Bag of Links #1
A while ago I had been posting my Finds of the Weeks series and this is the continuation of that. Instead of weekly though, this series will be more of a “whenever possible” kind of thing.
General Programming
- Some code optimizations can actually slow down your app. Beautiful Code: False Optimizations by sernaferna.
- Quad core + 8GB RAM + Server 2008 with Hyper-V = A Great Dev Environment. By Craig Lussier.
- I started using JQuery a few months ago and it’s now my favorite Javascript library. Combine with Visual Studio 2008’s Javascript intellisense, and you have scripting nirvana.
- jqModal is a modal dialog plug-in for JQuery. Worked great for a project I was working on two months ago.
- Safari Books Online is a great online programming books service. For a monthly fee, you get to read several books using your browser. The browser interface is not great, but the price is much lower than actually buying the book.
- Randomly ordering an array is simple. That’s what I thought until I ran across Techniques for Randomly Reordering an Array (by Scott Michell).
.NET/C# Stuff
- Eugene Osovetsky explained a few peculiarities when consuming WCF services from Visual Studio 2003: Solving the “disappearing data” issue when using Add Web Reference or Wsdl.exe with WCF services.
- If you have a DataReader and don’t intend to read all records from it, call IDbCommand.Cancel before you call IDataReader.Close so that the rest of the unread records are skipped.
- Scott Hanselman: Assembly Fiefdoms: What’s the Right Number of Assemblies/Libraries?
- VS.NET Tip of the Day: Reusing C# Source Code Across Multiple Assemblies. By ShawnVN.
- Setting the log file location at runtime with a DOM configured log4net. By Keyley on Kode.
- WCF – Recommended Settings for Tracing and Message Logging. MSDN.
- WCF – Enabling Performance Counters. By Nicholas Allen.
- One of these days I’ll get back into Windows Mobile programming. Adjust Your Ring Volume For Ambient Noise, Chris Mitchell.
- Did you know ReSharper supports wildcards in its Go To Type dialog box? Joe White’s 31 Days of ReSharper series is a must read for ReSharper fanatics like me.
- Is image processing in C++ a thing of the past? Discover Enhanced Image Manipulation with GDI+ (by Tade Oyebode).
- DataContractSerializer can be used to deserialize WCF messages.
- Unraveling the Mysteries of .NET 2.0 Configuration, by Jon Rista.
Database
- Stefan Delmarco talked about the NEWSEQUENTIALID function in SQL Server 2005.
- Mutexes are fun: Application Locks (or Mutexes) in SQL Server 2005. Mladen Prajdic.
Windows
- Experiencing strange issues with your Windows (like dialog boxes that don’t show up)? You may be having a desktop heap issue. Try these articles:
- Windows XP flakiness – solved. By Kevin Dente.
- “Out of Memory” error message appears when you have a large number of programs running. Microsoft Support.
- If IE crashes when you try to open SharePoint documents, try this fix: regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\OWSSUPP.DLL”.
Software, Tools, etc.
- If you have a Linksys WRT54* router, I highly recommend loading Tomato firmware. I have been using it for about 6 months now and it’s so much better than the built-in Linksys firmware. Tomato’s QOS works great to make sure my Vonage phone line remains usable at all times.
PowerShell
- Ben Pierce posted a series of very useful PowerShell command-line demos: Demo1 (Administering Windows), Demo 2 (Administering Servers in bulk), Demo 3 (How do I Know Which Class to Use), Demo 4 (Administering Hyper-V).
Something Different
- World War is a very nicely done digital animation by Vincent Chai. My son can watch it for hours.
- Your browsing history can be used by any web site out there to guess your gender. Using your browser URL history to estimate gender, by Mike on Ads.
- Humans can fly (video).
- A fascinating into the human mind: The Interpreter (Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?). By John Colapinto.