Alvin Ashcraft’s Morning Dew

Over the weekend, my friend and former co-worker, Matt Walker, blogged about the ‘need’ to print documents on paper. I couldn’t agree more, and wanted to add a couple of points to the discussion.

For anyone who has issues reading from an LCD or CRT for long periods of time, you can pick up a Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle. Sony’s device will display .doc, .rtf, .pdf, and .txt files out of the box. PDFs can be a little hard to read on the device because of how they are scaled, but there are 3rd party tools out there to convert PDF to RTF.

Matt talks about a free tool to print to PDF files. Another e-printing option built into Windows Vista is the “Microsoft XPS Document Writer” printer. You can create a portable document without installing any 3rd party tools. This option is for anyone who exclusively uses systems that can read the .xps format.

Peace out!

Silverlight

• Silverlight Charts and Graphs - with Source Code (Pete Brown)

Events/Community

• Spontaneous New York Ethiopian Nerd Dinner (Scott Hanselman)

.NET

• A Web Server in 30 Lines of Code and NHibernate 2.0 Alpha Is Out (Oren Eini)
• Using LINQ to Access the File System (Derik Whittaker)
• Extension Methods Under .NET Framework v2 and v3 (Phil Curnow)
• C# DateTime.MinValue Is Not the Same As SqlDateTime.MinValue (Justin Bezanson)
• If You Are Using a Loop, You Are Doing It Wrong (Chuck Jazdzewski)
• How To: Optimize the Memory Usage with Strings (Eugen Ciuta)

Design/Methodology

• Developers’ Three Favorite Abstractions/Patterns (Evan Hoff)
• We Need ALT.NET to Supplement the Traditional .NET Leadership (Jeremy D. Miller)
• The Best Coding Design Guidelines Ever (Milan Negovan)
• CHAPTER 1: Problems and Causes with the Way We Develop Software (Dan Bunea)

SQL Server

• How the SQL UNION Affects Table Design (Ken Downs)

PowerShell

• -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue => -EA 0 (Jeffrey Snover)

Link Collections

• Links (3/30/2008) (Steve Pietrek)
• Weekly Link Post 35 (Rhonda Tipton)
• The Morning Brew #62 (Chris Alcock)

Book of the Day

Miscellaneous

• Agile Coaching: The Daily Stand-Up Meeting (Jeffrey Palermo)
• SharedView is Very Cool (Chris Johnson)
• Using RSS for System Status (Michael Janke)
• The Roots of Best Practices (Christopher Bennage)
• Towards Bug-Free Code (Patrick Smacchia)
• Concurrancy-Oriented Code Reviews (Joe Duffy)

.NET

• Simple Way to Convert IEnumerable<Entity> to List<Entity> and Sorting Lists the .NET 3.5 Way (Derik Whittaker)
• Another Code Release - Preview Handlers for XP (Tim Heuer)
• How to Grayout an Image in .NET (Dan Rigsby)
• Custom Aggregations in LINQ (K. Scott Allen)
• Patterns and Practices WCF Security Guidance Now Available (Hosam Kamel)
• A Simple Closure to Handle Try/Catch Around Transactions (Ray Houston)

Silverlight/WPF

• DLR Pad: Xaml + Ruby/Python (Rob Relyea)
• Developing a Robust Data Driven UI Using WPF - Stock DataModel Sample (Eran Kampf)

SQL Server

• How to Use COALESCE and NULLIF to Prevent Updating Columns When a Parameter IS NULL or a Default Value (Denis Gobo)
• SQL Server 2008: Spatial Data, Part 2 (Jason Follas)

Visual Studio

• UPDATE: New Virtual Earth JavaScript Intellisense Helper Release (MS Public Sector Team)
• IronPython Studio Integrated Shell Setup Released on CodePlex (Quan To)

Link Collections

• Interesting Finds: March 28, 2008 and March 29, 2008 and March 30, 2008 (Jason Haley)
• Silverlight Cream for March 28, 2008 - #239 and March 30, 2008 - #240 (Dave Campbell)
• LINKBLOG for March 28, 2008 and March 29, 2008 (Arjan Zuidhof)
• Link Listing - March 28, 2008 (Christopher Steen)
• Links Today (2008-03-30) (Matt Hinze)

