everystockphoto

everystockphoto is a syndicating/search engine for stock/free photos. Photos come from various sources, e.g. Flickr, stock.xchng, Wikimedia Commons, photoXpress, and fotolia, and their usage is subject to their corresponding licenses.

Thrive for Developers

Thrive for Developers by Microsoft is “a one-stop community hub that offers job postings, technical content, and community resources. So whether you’re seeking new ways to differentiate yourself on the job, or you need to re-tool your skills for that next big role, Thrive has the resources to help you get there faster.” Looks and sounds interesting, but remains to be seen where it will go…

CppDepend

CppDepend is an “NDepend for C++”. It is made by the same company, and looks and behaves in a very much similar way.

Lean and Kanban Software Development

Found an interesting post on Edge of Chaos | Agile Development Blog (done by TargetProcess people) titled Lean and Kanban Software Development Digest and containing links to really interesting articles about the topic, and Kanban vs Scrum comparison among them.

Undocumented C#

Interesting (though useless) undocumented C# keywords (and corresponding IL instructions) described in Calling printf from C# – The tale of the hidden __arglist keyword on Bart De Smet’s B# .NET Blog.

Threading in C#

Joseph Albahari, the author of C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, C# 3.0 Pocket Reference, and LINQ Pocket Reference as well as LINQPad, has very nice Threading in C# article (well, it is 77 pages long and available in PDF format as well). As the author says, “[it] tackles difficult issues such as thread safety, when to use Abort, Wait Handles vs Wait and Pulse, the implications of Apartment Threading in Windows Forms, using Thread Pooling, Synchronization Contexts, Memory Barriers and non-blocking synchronization constructs.”

PostSharp 1.5 RTM

PostSharp 1.5 has been RTM-ed! Will have to try it in next project.

Exceptions in C++

In Google C++ Style Guide they state that they are not using exceptions in C++ code at Google. They have reasons for it (“historical” mostly, as usual), but I do not necessarily agree with their view on it. Anyway, exceptions are quite a controversial topic in C++ community, and a must-read C++ Exceptions: Pros and Cons article at CodeProject goes deeper into the subject.

Personally I think that exceptions are really great, although I see how people can get things messy/wrong when using exceptions in inappropriate contexts and/or in inappropriate ways. Recipe to avoid problems? My own short list:

• Use exceptions when they are really needed, i.e. when something exceptional happened
• Understand Exception guarantees AKA Abrahams guarantees (see more at Exception-Safety in Generic Components – Lessons Learned from Specifying Exception-Safety for the C++ Standard Library by David Abrahams)
• Follow Resource Acquisition Is Initialization AKA Resource Initialization Is Acquisition (or RAII/RIIA in short) principle

Today’s Sites/Blogs

• Ask the Performance Team (Thoughts from the EPS Windows Server Performance Team) – in their own words “… the Performance team covers a broad range of seemingly unrelated areas such as Core OS Performance, Printing, WMI and Terminal Services. Simply put – we’re a bit of a “catch-all” team. [...] Because we cover such a wide spectrum of technology, we see many different types of issues – some more frequently than others. So we thought we should share with the broader technical community. We’ll be sharing troubleshooting tips and technical information on areas of our specialty that we cover.”
• 45+ Excellent Code Snippet Resources and Repositories – it is what it says it is.

Flash and Silverlight Video Players

Needed Flash and/or Silverlight web-page video players for our web site, and found Silverlight – Video Player (at CodePlex) and Flowplayer – Flash Video Player for the Web. Both look really good and are fully customizable.

Styling a ScrollViewer/Scrollbar in WPF

In his Styling A ScrollViewer/Scrollbar In WPF article Sacha Barber explains how to do exactly what the article’s title claims. :)

.NET Events: Multithreading Issues

Threadsafe Events article at CodeProject explains problems one might encounter with .NET events in a multithreaded environment (not necessarily stating the absolute truth but still). Unfortunately, no-one has figured out the perfect solution, and we will have to choose “the best from all bad solutions” for some time still.

Asynchronous Callback Contexts article by the same author shows possible solution for event cancellation, particularly during object disposal: end-users do not expect components to raise events after they have been disposed or after they have unsubscribed from these events. The author refers to his Nito Asynchronous Library as a way to solve this issue.

NowDoThis

NowDoThis is an extremely simple task list/ToDo list web application. Check its NowDoThis blog to get more idea. And do not forget to use tabs (denoted by @ symbols in the list) – they are really nice.

