Link Round-Up for 8/9/07

Here are some useful articles and sites I found this week.

A former padawan of mine, Kirk Allen Evans, is a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft. If you’ve been to a Microsoft Developer event you’ve probably heard him speak on XML and Web Services. This week he posted an interesting article on Microsoft’s SOA strategy, Microsoft Does Have a SOA Strategy, After All. SOA or Service Oriented Architecture is a hot industry buzzword and Kirk applies some common sense to it. Since I’m working through a number of interfacing issues in the healthcare industry right now, I’ve found his advice quite useful. He is now a Jedi Master of this topic.

Speaking of expert programmers, Frank Wiles over at Revolution Systems has an interesting post about hiring programmers called A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality. Well, it’s good except for his extreme love of Perl (he addresses this in a follow-up post). I particularly liked this paragraph:

Companies need to stop thinking about their developers as cogs in the machine. They are more akin to artists, authors, designers, architects, scientists, or CEOs. Would your HR department rush to find the first person who would willing to take on the role of Chief Scientist, Art Director, or CEO in your company? Of course not, they would spend the time to do a through talent search for just the right candidate, court them, and then compensate them appropriately. They realize that having the wrong person in that seat is much worse than having the seat empty. It is absolutely the same with programming.

I’m a big fan of taking HR out of the picture as much as possible when it comes to hiring new programmers and putting the team the ‘new guy’ will be working with in charge. While this may mean some extra work up front for a department, it pays off big afterward when the right expert, or even junior team member, is brought on board. Read Frank’s entire article and the follow-up, they’re stuffed with great info on finding the right person for the job.

But, what can you do after hiring the expert programmer to get them to stick around? Chris Love has a good answer to this in his article, Working Conditions and Productivity. In it, he mainly covers telecommuting as an option. The savings for such a program is great in terms of money and time/productivity, particularly for those who live in a major metro area. It’s a great option for any development team and I highly recommend it. Only micromanagers who want to have lengthy face-to-face meetings at a drop of a hat hate the idea.

Finally, while I was looking into information about the upcoming release of VS 2008, currently scheduled for February 2008, I found this interesting video series: Programming With XML Using Visual Basic 9.0. It covers using the new LINQ technology with XML. I’m still working my way through the videos but it looks like pretty good info so far. Check them out if you want to get a leg up on the next version of VB.

That’s all for this week. Let me know if you see a good VB.NET or general programming article or web site by leaving me a comment.

Add comment August 9th, 2007

Link Round-Up for 8/1/07

Here are some links to some useful articles, links and blog posts I came across this week.

At the 10 Things blog on Tech Republic Janice Ward has a good article entitled 10 things you should know about being a great IT manager. This article ties in well with my article series on Marine Corps Leadership Secrets.

If you like trying new things and have the patience for it to download, Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 can be downloaded from Microsoft. According to what the VS team is saying this is a feature complete and final beta release of the Codename Orcas Visual Studio. There should be a RTM version out by the end of the year and the actual release is scheduled for February 2008. If have a spare development system that you won’t mind wiping out later give it a try.

If you’re wondering what VS 2008 will look like so far as code editing goes, take a look at this entry on Scott Guthrie’s blog. He has some cool screen shots of how Intellisense will work in VS 2008. The examples include the powerful new LINQ functionality so check it out to get a heads up.

I found Rich Newman’s blog while I was searching around for some info on exception management. He has a good article on Top-level Exception Handling in Windows Forms Applications. I checked out the rest of his blog and he has some really good, in depth, highly technical articles that I recommend you read. While his focus is primarily on C# there is plenty of value for VB.NET programmers there as well.

That covers this week’s link round-up. If you have a blog or article that you think I should take a look at, please leave me a comment.

Add comment August 1st, 2007

VB.NET Link Round-Up for 6/26/07

Here are some links to some useful articles and blog posts I’ve ran across recently.

On his new blog VBDudes, Dylan C decided to test out my Reverse String function against a looping method. My version won his test. I would also suggest he try the same function with String.Concat and StringBuilder to see how they perform.

At CodeGuru, Paul Kimmel has a good article called Process is Irrelevant. He makes a very good point, “Knowledge, flexibility, and the discretion of smart individuals beats a one-size fits all rule book any day.”

Paul has another good article over at DevSource from a couple of weeks ago entitled Cigars, Lambda Expressions, and .NET. If you’ve wondered about what Lambda expressions will mean to you in VB 2008, check out this article where he explains them well with examples.

Over at Panopticon Central Paul Vick tells us what’s going to be in and not in VB 2008 in this article: What’s in VB 2008? What’s out? While it looks like several good improvements are being made, it also looks like VB will once again get the shaft vs. C# since he says, “In the end, the schedule for VS 2008 was not sufficient to implement these features with a high degree of confidence. Which unfortunately means that they will have to wait to a release beyond VS 2008.” I find this disturbing since with VB 2005 things had more or less evened out.

If you know of any VB related links that I should check out, please leave me a comment.

EDIT: D’oh!!! I can’t believe I got the date wrong in the title! Oh, well.

1 comment July 26th, 2007