Jason Haley

Some Interesting Finds this week

Jason Haley — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:21:00 GMT

Its been a crazy week (more on that some other time), so I've been unable to get enough time to do the usual ling blogs ... so here are some links I've had the time to notice.

Other stuff
Michael Arrington - Technorati Acquires BlogCritics, Gets Into Content Game
Microsoft Downloads - .NET Rocks! - Ted Neward and Joel Pobar on Rotor 2.0 and .NET Rocks! - Jeffrey Richter on the Windows Memory Model and Advanced Debugging Techniques with Visual Studio and Windows IE8 Beta 2: Developer Technology Overview and A Medley of Debugging Tools
Vibro - Interview with Mark Russinovich on EDGE
Soumitra Sengupta - Jon Udell cURL's with SQL Server Data Services
Nathan - Data Structures and Algorithms E-Book (Or, the fast track to limitless power and wealth) and Simple Expression Evaluator project now on CodePlex

Web stuff
Dion Almaer - navigator.geolocation: Using the W3C Geolocation API today
Mike Gunderloy - QuarkBase Dissects Web Sites
The Moth - Debug into Fx 3.5 SP1 source

Cloud Computing stuff
Jason Corsello - SaaS Model to "Collapse" According to Lawson CEO

Career stuff
Rich - Learn Steps Needed To Make Change
Mark Curphey - Management Training Notes
Leo - 7 Little Habits That Can Change Your Life, and How to Form Them
Celine Roque - Negotiating the Web Worker Way

Business stuff
Samuel Dean - 3 Top Open Source CRM Solutions
Mike Gunderloy - Choosing an Online Storage Vendor
Scott Sehlhorst - Market Driven Competitive Advantage

Innovation stuff
Mitch Ditkoff - Managers Need to Become Innovation Coaches

Innovation Notes: August 28, 2008

Jason Haley — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:12:00 GMT

How to Form an Innovation Strategy, Scott Anthony
Scott briefly discusses a figure called "Goals and Boundaries" which is a visual aid to help communicate areas that innovators (who are creating products). The areas captured in this diagram are things like:

Target customer
Distribution channel
Steady-state revenue
Type of offering
Brand
Revenue Source
Suppliers/Partners
Tactics
Go-to-market approach

Scott also mentions a link to his new book: Innovator's Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work, by Scott D Anthony, Mark Johnson

Pay As You Drive impact equivalent to taking 10 million cars off the road in California, Pay As You Drive
Entry about a press release from the California Department of Insurance. Interesting read, my first reaction was - 'why would I drive less with a PAYD policy?' ... especially to the amount that the entry mentions. I would get the policy just because I only drive once a week, but to drive less just because of it ... not sure about that - what do you think? Interesting quote:

...if 30% of Californian drivers participate in Pay As You Drive insurance, California could avoid:

55 million tons of CO2 between 2009 and 2020.
That is the equivalent of taking 10 million cars off the road!
It would save 208 billion liters of petrol.
It would save Californians US$40 billion in car-related expenses.

The Key to Innovation Within Your Association Just Might be a Mentor, Stuart Meyer
A short entry on a way to keep the creativity and innovation working in an environment that may not be the most creative environment. Interesting quote from the entry:

... So how do we keep from stifling the innovation pipeline? How do we inspire new generations of association staff to take risks? How do we maintain the motivation to weather the obstacles of change to make a lasting difference within our association?
The answer is a tiny spark of encouragement.

Creating the Preconditions for Innovation: Maximizing Diversity, InnovationBIT
Long piece excerpted from chapter 2 in Innovation to the Core: A Blueprint for Transforming the Way Your Company Innovates, by Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson. Discusses the importance of who makes up an innovative team and what the effect of diversity is on that make up. An interesting quote:

We specifically look for the following diversity characteristics:

People who are divergent thinkers, and people who are convergent thinkers
People who are younger, and people who are older
People with a lot of experience, and people with a lot of imagination
People who understand technology, and people who understand people
People who are more analytical, and people who are more creative
People who are close to the head office, and people who work farther away
People from inside the firm, and people from outside the firm

The Challenges of Innovation, Front End of Innovation
This is a short summary of an article on BusinessWeek's web site: The Challenges of Innovation, by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. Three ideas are discussed:

Indifference
Hostility
Isolation

I haven't read the BusinessWeek article yet, but this summary makes me want to ... some really good points in there. A good quote from the blog entry:

Collaboration does not come natural in an organization, and so companies must make an extreme effort to make it part of their culture. What are some things that your company does to create a healthy environment where employees are not scared of bringing forth new ideas?

No final draft of interesting finds today

Jason Haley — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:37:00 GMT

I'm a really busy this week and can't get to the second round of visiting my blog finds from this morning, so there won't be any final draft today. Actually, there may not be any final drafts this week.

Interesting Finds: August 25, 2008 - [Final Cut]

Jason Haley — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:16:00 GMT

A day late...

Other stuff

Executor, the Ultimate Windows Launcher, Omar Shahine - a run down on the different launcher tools and a new favorite called Executor (which sounds to be a mix of slickrun and launchy).
Software Development Books: Investing In Yourself, Davy Brion - links to a nice list of recommended books.
Dynamic Assemblies, Tharindu Nishad Patikirikorla - a simple example of creating a dynamic assembly ... and an example of how painful it can be.
Fast Serialization, Greg Young - lengthy step by step detail of a (fast) custom serializer. Looks like a nice meaty post to read when you have some time.
Too many cores, not enough brains, Jonathan Edwards - Jonathan goes over his view point of the move to multi core development.
Book: Code Leader, Tim Stall - a good chapter breakdown chapter by chapter.

