The Weekly Links 3

This is the 3rd post in an ongoing series of weekly roundups of links useful to developers.

Tools

• SQL Server 2008 R2 RTM – Robert Bruckner blogs about the latest major release of the SQL Server platform.
• Tekpub MVC 2.0 Starter Site – Rob Connery releases a MVC V2 starter framework on CodePlex.
• Studio Styles – Stylish IDE schemes for the discerning Visual Studio user.
• Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 - Grigori Melnik announces about the latest release of the venerable Enterprise Library.
• Launchy – My personal tool of the week is Launchy, a replacement for the SlickRun, my previous program launcher.

Information

• What's new in T4 in Visual Studio 2010 – A comprehensive breakdown of the improvements in T4 (the Text Template Transformation Toolkit), Microsoft’s code generation tool.  Check out Scott Hanselman’s post on T4 for an introduction to it.
• Cyclomatic Complexity – What Is It and Why Should You Care? – a breakdown of what Cyclomatic Complexity is, and why you should care about it from the Java Metrics site.
• C# TDD Videos – Brett Schuchert releases a series of videos showing how the Shunting Yard Algorithm was implemented in C'# using TDD.
• SharePoint 2010 reaches RTM! – Old news now, but SharePoint 2010 was released last Friday…
• Learn Windows Phone 7 Development in 7 Minutes Each – A series of videos introducing developers to the Windows Phone 7 platform.
• Eliminating Comments: the Road to Clarity – John Sonmez describes how eliminating comments improves your code’s readability.
• Visual Studio 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts Poster – Download a handy PDF of the VS2010 keyboard shortcuts.
• SharePoint 2010 Developer Videos – A series of Channel 9 videos demonstrating the new features available for developers using Visual Studio 2010 to develop solutions for SharePoint 2010.
• Top 25 security issues for developers of web sites – exactly what it says it is…
• What is SharePoint Out of the Box? – Bill Simser blogs about what SharePoint OOTB means to him, following a recent series of blog posts on the topic.

Events

• SQL Immersion: Dublin 2010 – Advanced SQL training with Paul Randal and Kimberly Tripp in Dublin this June/July.  Via Bob Duffy’s blog.
• Epicenter 2010 - The 2nd Annual Irish Software Show, epicenter 2010, takes place in Trinity College Dublin between Tuesday 8th and Friday 11th June.

Careers

• Aurion Learning – ASP.NET developer required for the educational software ISV based in Belfast.  More details via NIJobFinder.
• Asidua – Software Developers and Graduate Developers, based in Belfast.
• First Derivatives – A number of developer roles are currently being advertised by the Newry based financial software firm.
• Navinet – Various developer roles based in the new Belfast centre of excellence for the American healthcare firm.
• Isaac Agnew – A senior Software Developer required in Belfast.
• CitiGroup (via NIJobFinder) – Several development roles, based in Belfast.
• QUB – Software Engineer (Grid Computing), based in Belfast.
• Moy Park (via NIJobFinder) – Information Assistant, based in Craigavon.
• Parity – A number of roles available with my own company, based in Belfast.

Normal Service Will Resume Shortly…

 

Folks, apologies for the lack of posts this past week.  A minor traffic accident earlier in this week led to a lot of stress and hassle (my daily commute jumped from 1 hour to 2.5 hours), and meant that I wasn’t about to spend any time crafting posts.  Rest assured, normal service will resume next week.

Unfortunately, the same mishap meant that I missed Jesse Liberty’s talk on Silverlight tonight in Belfast, and will mean that I also miss Open Spaces in Dublin this week.  I hope the day goes well for everyone who can attend!

The Weekly Links 2

This is the 2nd post in an ongoing series of weekly roundups of links useful to developers.  Given the release of Visual Studio 2010 earlier this week, there is a definite VS2010 theme in today’s post.

Update

Just to make aware, it looks likely that the BarCamp Belfast event will be postponed from the 17th to the 22nd of April.  Check the twitter account for the latest news.

