Book Update: 100% Final Draft!

Whoof!  We’ve got 100% of our chapters for The Book through the final edits and delivered to our editor at O’Reilly.

Last count for tools: 176.  Absolutely no clue what the final page count will be, but it will almost certainly be over 1100 pages, perhaps even over 1200.  A rough bit of work in Cygwin tells me we had 842 figures between gif, jpg, bmp, and png files.  Not all of those made the cut, but the vast majority did.  There’s also one token SVG file in there, just because we weren’t difficult enough with everything else.

The final list of tools, in absolutely no sensible order, is shown below.  I’ve no clue if this will render properly by the time it makes it through BlogJet, Blogger.com’s stylesheets, and whatever agent you’re using to view this post with.  Hopefully so. 

XSD.exe	Krypton Toolkit	Community Server
WSCF	ControlSpy	Subtext
Codus	Visual Studio Express Editions	Flexwiki
MyGeneration	SharpDevelop	XP Remote Assistance
Peli's Reflector Addins	MonoDevelop	Skype
SourceMonitor	SnippetCompiler	GAIM
CR_Metrics	Notepad2	TFS Admin Tool
Ndepend	Regulator	NHibernate
Vil	Regulazy	Npersist
FxCop	FileMon	ObjectMapper
Nprof	TCPView	Castle ActiveRecord
SVN 1-Click Setup	RegMon	CoolCommands
TortuiseCVS	Process Explorer	ClassDesigner PowerToy
TortuiseSVN	ClrSpy	VSFileFinder
AnknSVN	ClrProfiler	PINVOKE.NET
SourceSafe Binding Remover	ClrDump	HTML/ASP.NET Spell Checker
WinMerge	Managed Stack Explorer	VSWindowManager
Atlas	Fiddler	CopySourceAsHTML
Anthem.NET	Ping Plotter	CSSPropertiesWindow
AJAX.NET Professional	LogParser	Web Application Project
UrlRewritingNet.UrlRewrite	Regex Kit Visualizers	VSContentInstaller PowerToys
BusyBoxDotNet	NProf	NxBRE
CSS Friendly ASP.NET 2.0 Control Adapters	ASP.NET Cache	Log4Net
FreeTextBox	Conchango XML Visualizer	Lucene.NET
WebChart	Expression Graphic Designer	LibCheck
RSSToolKit	Expression Interaction Designer	NetSpell
Nunit	XamlPad	Nplot
Nunit Code Snippets for Visual Studio 2005	Service Configuration Editor	nSort
MbUnit	Service Trace Viewer	Relfector.Diff
Zanebug	WinFX Development Tools	RSS.NET
Fitnesse	ILDASM	SharpZipLib
Ncover	Reflector	ExcelXMLWriter
nCoverExplorer	Dotnet IL Editor	iTextSharp
TestDriven.NET	Dotfuscator	GhostDoc
NMock2	Threat Analysis and Modeling Tool	CR_Documentor
Rhino.Mocks	Bouncy Castle	Ndoc
NUnitForms	XSS Library	PDFCreator
Ntime	PrivBar	skmFaqs
Selenium	MakeMeAdmin.cmd	BugTracker.NET
Watir	nxslt2	CodeTrack
DotNetNuke	eXML	Bugzilla
PicoContainer.NET	Xinclude.NET	Trac
Mono	Xpointer.NET	SlickRun
Rotor	XML Diff and Patch	ZoomIt
Castle MonoRail	EXSLT.NET	Magnifixer
Castle Windsor Container	XSDObjectGenerator	Less MSIerables
Enterprise Library	ConnectionStrings.com	FileZilla
OpenNETCF	SQL Connection String Builder	CommandPromptHere
Nant	SQLite Administrator	Cropper
MSBuild	Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET	ColorMania
MSBee	Oracle SQL Developer	PowerShell
MSBuild Community Tasks	Web Developer Toolbar for Internet Explorer	PowerShellIDE
MSBuild Sidekick	Web Developer Extension for Firefox	TaskSwitcherXP
CruiseControl.NET	Web Developer Helper	SyncToy
CI Factory	Drip	Unlocker
Unleash IT	DOM Helper	Cygwin
Web Deployment Projects	W3C Markup Validation Service
WiX	WebXACT
XP Common Controls	HTML Tidy
DockPanel Suite	Basecamp

So there you have it.  We’re done with the vast majority of the work.  We’ve still got copyedits to handle, but James tells me that goes much quicker.

Many thanks to the folks who contributed articles to the book.  Many thanks to the reviewers.  Many thanks to Ralph Davis who was our copy editor and did a tremendous job of polishing up our work.

Most of all, thanks a bunch to the people who were passionate and smart enough to create all these tools.

That’s all for now.  I’m going to spend the evening with my family who hasn’t seen much of me for the last two months as James and I have crushed to finish this thing.

Two Rants on Visual Source Safe

Jeff Atwood started the latest rant on Visual Source Safe and then Phil Haack took the ball and ran with it.  The posts are only mini-rants and have some good info, plus a couple links to other good stuff like Eric Sink’s most excellent treatsie on working with Source Control.

I’m not a VSS fan at all, preferring Subversion for the projects I’ve been working on—but I will say that Brian Prince, a guy I’ve lots of respect for, has had fine success with VSS at his company.  Brian and his team follow the practices laid out in Microsoft’s white paper on enterprise development with VSS and haven’t had any problems — but it seems to me they’re in the minority. (Sorry, couldn’t find a link for that paper.)

 

Update: Fixed typo in Phil’s last name.  Mea culpa, dude.

Hitting the Final Stretch

Blogging has been sporadic of late, and often nothing more than regurtitated links to good stuff other folks have written about.

James and I are in the last stretch for work on the book and we’re crushing to hit our final deadline.  Actually, that’s come and gone, but we’ll have 100% of the book finalized and off to the Production folks at O’Reilly by Friday the 18th come Hell or high water.  We’ve been pushed back for a couple reasons, mostly last-minute restructuring and edits our senior editor asked us to do. 

It was frustrating as all get out to have this hit so late in the game but, putting my tetchy whining aside, it’s making the book way more better.  (“’Way more better?’  You want me to pay money for your book when you write like that?”  Heh. You bet.)  Each article’s doing a lot better job of flowing through in a regular fashion, so readers will have a lot more consistent and productive reading experience.  (Reading experience.  Heh.  If it works for software it ought to work for books.)

We’ve also drastically reworked the chapter introductions, thanks to pointed, spot-on comments from our tech reviewers.  The introductions now do a lot better job of discussing the general topics and concepts in a chapter, so readers will have a better grasp on the fundamentals as they press through the articles.