Web stuff

Custom Alert Boxes using Javascript and the DOM, Helbrax - just what it sounds like. I always like to see the way people implement these javascript message boxes (and how they work in the different browsers).
Pitfalls to Avoid When Designing Forms, Philipp Lenssen - tips on usabilty design in web forms.

Database stuff

SQL Server Alerts, Muhammad Shujaat Siddiqi - step by step walk through setting up sql server alerts.
Large Query Performance and Query Parallelism, Linchi Shea - list of some performance stats.

Debugging stuff

Debugging Silverlight Applications: SOS.DLL, Sasha Goldshtein - Sasha walks through using SOS when debugging silverlight applications.

Agile stuff

Virtual Scrum Board, David Brabant - pinter to a utility named "Virutal SCRUM Board (VSB)". Can download a free trial.
Introducing Kanban at Xclaim, Dave Laribee - entry on personal experience using agile and some views on things that didn't work for them.

Cloud Computing stuff

Amazon SimpleDB Releases QueryWithAttributes, AWS Blog - new feature for Amazon's SimpleDB - QueryWithAttributes - looks to be the same query, just the result now has additional attributes returned as well.

SOA stuff

Service Oriented Architecture with Java, Jack van Hoof - intro to a new book the the same name "Service Oriented Architecture with Java"

Career stuff

Dealing With Speculative Work, Celine Roque - good entry on when you are asked to do the work before the client decides that its what they want and then pay you (called 'speculative work').
Web Worker 101: Working with Subcontractors, Mike Gunderloy - four things to take into consideration before you bring in a subcontractor to help.
The Dirty Little Secrets of Productivity Bloggers, Zen Habits - down to earth look at 'productivity bloggers'
Software Careers: The Starting Salary Game, Dave Horne - some good tips on how to deal with the question of how much you made at your last job.

Innovation stuff

Getting Down to the Business of Creativity, Mitch Ditkoff - another good reminder. The basis of this entry is an article I linked to in one of my innovation notes a while ago.

Other link blogs

Weekly Link Post 56, Rhonda Tipton
Links of the Week #50 (week 34/2008), David Vidmar
Links (8/24/2008), Steve Pietrek
Link Listing - August 24, 2008, Christopher Steen
Double Shot #276, Mike Gunderloy

Interesting Finds: August 26, 2008 - [Rough Draft]

Jason Haley — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 04:16:00 GMT

Other stuff
Member 3422877 - Unit Test Utility: Restoring Database State after each unit test execution
Jeff Atwood - Deadlocked!
Emergent Chaos - Authenticating Alan Shimel is Certifiably Hard
Travis Illig - Windows Home Server First Impressions
Er. Verendra - File Manager using C# and multithreading
Know It All, - Behind the Curve
Dwayne Melancon - On my radar
Sasha Goldshtein - Garbage Collection Notifications in .NET 3.5 SP1
Mike Gunderloy - Network Storage for the Web Worker
Sara Ford - Did you know… How to hide or show the Script Debugging Disabled warning message? - #298
Bhupindra Singh - Type Forwarding in .net from one assembly to another assembly.
Omer van Kloeten - Throw Before You Yield
Shawnfa - Using RSACryptoServiceProvider for RSA-SHA256 signatures
Andrew Stopford - MbUnit TypeFixture and MbUnit RowTest
Tara Kizer - How to run a process using different credentials
Jeff Alexander - Technet Magazine: September 2008 Edition
Brad - It's Not About Being Cool

Web stuff
Dion Almaer - Razor Profiler: Check out your Ajax code and Firebug 1.2: The final release is out there
Scott Mitchell - Download CopySourceAsHtml
IE Blog - Privacy Beyond Blocking Cookies: Bringing Awareness to Third-Party Content and IE8 and Privacy
Ryan Farley - Scraping, or Programatically Accessing, a Secure Webpage

Database stuff
Denis Gobo - Interesting Bug/Feature In SQL Server 2008 RTM
Tibor Karaszi - Make sure you play with data collector on a virtual machine
Aaron Bertrand - Planning on using FILESTREAM? Read this first!
Pinal Dave - SQL SERVER - How to Rename a Column Name or Table Name

PowerShell stuff
JohanS - PowerShell - An introduction, Part II
The PowerShell Guy - PowerShell Load-MdtConfigManager Function
Windows PowerShell - PowerShellPlus V2.0

Debugging stuff
Tom - SOS Best Practice: Match the SOS version with the process being analyzed and ASP.NET Tip: Keep hidden files hidden
Nicholas Allen - Pipe Properties

Security stuff
Schneier - Full Disclosure and the Boston Farecard Hack

Architecture stuff
Sam Gentile - Thoughts on Evolutionary Design
pdestoop - Enterprise Architects finally value Infrastructure Architects

Career stuff
Zen Habits - Life’s Enough: Stop Comparing Yourself to Others
Be Excellent - Introducing Change Into Your Organization
Rosa Say - The Self-improvement Targets of Self-Leadership

Business stuff
Guy Kawasaki - The Five Most Important Lessons of Entrepreneurship
pdestoop - Businesslink: Pricing your product or service
Be Excellent - Strategy Execution and High-Impact Firms

Innovation stuff
Thiago - The Challenges of Innovation
Jeff Cornwall - More Ideas

Community stuff
Dion Almaer - Want a Free Pass to The Ajax Experience?
Dan Hounshell - One Thought: Why Regional Conferences + Open Spaces Rock
Davy Brion - Why The ALT.NET Community Needs To Change Their Ways
Evan Hoff - Community Reality Check: Is INETA a concrete life raft?

