Friday, December 7, 2007

Just Say No To Software Development Reference Books!

Someone asked today if I could recommend any TFS books. "I don't have any books- I have Google," I replied. This was sort of a flippant answer but it's the truth. I didn't know how prescient this statement was until I ran into a problem later in the day.

I've recently been working on bidirectional communication between Sharepoint 3.0 and TFS 2005. Toward the end of the project I ran into a problem relating a TFS display name (such as 'John Doe') to a Sharepoint account name (think 'DOMAIN\doejoh'). After a little research I developed a theory that the IGroupSecurityService interface was going to play an integral part in my quest for account names. I plugged 'TFS IGroupSecurityService' into Google and out popped the exact answer that I was looking for. I'm not a Google cheerleader and I love books, but how could I have found this information in some overpriced, overlong book from WROX, Apress, O'Reilly, etc.?

I read a lot of books about history. I think that it's fascinating that we as a species have quite suddenly developed this ability to have all of this information available in an easily searchable format.

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Most Exciting Visual Studio 2008 Feature


There's a lot of talk about LINQ, WPF, WCF, etc., but my favorite new Visual Studio 2008 / .NET 3.5 feature so far is the 'Remove Unused Usings' function.