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).

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.

Just in case anyone else needs to do this out there…

I recently got myself a nice ThinkPad X60 Tablet PC. It doesn’t come with a DVD-Drive and although I have an external DVD drive, I just can’t seem to find its power adapter. Argg!

In order to do this, you must have the following:

• Windows XP installed on the PC you want to install Vista to.

Procedure

1. Log in into Windows XP on the PC you want to install Vista to.
2. Use Partition Magic or another partitioning tool and create a second partition for Vista. Make it a Primary Partition (don’t know if this is required but this is what I did). Format the second partition with NTFS. Your Windows XP installation will be left alone and you will be able to dual boot to it.
3. Create a folder (let’s called it "c:\VistaInstall") and copy all files from the Vista DVD / ISO there (either extract the files from an ISO image using a Virtual CD/DVD emulator like Daemon Tools, or copy the files from another PC with a DVD drive over the network).
4. Run Setup.exe from c:\VistaInstall.
5. Choose Custom Install and follow the prompts to select the second partition you created.
6. Follow the rest of the on-screen instructions.

As part of the installation, Vista Setup will copy the installation files to the new partition. After it reboots, it’ll have all the files there to continue.

After you are done with the install, you can delete the temporary folder c:\VistaInstall that you created.

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′

Programming

• Very good tips to gain a better understanding of your Project Managers: 10 things Project Managers wish Developers understood. By Frank Kelly.
• Jakob Nielsen’s Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes point out some common design problems that can be easily avoided.
• What’s your favorite code search engine? Learn to search for code better with one of these 5 Great Code Search Engines!. By David Knight.

C#.NET

• Scott Guthrie provided an extensive First Look at Using Expression Blend with Silverlight 2.
• Circular references with WCF: solved a different way. By Ruurd Boeke.
• Bored with nothing to read? Check out Jon Skeet’s C# and .NET articles and links. Lots of good stuff to peruse.
• Keith Brown’s Security Briefs: Limited User Problems and Split Knowledge discusses WCF services running under normal user accounts.
• WCF - Securing your WCF service. By William Tay.
• WCF - Fundamentals of WCF Security. By Michele Leroux.

.NET Tips & Tricks

• Did you know you can give threads any names you want (MSDN)? The names are extremely useful when it comes to debugging time:

  

• System.IO.Directory.CreateDirectory will create all directories and subdirectories as specified by the path parameter. No need to write code to create each directory in the chain. Just do this:

  Directory.CreateDirectory(@"c:\MyApp\Env\Dev");

• System.IO.Path.GetDirectoryName returns the directory name from a fully qualified file name.
  

Powershell

• Round-robin game scheduling algorithm in Powershell. By Scott Hanselman. Check out my C# 2.0 algorithm in the comments section.
• Mitch Denny wrote How To: Host the PowerShell Runtime.
• Use Powershell array expression syntax @(…) allows you to force a scalar return value to be wrapped in a array, if it’s not already in an array. I learned about this the hard way while trying to figure out while Get-Childitem sometimes returns an array and sometimes a scalar. Bruce Payette wrote more about it here.

Windows Mobile / Pocket PC

• I needed a way to stream music and other media to my Windows Mobile phone (Samsung SCH-i760) and all the PCs around the house. Orb seems to be the answer. I’ve only had it running for a few days but it seems to be working great. I can stream music and photos (have not tested videos yet) to any PC in the house or anywhere on the net. I can also listen to my entire music library on my i760 phone anytime, anywhere through Verizon Wireless’s unlimited (with a catch… not to exceed 5GB) EDVO connection.

  

• I am a Google Mobile guy, but Yahoo! Go for Windows Mobile also looks very cool. I downloaded it to my Samsung SCH-i760 a few days ago. I am still checking it out but here are a few things I like:
  • Nice and responsive interface.
  • Built-in RSS Reader.
  • Street and satellite maps.

    Here are a few screenshots:

    

    

     

Software and Tools

• You can configure Notepad++ to always use spaces for tabs/indentation. The option is a little hidden. It’s in Settings/Preferences/MISC, under Tab Setting:

  

Something a Little Different

• Alien Prank Goes Bad (video).

.NET

• For Resharper users: Goto Type supports title caps and wildcards. Joe White wrote about it here.
• Paulo Reichert provided a good tutorial on how to implement your own configuration sections using .NET 2.0’s ConfigurationElement/ConfigurationElementCollection/ConfigurationSection.
• There is a Richmond Geek Dinner this coming Tuesday. Organized by Justin Etheredge.
• You can now download .NET source code without using the debugger. Via Marguee de Sells.
• Mark Gregory Turansky explained why "Code complete" does not mean "done".
• Scott Hanselman put together another one of his very useful lists… this time it’s a list of Visual Studio themes.
• Don’t miss Kyle Beyer’s Top 10 Best Practices for Production ASP.NET Applications.
• How to Achieve Operational Overloading in WCF. Dinesh Tawar.
• Roy Osherove proposed that someone comes up with unified API for testing and mock framworks like ADO.NET for database access. Hmm Microsoft and Scott Guthrie, are you listening?
• Building WCF Services for Deployment in Transiently Connected Networks. By Rick Garibay.

Software and Tools

• Looking for a free sharepoint host? You can get a free sharepoint account with 5MB disk space, 5 users from Frontpages Web Hosting Network. Link is here.

Gadgets

• The HD format war is over. I am waiting for Blu-ray players go go down to the $150 range before I’ll get one.

And Now, Something A Little Different

• If you are the type who crack sarcastic jokes a lot: you may want to read this.
• I predict that this prediction on machine intelligence will be way off the mark.

Finds of the Week is on break for the Lunar New Year/Tet holiday. The series will resume next week.