From Jesse Ezell: If you are looking for a place to brush up on your .NET skills and missed TechEd this year, you can see the TechEd 2002 sessions (like 200+ sessions with slides, video, and audio), as well as check out some great Balmer videos like the infamous "developers! developers! developers!" chant. Definately a top notch resource.

QuickCode is a VS.NET add-in that expands phrases into code, e.g. prop int test would expand to an entire property implementation. It works for C# and VB.NET and appears to be very flexible.

I learned how to write good emails at the foot of the master — Don Box. Whenever we’d decide we wanted something, he’d grab his computer and say, “Let’s write the email” and it would be done.

One of the most important things that I’ve ever learned about high-tech communications is to never, ever write an email in anger. Or, to be more precise, never *send* an email in anger. I encourage you to actually write it. It always makes me feel better. But don’t address it, because you want that email to first end up in your Drafts folder and go from there to your Deleted folder. If you address it and mean to press Ctrl+S to Save but manage to press Alt+S to Send by mistake, you might well be looking for work in another industry. If you don’t address it, however, Outlook complains and you can breathe a sigh of relief. Frankly, I wish there was an add-in that protected me even if I ignore my own advice:

Of course, this spouting could only occurred after I’ve violated my own advise, as I’ve often done over the years, always to my determent. When you’re angry, all you care about is making sure that your anger comes through. If I give myself an hour or two to think on it, when I come back to read that angry email, it always makes me flinch. Writing an email once I’m done being angry always yields the nicest, most thoughtful emails that I can write. Those I find to be *much* more effective.

The list of tools and samples from recognized experts across technologies has grown to monstrous proportions at the new DevelopMentor Developer Resources page. Highly recommended.

"The KDE Project has emerged as possibly the first real-world adopter of Project Mono for application development. Mono is an open source alternative to .NET for Unix and Linux desktops, initiated in July 2001 by Ximian Inc." The reason that this is interesting for Windows developers is that with both of the major Linux desktops, i.e. Gnome and KDE, supporting .NET, it's possible that a simple .NET application or component could actually work across Windows, Gnome and KDE. Now .NET becomes the OS. Shades of Java, which failed in this space I know, but still interesting...

Just when you'd thought you're learned everything there was to know about foreach in part 1, I've got more in part 2! This part (the final : ) discusses implementing support for foreach in your own custom types as well as how to patch holes in the framework where they forgot to add foreach support. Enjoy.

Ian Griffiths and Chris Sells "Unresponsive programs are extremely frustrating to use. Applications that sometimes freeze for a moment are a source of much irritation, especially if they don't provide any feedback on what they are doing, or how long it is likely to be before they start responding again. This behaviour can be particularly common among applications that use remote facilities such as Web services. This article describes how to maintain responsiveness in .NET Windows Forms rich client applications, even when invoking potentially long-running Web services, by using multiple threads."

Shawn Wildermuth and Chris Sells "In the .NET Framework, rich clients can bring database servers to their knees, just like Web-based applications. But with the disconnected nature of ADO.NET, your rich clients can manipulate and analyze database data without impacting the database server. Once you have the data in the rich client, you can do high-performance analysis of the data—including sorting, filtering, and querying—without expensive server calls. In this article we will show you how to use DataSet, DataView, and XmlDataDocument to make your rich clients work with database data in a disconnected way."