I've come accross several good posts recently, reminding developers not to get sucked into a "Red Queen's Race", trying to keep up with every new development tool and technology, and every popular development author's latest book.

On the other hand, your job as a developer includes the responsibility to promote tools and practices that enable your company to create more reliable, more aesthetically pleasing versions of its software, delivered much more quickly -- and quite possibly requiring fewer (but better trained) developers.  Somehow, you have to sort through all the hype, to identify the subset of tools and practices that are actually destined to become industry standards, and you need to understand these technologies well enough (and early enough) to design your CURRENT code and architecture in a way that will make eventual migration to the new standard as painless as possible.

You'd think, with several months free of any of those pesky JOB responsibilities, that I'd have no problem catching up on my backlog of unexplored technologies and unread books, even with the distraction of daytime TV shows like "MythBusters" and "Dirty Jobs", and regular trips to the beach, but even after dropping some of the more "speculative" technologies, like F#, Acropolis, and the ADO.Net Entity Framework, from my study list, I still feel like I'd need to take the rest of 2008 off, just to cover the essentials... and maybe 2009 too!

One of the first things I wanted to do this summer, was to set up a realistic simulation of an acceptable enterprise development environment, using virtual machines, in order to practice with, and test, Agile tools and processes.  I finally settled on using VirtualPC 2007 to create VS2005 and VS2008 Pro Beta2 workstations, with associated continuous integration VPC servers running a whole slew of open source analysis tools.  I can check for issues developing as a Least Priviledged User on my Vista laptop host system, compared with developing with full admin. priviledges on Windows XP running inside a virtual machine.  To create a fresh work or test environment, I can simply copy a "base" VPC image, without having to reinstall the OS.  It may even be possible for the server to automatically publish the compiled output to a fresh VPC image for testing. If you want to set up something similar, you'll save yourself A LOT of time and misery if you refer to the links below.  One hint: Use the NAT networking option to share the host system's internet access and virus scan software, for tasks like downloading OS updates, and switch to a Loopback Adapter when you want to communicate between VPC images, or between your host and a VPC image. You'll also want alot of disk space (each VPC dev. workstation ends up around 9GB.), and alot of RAM (My system has 2GB).

    VPC Development and Debugging White Paper
    Creating Smaller Virtual Machines

For more information and guidance on CI server-based development, I recommend the recently-published Continuous Integration", from the Martin Fowler series. Setting up your server to automatically regenerate the database, complete with a clean set of demo data, in order to validate schema changes, is just one example of possibilities I'd never considered.

I found a couple of new books, covering enterprise Agile and Agile project management, to be enjoyable, quick reads, suitable for managers who may just be starting to seriously consider Agile practices, but the books didn't contain anything that would be new to developers who have been keeping up with Agile community discussions over the years.

    "Scaling Software Agility", from the Agile Software Development series
    "Manage It!", from the Pragmatic Programmers series

I've been working through the LINQ examples in the recently published "Introducing Microsoft LINQ", and I definitely recommend that book as a quick way to get up to speed on the three flavors of LINQ (to Objects, to XML, and to Databases), and the new C# 3.0 language features LINQ is built on.

Its a strange kind of vacation...