New and Notable 111

Sipping the first cup of coffee, ah yes, there's a possibility I'll be awake soon...Coffee is God's gift to fathers with three year old girls...

Windows Vista

• The big news is a major new release of Vista, Build 5472 is available now on Connect and I believe its good enough to make a public release on MSDN

Extreme Programming/Agile

• I'm thrilled to see my good friend and Agile Guru Jim Shore's announcement about his first fully-accredited XP course!! Jim is a consultant on my team and he can make your organization go wicked fast and produce great software too. Notice, "XP course", not Agile.
• Interview with Andy Hunt (of Pragmatic Programmers) on thier new book, Practices of an Agile Developer
• TDD Worst Practice: Test Driven Debugging; I hate when people do this and say they are doing TDD. I've said it once, I'll say it again; if you are spending time in the debugger for logic and business verification, you are wasting your companies money and time. Write a test. The debugger is only for very weird, intractable exceptional situations where there is no other recourse. If you see every testing situation this way, well you need to learn about TDD-)

CLR

• Greg Young continues his exceptional blogging at a level that excites me with Performance: String Reverse. I better get back to my CLR Internals blogging before Greg blows me off the scene-))

Indigo/WCF/SOA

• Fellow Codebetter blogger Steve Herbert continues with Asynchronous Web Service Calls - The Truth Behind the Begin...End...Functions Part 2

Tools/Community

• Microsoft has aquired SysInternals. I'm both thrilled and scared. Obviously they are buying the talents of Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell, both of which know Windows Internals better than, well, most of the Windows team-). I'm scared for what will happen to the best free tools on the planet and frankly tools that must be installed with every new or repaved system. I'd advise you to go download them now while you still can.
• As both Scott and I have said, Mike Gunderloy is the supreme master of these kind of posts, and some of us are just mere immitators, so if you are reading this and for some strange reason not subscribed to Larkware, click here and make sure you are. These next few items come courtsey of Mike's The Daily Grind 931:
• SourceGear Vault has just shipped 3.5
• TeamPrise 1.1 Client has just shipped with "The most notable features added to version 1.1 are support for the NTLM version 2 authentication scheme and Universal Binary support for Mac OS X."
• Also see my buddy Eric Sink's post on the above 2. Congrats!!
• SharpDevelop2 has just hit its 2.0 Final Release. I must say that I didn't take this open-source IDE very seriously in its V1, but in work for a book project I looked at V2 and it's pretty hot