployment, including a new publishing pipeline and lots of features built right into the product ‘
From now on, wherever we see ‘new’ and ‘visual studio’ we need to make a mental note that this probably means VS2010 instead of 2008
The Devil’s IT Manual: Part 4 - Initiating a project with a Strategy one-pager - Phil Factor
‘ A cross-functional team has been put in place to gain buy-in to the principle of forming a sub-committee to supervise the drafting of a straw-man by an Intern or Industrial Trainee ‘
uhh, OK. Will try this next week
Back to Basics: Reference Filing - Dustin Wax
Dustin knew exaclty how to file his papers in the way that David Allen (GTD guru) descibes it, until he got too much un-filable pile got too big: ‘ And thus my empire of paper fell ‘
Reducing the Cost of Change - Oren Eini
How to call controllers in external assemblies in an ASP.NET MVC application - Simone Chiaretta
‘ This is useful if you have many controllers with the same name in different namespaces: by specifying the namespace in the route definition, you are limiting where the framework will look for the controller ‘
Working with an innovation consultant part 2 - Jeffrey Phillips
‘ After working with a number of companies on innovation initiatives and projects, I’ve learned a lot about the needs for innovation and how to structure an innovation program or project ‘
Terminology - xkcd
Yeah right. Of course the real underlying problem here is the US centric approach

LINKBLOG for November 12, 2008

AZuidhof — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:48:53 +0000

Remotely connecting to a Hyper-V virtual machine with networking disabled - Grant Holliday
"C:\Program Files\Hyper-V\vmconnect.exe" MyHyperVServer VS2010CTP
The Myth of Self-Organizing Teams : Jeffrey Palermo
‘ In order for a team to exist, it must have a mission, a purpose in life. This mission must be directed, and is probably what caused the team to form in the first place ‘
Cloud Computing (and Azure) - Right for your site? - Jason Young
Fluent Interfaces and Flowcharts - K. Scott Allen
A Gem of a Lesson from Rails - Billy McCafferty
‘ For the past few months, I’ve gotten the privilege to develop a good sized, production Ruby on Rails application. I say privilege because it has shed light on many lessons for the way we develop in the Microsoft community ‘
Choosing the Right Presentation Technology - J.D. Meier
The Worst Software Iâ€™ve Ever Written - David Starr
‘ I have been stupid busy and am stacking up blogging topics like cordwood. Maybe itâ€™s because of that guilt that I am about to tell you about the absolute worst piece of software I ever gave birth ‘
We need more war stories!
Writing Tests to Catch Memory Leaks in .NET - Brian Genisio
Why So Many Overloads for StringBuilder’s Append? - Jason Bock
Once Again, the Long Tail Refuses to Be Buried - Mathew Ingram
‘ Contrary to what some might think, Chris Anderson didn’t invent the idea of the “long tail” ‘
*** Jumping off the SharePoint Train - Maggie Longshore
Maggie worked on learning SharePoint, but jumped ship due to other more important topics for the moment. I can relate here, in the sense that I try to stay out of SharePoint a bit more deliberate, as it is such a huge overwhelming world of it’s own (Maggie talks about literally hundreds of SP bloggers alone!). I can only restate the question I asked earlier: Do you have time to learn everything?. My answer is a definite no, and it’s key to decide what we learn and what we consciously put aside, for the sake of staying sane
NDepend - Kirill Osenkov
Review of this tool which is, IMHO, still unsurpassed in it’s ease of use and - above all - slick interface, in the range of .NET tools
How to Do Many Projects (Part 4): Resource Planning - Jurgen Appelo
Jurgen gives his opinion on professional resource planning and concludes: ‘ Resource planning is not difficult. It just requires some discipline to do it right’ Read on for an interesting view, think it’s the first I see someone make a case for setting apart developer time for both self improvement and improvement of the company tool base and principles
Multiple threads to improve UX (User Experience) - Jay Kimble
‘ The idea (…) is this: if we could predict what the user will do next we could fire up a thread and attempt to pre-load the result into a cache before it is even requested (…) ‘
The Landmine of Parsing HTML and Stripping HTML Comments - Phil Haack
Funny how something basic like parsing HTML is still such a tough job. Phil even created it into a challenge
SubSonic and Projections - Ben Scheirman
(Mostly) praise for the new version of SubSonic ‘ With the most recent release of the new query API in SubSonic, we were given a lot of flexibility. This was much needed in our project because getting single results and collections off of a single entity is rarely sufficient for complex applications ‘

LINKBLOG for November 11, 2008

AZuidhof — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:52:19 +0000

Slowly getting up to speed again tonight, after a couple days of unwanted break - flu -

