The Moth

Happy New Year! Regular readers know that on this day I gather links to my own favorite blog posts of the past year (like I did in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007). Enjoy the 18 links below (out of the 122 blog entries I made in 2008)!

01. Visual Studio 2008
At the start of the year I completed my multi-month series on VS2008 and .NET 3.5 topics by writing a short article for TechNet and a longer one for QBS. I also recorded more screencasts on this topic including about Client App Services, Sync Services and the MAF. I linked to those 3 from the resources post of the session I performed/delivered most in 2008: Five VS2008 Smart Client Features.

02. Silverlight 2 Beta 1
After putting VS2008 behind me, I spent a lot of my time getting up to speed on Silverlight 2 and creating a (what turned out to be a very popular and highly ranked :-) session in the Beta 1 timeframe. I blogged a lot about the technology and most of my posts are linked to from this single Silverlight post.

03. Presentation Tips
Early in the year I wrote 2 posts to help you with the basics of setting up your machine for the most important part of a presentation (the demos): Setting Up the Laptop and Setting Up Visual Studio.

04. Other non-technical
This was the year I transitioned from Europe to the US, the side effects including a blog post with a list for settling in that others found useful: Getting a USA life. The transition was also to a new role joining the hordes of Microsoft people that spend a lot of time in Outlook – this inspired me to come up with some Email Rules.

05. Debugging
After settling in, I found myself living in the Visual Studio debugger quite a bit and sharing (via the blog) findings, advice and tips. For example: name your threads, 2 cool tips, make object id, debuggerdisplayattribute and, my favorite, understanding the terminology behind active and current stack frame (and current thread).

06. Parallelism
No surprise that parallelism is featured on this blog this year (as it was last year) and it should be no surprise that it will continue to be prominent here next year. My goal is to deliver shorter posts in the future, but for now you can use a cup of your favorite beverage while consuming my thoughts on: Threading vs Parallelism, Fine Grained Parallelism, Not Explicitly Using threads for Parallelism, the CLR 4 ThreadPool engine and the new Task type.

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