Oh, by the way, our list of tech reviewers includes a bunch of Really Smart Folks.  I’m absolutely amazed at the folks who signed up to review this beast: Sam Gentile, Jason Follas, Daren May, Patrick Cauldwell, Marc Holmes, Scott Hanselman (yep, him), and Bill Wagner (Bill Wagner!!).  Mitch Wheat also caught a number of great things from the chapters I posted up on my biz site.

We’ve busted our butts on this book, and I hope you folks who buy it will feel you got your money’s worth.

SharePointKicks Site

Perhaps you know of the DotNetKicks site which lets .NET geeks call out interesting .NET-related news.  Did you know there’s also a similar site specific for SharePoint?  Gobs of pointers to great content.

Subscribed.

Office SharePoint Server / Workflow Widgets

A couple resources you’ll need if you’re starting to work on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) or workflow:

SharePoint Services v3 Starter Kit — holds templates and a custom workflow for VS 2005

SharePoint Server 2007 SDK — documentation, How Tos, samples, references

Virtual PC Not Detecting NIC

I’m setting up a VPC for some SharePoint work and it wasn’t finding my laptop’s network card during configuration.  Bummer.  No clue what’s going on here — it was finding the wireless card OK, but I need to run over the hardwired NIC.

Google and Ben Day to the rescue: futz around with Virtual Machine Network Services for the adapter.  VMNS (because you can’t have enough acryonyms) was enabled on my wired NIC, the Cisco VPN client, and my wireless NIC.  (Check Control Panel -> Network Connections)  I disabled it from the wired NIC, saved the settings, enabled it again and Poof! I’m able to use the wired adapter in VPC.

Thanks, Ben!

(Wonder if he’s related to Green Day.)

Now Playing: Thin Lizzy — Jailbreak.  I forgot about these guys for decades.  Nice to have stumbled across them again.

Good SharePoint Chart

I often have problems clearly explaining the differences between SharePoint Services and SharePoint Server.  This graphic, nabbed from one of Microsoft’s killer FREE online training courses, does a great job of breaking out what’s provided by which thing.

Great Troubleshooting Resource

“Back to basics!”  How many times have you said that to yourself after you’ve allowed yourself to get distracted by some red herring during troubleshooting?  Probably too often. 

David Agans has a great companion website to his book Debugging: The Nine Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems.  Be sure to check out the debugging poster and the list of other useful sites.

I’ve got his book added to my queue of things to buy in the next few months.  It looks like a great addition to my bookshelf.

The Future of Sysinternals Tools

Folks who love the amazing stuff from Sysinternals like TCPView, RegMon, etc. can perhaps breathe a bit easier after reading Mark’s post on his first week as a Microsoft employee.  It sounds like there’s a firm committment to keep the tools free—including a new license which is more open than the previous one.

I’ll admit I was exceedingly pessimistic about the future of the tools.  Looks like I was wrong.  I’m quite relieved to read this latest update!

Great Tutorial on Submitting Open Source Patches

Jeff Atwood challenged Scott Hanselman to come up with a detailed blog post on exactly how to submit a patch to an open source project.

Of course Hanselman rose to the occasion.

Must Read stuff.

My First Few Days

So here I am at Thursday, starting my fourth day at my new job with NuSoft. 

Initial thoughts?  I am so over my head with work to do and new technologies to get up to speed on — and you know what?  That’s a great place to be.  I love challenges and am really pumped up about all the cool stuff I’ll be working with in short order.

I’m also really fortunate to have gotten on a company with a bunch of incredibly smart folks.  I was out for dinner last night with a few colleagues and one relative newcomer said “You know what?  This is the first place I’ve been where when you’re in the room with co-workers it’s usually a good idea to just shut up and listen.”  He was talking about the knowledge level of the folks on various teams and he’s right.

Lots of work, lots of challenges, lots of exciting stuff to do.

The Ugly Side of Open Source

Kevin Downs has stopped work on NDoc 2.0, because of a lack of support from the community and because of the dumbass treatment he’s received from idiots who 1) never contributed any support to NDoc and 2) felt they were entitled to a new release supporting .NET 2.0.

Read a bit on Charlie Chen’s blog for a detailed e-mail from Kevin talking about the bottom line, including some true jackass behavior by folks who decided the right way to speed development on NDoc 2.0 was to automate e-mail spam bombs to Kevin’s e-mail addresses.  Way to go, guys!  Your smart actions certainly got the desired result, no?  (That was sarcasm, BTW.)

You Know You're a Math Geek When...

… you’ve “eagerly plunged into A History of Vector Analysis: The Evolution of the Idea of the Vectorial System”.

From Charles Petzold’s blog.

(Me no math geek.  Me edjukated in rural California.)

Book Review: No Fluff, Just Stuff

No Fluff, Just Stuff 2006 Anthology

ISBN:0977616665

Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf

This book is every bit its title: Concise, targeted chapters getting right to the gist of a topic.  Furthermore, the chapters are written by some of the sharpest folks in the software industry -- they know a thing or three and are great authors who've written clear, understandable pieces.  The book is based on the No Fluff, Just Stuff Symposium series (ww.nofluffjuststuff.com) in which the authors travel around North America giving intense multi-day seminars.

The book's first chapter, "Real World Web Services" by Scott Davis, sets the tone for the rest of the book: a nice walkthrough of Service-Oriented Architeture, cutting through all the hype surrounding SOA and doing a great job of explaining it in five short paragraphs.  Davis moves on to more detail on web services, walking the reader through SOAP, REST, and JSON.

The other chapters follow the same line with clear background and focused discussion on the most important parts of the topic.  You can read about instrumenting software, using code coverage, or even dealing with CSS from a developer's perspective.  Much of the book's code is Java-centric, but the concepts are important and similar across platforms, so any developer (even a .NET geek like me) can get a lot out of the book.

Additionally, the book's not solely focused on pure code.  Several chapters highlight process or methodology topics, like Jared Richardson's "The Cornerstone of a Great Shop" which discusses build processes, or Venkat Subramaniam's "From Fragility to Agility: Methodologies and Practices" which hits the main points of rolling into agile development.

This book is a terrific read.  It's concise, it's detailed, it's well-written.  Definitely a keeper for my bookshelf.

(See my standard review disclaimer)

Safari Online Changes

I just waded through a survey gathering info about an upcoming change to Safari Books Online.  I’ve been a long-time subscriber to Safari and it’s helped me through any number of tough spots — for a very small price you get access to a huge library of books, all of which you can search through.  The only hitch is that you subscribe for slots on a bookshelf, and you have to put a book on your bookshelf to read anything past the preface and TOC.  It’s flexible, it’s inexpensive, it’s wicked big with gobs of material.

