New and Notable 381
First time I have been up at 5AM in a very long time. BTW, the new Starbucks Via Ready Brew coffees are amazing. They are whole bean instant coffees. They say it took them 20 years to come up with it. All I know, is that it is the first instant coffee I have ever had in my life that doesn’t taste like well, instant coffee. It tastes full bodied like the fresh brewed Starbucks. If you’re a developer, you probably are a coffee fan so try it out.
Agile
- Ted Neward has opened a whole can of whoop-ass in his post “Agile is treating the symptoms, not the disease”, a quote from the one and only Billy Hollis. He has predictably stirred about the Twitter masses so he expressed it in a longer fashion. If I understand Billy and Ted correctly, we have not made computing/software simpler; in fact we have made it much more complex (just look at Ted’s list of technologies the typical .NET developer has to know) and Agile is a way to deal with the complexity instead of simplicity. To quote Ted, “
But agile is not going to reduce the technology complexity load, which is the root cause of the problem.
Or, perhaps, let me ask it this way: your 16-year-old wants to build a system to track the cards in his Magic deck. What language do you teach him?
We are in desperate need of simplicity in this industry. Whoever gets that, and gets it right, defines the "Next Big Thing".” Seriously, read the whole thing before you judge – it is really thought provoking.
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Seven Essential Teamwork Skills – The Agile Advice man has taken “7 Essential Skills for Teamwork” which is a page on a public elementary school web site, and adapted it for Agile.
ASP.NET and Web Development
- Targeting earlier .NET frameworks 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 using Visual Studio 2010 – You can still multi-target in VS2010 but the behavior is different. With VS 2010, only the latest 4.0 version of the .NET framework will be installed on your machine as part of the Visual Studio installation. For VS 2010 to be able to target any of the earlier frameworks 2.0, 3.0 or 3.5, the .NET Framework 3.5 Sp1 must be installed on the machine.
- Expression Encoder 3 – Free and on Web Platform Installer – Via Mike Ormand, The Web Platform Installer (Web PI) now has an option to install the free version of Expression Encoder.
- URL Routing with ASP.NET 4.0 Web Forms (VS2010 and .NET 4 Series) – ScottGu continues his multi-part series with a cool new runtime feature in ASP.NET 4 – which is the ability to use URL routing with Web Forms based pages.
Windows Azure
Software Development Tools/Software Design
- My History of Visual Studio (Part 6) – Rico Mariani continues his fascinating personal, insider history of Visual Studio
- Resharper 5.0 Overview – Wow! Lots of great stuff here including ASP.NET/ASP.NET MVC. Can’t wait to play with it
- 200 Page Manual on Inversion of Control, Part 2 – Rob continues on his very good Part 1, and explain a bit more as to *why* you might want to use DI/IoC and how it won’t turn your application into the Mars Rover.
