August 2003 - Posts
At this rate I should call it .NET in the morning... (12:18 EST)
- Link Interface - Another source for your recommended daily allowance of .NET links. It looks like Mike has started a fad.
- Microsoft.com Web Services - Microsoft has released web services to interact with MSDN, Technet, etc. Maybe now someone will build a decent search.
- O'Reilly Developer News - O'reilly has launched a new developer news site, RSS included.
-James
Mike Gunderloy(with The Daily Grind) and Sam Gentile(with New and Noteworthy) have inspired me to start my own daily list of links that I have found helpful. Just about every day I run across 2 or 3 cool articles, tools, new books, etc and I am going to use this venue to just drop those links on you. Unlike The Daily Grind alot of these links might not be new, but they are new to me, and hopefully will be useful to you.
- James
There has been a number of articles recently about how to succeed in this industry. With outsourcing becoming more and more popular, large numbers of qualified developers in India who are willing to work for less, and a bad IT economy, more and more developers are in fear of their job and want to know what they can do to increase their chances of surviving and being successful in this industry. There is a simple one word answer; passion.
If you have a passion for programming and working in this industry then I promise that you will be successful. People will passion are the ones who go home at night and end up writing more code. People with passion are the people who spend their weekends writing articles and blogs. People with passion are the people who end up reading books on XML at the beach.(You know who you are).
I have always made this distinction in the people that I meet, are they a "career" developer... or are they a developer who has passion . Career developers expect their employer to educate and train them about the newest technology, developers with passion already have the beta at home and are writing applications with it in their spare time.
If when you were reading Eric Sink's article on Career Calculus you thought to yourself, "Wow, someone put in writing what I have always thought", then you have the passion.
There was a blog post not that long about whether you would let your child go into the IT industry. I think there is a simple answer to this question, if they are looking for a career where they can make decent money and spend their night and weekends skiing then I would tell them to be a Lawyer or Accountant. But if your child has already figured out how to hack past your parental controls and wrote a VB app for your office, then I would tell him to go for it.
Unfortunately passion is not something that can be taught, does this mean that you can't be successful in this industry if you don't have passion? Yeah, you can... but it is going to be alot harder. (But chances are if you are reading this blog at 12:00 at night you probably have it).
-James
Nolan Godfrey presents a pretty cool idea in his article on the angrycoder about using a digital watermark
to protect your code. This digital watermark is just a really obfuscated method
that in the end prints out your copyright text, but it is a unique way to
protect someone from decompiling and then wholesale copying your
code.
-James
Apress continues to impress me with the amount of intriguing
titles they have in the pipeline..
Applied
.NET Attributes - Applied
.NET Atrributes explores the application of .NET attributes and how developers
can write custom attributes that provide the maximum level of code reuse and
flexibility.
Maximizing .NET Performance - Maximizing .NET Performance focuses on providing developers and
architects with the systematic analysis of performance relating to key Framework
topics like remoting, garbage collection, and threading.
Code
Generation in Microsoft .NET - Code Generation in Microsoft .NET teaches how to implement automatic
code generation a significant new trend in enterprise software development to
reduce costs and improve efficiency and reliability.
These are some pretty specialized books that sound like they
could be very good. I always wonder how Apress manages to publish books that
would not be economically viable to other publishers.
-James
There is an article in EWeek this week that talks about how Microsoft
will be embracing UML, and including better UML development tools in both
Whidbey, and then even more improved tools in Orcas. This is definitely
very cool, Visio just does not cut it... and Rational is way to damn expensive.
Lately I have been trying out Visual UML, which is pretty good, but I would love something
cooked in to Visual Studio.
- James
I am working on a book that will be a large collection of Visual
Studio .NET Tips, Tricks, Hints, Hacks, and Tools and while I have put together
a large list of these, I want to hear from people who have a favorite tip or
trick so that it can be included in the book.
Send me your favorite VS.NET tip or trick and if it makes it into the book I
will make sure you are in the acknowledgements as well as getting you a free
copy of the book when it comes out. Unfortunately if I already have that
tip or trick, or it is not included, I can't get you a free copy of the
book, but I will still add you to the acknowledgments.
So send me your tips and tricks to javery@infozerk.com. And thanks for
contributing to what I think will be a great book.
-James
I recently wrote two reviews for DotNetToolBox.com, one on NUnit and the other on
CodeSmith, two of my
favorite free tools. If you get a chance you should take a couple minutes
and contribute a review on your favorite free .NET tool, it will seriously only
take you about 10 minutes. Apparantly Scott will really appreciate it. :)
-James
I recently had the opportunity to really dig into the NUnitASP extension to
NUnit, and I was very
impressed with what was possible. (You will have to recompile the code with the
new NUnit 2.1 assembly). Using this extension you can write a unit test that
accesses your ASP.NET page, check for controls, press buttons, and more. Very
cool stuff.
-James
Scott Mitchell
makes some good points about what is current lacking in our current blog
comment systems and how it could be improved. I agree with him on the most part,
but I think there are two things that are important to maintain when
modifying the comment experience.
1) There should be some level of anonymity preserved. Yes, most people would
login or create an account to leave a comment, but there are a number of
different people who would not want to login and just want to drop a quick
comment. I think this option should still be available.
2) I would not want to make users log in on each and every blog, if
there was a login implemented it would best if it was blogging system
wide. For instance I would only have one login for all blogs using
.Text.
I think the coolest part of Scott's suggestions is the idea of thread based
commenting. I have always enjoyed thread based forums, but the trend has definitely been
toward single thread
forums lately.. so I am not sure how popular this would be.
-James
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