This Week’s Link List (January 21, 2011)

Whew! Friday…made it! Once again, lots of interesting content out there this week. Instead of simply listing a bunch of links, I’m experimenting this week with categorizing some of them. Hopefully, this will help you find stuff that YOU find interesting…enjoy!

• Microsoft officially launched WebMatrix at CodeMash this year. Josh Holmes walks you through keynote in a blog post (or you can just watch the embedded video) and Keith Casey blogs about the good, the bad, and the ugly of the CodeMash event.
  • http://www.joshholmes.com/blog/2011/01/17/its-your-web-the-webmatrix-and-more-launch/
  • http://caseysoftware.com/blog/codemash-2011-recap

• Cal Evans continues his blog series "Six Ways to be a Better Client for Your Developer" with 3 new posts this week:
  • Understand that they (developers) probably know the best solution: http://blog.calevans.com/2011/01/17/six-ways-to-be-a-better-client-for-your-developer-point-2/
  • Don't be sold a solution: http://blog.calevans.com/2011/01/19/six-ways-to-be-a-better-client-for-your-developer-point-3/
  • Don't set deadlines, set milestones: http://blog.calevans.com/2011/01/21/six-ways-to-be-a-better-client-for-your-developer-point-4/

• There were two new posts that follow up on Microsoft's JumpIn! Camp that took place in November:
  • Mark Evans writes about his impressions of day 3: http://www.freelancephp.co.uk/2011/01/15/jump-in-camp-%E2%80%93-sql-server-edition-%E2%80%93-day-3/
  • I published an interview with Ashay Chaudhary, the Program Manager for the SQL Server Driver for PHP and organizer of the JumpIn! Camp (and, yes, by including this in my link list I am being somewhat self-promotional, but I really enjoyed the interview with Ashay and thought he had interesting comments on the camp): http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_swan/archive/2011/01/18/interview-ashay-chaudhary-on-the-sql-server-jumpin-camp.aspx

• Kevin Schroeder, Technology Evangelist at Zend, posted two podcasts from ZendCon 2010: Introducing Zend Framework 2.0 and Unit Testing in Zend Framework 1.8.
  • http://www.eschrade.com/page/zendcon-2010-podcast-introducing-zend-framework-4d34cc09
  • http://www.eschrade.com/page/zendcon-2010-podcast-unit-testing-zend-framework-4d371b1e

• Lists of 5. (This will likely not be a recurring category.)
  • 5 things PHP envies in Java (I didn't know PHP had Java-envy): http://css.dzone.com/articles/5-things-php-envies-java
  • 5 things you may not know about code igniter: http://derekallard.com/blog/post/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-codeigniter/

• Miscellaneous (i.e. categories unto themselves).
  • Chris Hartjes posts "a lesson on the value of actually looking at the source of a third-party library when you are trying to figure something out…": http://www.littlehart.net/atthekeyboard/2011/01/19/smarter-db-migrations-using-zend-framework-and-doctrine-1-2/
  • Chris Cornutt posts a second article on unit testing, this time diving a bit deeper into PHPUnit: http://blogs.sitepoint.com/2011/01/20/be-more-asssertive-getting-to-know-phpunits-assertions/
  • Vikram Vaswani posts part 2 of a series on using the Stack Exchange API with PHP: http://devzone.zend.com/article/12943-Using-the-Stack-Exchange-API-with-PHP-part-2
  • This article about how to be organized is a bit long, but it made me laugh at one point: When describing what to do if you are managing a site with 100,000,000+ pages, the author says "You're Microsoft. You should know what you're doing by now.": http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/19/cleaning-up-the-mess-how-to-keep-your-coding-workflow-organized/
  • Matthew Weier O'Phinney describes some strage behavior in the new SplPriorityQueue feature in PHP 5.3: http://weierophinney.net/matthew/archives/253-Taming-SplPriorityQueue.html

• Just for fun. (Did Bill Gates really say "640K [of computer memory] ought to be enough for anybody"?) http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/01/24-gigabytes-of-memory-ought-to-be-enough-for-anybody.html

Have a great weekend!

-Brian

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