Other link blogs
Alvin Ashcraft - Dew Drop - August 25, 2008 and Dew Drop - August 26, 2008
Harry Pierson - Morning Coffee 172
Darren Stokes - Visual Studio Links #68
Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for August 25, 2008
Christopher Steen - Link Listing - August 25, 2008
Chris Alcock - The Morning Brew #165
Mike Gunderloy - Double Shot #277

Interesting Finds: August 25, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Jason Haley — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:52:00 GMT

Other stuff
Omar Shahine - Executor, the Ultimate Windows Launcher
Davy Brion - Software Development Books: Investing In Yourself
Tharindu Nishad Patikirikorla - Dynamic Assemblies
Greg Young - Fast Serialization
Phil Haack - Streamlined BDD Using SubSpec for xUnit.NET
Dare Obasanjo - Best Practices for Web Sites Seeking to Prevent Service Degradation due to 3rd Party Widgets
Sasha Goldshtein - More on Converting Native Exceptions to Managed Exceptions
Jonathan Edwards - Too many cores, not enough brains
Tim Stall - Book: Code Leader
Robert Scoble - Story Pitch: Microsoft’s “flattened” Windows 7 team and what it means for business
David Brabant - Desktops: a new utility by the SysInternals' folks
Udi Dahan - Domain Events - Take 2

Web stuff
Daniel Cazzulino - How to get ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 to run with .NET SP1
Helbrax - Custom Alert Boxes using Javascript and the DOM
Philipp Lenssen - Pitfalls to Avoid When Designing Forms

Database stuff
Muhammad Shujaat Siddiqi - SQL Server Alerts
Linchi Shea - Large Query Performance and Query Parallelism
Kimberly Tripp - SQL Server 2008 fails to send database mail, Sparse columns with filtered indexes, Upcoming Events, and - as usual - catching up (i.e. cookies)! and Installing Data Dude CTP16 with SQL 2008 and Visual Studio and Auto update statistics and auto create statistics - should you leave them on and/or turn them on?? and Updates (fixes) to sp_helpindex2
Pinal Dave - SQLAuthority News - 4 Million Visits - over 675 SQL Server Articles
Aaron Bertrand - Pushing for more tools-related fixes for SQL Server 2011

Debugging stuff
Sasha Goldshtein - Debugging Silverlight Applications: SOS.DLL

Agile stuff
David Brabant - Virtual Scrum Board
Dave Laribee - Introducing Kanban at Xclaim
Ade Miller - Scrum Bestiary - The Rubber Duck

Cloud Computing stuff
Alessandro Perilli - Gartner forecasts that Cloud Computing will be mainstream in 2-5 years
AWS Blog - Amazon SimpleDB Releases QueryWithAttributes

SOA stuff
Joe McKendrick - Is SOA an elixir or real fix for ‘medieval’ data practices? and WOA wins hands-down over SOA in popularity contest
Todd Biske - ITIL and SOA
Jack van Hoof - Service Oriented Architecture with Java

Career stuff
Celine Roque - Dealing With Speculative Work
Mike Gunderloy - Web Worker 101: Working with Subcontractors
Zen Habits - The Dirty Little Secrets of Productivity Bloggers
Dave Horne - Software Careers: The Starting Salary Game

Innovation stuff
Mitch Ditkoff - Getting Down to the Business of Creativity

Other link blogs
Rhonda Tipton - Weekly Link Post 56
David Vidmar - Links of the Week #50 (week 34/2008)
Steve Pietrek - Links (8/24/2008)
Christopher Steen - Link Listing - August 24, 2008
Mike Gunderloy - Double Shot #276

Interesting Finds: August 24, 2008 - [Final Cut]

Jason Haley — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 13:29:00 GMT

Other stuff

Is There Still a Community for Telligent?, Keyvan Nayyeri - I just found Keyvan's blog this past week, so this link is a little old. It is a pretty long discussion of 'Community' specifically around Community Server but more generally around .Net as a whole. It does seem like the community that I follow in the blogs is on a 'down cycle' ... the bummer is right now I'm too busy to do much about it.
Microsoft Licensing Changes: Greedy and Monopolistic?, Brad - an interesting response to Microsoft's licensing changes.
Roland Weigelt’s GhostDoc for Visual Studio, Alvin Ashcraft - a good explanation of GhostDoc and a reminder to get this addin if you don't already have it.
Amazon Confirms Student Version Of Kindle, Michael Arrington - sounds like Amazon is targeting the electronic text book business next.
Open Source Podcast to Stack Wood By, Dave Burke - Dave points to a podcast that sounds interesting - Paul Graham's keynote presentation at OSCON 2005.
SmallestDotNet: On the Size of the .NET Framework, Scott Hanselman - Scott goes over the details of the real sizes of .Net and some tips on how to get only what you need.
Anatomy of a LOB (Or, Mind Mapping a Modern .NET App), Nathan - Nathan shares a mindmap he put together for an LOB application he is looking to (re)write in a SaaS sort of way.
RESTful JSON: Bringing REST and RPC Closer Together, Dare Obasanjo - Dare continues to build on his previous posts about REST.
X509 Certificates for Developers, Michael Stiefel - nice entry on PKI and the big picture of using x509 certificates. Part 1 of a 2 part posting on the subject.

Web stuff

ASP.NET MVC Tip #37 – Create an Auto-Complete Text Field and The Evolution of MVC, Stephen Walther - a couple of good links about extending MVC (adding the ajax Auto-Complete behavior to MVC) and a good history of MVC. No wonder Stephen's books are always 1000's pages long - his daily posts are around 6 pages. I like his writing style of using textual explanations, step-by-step walkthroughs (with code) and visuals to get his point across.

