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Michael Feathers (Working Effectively with Legacy Code) has posted an interesting read, 10 Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice) over at ObjectMentor. He gives a brief synopsis of each and why he thinks programmers should read them. I’ve read 4 of them previously and those were thought provoking. There are some interesting links in the comments as well.

TOPIC: Real World TDD with Rhys Campbell
DATE: Thursday, March 5th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

Join us at the Perth .NET Community of Practice, to hear Rhys Campbell present on the essentials of TDD and how it encourages good software design as opposed to just having tests. Rhys will cover the differences between unit, acceptance and integration tests, why conventional unit test examples often do not work in the real world, what to test and what to mock, automating your tests, coding examples of how to use Mocks, Stubs, Fakes, Dummies and Spies… what are they and how do they help me.

The Tech SummerFest roadshow is coming to Perth, the week of 20th April.

What is it?

It’s a mini-TechEd type event, jointly sponsored by Portal Synergy, Wardy IT Solutions, AB Training and Microsoft. It includes a Technology Showcase and three concurrent tracks of training in current and upcoming Microsoft technologies. Here is the week’s schedule. This event is being run by Anthony Borton, Peter Ward, Richard Angus, Dave Glover and Andrew Coates.

I have a free ticket to the Technology Showcase day (Monday, 20th April) to giveaway at Thursday’s User Group meeting, courtesy of the organizers.

I just received a reply to a query I sent to the (Australian) Angus & Robertson online bookstore. Part of the (very quick) response that was unrelated to my query was quite surprising:

“Angus & Robertson is currently in the process of developing a completely new
website. The refreshed Angus & Robertson website will be available in April.
During the transition to the new website, customers will not be able
to purchase items via the Angus & Robertson website.” [my emphasis]

That seems really crazy to me. If losing 5+ weeks worth of online sales was not enough, what happens if their new web site project overruns? They lose more sales! I can only assume they don’t currently sell many books online…

Some excellent advice in this article, My stored procedure “best practices” checklist, posted by Aaron Bertrand.

“When developing stored procedures, there seems to be a lot of emphasis on “get it done fast.” Which means type all lower case, pay little attention to formatting, and sometimes throw best practices out the window.”

If you are about to start a new project, Barry Williams’ DatabaseAnswers contains some good ‘kick-start’ database schemas to get you thinking about your Domain. Ten of his designs are available as the SQL Server 2005 Express Starter Database Schemas.

I’m not currently working with WPF, but I came across this tip that I wanted to make sure I could find when I am: Life changer XAML tip for Visual Studio!

Despite being reasonably active on StackOverflow, I wonder if it will eventually go the way of most forums when the noise level becomes too high? One thing’s for certain, its search ability is as bad as another high-profile programming site I probably shouldn’t mention (and I don’t mean the Symbol developer site, which is certainly a candidate…).

Once in a while, there are questions and answers on SO that really stand out, such as this answer to the question “Why is UI design so hard for some Developers?”.

Every so often in the middle of a task, you can get stymied by the simplest of things and by the time you’ve spent 15 minutes looking for a shortcut, you give in to temptation and go off at a tangent to try and solve the minor problem yourself.

Some time ago I wrote a simple and easy to use generic tool to script out a Table/Database as INSERT statements. Well, I couldn’t find it today! After downloading 2 scripts that wouldn’t work for some undiscovered reason(!), I resisted the temptation to knock something up, did a quick search and found Mladen Prajdić‘s SMSS Tools Pack 1.5. Not only does it have the generate a table as INSERTS as a right-click action within SSMS but a whole lot of other really nice to have features (the full feature list is here), including Window Connection Coloring.

It’s available for SQL Server 2005 and 2008 in full or Express versions.

This white paper, SQL Server 2008 White Paper: Analysis Services Performance Guide, describes how application developers can apply query and processing performance-tuning techniques to their SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services OLAP solutions. This white paper is organised into three sections: Enhancing Query Performance, Enhancing Processing Performance and Tuning Server Resources.

These may also be of interest:

• Analysis Services Many-to-Many Dimensions: Query Performance Optimization Techniques
• Analysis Services Distinct Count Optimization