Unattended .NET Installation

We needed to do unattended .NET 3.5 SP1 installation for our project, and at the same time we wanted to reduce the hard disk image size, so, after some Internet “crawling”, we found Silent .NET Maker synthesized – [a] script [that] builds custom .NET unattended, switchless, multimode installers/nLite addons, supporting all latest .NET framework versions, all its hotfixes and langpacks for win 2K/XP/2K3 x86 up to date. The thing really works, and we managed to get the size of full .NET 3.5 SP1 installer with all hotfixes down to something like 43MB (packed with 7-Zip) for 32-bit Windows XP. Not bad reduction! Aaron Stebner has also something to say about this topic.

Visual Studio Debugger Visualizers

DebuggerVisualizers – Boost C++ Libraries has nice introduction to custom Visual Studio debugger visualizers.

Today’s Sites/Blogs

• Started to “bump” into the Smashing Magazine quite often nowadays. Usually it collects interesting Internet resources related to web development (notably CSS, HTML, AJAX, etc.) and design (user interfaces, fonts, new ideas, etc.), and also has some tutorial-like or how-to-like posts (e.g. about PNG optimization, common mistakes, etc.). Really nice! Webdesigner Depot, Line25 Web Design Blog, and Presidia Creative all have similar concept.
• Windows Presentation Foundation SDK by Windows Presentation Foundation SDK writers and editors. Might be more interesting, but OK nevertheless.
• Expression Blend and Design – The team blog of the Expression Blend and Design products

Viral Marketing in Action

Don’t know how I missed it when it came in February, but here it is – absolutely fantastic and hilarious viral video clip titled “Sony releases new stupid piece of s%#$ that doesn’t f#$%ing work”. Must see! :)

ClaroVision.NET Platform Videos

My company, Oy ClaroVision Ltd, has been developing a media center (how we understand and see it) since 2006. What you get is:

• Digital Television PVR Record up to 6 channels and watch one more simultaneously
• Photo Album Organize your photos in a way most convenient for you thanks to extensive support of playlists (and, of course, you can view your photos too!!! :)
• Music (including CD) Take control of your music collection thanks to playlists and CD-ripping function
• Video (including DVD) Watch and organize all your videos, including DVDs (Blu-ray coming)
• Web Browser Access exciting Internet services on the living room TV (it is not a walled-garden browser!)
• Videophone Stay in touch with your family and friends

It is networked, so you can access content stored on your home PC/server as well. The main accent was made on usability – whole thing is very uniform and is controlled using remote control’s arrows, OK, Menu, and Back buttons.

We reached the beta milestone some time ago, and now we are ready to go to the public with our product. Here are some demo videos (all of them have HD version, so they are a bit bandwidth-demanding for proper watching) that make it easier to understand what we are talking about. You can find these same videos on our completely revamped website together with more detailed information about the platform and our company. Your comments are very welcome!

40+ Essential Front End Web Developer Cheat Sheets

40+ Essential Front End Web Developer Cheat Sheets lists essential cheat sheets for the most common web technologies, including both client-side (e.g. HTML, XHTML, CSS, javascript, jQuery, etc.) and server-side (php, ASP.NET, etc.) markup and development.

Font Burner

Font Burner makes it possible for you to use new fonts on your website, even if the end user does not have your chosen font(s) on his computer. There is nothing to install, neither on your computer nor on the end user’s, and the thing is free. The archive of offered fonts is really big (more than 1000 fonts). Really cool!

The only caveat is that, as it is using sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, see more info) to change the fonts, it is likely rather impractical to use it for anything bigger than headings. Basically it hides the text and puts a Flash file in its place, and that Flash file is able to render the chosen font.

Iconfinder

Iconfinder is to icons what Google is to the web – a search engine.

Best JavaScript, HTML, and CSS Practices for Beginners

Nice collections of tips:

• 30 HTML Best Practices for Beginners (this one has CSS tips too)
• 24 JavaScript Best Practices for Beginners
• Take Your Design To The Next Level With CSS3
• 10 Ways To Make Your Site Accessible Using Web Standards

YouTube XL

YouTube has released YouTube XL – a video portal targeting big screens, e.g. TVs, and offering no-mouse navigation (this navigation does not work perfectly though, at least at the time of writing).

Windows Media Player: WMP Mini FAQ

While searching for a solution to DRM-related troubles with film2home.fi video on demand service (gosh! no wonder that VoD purchasing rate is abysmal over here!) I have bumped into a Windows Media Player: WMP mini FAQ – an absolutely great collection of remedies to all kinds of Windows Media Player problems. Did not manage to solve my (in fact, film2home’s) problem though… :)

Today’s Sites/Blogs

• TomasP.Net blog by Tomas Petricek, author of Functional Programming for the Real World: With Examples in F# and C# (have not read this book yet, so no idea how good it is), features plenty of interesting information about functional programming in general, and in F# in particular.