Brian On Software

This is the second post on "This Week’s Geek Links".

I’ll start out by recommending you to watch these two videos which have nothing to do with software development, but everything to do with courage, humility and living. The normal structure of this post follow the links to these videos.

Highly recommended to watch this week

• "How To Achieve Your Childhood Dreams"
  Carnegie Mellon University Professor Randy Pausch gives a full lecture at CMU on how to achieve your childhood dreams, and why it’s totally acceptable to dream beyond limits. It is such a unique and inspiring moment in his life because Prof. Pausch has cancer and doesn’t have much time too live (he was diagnosed with the disease on August 2007, and the doctors told him that he had about 7 months to live). WOW! It feels so good to see a human being so full of life given these circumstances. He surely affected my way of thinking about life in more than one way! One thing about his lecture that I’ll never forget is the "brick wall of life"…you’ll understand better when you see this video.
• "Time Management"
  Once again, Professor Randy Pausch gives another talk in front of a full auditorium at University of Virginia. His talk is on time management, and what better person could give a talk like that than someone who doesn’t have much time in his hands? Prof. Pausch gives pragmatic ways and useful tips on how to better manage your time, optimize your results and minimize stress in a simple, intelligent and funny manner. I pray that he’ll have many more years to live. Feel free to share it amongst your friends and co-workers.

Blog Posts

• "ASP.NET MVC Example Application over Northwind with the Entity Framework"
  Brad Abrams writes about these new technologies from Microsoft. If you have VS2008, ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions, ADO.NET Entity Framework Tools DEC 07 Preview and the Northwind sample database. The article itself is well presented and partitioned with lots of screenshots. Not a bad intro!

Articles

• "How Difficult is it to Write a Compiler?"
  Laurence Tratt wrote a very simple article focusing on the higher-level steps required to build a compiler in its most general approach. I have never wrote a compiler before but his article sure gave me a little push to try to one of these days. Laurence describes how most of the ‘popular’ compilers in use today are using a set of three basic stages: 1) creating a parse tree from an a source code input, 2) generate an abstract syntax tree from the parse tree and, 3) turn the abstract syntax tree into object code. If your next programming challenge is to design a compiler (maybe for the fun of creating one?), this article will surely help you on the way.
• "How to Use Design Patterns: A Conversation with Erich Gamma"
  In this three-part article, Bill Venners talks with Erich gamma on what he thinks people should actually do with patterns? What should their attitude be about patterns? How can people use patterns to do a better job? What is the real value? He also dives into the approach that was taken to write the Design Patterns book and how it was influenced by Christopher Alexander’s work on construction/building design.
• "A Guided Tour of WPF"
  Josh Smith has published a very informative series of articles that will no doubt help you to learn a lot about WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) if you’re starting out with that new technology. At work, we’re currently migrating an old VB 6 application to a .NET version with WPF. We were thinking of going with GDI+ for drawing and managing the UI elements, but after reading Josh’s articles, it is without a doubt that we’ll jump on the WPF train. His articles and the MSDN documentation concerning WPF are a good combination to properly learn and use WPF in your .NET applications!
• "The WPF Thought Process"
  Written by the same author of the "A Guided Tour or WPF", this article shows you the inner thoughts a novice developer to WPF goes through when tackling a UI-centric problem. At the end, it really shows the power and simplicity of WPF over other UI technologies such as GDI+.

Podcasts

• "Interview with Erich Gamma"
  Software Engineering Radio interviews Erich Gamma, one member of the GoF and distinguished engineer at IBM, on the Eclipse IDE architecture core and everything else related to Eclipse. He also shares with us how and why the JUnit tool came to be (very interesting stuff), as well as his new project and passion: the Jazz project, a technology for collaborative software development.

Screencasts/Webcasts

• "Kent Beck on Implementation Patterns"
  InfoQ interviews software crafstman Kent Beck on the subject of his new book, Implementation Patterns (which you can read a sample chapter here), and also talks about what it takes to be Agile and what it really means to be Agile. There’s also a good conversation around software patterns and why there an important concept to understand in software development. I really enjoyed this interview and most importantly the last thing Kent said: "And that’s what I think: patterns will make a difference when people write about stuff they care about". The video is half an hour long.

News

• "Microsoft bids $44.6 billion to buy Yahoo"
  Wow, now that’s a lot of money…I guess there’s more to software than 1’s and 0’s…