Tools

• Visual Studio 2010 Released – Scott Hanselman highlights the new features in the latest Visual Studio release.
• Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects Beta – Following this week’s release of VS2010, the Visual Web Developer Team Blog announce the release of the latest release of the Web Developments Project
• SPServices – A jQuery library that wraps wraps the SharePoint web services in an AJAX wrapper for use in JavaScript.  Available from CodePlex.
• AllMargins – A VS2010 extension that replaces the excellent add-in Rockscroll for VS2005/2008.
• Ninite – A great website that allows you to build a bulk installer of a number of great (freeware or open source) applications for Windows. [I used the installer generated by the website this week to help pave my new developer machine, and I really recommend it!]
• CodeRush Xpress for C# and VB – The refactoring toolset is now freely available to all Visual Studio 2010 developers.
• PSake 4.0 – An updated version of the PowerShell Build library for .NET 4.0 is announced by James Kovacs.

Information

• Moving to Visual Studio 2010 - A free eBook is made available by Microsoft for developers on how to move to VS2010.
• Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 – A free eBook from Microsoft Press, useful to database developers who are already using SQL Server.  Link courtesy of Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day.
• My History of Visual Studio – Rico Marian gives his personal history of Visual Studio, as he leaves the Developer division in Microsoft.
• Visual Studio: Why is there no 64 bit version? (yet) – Another post from Rico Marian on why there isn’t a 64 bit version of Visual Studio.
• Same Markup: Writing Cross-Browser Code – A blog post form the IE blog on how to write cross-browser compatible HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
• Rethinking the User Interface Paradigm of IDEs – Niall Doherty highlights the Code Bubbles project that could be the future of the developer user interface.
• How to Refactor the Helper Class – John Sonmez blogs on how to go about refactoring a helper class.  The second in a two part series of posts.

Events

• NW-MTUG Lightening Session – Alan Bradley from NW-MTUG calls for local speakers for a planned event later in teh yaer.
• C# 4.0: What's New? – The next NW-MTUG event in Derry/Londonderry is announced for 17th May.
• LIDNUG: .Net Code Protection with SecureTeam – A online event from the LIDNUG on how to protect proprietary software.
• Introduction to Application Development With Silverlight 4 – NIMTUG host Jesse Liberty in Derry on 22nd April.

Careers

• Northgate IS – Various technical positions are currently available from Northgate IS in Belfast.
• Liberty IT – Software Professionals, Database Developers and Associate Software Engineer/Graduates roles in Belfast.
• Kainos - Infrastructure Services Engineer, based in Belfast.
• Acorn IT Solutions (via NIJobFinder)– Software Developer, based in Maghera.
• Allstate – Oracle DBA, based in Belfast.

First Day…

Today, I started my job with Parity in Belfast.  I’ll be working in the support team.  Despite being labelled a developer in the past, I’m more than happy with this.  Over the past 5 years, I’ve spent more time maintaining and extending existing applications than on green field development.  As part of my introduction to the team, I was given a brief overview of the projects I’ll be working on over the next few months, and I can tell you the following:

• I’ll be busy.
• The work will be a mixture of bug fixing, implementing change requests and new development work.
• I’ve have a lot to learn, as I’ll be working on solutions with technologies completely new to me (K2 anyone?).
• I’ll be really busy.

My new colleagues at Parity have been very welcoming, and I’m already impressed with the culture. People are left to get on with things, and to take responsibility for their own work.  Also, there isn’t a tide of paperwork to fight through in order to get things done.  What a relief!

Anyway, time for bed.  I’m knackered.

Game of Thrones

 

It was recently announced that a fantasy series, George R. R. Martins’s A Song of Fire and Ice, will be filmed in Belfast later this year.  Being a fan of Sci-Fi and Fantasy (FIJAGH!), I picked up a copy of Game of Thrones, the first book in the series, from my local library.  I've just finished reading it, and I am already a huge fan of the series.  While some reviewers have compared it to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, it reminded me more of Dune, with the detailed descriptions of the myriad court factions jostling for power.  The book is also quiet brutal, with none of the fantasy escapism that puts some people off the LOTR.  All in all, was an excellent read, and I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the series, Clash of Kings.

I’ve just checked the IMDB site for details of the HBO production of Game of Thrones, and it looks to have a pretty impressive cast list.  Sean Bean (LOTR, Red Riding) is in the lead role as Eddard Stark.  It looks like Jennifer Ehle (Pride and Prejudice, Possession) will no longer be appearing as Catelyn Stark, but she is replaced by a local actress, Michelle Fairley.

Unfortunately, the talentless Lena Headey (300, St. Trinian’s) is also appearing.  Thankfully, she is the evil Cersei Lannister, so we can “Boo!” when she appears onscreen to ruin a scene.

New Mobile Phone

 

I finally got around to buying a new mobile phone today.  While it isn’t the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Android handset that I really wanted, the Nokia 7230 is a definite step up from my last mobile phone.

