Finds of The Week – March 16, 2008

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