(Almost) all you ever need to know about SQL Server indexes

All in one page too: Brad's Sure Guide to Indexes. Quite a tour-de-force. Read it over lunch, be a better engineer/DBA by the afternoon.

Easy sequence diagrams

Another in the vein of easy UML diagramming tools: Web sequence diagrams provides a quick, dirty and very easy way of generating sequence diagrams using a little DSL.

For example the code:

Alice->Bob: Authentication Request
note right of Bob: Bob thinks about it.
Bob-->Alice: Authentication Response

produces the diagram:

Just as with Balsamiq I like it because I find I can stop worrying about making everything line up prettily and concentrate on the problem I’m trying to solve.

Balsamiq templates for UML

Not a very snappy blog title, but there you go. Rainer Eschen has created some very nice UML templates for the very wonderful Balsamiq Mockups UI wire-framing tool.

It’s not a perfect solution because you can’t import the symbols directly as components (cf. Visio’s shapes), but it’s very nice to have.

Egregious Spaghetti Boxes

The so-smart-it-makes-me-jealous Martin Fowler on Request Stream Mapping and how to use it to get a view into how over-layered your ESB – or any other multi-layered application – might be.

Very cool WPF/XAML add on for Visual Studio

Karl Shifflett has one of the better blogs about WPF and XAML. As a side project he also has created "XAML Power Toys", a Visual Studio add-in that provides a set of great tools for better editing of WPF projects and creating things like data-bound WPF controls.

To quote Karl:

The primary goal of XAML Power Toys is to deliver tools that enable developers to quickly layout and maintain Line of Business Application forms using the UI controls that ship with Visual Studio. 

 

You’ll notice that the below features are business form focused.  This does not limit the use of the software, I’m just providing the current target project type.

Recommended.

Comet: Low-latency solutions to Ajax polling

http://cometdaily.com/ provides a central blog about all things related to Comet, a technology, or really a technique which is intended for Browser based solutions requiring long lasting, low-latency and "server push" techniques. It isn't fully baked yet, but shows a great deal of promise yet.

The About page define Comet like this:

What is Comet
Comet is a set of techniques providing low-latency data transit for the browser. The two most popular techniques, “forever-frame” and “long-polling“, significantly reduce latency over Ajax polling. Comet in the browsers typically requires a web server optimized for large numbers of long-lived HTTP connections, and a JavaScript client to communicate with the Comet server. A number of open source and commercial options exist today.

A Primer on Distributed Version Control Systems

A new kind of version control system (VCS) is rapidly gaining traction. Distributed VCS has seen a lot of excitement and uptake in the Open Source world where developers have a completely disconnected workflow. A workflow that is location and time independent and where developers are often only very loosely cooperating. Traditional VCS with it's commit and branch workflow doesn't quite cut it.

Ok, in the interests of honesty I don't quite grok the details myself yet. But these articles will make you seem like an expert next time someone casually mentions "Git" in conversation. It's either that or they're English and delivering a scorching insult: I leave determining the context to you.

 

"Distributed Version Control Systems: A Not-So-Quick Guide Through"

http://www.infoq.com/articles/dvcs-guide

"What a DVCS gets you (maybe)"

http://www.dehora.net/journal/2008/04/06/what-a-dvcs-gets-you-maybe/

"The Differences Between Mercurial and Git"

http://www.rockstarprogrammer.org/post/2008/apr/06/differences-between-mercurial-and-git/