Object Mentor

Finally I am back! :) Last year or so I was really busy working on our product, but now we are basically ready, and I can spare more time for “hobbies”.

So, today I found Object Mentor and its blog. There are plenty of articles on agile, TDD, good software design principles, C++, and many-many other topics. Definitely worth following…

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…

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

browsershots.org

browsershots.org site helps to check your web page for browser compatibility by providing cross platform browser testing in form of taking screenshots of your web page in all kinds of browsers/OSes. It supports seemingly everything there is out there (main page has something like 100 checkboxes for various browsers) and you can customize all kinds of options like screen resolution, Java version, etc. It is a free service, but there is an option to get “priority lane” for money.

UPDATE Just found 10 Browser Testing Tools: Roundup for Web Designers by Bryan Connor – a nice collection of browser testers with short reviews.

stackoverflow.com

stackoverflow.com was started recently by Joel Spolsky (no intro needed, I guess), and Jeff Atwood, the author of the Coding Horror blog. It is a programmer Q&A site that offers programmers the opportunity to ask questions and receive answers from the programming community for free, and intends to become the right source of answers for any programming question. What I have seen so far looked interesting and promising.