Chinh Do

.NET, C#

• 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.

General Development

• 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.

Software, Tools, etc.

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

Gaming

• 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).

Something Different

• Battle at Kruger (video).

.NET/C#

• 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.”

General Programming

• 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.

    

Tools

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

Something Different

• 10 Amazing Chemical Reactions.

Programming

• 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.

.NET/C#

• The evil sou file - fighting and winning with Visual Studio. By Brian Noyes.
• Joshua Flanagan had an interesting idea on a Readable Regular Expressions framework.
• Derik Whittaker posted a tip on how to share config files between projects.
• Jon Galloway: //TODONT: Use a Windows Service just to run a scheduled process.
• You can throw away your own TitleCase method now. Because there’s one in the framework. Via ASP.NET FAQ.
• Operator~ and BinarySearch. By Shahar Y.
• Steven Harman detailed a hack to get Visual Studio to use more than 2GB of RAM.
• Frank-Leonardo Quednau: Lazy instantiation one-liner of instance fields with the coalesce operator.

Software and Tools

• 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

Something Different

• Top 50 soccer goals (video).

“Chunking” is the technique used to break large amount of work into smaller and manageable parts. Here are a few reasons I can think of why you want to chunk, especially in a batch process where you have to process large number of items:

• Manage/minimize peak memory requirement.
• During failures, the entire process can resume at the last failure point, instead of all the way from the beginning.
• Take advantage of multiple processors/cores (by having multiple threads, each processing a small chunk).

Here’s a helper method to quickly split a List<T> into chunks:

/// <summary>
/// Splits a <see cref=”List{T}”/> into multiple chunks.
/// </summary>
/// <typeparam name=”T”></typeparam>
/// <param name=”list”>The list to be chunked.</param>
/// <param name=”chunkSize”>The size of each chunk.</param>
/// <returns>A list of chunks.</returns>
public static List<List<T>> SplitIntoChunks<T>(List<T> list, int chunkSize)
{
    if (chunkSize <= 0)
    {
        throw new ArgumentException(“chunkSize must be greater than 0.”);
    }

    List<List<T>> retVal = new List<List<T>>();
    int index = 0;
    while (index < list.Count)
    {
        int count = list.Count - index > chunkSize ? chunkSize : list.Count - index;
        retVal.Add(list.GetRange(index, count));

        index += chunkSize;
    }

    return retVal;
}

If you want to be more efficient at the cost of readability, the second version below moves the items from the big list into the small chunks, so both types of lists will not need to be in memory at once:

/// <summary>
/// Break a <see cref=”List{T}”/> into multiple chunks. The <paramref name=”list=”/> is cleared out and the items are moved
/// into the returned chunks.
/// </summary>
/// <typeparam name=”T”></typeparam>
/// <param name=”list”>The list to be chunked.</param>
/// <param name=”chunkSize”>The size of each chunk.</param>
/// <returns>A list of chunks.</returns>
public static List<List<T>> BreakIntoChunks<T>(List<T> list, int chunkSize)
{
    if (chunkSize <= 0)
    {
        throw new ArgumentException(“chunkSize must be greater than 0.”);
    }

    List<List<T>> retVal = new List<List<T>>();

    while (list.Count > 0)
    {
        int count = list.Count > chunkSize ? chunkSize : list.Count;
        retVal.Add(list.GetRange(0, count));
        list.RemoveRange(0, count);
    }

    return retVal;
}

Finds of the Week will be back online the last week of May.

Programming

• Omar AL Zabir discussed tips on how to reduce website download time by heavily compressing PNG and JPEG.
• Jeff Atwood wrote a detailed how-to on how to set up Subversion on Windows.
• Poorly Formatted Code Costs You Money. By Jakub Korab.

.NET/C#

• For when I finally find time to learn LINQ: Architecting LINQ To SQL Applications, an 8-part series by Ian Cooper.
• Unit Testing with Silverlight. By Scott Guthrie.
• Toolico.com has a nice Silverlight utility to lookup/generate string formatting codes.

  

Windows Mobile/Pocket PC

• First Impressions Of Windows Mobile 6.1. Information Week.

Gaming

• StarCraft 2 videos.

  

Something a Little Different

• New Version of Google Maps with expanded Street View released.

Programming

• Lighten up, you’re having fun. Says Kyle Baley.
• Sergio Pereira shares tips on how to get more work done: Automation FTW.
• Green tests != proven code. By Derik Whittaker.
• "k" explains deadlocking with The Parable of the Bathroom.

.NET/C#

• ASP.NET MVC Source Code Now Available. By Scott Guthrie.
• Patrick Smacchia: I want non-nullable types in C#4.
• Why Convert.ToInt32 Might be dangerous. DevMuse.
• FormatWith 2.0 - String formatting with named variables. By James Newton.
• How to: Optimize the memory usage with strings. Dot Net Facts.
• Dan Rigsby demonstrates a technique to grayout an image in .Net.
• Discover Mighty Instance Management Techniques For Developing WCF Apps. By Juval Lowy.
• Good introduction to ASP.NET MVC from Chris Tavares: Building Web Apps without Web Forms.

