First it was the Halo 3 review (which I can’t agree or disagree with yet because I’m still stuck on level one) which a Wii zealot forwarded to me because he likes to send me links to negative portrayals of anything MS-related (like that’s a challenge to find : ), then it was the BioShock review (a game I never figured out the cool part of), then his POV on the console wars (I’m proudly a member of the frat-boy demographic!) and finally it was the Tomb Raider Anniversary review (a game I haven’t played since v1 and preferred the Apple ][+ equivalent) which had me laughing out loud.

Agree with him or not, you gotta appreciate Yahtzee’s style.

After programming with MFC (a lot!) and writing the ATL book, it was *very* difficult for me to live in a world without the source code to figure out how something was working. All of us have since moved over to Lutz’s most excellent Reflector, but that’s still no substitute for actually stepping in and now ScottGu has announced that we’ll have the ability to browse and debug with the .NET library source code, integrated into VS2008:

Wahoo!

Save yourself the Suzy whoever and read this instead:

1. Be humble
2. Take calculated risks
3. Have an emergency fund
4. Mix it up
5. It’s the portfolio, stupid
6. Average is the new best
7. Practice patience
8. Don’t time the market
9. Be a cheapskate
10. Don’t follow the crowd
11. Buy low
12. Invest abroad
13. Keep perspective
14. Just do it
15. Borrow responsibly
16. Talk to your spouse
17. Exit gracefully
18. Pay only your share
19. Give wisely
20. Keep money in its place

Following this advice will put you in the top 20% of investors in the world.

Programming WPF

By Ian Griffiths and Chris Sells

Order Yours Today!

Buy Programming WPF, 2nd edition today!

Table of Contents

• Foreword (Don Box)
• Foreword (ChrisAn)
• Preface
• 1: Hello, Avalon
• 2: Applications & Settings
• 3: Layout
• 4: Input
• 5: Controls
• 6: Simple Data Binding
• 7: Binding to List Data
• 8: Styles
• 9: Control Templates
• 10: Windows & Dialogs
• 11: Navigation
• 12: Resources
• 13: Graphics
• 14: Documents
• 15: Printing
• 16: Animation & Media
• 17: 3D
• 18: Custom Controls
• A: XAML
• B: Interoperability
• C: Multithreaded Programming
• D: WPF Base Types
• E: Silverlight (by Shawn Wildermuth)

Samples

Code samples

John Osborn of O’Reilly and Associates had this to say in my morning email:

“Congratulations, guys. The book is printed and shipping! Just got my copy this morning and it looks great. A very substantial body of work, to say the least.

“Thanks for all of your hard work on this project. Now to crank up the PR machine and make sure no book shelf is without a copy.”

Wahoo!

Shawn Wildermuth has prepared a v0.8 release of Genghis that includes a bunch of stuff that the folks that put the v0.6 release together dropped. The v0.8 release has all the good stuff from the v0.5 release and all the new stuff from the v0.6 release in a .NET 2.0 package.

Shawn’s really done all the work for Genghis since I came to Microsoft. Thanks, Shawn.

For structural typing fans (and they'll be more of you over time -- trust me), David Meyer has posted a duck typing library for .NET. There are many reasons this is cool, but in summary, it allows for many of the dynamic features of languages like Python and Ruby to used used in any .NET language. Very cool.