Finds of the Week – December 13, 2008

.NET, C#, Programming

• Bill Gates showed a video at his CES keynote speech about what his last day at Microsoft may be like. View the video on YouTube.
• Slate’s article "We’re Watching You, Slacker" is an interesting read on a research study on peer effects. Via The Old New thing.
• Anis Uddin Ahmad shared a tip on how to avoid POSTDATA resend warning from the browser.
• The Visual Basic Team released a whole bunch of performance statistics comparing Visual Studio 2008 vs 2005. Short summary: Visual Studio 2008 is faster, sometimes a lot faster.
• I learned from Sara Ford that the File.OpenContaingFolder command I wrote about last week is actually available by default in Visual Studio 2005/2008 from the context menu for each file tab:

   

• Stephan advised to use the "money" data type to store currency amounts instead of doubles. For good reasons.
• From .NET Tip of the Day: there is a configuration setting for .NET’s SmtpMail class to drop outgoing messages to a folder. Great for testing.

Software & Tools

• Cpu-z is a cool little freeware application that provides information about your CPU. Here we are looking my brand new quad-core CPU.

  

• Service Pack 1 Release Candidate for Windows Vista is available for public download. Maybe I’ll install it.
• If you need a folder/file comparison/diff tool, try the SourceGear’s DiffMerge, now free. Via WebLog of Ken Cox.
• Windows Vista has a very useful but hidden Copy as Path feature (Via Luke Foust). In Windows XP, the Send To X Powertoy used to provide this feature.

  

And Now, Something Different

• I enjoy doing graphics design now and then. Here’s a cover I did this past weekend for the Richmond Vietnamese Association’s annual Tet (lunar new year) magazine issue (click image for full-size):