Book of the Day

Miscellaneous

• I {entity} Unicode (Jeff Atwood) - Gotta order one of those bumper stickers.
• Workflow Software: I’m Calling the Bluff (Leon Bambrick)
• Mike Swanson: MIX08 Show-Off Winners (Rob Relyea)
• Automation FTW (Sergio Pereira) - Some good hints on automating daily development-related tasks.
• Hanselminutes Podcast 105 - Rocky Lhotka on Data Access Mania, LINQ and CSLA .NET (Scott Hanselman)
• Windows Search 4.0 Preview for Windows Vista (MS Downloads)
• How Microsoft Works (Jeffrey Snover)
• Getting Ready for Windows Live Wave 3 (Chris)
• BgShell (Background Shell) (Lee Holmes)

.NET

• IteratorStream (Greg Young)
• LINQ to SQL Issue with DateTime Fields and LINQ to SQL Limitation with Abstract Base Classes (Derik Whittaker)
• Real Ultimate Power : Dependency Injection with Ninject (Ryan Lanciaux)
• FormatWith - String.Format Extension Method (James Newton-King)
• Stored Procedure Mapping (Noam Ben-Ami) - Some ADO.NET Entity Framework Tools info.
• Async Operations in WCF: IAsyncResult Model (Server-Side) (Dan Rigsby)
• ADO.NET Entity Framework Performance Comparison (Brian Dawson)
• A Better Way to Extract Data From DateTime (Amit)

Silverlight/WPF

• More Calculator (Scott McCraw)
• Live Messenger - Login Screen UI (Jose Fajardo)

Web Development

• Interesting 3rd Party Controls and Demo Applications for ASP.NET and Silverlight (Dan Wahlin)
• New Features in the Next BlogEngine.NET (Mads Kristensen)

Visual Studio

• XML Tools in Visual Studio 2008 (Stan Kitsis)
• More Specs Available for “Rosario” - Feedback Opportunity (Anthony Borton)
• VSCT PowerToy Released (VSX Team)
• 3 Ways to Run NUnit From Visual Studio (Shahar Abramovich)

SharePoint

• Using TypeMock.NET to Abstract SharePoint with Mocks (Adam Buenz)

Link Collections

• Interesting Finds: March 27, 2008 (Jason Haley)
• March 28th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight, .NET (Scott Guthrie)
• Visual Studio Links #14 (Darren Stokes)
• LINKBLOG for March 27, 2008 (Arjan Zuidhof)
• Links (3/27/2008) (Steve Pietrek)
• Links Listing - March 27, 2008 (Christopher Steen)
• The Morning Brew #61 (Chris Alcock)

Book of the Day

Silverlight/WPF

• WPF Diagram Designer - Part 4 (Sukram)
• Get Paid For Streaming With Silverlight? (Scott)
• A Silverlight Calculator (Scott McCraw)

.NET

• Introduction to ADO.NET Data Services (Part 3: Reading and Manipulating Results in a .NET Consumer Application) (Greg Galipeau)
• .NET Framework 3.5 Distribution Size (Rick Strahl)
• Moq’s MockBehavior (Aaron Jensen)
• The Weekly Source Code 22 - C# and VB .NET Libraries to Digg, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Live Services, Google and other Web 2.0 APIs (Scott Hanselman)
• C# HTML Table Builder (Trev)
• NDepend - Static Analysis on Steroids (David Mohundro)
• How To: Use the Group Clause in LINQ (Corey Roth)

Web Development

• Using jQuery to Consume ASP.NET JSON Web Services (Dave Ward)
• ASP.NET MVC: Goodbye SmartBag, Hellow ViewDataExtensions (Jeffrey Palermo)
• Kigg - Upgraded to MIX08 ASP.NET MVC Release (Kazi Manzur)
• SubSonic BlogProvider for BlogEngine.net (Luke Nathan Foust)
• Timeline .NET (Rob Chartier) - Nice-looking timeline web control
• Using Custom BasePage Class in ASP.NET (Satheesh Babu)

Visual Studio

• Finding Shelve/Unshelve in Visual Studio 2008 (Charles Sterling)

Miscellaneous

• ZipInstaller Lets You Install Windows Apps Without an Installer (Brad Linder)
• Photoshop Express Enters Public Beta (Cristian)

Link Collections

• Silverlight Cream for March 26, 2008 - #237 (Dave Campbell)
• Interesting Finds: March 26, 2008 (Jason Haley)
• Weekly SOA Crumbs #12 (Dilip Krishnan)
• LINKBLOG for March 26, 2008 (Arjan Zuidhof)
• Links (3/26/2008) (Steve Pietrek)
• The Morning Brew #60 (Chris Alcock)

Book of the Day