Scrum Alliance - New to User Stories?Written for the Scrum Alliance. A CSP’s perspective on user stories, requirements, and use cases

Good definitions -- comparing and contrasting -- between requirements, use cases, and user stories:

Scrum Alliance - New to User Stories?Written for the Scrum Alliance. A CSP’s perspective on user stories, requirements, and use cases

Ultimate Guide to Website Wireframing

Lots of website wire framing tools listed.

Ultimate Guide to Website Wireframing

Git Source Control Provider

I'll have to try this out too.

Git Source Control Provider: "Visual Studio users are used to see files' source control status right inside the solution explorer, whether it is SourceSafe, Team Foundation Server, Subversion or even Mercurial. This plug-in integrates Git with Visual Studio solution explorer."

FsCheck: A random testing framework

I'll have to check this out.

FsCheck: A random testing framework: "FsCheck is a tool for testing .NET programs automatically. The programmer provides a specification of the program, in the form of properties which functions, methods or objects should satisfy, and FsCheck then tests that the properties hold in a large number of randomly generated cases. While writing the properties, you are actually writing a testable specification of your program. Specifications are expressed in F#, C# or VB, using combinators defined in the FsCheck library. FsCheck provides combinators to define properties, observe the distribution of test data, and define test data generators. When a property fails, FsCheck automatically displays a minimal counter example."

Mockingbird

New (?) UI mockup tool similar to Balsalmiq and another one I can't remember.

Mockingbird

Test with Windows Live Writer

Everyone is telling me that this tool is really the cat’s meow. So far – about 20 words into it – it’s really not half bad.

Let’s insert a photograph, even though this blog isn’t so much of a blog as a glorified collection of bookmarks.

Hmmm, kinda cool!

I wonder if this would work with ScrewTurn Wiki? (Although I would tend to doubt it, but you never know.)

A few thoughts on jQuery templating with jQuery.tmpl | Encosia

I have to create some email templates for use by (gulp) classic ASP. I thought I'd do a bit of reading on templates in order for (1) my template tag convention to be inspired by existing templates and thus be future-friendly, and (2) perhaps if I'm lucky, to find a template I can actually use on the server itself. (PURE, mentioned below, might be a candidate.)

A few thoughts on jQuery templating with jQuery.tmpl | Encosia: "I spent some quality time with Dave Reed’s latest revision of John Resig’s jQuery.tmpl plugin recently, migrating a small project from jTemplates. Since both the jQuery team and Microsoft team have requested feedback on jQuery.tmpl, I decided to write about my experience using it (as I am wont to do with these templating proposals).
Overall, jQuery.tmpl is a great step in the right direction. It’s small, it’s simple, and it’s fast. Overloading append() to allow the append(Template, Data) syntax is phenomenal. That approach feels more like idiomatic jQuery than anything else I’ve used, including jTemplates."

He mentions that it lacks composability, but this article is from May. Has Microsoft added it since then?

From the comments, a few more libraries to consider:

Spark - the new hotness, apparently. Included with the latest Microsoft MVC, if I'm not mistaken.

PURE - seems more decoupled than the others, but at first glance it doesn't seem to support to ubiquitous "${}" convention.

I'm still reading. This is kind of a brain dump for further research at some point when I have more time (i.e. when hell freezes over).

Teach Visual Studio Your Own Language -�Easy! - Journal - Rinat Abdullin

Teach Visual Studio Your Own Language -�Easy! - Journal - Rinat Abdullin: "In this article we'll see how simple it is to extend Visual Studio with a custom language. This language will have a real syntax that will be evaluated and transformed into the C# code on-the-fly, saving a few lines of repetitive code!"

BDD, Fluent Interface Generator, and a new .NET 3.5 Parser generator

StoryQ uses a fluent interface generated by Flit, the Fluent Interface Toolkit, which is turn was developed using Irony, a new development kit for writing parsers in .NET. (However, the last release was almost exactly a year ago, so who knows what's up with it?)

Javascript Libraries and ASP.NET: A Guide to jQuery, AJAX and Microsoft - Articles - MIX Online

Javascript Libraries and ASP.NET: A Guide to jQuery, AJAX and Microsoft - Articles - MIX Online: "When Microsoft announced they would begin providing official support for jQuery, few of us realized how profoundly that announcement would eventually impact client-side development on the ASP.NET platform. Since that announcement, using jQuery with ASP.NET has moved from the obscure, to a central role in ASP.NET MVC’s client-side story, and now to the point of potentially superseding ASP.NET AJAX itself."

NET jQuery Extensions at GitHub

Highlights include:
"Templating – Previously referred to as jQuery.tmpl or jQuery-tmpl, the jQuery Templating feature was Microsoft’s first foray into working with the jQuery team and community. Though its inclusion in jQuery isn’t planned until jQuery 1.5 is released, you can begin using it in plugin form immediately. That plugin is currently available on GitHub: http://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl"
and
"Data Linking – The next feature that may be a precursor to more official things to come is the jQuery-datalink plugin, which is also available on GitHub: http://github.com/nje/jquery-datalink. With this plugin, you can “link” JavaScript objects together so that they remain synchronized when changes are made to one or both of them. The canonical example of this is linking a JavaScript object’s properties to corresponding fields in a form, to eventually automate tasks such as change tracking and submission."

