I realized recently that even though I've been working on them for a while, I've not posted at all about the video series I'm working on. I've been recording a number of "How Do I" videos on Visual Studio Extensibility for a couple of months for MSDN and you can find them here. If you're interested in learning how to take Visual Studio places you've always dreamed of then check the series out. Once you get the hang of it, it's pretty straightforward to do some awesome stuff and customize the IDE with all kinds of improvements and goodness.
Incidentally, if you work with Visual Studio eXtensibility (or VSX as it's called for short) and you're interested in seeing a specific topic covered, then drop me a line and we'll try add it to the list. For those itching to get to the new stuff, the Visual Studio 2008 SDK V1 just got released this week, too, and there are some great new features, like the Visual Studio 2008 Shell which you can use to host all kinds of applications of your own with no licensing fees.
The videos themselves are part of a series across a lot of Microsoft technologies. If you've not checked out the How Do I series, definitely give them a look - they're bite-sized bits of info on all kinds of good stuff.
If you're just interested in seeing videos of me, though (no, nothing like that!), then keep an eye on the Virtual Tech Ed video page.
Scott Hanselman has a regular post he calls the Weekly Source Code (the link is to the latest one - very funny post about LOLCats and LolCode using the DLR). However, I just found my own interesting bit of code. It's from the IronPython Language Services sample in the Visual Studio SDK. It's basically an for loop with no parameters (so an infinite loop) and then a break condition:
for (; ; ) {
scope = scope.Parent;
if (scope == null) break;
//Some work
}
Arguably not a good idea - isn't that what a While loop is for? Still, an interesting read.
Just found this great article on 10 common architectural mistakes in designing systems. I've been meaning to put a similar list together for a while, so I think it's nicely covered and very to the point.
Read another way, a number of the items can be seen as checklist To Do items, actually.
[Found via Scott Hanselman's blog] Paul Andrew has put up a nice .NET Framework 3.5 Commonly Used Types and Namespaces poster. He discusses it a little on the post, so check it out, but if you just want the posters directly you can get them at this Microsoft Download link.
Planning Poker is a nice collaborative way to estimate software projects. It's one of a group of similar techniques, but I saw a nice site today where you can buy an actual set. The site also has a nice overview of the approach: http://www.crisp.se/planningpoker/. I've used similar approaches, but not this one entirely - anyone got any views?
There's also a free online version at PlanningPoker.com, but if you have to do it in a browser at your desk that kind of defeats the goal...?