PROGRAMMING

• Twitter Word Cloud Visualization with Google API – Elijah Manor
• Book review: Professional Refactoring in C# & ASP.NET – Jef Claes
• ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta Released – Phil Haack
• LINQ Query Syntax – a whistlestop – Marc Gravell
• Microsoft PDC09 keynote highlights – Maarten Balliauw
  Look, it’s already PDC time. Time flies when you’re busy doing other things…
• How We Do Things – The Team Room – Scott C Reynolds
• Using the JQuery dialog widget in a custom SharePoint web part – Charles Lee
  On JQuery UI… ‘ Actually it (like a lot of the JQuery UI widgets) is an incredibly powerful tool to your client side arsenal ‘
• Where do you benefit from dynamic typing? – Jon Skeet:
• Reproducing a WPF memory leak – Ayende Rahien
  ‘ (…) I started getting more reports from people experiencing large memory usage from NH Prof. That lead me to try to track it down again ‘
• Writing Maintainable Automated Acceptance Tests – Adam Goucher
• How to get Started with TDD – Miško Hevery
  ‘ Best way to learn TDD is to have someone show you while pairing with you. Short of that, I have set up an eclipse project for you where you can give it a try: ‘
• Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) released on DevLabs – Matthew Podwysocki
  ‘ If you’re not familiar with Rx, it is a library for composing asynchronous and event based programs together using observable collections (IObservable<T>) ‘
• The High Cost of Losing a Developer – Dave Laribee
  ‘ The point of this post is simple: RETAIN YOUR GOOD DEVELOPERS ‘
• Request/Response Service Layer: Conclusions – Davy Brion
  ‘ Now that you’ve learned everything there is to know about the Request/Response Service Layer (RRSL), i’d like to repeat the benefits of the RRSL that i stated in a previous post: ‘
• Raising Events With Rhino Mocks AAA Syntax – Richard Banks
  ‘ I was just helping out someone today and showing them how to do it using the Arrange, Act, Assert (AAA) syntax in Rhino Mocks 3.5 and I thought you might be interested in know how to do this as well ‘
• It Doesn’t Matter If You Know What You’re Doing – Lee Brandt
  ‘ Developer’s, in general, are always afraid to let other developers see they’re code. They are afraid they won’t measure up ‘
• Clojure: A first look at recursive functions -Mark Needham
  ‘ Clojure doesn’t perform automatic tail call optimisation so we end up with a stack overflow exception if we run the function with a big enough input value ‘
• Mindfulness and Agile Teams – Amr Elssamadisy
  ‘ Fewer distractions can be found in many Agile teams as they focus on delivering customer value and having self organizing teams focused on one project at a time ‘
  A keynote
• Four Attributes of the Ideal Pilot Project – Mike Cohn
• Make Email Your Servant (Not Your Master) – Paul Sloane

THE REST

• The Complete Guide to Google Wave Is a Comprehensive Book on Wave – Google Wave – Lifehacker
  do you already Wave? Find me on azuidhof [AT] googlewave [DOT] com, let’s start the conversation!
• Disciplanner Makes Tracking and Assessing Your Goals Simple – Jason Fitzpatrick
• Tom’s Planner Is an Impressive, Intuitive Project Scheduling Tool – Adam Pash
  Cool new planning tool. Try it while it’s free!
• Information Pollution Alert! Living with Data Smog – Dustin Wax
  ‘ it’s not just that there’s too much information out there for one person to adequately encompass, it’s that there’s too much data out there to even make out the information clearly ‘
• Productivity Down! An Emergency Response Guide – Organize IT
  ‘ We’ve all been there, and more often than not when you’ve lost your momentum it’s doubly hard to get it back again ‘
• How to Achieve Critical Goals – The 4 Steps – Mr. Self Development
  ‘ Failure to achieve a “critical” goal renders the achievement of-all-other-goals inconsequential ‘
• 12 Lists That Help You Get Things Done – Dustin Wax
  Want to be *really* productive with your lists? Split them up. Dustin explains how
• Productivity Tips #15: Focus On That Which Matters Most – Organize IT
• The Only Way to Become Amazingly Great at Something – Leo Babauta
  ‘ (…) don’t get discouraged if you’re just starting out. Have fun, like we all did in the beginning. If you have fun, you’ll learn to love it, and THAT’S when it clicks ‘
• Searching for a Shared Virtual Workspace? – Clemens Rettich
  Showdown between Google Groups and Windows Office Live
• How To Focus On What Truly Matters – Sid Savara
  ‘ How did I end up working on all these things that aren’t who I am, and that don’t represent where I am going? ‘
  What to do about it
• Five Best Online Backup Tools – online backup – Jason Fitzpatrick
  Don’t leave the house without an online backup plan in some way. Me? Dropbox all the time!
• 25 Internet Startups That Bombed Miserably – Business Pundit
  Always great to read about other people’s failures. As long as you learn the lessons that can be drawn
• Watch 4 Days of TED India in 4 Minutes [Video] – Amit Agarwal
  This Friday I’m going to TEDx Amsterdam here in the Netherlands (well, a simulcast streaming version of it, to be exact, since I wan’t on the invitation list ). Looking really forward to it. Amit has a couple video’s from the Indian version to whet your appetite with TED, in case it’s new to you
• The importance of innovation in the era of the “new normal” – Jim Carroll
  ‘ I’ve witnessed first hand what innovation leaders are doing to ensure that they can survive and thrive in a period of n rapid economic change ‘
• 13 Ways I Get Back into Blogging after a Vacation – Darren Rowse
  Getting back into the flow can be hard after a holiday. Darren shows how the get back the magic inspiration of writing
• The Anti-Social Network – Omer van Kloeten

