I find it very therapeutic to “sync to paper” on a regular basis. Yesterday I was grumpy as I had way too  much in my head and in my Inbox. Late last night I grabbed my trusty Moleskine and wrote it all down – I “synced to paper”. I slept well and woke up grump free.

I also realised while “syncing to paper” last night that I carry around a lot of links in my head to stuff I find in my job which I keep meaning to share but never quite do. The sort of stuff I might mention to you if we met in the staff kitchen making a cuppa – except, we don’t work in the same building.  Aha – SyncToBlog was born! I suspect a weekly SyncToBlog will suffice but only time will tell.

  • Remember, when all else fails, run Visual Studio as Administrator on Vista. I was trying to install a copy of .TEST from Parasoft. Part of the install process involves generating a machine id to then get a license. My machine id as reported by .TEST was oddly blank. The nice support folks at Parasoft sorted me out. Turns out it needed to write to a part of the registry which needed full admin. Run as Admin and voila – a well formed machine id was generated.
  • Ever wondered what you might do if you lost your job? Well this InfoQ session on CouchDB I watched turned out to be a look at the choices one developer made when placed in this situation – to sell his home, move his family and start writing Open Source software, CouchDB. I found it a pretty interesting watch.
  • I really need to sit down and play properly with a mocking tool/library. However for the moment I need to be happy with just finding them! A new one for me is Moq (“Mock-you”) which uses .NET 3.5 (LINQ, lambdas) to get things done. It claims to be simple. It could well be where I first spend some time.
  • I need to be a better author. Hence these 10 tips caught my eye from devx.
  • I have been playing with .NET Framework 4.0 parallel bits of late. I happened to come across an area of devx intended for articles on parallel – looking a little slim at just two right now but both are good articles.
  • The Web Platform Installer made 1.0. Sweet. At last we have the slickness of things like WampServer (Which I made a screencast on last year to scare “the management”!)
  • The Startup Podcast is a great new(ish) podcast for … startups. A must read if you are a MicroISV (I wish I had done more while working with UK ISVs to help the little guys – a missed experience for me)
  • A brand new .NET sample application (new to me anyway) is the .NET StockTrader. It is a service-oriented application based on Windows Communication Foundation (.NET 3.0) and ASP.NET. It attempts to look at many of the .NET enterprise development technologies for building highly scalable, rich "enterprise-connected" applications. I just need a few days to pull it apart… ho hum.
  • I am interested in Windows 7 and interested in Windows Azure. Which is a shame as they don’t play together right now. This blog post suggests a VPC as the answer and takes you through the steps to get a VPC together.
  • Been dabbling with 64bit of late. This blog had some nice info on SQL Server and 64bit.
  • I went looking for coding standards and found an Aladdins cave of downloads around WCF at Idesign
  • Confused about Lamdas and anonymous method and delegates? Well, you won’t be if you read this article over on devx.
  • There is another free enterprise application framework for .NET with built in ORM etc - Habanero. I just have no idea if it is any good :-( Worth a look.

Thanks for reading.

 

TOP TIP: Viewing DevX articles without the inline advert

A lot of the links above are to DevX which has a lot of inline adverts. Your friend is the Print button on the right hand side :-)