Trumpi's blog

Your top 5 blogs

Question: If you could read only 5 blogs, which blogs would you read?

You can either post it in the comments or write your own post linking here.

Our daily link (2008-01-23)

jQuery

• MooTools 1.2 Beta 2 Released, Adds New Element Storage
• jQuery, Facebox and AJAX

Agile

• The magic ingredient for the FitNesse, Spring and Hibernate TDD soup
• Retrospectives: You live, you learn
• Code Reviews
• Reviewing Databases
• Sustainable Pace -- in self-defense
• When is a Scrum Master (or a PM) Not?

Software

• Introducing NameSpace# - Diagnostics and Viewer for HxS
• Sharpening Our Functional Test Axe

ASP.NET

• Tip: How to get the client culture from an ASP.NET app
• Failing AJAX Update? Check the Viewstate
• New MVC stuff == a good thing
• Adding Up and Down Arrow Images to a Sortable GridView

Misc

• Did you know... There are 4 window layouts that you can save - #135
• HTML 5 Public Working Draft Released
• Best SCM Best Practices Article
• The Case For Typemock
• Powershell Batch Rename

Our daily link (2008-01-16)

Software

• Rhino ETL 2.0
• Announcing Sandcastle Version 2.4.10115

Agile

• Patterns of Agile Adoption by Mike Cohn

Misc

• Creating vCalendars programmatically in C# - A code snippet that can be used to create a vCal message.
• Total Summary Rows in Datagrid with DataItem
• Spring.NET 1.1 brings AOP to .NET development
• JsonSQL: JSON parser, SQL style
• Did you know... You can auto-hide all of your tool windows with one command? - #130

Career stuff

• It’s Not Rocket Science: How to Explain a Complex Idea

It is amazing what traceroute will reveal

Our daily link (2008-01-15)

I'm quietly spending my last week of leave at home...

Agile and Project Management

• Why do Some Projects Continue to Push Unrealistic Software Development Schedules? - it makes no sense in the long run.
• Continuous Integration: From Theory to Practice 2nd Edition - Nice booklet on builds.
• Use Cases vs. User Stories
• TDD Is Also An Organizational Process

Misc

• Understanding version control - I was naive. This is a good read highlighting all of the different forms of version control. Contrary to my belief, there is more that 3 kinds.
• TypeMock Snippets For Visual Studio - I'm installing these. It will probably shave several minutes of my unit testing time.
• SSIS vs. CSV - Ayende complains about one of the many shortcomings of SSIS - lack of proper CSV support.
• COALESCE function instead of long CASE WHEN ... ELSE (T-SQL) - Nice SQL tip
• Build your own CAB #17: Boil down the "wiring" to a Registry - the latest in Jeremy D. Miller's series on the MVP pattern.

Career stuff

• No Silver Programmers - "The significant thing is not that some professional programmers are awesome, it's that some professional programmers suck." Larry O'Brien challenges the notion that the best developers are 20x more efffective than the worst.
• Heroes and Villains - This article looks at how we are cultivating an anti-team mentality in the software industry.
• You Are Creating Bugs In Your Software
• Yet another reason to raise my rates
• Bad Programmers Are Not Good Programmers Who Are Slow
• Why Your Manager Doesn’t Like To Throw Away Work (And You Do) [via Link Listing]

Our daily link (2008-01-13)

Going to watch Elton John tonight, so this post is a little early.

Agile

• Avoid mega unit tests - 500 lines for a unit test? Something is wrong...
• Agile Absolves Developers -"Agile increases responsibility." Nuff said. [via Interesting Finds]

Web services

• Creating RESTful Web Services with Windows Communication Foundation - this article contains the most detailed explanation of REST that I could find and explains how to implement REST using WCF.
• REST, SOAP, WS-* and SOA: Oh My!

New blogs

• Gray Matter - A blog by Gray Knowlton primarily focusing on the MS Office "Open Xml" formats.

Career stuff

• 10 Absolute "Nos!" for Freelancers - don't get schnaaied.
• 10 Fail Proof Tips for Delivering a Powerful Speech

Misc

• Catching Handled Exceptions During Debugging - Useful hint.
• Datejs - An open source JavaScript date library.

