Windows Developer Power Tools is up on Amazon and ready for pre-orders. The book hasn’t been released yet (it’s currently slated for November 1st), but it can be pre-ordered. You can find some sample chapters on Jim’s page for the book. The book was written by James Avery and Jim Holmes with a variety of contributing authors (including myself). I’m obviously biased, but I love what I’ve seen of the book up to this point.
There are a lot of great freeware and open-source tools out there and the book helps you navigate, evaluate, and see them in action based on the current task(s) that you are trying to solve. I wish this book would have been written a couple of years ago because it could have saved me countless hours in discovering tools and libraries that would have been a tremendous help.
It has been interesting going through the process of submitting articles for the book and reviewing others. In the process of helping do some light-weight reviewing I’ve learned about a lot of interesting tools, libraries, and concepts that I hadn’t previously been exposed to (and I spend a lot of time playing with development tools).
Simply put, this book is long overdue. Although there is a lot of content, it does a great job of giving you enough information to determine if the tool or library is a good fit to help in your project (or future projects). When you look at the number of tools covered and realize that they are all free, you realize how valuable the concept is.
The book has also has a rough cuts version posted at Safari.
If you want an idea of what the book will cover, check out the table of contents.
I ran across the Kaizen Secrets of the Toyota Mind post on the PANTA REI blog tonight and I think that all of the “secrets” are all applicable to lean software development. If you haven’t seen the post, I encourage you to check it out and think about each of these statements in relation to the work that you are doing and how each each of these items could help and be applied at both a project and an organization-wide level.
Well, today started out really well until I walked up to the America West ticket counter. I can’t even begin to tell you the things I’ve seen, the lack of quality service, the lack of organization, and the mis-communication that has occurred between the staff, operations, and information systems of America West / US Airways. Overall, I’ve handled it pretty well (considering I’ve been standing in lines since 9:30pm, it’s now 5:19am, and I’m on the west coast instead of the east coast).
Rather than rant about all of the things that I’ve seen over the past day (which ultimately led me to wrong side of the country and has me blogging from a terminal full of angry and tired ex-customers ), I just want to warn everyone about flying America West / US Airways unless it is a last resort. I’ve spent a lot of time traveling and I am a very patient individual, but I have never seen an airline like this before.
On the upside, I’ve heard some interesting stories in the late hours here in the terminal. I’ve talked to multiple individuals that are coming home or on their way to Iraq. I listened to an older gentleman from Turkey tell me about his alcoholic father and how he has been stuck in the terminal for two days after losing his papers. I’ve talked to a few roadies that missed their connection to meet the band for the beginning of their tour. And I talked to an individual that told me about his religious evolution since being shot twice.
It may have not been a comfortable trip, but it sure was interesting.
If you haven’t seen this yet, the VSTSPlugins project allows using Team Foundation Server with CCNet. You can find the documentation on the CCNet Confluence site and the VSTSPlugins project on SourceForge.
