Good stuff

Once again I have a list of items flagged for comment in Bloglines but at least this time I have an excuse: “We were on a break!”.

First is a link from Brad Wilson to where Bruce Eckel writes about how the “Hyper enthusiasts” of the Java world have moved on to Ruby. Bruce makes some good points. Personally I’d be pretty happy if all persuasuion of “hyper enthusiast” were to vanish overnight, IMHO they just get in the way, distort the picture and encourage bad decisions…

Adi Oltean writes about how you can ease the migration of Windows systems from physical hardware to virtual machines by using NTBackup. This is likely to be even more useful now that VMWare have released a free server product.

Jeff Atwood talks about avoiding unecessary dependencies. I’m with him 100% on this one.

Cory Foy points out that, in his experience, Unit Tests Are Free in TDD. I’ve not measured my TDD projects in this way but his numbers match up to my gut feeling (for what that’s worth ;) ).

Joel deVilla links to What Works in Software Development. Useful, sensible stuff. Read it.

Greggm shows us how to make it slightly easier to debug optimised release builds with judicious use of a pragma to turn off optimisation for small sets of code.

Martin Fowler clearly defines “constructor initialisation”; this may provide some useful arguments to help wean people off of the evil that is two stage construction.

Matt Davey posts some code to embed Python in C++ using boost::python.

Udi Dahan tells us of his First Principle of Design. Seems sensible to me, but then once you get into TDD you start to want everything to be as loosely coupled as possible…

Nish points us to some code for a managed smart pointer for using native objects in managed code. This is something that I was looking into a few weeks ago when I was doing some C++/CLI investigations…

And finally, “I attack the kobold wearing the headdress made of human ears”. A must view video for anyone who plays or used to play role playing games. I’m sure we weren’t this bad ;)