Podcasts

• Hanselminutes #96 - Starting Small with F# with Dustin Campbell

Our daily link (2008-01-12)

I'm back from holiday with over 1000 feeds to read. I also got my new gigabit router today. Heard bad things about it from Amazon, but we'll have to see...

Agile

• What do you wish your CEO knew about Agile?
• Your first ***** stinks! - I don't know whether the stars are kleene stars or just censorship.
• Why You Should Test Your Requirements - because they can be wrong.

Software

• The much exaggerated death of the WiX toolset - WiX is not dead.
• Votive in WiX v3.0 now supports Visual Studio 2008 - Title says it all
• To Release an Unbuildable TreeSurgeon? - there is a problem with the new NCover - it is now commercial and cannot be bundled with TreeSurgeon.

Career stuff

• Billy Martin's Technique for Managing his Manager - I've used this one once or twice :)
• No Matter What They Tell You, It's a People Problem - "Do you like the company of your teammates on a personal level? Do you respect your teammates professionally? If you were starting at another company, would you invite your coworkers along? Do you have spirited team discussions or knock-down, drag-out, last man standing filibuster team arguments? Are there any people on your team you'd "vote off the island" if you could?"

SQL

• What's wrong with COUNT(*)? - A look at the performance implications of COUNT(*). (Hint: There doesn't seem to be any for SQL Server 2005 SP2.)

Misc

• Managing Config Files
• Handling Multiple Environment Configurations with .NET 2.0
• Why are INI files deprecated in favour of the registry?
• Log4Net Config to Make Your Loggin' Rockin' - a very nice log4net configuration. We use it too.
• Code Review Check List - A good high level list of things to look out for in a code review, but seems more like a test list to me.
• AutoMockingContainer and ASP.NET MVC: Round 1 - Kyle Bailey talks about a problem with Jacob Llewallen's AutoMockingContainer and how he solved it.
• Visual Studio 2008 New Multi-Threaded Debugging Feature - This is so cool!
• Did you know... How to close just the selected files you want? - Another cool VS tip.

Our daily link (2008-01-02)

I've been checking out JQuery today. It is fantastic!

C#

• In C#, When to use String verses string - There are also two different pronunciations of 'tomato'. [via Daily Bits]
• Tip of the day: Double question mark - very coelescy!

SQL

• SQL 2005 HTTP Endpoints - this is like stored procedures, but they look like web services.

Misc

• Zotero - this may be useful for bloggers to collect info. [via Daily Bits]
• Software Development Predictions for 2008 - I like number 2 in this list.
• Did you know... You can change the RSS feed on the Visual Studio Start Page? - No I didn't. Thanks!
• Rethrowing exceptions and preserving the full call stack trace - save yourself a lot of pain and follow this guy's advice!

Web

• Improve maintainability of ASP.NET databinding - let the compiler do more for you.

Humour

• And now, an LOL cat translation of the Bible - hilarious, yet uplifting.

Our daily link (2008-01-01)

Happy new year! And no, I didn't get an MVP award.

Podcasts

• .NET Rocks! #303 - Ken Levy on Visual Studio Extensibility

MVP Awards

• Once more unto the breach dear friends...............I'm an MVP again!!! Wallace B. McClure
• [MVP] Congratulations! You have received the Microsoft MVP Award
• New Year, New Challenges, and an MVP - Jeremy D. Miller
• Happy To Be... An MVP.. Again...Again!!! - Paul Ballard

Misc

• Ensure the quality of the code that will be developed this year - Patrick Smacchia shows how to set up NDepend to issue warnings only for code that was added or changed in 2008. This looks like an excellent way to start enforcing quality on projects with a large existing code base.
• Refactoring Motivations - Jay Fields investigates four reasons to refactor existing code.
• Tricky Code - Another puzzle from Ayende.
• Goodbye Daily Grind - The Daily Grind Blog is no more.
• Why The Mainstream Concurrency Model is Broken - I'm too lazy to type the title again.