Database stuff

DevLink 2008 Presentation, Joe Webb - points to a zip file of his presentation material about writing better queries. The ppt is 21 slides and the sql file is 500+ lines of sql.
Geek City: Reading the Transaction Log, Kalen Delaney - entry about a recent commentary she wrote and comments about it. She asks the question: How Important do you think it is that Microsoft provide a log reader tool for us?
SQL SERVER - Fix : Error : 40 - could not open a connection to SQL server - Fix Connection Problems of SQL Server, Pinal Dave - some trouble shooting tips for the "Error: 40 - could not open a connection to SQL Server"

Career stuff

Do You Want More Web Work?, Aliza Sherman - Interesting entry on personal experience of being too busy.

Business stuff

Not Getting a Rise out of your Elevator Speech?, Freelance Switch - good entry on some tips to getting a conversation started ... with hopes of turning a short conversation into a more effective and longer one.

Other link blogs

LINKBLOG for August 23, 2008, Arjan Zuidhof
Everyman Links for August 23, 2008, Dave Burke

Interesting Finds: August 24, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Jason Haley — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 04:27:00 GMT

Other stuff
Keyvan Nayyeri - Is There Still a Community for Telligent?
Alvin Ashcraft - Roland Weigelt’s GhostDoc for Visual Studio
Brad - Microsoft Licensing Changes: Greedy and Monopolistic?
Omar Shahine - First iPhone Exchange bug fixes in 2.0.2
Michael Arrington - Amazon Confirms Student Version Of Kindle
Dave Burke - Open Source Podcast to Stack Wood By
Scott Hanselman - SmallestDotNet: On the Size of the .NET Framework
Nathan - Anatomy of a LOB (Or, Mind Mapping a Modern .NET App)
Dare Obasanjo - I Want a Windows App Store and RESTful JSON: Bringing REST and RPC Closer Together
Michael Stiefel - X509 Certificates for Developers

Web stuff
Stephen Walther - ASP.NET MVC Tip #37 – Create an Auto-Complete Text Field and The Evolution of MVC

Silverlight stuff
Itamar Kotler - SilverLight 2.0 - 3D Rotating Image Cube / Box
Hannes Preishuber - Silverlight 2.0 plugin ID or not ID

Database stuff
Joe Webb - DevLink 2008 Presentation
Kalen Delaney - Geek City: Reading the Transaction Log
Pinal Dave - SQL SERVER - Fix : Error : 40 - could not open a connection to SQL server - Fix Connection Problems of SQL Server

Career stuff
Aliza Sherman - Do You Want More Web Work?

Business stuff
Freelance Switch - Not Getting a Rise out of your Elevator Speech?

Other link blogs
Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for August 23, 2008
Dave Burke - Everyman Links for August 23, 2008

Interesting Finds: August 23, 2008 - [Final Cut]

Jason Haley — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 17:20:00 GMT

Other stuff

My favorite kind of Friday, one where we get a new Sysinternals Utility - Desktops v1.0 and FreeImage 3.11 released - C# wrapper added, Greg Duncan - Greg finds a couple of new releases from sysinternals. I hadn't heard of Desktops before - its a virtual desktop utility ... have to try that one out. I don't know anything about FreeImage, have to add it to the list of things to look at in down time.
Dashboards Are For Driving, Steven A Lowe - interesting dashboard application with gauges ... looks similar to something a guy at work is working on.
Interfacing with Insanity, Kathleen Dollard - Kathleen discusses some realizations of working with data bindable business objects collections. Talks about the CSLA, but could be about any other BO layer framework.
Hotspots On Chrysler, CoolBusinessIdeas - $29 a month (plus~$500 for router) to get a EV-DO and WiMax hotspot in your Chrysler ...
Did you know… How to show or hide the “No Debugging Information” warning? - #297, Sara Ford - another debugging setting tip from Sara.
How to get USB booting working, Michael Kleef - looks to be a step by step of how to get a usb flash drive to be bootable. Seems like a good project to take my mind off of work someday :)
A Subtle DIfference in Catch Blocks, Jason Bock - Jason dives deep into exceptions in IL/.Net ... make me wonder what he is working on ...
Quick Quiz on Tasks, The Moth ... neat sample to try and guess the flow of logic ... my guess wasn't even close. I really need to spend some time with the Parallel Extensions ...
Thread synchronization: Wait and Pulse demystified, Nick Butler - wow good explanation of some thread synchronization classes in .Net ... I could have used this about 6 years ago when I was learning .Net and multi threading.
Console 2.00.140, Tomas Restrepo - written in C++ 9.0 (open source) and is a windows console enhancement ... should check it out.

Web stuff

More on Dynamically Loading ListView Templates, Mike Ormond - interesting short code sample on using LINQ ... something I need to work with more.
Dealing With Denial of Service Attacks, Phil Haack - Phil gives a good example of using the LogParser util and how he set Url Scan 3.0 in response to a DoS attack.
Book Plug: Advanced ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls For .NET Framework 3.5, Brad Abrams - the title really sounds good ... anyone get a copy of it yet?
ASP.NET MVC Tip #36 – Create a Popup Calendar Helper, Stephen Walther - this is a long one but I intend to read it. Stephen mixes it up with Ajax controls, behaviors and views ... looks pretty good.

Reflector stuff

Thanks Lutz Roeder!, Aaron Skonnard - I like Aaron's reaction to the news. Some of us take things for granted and forget that Lutz did all the hard work for us for years (plus support) ... so I agree we should give him a big thanks for what he has accomplished ... of course now we are addicts and need know that we can still get our Reflector fix :)

Database stuff

How to create an autonomous transaction in SQL Server 2008, MS SQL ISV - just what the title says, lots of sql.
Updates of Ola Hallengren's maint procedures, Tibor Karaszi - pointer to a whole bunch of helpful sql server maintenance stuff from Ola Hallengren.

