I don’t read long blog posts very often but this week I read the latest post form the Windows 7 team from start to finish. I wasn’t even distracted as I usually am when reading long posts on the web.

Retro Style Photoshop Tutorials

There has been a fair amount of activity in the blogsphere to Roy's original post about increasing TDD adoption. Roy updates some of the reaction here and here. Udi comments on my reaction that the most important thing is to being writing tests and then learn how to write them better. Udi questions whether it is right for us to expect customers to allow us to learn on their time. And Casey Charlton makes a similar point in comments on Tim's blog. There has been a fair amount of discussion as to how we teach TDD over at the TDD mailing list too.

Who are the on demand (SaaS) message queuing (MQ) providers ? What are the advantages of using one over the other ? Check out the article for answers to the above questions.

As the world economy continues to look shakier by the day, and major corporations have begun to trim work forces, it might not be such a bad idea to start looking for a new job. Sites like Craigslist, Monster, and HotJobs have a lot of listings, but they’re not well filtered. Searching for jobs on those sites can be a crap shoot, and many of the best job offers aren’t posted on those mega sites.

Even as I study (ever so slowly) for MCPD certification for my own reasons while I'm at home (spare me the biased anti-Microsoft flames on that, I don't care) I'm finding that Microsoft end developers (Morts) and Microsofties (Redmondites) alike are struggling with the bulk of their own technology and are heaping up upon themselves the knowledge of their own infrastructure before fully appreciating the beauty and the simplicity of the pure basics.

With the financial markets behaving like random number generators & entropy seemingly about to win, conventional wisdom holds that the tech sector is hosed. Au contraire ... for the geeks who understand, this is an awesome time to be doing something new.

We ran into a weird issue at work today. Take a look at the following code...

So why is it so hard to find really good PHP programmers that can do wonders with an open source CMS? Why do developers jump ship, disappear or simply stop answering emails during or after a project? Here are some of the reasons and tips on how to choose a CMS that attracts top notch PHP developers.

Sun Microsystems, one of the world’s largest server and software makers, finds itself in an awkward position: It might soon have enough cash to buy all of its stock and go private.

I ran into a variation on an old threading problem the other day that I found nearly impossible to unit test. When I say impossible, getting my test scenario to succeed meant the guaranteed setting of two threading primitives before a WaitHandle evaluation occurred. Getting this to run properly every time requires some fancy test code which is where I stop and say to myself - "there has to be a better approach."

Could Microsoft’s next killer OS be SharePoint? Instead of being quite so blatant, Microsoft has taken a quieter back route to achieving the same ends via two related technologies: 1. Baking SharePoint reliance into more and more of its products 2. Requiring users to buy pricey client-access licenses (CALs) in order to use Microsoft’s servers Microsoft has been basing a growing number of its products on SharePoint technologies to provide basic common services like storage, pub/sub, identity/security infrastructure, communications and collaboration functionalities. With SharePoint’s BDC catalog and search server it is apparent that Microsoft is targeting SharePoint to serve as an integration layer on top of services and LOB applications in the organization.

An attentive reader pointed me at this long thread on a third-party forum where some people are musing about possible future features of C#. There is far, far more here than I possibly have time to respond to in any kind of detail. Also, I am not going to spill the beans. Anders is giving a talk at the PDC at the end of the month. His talk is titled "The Future of C#" and I'm not going to steal Anders' thunder (or give our marketing department conniptions) by giving specific details at this time.

Keeping it "short 'n sweet," WinFuture has posted some screenshots of build 6801. Check out the image below with the spiffy new wallpaper, then go visit WinFuture via the reference link below the screenshot to see the rest of them!

Interviewing a candidate is so much fun because you get to passively assert your superiority and be professorial enough that you can justify those nine years you spent in graduate school studying compiler optimizations only to get a job maintaining a failure-prone database driven web app.

One of our early goals for Google Chrome was to make the browser as fast as we possibly could. But in addition to raw speed, we wanted it to be highly responsive. After all, it doesn't matter how fast pages can be loaded if the user interface is locked up!

Note that this is comparing mostly the Landing Pages (and in some cases the samples) of the given Ajax Frameworks. Ajax Frameworks included are jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, ASP.NET AJAX, GWT, ExtJS, ExtGWT and ours (Ra-Ajax) Please feel free to comment about other Ajax Frameworks I should add to the list or correct me if I've done something wrong when measuring...

Twitter is an amazing service that we all love, everyday we notice a new twitter tool or service that makes using it more easy and fun. Today we wanted to highlight more than 25 of our favorite Twitter add-ons, tools and services that won ’t resist. Let us know your favorite twitter tool and why you like it.

In this part of the design patterns series we investigate the command pattern and its uses.

3D Typographic design is now more popular and we can notice a surge for 3D Type work on portfolio sites. Here we have collected 25 of the cool 3D typographic Text effect tutorials

This is a writeup of Jim Copliens talk at JAOO about "Taking Architecture into the Agile World" - and Jim did say some controversial things like "Java is a toy language", "Refactoring is bad" and so on. Remember to read Jims comment that clarifies the points.

A practical guide on when and how to outsource some of your software testing activities

Introducing Geode, an experimental add-on to explore geolocation in Firefox 3 ahead of the implementation of geolocation in a future product release. Geode provides an early implementation of the W3C Geolocation specification so that developers can begin experimenting with enabling location-aware experiences using Firefox 3 today, and users can tell us what they think of the experience it provides. It includes a single experimental geolocation service provider so that any computer with WiFi can get accurate positioning data.

In this conversation Microsoft Technical Fellow and Chief Architect of C# Anders Hejlsberg sits down with programming language design legend and computer scientist Guy Steele (creator of Scheme and expert in several languages ranging from LISP to Java).

5 WordPress trends and how-to for web developers: User Contributed Link Feed, Post Thumbnail, Tabbed Content and more.