Daily Links - 25/10/2007

Are you ALT.NET?

How an open source developer transitioned to .NET

LinQ to SQL tutorial series by Scott Guthrie (pdf booklet format)

TDD - Rhino Mocks - Part 1 - Introduction

Decorator Pattern

Daily Links - 22/10/2007

Firefox Mobile

Free .NET obfuscator
free, but if you want support or upgrade options, you'll need to hand over some cash.

TOGAF
"The Open Group Architecture Framework, is an industry standard architecture framework that may be used freely by any organization wishing to develop an information systems architecture for use within that organization."

Top 5 Application Security Vulnerabilities in Web.Config Files

Mastering JavaScript - Concept and Resource Guide

Golf: The Best Driver

Maybe the title should be "the best driver for me", but anyways - here's my opinion:

Overview of my game:
Fast swing speed (100+ mph)
High handicapper (tend to slice)

Like most beginners, when I started playing golf, I left the driver at home. I started out teeing with the a 5-iron, which got me a reliable 180 meters off the tee. I soon progressed to a few "driving" irons, which got me up to 200, followed by the 3 Wood.
Here follows my progression in drivers:

1) Ben Hogan CS-3 with draw spec - $140

It has a 420CC head, which is was a nice progression from the 3 Wood. Hitting the large over-sized Drivers was still a problem. It has a great high-quality Aldila shaft, and the draw brought the ball nicely back in play when opening the shoulders (which usually produced a slice or fade) Great club if you're on a tight budget.

Website
Reviews

After hitting a while with the Hogan, I started to do a little more research into the driving game, and found this site.
The top Driver according in 2006 was the Tour Edge Exotics, so naturally when the local pro shop had a special, I bought one.




2) Tour Edge Exotics - $499

9 Degree with stiff shaft. Wow. Added another 30 meters to my drives, though it's a little harder to get a draw action.

Website
Reviews
TheSandTrap Review






3) Nickent 4DX - $250

Haven't hit with this club yet (not available where I'm from), but it looks very promising. Same titanium make-up as the TE, but it has a draw spec model (ala CS-3)
Top of the rankings golftestusa 2007. It also looks like this club is a lot easier on the pocket than the other top-of-the-line clubs.

Website
Reviews

Daily Links - 11/10/2007

Layered Architecture, Dependency Injection, and Dependency Inversion

Database Performance Optimization - Denormalization using MySQL Triggers

Caching in ASP.NET while making sure that cache data is synch'ed with the database - in 3.5 minutes

Google Gears
"open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality"
"Gears provides three key features:
* A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
* A database, to store and access data from within the browser
* A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background"

Speed Up Your Site! 8 ASP.NET Performance Tips

43 Exceptionally useful AJAX Applications

Coding .NET for Linux Environments (free software)

Grasshopper 2.0
Implements a cross-compiler that translates M$ Intermediate language to Java bytecode
It seems the free edition only supports Tomcat though, so for commercial App Servers like IBM Websphere, you'd have to buy the enterprise edition.
product overviews and reviews

Mono
"Mono allows your existing binaries to run on Linux with copy-deployment."
It's basically an open-source .NET framework for Linux

IDE:
MonoDevelop
"free GNOME IDE primarily designed for C# and other .NET languages"

Daily Links - 08/10/2007

Silverlight links

GOA Winforms for Silverlight and Flash development
Winforms controls for Silverlight development

SQL Server: Notify user of long running process
...also handy for keeping long processes alive in .NET

Cool UI Templating Technique to use with ASP.NET AJAX for non-UpdatePanel scenarios

More than 100 on-line web 2.0 generators

Super easy SQL Server 2005 Database Schema change auditing

Scott Guthrie announces ASP.NET MVC framework at Alt.Net Conf

How to debug web applications using Firebug

Working with DataReaders
Overview article on using DataReader for efficient data access.

ScaleOut Software (3rd party software)
Distributed caching for server farms

tangible FREE modeling tools for Visual Studio.NET
"With tangible modelling tools you can directly create Use Case Diagrams, Component Diagrams, State Charts, Class Diagrams, Activity Diagrams and Persistent Object Models."
I would like to have seen sequence diagram integration

Daily Links - 04/10/2007

More articles wrt [Distributed] caching
Caching Architecture Guide for .NET Framework Applications
NCache - distributed caching for .NET

NHibernate for .NET - persistence framework for .NET (also provides model whereby you can "plug in" the caching mechanism)
"It handles persisting plain .NET objects to and from an underlying relational database."

Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries

Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format
Highly compressed XML standard for across-the-wire transactions. Links are from
previous post comments, but I thought it interesting enough to link here.
Implementation from 3rd party vendor: AgileDelta

Daily Links - 03/10/2007

A Raw Serializer
Good article on serialization covering Binary, XML, Compression and Encryption of data streams

Surface computing hands-on article

Utilities.NET
"Utilities.NET is a collection of helper classes and components for quickly solving common .NET programming tasks."

Profiling .NET Applications
Tutorial on profiling .NET applications using ANTS

Subversion 1.5 features

Some articles on [Distributed] Caching:
Distributed Caching with Memcached
Domain Objects Caching Pattern for .NET
Web Caching Architectures: Hierarchical and Distributed Caching

Logitech vs M$ Bluetooth mouse comparision