Debugging stuff

Hard and Soft Mode Debugging or The Woes of Soft Mode, Rico Mariani - Rico goes into several examples of how hard it is to keep a debugger from corrupting what it is debugging when you have both Hard and Soft Mode debugging ... a bit over my head.

Architecture stuff

Architect Journal 16: IDENTITY AND ACCESS, pdestoop - pointer to the new Architectural Journal

Cloud Computing stuff

Gears 0.4 + Mashup of Gears and Google App Engine, Brad Neuberg - entry on a mashup called Upload Movie Tool.
SpiderOak: Another Take on Online Backups, Mike Gunderloy - Mike has some details on another online storage site.
Wells Fargo launches Secure Online Storage with Two-Factor Authentication, Omar Shahine ... Wells Fargo? Storage? Add another choice for online storage.

Career stuff

Making The Most Of Any Opportunity, Rich - nice simple 9 item list ... good advice.
How to Make a Career Change, Louise Fletcher - good advice on things to consider and/or do if you are thinking about switching careers

Business stuff

Great Source of Stories that Offer Insight and Inspiration, Jeff Cornwall - links to a site that has "over 1,200 free podcasts and video clips of entrepreneurial thought leaders"

Blogging stuff

11 Ways to Open a Post and Get Reader Engagement, Darren Rowse - tips on staring a blog post ... something I can always use advice on.

Innovation stuff

New innovation trends database planned, Innovation Weblog - pointer to someone who is setting up an Innovation Trend Database.
Facilitating Innovation: Establishing an Environment of Possibilities, James P MacLennan - some advice on establishing a skunk works operation.

Community stuff

Code Camp 5 - Registration Count is Over 150, Jason Bock ... impressive listing of sessions - 2 months before the event (one important thing to remember about Code Camps is a good lead time to get the speakers and sessions).

Other link blogs

LINKBLOG for August 22, 2008, Arjan Zuidhof
Link Listing - August 21, 2008 and Link Listing - August 22, 2008, Christopher Steen
Linkswitch: Coders FTW, FreelanceSwitch
Double Shot #275, Mike Gunderloy
Dew Drop - August 23, 2008, Alvin Ashcraft
New and Notable 268, Sam Gentile

Unread items and my latest opml

Jason Haley — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 05:52:00 GMT

Do you see unread items in your rss reader as todo items? Do you think you have to at least look at it if it is unread? I would have to say I 'sort of' do see it as something I should at least look at ... and after reading through my subscriptions I prefer the unread items to be 0 ... but maybe I'm just weird like that ;)

For those of you interested in what I subscribe to, I just put the latest version of my opml at: http://jasonhaley.com/files/subscriptions.opml

Interesting Finds: August 23, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Jason Haley — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 05:38:00 GMT

Other stuff
Greg Duncan - My favorite kind of Friday, one where we get a new Sysinternals Utility - Desktops v1.0 and FreeImage 3.11 released - C# wrapper added
Steven A Lowe - Dashboards Are For Driving
Kathleen Dollard - Interfacing with Insanity
CoolBusinessIdeas - Hotspots On Chrysler
Sara Ford - Did you know… How to show or hide the “No Debugging Information” warning? - #297
Jean-Paul Boodhoo - Building A Solid Core Contest - Announcing the winners
Rico Mariani - Hard and Soft Mode Debugging or The Woes of Soft Mode
Michael Kleef - How to get USB booting working
Jason Bock - A Subtle DIfference in Catch Blocks
The Moth - Quick Quiz on Tasks
Windows SDK - Bug Notification: VS2008 SP1 Breaks WinSDK Configuration Tool
Nick Butler - Thread synchronization: Wait and Pulse demystified
Tomas Restrepo - Console 2.00.140

Web stuff
Mike Ormond - More on Dynamically Loading ListView Templates
Xiangyang Liu - Building and deploying your web application the easy way
Phil Haack - Dealing With Denial of Service Attacks
Scott Forsyth - IIS, Windows Authentication and the Double Hop issue
Brad Abrams - Book Plug: Advanced ASP.NET AJAX Server Controls For .NET Framework 3.5
Stephen Walther - ASP.NET MVC Tip #36 – Create a Popup Calendar Helper

Reflector stuff
Aaron Skonnard - Thanks Lutz Roeder! ... I like Aaron's reaction to the news. Some of us take things for granted and forget that Lutz did all the hard work for us for years (plus support) for free... so I agree we should give him a big thanks for what he has accomplished ... of course now we are addicts and need to know that we can still get our Reflector fix :)

Database stuff
MS SQL ISV - How to create an autonomous transaction in SQL Server 2008
Tibor Karaszi - Updates of Ola Hallengren's maint procedures

Architecture stuff
pdestoop - Architect Journal 16: IDENTITY AND ACCESS

Cloud Computing stuff
Brad Neuberg - Gears 0.4 + Mashup of Gears and Google App Engine
Mike Gunderloy - SpiderOak: Another Take on Online Backups
Erick Schonfeld - Google Offers A Geolocation API For Gears (But It Only Works On Windows Mobile)
Jeff - Amazon Sends Death Blow to I.T. Data Center
Omar Shahine - Wells Fargo launches Secure Online Storage with Two-Factor Authentication ... Wells Fargo? Storage?
Evangelos Simoudis - On-Demand/SaaS Reality: Offering Services Around SaaS Solutions
Aliza Sherman - The Risks vs. Rewards of Cloud Computing
David Chappell - Responses to A Short Introduction to Cloud Platforms

Career stuff
Rich - Making The Most Of Any Opportunity
Louise Fletcher - How to Make a Career Change

