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

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.

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.

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

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

• 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.

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.