Now it looks like they’re going to bust apart that huge library into four separate sections for biz productivity, developers, information technology, and graphics/web.  You’ll have to pay $50 per month to have acecss to all four libraries.

That sucks.  I likely won’t keep up my subscription if they move to that model.  The attraction of Safari to me is the wide range of material I have access to — stuff I’d never buy because I don’t use it.

I hope plenty of their customers pitch a fit as I did.

Now Here's Good Writing Advice!

Another gem from Jason Haley’s Interesting Finds: Petzold Book Blog - Book-Writing Advice.

Lots of terrific advice from a guy who’s written a book or two.  I’ve busted any number of his rules, particularly #4: get enough sleep and #6: maintain a balanced life (tough to do the Mr. Mom thing while co-authoring 1200 pages…).  I definitely busted #13: Don’t get a haircut until the book’s completed, but if you think I could go six months without a haircut…

#11 is sheer gold: Seek progress, not perfection.  That’s tough when you’re attached to those words you’ve agonized over, but it’s vital.

SnagIt Roolz!

I’ve been using SnagIt from TechSmith for a number of months now and it is simply a killer screen capture tool!  It’s been a breeze to use it for the hundreds (literally) of screenshots I’ve done for the book — it’s saved me hours of work compared to dealing with Paint which is just a joke.

Plus, SnagIt has a bunch of great features like a Flickr profile which lets me upload screenshots right to Flickr.  Now that’s cool!

Better still, SnagIt provides a printer driver which lets you print anything as an image.  This scored me big time Wife Points tonight as I did some SnagIt magic which let me get a page from a PDF file she had into an image which she could then easily insert into a Word document she’s working on.  (Hat tip for that trick to Graham Mayor’s very helpful tips site.)

(Disclaimer: I got SnagIt as a speaker gift from TechSmith for speaking at the Day of .NET this last May.)

Interesting Security Review of Vista

A very interesting commentary on vulnerabilities in Vista’s TCP/IP stack, based on a white paper by folks at Symantec.

The vulnerability count plummeted from 34 in build 5231 to 2 in build 5384.  Ok, ok, there are many things to consider, but Dave G’s points about trending and active security reviews are very valid ones.

Good reading on the post, and the white paper looks good as well — but I’ve only skimmed the first couple pages.

Updated: Via Michael Howard’s blog.

The Only Thing Worse

… than the pain of returning to jogging after a layoff of many months is the pain of getting back out on the second day of returning to jogging.

Ugh.

(Actually, not pain but soreness — but that just doesn’t sound quite as good or evoke as much sympathy.  What?  No sympathy?  Feh.)

.NET vs Java Smackdown

Dave Schmitt responds to a customer’s snarky questions on why they should choose .NET over Java.  Schmitt’s responses are well-measured and full of some interesting facts (complete with references).  OK, so Schmitt’s an MS employee and you should filter his comments from that viewpoint, but it’s a very good post and very good reading — especially the bits and pieces on security.

Love the title of Schmitt’s post.

(Via Daily Grind)

What Do You Edit?

Years ago when I was a semi-young punk flying around on big radar planes, I had a buddy in my office give me something to review.  I pulled out my red pen and bled all over the sheet of paper he’d given me.  He looked at the work I’d done and said “You didn’t fix my errors, you changed what I wrote into what you would have written.”

Oops.  He was right.

I’ve done a whole lot of writing and a fair amount of editing since then, but that incident has always stuck in my head.  Don’t waste your time during editing by needlessly changing the author’s voice, style, or approach.  If there’s a gramatic problem, edit.  If there’s a clarity problem, edit or point it out.  If there’s a structural issue, edit or point it out.  If there’s a difference in style or voice from how you would have written it, leave it alone.  You’re editing, not writing.

(I’m not complaining about the editor on our book, BTW.  He’s done great work for us and has helped me avoid looking too much the fool.)

We Have a Cover!

Now THIS is a cool cover!

Wish I’d won the flip to see whose name came first on the cover.  Note to self: In the future, don’t trust James to do coin tosses via IM.

I've Got A Job!

This last month has been brutal for any number of reasons, none the least that I’ve been hard at work trying to line up employment.  That’s always an agonizing process, but I’ve been pretty stunned at the various opportunities which landed in my lap, including several which came out of the blue, one of which completely knocked me over.

The process of interviews and weighing options is over, though: I start work on 7/31 for NuSoft Solutions as a principal consultant in Cincinnati, Ohio.  This is an exciting position for me, and I’m chuffed about going to work for them in no small part because of great feedback I’ve gotten from Ben Carey and Drew Robbins, both of whom used to work there.

At some point I’ll write up a separate post on the long, convoluted journey I’ve had over the last six years since setting parenting as #1 priority over work.  Six months ago I was seriously wigged out about what would happen when I started to look for full-time work again — just ask James or Josh (who gave me a much needed Dope Slap some time back), as they suffered through some of (a lot of?) my whiny crap.

Now I’m nearly done with the book, and I’m pumped up about heading off to a great company to get great stuff in place for customers.

Life is good.

Tools in Latest WinFx CTP

I’ve finished up writing on WinFx whoops I mean .NET 3.0 tools, but had to take a quick look at the just-released July CTP bits.  (No, I didn’t write on them simply because I was already underway with the last release…)

The updates for the Service Trace Viewer are really nice!  The main screen’s message detail looks a bit cleaner and is easier to read:

Best of all are the updates to the graph view.  Nice icons in the graph pane (left) are a good improvement, and again, the message formatting in the content pane (lower right) are much better.

Really, really slick updates!

Last Chapter Completed!

Wow, I'm a bit numb. I just delivered the book’s last chapter (on WinFx I mean .NET 3.0) to O’Reilly.

I’m going to go sit down, relax with a non-technical book for a bit, then jump in to polishing up the book’s introduction section.  After that it’s time to get cracking on consolidating input from our technical reviewers and polishing things up they’ve pointed out.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s not a train!

More Annoying Keyhole Stupidity

The bloggers on MSDN are a killer resource for us geeks.  The default mail links on those pages are a killer pain in the backside.  To wit:

Note that I even used IE to view this page, not my default Firefox browser.

This happens time and time again on MSDN blogs.  I end up launching Notepad2 to write the message, then paste it into that stupid little message block and hope it took correctly because I sure as hell ain’t gonna scroll through the entire message to read it one or two words per line…

Ted Stevens "A Series of Tubes" Techno Remix

Here’s a hysterical You Tube video smacking Ted Stevens for his asinine comments on how the internet works.

