Firstly, Scott & Vivian had a new (as yet unnamed) baby girl.  Go say congratulations.

Development

• Apparently Adobe’s new Photoshop CS3 was developed using agile methodology with great success.
• Scott Hanselman throws down the challenge for the Ultimate Developer Rig
• Scott Guthrie has an extensive post on some new Orcas features: Automatic Properties, Object Initializers, and Collection Initializers.  Automatic properties, such a simple change but will save so much redundant coding  Also, extension methods rock!
• Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud looks like it may have some serious potential for small-med developers.
• .NET 2.0 makes custom configuration section handlers even easier
• Angus Locan recons Javascript development in Orcas is great

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WordPress have just (read: finally!) released the public WordPress Plugin Directory where you can download all the plugins that have been submitted to the development plugin site wp-plugins.org.

Plugins now have a permanent download link, because the directory always takes the latest version and links straight to the download file.  It also provides stats on downloads over time. Brilliant!

From the post, here are the benefits to plugin developers:

• Exposure to the millions of people who visit WordPress.org every month.
• Free SVN hosting for GPL plugin development at wp-plugins.org. (Like always.)
• Automatic download packages and free hosting of those.
• Statistics about how many people are using and downloading your plugins.
• Prominent links to your homepage, and the ability to specify a Paypal donation link from your plugin page.

Here’s a link to all my plugins on the directory.  This is so very great.  Thanks to Matt & his team for getting this up & running.

JetBrains have released the first EAP version of ReSharper 3.0.  According to the 3.0 Roadmap, the 3.0 release is going to be mostly about adding in VB.NET support for ReSharper.  There is a full list of changes for this build available here.

VB specific changes:

• Rename works in Visual Basic
• The following refactorings work in Visual Basic:
  • Rename
  • Move type to another file
  • Copy type
  • Move static members
  • Introduce variable
• Live templates work in Visual Basic (not all macros work; no bundled templates)
• Type name completion (Control+Alt+Space) works in Visual Basic
• Smart code completion (Control+Shift+Space) works in Visual Basic

Non-VB specific changes:

• TO-DO Explorer (try ReSharper -> Windows -> To-do Explorer)
• Solution-wide error analysis (enable it by checking the ReSharper -> Options -> Highlighting -> Analyze whole solution checkbox)
• Automatic member reordering (configured at ReSharper -> Options -> Member Order; configuration UI is plain XML for now as the options are not finalized yet)
• More context actions and quickfixes
• Suggestions
  • Make field read-only
  • Make parameter type more specific
• XAML is supported (to the extent of recognizing symbols declared in XAML files and resolving some references; more will come in future builds)

Download here.  I’d highly recommend installing this in a Virtual PC image if you use your machine for development normally. I’m using the Orcas CTP image, that way I get to test two things at once. 

Microsoft has released service pack 2 for Windows 2003.  There’s a summary of what’s new on this TechNet article, and a full list of updates here.  There’s a marketing promo for installing the service pack, the most interesting points of this release for me are:

• Utility improvements
  Making common tasks easier, SP2 introduces customer-driven improvements to the Domain Controller Diagnostics tool (DCDIAG) and MS Configuration (MSCONFIG) tool. SP2 also has an updated Access Control List (ICACLS) program to allow for greater flexibility when backing up Access Control Lists.
• Management tools made easier
  SP2 includes the Microsoft Management Console 3.0 (MMC 3.0). MMC provides a framework that unifies and simplifies day-to-day system management tasks on Windows by providing common navigation, menus, toolbars, and workflow across diverse tools. MMC tools (called snap-ins) can be used to administer networks, computers, services, applications and other system components. MMC does not perform administrative functions, but hosts a variety of Windows and non-Microsoft snap-ins that do.
• Performance improvements
  Service Pack 2 offers performance improvements for Windows Server 2003 running as a Virtual Server guest under high Advanced Processor Interrupt Controller (APIC) rates. It also improves SQL Server performance under intensive workloads. Both of these improvements lead to more efficient data processing.

I was reading Nick Bradbury’s blog the other day & he had a post on RSS Good Practices: Provide Alternate Content When Embedding Video where he said

Lately I’ve noticed a lot of feeds that contain embedded videos which fail to provide alternate content for readers who can’t view the videos.  For example, a number of feeds use the HTML <embed> tag to embed video objects but neglect to include <noembed> sections.  The end result is a less-than-optimal experience for many people …

… A more user-friendly solution would be to include a <noembed> section that contains a thumbnail image of the video which links to the actual video

This is an important thing to consider, especially for people who provide a full-text RSS feed.  Unless someone wants to comment (or read the comments) there’s not often a reason for people to leave their feed reader and actually load up my website.  But if I’ve embedded video in a post, they can’t see it.  And if it’s come from YouTube or a similar service, they simply won’t see anything because YouTube doesn’t provide a <noembed> section in its code. Neither does Google Video, Soapbox (it does have a HTML link back by default though) or GameVideos.  This is a real shame, because it would be trivial for them to do so & it would make the user experience much better, not to mention increase their click-through rate.

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Finally got my internet connection back up!

Development

• Following on from all that Fizz-Buzz discussion last week, Phil Haack looks as recursion vs using stacks and why recursion isn’t always the best solution.
• Jeff Atwood looks at using Amazon’s S3 service for hosting images to reduce bandwidth and finds the great S3Fox Organizer for FireFox.
• FreshBooks, the best invoicing solution I’ve found, has just announced that they’ve joined with Basecamp to make online organising of tasks and projects even easier.  Signup here & I get a kickback!
• The Google Webmaster Central Blog has a post up on the correct use of the site: command and how it will be changing in the near future.

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