June 2008 - Chinh Do

Touching a File with PowerShell

I am finding more and more things I can do with PowerShell everyday. The other day, I had to “touch” a file… one line is what it takes:

(ls testFile.txt).LastWriteTime = New-object DateTime 1991,12,31

ReSharper 4.0 is released.
Andre Loker shared a very cool trick available with C# 3.0: Getting rid of strings (2): use lambda expressions.
Official Guidance: New Recommendations for Strings in .NET 2.0. By Dave Fetterman, BCL Team Blog.
Scott Guthrie announced availability of Silverlight Beta 2. Looks like there are a ton more controls.
Sending SMTP Email Asynchronously with SmtpClient.SendAsync().
Igor Ostrovsky gave an easy-to-digest summary of concurrency in .NET Framework 3.5.
Tools And Techniques to Identify Concurrency Issues. By Rahul V. Patil and Boby George, MSDN Magazine. Lots of good information on concurrency issues, how to analyze/detect problems, and pointers to tools.
Did you know about AppDomain::UnhandledException Event? I didn’t, until my Windows Service started to die without even leaving a nice goodbye… stacktrace. Well there was this mysterious looking entry in the Events Log. MSDN.
Add color to your Console apps with ConsoleColor. MSDN.
Exceptional Performance : Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. Yahoo! Developer Network.

15 Tools to Help You Develop Faster Web Pages by Jacob Gube (Six Revisions).
Nick Beradi showed you how to Turn Google App Engine into your own Personal Content Delivery Network (CDN). App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.
An interesting look at Gmail client-side code: Gmail Client Side Architecture Part 1. By Sajith .M.R.

FireFox 3 is out. To get the most of of it, check out lifehacker’s Power User’s Guide to Firefox 3.

Jeff Atwood discussed Physics Based Games.
If you are a PC gamer, don’t miss Is the Market for PC Gaming Finished? by Aaron Stannard (Aaronontheweb).

Microsoft project code named “Velocity” is a distributed in-memory caching platform that provides .NET applications with high-speed access, scaling, and high availability to application data. Download the Community Preview here.
Danny Simmons enumerated various reasons for using Entity Framework.
If your netMsmq WCF service shows signs of a handles leak, you may want to make sure you have .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1 installed.
Bryan wrote a timely article on TDD Tips: Test Naming Conventions & Guidelines.
Microsoft announced the release of Microsoft Source Analysis for C#.
“Source Analysis is similar in many ways to Microsoft Code Analysis (specifically FxCop), but there are some important distinctions. FxCop performs its analysis on compiled binaries, while Source Analysis analyzes the source code directly. For this reason, Code Analysis focuses more on the design of the code, while Source Analysis focuses on layout, readability and documentation. Most of that information is stripped away during the compilation process, and thus cannot be analyzed by FxCop.”

Warn the User when Caps Lock is On in web apps. By Scott Mitchell.
Denis Gobo put together a very good and extensive list of SQL Server Programming Hacks. Many of the tips are not really “hacks” but still good to know nonetheless.
Not sure how useful this is with most networks blocking everything these days, but it’s cool anyway: you can now access the Sysinternals tools on a fileshare directly at \\live.sysinternals.com\tools.
Damien Guard released a new version of his Envy Code R monospaced font designed for programmers.

The Query command line utility displays active Terminal Service/Remote Desktop sessions, among other things. This replaces the qwinsta utility.

Borland Turbo Pascal was my favorite language in my early days of hobby programming. I feel a little sad to hear that Borland recently sold their CodeGear division to Embarcadero.
Day-to-day with Subversion is a good and detailed write-up on procedures most developers need to perform daily. By Bil Simser.

Google Maps Street View is in Richmond.
Goo

It looks like the Street View images were taken around September 2007 because according to IMDB, the movie Game Plan was playing in the US starting 9/23/2007:
Google Maps adds user-created photos, videos, maps. Via CNET.
Goog