I was a resident of the state of Alaska until the 2004 elections when I changed to Ohio so I could vote where I was getting taxed.  There are many things I don’t care for in Ohio politics, but I’m happy to be away from Stevens and the other Alaskan Senator and Congressman.  Greedy fools, all of ‘em.

(Via the Daily Grind)

Win Dev Power Tools On Safari Bookshelf!

Our book is available on Safari Online’s Rough Cuts!

Nine chapters are in this current version.  More will be added shortly, although I’m not exactly sure what the schedule will be.

Pretty exciting stuff!

Great WCF Book

I’ve been dipping my toes into Windows Communication Foundation for a couple articles for The Book.  Windows Communication Foundation, Hands-on! is proving to be a great resource for learing WCF.  It’s lab-based and works step-by-step to get you going in WCF.  It’s written by three guys from Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism group, and all three have intimate knowledge of WCF’s workings.

I’ll post a more in-depth review of it later, but thought I’d toss this blurb out for now.  It’s a great book (so far), marred only by some deltas between the CTP version they wrote about in the book and what’s working in the current version — still, it’s not a major stumbling block and is something you should expect if you’re working with bleeding edge technology.

Also, be sure to check out Michele Leroux Bustamante’s site supporting her upcoming book Learning Windows Communication Foundation.  More good info from a very smart lady.

Announcing Our Book! (Windows Developer Power Tools)

Announcing Windows Developer Power Tools by myself and James Avery, to be published by O’Reilly sometime in November.  (Yep, we pushed back a month after having tried to push forward a month.  The book will be much better for the extra time.)

The book is around 1100 pages of goodness on open source and freeware tools you can use to improve your software development work.  The book’s all about using tools to bring value to the entire development cycle from writing code to testing to lifecycle management.  We’ve got something like 170 tools from Anthem.NET to Sysinternals RegMon to Bugzilla.  We chose tools which help improve the quality of code you write, or help improve your productivity as a developer.  (We also chose stuff we thought was just plain cool, too.)

What’s really neat is that we’ve had a significant number of articles written by the tool creators themselves.  This is great because 1) these folks know their own tools inside and out and can best write about the tools’ value, and 2) they were passionate enough to write the tool in the first place and that passion (hopefully!) comes across in their articles.  We’ve also had some terrific folks contribute articles to the book as well.  James and I have still ended up writing probably 70% of the book ourselves, plus we edited every submission for consistency, style, and content.

We’ve got two more chapters to put nails in: Database Utilities, and WinFx / .NET 3.0.  We hope to have those completed mid-week, then it’s time to focus on polishing up the great structure we’ve got in place.  We may drop a few articles here and there for various reasons, and we’re going to flesh out every chapter’s introduction so that readers are clear on where the tools in that chapter fit in the development cycle, and how those tools bring value to a product.

We’ve a significant amount of effort left, but the book is shaping up really, really well.  We’ve had some brutal inital feedback from Tech Reviewers, but we’ve also had some very uplifting, enthusiastic feedback from a number of TRs too.

I may be biased, but I think the book’s going to be fantastic.  (What, like you would say “It’s going to suck big time”?)

You can have a look at the table of contents if you like, or you could even have a look at a sample chapter of the book.  We’d love to have your feedback on the content.  We’ll be posting up other chapters occasionally.  I’ll announce that here when that happens.

Web error: "Mutex could not be created"

I’ve run across this a couple times and thought I’d document it here.

On occasion I get a server error for one of my websites “Mutex could not be created” with an exception System.InvalidOperationException: Mutex could not be created.

I’ve found the solution to this at ASP.NET forums in a response by Joao Morais.  It’s helped me out a couple times, but I’m still no closer to finding out what causes it.  (To be frank, it hasn’t happend enough to rise above the pain threshold where I need to track it down.)

Dayton DevGroup: Sam Gentile's Slide Deck Now Available

Sam Gentile presented at our .NET group here in Dayton back on 6/28.  His topic was SOA in WCF (pronounced “Indigo”).  You can now find his slide deck up on our group’s site here.

The Joys Of Being Subjected To A Tech Review

We’ve just gotten back some specific feedback on a few initial chapters from a couple of tech reviewers.  We’ve been fortunate to have gotten a great set of tech reviewers for the book.  I mean great.  I mean lots of smart folks and a couple industry leaders.  Wow.

But it’s definitely a bit brusing, especially the comments from one fellow who come across as fairly snarky.  Well, OK, his comments aren’t overly snarky, that’s just my bruised ego whining like a puppy that just got its nose smacked with a rolled up paper.  It can sometimes be deflating to read feedback on one’s work, but the point to keep in mind is that having Really Smart People point out weak spots in your book is a Really Good Thing.

Your work will be much better for it; you just have to set aside your ego for a bit.

(Actually, that goes for just about anything in your career.  Get Really Smart People to give you (hopefully) constructive criticism and you’ll end up doing better work.)

Why I Love My Nation

Why do I love my country so much?  Because people like Dinesh D’Souza come here and write articles like this about why they’ve adopted this nation as their own.

(Via Instapundit)

Estimation Basics

Jeff Atwood is continuing his series of commentary on Steve McConnell’s Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art.  I very much remember the exercise Atwood pulls from the book — I read this as part of reviewing McConnell’s book and thought it was amazing.

The numbers are pretty clear: what we estimators think is 90% certainty is more like 30% certainty.  Great stuff to read.

The Calm Before the Storm

I’m sitting here listening to Phish’s Undermind and enjoying a bit of quiet time as I finish one of the last two articles I have to write for this next drop of the book.  The last six weeks have been brutal with scads of writing and loads of editing contributions from various authors.  We’ve got our major delivery on Wednesday, then one final chapter to finish up.  I’ll have one or two pieces to write for that chapter—James and a couple other contributors are handling the rest of that bit.

After that it’s another crush, wading through reviewing edited chapters and trying to get tech review input dealt with.  Final delivery to Production is on 20 July, which doesn’t leave us scads of time, but we’re confident things will roll on nicely.

Still no clue when O’Reilly will get the book on Rough Cuts.  This part’s been a bit frustrating since we were hoping to get feedback on the book’s content early in the game, but that’s just not panned out.  One good bit of news about Rough Cuts: James and I will have some Safari Online coupons to hand out which will let a number of folks have a free look at the book. 

No, no, don’t e-mail me now.  I’ll let you know when we’ve got the book up and when we’ve got access to coupons.  We’ll probably run a contest and give them out to the five best renditions of Meatloaf’s Paradise by the Dashboard Light or something equally creative.  OK, maybe we’ll just hand them out first-come, first-served.

(This is actually the first time I’ve ever listened to Phish.  Heard about ‘em for years, but never heard a blip of their music.  Undermind is great stuff, and I’m looking forward to digging through some of their other stuff on Rhapsody!)