Business stuff
Erick Schonfeld - How Accurate Are Listings On Real Estate Sites?
Jeff Cornwall - Great Source of Stories that Offer Insight and Inspiration

Blogging stuff
Darren Rowse - 11 Ways to Open a Post and Get Reader Engagement

Innovation stuff
Innovation Weblog - New innovation trends database planned
Jennifer - What keeps your company from innovating?
James P MacLennan - Facilitating Innovation: Establishing an Environment of Possibilities

Community stuff
Jason Bock - Code Camp 5 - Registration Count is Over 150

Other link blogs
Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for August 22, 2008
Christopher Steen - Link Listing - August 21, 2008 and Link Listing - August 22, 2008
FreelanceSwitch - Linkswitch: Coders FTW
Mike Gunderloy - Double Shot #275
Alvin Ashcraft - Dew Drop - August 23, 2008
Sam Gentile - New and Notable 268

Interesting Finds: August 22, 2008 - [Final Cut]

Jason Haley — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:54:00 GMT

Other stuff

The New Focus Group, Rob Howard - a background entry on where Community Server is going with its analytics/BI tool.
"Code Leader", Jason Bock - review of "Code Leader", a new book by Patrick Cauldwell
PureText, Scott Watermasysk - Scott mentions a copy/paste utility I haven't heard of: PureText.
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR release, Charles Sterling - CTP16 release of VSTS 2008 database edition ... not sure what 'GDR' stands for though ... anyone?
Screencast: Creating your First WCF Service and Screencast: Configuring WCF Services with Endpoints, Aaron Skonnard - Aaron points at some of the first screen casts that pluralsight is doing over WCF/WF on channel9.
Error creating window handle., Morten Lyhr - tip on calling dispose when removing controls from their containers in WinForms
CR/R! Wrap up, Jay Kimble - sounds like Jay likes Code Rush/Refactor! better than Resharper. Of course he has a few things he misses from Refactor though. Also points at Rory's zip that contains the community plugins.
The Return of the CLR, Sam Gentile - I think I can safely say I bought the first version of the SSCLI book due to Sam's CLR talks at code camp.

Reflector stuff

Red Gate & Reflector: My Concerns..., Jay Kimble - requests that Red Gate not bundle anything with the free Reflector download. Totally agree with him on that.
The Future of .NET Reflector, Greg Robinson - copy of the email that went out announcing the change of hands.

Web stuff

A simple jQuery Client Centering Plugin, Rick Strahl - Rick creates a jQuery plugin for centering elements in a browser window ... something that we all seem to do often.
Ajax Control Toolkit released for .NET 3.5 SP1, Bertrand Le Roy - release announcement and links to the download on codeplex.
Localize text in JavaScript files in ASP.NET, Mads Kristensen - Mads has created an httphandler to provide a way to localize javascripts.
ASP.NET Futures - Generating Dynamic Images with HttpHandlers gets Easier, Scott Hanselman - wow this looks cool! Ever write an httphandler to generate images? Then you should check this out.
Caching Interview Questions Part 2, Shivprasad Koirala - more cache related questions and answers plus links to his other sets of interview questions.
Known issues for ASP.NET with .NET 3.5 SP1, Tom - Tom describes a couple of known issues and their workarounds.

Database stuff

SQL Server 2005 temporary tables bug, feature or expected behavior?, Mladen Prajdic - are you a sql server guru? If so you might be able to help him out.
SQL SERVER - UDF - Function to Convert Text String to Title Case - Proper Case - Part 2, Pinal Dave - quick Sql script to set the first letter of each word to upper... would me a great function.

Security stuff

MS Antivirus 2008 morphed from XP Antivirus 2008, lithium - keep an eye out for a file "MSASetup.exe"

Architecture stuff

My latest article: Web Services federated identity patterns on the Architecture Journal, Jesus Rodriguez - reminder that the next edition of the Architectural Journal is out. This issue is all about identity and access.

Cloud Computing stuff

Amazon: One Stop Deployment, James Robertson - his reaction to Amazon's EBS announcement.
Amazon Boosts Storage Features In EC2, Nik Cubrilovic - Nik's reaction to the EBS announcement and some links to RightScale, Mosso and MediaTemple all things I haven't heard of.

Career stuff

6 Answers About Telecommuting, Mike Gunderloy - good list of things telecommuters face (or people wonder about them). I totally agree with the #3.
Working for Microsoft outside the U.S., Microsoft HR - ever think about working for a company in an other country?
Leadership Development Crisis?, Be Excellent - interesting entry on leadership development or lack there of it

Business stuff

Company Blogs Can Provide Big Insights, Scott Blitstein - entry about product blogs and bloggers. Something I'm looking into for work.

Other link blogs

Dew Drop - August 21, 2008 and Dew Drop - August 22, 2008, Alvin Ashcraft
Visual Studio Links #67, Darren Stokes
FOLLOW UP: Developer Dinner on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, Federal Developer
LINKBLOG for August 21, 2008, Arjan Zuidhof
Links (8/21/2008), Steve Pietrek
New and Notable 267 - ASP.NET MVC, Sam Gentile
The Morning Brew #164, Chris Alcock

Interesting Finds: August 22, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Jason Haley — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:31:00 GMT

Other stuff
Rob Howard - The New Focus Group
Know It All - Midsize IT Blues
Jason Bock - "Code Leader"
Jonathan Edwards - What’s next?
Pablo Galiano - How do I get a model element name property without using reflection / TypeDescriptor
Scott Watermasysk - PureText
Charles Sterling - Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR release
Aaron Skonnard - Screencast: Creating your First WCF Service and Screencast: Configuring WCF Services with Endpoints
Morten Lyhr - Error creating window handle.
Jay Kimble - CR/R! Wrap up
Sam Gentile - The Return of the CLR
Zen Habits - Is Our Addiction to Saving Money Destroying the Real America?

