I’m seen parts of this book in pre-production and it’s a must read!

Jim with the Book

Windows Developer Power Tools on Amazon

Want your copy signed??? Come to CodeMash! 🙂

Because he was on tape – Dave Redding decided to write more about the Command Pattern – it’s worth a read.

Announcing Arc on the Street. This is going to be an opportunistic podcast. I’ve got a podcast recording rig that I’ve been playing with (many posts to come later about the rig). The best part about it is that it’s very portable and all battery powered.

So I was having a drink with my friend Dave Redding who was asking about patterns. I pointed him to Christian Gross‘s Foundations of Object-Oriented Programming using .NET 2.0 Patterns book. Turns out that he already knew some about patterns and had used the Command Pattern in the past. Well – in our first “Arc on the Street” Dave is going to tell us about that implementation and a little bit about patterns in general. At the time of the recording, I was thinking that I would do two series “Dev on the Street” and “Arc on the Street” but I’ve decided that it make more sense to just have one and for me to concentrate on the architect level topics.

I had the great pleasure of being on .NET Rocks speaking about SQL Everywhere and a whole lot more! I really should have gotten them a better photo – but such is life.

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=202

I want both of my readers and good friends to come to CodeMash so I’m going to pitch it again today… 🙂 

CodeMash is an amazing event with some real world class speakers. They are coming to Sandusky for $99.00 for this amazing conference. For a grand total of $302.24 (including taxes and other fees that we are forced to pay) you will be housed and feed both physically and mentally for 2 days! If you want, for another $88.00 (+ taxes and fees) you can stay over Friday night and enjoy the water park soaking in the water, warmth and all of the knowledge that you have pumped into your brain over the previous two days.

Link to CodeMash

The PDC 2007 will be October 2-5 with a couple of preconference days.  There’s not a ton of detail, but the PDC is always the forward looking, we are about to release some things that are huge type of event.

You should definitely put this on your calendar.

Link to PDC announcement page

I’m feeling inadequate It’s kind of amazing, this is a hot blogging day for me and Scott Hanselman still has me outpaced even though he’s in Tanzania at the moment.

What’s even more amazing is that all of his posts are interesting and informative.

Not to sound too much like a fan boy (borrowing a line from Scott himself) but several times this week I’ve been asked questions and the answer has been listen to X Hanselminutes on topics from Reflection to contact management in A Better Outlook. I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately and I’ve caught up on a lot of the Hanselminutes that I haven’t had time to listen to before.

Side Note————————-

I got a Kensington FM transmitter for my IPod (bought before the Zune came out…) and listen to a ton of podcasts while driving. (I’ll post about those soon and add them to my blogroll.)

————————-

It’s been cool getting to “know” Scott through the podcasts. If you don’t listen to it, you should. I’ve learned about a lot of little things that I have not had time to explore and gotten better explanations to a lot of things that I already knew.

Some examples:
I have not had time to investigate PowerShell

Windows PowerShell (MONAD) Part II
Jeffrey Snover, PowerShell Architect
Microsoft Command Shell (MONAD)

This is one of the best and most concise explanations of how Scrum works

The Line of Scrummage

I have changed how I do email because of this one

A Better Outlook

I was actually mentioned in this one about one of my little pet topics Code Generation

Code Generation

What was fun about this was how surprised he sounded when he said my name.

I also like the non-programming topics, such as HDTV, Diabetes Technology and the Hanselminutiae topics.  

Link to http://www.hanselman.com

Last night Eric Maino (http://www.meeteric.net) gave a talk at GANG (http://www.migang.org) about Test Driven Development (TDD). It was a very good talk that touched on a lot of the important issues involved in testing. It was a good overview of NUnit (http://www.nunit.org) and how TDD works. The slides will be up on the GANG web site soon.

One of the questions that came up was how GUI testing works with NUnit. I happened to attend a talk at SD West (http://www.SDExpo.com) by Elisabeth Hendrickson from Quality Tree (http://www.qualitytree.com) on that exact topic. She has been working on a test harness for GUI testing that’s built on NUnit. You can learn more about it here – http://www.qualitytree.com/autotest/dotnetgui.htm.

There’s a free webcast coming up that you should know about titled “Obfuscation, IT Governance and Enterprise Risk Management”. It’s being hosted by PreEmptive Solutions – the creators of Dotfuscator. They know just a bit about the topic so it should be worth hearing.

Event: Obfuscation, IT Governance and Enterprise Risk Management  

Date and Time: Monday, April 24, 2006 1:00 pm Eastern time zone

Duration: 30 minutes

Description: Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of the role of obfuscation as an effective control for application security, access control, IP protection in the context of broader IT governance and enterprise risk management frameworks.

I know that there are a lot of choices out there and rather than just picking one or going off of one or two people’s opinion – I thought I’d just ask on my blog what your opinion is…

Feel free to comment on this in the comments or send me an email with your comments.