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If you own a 30GB Zune you might have found that it didn’t work too well today! The reason is reported to be a bug in the code which calculates the date and time from an offset.

A useful post of free tools for the SQL Server DBA by David Bird over at SQLServerCentral.

Did you know that JetBrains have a .NET blog, covering their .NET tools, including Resharper and dotTrace?

Here’s a Resharper Navigation gem from November: Navigate from Here

[The Resharper keyboard shortcut sheet is here: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/docs/ReSharper40DefaultKeymap.pdf]

The folks at Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices Group have released a series of ‘cheat’ sheets as part of the Application Architecture Guide 2.0:

“Cheat Sheets are quick and dirty reference sheets that provide quick insights or actions. They’re compact and meant to be read fast by summarizing important points.”

There are How-Tos and Videos as well. Worth checking out…

I came across this site, .NET Tip of The Day, with a few useful .NET tips and tricks. It has a RSS feed here.

A quick reminder for anyone intending to come along to DevJam event.

The line up for this week’s DevJam meeting of the Perth .NET User Group (Thursday, 11th Dec) has been finalised:

Hadley Willan: Implementing IDisposable
Tiang Cheng: Visual Studio Testing Techniques
Adrian McGrath: Configuration Management Introduction
Michael Minutillo: Test-Driven Philosophy
Jeremy Thake: Azure
James Miles: LINQ->WPF
Alastair Waddell: WCF Syndication Feeds

DATE: Thursday, December 11th, 5:30pm
VENUE: Excom, Ground Floor, 23 Barrack Street, Perth
COST: Free. All welcome

There will be pizza and refreshments.

If you’re ever in need of a fast CSV file parser and you’re contemplating writing one, before you do, check out Sebastien Lorion‘s implementation on The Code Project.

Ramp Up is a free, online, community-based learning intiative from Microsoft that provides materials for building your skills with Microsoft developer tools and technologies. The easy-to-access and easy-to-follow Ramp Up ‘routes’ are authored by subject-matter experts from the technical community, and include a variety of learning resources including whitepapers, codecasts, and v-labs. When you finish a route, you get rewarded with discounts on certification exams and e-learning (25% discount on certification and 50% off on e-learning).

In addition to the new route for SharePoint, Ramp Up also offers training for developers switching to C# (Aspiring Developers, Java Developers), and developers who want to update their skills to the latest version of Visual Studio 2008.

These are great! Bruce Schneier facts ala Chuck Norris style. My favorite is:

Bruce Schneier knows Alice and Bob’s shared secret.

It’s interesting how users’ opinion of your software can change dramatically depending on their installation experience. Take me for example. A few weeks ago I opened RssBandit (my feed aggregator) and it helpfully informed me there was a new version available, so what the heck I thought, and installed it. It installed prompty but also had the side effect of promptly eradicating my feed list (which by coincidence I had only recently rebuilt after stupidly losing a disk drive). OK, it’s free software, and I did click “Yes”, and to the author’s credit, the bug has been fixed pretty quickly, but the experience has left me ill-disposed towards it (what happen’s if I upgrade again, will I lose my feeds again?) Time to give Outlook 2007’s RSS feed reader a go…

Which RSS feed reader do you use?