Every now and then I have people who want to know what books I recommend in regards to IT and Software. My list tends to change over time, so I plan on keeping this up to date. I'll be posting this link on the home page, so feel free to check back any time. 

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture  - Martin Fowler Great book with great patterns for enterprise architecture.	Head First Design Patterns Good intro to design patterns.
The Pragmatic Programmer Great book for those who like to program but what some more direction on the ways of great software development.	Refactoring to Patterns Learn how to refactor your code into patterns.
Working Effectively With Legacy Code New to unit testing? Having problems with how to understand and test old code? READ THIS BOOK. This book helps any developer understand "hand-me-down" code. :)	Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C# Can't be a book written by Robert C. Martin like this one. All around goodness.
xUnit Test Patterns You know how to unit test? But what about all of these edge cases? How about testing sending emails? How to test file handling?	Framework Design Guidelines A great resource for someone who is attempting to write a framework for a team. This is not the end-all-be-all, but it is a good resource.
Code Complete 2 A must read for any developer.	Agile Software Development with Scrum Get a grip on the development process with Scrum.
Software Estimation Another classic from McConnell. If you need to learn how to estimate better, pick up this bad-boy. If you're agile or waterfall, this can help.	Release It! Having trouble getting things out the door? This book will help guide you. Completely mind altering book.
Practices of an Agile Developer Excellent book on agile development.	Learning WCF If you're interested in SOA, then you need to learn WCF. This book helps you ramp up and get dirty quick.
Agile Web Development With Rails Again, in my quest to learn new languages, I decided to whip up some web apps with Rails. Very slick, very nice. If you want to learn how to build web apps with Ruby check out this book.	Everyday Scripting with Ruby In my quest to learn a new language every year, I picked up a copy of this book. It has been outstanding in helping a .NET architect become a dynamic language convert.

I've been using GMail since it first came out. I remember getting it and having TWO invites to send to friends. This is back when Gmail invites were going for $100.00 a pop.

Through the years its been a great service and I've love every single second of it. Its truly the best at keeping track of conversations, and this works wonders for insanely active groups like ALT.NET.

Over the last couple of months its seemed that Gmail has gotten progressively slower and slower. Through using Fiddler I was able to determine that larger chunks of JavaScript was coming down the wire. The amount of AJAX and DHTML going on behind the scenes brings Gmail to a crawl.

How to overcome it?

On the top right hand side of your page, click "Older Version".

This will load the UI without all the bells and whistles and its about 5 times as fast in regards to response times.

Unfortunately there is not an option in the preferences to make this stick. As soon as I log in, I immediately click "Older Version". Alternatively you can also switch to "Standard HTML View" at the bottom. But with this, you don't get any smooth AJAX. Its regular HTML page post backs.

At Tech-Ed last week they offered the ASP.NET 3.5 Beta Exam. The beta exam is not available in Phoenix, so I decided to give it a whirl on Thursday. I didn't plan to take the test so I didn't have a lot of time to review (maybe 30 minutes of review) and I just dove in and took it.

Normally MS Exams have about ~40 questions and they take a couple of hours for me to complete. I was expecting the same from this one...

Nope. This exam had 70 questions. Wowza. I'm assuming the reason for this is one of these scenarios:

• This is a beta exam and they need to weed out some questions
• They have bumped up the number of questions in the exam

So how hard was it?

Well ... it's a little harder than the 2.0 version. A lot of it is repeated from 2.0, but this new beta exam threw me for a loop in a few areas.

The areas that threw me for a loop were:

• WCF Integration Questions (I'm very well vested in WCF, but I just was not expecting it in this exam - there's a WCF exam for that!)
• Deep AJAX Questions (Don't do much AJAX stuff, lets be honest... JavaScript is not my favorite language)
• Miscellaneous Mobile Questions

The main thing about MS exams is that they are LONG and tricky. Sometimes you'll get asked a question and all four answers look right. LOOK VERY CLOSE. You'll see that maybe one word is spelled wrong, or the line's are swapped, etc. They will confuse you. But the main thing to do is be alert. The test will wear on you, its long. By the 2.5 hours in, you'll get tired of the test and you'll want to just hurry through it, don't. Just take your time.

So How Did I do?

Since its a beta exam, I won't know for about 2-3 weeks. They send your results in the mail. I feel like I passed, but we'll see when the results come in.

... and no, I didn't take any pills before or after... :) I'm just joshin' ya'll.

This past weekend I presented the topic "Intro to Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control" at the Phoenix Desert Code Camp. A big thank you goes out to everyone who attended. It was such a popular topic that it actually moved up to the largest room in the conference location, the Theater at UAT! Thanks again everyone!

At the bottom of this post are the resources from this presentation.

Resolution from Error During the Presentation

For those of you were present when I ran into an issue with this "DynamicMethod" error, I have figured out the issue. It's a bug in Unity. It looks like its been fixed and should be available in the next release.

I was able to work around this issue by moving the Dependency attribute into the Interface. I have updated the code in the download below to reflect this.

Presentation Resource Download

Full Solution Download (900K)

PowerPoint Presentation

You can also view the presentation online - located here.