Reflector stuff
Jay Kimble - Red Gate & Reflector: My Concerns...
Nicholas Allen - Reflector Changes Hands
Greg Robinson - The Future of .NET Reflector

Performance stuff
Ayende Rahien - Stupid Micro Benchmarking: Proxy Performance

Web stuff
Dion Almaer - Ajax Head Pattern; Unobtrusive Rails Apps and Page Test: Run AOL’s tool in the cloud, then sit back and wait and WARNING: JSLint may continue to hurt your feelings and Emulating onhashchange without setInterval
Rick Strahl - A simple jQuery Client Centering Plugin
Bertrand Le Roy - Ajax Control Toolkit released for .NET 3.5 SP1
Mads Kristensen - Localize text in JavaScript files in ASP.NET
Scott Hanselman - ASP.NET Futures - Generating Dynamic Images with HttpHandlers gets Easier
Steve Rubel - Get Paid to Twitter Using the Adjix Link Shrinker
Shivprasad Koirala - Caching Interview Questions Part 2
Tom - Known issues for ASP.NET with .NET 3.5 SP1

Database stuff
Mladen Prajdic - SQL Server 2005 temporary tables bug, feature or expected behavior?
Pinal Dave - SQL SERVER - UDF - Function to Convert Text String to Title Case - Proper Case - Part 2

Security stuff
lithium - MS Antivirus 2008 morphed from XP Antivirus 2008

Architecture stuff
Jesus Rodriguez - My latest article: Web Services federated identity patterns on the Architecture Journal

Cloud Computing stuff
Erik Sherman - Cheap Hardware Will Force Cloud Computing
James Robertson - Amazon: One Stop Deployment
Nik Cubrilovic - Amazon Boosts Storage Features In EC2

SOA stuff
Nick Malik - Malik's Laws of Service Oriented Architecture
Dan Foody - Less Governance is Good Governance
Tod Biske - Governance: Are you on the left or the right?

Career stuff
Mike Gunderloy - 6 Answers About Telecommuting
Microsoft HR - Working for Microsoft outside the U.S.
Be Excellent - Leadership Development Crisis?

Business stuff
Microsoft Downloads - Hosted CRM Provisioning Solution
Scott Blitstein - Company Blogs Can Provide Big Insights

Innovation stuff
Priya - $100,000 for Innovators

Other link blogs
Alvin Ashcraft - Dew Drop - August 21, 2008 and Dew Drop - August 22, 2008
Darren Stokes - Visual Studio Links #67
Federal Developer - FOLLOW UP: Developer Dinner on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for August 21, 2008
Steve Pietrek - Links (8/21/2008)
Sam Gentile - New and Notable 267 - ASP.NET MVC
Chris Alcock - The Morning Brew #164

Interesting Finds: August 21, 2008 - [Final Cut]

Jason Haley — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 18:18:00 GMT

Other stuff

The Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility, Clarke Ching - Clarke recommends a book and points at a free chapter of it.
Growing Pains for India's Tech Industry, Know It All - points at a Wall Street Journal article titled "For India's Tech Titans, Growth Is Waning" , which looks good (but long).
Rotor v2 book draft available, Ted Neward - Ted gives a detailed run down on what it has taken to get this version of the book 'published'.
CSLA into the future, Rocky Lhatka - Rocky mentions the pain of maintaining the CSLA (and all its flavors) in C# and VB ... sounds like he is leaning towards phasing out one of the languages or looking for help to handle one.
Support Visual Studio Test Runner, James Newkirk - reading the first paragraph made me smile - "... and would require Professional edition or higher". Probably a good idea.
My (Web) Tools of the Trade, Mike Gunderloy - I always like these types of listings ... especially from people like Mike. Nice to see what tools are out there (and with Mike's list - its a non-Microsoft type list).
Verisign’s Personal Identity Portal Is Half Way To Password Bliss, Michael Arrington - small entry on Verisign's Personal Identity Portal, which seems to be a single sign on type application. Interesting to me because I'm currently working on single sign-on at work.
The Weekly Source Code 32- Atom, AtomPub and BlogSvc, an AtomPub Server in WCF, Scott Hanselman - seems like just yesterday I mentioned it would be nice if Scott looked at the BlogSvc ... good timing I guess.
VB 2008 Language Deep Dive - Presentation Materials (Jonathan Aneja), VB Team - Some links to some great looking material here if you're into VB
Did you know… You can debug an executable that isn’t a part of a Visual Studio project without using Tools – Attach to Process? - #296, Sara Ford ... I hope you guys know about this one ...

Web stuff

Ra Ajax: Ajax for .NET and The lessons of CSS frameworks and querySelectorAll is coming fast, Dion Almaer - in case you didn't know - I like javascript ... which is often why I link to Dion's blog. He finds some really good stuff (and usually its practical and useful). This first entry has a few good links in it about writing ajax libraries. The second one is about css frameworks - mostly about an article/entry by Eric Meyer. The last one has to with performance of different javascript 'libraries'.
Making creating DOM-based applications less of a hassle, Chris Heilmann - short entry about a javacript named ViewsHandler that he wrote.
Caching Interview Questions Part 1, Shivprasad Koirala - some interesting trivia geared towards Asp.Net caching/state management. Some are pretty detailed.

Database stuff

SQL SERVER - Behind the Scene of SQL Server Activity of - Transaction Log - Shrinking Log, Pinal Dave - Entry that aggregates some pretty detailed information about some things to consider when backing up transactional logs and shrinking files.

