• Thread synchronization: Wait and Pulse demystified. By Nick Butler.
• Use a shortened GUID for file names and request strings. ShortGuid – A shorter and url friendly GUID class in C#. By Dave Transom.
• Top Ten Tips to Using XPath and XPointer. By John E. Simpson.
• Client-side caching for script methods access in ASP.NET AJAX, by Jeffrey Zhao.
• A very nice two-part introduction to jQuery, by Rick Strahl.
• A COMPARISON OF MICROSOFT’S C# PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE TO SUN MICROSYSTEMS’ JAVA PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE. By Dare Obasanjo.
• Silverlight
  • Silverlight 2 End to End Tutorial: Building a Digg Search Client, by Scott Guthrie.
  • Fluid Canvas in Silverlight, by neo.
• WCF
  • Performance Improvement for WCF Client Proxy Creation in .NET 3.5 and Best Practices. By Wenlon Dong.
  • A comprehensive guide to using MsmqIntegrationBinding with MSMQ 3.0 in WCF. By Simon Evans.
  • If your WSE 3.0 Mutual Certificate Authentication web service runs very slowly, try setting establishSecurityContext to true.

PowerShell

• PowerShell Community Extensions has very useful cmdlets such as Get/Set-Clipboard, Write-GZip, Start-Process, Select-Xml and many others.
• John D. Cook’s PowerShell Cookbook has lots of useful PowerShell recipes.

Apps and Tools

• Microsoft Windows SteadyState (free) is great for maintaining public-access computers.

Other Stuff

• Anatomy of a malware scam – The evil genius of XP Antivirus 2008. By Jesper M. Johansson. If you’ve had to help your relatives and friends clean up after XP Antivirus 2008/2009, read this very detailed analysis of the malware.

• 11 Visual Studio 2005 IDE Tips and Tricks to Make You a More Productive Developer
• Watch Live TV on Your Windows Mobile Phone/Pocket PC
• 5 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Gmail IMAP
• StringBuilder is not always faster
• My Silverlight 1.1 Hello World Application
• Speed Up Gmail IMAP by Working Offline
• Installing Windows Vista without CD/DVD Drive

.NET

• Just in case you have not heard, Visual Studio 2008 has been released (ScottGu). I installed the released version earlier this week and everything looks good so far. The first thing I noticed was the very quick load time compared to 2005.
• Silverlight 1.1 is now 2.0. By Tim Sneath.
• Dan Fernandez listed the top 15 things to love about Visual Studio 2008 Express.
• Service Pack 1 for .NET Framework 2.0 is available. By Guy Barrette.
• Aaronontheweb shared 5 Hot ASP.NET Tips and Tricks for the week of 11/20/2007. By Aaronontheweb.
• bloggingdeveloper wrote a nice article on how to compress ViewState.

Software and Tools

• Odiogo can make your blog talk. By Mads Kristensen.
• I have been a long-time user of MSN Money Porfolio and stock charts but lately I really liked the stuff Yahoo! has been adding to their Finance section. Their new Flash-based stock chart is the best in its class. My favorite feature is the ability to drag left/right to go back/forward in time. Also their quotes are now streaming (AJAX)… meaning anywhere you see a price quote, it will be automatically refreshed. Real time quotes are available for as an optional service as well.

  

• To track disk space usage, my tool of choice is Windirstats. Windirstats is Open Source.

  

Tech, Windows Mobile, Gadgets

• Google has just released the beta version of My Location, a service that allows GPS like functionality with Google Maps on your mobile device without a GPS. It doesn’t work for me on my Samsung i760 though. I always get this error message: “Your current location is temporarily unavailable”.

  

  Looks like many others are getting the same error as well.

And Now, Something Different

Be careful where you put your cellphone.

.NET

• Mike Duncan wrote a nice article on 3 hot uses for HttpContext.Current.Items “They” won’t tell you about. Wish I had thought about this 6 months ago when I was trying to implement a "static" variable that only lasts for the duration of the page request.
• Too busy with real work to read up on the soon to be released Visual Studio 2008 (by end of November)? Daniel Moth has put together a summary the top 10 things to know about VS 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 here.
• For Oracle developers, check out Gojko Adzic’s article on the new function result caching feature in Oracle 11.
• Java and .NET to drive double-digit wage growth. Yes double-digit wage growth! That should happen more often. By  Gavin Clarke via regdeveloper.co.uk.
• Doug Stewart wrote another comprehensive article on new features of Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5.
• There’s something slow, in your program flow. Who you’re gonna call? Profilers of course . M has put together a detailed article of how to use the ANTS profiler. Also check out Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability by J.D. Meier, Srinath Vasireddy, Ashish Babbar, and Alex Mackman.
• Marquee de Sells has several interesting points on the consequences of working for Microsoft remotely.

Software and Tools

Vector Magic is the probably best bitmap tracing tool currently available. Check out the amazing samples. Free!

Resharper is a great productivity and code analysis add-in for Visual Studio. It’s the only add-in I currently use. My top 5 favorite Resharper features are:

• On the fly error/warning checking (squiggly lines). See problems with your code as you type them.