Book Review : Beyond Code - Jan van Ryswyk
‘ It was a quite enjoyable book that focuses on how to distinguish yourself as a software developer ‘
The Old School Manifesto - Bill Miller
Bill basically states that everything old is new again. This quote stands out ‘ Customers are sometimes too busy to tell you what it is that they want. It is the development team’s responsibility to understand the need and to use their knowledge and intelligence to create a superior solution ‘
Take this advice to heart
Balsamiq Mockups for Desktop - Alvin Ashcraft
which is ‘ (…) a simple, easy to use tool for creating UI mockups with a hand-drawn look to them ‘
Integrating NUnit test results in Team Build 2008 - Maarten Balliauw
Being professional - pt. 2 - Pascal Van Cauwenberghe
Next one of Pascal’s series on “being professional”
Unattended install of TFS 2008 October Power Tools - Anthony Borton
10 Ways To Shoot Yourself In The Foot - Part A - Shahar Y
Found some good tips here…
Communication-Enabled Mashups: Empowering Both Business Owners and IT - David Jacobs
When given enough thought, mashups might have their place in the business environment
WCF the Manual Way…the Right Way - Miguel A. Castro
‘ Don’t be lured by Visual Studio’s promise of simple templates for creating WCF services; here’s why you should plan to create your services manually ‘
How To Organize A Gosh-Darn Good Resume - Max Pool
‘ Part #3 of the 3 Days To Building A Perfect Resume series ‘
Interfaces + Factory pattern = Decoupled architecture - Shivprasad Koirala

LINKBLOG for November 7, 2008

AZuidhof — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:31:13 +0000

Sessions from PDC2008 now available! - Brian di Croce
For those who missed PDC
There’s nothing worse… - Jeremy D. Miller
‘ Leaving work without solving the issue just leaves a very sour taste in my mouth ‘
We’ve all gone through such things, haven’t we?
Decoupling Your Classes - Mike Hall
Mike decouples his all too coupled classes, throwing in a design pattern here and there (well, here, not there)
‘ Don’t you hate it when you go back to some old code and then just want to vomit? I had an experience like that recently ‘
Solving Problems with TDD - Christopher Bennage
A base fixture class can help reduce repetitive code - Karl Seguin
‘ This is one of those posts where you throw up some code and hope you’re doing it right (if I’m not, do tell) ‘
Application Architecture and the Agile Architecture Method - Ade Miller
Clearing the cache of a LINQ to SQL DataContext - Garry Shutler
The 90/10 rule of marketing a job - Seth Godin
So it’s 90-10 instead of 80-20 these days?
WCF and http (gzip/deflate) compression and Silverlight - Ramon Smits
Becoming a ReSharper Samurai - Part 1 - DimeCasts.Net # 61
Man, I look like a walking ReSharper ad - should get a licence for free; hint, hint
50 New Features of SQL Server 2008 - Microsoft .NET Support
Everything you always wanted to know about SQL Server 2008
Simple Ways To Save Time With A Default Code Library - Thord Daniel Hedengren
Improved Google with Firefox - Mike Gunderloy
‘ there are some Firefox add-ons that can make using Google a much improved experience. Two in particular are worth looking at: CustomizeGoogle and GoogleResultsWalker ‘
Lance Armstrong on Politics, Ego, and Twitter at Web 2.0 Summit - Rick Turoczy
Webcast with *that* Lance, who is an ” internet entrepreneur” these days - whatever that means in his case
mTAIL Tracks Log File Changes - Jason Fitzpatrick
Small Windows tool based on the UNIX tail program
Branding 101: How to Promote Your Blog Like the Big Guys Do - Leo Babauta
How to Compare / Test the Equality of two Queries in SQL Server with SQL - Troy DeMonbreun
‘ I often find the need to compare two different queries for equality in Microsoft SQL Server. By equality, I mean that the two queries return the same data ‘
Agile Software Development - How Agile Are You? - Kelly Waters
Recent Readings of Interest - Mark Levison
Marks has an interesting set of Agile related posts, save for later reading…
Three Great Reasons Why Even Lonely Developers Need Source Control - S Chipps
‘ As programmers, sometimes our brain writes checks our fingers can’t cash ‘ good quote! But Sara gives me a good kick to go and see why SubVersion does not work anymore on my machine
.NET 4.0’s game-changing feature? Maybe contracts… - Jon Skeet
‘ the goodness of Design By Contract can be put into a library, then everyone can use it. Enter CodeContracts… ‘
How Much Time Should You Spend Working Each Day? - Joel Falconer
‘ What sort of lifestyle were you interested in when you decided to do this? Was it so you could work less, or so you could work through the night instead of in the blistering sunlight hours? ‘
Free addin to help make your Visual Studio fly (well a little at least) - Free CodeRush Xpress for C# Developers - Greg Duncan
Reflection Tips on Nested Classes: Use (+) plus instead of (.) dot with Assembly.GetType - Shahed Khan
Scriptable vs Visual? - Patrick Kua
‘ Most programs tend to follow two schools of philosophy in their design, one that I’m going to call ’scriptable’, the other, ‘visual’ ‘
Reflections on KaizenConf - Chris Patterson
The Weekly Source Code 36 - PDC, BabySmash and Silverlight Charting - Scott Hanselman
Cloud Gazing with Silverlight - John Papa
John’s latest MSDN article ‘ answers some of the most common questions I get when I start talking about Silverlight 2 programs being used for data centric and service driven apps ‘