Finds of the Week – December 15, 2007

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.