I’ve just finished synchronizing my contacts using the Nokia Ovi service (Mobyko does not support the 7230 yet), and I’m now looking to use the open source application GCal Sync to sync my google calendar with the mobile phone’s calendar.  Assuming I can get GCal Sync to work, in the future I will also be able to develop and deploy my own custom applications to the phone.

Links Roundup

This is the first in a series of weekly roundups of links that will be useful to developers.  This is based on Chris Alcock’s The Morning Brew, but will also include additional links on SharePoint development, and will focus on events for developers in Northern Ireland.

Tools

• QuickUnit – A Visual Studio add-in to design and generate unit test projects within the IDE.
• Mono Tools - Miguel de Icaza of the Mono team announces the release of Mono Tools, an IDE add-in to allow .Net developers to build solutions using the Mono framework directly from Visual Studio.
• ASP Classic Compiler – A CodePlex project that allows developers to package classic ASP pages as executables so they can run within the ASP.Net environment. I think this is insane, but possibly very useful for those working with legacy projects.
• Switch project files between VS2008 and VS2010 – Given the imminent release of Visual Studio 2010, Steve Dunn’s command line tool allows you to open an existing VS2008 project file from VS2010 without converting the project.

Reference/Information

• Windows Programming: The “it works on my machine syndrome” – Patrick Smacchia of NDepend fame writes about issues that catch the unwary .Net developer when developing applications that run on Windows.
• Precision and accuracy of DateTime – Eric Lippert writes a useful post on the precision of the DateTime struct, and how the StopWatch class should be used to measure elapsed time accurately.
• Visual Studio Myth Busters – An extremely cheesy interactive page on MSDN to tell you the benefits of the various versions of Visual Studio.
• Extreme Programming (XP) at a Glance – A handy blog post giving a concise breakdown of what XP is by J.D. Meier.
• Moving to Visual Studio 2010 – An eBook from Microsoft on what to expect when you upgrade to Visual Studio 2010.
• SharePoint 2010 Certification Details – Tobias Zimmergren gives a breakdown of the new Microsoft certification exams for SharePoint 2010.

Events

• BarCamp Belfast – The unconference returns to Belfast on Saturday 17th April.
• Open Coding – The second Irish open spaces coding day is in Dublin on Saturday 24th April.  I am definitely attending, so let me know if you are also going!
• Visual Studio 2010 Launch Events – Martha Rotter gives details of the various launch events for later this month. She also has created a Twitter alias for all Microsoft tech events in Ireland - @MSIrlTechEvents
• Microsoft Office and SharePoint Roadshow for IT Pros – Read details of the venues and dates for the joint release in Ireland.

Careers

• Replify – Software Engineers (various levels), based in Belfast.
• South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust – ICT Officer, based in the Ulster Hospital, Dundonald (via NIJobfinder).
• Randox Laboratories – Software Engineers, based in either Co. Antrim or Co. Donegal.
• Fluent Technology – Support Manager, based in Belfast.
• Lagan – QA Engineer, based in Belfast.

Why I’m Blogging…

Sorry for the delay in posting again.  I spent the Easter weekend visiting friends in Sheffield, and had a great time catching up with them. But now that I’m back, I thought it would be useful to set out the reasons why I’m blogging, and what I hope to do with the  blog over the next few months.
The main reasons I’m blogging are:

• To market myself.  This blog will be a body of work on the topics that I’m passionate about.
• To make me a better communicator! 
• To expand on my answers to StackOverflow questions.  Quite often, when I get interested in a SO question, there is additional material that doesn’t make it into the answer. I plan on using that material in posts on this blog.
• To note technical points that are of interest to myself and others.  For instance, you can expect to see a number of posts on developing and configuring SharePoint 2010 over the next few months.
• To document my own personal projects.

The last point is the most important.  For a while now, I had a number of personal projects that I wanted to start work on, but never seemed to have the time for.  By documenting the projects using this blog, I will publicly committing myself to completing these projects, and will also break up the project work into post sized pieces.

Given the above, I plan to post at least twice weekly to the blog.  The blog posts will in general be one of the following types:

• A roundup of useful links (every Friday)
• Articles summarizing work done on personal projects (typically on a Monday or Tuesday, to document work done over the weekend)

You can also expect to see occasional posts on the following topics:

• SharePoint 2010
• Becoming a better developer
• Useful code snippets