PowerShell

• PowerShell 2.0 has script debugging! Bart de Smet has more on his article: Windows PowerShell 2.0 Feature Focus - Script Debugging.

Programming

• K. Scott Allen has Three Rules for Database Work.

C#

• Phil Haack shares his Thoughts on ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 and Beyond.
• Charlie Calvert covers the basics of LINQ Expression Trees.
• Srivatsn writes about DeepZoom techlology in Silverlight 2: Deepzoom in dynamic languages.
• Howard Dierking Lambda, Labda, Lambda is a nice explainer of lambda expressions.
• The world would be a better place if more programmers live by this rule: The First Rule of Programming: It’s Always Your Fault. By Jeff Atwood.
• TDD: Introduction to Rhino Mocks by Stephen Walther is a good intro of Rhino Mocks.
• Many of the tips in John Powell’s 10 Tips to Boost Your Productivity with C# and Visual Studio 2008 are applicable in Visual Studio 2005 as well.

Something a Little Different

• Confessions of a Car Salesman

Programming

• Good productivity tips from Matt Moore: 10 Ways to Improve Your Programming Productivity - Matt Moore.
• Dejan Cancarevic has put together a list of Most used CSS tricks.
• Here’s a good article to send to your manager the next timeyour project runs late: Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it. By Joel Spolsky.
• Getting LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities to use NOLOCK. By Scott Hanselman.
• After all these years looking at Process and Thread IDs, I have no idea that they are multiples of four on Windows NT based OS’es. Raymond Chen (he Old New Thing) explained the history behind this fascinating fact.
• José M. Aguilar has put together a very sensible list of 13 Tips to Comment Your Code. Translated and republished in English by Timm Martin.

C#.NET

• Tame Your Software Dependencies for More Flexible Apps. James Kovacs, MSDN Magazine.
• Want to become an expert in WCF? Just read these links: Windows Communication Foundation - 65 Links to make you an expert! By Joe Stager.
• WCF Tips and Gotchas from Neudesic Teams. By Sam Gentile.
• Amit discussed a frequent source of memory leaks in managed code: events.
• Log a screenshot with your error: Creating screenshot with C#.
• if … else if … else if … else … : an alternative. By Philippe Leybaert.
• John Papa wrote a nice introduction to Standard Query Operators with LINQ. Via MSDN Magazine.
• WCF - Recommended Settings for Tracing and Message Logging. MSDN.
• Enabling Performance Counters in WCF. By Nicolas Allen.
• Introduction to C# Anonymous Methods. By Patrick Smacchia.
• Did you know that .NET Framework 3.5 have 98 assemblies, 309 namespaces, and 11417 types? Read more: Number of Types in the .NET Framework. By Brad Adams.

Software & Tools

• Seanwin has put together a very nice list of 10 Killer Firefox Extensions That You Probably Don’t Know About.
• TIP - You can launch processes on remote Windows machines using Sysinternals’ Psexec.

  

• TIP - Change your Windows desktop DPI/font size to make text more readable.
• TIP - You can change the View Source Editor in Internet Explorer. Notepad++ works for me. Thanks to Tim (a colleague of mine at work) for pointing this out.

Gadgets

• I got myself a ThinkPad X60 Tablet PC last week, so naturally I’m writing this article on it :-). The Tablet PC Team Blog is a good starting location to look for Tablet PC tips. The combination of a Tablet PC and Microsoft OneNote is very nice. I am surprised at how good the text recognition engine engine in Windows Vista is.

   

Misc

• For musicians: celemony’s Direct Note Access technology can extract and move individual notes inside audio chords. Very cool stuff. I feel like installing my old copy of Cakewalk Sonar and start making some music again. Via .NET devHammer.

Something a Little Different

• Reporter Owned by Sled

Programming

• 6 Ways to Increase Your Confidence As You Code. By Ben Watson.
• Hugo Vidal Teiseira gives Ten UI Lessons from the Real World. With pictures.
• Koen Witters writes about something basic to all computer games: The Game Loop.
• Microsoft Excel: Revolutionary 3D Game Engine? by Peter Rakos.
• The Diminishing Return on Code Uniformity. by Max Pool ({codesqueeze}).
• 9 Practical Ways to Enhance your Web Development Using the Firefox Web Developer Extension. by Jacob Gube.
• Rick Strahl writes about improvements in IE8 script debugging features: Sensible Debugging in IE 8.

C#/.NET

• Turn any class into a Singleton with the Singleton Factory. Via cognitive Coding. Nice!
• Read it for the comments: Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry? Also check out the Reddit comments. Article by Russell Ball.

Software and Tools

• Daniel Spiewak talks about the "Wow" Factor in Firefox 3.0.
• Mini Review of Internet Explorer 8 by Joe Walker.

Something a Little Different

• Machines ‘to match man by 2029′