Debugging stuff

Easing The Pain Of WCF Debugging, Davy Brion - Tips on turning tracing on to help with wcf debugging. Link to a cool looking tool called Service Tracer Viewer (SvcTraceViewer.exe).
Debugging Silverlight applications with windbg and sos.dll, Tess - This entry is just what it sounds like.

Cloud Computing stuff

Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Bring Us Your Data and Amazon EBS - Tool and Library Support, AWS Blog - a couple of entries mentioning different tools that can be used with amazon's EBS and EC2, plus some code libraries.
Some Thoughts on Amazon's Elastic Block Store, Dare Obsanjo

Career stuff

The need and benefit of mentoring, Tim Stall - interesting article on mentoring from software engineer's point-of-view.
The State of Telecommuting, Mike Gunderloy - some interesting stats on telecommuting ... is it on the rise.

Community stuff

Fourth Ignite Boston Event on September 11, Chris Bowen - wish I could be there ...

Other link blogs

Dew Drop - August 20, 2008, Alvin Ashcraft
LINKBLOG for August 20, 2008, Arjan Zuidhof
Link Listing - August 19, 2008 and Link Listing - August 20, 2008, Christopher Steen
Links (8/20/2008), Steve Pietrek
Everyman Links for August 20, 2008, Dave Burke
The Morning Brew #163, Chris Alcock
Double Shot #274, Mike Gunderloy

Interesting Finds: August 21, 2008 - [Rough Cut]

Jason Haley — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 04:13:00 GMT

Other stuff
Clarke Ching - The Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility
Pablo Galiano - How do I flush content to the Visual Studio output window and How do I get the model element associated to a shape and vice versa
Know It All - Growing Pains for India's Tech Industry
Ted Neward - Rotor v2 book draft available - SWEET!
Rocky Lhatka - CSLA into the future
James Newkirk - Support Visual Studio Test Runner
Mike Gunderloy - My (Web) Tools of the Trade
Michael Arrington - Verisign’s Personal Identity Portal Is Half Way To Password Bliss
Vsx Team - Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 has been released!
Scott Hanselman - The Weekly Source Code 32- Atom, AtomPub and BlogSvc, an AtomPub Server in WCF
VB Team - VB 2008 Language Deep Dive - Presentation Materials (Jonathan Aneja)
Susan Bradley - TSEnabled=1 needs to be set on the 2008 TS server box
Liu Junfeng - YAML Parser in C#
Andrew Stopford - Rotor 2.0 referance book
Sara Ford - Did you know… You can debug an executable that isn’t a part of a Visual Studio project without using Tools – Attach to Process? - #296

Performance stuff
Chris Brandsma - C# Object Creation Time Trials
Morten Lyhr - Delegates - Late Bound VS Expression

Web stuff
Dion Almaer - Ra Ajax: Ajax for .NET and The lessons of CSS frameworks and Chain.js: jQuery Data Binding Service and querySelectorAll is coming fast
Chris Heilmann - Making creating DOM-based applications less of a hassle
Stephen Walther - ASP.NET MVC Tip #35 – Use the NHaml View Engine
Shivprasad Koirala - Caching Interview Questions Part 1

Silverlight stuff
Mike Dobbles - Silverlight Tutorial: How to create a skinnable custom control

Database stuff
Pinal Dave - SQL SERVER - Behind the Scene of SQL Server Activity of - Transaction Log - Shrinking Log

Debugging stuff
Davy Brion - Easing The Pain Of WCF Debugging
Tim Heuer - Troubleshooting data/service access in Silverlight
Tess - Debugging Silverlight applications with windbg and sos.dll

Security stuff
Schneier - A Security Assessment of the Internet Protocol
mordaxus - Write Keyloggers Professionally!

Architecture stuff
Stefan Tilkov - 97 Things Every Architect Should Know

SOA stuff
Stefan Tilkov - More REST Debates

Cloud Computing stuff
Steve Rubel - Cloud Computing's Impact on Digital Marketing - Trends to Watch
AWS Blog - Vertica / Sonian / Amazon Webinar and Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Bring Us Your Data and Amazon EBS - Tool and Library Support
Dare Obsanjo - Some Thoughts on Amazon's Elastic Block Store

Career stuff
Tim Stall - The need and benefit of mentoring
Mike Gunderloy - The State of Telecommuting

Business stuff
Nicholas - Own Your Stake In The Web

Community stuff
Chris Bowen - Fourth Ignite Boston Event on September 11

Blogging stuff
Darren Rowse - Blog Hosting - Which Hosts Top Blogs Use

Other link blogs
Alvin Ashcraft - Dew Drop - August 20, 2008
Arjan Zuidhof - LINKBLOG for August 20, 2008
Christopher Steen - Link Listing - August 19, 2008 and Link Listing - August 20, 2008
Steve Pietrek - Links (8/20/2008)
Dave Burke - Everyman Links for August 20, 2008
Chris Alcock - The Morning Brew #163
Mike Gunderloy - Double Shot #274

Idea for a killer link blog ... or a link blog killer

Jason Haley — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:35:00 GMT

I've been thinking about this for the past week or so, but currently have no time to do anything about it ... so here it is: create an app that consumes the most popular link blogs (I was thinking of the microsoft oriented ones) and every day publish the links that are in common or at least rank them by how many of those link blogs have linked to a specific entry (will need at least 48 hours give-or-take between all the link blogs publishing dates... not sure how to handle that - maybe like a stock market ticker updates numbers ...) .

I was thinking of the following:

a list of the day(s) most linked to entries
a list of entries that are unique (not in common) - might be some diamonds in the rough

If anyone builds this thing (let me know), I think it could be a link blog killer ... which of course would defeat the source of info - but it would be a useful way to get the most popular entries instead of subscribing to 10 link blogs or so.