• Six political animals you might encounter at your client’s office – Chip Camden
  Chip has a great overview of difficult personalities you might will encounter somewhere in office space. And most importantly, how to deal with them
• People Motivation: Target Intrinsic Desires – Jurgen Appelo
  ‘ (…) what is intrinsic motivation? Well, let’s investigate, starting with Self-determination theory ‘
• Thoughts about the Design Master Class – Laila Bougria
• Change base directory of a site in IIS – Alkampfer
  ‘ This technique works for IIS6 and IIS7 with the “IIS 6 WMI Compatibility” installed. The purpose is changing the directory of a web site in a remote server ‘
• Twitter is crowdsourcing the translation to Italian, and I’m part of it – Simone Chiaretta
  ‘ The cool thing is that the interface is not being translated by a team of professional translators but by a selected number of users ‘
  And Simone is among those users. Earns you at least a nice ‘translator badge on your profile page
• URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) – Scott Guthrie
  ‘ This is the eighth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release ‘
• Life inside an Aggregate Root, part 1 – Richard Dingwall
  ‘ One of the most important concepts in Domain Driven Design is the Aggregate Root — a consistency boundary around a group of related objects that move together ‘
• Dead Simple Geolocation… – Scott Galloway
• Showing a List of Today’s Birthdays in SharePoint – Kirk Evans
• VSTS 2010 TMap process templates infographic – Clemens Reijnen
• Software Externalities – Phil Haack
  ‘ (…) these so called “simple” solutions need to factor [maintenance, ed.] in, or the customers will continually be left with the clean-up duty while the polluters have long since moved on ‘
  Spot on!
• Why I Prefer Web Application Projects – Brendan Enrick
• Avoid Entrenched Dependencies -Steve Smith
• Changing the role of test managers – Gojko Adzic
• Using SQLite in 64-bit .NET environments – Benny Michielsen
• Build Your Own Data Access Layer: Enabling Bulk Inserts – Davy Brion
  ‘ Note: This post is part of a series. Be sure to read the introduction here ‘
• TIP: How to Run Programs as a Domain User from a Non-domain Computer – James Kovacs
• Non-Technical Factors that Lead to Poor Architectures – Mike Walker
• The Woodcutter and the Leprechaun – Kees Dijk
  Story time! ‘ There once was a woodcutter working hard cutting down a tree. Suddenly a leprechaun appeared and started yelling stop stop ‘
• High Scalability – High Performance at Massive Scale – Lessons learned at Facebook
  Referal to a webscast on how Facebook manages to handle it’s enourmous user base
• Team Explorer 2005 & 2008 & 2010 Beta 1 Compatibility Matrix – Teams WIT Tools
  Issues and workarounds.
• All the Nobel Prize Winners by Country – Amit Agarwal
• Git# Offers Git Access for .NET and Mono Projects – Abel Avram
  ‘ Git# is meant to be “fully compatible with the original git and shall be a light weight library for cool applications that are based on git as their object database or are reading or manipulating repositories in some way ‘
• Try to knockout before you consider to mock-out – Venkat
  ‘ As more programmers are getting excited about test driven development (TDD), one concern I am
  hearing more these days is “my tests and mocks make it hard to refactor code.” ‘
• A Guide to Receiving Feedback Part I: Ask for It – Patrick Kua
  ‘ I think there are plenty of resources for how to give effective feedback (…) yet I can’t find as many about the other end, or how to go about receiving feedback ‘
  So here it is
• Scala: Code Kata #2 – Karate Chop – Array Slicing Attempt – Mark Needham
• Seven Essentials Teamwork Skills – Mishkin Berteig
• Share Folders in Google Docs – Google Blog
  ‘ You can now share folders with your contacts and even make some of your folders public ‘
  Certainly a nice addition to Google Docs!