Important Book Writing Statistics

Approximate espresso and coffee consumption in the last five months:

8 Lbs Liquid Amber Espresso Blend

2 Lbs Decaf Donkey Blend

(That works out to ~400 shots of espresso)

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 – 10 Lbs beans from varied locations including Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Yemen, Rwanda, Java, and Ethopia.

I’ve got a bag of some great Kona ready to roast up when we hit our final delivery in a few weeks.  Until then, it’s the same good stuff listed above.

Needless to say, my espresso machine and roaster have been getting a workout.

Free For the Taking: Java Development Books

I get a lot of review books and occasionally I get some stuff that’s outside my normal domain.  I just got a FedEx delivery with three Java books:

• Quartz Job Scheduling Framework
• Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate, and Eclipse
• Java Studio Creator Field Guide

I like Java a lot, but haven’t been in that domain for some time, so I can’t use ‘em, I ain’t gonna read ‘em (30 books on the pile right now), and I most likely can’t hand ‘em out at my .NET Developers Group…

You’re welcome to the books if you’re in the Dayton area and are interested in them.  Drop me a line via the contact link on the right sidebar of my blog and we can set up a meeting to hand over the goods.

New S. Ohio Group for Exchange Geeks

Check out the announcement for the new Southern Ohio Exchange User’s Group.  Light on details at the moment, but I sure know the pain of trying to get the word out about a new user group.

Spread the love and pass on the link if you’re an Exchange geek, know somebody who is, or play one on TV.

Top 10 Superheros

OK, so I’m a big fan of comic book hero movies.  Good ones, that is.

This article listing ten of the best and five of the worst is great stuff because it hits a couple of my favorites: The Rocketeer and Hellboy. I don’t agree that X-Men deserves top billing on the best list, nor do I agree that Daredevil belongs on the worst five list.  The Fantastic Four most definitely does, but I’d rate it as the absolute worst piece of dreck to ever hit the screen, not number four.

(Why yes, I am definitely needing a momentary break from the last weekend’s crush for the book…)

Recent Good Tunes

I’ve been completely dependent on Rhapsody the last few weeks to keep me semi-sane as we crush to hit our final deadline for the book.  Here’s some stuff I’ve been pleased to have had coming through the speakers:

• Guster -- Ganging Up On The Sun (Guster’s latest.  Wicked good stuff)
• The Strokes -- First Impressions of Earth, Half Smiles of the Decomposed  (Not as good as their first, but tasty all the same)
• Van Halen -- I, II, and Women and Children First (How on Earth did I forget about Van Halen for so long?  Yeesh.  Brings back many good memories of school, along with a few painful ones too.)
• Longwave -- The Strangest Things, There's a Fire.  I’m almost embarassed to admit that I found Longwave after listening to Keira Knightly’s Rhapsody playlist.  It sounds like I’m some People-magazine addicted celebrity babe stalker.  Which isn’t the case, but you won’t believe me anyway.  Go check out her playlist for some absolutely amazing stuff.  No clue if she put this together herself, or if some publicist did.  Whoever stuck it together has great tastes in indie music.
• The Farm -- Spartacus.  See above.
• Springsteen -- We Shall Overcome - The Seeger Sessions  (John Henry.  Go listen now.  Check your pulse to see if you’re alive if your feet don’t start bouncing along with the music.)
• Grace Potter and the Nocturnals -- Nothing But The Water (Excellent, killer, beauty, outstanding bluesy stuff, and Grace has an amazing voice which hangs perfectly with the great band behind her.)
• 12 Girls Band -- Freedom (OK, this is seriously funky Asian girl band stuff, but it’s cool and a nice break from other stuff.)

UI Keyholes

Way back in 2003 I went to the Software Development Expo out in Santa Clara.  I met Josh there and saw a bunch of amazing folks like Steve McConnell talk. 

One of speakers I saw was Scott Meyers, author of the great work Effective C++, who gave a couple amazing presentations, one of which was on keyholes in software design.  Keyholes are poorly thought bits and pieces which badly limit your view into what’s really going on, or limit your ability to effective accomplish the task at hand.

A prime example are dialog boxes or windows which aren’t resizable, thereby making you do a whole lot of scrolling manually via scrollbars  To wit, the Select Subfoolders dialog in Microsoft’s nice-in-concept SyncToy for XP which lets you sync up two folders on disparate systems. 

The amount of manual scrolling I have to do sucks, quite frankly.  It would be very nice to be able to get this window wider, but no, I’m not offered that option.  Grrrrrr.

Do your users a favor.  Avoid these kinds of silly, annoying restrictions.

TaskSwitchXP Goodness

It helps to re-RTFM every once in awhile.  TaskSwitchXP, if you aren’t using it already, is a killer replacement for normal Windows Alt-Tab task switching.  Lots of shiny goodness, lots of configuration options for you to play with.

I didn’t realize, however, that you could use Ctrl-Alt-Tab to isolate task switching between all instances of the app currently in the foreground.  For instance, I’ve always got a crapload of Notepad instances open among the 15 or so apps I’m often running.  Using Ctrl-Alt-Tab gives me a nice focused list like this:

Wheee!

Now Playing: The Strokes — This is It.  Wow, great Punk/Indie/cool stuff.  The Barely Legal cut has a terrific riff going on, and for some reason it’s stuck in my Rhapsody stream and keeps replaying again and again and again.

Book Review: Extreme Programming Pocket Guide

Extreme Programming Pocket Guide, by "chromatic". O'Reilly Books, 2003. 90-ish pages of pocket-sized XP love.

I've had my nose stuck to the grindstone working on the book James and I are writing, but badly needed a bit of time away doing something else, so I pulled this tiny work off the stack of review books (now 30 books high) and blasted through it in a short hour.

It’s short, sweet, to the point, also injected with the occasional XP Dogma Line such as if you don’t implement all 12 practices then you’re not doing XP and your manhood will shrivel or your womb will be barren.  I get tired of that line, but the rest of the book is truely golden.

It’s concise and lays out great sections on why one should consider XP, roles in XP, artifiacts, and a few others.  The real wealth is the section on XP practices where the 12 tenets are laid out in concise, reasonable fashion.  These practices are clear and understandable without a bunch of mystical handwaving or badly-written example scenarios I’ve suffered through in a couple other XP books.  (Roodyn’s Extreme .NET comes to mind as a painful example of that.)

The book’s conciseness and focus makes it a perfect tool if you’re trying to sell XP to your management, team, or co-workers.

(Standard Book Review Disclaimer)

 

Standard Book Review Disclaimer

Here’s my standard (as of this moment) disclaimer about some of my book reviews.  I’ll try to link to it when I review a book I’ve gotten as a review copy.

