Wow getting your wisdom teeth pulled has somehow really opened up my schedule and allowed me to get a lot of reading done lately. I recently picked up Refactoring Database: Evolutionary Database Design by Scott W. Ambler and Pramod J. Sadalage This book is part of the Martin Fowler Signature series and it shows. The book had the same format as the others in the series which had a nice constancy and was easy to just pickup and read whenever. I found that the book was well written and that the tradeoffs and implementation strategies were well written and...

Jeremy D. Miller just put up a really good post on some fundamentals. Check out the post here

I got my wisdom teeth taken out on Wednesday and decided to read my new copy of "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" by Michael Feathers. To sum it all up.... I would rather have my wisdom teeth removed than recommend this book to anyone who has any experience with legacy code. I found that the book was a wrapper for Martin Fowlers Refactoring with a lot of buzz words like TDD, SRP, OCP, and more scattered liberally throughout the book without much about applying these ideas to legacy code. I think that if you have read Refactoring that you...

    At the last edmonton user group meeting I finally won something (besides a t-shirt :D). I won a copy of Framework Design Guidelines by Krzysztof Cwalina and Brad Abrams.     I had heard a lot of good things about this book from others but really had no motivation to buy it. The title is way to exciting and if I leave it out girls might be breaking down my door just to touch it (the book you sickos!). I must say that I was pleasantly supprised with the book and definately think it is worth having a read for...

For those of us in the *nix space the whole SCO debacle has been going on for years. They claimed that they bought what was UNIX (UNIX actually does not actually exists as a technology really anymore and is more of a family of products now) and that all sorts of linux distributions stole code from it and were therefore violating copyright infringements. They then seemed to put all of their energy and money into suing distributions of (usually) free. While I can see where they are comming from that it was their code but then they started to sue everyone...

An article was out in the Edmonton Journal this weekend about the current project I am doing part of: http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/cityplus_alberta/story.html?id=11b4ff4f-fd95-495c-a339-5e23ced4de86&k=79586

Derik Whittaker had an interesting post about how to access the GAC as though it were a regular file system called Hacking the GAC. A few interesting and different ways were posted that I had never heard of. The simplest way that I know of is to go start->run and type in c:\windows\assembly\GAC and the cache will open up just like a filesystem. We actually used this on one project where we could only use third party assemblies on the clients network. What we would do was develop locally (because our net connection in the office was way to...