GuruStop.NET

http://www.101ftb.com/T80G10C780

Five days ago I got a great email from 101 Free Tech Books. Seems the drawing I wrote about is real!!

Yes, I won a FREE print book. Filled in my shipping information yesterday and got the post that confirms my order was being processed. Feels so real! I’m even asked to give testimonials after receiving the book, which I will…

Which Book?

The book I have chosen is “Professional WCF 4: Windows Communication Foundation with .NET 4”. Sounded like a great title!

There is a trick in here. The option for books is only available from my wish list prior to the random drawing. I didn’t pay enough attention to this earlier, so, had a very small wish list of just “sample” books in it. Some of them I already had as ebooks. This was not very right.

I also tried to choose another book, add to my wish list, and go back to choosing again, but, as mentioned, only the books added prior to wining were there. Makes sense though!

You Can Win Too!

Now, I can recommend those people even more! They emphasize completely on showing how real this is, and I seem to believe them so far.

The SVN News

Today I was hanging around GitHub when realized a relatively old news, dated to April 1, 2010, saying they do support SVN.

Announcing SVN Support

Yes, it’s April Fools day. Very funny date to announce anything serious as they admit themselves in an update to the news post, but it DOES work.

Use the same Git clone HTTP URL, just add “svn.” between “http://” and “github.com”:

http://svn.github.com/[user]/[repository]

It even allows you to write changes back to the repository, as announced in the more recent news post, dated May 4, 2010, check it out for the “cavets” (known issues):

Subversion Write Support

That uses the same URL but with HTTPS:

https://svn.github.com/[user]/[repository]

This should work best when you want to get some project for read-only access or very few commits from your side, when this project has a very long history you are not really interested in. Of course you wouldn’t want to use that if you are leading (or a main committer to) a project hosted at GitHub.

Here’s another email from the internal mailing list of Injazat .NET Ninjas (Ninjazat, AKA  as we call ourselves), that I’m sharing with blog readers as well.

Just a place holder, until I move one of my 18 (just discovered the number now – terrifying!) drafts in my Windows Live Writer into a published post, or delete them all!

Subject: [Learning] Some very interesting videos

Some videos from NDC 2009 event (Norwegian Developers Conference 2009) – about software design and related issues:

· NDC Video – Robert Martin – S.O.L.I.D Principles of OO class design

· NDC Video – Robert Martin – Craftsmanship and Ethics

· NDC Video – Robert Martin – Component Principles

· NDC Video – Robert Martin – Clean Code III – Functions

· NDC Video – Michael Feathers – Working Effectively with Legacy Code

· NDC Video – Jeremy D. Miller – Convention Over Configuration

· NDC Video – Michael Feathers – Seven Blind Alleys in Software Design

· NDC Video – Ted Neward – WCF Patterns

· NDC Video: Michael Feathers – Design Sense

For the complete list of videos from this event check videos from:

I was just starting to read the very first pages of the great book "Beautiful Code" (by Andy Oram, Greg Wilson) this morning as a refreshment and as an indirect result to Scott Hanselman‘s list of basic must-read books (although it didn’t include this book – BTW, I read parts of it before, and I don’t remember why I stopped), I had to write this post.

To all of you guys thinking in DDD, TDD, MVC, ASP.NET, shiny AJAX and RIA (Flash/Silverlight) controls, GC, SharePoint, Rails, Python, ORMs (NHibernate, SubSonic, Linq2SQL,…), etc.. etc… Please get back to basics and read the PLAIN OLD C CODE I’m quoting in this post. Hopefully it’s not illegal to quote such!

The code is a VERY simple RegEx (Regular Expression) matching. Some code that you send a pattern and text to match. It returns 1 if the text matches the pattern and 0 otherwise. The pattern domain is a very stripped version of RegEx than only includes:

• c => (Any character) matches any literal character c
• . => (Period) matches any single character
• ^ => matches the beginning of the string (meaning there must be beginning, not empty string)