I get a lot of books free as review copies.  I write about most of them if I’ve time to read them and they’re interesting topics.  Just because I got them for free doesn’t mean I feel obligated to give fawning reviews of them.  I write about what I like and don’t like without any feeling of obligation to the publishers — who you should know never ask or imply that such a thing should be done.

Regardless, you ought to know when I’ve gotten a book for free.  So there.

(Not valid in the states of Nevada, Ohio or the other 48.5 states.  Your mileage may vary.  Some settling may occur during shipment.  Don’t use heavy machinery after reading due to risk of drowsiness.  Avoid contact with water.  Keep away from children under 43.)

Great Indigo Presentation

The famous (infamous?) Sam Gentile spoke on Indigo and SOA last night at our .NET group here in Dayton.

Sam’s quite a character (the expression “he’s strong coffee” comes to mind), wicked smart on Indigo, and obviously passionate about what he does.  He’s also not afraid to vent his opinions on everything from VB.NET developers to various decisions Microsoft’s made about various pieces of technology.

You should definitely take advantage of seeing Sam speak if you have the opportunity.  Hanging out with him afterwards is also quite an adventure…

(His vents on VB.NET folks were tongue in cheek.  I think.)

OR/M == Vietnam?

Jeff Atwood can’t write a blog post to save his heinie.  His stuff is never interesting, it’s poorly written, and it’s never germane. 

Oh, wait.  I have that completely inverted.  All of his stuff is provoking, well-written, and mostly always pertinent.  But I digress.

If you’re using or considering using object relational mapping to handle business object persistence then you need to read his post today which really refers to another one by Ted Neward.  A buddy of mine is adamantly in the “O/RM rulz the woild!” camp.  I remain a fence sitter, simply because I don’t have time to actively think out both sides.  Maybe after I finish work on the book and sleep for a week or two.

I haven’t gotten through all of Neward’s original post, but both are good reads.

(Cool.  I got both “germane” and “pertinent” in a post.)

Seriously Good Webcasts

Michele Leroux Bustamante (AKA “Das Blonde”) is putting on three MSDN webcasts this week.  She’s a brilliant lady and knows her stuff, particularly for security and Windows Communication Foundation.

Check ‘em out.  The price is right, after all.

A Quiet Sunday Morning for Editing

…Or maybe not so much.  Two cats providing entertainment with a yeowling, sibling-rivalry dustup.  One 23–month old giggling and laughing while fishing near your feet, plus bashing on a couple old pots and pans.

Good thing Child #1 and Momma are still asleep, otherwise there’s no telling what they’d be adding to the cacophonous mix.

Me?  OK, I’m listening to Longwave’s There’s a Fire which is some seriously good stuff.

Sniveling Grubs (Semi-Politics)

Charles Krauthammer has a wonderful article on why Australia is such a good friend of our nation, and why we like them so much in return.  One reason?  Australian House of Representative members like Julia Gillard who express their distaste for opponents in rather plain terms: “I move that that sniveling grub over there be not further heard.''

Regardless of your politics, the article’s quite a good read.

(Krauthammer admits some bias to Aussies, having married one.)

[Via Instapundit]

Hire Me!

James and I will be finishing up work on our book in a few weeks, and I’ll be looking to transition to a full-time job shortly thereafter.  I’ve already started the job hunt process, but thought I’d put a post here as well.

I’m looking for a position doing development, project management, or solutions development in a customer-facing role.  I’ve had a very wide range of experience and can help you and your company out with just about anything from network managment to development to testing.  (I’ve also done retail wine sales, so I can help you figure out what you should drink with your salmon…)

Location preferences would be the Dayton/Cincinnati/Columbus area.  Relocation’s an option, but only after September and it would need to be a pretty compelling opportunity.  I am, however, available for remote/virtual/telecommuting work and have five years productive experience in such a slot.

I’ll be available for work starting the first week in August.

If you’re interested, feel free to have a gander at my resume, or contact me via the link on the right sidebar.

Touring a Book Printing Plant

Chris Sells and his two sons take a great tour of a printing plant as Sells’ book is being produced.  Neat stuff, and very interesting photos.

(Via Kate Gregory)

Another Presentation

I gave my “Intro To Security” spiel at the Cincinnati .NET User Group tonight.  (Whoops!  Look at the hour!  I mean last night.)  Nice crowd, good folks, only a couple started snooring on me.  Thanks to James for inviting me and the rest of the Cincy group for making me welcome!

You can find links to the updated slide deck and code over at my company’s site.

(And thanks to my wonderful little daughter who turned six years old today and didn’t complain when her Momma left on biz travel and her father abandoned her with the babysitter.  An ice cream cake from Ritter’s at lunch might have had something to do with that…)

Book Status

Still no update on when our book will get on to O’Reilly’s Rough Cuts, which is bringing me down.  James and I are holding off announcing details until that point, and I’m having a helluva time keeping my yap shut.

In the meantime, I’m feeling a bit like the folks at Weta Digital in the final weeks of Return of the King: loads of work, and we keep adding new things to write about.  This isn’t bad, because we want the book to be a killer tome, but it does mean I get a bit of a glazed look in my eyes from time to time.

Final milestone for 100% first-draft delivery is 4 July, which is (Holy Smokes!) just 15 days away.  Whoof.

Jim.Mode = NoseToGrindstone;

More ReSharper Goodness

Small things matter.  Like being able to quickly open up a file somewhere in your solution when you run across a reference to it in your code.  I’m still not in a complete transcendental existential plateau with ReSharper, but I do on occasion come close to Maslow’s fifth level with goodies like this:

• Find a reference to a file in the code you’re looking at (CSS Friendly ASP.NET 2.0 Control Adapters, BTW)
• Hit Ctrl-Shift-N
• Start typing a few characters of the filename
• ReSharper gloms through all files in the solution and starts listing files, filtering out as you type more characters in
• By the fourth character I’m to a set of files like so:
• By the fifth character I’m down to two choices, enabling me to use the arrow key and Enter
• The desired file pops into my editor.

Shiny.

Sodas and Mentos -- Kids, Don't Try This At Home

From Greg Hughes's blog, a science experiment gone oh so wrong. The horror!

Good Stuff on Obfuscation

Jason Haley has been posting up a series of articles on obfuscation.  He’s got a post on String Encryption and Renaming.

Good reading!

Good Customers, Bad Customers

Customers are and should be the top priority in any line of work, but customers also need to know that there are borders beyond which they may not pass.  It’s not OK to get abusive, it’s not OK to go nuclear and dump venom on a customer-facing representative just because your issue wasn’t addressed Right Friggin’ Now! 