  

• Refactor (Rename, Extract Method, Introduce Field, etc. )
• Goto Type/File/File Member. Fastest way to navigate. Every class, file, or method is only a few keystrokes away.

  

• Find Usages. Find what is using a class/method/property. Great for finding code dependencies. Indispensable for learning a new application you are not familiar with.

  

• Reformat Code.
• Enhanced Intellisense.

Windows Live Writer is a windows editor for blog posts. Your drafts are saved locally. Works with WordPress. I like it. This post was written using Windows Live Writer.

Gadgets

• Akamai launches a new HD content website (via engadgetHD).

Miscellaneous

• At my work it was announced that we will be switching to "Outlook" from Lotus Notes. We are currently on Notes 6 and it’s the most atrocious of a program I have had the pleasure of using on a daily basis. Some of the most basic features like Search does not even work. Argg! I had to create my own Notes index by periodically exporting all messages to text files so that Windows Search will index them. I can’t wait to get back to Outlook/Exchange.
• Have you wondered why Windows Explorer doesn’t show the size of a folder? Here are the reasons (Raymond Chen via blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing).

And Now, Something Different

I’ve always been skeptical whenever I hear people say or write that we only use 10% of our brain. Well, it looks like there is no scientific evidence to suggest that. Read more here.

.NET

• Tip/Trick: Hard Drive Speed and Visual Studio Performance (ScottGu via weblogs.asp.net). ScottGu doesn't need a link from me, but I feel that this post of his is very important for all .NET developers to know. Scott recommends a minimum of 2GB of RAM for a Visual Studio machine. I have 4GB on my home PC by the way and it's great, because it lets me do things like typing up this article in Visual Studio 2008 in a Virtual PC, for example.
• How Do I: Create and Modify a Cascading Style Sheet in Visual Studio 2008? (Todd Miranda via msdn.microsoft.com). Check out the new support for CSS in Visual Studio 2008.
• DiscountASP.NET and Community Server do not mix, despite what DiscountASP.NET advertises (AjaxNinja, via AjaxNinja.com).

Tools

• I hope my hard drive doesn't crash in the next few days… because my initial Mozy backup is still running… about 3 weeks after I started it. At this rate it should be done in a few more days.

  

• Oracle SQL Developer is a very nice and full-featured Oracle query and browsing tool. Best of all: it's free.

  

Windows Mobile / Pocket PC

• I wrote before about how Verizon Wireless may cut you off if you use up too much bandwidth per month. Good news: Verizon Wireless has just settled a N.Y. probe (news.com) into that practice.
• I've been checking my Gmail account everyday every since the IMAP announcement on Oct 24. Today, it finally showed up!

  

• Capture Screen Utility from Fann Software is a free screen capture program for Pocket PC and Windows Mobile devices. It's free, and it works.

  

Miscellaneous

• If you are anoyed about that pesky Windows Language Bar that keeps coming back after you tell it to go away, you are not alone. Here's how to get rid of it for good (How-To Geek Blogs).

• Improve ODP.NET Performance (Mark A Williams, via Oracle Magazine) shows how Connection Pooling, Controlling Fetch Size, and Statement Caching can be used to maximize performance with the Oracle Data Provider for .NET.
• Did you know that you can profile a selected Unit Test in Visual Studio Team System? Read more at Profiling a Unit Test (Noah Coad, via blogs.msdn.com).

Tools

• Sysinternals (now part of Microsoft) has released a new version (v11.02) of their extremely useful Process Explorer utility. This is one of my must-have utility on any new system.



• FileZilla is an open source FTP utility for Windows. It's free and has all the features I use. What more can one ask for?



• I signed up for Mozy two weeks ago. The price is right: $4.95 per month for peace of mind. However, it’s been 2 weeks and the initial backup is still only 50% complete!! I have a Verizon FIOS connection with 2000 Kbps upload speed and about 37GB of data to backup. I’ll post an update on how restores work whenever this thing finishes.

Windows Mobile / Pocket PC

• Google has just announced free IMAP for Gmail! Unfortunately, it's not available on my Gmail account yet. I am hoping that the IMAP with Windows Mobile Outlook is better than Gmail mobile (via Pocket IE or Opera Mobile).

Blogs

• Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen is one of my favorite .NET related blogs. I don't know how he does it, but Scott often writes several detailed posts a day. Don't forget to check out his Tools List post.

Miscellaneous

• Did you know that the best Wikipedia content is often from anonymous "good samaritans"? "Anonymous contributors with a single edit had the highest quality of any group." Read more here.

And Now, Something Different

Alexa.com's current list of 100 Top Sites in the United States (sorted by traffic) has a couple of interesting entries. In addition to the familiar Yahoo!, Google, and Myspace, there are two Vietnamese related sites: VnExpress at number 70, and Vietfun, at number 80. Besides these two sites, there are no other non-English or minority-centered web sites on the list that I could tell.

Possible explanations:

• Alexa rankings are way off base.
• Vietnamese Americans are using the net much more than any other minority groups (unlikely). If this is true, there is an untapped market here.

Anyone else has an explanation?