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.