If you need to get a grip of a particular Microsoft technology and have no idea how to start learning in a structured way, you should check out the Microsoft Developer Guidance Maps. It provides a detailed overview of all relevant topics related to the different key technologies and provides direct links to all tutorial material about it (be it videos, hands-on labs or what not).

The Microsoft Developer Catalog is a map of resources for developers. It's a catalog of pointers to useful code samples, how tos, videos, etc. for the Microsoft application platform. We're using this catalog as a way to model, prototype, and test ways to find, organize, and share developer guidance in a meaningful way. As we refine the organizational patterns of the content we can build commonality between the technologies. This commonality is what we are referring to as a "Simple IA" where IA is information architecture. Think of it as a simple way to look at groups of content.

Doing some Java for a project now. I sure miss Environment.Newline...


public static String newline = System.getProperty("line.separator");


Came across an amazingly interesting series of lectures on Functional Programming on Channel 9. In the 13 part C9 Lectures: Functional Programming Fundamentals, Dr. Erik Meijer, one of the most colorful Microsoft employees, takes us into the fascinating and somewhat alien world of Haskell.

I will discuss my thoughts on each episode as I follow along. Doing some Haskell gets me well outside of my comfort zone, so I might even have something worth reading to say about if :)

The first episode takes a short history tour through the origins of functional programming, talking about languages like ML, Miranda, Cecil and other obscurities. He kind of lost me when he rushed through SKI Combinators, but the gallery of languages and what influence on modern languages they had was pretty cool.

My eyes glazed over a little when I saw the Quicksort in Haskell, the same way they did at about page 6 of Knuth... I hope things will make more sense after seeing the next lecture... That, or I really should stick to LOB applications :P

In this excellent four-partShunting Yard Algorithm in C#, TDD Style videos, Brett goes through quite a few red-green-refactor cycles in implementing this alogrithm to transform an expression into the Polsih notation.

If you've never done TDD, this is great demo of its value. If you've done TDD, it might be less interesting but informative nonetheless!

Because I'm going through a MS Partner Academy training called 'Developing .NET Applications With Visual Studio 2010 for Technical Pre-Sales Professionals', I come across a lot of stuff I hadn't really looked at before.

One of those is F#. I made a blogpost about it working with WPF quite a while back, but never really dove into it.

So, yesterday I saw this amazing webcast by Luca Bolognese called An Introduction to Microsoft F#. Even though Luca has 'an outrageuous accent' the talk is quite informative and pretty funny. It also gives a nice overview of F# and how/why it's used.