Friday Links #49
02 May 2009Windows 7 RC release date confirmed - vnunet.com – Looks like May 5th is the day. Other reports put the final release sometime from late August to October based on past releases.
Chad Campbell’s Blog : Silverlight - 7 Twitter Accounts I Follow - Here are the 7 Twitter accounts, in alphabetical order, that I have followed related to Silverlight and have found valuable.
The Silverlight Blog – Home - ‘Getting Started with Silverlight’ is a series of 11 videos and hands-on materials that introduces you to the concepts, skills, and applications you need when starting down the road of building your first Silverlight application.
Windows XP Mode coming to Windows 7, could be a game-changer - One big strike against Vista was the fact that some programs which worked just fine in Windows XP just wouldn’t run properly. Not even after playing with compatibility mode options. Microsoft has, however, come up with a brilliant solution for Windows 7 that could do wonders for Windows 7 enterprise adoption.
| [The Big Book of BitTorrent: The Torrent Guide for Everyone | MakeUseOf.com](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-big-book-of-bittorrent-free-pdf/) - In 28 illustrated pages, Saikat Basu from The Things I Do takes newcomers by the hand and guides them in their first steps. Initiates, but also the more experienced users get their fair share of information. |
Lifehacker - Weekend Project: Teach yourself a magic trick – Fun - Impress your friends and family with ten different easy to learn magic tricks this weekend, all taught and demonstrated in video format. Some of these are really simple and yet totally convincing.
| [Five Reasons Why Designers are Switching to Mac | How-To | Smashing Magazine](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/26/five-reasons-why-designers-are-switching-to-mac/) - It’s no secret that there has been a growing trend in recent years toward developers, especially of the web variety, choosing a Mac as their main dev machine. In this two-part series, we will examine some of the reasons behind this trend. |
Novelties - Eyeglasses With a Digital Dimension - NYTimes.com - Ever imagine that eyeglasses or contact lenses could deliver digital images directly from a smartphone to the retina? Contact lens created by Babak A. Parviz and a team at the University of Washington in Seattle offers built-in electronics to create displays.
CodeProject: LINQ to World Wide Web (www) - A different flavor of LINQ. - ‘LINQ to www’ is LINQ to query data from complying (REST like)web sites.
Display Tuner - Manage your monitor settings with ease! - Display Tuner is much more convenient than MagicTune, NaViSet or similar software.
Introducing Html Utilities for Silverlight - The primary target for this library is someone who: Develops software in Silverlight; Uses the Html DOM libraries in Silverlight
Shawn Wildermuth - Silverlight 3 Hidden Features: TextBox.CaretBrush – Not being able to set the brush color of in Silverlight 2.0 caused us more problems than you might imagine. Glad it’s fixed.
Writing unit tests can be fun at Mark Needham - When I first started working at ThoughtWorks I used to think that writing tests was boring and that it was much more fun writing production code. A couple of years have gone by since then and I think I actually get more enjoyment out of writing tests these days.
The 7 Phases of Unit Testing - Karl Seguin - CodeBetter.Com – Funny because it’s true for the most part. I think I’m at phase 6.
Mozilla delivers Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, boosts speed – I’ve downloaded and it’s better than 3.1. Still find myself using Chrome more for some reason.
| [Yahoo’s Zimbra Desktop 1.0 released | The Download Blog](http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10229060-12.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5) - Yahoo acquired in 2007 and held onto for about a year before development workpicked up again in earnest. Now, more than a year later, Zimbra Desktop 1.0 has shaken off its beta and is available as a free download for Windows and Mac. |
Windows Vista SP2 RTM + Windows Vista SP1 Blocker Tool Removed - Windows Vista Team Blog – I’m a Vista fan but I admit that it feels like too little too late at this point.
| [Wolfram | Alpha: Our First Impressions – ReadWriteWeb](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wolframalpha_our_first_impressions.php) - Where Alpha exceeds, is in the presentation of its “search” results. When asked for how many internet users there are in Europe, for example, Alpha returned not just the total number, but also various plots and data for every country (apparently Vatican City only has 93 Internet users). |
Singletons vs. Static Classes : LeeDumond.com - Today, I’m musing about Singletons vs. Static Classes – two constructs which appear to accomplish the same task. Or do they?
| [QuakeLive: Quake3 re-incarnated in your browser, completely free | freewaregenius.com](http://www.freewaregenius.com/2009/05/01/quakelive-quake3-re-incarnated-in-your-browser-completely-free/) -Quake III is back! And completely free to play, right here in your web browser. |
Pick of the Week
TestDriven.NET - If you do unit testing, then you want this tool. Takes all the pain out of running and debugging .NET unit tests and coverage reports. Makes for friction free development. Download it now, I’ll wait.