.farshid sedghi’s personal blog.

Mike Gunderloy is one of my favorite writers and up until today it amazes me how much he churns out in terms of reviews, tip and tricks, articles, blogs, newsletters and now a new book and still do work on the side and have a family. I specially enjoy the daily Grinds and his developerCentral newsletters (which now is a blog)… and I saw that he wanted his book to be reviewed and since I have the book and have read most parts of it, I thought I would thank him through this.

The Coder To Developer is very well written book in the sense that like everything else Mike writes, it is practical and to the point. In this book he covers many things that any developer that wants to improve and exapand their experience thinks about. Things like, how can I organize and plan my projects for best outcome, how about documentation, how should that be done, or logging what my application does, what are best practices there. Anyways, to give a brief bullet point review, Mike brings up these point in this .NET development centric book (I am saying .NET because the tools he review are pretty much for .NET development ones).

So in essence he talks about:

· How you should organize and plan your projects

· Tools, from IDE to addins, Macros and many other development related tools that will come handy

· Documentation checklist and how to create it

· Configuration mgmnt (source control)

· Code generation, why, how and what tools can be used

· Strategies on packaging your software for installation

· And a number of other tips and suggestions on development related matters

Very good and practical book and I recommend it very much.

The last week, we have been working a lot on releasing a new website here at the Bahá’í World Centre and we are almost there..another day or two (knock on wood) and it will be out the door…stay tuned for the announcement…

Last night Devin and I met up with Rick and his lovely wife Elisabeth. I met Rick the first time in Seattle back in august, so it was nice to see him here in Haifa, now that they are here on pilgrimage. We went for dinner at Fatoush, an Arab place with really yummy food.

On other notes, it’s funny at first when I moved here to Israel, it was really weird to start working Sunday morning and have 1.5 days weekend, and this Friday I was off and nowadays I have gotten so used to it, that it will probably feel odd to sleep in on Sundays once I leave Haifa.

Two interesting links I came across today was The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities and Google’s Suggest which is nice usage of iframes…and thinking about it, this is nothing new, just that no website I have used/created has ever used this feature of it.

The search has been long. For a while now I have contemplated whether if I should start bloggin’ or not and still I can’t say I have decided fully. why? a few reason, probably the same that you have thought about yourself…however in my case I think the sole biggest reason is that I don’t find it easy enough. For reading blogs, I use newsGator and I really like it since it’s integrated with outlook and I dont have to fire up a seperate app for it. But posting, I would like something similar, basically I want to be able to do most things I can do on the website in terms of posting from within Outlook.

There is a lot of talk on discussion groups about it now that spaces.msn.com has been released but the only real thing I have found so far is on Dare Obasanjo’s blog and from the looks of it nothing is in sight yet, so we will see.

On misc notes, I am reading Joel on Software and I am enjoying it very much. At first it made me raise my eyebrow for the informal language he has used to write the book, but I realise now that a lot of the development stuff that can be boring to read are actually enjoyable to read about here cuz of this fact. Anyways, really good book..

Also, ma boy, DeVo has created his space here too. I have been trying to talk him into this whole blog thing for a while now and it seems like he is starting to come around…

I heard about this beta of spaces on MSN and thought I would give it a try…lets see how it works out and if I will have the time and won’t get lazy and actually blog once in a while. Will try and set up a link from my first blog on http://farshid.sedghi.org later on…