Furthermore, if you as a customer cross those lines then you deserve to have that rep’s manager, in a polite and professional manner, put you firmly back in perspective.

Josh Ledgard has a very thoughtful post on just this topic as relating to Microsoft: scooblog by josh ledgard : Anyone but you again. Be sure to read the first comment, as it’s a great example of someone who’s over the line.  What a hysterical affirmation of Josh’s point.

Security Goodness: Drag & Drop to MakeMeAdmin Command Prompt

I use Aaron Margosis’s MakeMeAdmin.cmd to give myself admin privileges when needed.  That command file (real developers don’t use batch files) gets you a command prompt running in an administrator’s context, enabling you to launch new Explorer sessions, programs, etc., all from an Admin’s context.

Last night I stumbled across something that I’d no idea was possible: You can drop a shortcut into that command prompt window, at which point the shortcut’s full path will appear in the prompt.  Hit “Enter” and Poof! you’ve got a shiny app running in the Admin context.

Wow!

I’m embarassed to say that I can’t even credit the place I ran across this tip at.  I read the blog post or comment and moved on to do other things.  What I’d read really didn’t even sink in until I climbed out of bed this morning and sat down at the computer…

Tutorials Done the way Tutorials Should Be (Anthem.NET)

I’ve been trolling through a lot of open source and freeware tools over the last six or eight months.  I’ve seen some great documentation (Varszegi’s NSpring’s API dox rock!) and I’ve seen utter crapware.  Most projects suffer in the tutorial/implementation area even if their API dox are up to snuff. 

Let’s be honest: what’s fun about writing up that implementation/tutorial stuff?  Nutin’, but it’s critical if you want users of your stuff to be able to jump right in and get rolling.

Anthem.NET’s tutorials/demos are the best I’ve run across since I started brushing against open source a number of years ago.  The example web project in Anthem.NET’s distribution has 43 separate examples.  43!  With code.  And they’re well-written!  Additionally, Howard Richards has a great walkthrough on Code Project.

I know the effort involved in getting this level of quality of documentation up, and I’m happy the Anthem.NET team did it.  I’ve done very little with ASP.NET, so I’m learning about AJAX, Anthem.NET, and ASP.NET fundamentals all at the same time.  This documentation makes it oh so much more pleasant.

Well done, folks!

Confused about the WinFx/.NET 3.0 Idiocy? Some Clarifications

Roy Osherove passes on information from various folks at Microsoft who are trying to clear up the confusing mess they’ve created surrounding .NET 3.0/WinFx/LINQ.

This is actually a pretty clear, helpful post.

I Have a LOT of Work To Do

…before I’m able to catch up to these folks: Amazon.com Top Reviewers.  Top reviewer has posted 11,500–ish reviews?  Yeesh.  Guess I’ll have to work hard to get up from my current 27.

Jeff Atwood on Steve McConnell on Estimating

I reviewed a couple chapters of Steve McConnell’s Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art as he was writing it.  (Now that I sound like I am sooo cool, let me point out that he opened the review process up to hordes of folks via his website, so it’s not like I’m all that cool.)  What I read was solid gold, although I’ve not had time to buy and read the entire book yet.

Jeff Atwood over at Coding Horror has a nice extract and bit of commentary on why estimations are so often horribly wrong.

Just another kick in the pants that I need to get and read a copy of this book.

Editing Non-English Speaking Writers

I’ve been working through a number of articles for our book written by non-native English speakers.  Frankly I’m stunned and a bit embarassed at how amazingly well-done the vast majority of the articles are.

I lived and worked in Germany for about 3.5 years and was nicely conversant in German.  Far from fluent, but I was able to get across just about any concept I needed to both at work and at the Gasthaus after a couple beers.  Just don’t ask me to do the genative and other cases, which always killed me.

Back to the point.  I never would have considered writing an article in German for a publication, so I’m amazed at the great pieces I’m getting from our contributors.  I realize English tends to be a common business and technical language, but regardless… Russian, Israel, Germany, Brazil, Austria, China, Switzerland, Italy.  I’ve had pieces from all of these nations across my screen.  I’ve only had one which needed massive edits, and frankly I’ve had more thanone native English speaker who I had to do significantly more editing on!  One foreign writer even had down the proper usage of semicolons and commas in extended lists.  If that ain’t a subtle piece of work I don’t know what is.

I have no idea where I’m going with this blog post.  I’ve just been knocked over at how cool it is and thought to share my blatherings with my three readers.

More Great Stuff on the Internet

My wife and I were avid fans of Northern Exposure when it was on. We especially loved the episodes where Chris Stevens did anything with his "Fling", a huge tebuchet.  I remember several various things getting the Fling: a car (perhaps?), a piano, his dead buddy Tully  still in his coffin.  Imagine my happiness when I found a reference to this today: trebuchet - Photobucket.

(Via Hugh Hewitt)

Interesting Counterpoint to Benefits of Agile Development

Via Ron Jeffries's blog, a ten-point critique of evidenciary claims made in Craig Larman's Agile and Iterative Development: A Manager's Guide": Misstating the Evidence for Agile and Iterative Development, Chapter 6, Evidence.

I haven't read Larman’s book, but the article’s author, Isaac Gouy, gives specific quotes out of Larman’s work, then does a handy job refuting those points based on evidence Larman himself cites.

It should be noted I am not jumping in on Gouy’s side.  I’ve a huge distrust of short snippets of quotes taken from larger works.  We see our lousy media doing a great job of handily, purposely distorting the gist of an argument via Dowdification.  (Note that’s done on either side, not just via MoDo.)

Regardless of the Dowdification factor, Gouy’s article makes for interesting reading.  Do be sure to read Jeffries’s commentary on Gouy’s background on comp.software.extreme-programming.  Jeffries emphatic non-committal says something on its own.

Making a Political Difference

You may not care about politics and that's fine. Skip on past if that's the case.

If that's not the case, then plop by Captain Ed's blog and read about how the Porkbusters movement helped cut the Senate's asinine appropriations bill by an imense $13.5 billion. That's billion with a "b".  According to Capt. Ed, that works out to $45 for every man, woman, and child in the USA.

The blogger-driven Porkbusters movement is responsible for much of the momentum for cutting out rediculous crap like Trent Lott’s $700 million railroad and a $200 million bailout for Northrop Grumman (whom I used to work for).

Polemics like Ann Coulter and the moonbats at Daily Kos aren’t good for much, but grass roots level movements like Porkbusters can indeed make a difference.

How cool is that?

