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Lots of big stuff happening this week. Today Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available to MSDN Subscribers and it'll be available for everyone on Wednesday. I'm running Beta 2 on all my machines now and really digging it. It's much faster than Beta 1 and I'm doing all my work in it now. It's come a long way and I'm really impressed at the polish. .NET 4 This is a big deal. This isn't ".NET 3.6" - there are a lot of improvements of .NET 4, and it's not just "pile on a bunch of features so you get overwhelmed." I've been working with and talking to many of the teams involved and even though it's a cheesy thing to say, this is a really customer-focused release. Shouldn't every release...

The team I work for is called Server and Tools Online. If you go way, way up, our boss is Soma ( Yes, this Soma ), but down here in the trenches there's the folks that make content and systems to help you after you "File | New Project." Our goals this year are to get back to basics and make sure that our online user experience meets these goals in as few clicks as possible. A few months ago I snuck a few "comps" out of a meeting with the designers on MSDN . A few months before that we talked about the a upcoming "loband" option for MSDN and performance improvements to the MSDN library that are bringing page-load times for the MSDN library to the 1- and 2-second level. There was a lot of great comments and feedback...

Cross-browser testing is a hassle. Most of the time you can follow standards and get a decent looking website working cross browser, but there's always variations. All browsers have their quirks and older IEs have more than their fair share. As I see it, there's basically three main pillars of cross-browser testing:   Pros Cons Breadth ScreenShot Service Gets you screenshots of your site on a million browsers and platforms No interaction with the browsers, no way to debug interactions. Depth - Interaction Virtual Machines You really get to see how your site looks and works on many browsers. You have to maintain a bunch of Virtual Machines, or a be aware lot of browser installations. Depth - Look and Feel SuperPreview Lets you see...

You, Dear Reader, very likely don't need this information. I assume you're probably not a beginner. BUT, you likely KNOW a beginner. Share this information with them! A bunch of people on Twitter discovered the MSDN Beginner Developer Center today. I tweeted it, figured it was a throw-away tweet and it was "re-tweeted" several dozen times. Apparently there's a hunger for Beginner content out there! Who knew? ;) It's at http://www.msdn.com/beginner   and here's some of the cool stuff. Tell your 12 year old and your great-aunt, Dear Reader. There may be a programmer inside one of them. There's several tracks to go down, first the obvious Web Track and Windows Track , but also Aspiring Pro and Kid's Corner...

TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATIONS: If you enjoyed this post, or this blog, please make a secure tax-deductible donation directly to the American Diabetes Association . Please read my personal story about life as a diabetic and donate today . ALL PROCEEDS will go to Diabetes Research. Everyone collects utilities, and most folks have a list of a few that they feel are indispensable.  Here's mine.  Each has a distinct purpose, and I probably touch each at least a few times a week.  For me, util means utilitarian and it means don't clutter my tray.  If it saves me time, and seamlessly integrates with my life, it's the bomb. Many/most are free some aren't. Those that aren't free are very likely worth your 30-day trial...

My first job at Microsoft was as a developer evangelist. The company I ran before I came to Microsoft did a great deal of “technical evangelism” for ASP, Java, Flash, and others. And many of the folks who read my blog are “Technical Evangelists”, either as part of their job, or in their work with their developer community of choice. So – I wanted to share this super (and free) eBook. http://developer-evangelism.com/ I love the part on “Remove the Brand”. Hope you enjoy it !   Technorati Tags: eBook , free , software development , programming Read More...

J. D. Meier emailed me this week to ask my opinion on “Lean” and referred me to [ THIS POST ] For almost 30 years (yes, I wrote my first program for money in the 70’s as a teenager) I’ve been a “practical” geek. I don’t invest much in methodologies, or teh business / development fad of the era. I’ve seen dozen of Silver Bullets come, and go. Only to be replaced by the newest “holy grail” of software development, Here is a quote from the blog post …… A central concept in Lean is that planning, executing, and delivering work in small batches minimizes waste. The ideal limit of working in small batches is the single unit. Creating one piece at a time with zero waste is the ideal of one-piece flow . Though I haven’t seen the process articulated...

As web programmers, we use a lot of strings to move data around the web. Often we’ll use a string to represent a date or an integer or a boolean. Basically "1" in instead of 1, or "April 1, 2009" rather than a proper ISO-8601 formatted culture-invariant date. While these strings are flying around via HTTP it's not a huge deal, but sometimes this loose, even sloppy, use of strings can leak into our own code. We might find ourselves leaving the data times as strings longer and longer, or not even bothering to convert them to their proper type at all. This problem is made worse by the proliferation of JSON, and schema-less/namespace-less XML (that I've often called " angle-bracket delimited files " as they're...

I'm running 64-bit operating systems on every machine I have that is capable. I'm running Vista 64 on my quad-proc machine with 8 gigs of RAM, and Windows 7 Beta 64-bit on my laptop with 4 gigs. Writing managed code is a pretty good way to not have to worry about any x86 (32-bit) vs. x64 (64-bit) details. Write managed code, compile, and it'll work everywhere. The most important take away, from MSDN: "If you have 100% type safe managed code then you really can just copy it to the 64-bit platform and run it successfully under the 64-bit CLR." If you do that, you're golden. Moving right along. WARNING: This is obscure and you probably don't care. But, that's this blog. Back to 32-bit vs. 64-bit .NET Basics I promote...

I used to hate podcasts , but that didn't last long. I got a longer commute, bandwidth became less of an issue and podcasts, frankly, got better. Of course, I'm a smidge biased . I listen to a number of podcasts, not all technical, of course. I also watch the nightly news and a number of other news and political TV shows delivered not over the air or via cable, but by podcast. Here's some technical podcasts, collected and recommended by the my folks and friends on Twitter . I've heard some, and added my thoughts. Others I look forward to listening to. They are listed in no particular order. I threw mine in there as well. ;) NOTE: If you've created a list of YOUR favorite .NET Podcasts, send me a link to your blog and I'll...