Code Contracts Primer

Code Contracts Primer by Derik Whittaker looks like a nice intro to Code Contracts:

1. Introduction
2. Handling Legacy Code
3. Providing Support for Unit Tests
4. Utilizing Pre and Post Conditions
5. Utilizing Object Invariants
6. Interface Contracts

Debugging MSBuild Scripts (VS2010)

I did not actively search for the subject, but once I bumped into a three-part article about the MSBuild script debugging (Part I, Part II, Part III) on The Visual Studio Blog I immediately though that it is worth remembering about it when (I am not saying if, but rather when here) I need it in the future. The blog itself is also worth checking, as there is much information about VS IDE, MSBuild, and extensibility from the Visual Studio development team.

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…

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.

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.

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

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.

How to Debug Crashes and Hangs

How to Debug Crashes and Hangs article by Kirill Osenkov [MSFT] summarizes useful things about debugging in Visual Studio.

XPeFiles.com

XPeFiles.com is featuring not only XP Embedded blogs and forums, but also many downloads, including various components for XPe.

WPF Blogs

• DevDave – Dave Relyea’s Silverlight Blog by Dave Relyea [MSFT]- really much info about Silverlight and WPF, including layout and panels
• Ruurd Boeke Enterprise development and technobabble – layouts, panels, controls, etc.

Buffer Management for Networked .NET Applications

Found TCP: Buffer Management and related Async Sockets and Buffer Management and Async Sockets and Buffer Management [CTD] articles on Greg Young’s blog. These articles describe the problem and show the solution:

When you call BeginReceive/BeginSend on a socket, the memory that you pass to the method will be pinned for the duration of the call. This will lead to heap fragmentation and to make matters worse it will often be in your gen0 heap if you aren’t careful. This becomes especially true in the most common socket applications (request/response) as BeginReceive is often called and waits for a long time to receive data (by long time I mean a few seconds or more).

The blog itself is interesting on its own.

Today’s Blogs

Found these blogs today:

• Essential WPF by Tomer Shamam – WPF-related info, including localization
• Just Code by Tamir Khason – WPF and not only…
• IEnumerable<Stuff> – much of functional-style programming in C#, generics, closures, etc.

Microsoft’s Paper on Distributed Agile

Ade Miller, development manager at Microsoft patterns & practices group, blogged about launching of patterns & practices Agile Development Showcase. Among others, that resource features interesting Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices article.

Sunday Games

F%#%ing WORK!!! :) It’s Sunday, and time to relax a bit! Found some interesting sites with Flash games:

• MUO Games – The Best Websites to Play Flash Games – this one lists some sites
• MUO Games – 5 Rhythmic Flash Games To Groove Up Your Day – lists 5 music/rhythmic games, some are really interesting and nice.

Peli’s Farm Blog

Peli’s Farm is a must read blog of Jonathan ‘Peli’ de Halleux, the “original” author of MbUnit (now part of Gallio), few Reflector plugins, QuickGraph, and many other things, and who works on Pex (now a DevLabs project) at Microsoft Research (Nikolai Tillmann’s Blog has more information on Pex).

Mike Wasson’s Blog and Samples

Mike Wasson’s Blog is “about the DirectShow SDK and related topics”. Mike is also the author of at least two DirectShow samples (Video Test Source Filter, and Async Filter 2 Sample) on MSDN Code Gallery.

More C++ Idioms

More C++ Idioms is a Wikibook aimed toward anyone with an intermediate level of knowledge in C++ and supported language paradigms. The goal there is to first build an exhaustive catalog of modern C++ idioms, and later evolve it into an idiom language, just like a pattern language.

The thing has been started by the author of C++ Truths blog. The blog is interesting by itself, as it has really many interesting articles on advanced C++ topics.

Prioritizing Your Product Backlog

Mike Cohn, the author of Agile Estimating and Planning and User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, the founder of Mountain Goat Software, a blogger, and a founding member of the Agile Alliance, gave an excellent Prioritizing Your Product Backlog presentation on Agile 2008 Conference.

Today’s Blogs

• The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen – really nice blog with a lot of in-depth info, e.g. wonderful posts about The implementation of iterators in C# and its consequences (part 1, part 2, part 3), The implementation of anonymous methods in C# and its consequences (part 1, part 2, part 3), a lot of native Win32 topics (e.g. DLLs, processes, controls, etc.), etc. Probably there is no aspect of Windows that would not be covered at that blog! :)
• jaredpar’s WebLog by Jared Parsons – blog of the author of RantPack – a library that features functional programming patterns (tuples, immutable/persistent collections), threading utils (futures, cancelable futures, active objects, various other primitives), etc. The blog is very interesting, and there are many insights into software development topics

DirectShow Resources

There is no need to say anything about any of the following:

• Geraint Davies Consulting Ltd or GDCL – the home of Geraint Davies, the author of DirectShow, and famous GMFBridge. The site has a lot of interesting information about DirectShow, e.g. introduction to filters, technical Q&A, as well as some pretty elaborative samples like demuxers
• The March Hare – the guy is always present at DirectShow forums :) . Filter Graph Library, despite being written by another guy can be downloaded from this site as well
• Alessandro Angeli’s Programming FAQ – a lot of useful DirectShow tips and tricks
• GraphEditPlus – is GraphEdit done right :) . Especially nice time-saving feature is its graph code generation – you build the graph and GraphEditPlus generates its C++ creation code

Software Testing and Related Things

By accident found Google Testing Blog. Not bad.

One of the articles is called How to Write 3v1L, Untestable Code – a must-read for newbie (and not newbie too!) programmers. Not on this blog, but nevertheless related article is How To Write Unmaintainable Code by Roedy Green – very serious collection of bad things despite it is very funny to read.

Unit Test Boundaries

Unit Test Boundaries by Phil Haack [MSFT] – very interesting article about unit testing and related concepts like code orthogonality (by Jeremy Miller). When I was reading these posts, I “bumped” into CodeBetter.Com – a collection of blogs related to, well, coding better.

Wintellect’s John Robbins’ Blog

Related to my previous Wintellect post: Wintellect’s John Robbins has an excellent blog filled with… well, a bit of everything, including Debugger Settings Visual Studio Add In, Visual Studio tips, info about interesting tools, etc.

Wintellect Power Threading and Power Collections Libraries

Wintellect’s Jeffrey Richter created the Power Threading Library containing many classes to help with threading and asynchronous programming. More information about the library’s classes can be found via Jeffrey Richter’s Concurrent Affairs column in MSDN magazine. Then there is the Yahoo! Group established to support the use of this library

On top of that, Wintellect has the Power Collections Library that extends the Base Class Library with an algorithms class and a series of new containers. Now the library has moved to CodePlex and is available with the source code. Wintellect’s Peter Golde has excellent blog going into deeper details about the library.

Informikon

Informikon provides technical information and resources related to programming multimedia applications on Windows. There are quite many tutorials, blog, and forums and topics inlcude DirectShow, DirectX (also in managed environment), FFMpeg, etc.