From Rands:

Here is an audacious goal for your resume: to get you to a point in your career where you no longer need a resume. It’s the point that in your chosen industry people know who you are and what you are capable of. And they want you doing it at their companies.

The documentation for the DoesUserHavePermissions method starts hopeful:

"The DoesUserHavePermissions method of the SPPermissionCollection class returns a value that indicates whether the current user has the specified permissions."

But it goes downhill in the "return value" section:

"true if the current user has the specified permissions; otherwise, raises an access denied exception and prompts the user for authentication."

It is not exceptional for a user to not have permissions, so raising an exception in those cases is not something you would expect to happen; especially since the method returns a boolean, which does support the false value.

A general design guideline for .Net development as described in the Framework design guidelines (p183-188) is: "DO NOT use exceptions for the normal flow of control, if possible."

Saw the new (?) chart API  yesterday and so far I am impressed with the amount of options you have when you generate charts. For the moment the only limitation is that you're limited to 50k requests per day, but that should be enough for most uses (esp. when you use some smart caching).

To make using the API just a bit easier I started with a wrapper in C#; for now it only supports the most basic options for the 2D and the 3D piecharts, but the more to come soon.

If anybody is interested in helping complete the wrapper, let me know and I'll host the source on CodePlex.

Nice, you can use any IEnumerable as the source for you LINQ queries.

class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {

         var result = from x in GetSequence(12) where (x%2) == 0 select x;

         foreach (var x in result) {
             Console.WriteLine(x);
         }

        Console.ReadLine();

    }

    static IEnumerable<int> GetSequence(int max) {

        for (int i = 0; i < max; i++) yield return i;

    }
}

A nice surprise today when the mailman brought 4 new books:

1. Programming Pearls, 2nd Edition by Jon Bentley
2. The No Asshole Rule by Robert I. Sutton, PhD
3. Mastering Regular Expressions, 3rd edition by Jeffrey E.F. Friedl
4. Code Complete, 2nd Edition by Steve McConnell

1,2 and 4 I consider required reading for any serious developer, allthough I have only read Code Complete myself.

Now the only thing left is to actually read all the books I have collected in the last couple of weeks.

I. M. Wright's Hard Code is a collection of 49 columns Eric Brechner wrote for the Interface magazine at Microsoft from June 2001 till April 2007. The topics of the columns range from software development to career development to being a better manager. And along the way give you great insight in the process of software development at Microsoft.

The best column is "Where's the beef? Why we need quality", which describes the change Microsoft needed to make when the primary users switched from enthusiasts to consumers and enterprises. Customers that want a turnkey solution - you turn it on and it works. The key to making the switch is, according to Eric, raising the quality bar and focus on customer issues. And the three areas to work on are:

• Better design and code
• Better instrumentation and test
• Better supportability and recovery

Highly recommended.

Also read Eric's blog, where he posts a column every month.

Last week I was at the MS SOA & BP conference on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, the overall theme of the conference focused on the ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) and ISB (Internet Service Bus) powered by BizTalk server and biztalk.net respectively. Another theme was the focus on modeling, allowing developers to focus more on business problems and less on the plumbing.

The keynote

The keynote focused on the next wave of products for building Service Oriented Applications, called "Oslo", focused on modeling business processes and exposing them on the service bus. This modeling is currently done by different people using different tools, but the next version of Visual Studio will allow business analysts, architects, developers and operations to work on the different views of the same model using the same tool (Visual Studio).

The products included in "Oslo" are:

• BizTalk Server “6” – Process Server, based on Workflow Foundation and Windows Communication Foundation
• BizTalk Services (biztalk.net) – Internet Service Bus, authentication, communication and workflow outside the firewall
• Visual Studio "Rosario"
• System Center “5” – Operations – infrastructure support
• .NET Framework 4.0

Other sessions

Steve Swartz and Clemens Vasters had 4 great sessions (SA 208, SA 209, SA 310, SA 309), using the demo shown during the keynote about event planning, they show how they build it using modeling and the biztalk.net ISB. Since the same sessions are planned for TechEd Europe, the slides or the video should be on the web soon.

Don Smith showed the next version of the Web Service software factory called the modeling edition (Session FT 206). This release allows you to model your WCF services with a tool similar to the current class diagram and generate code based on that, instead of the previous versions, that generated code first. More info and the download on the Service Factory homepage on Codeplex.

Other interesting sessions were the overview session on Biztalk 2006 R2 (FT 309) and several deep dive sessions about WCF adapters (FT 400), testing Biztalk solutions (FT 306) and error handling (FT 201).

Channel 9 coverage

ARCast.TV - App Of The Future: The Internet Service Bus (Part 1 of 2)
ARCast.TV - App Of The Future: The Internet Service Bus (Part 2 of 2)
ARCast.TV - SOA Business Process Conference Day 1 Recap
ARCast.TV - SOA and Business Process Conference Day 2 Recap
ARCast.TV - SOA and Business Process Conference Recap - Day 3

I'm visiting the Microsoft SOA & Business Process Conference next week organized by the Connected Systems Division. It promises to be an interesting conference, with 4 talks by Steve Swartz and Clemens Vasters and a number of talks about Biztalk 2006 R2.

More info on the conference site.