Interesting Finds – August 27, 2008

If you are a subscriber to my blog, you may have noticed that I have not been posting my more “Finds of the Week” in the last 2 months. Well, I was a little busy with the month-long Euro 2008 tournament in June, plus a couple of new games (Crysis and Medieval Total War II). Finally the Olympics in August finished me off.

I am going to turn this series into a periodic (as in longer than weekly :-)) Interesting Finds series from now on.

Oh, if you want to know… Crysis is ok. Very good graphics and requires a hot rod box but gameplay is just ok. I am more into realistic squad-based shooters. Medieval 2 is very addictive.

.NET, C#

• I can’t believe I didn’t know about ThreadStaticAttribute. While searching for more information on it, I ran across this interesting article on MSDN Magazine: Scope<T> and More (Stephen Toub) that talked about the use of ThreadStatic in System.Transactions.
• 10 Tools Which I Left After Using VSTS 2008. By joycsharp.
• NDepend – deep code metrics. By John-Daniel Trask.

Programming, General

• Windows Vista and Server 2008 bring us Transactional NTFS. Find out more with Enhance Your Apps With File System Transactions. Jason Olson, MSDN.
• 10 reasons why SQL Server 2008 is going to rock. By Angry Hacker.

PowerShell

• I am finding more and more things I can do with PowerShell everyday. The other day I had to “touch” a file… two lines is what it takes:

  PS C:\Users\Cdo\AppData\Local\Temp> $f = ls testFile.txt
  PS C:\Users\Cdo\AppData\Local\Temp> $f.LastWriteTime = new-object System.DateTime 2007,12,31
  PS C:\Users\Cdo\AppData\Local\Temp> ls testFile.txt
  
  
      Directory: Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\FileSystem::C:\Users\Cdo\AppData\Local\Temp
  
  
  Mode                LastWriteTime     Length Name
  ----                -------------     ------ ----
  -a---        12/31/2007  12:00 AM          8 testFile.txt
  
  
  PS C:\Users\Cdo\AppData\Local\Temp>

Something Different

• Euro 2008 Official Match Ball – special production film . Yes, I was a little obsessed with Euro 2008.