• SEO with ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 – K. Scott Allen
• The Things We Learn – Jim Johnson
  ‘ As in any new situation where you’re just thrown in, there are a number of things that you learn – some good, some useful, and a few not so good ‘
• Git for Windows developers – Igor Moochnick
  ‘ Just moved to Git on Windows. It gives me more flexibility for the local repositories and distributed development for my new team ‘
• Unit Test Definition 2.0 – ISerializable – Roy Osherove
• Building an MVC Gaming Statistics Site – Setting Up the Project : Brendan Enrick
• 40+ Desert Island Web Development Tools – Smashing Magazine
• “Getting Started with Windows Presentation Foundation” (WPF) Cheatsheet/Refcard from DZone – Greg Duncan
• If Craigslist cost $1 – Seth Godin
  ‘ If you lead a group that allows anyone to join, for free, your group might be large, but it’s not tight, it’s not organized to make important change. Commitment slows things down in the short run, but ultimately aligns interests ‘
• Perform OCR with Google Docs – Turn Scanned Images Into Editable Documents – Amit Agarwal
  Cool new enhancement in Google Docs. It’s not Evernote yet, but still
• ScottGu, DotNed, loads of new stuff and intellisense – Peter’s Gekko
  Scott Guthrie was in the Netherlands last week. I wasn’t in the possibility to see heem, unfortunately, but the reports I heard was that it was absolutely worthwile
• Beating the duct programmer with generic domains, subdomains, and core domains – Ian Cooper
• Generically Constraining F# – Part II – Matthew Podwysocki
• Querying mobile data objects with LINQ – Jon Udell
• 40 Desert Island (aka Portable) Web Dev Tools – Greg Duncan
• Stability first… then speed! – Mike Cottmeyer
  ‘ So many folks want to flip a switch and magically become agile ‘
  Which is not gonna happen

What are the consequences? At least that the frequency the Linkblog is being published will be a little irregular, depending on available time. No more daily updates, but when there is one, it will be current stuff. Not a rehash of the past days: my intention remains to provide you with fresh links only. For the rest: time will tell whether I’ll go back to the regular schedule. Nothing to say about that yet…

Take care, then I’ll do the same!

• Windows 7 – User Experience Design – Andries van der Meulen
• The Largest Wicked Problem in Software is Politics and Management – Jak Charlton
• Lacking Confidence – Christopher Bennage
  ‘ Despite the fact that I don’t officially care what others think, I frequently base my actions on the anticipated responses of others.
  Christopher makes a confession that is wholesome for him, and probably for more of us
• Refactoring Day 25 : Introduce Design By Contract checks – Sean Chambers
• Sysinternals 101 – “Notes from the field,” a quick intro to a few Sysinternals utilities (Process Explorer, TCPView, Process Monitor, VMMap) – Greg Duncan
• LINQ to NHibernate: A Vast Improvement – Russell Ball
• VSTS Rangers Site is now live – A great resource for serious VSTS/TFS users – Greg Duncan
• Caching Key Generation Considerations – Steve Smith
• Michael C. Feathers: Seven Blind Alleys in Software Design – Jonas Bandi
  Video of Michael Feathers. Transcript included
• Book Review: Trust Agents – Eric Brown
• Building Remarkable Work And Play Environments – Part 12 – Rajiv Popat
  ‘ The incident was an interesting insight into what alpha-geeks and genuine builders expect out of their organization when it comes to logo-wear and toys ‘
• The Project Manager And Social Media (presentation) – Bas de Baar
  ‘ This presentation will explain how social media can solve communication problems specific for today’s and future projects, and how these tools help PMs improve their own skills.” ‘
• Some “Developers” Just Can’t Develop – Richard Banks
  ‘ (…) the slow realisation dawned on me that I’d been lied to. I know – I’m quick off the mark aren’t I? ‘
  Oops!
• You don’t know what you’ve got until you get it – Willem van den Ende
  ‘ (…) many potential users will have the same idea as me: they already have a solution that works for them, so they are not going to try this new thing out ‘
• Design Patterns Explained – Stanley Kubasek
  review of the book by this title
• Build Your Own Data Access Layer: Hydrating Entities – Davy Brion
  ‘ Note: This post is part of a series. Be sure to read the introduction here ‘
• Castle WCF facility and bit of channel reconnection – Bart Reyserhove
• Host .NET Applications on Rackspace Cloud Servers with Mono – Rinat Abdullin
  ‘ Let’s talk about deploying .NET applications on Linux-driven Cloud Servers offered by the Rackspace (”Slicehost” and “Mosso” brands) ‘
• Wrap-up: Doing More with Less – James Kovacs
• Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake
  Tony Hoare on how he “invented” the null reference, and that this is the mistake of his lifetime
• Giving and Receiving Effective Feedback – Mark Levison
• Agile Testing versus Waterfall Test Phases – Kellly Waters
• Introduction to DDD for the implementation oriented – Jettro Coenradie
• 5 Copywriting Tips For Any Sized Business – Monika Mundell
  ‘ Copywriting, according to Wikipedia is described as “getting across the perfect message, with the perfect words ‘
  And here’s how to do it
• Book review: Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 – Maarten Balliauw
  Maarten reviews this new book co-written by Simone Chiaretta and Keyvan Nayyeri:
  ‘ If you need a book which gives you the basics and some more advanced topics, Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 is really for you ‘
• The Social Web Isn’t Just for the Young Anymore – Jennifer Martinez