Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Morning Coffee 109

• I forgot to add a number to my last morning coffee post. However, after extensive research, I have determined that it was #108. So thing are continuing as usual today with #109. On the other hand, do you really want development and architecture opinions from a guy who can barely count? :)
• The finalists in the Dream-Build-Play contest have been announced. I haven't played any of them yet (some are available for download) but they several of them sure look good.
• And speaking of gaming, MS announced an Xbox 360 price drop yesterday. So if you want to get in on some of the XNA action, here's your chance (or you could just build for your PC - take your pick).
• Finally on the gaming front, if you're not busy Monday you can watch the first day of Gamefest 2007 online. Get the scoop on XNA 2.0 as well as the new XNA networking support. I, alas, am busy Monday so I'll have to catch it on demand.
• On to, you know, actual geek stuff things. Scott Guthrie seems to have retired his LINQ to SQL series and moved on to LINQ to XML. He shows how to build an RSS reader application with LINQ to XML. An oldie demo, but a goodie.
• Wanna learn F#, there's a whole site of samples up on CodePlex. (via Don Syme)
• Jeff Atwood is annoyed at how many different products you have to install to get a current & complete setup of VS 2005. Of course, MS shipped two parts of that stack since VS05 shipped (TFS & DBPro), three service packs (VS05 SP1, SQL 05 SP2 and DBPro SR1) and a major OS upgrade (VS Vista update). Doesn't the same thing happen with any shipping product after a few years? BTW, if this is such a huge hassle, I wonder why Jeff doesn't create a slipstreamed VS installer?
• Udi Dahan has a great post on estimation where he claims "Developers don’t know how to estimate." No argument, but the way he phrases it sounds like it's the developer's fault they suck at estimation. It's not. Developing - by definition - is building something you've never built before. Is it any surprise we suck at estimating how long it will take us to do something we've never done before?