Chinh Do

.NET Programming, C#

• HTTP Programming with WCF and the .NET Framework 3.5 is a good article covering HTTP endpoints in WCF 3.5. By Justin Smith, MSDN Magazine.
• WCF Load Test is an open source tool that can generate unit tests from WCF trace files.
• Source Code Outliner PowerToy for Visual Studio 2008 is now available. Via James Lau.
• Good tips on interview techniques from Dustin Andrews: Why doesn’t anybody ask me to code a unit test in an interview?
• Throw away that mouse and go mouseless with ASP.NET 2.0. Suprotim Agarwal.
• Quake 3 Arena Ported to .NET Managed C++ VS 2008! Greg Dolley.
• Add support for OpenID to your ASP.NET app. Mads Kristensen posted his OpenID implementation.
• How to Create a Database Object Programmatically in Enterprise Library, Painfully? Yang’s .NET Zone.
• Miked Esjardins shared his experience contributing to an open source project.
• Andy shared first hand tips on being a developer during a recession.
• Firefox is a developer’s best friend. According to Mohsin.

Powershell

• [Tip] Option Explicit in PowerShell. Sharar Gvirtz.

Software and Tools

• Yahoo Implements OpenID. Michael Arrington, via Techcrunch.
• Microsoft Expression Encoder is my new tool of choice to perform batch compression of digicam movies. Batch processing is handled very nicely, especially on my new Quad Core PC. I used to use MeGUI/x264 before, but it was just taking too much time to work through the various bugs and issues.

  

• If you use OneNote, check out the OneNote 2007 PowerToys. John Guin.
• Speakeasy’s Speed Test is my favorite bandwidth tester:

  

Windows Mobile / Pocket PC

• Scott Hanselman posted a nice list of mobile-friendly web sites.

Something Different

• The FT liveblogs the Societe Generale conference call, via Marc Andreessen.

It’s 2008. Happy New Year!

Tips and Tricks

• I can’t believe I didn’t know about this Visual Studio command before: File.OpenContainingFolder. Asmita A Wankhede mentioned it, but he left a few important details out. By default, this command does not have a shortcut, so you would have to assign one to it (try CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+O). Also, the "item" that this command works on is the currently opened item in the editor, not the selected item in the Solution Explorer. See my Visual Studio tips article for instructions on how to create new shortcuts (section 3 – Make New Shortcuts).
   
• Aaron Lerch shared a tip on how to use Powershell to perform search-and-replace on an entire folder hierarchy.

.NET, C#, Programming

• Derik Whittaker’s article on Things to think about if you want to be a consultant lists some questions to ask and things to be aware of if you are thinking about becoming a consultant or contractor.
• I need to start using Log4Net soon at work and Emanuele Bartolesi’s walk-through on how to use Log4net in your ASP.net application will come in handy.
• Dare Obasanjo asked a thought-provoking question: Does C# 3.0 Beat Dynamic Languages at their Own Game?
• Aaronontheweb made 8 Bold Predictions for Web 2.0 in 2008. One of the predictions is that Google will have its first failure in 2008. I thought Google Answers was it.
• If you are learning WCF, check out Michele Bustamante’s That Indigo Girl. Via Is This Thing On.
• If you have done or are planning to do automated GUI testing, check out Automated GUI testing – Is it worth it? by Mladen Prajdić.
• Bruce Eckel wrote about the The Mythical 5% of top developers and shared tips on how you can be part of that exclusive club.
• For Oracle developers, ODAC 11g has been released. Via Mark A Williams.
• If like me, you have heard about SubSonic but don’t know much about it, Kent Sharkey’s Introduction to SubSonic (Dotnetslackers) provides a quick primer.

Software And Tools

• Did you know that something called Robocopy (short for Robust File Copy, not Robot Copy), is the new XCOPY? It’s a standard tool in Windows Vista and is also available as part of the Windows Resource Kit. Via Don Box’s Spoutlet on Pluralsight.

  

• I recently tried and liked GhostDoc very much. It’s a free Visual Studio add-in to help write XML documentation comments. Roland Weigelt wrote a nice intro article on GhostDoc on DotnetSlackers here.
• SyncBackSE is a great folder synchronization utility. It has tons of features… maybe even a little bit on the bloated side. It costs $30 for a single license. If you just want something simple, Microsoft’s free SyncToy may do the trick for you.

   

Gadgets

• From CES, it looks like Blu-ray will be the winner of the HD format war. No, the war is not completely over, but this was the landing at Normandy… so to speak. The loss is just too great for the HD-DVD camp to recover.

And Now, Something Different

• Richmond’s Lunar New Year Festival is on Jan 27.

Here are this week’s finds:

.NET, C#, Programming

• ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview is out (ScottGu). This includes the ASP.NET MVC Toolkit.
• Mikhail Arkhipov announced a new version of the Visual Studio Spell Checker add-in. I have not used this before but it’s next on my install list.
• Kyle Baley’s article Refactoring by rote, or "How to have a ReSharper Orgy!" is an entertaining read. You’ll probably learn some things from it too.
• Another interesting post from Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror): Sorting for Humans : Natural Sort Order.
• Mark Willams shared a technique on how to create a variable In-List with ODP.NET.
• Eric Lippert takes us on another fabulous adventure in coding: Immutability in C#. The series has 5 parts so far. Read them here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5.
• Paul Nielsen shared his experience designing and implementing a 35K TPS SQL Server database in 10 lessons from 35K tps. Highly recommended.
• If you are new to Subversion like me, check out Subversion and TortoiseSVN tips and tricks from Vidmar.net.
• Where Are All the Qualified Programmers? by Scott Westfall is an interesting take on the supposed programmer shortage in the U.S.
• Gary Barber’s article 10 Signs You Are Working Too Much reminds me of some of my past projects.
• Jim Wilson has put together a nice list of Firefox Extensions for web development.
• I am still eagerly waiting for the upcoming release of the .NET Framework source code (ScottGu). The immediate reason is that I want to create a class like List<T> but allowing only unique items and having a Contains method that "approaches an O(1) operation" like Dictionary<T>.ContainsKey().

Software and Tools

• SgmlReader is an XmlReader API over any SGML document including HTML and OFX for example. HTML is an SGML grammar, so you can use this tool to convert HTML into well-formed XML. I started to use this for my current project last week and it’s been working great so far.
• Gmail Associate Product Marketing Manager Robby Stein wrote about 5 little-known Gmail features you may not yet know about. I love the "Archive and next" shortcut and "Filter messages like this" features. 

  

• Also from the Official Gmail BLog, Dave Cohen announced the cool new label colors feature. 

  

• Iris open source syntax highlighter supports over 460 syntaxes. It has a web interface here.

  

• PowerTab, from Marc van Orsouw (PowerShell Guy), is a great "intel
  Technorati Tags: dotnet,c#,powershell
• lisense" add-in for PowerShell.

And Now, Something Different

Here’s a Christmas tree made out of Heineken beer bottles. I took this picture last December at the Imperial Hotel in Hue, Vietnam, while vacationing there. Click on the picture for a larger version.