Joseph Fluckiger's Blog

  It was cool to discover that Channel 9 linked to my blog post on how RAM disks do not speed up Visual Studio :   Joe Nalewabau and Dan Fernandez talk about my blog. Starting at minute 19:50, Dan says: Dan: "Joseph Fluckiger", I hope I am pronouncing that right.  Joe: "I'll let you handle that one". Dan: "Probabaly for the better."  :) Dan: “We talked about this at our 1 year anniversary with Scott Hansleman using RAM disks to speed up Visual Studio. Joseph actually went through and did a test of RAM disk vs. no RAM disk. And he actually shows that RAM disks aren’t worth it. They are only a few milliseconds faster and you have to copy files into the RAM disk which is a pain.” Dan: "Thank you Joseph for actually doing the work and verifying that it is a vicious rumor."   I found the Channel 9 reference because I was looking through my blog stats and saw that the RAM disk post is the most...

I discovered a great little .NET developer tool yesterday: LINQPad . I needed to write a LINQ statement with a Group By and was having trouble figuring it out. While poking around on stack overflow , someone suggested this tool. But even better, the most useful application of this little application is the ability to quickly write pieces of code. It has a nice little interface which applies indentation and colors to your code, but is also very light weight and fast. It even allows you to quickly execute your code and display the results with a nice little .Dump() utility. My Visual Studio has been quite slow lately since my project has hundreds of thousands of lines and I am also running Resharper. Write snippets of Code quickly with LINQPad:   Learning LINQ:

I recently decided to go back to school to get a degree in software engineering from the University Of Texas at Austin attending the executive format offered by the engineering department. Is it worth it? What is it like? You can read more on the UT website, but below I will give you my personal perspective, the answers to the questions I had when deciding whether to pursue the degree. First question: Are the topics covered relevant?   I am a consultant software developer working for Catapult Systems working on enterprise software development. Am I going to learn things which I can apply? I don’t want academic fluff. I am a working professional and need real application. I am currently in my first semester and so far the material has been very interesting and I have been able to apply much of the material learned to my current projects at work. I’ve even integrated some of the code written for projects into projects at work. Below is a list of the courses offered. Here is a cour...

I’ve been running an SSD as my primary drive for a few weeks now and it performs quite well. Outlook doesn’t hang, and Visual Studio build times are cut way down. Boot up and shut down are much better. Total cost: $260 + $50 = 310. Using winsat tool: Patriot Torqx SSD 64 GB, as primary drive in laptop Sequential read: 116 MB/s (3 x faster) Random read: 39 MB/s (35 x faster) Sequential write: 90 MB/s (2.5 x faster) 7200 RPM 100 GB in expansion slot : Sequential read: 40 MB/s Random read: 1.11 MB/s Sequential write: 34.7 MB/s

Stackoverflow.com is a fantastic online resource for answers to technical questions. There are several reasons that Stackoverflow.com is better than other sites. Jeff Atwood, who is the founder of stack overflow described the site succinctly as "expertsexchange.com without the evil. :)" The Webster's type definition would be: Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow programmers. It is unique in that it uses aspects of wikis, blogs, digg, and forums to allow the best answers float to the top rather than stay buried somewhere among other less useful answers. I loved experts exchange . It was the site that helped me get started in programming back when I was learning Perl. I was amazed at how quickly people would give of their time to answer my questions. Now I am glad to see an even better resource called stack overflow. Give it a try. You'll find higher quality answers than any other online Q&A site...

  This is amazing. You can embed a Silverlight app in your blog using Windows Live Writer and this plug-in . For example, here is the Silverlight showcase application from the home page of http://silverlight.net .

The biggest announcement about TFS 2010: "Price – We’re not quite ready to announce the pricing and licensing for 2010 yet but I can tell you that it will be at least as easy and cost effective to get as SourceSafe has been.  Stay tuned for more info on this." great post . That means that instead of $20,000 for licensing (current cost of TFS for a small development team), I am speculating that it might be included with license of Visual Studio/MSDN Universal License. Visual Source safe was the most popular source control system in the world in the 90s. Now it is the most hated source control system in the world (for good reasons.) I hate it when VSS asks me: "Would you like to run the analyze utility to make sure your files are not corrupt?" But the one thing that VSS had/has is it is easy to set up and use. TFS 2010 Basic aims to make setup easy (no SharePoint dependency). Screenshot of  TFS Basic Configuration Wizard (easy easy): TFS is awe...