More from Scott Guthrie:
"jQuery Templates
The jQuery Templates plugin enables you to create client templates. For example, you can use the jQuery Templates plugin to format a set of database records that you have retrieved from the server through an Ajax request.
You can learn more about jQuery templates by reading my earlier blog entry on jQuery Templates and Data-Linking or by reading the documentation about it on the official jQuery website. In addition, Rey Bango, Boris Moore and James Senior have written some good blog posts on the jQuery Templates plugin:

• Not Using jQuery JavaScript Template? You’re Really Missing Out
• jQuery JavaScript Templates Tutorial: Nesting Templates
• Introducing jQuery Templates
• jQuery Templates in the Wild
• Web Camps Demos: Adding jQuery to the ASP.NET MVC Music store

When the next major version of jQuery is released -- jQuery 1.5 -- jQuery Templates will be included as a standard part of the jQuery library."

New Password Not Enough to Secure Hacked E-mail Account | threatpost

New Password Not Enough to Secure Hacked E-mail Account | threatpost

Javascript MVC frameworks

Sammy.js
http://goutamdey.com/2010/01/02/5-javascript-mvc-frameworks-2/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/386885/is-there-a-javascript-mvc-micro-framework

jQuery Grid Recommendations - Stack Overflow

jQuery grid reference from StackOverflow:

jQuery Grid Recommendations - Stack Overflow: "The best entries in my opinion is Flexigrid and jQuery Grid (1st & 2nd in list). The others are included for completeness.

Flexigrid: http://flexigrid.info/
jQuery Grid: http://www.trirand.com/blog/
jqGridView: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/jqGridView
Ingrid: http://reconstrukt.com/ingrid/
SlickGrid http://github.com/mleibman/SlickGrid
I like the jQuery Grid (#2 above) better than Flexigrid mostly because it supports editable cells, and has very good documentation and samples on the website."

How to

Fascinating -- from www.edwardtufte.com, in the section where he criticizes the PowerPoint culture at NASA that contributed to the Columbia disaster in 2001.

"How to make engineers write concisely with sentences? By combining journalism with the technical report format. In a newspaper article, the paragraphs are ordered by importance, so that the reader can stop reading the article at whatever point they lose interest, knowing that the part they have read was more important than the part left unread.

State your message in one sentence. That is your title. Write one paragraph justifying the message. That is your abstract. Circle each phrase in the abstract that needs clarification or more context. Write a paragraph or two for each such phrase. That is the body of your report. Identify each sentence in the body that needs clarification and write a paragraph or two in the appendix. Include your contact information for readers who require further detail.

-- William A. Wood (email), September 8, 2005"

The Marvels of Monads - Yet Another Language Geek - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

The Marvels of Monads - Yet Another Language Geek - Site Home - MSDN Blogs: "With all of the attention that monads get, why am I writing yet another explanation of monads?� Not to compare them to some everyday occurrence or to chronicle my journey to understanding.� I explain monads because I need monads.� They elegantly solve programming problems in a number of languages and contexts."

Mastering the 960 Grid System | Nettuts

Looks a little complicated, but they claim it'll be easy peasy by the end of the article.

Mastering the 960 Grid System | Nettuts: "We’re already familiar with the 12- and 16-column variants of 960.gs, but did you know that a 24-column alternative exists too? In this article, you’ll master the 960 grid system by dissecting the 24-column version demo. If you’ve only used 960gs before for Photoshop mockups, consider this your lucky day. By the end of this article, you’ll be able to convert your designs to HTML and CSS in no time at all."

Don’t let jQuery’s $(document).ready() slow you down | Encosia

Don’t let jQuery’s $(document).ready() slow you down | Encosia: "... what if $(document).ready() is slowing you down? In this post, I’m going show you specific instances where postponing startup code until the document’s ready event slows perceived page load time, could leave your UI needlessly unresponsive, and even causes initialization code to run slower than necessary."

Fiddler Extension – Request to Code | Chad Sowald

Who knew? Fiddler Web Debugger - Useful Extensions

This one is particularly cool:

Fiddler Extension – Request to Code | Chad Sowald: "This Fiddler extension generates C# or VB.NET code to duplicate a web request. �You simply drag one or more Fiddler sessions into the newly created “Code” tab and the extension will produce appropriate code that you can copy and paste into your program that reproduces those requests."

There's also this: JSON Viewer

Scott Hanselman - How to Post Code To Your Blog and other Religious Arguments

Scott Hanselman - How to Post Code To Your Blog and other Religious Arguments: "If you've got a programming blog, chances are you'll want to post some code snippets. Posting code sounds easy but it's surprisingly tricky if you consider all the ways that people will be reading your blog. There's a number of ways. Here's a few and their pros and cons."

Commonly Confused Bits Of jQuery

Commonly Confused Bits Of jQuery: "The explosion of JavaScript libraries and frameworks such as jQuery onto the front-end development scene has opened up the power of JavaScript to a far wider audience than ever before. It was born of the need — expressed by a crescendo of screaming by front-end developers who were fast running out of hair to pull out — to improve JavaScript’s somewhat primitive API, to make up for the lack of unified implementation across browsers and to make it more compact in its syntax."