(Via Instapundit)

Social Engineering, the USB Way

From Keith Brown's blog, a frightening look at how simple it is to get careless folks to do your hacking for you. Security isn't only about SQL injections, buffer overflows, or running FxCop to find the stuff you missed. Security is about policies, procedures, and perhaps shutting down USB ports on systems.

Dark Reading - Host security - Social Engineering, the USB Way - Security.

(And oh, by the way, take your regular account out of the Administrators group, you fool!)

The Joys of MSDN's Fluid Locations

MSDN has some great stuff on it.  The API documentation is helpful, the knowledge and transparency of the scads of bloggers there is simply incredible (and EXTREMELY helpful when searching for answers), and there’s just some Plain Cool Stuff.

Until they move it.

This seems to be an ongoing problem at MSDN.  Get some good content up, then six or eight months later move stuff around so all the links don’t friggin’ work.  Case in point, the following spot from MSBuild’s front page:

Of the four links circled in red, three get Page Not Found errors.

Not overly helpful.

So You Think You're an RC Pilot?

I’ve watched my Dad do neat things with his R/C airplanes, but nothing like this: Amazing R/C airplane demo.

Just amazing.

My Office Window View

There are certain advantages to being at my desk at home during the day.  One would be the view out my “office” window.

Such things help balance out the grey hair I’ve gotten while staying at home to take care of two small children…

Windows PowerShell Blog

I’m just starting to explore the Windows PowerShell, plus the exciting-looking PowerShellIDE.  I ran across the PowerShell Team’s blog and it’s absolutely worth adding to your agreggator, if only to read messages like this one from Dean Tsaltas which starts off:

"We’ve heard that some of you think our PowerShell sample scripts on the TechNet Script Center stink. Do you have any idea how much that hurts? We slave over hot keyboards day in and day out trying to help you ungrateful scoundrels learn more about scripting. And how do you repay us? Nasty emails and smear campaigns, that’s how….just a sec…what’s that?...what do you mean they have a point? Really? Oh. OK."

That post only gets better, especially since it’s an open admission that they’ve work to do.  All the other posts on that blog look to be filled with lots of goodness as well.  But I digress. 

PowerShell looks way cool, and I’m looking forward to playing around with it.

JetBrains' Killer Tools Blog

I just ran across this today: the JetBrains .NET Tools Blog. How cool is this?  Tips, tricks, and neat stuff from the folks who bring you ReSharper, .Trace, Omea Reader, and a host of other slick tools.

Today’s post is a great walkthrough on using the Go To Type feature.  Most excellent.

Book Review: Programming .NET Components, 2nd ed

This one got bounced from Slashdot some time back and I forgot to post it up here.

Looking for a concise, well-written book covering everything from interface-based design and development to the nitty-gritty on remoting in .NET? If so, you ought to give Juval Löwy’s Programming .NET Components, 2nd ed. some consideration. His book, focused on the benefits of getting software into well-defined components, does a great job of hitting the details on tough implementation issues while clearly laying out fundamentals needed to understand the problems.

Löwy, recognized as a Software Legend by Microsoft (which may instantly disqualify him as a Smart Guy on Slashdot), nicely covers general .NET topics such as the Just-In-Time compiler and garbage collection. Thankfully he doesn’t spend hundreds of pages on this, instead moving on to the main gist of the book: how to go about creating component-based systems.

The beginning parts of book aren’t a theoretical mess on design; rather Löwy’s kept it to how one goes about laying out functionality in different assemblies and how you can best accomplish that using by interfaces to structure that functionality. He nicely introduces interface-based programming for developers who might not be familiar with that approach. There’s also good coverage of using generics in interfaces, particularly some of the trickier bits such as derivation and constraints.

The remainder of the book gets into more complex concepts for getting your components to function together. Löwy has some very good coverage on asynchronous calls and event-handling. His sections on multithreading/concurrency and remoting are very detailed and provide solutions to difficult problems.

One thing I liked a lot about the book is Löwy’s strong emphasis on dealing with potential errors which may occur. Every section is rich with practical advice on identifying and handling error conditions that might pop up. Löwy’s also very good in pointing out where you’ll need to make tough decisions, for example when deciding on whether to use Enterprise Services (DCOM), remoting, or web services for communication between components.

Generics, new to the .NET 2.0 Framework, get a lot of coverage in this book. Löwy’s done a lot of other writing on the usefulness of generics. Each major section includes a discussion on how generics might benefit a particular scenario, plus there’s a separate appendix serving as an introduction to generics.

A good friend of mine feels that Löwy tends to favor complexity in his approach to design and implementation, but I didn’t get that from this book at all. Löwy lays out a clear case for what he’s talking about, plus he gives you the pros and cons to make an informed decision about how you’ll design and implement your code.

iPod Woes

Well this just plain sucks: my iPod has decided to eat its young and refuses to talk to the computer holding my music library.  The thing’s also skipping songs and just generally behaving in a quite rude fashion.

The iPod Updater software won’t even talk to the thing, which is making it tough to try and reset the iPod.  I’m not very pleased.

I’ll have to spend some time digging back through my copy of iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition, but I really wish this thing had waited a bit to crap out.  Not like I’ve scads of time to fool with this at the moment.  Grumble.

Ron Jeffries on Focusing on Value

If you can focus your work on the 20% of a system which brings 80% of the system’s total value to your customer, then what should you do with the remaining 80% of work? 

Ron  Jeffries has a great article, The "Eighty-Twenty" Rule, with a pretty stunning graph and conclusion: forget the remaining 80% and go find another four projects in which you spend 20% of the time hitting the 80% mark on each project.

As Instapundit would say, read the whole thing.

First Rose Pix of the Year

The roses are exploding and doing quite nicely this year.  The New Dawn in the front continues to do its best to eat the house:

The canes over the entryway tend to darken things a bit, but the aroma from the blooms is worth it.

The Kirsten Poulsen and Marie Pavie roses in the wildflower bed are doing very well too.

There are several other rose beds doing nicely, but this was it for today’s pix.

Favorite Developer-Oriented Utilities?

UPDATE: I completely forgot to mention a critical factor: These tools need to be freeware or open source (FOSS).  There are a ton of great utilities around which you can drop money on, but we’re focusing on FOSS toys.

One of the parts in the book James and I are writing covers miscellaneous Windows Utilities.  This chapter covers miscellaneous utilities developers find handy, but don’t fit easily in other categories like Troubleshooting, Build, Editing, etc.  We’re already writing about a good list so far: Cygwin (more than a utility, but a good fit), Cropper, SlickRun, TaskSwitchXP, ZoomIt, VMWare and Magnifixer. 

However, we’re always interested in more cool tools to write on.

Do you have any other developer-oriented utilities you think are the bee’s knees?