Finds of the Week – June 17, 2008

.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).