Attending conference isn't equivalent to taking a break.

Very good article about how to approach personal development in the field of technology. It arrived just in time because I’m going to participate in Microsoft Architect Forum in Dublin and I can leverage some tips of Douglas.

Mono is very well - CCNET on Mono

Mono is well and it's getting even better.

Resonable comparison of a few AJAX frameworks for .NET

The comparison can be found here. It seems to be quite good and useful but there is one interesting thing. Author of the review is at the same time author of one of the analyzed frameworks. And his library seems to be the best one. Coincidence? Who knows :).

Java is great language but teaching ONLY Java is bad idea.

Joel’s article says that teaching Java is bad idea. Many people have disagreed because according to them every language is equally good. I think they didn’t catch the main idea that is behind the article. Java isn't good because it doesn’t require you to think too much. You don’t have to know what happens under the hood when you write particular line of code. In this case C or even C++ is much better. I agree you have to have some knowledge in order to write a program but to be honest very often if your code compiles then it works. Of course it can be slow, memory consuming and crash encountering marginal conditions but it will work more or less. From business point of view Java and C# are great languages but I think that you still HAVE to know what is really going on when you write code. IT systems are almost everywhere and they are taking over more and more human activities in many fields. Maybe I am wrong but I would NOT like to find out software bug at the moment when my life/future/animal/money/t-shirt is fully dependent on it.

Concurrency and Coordination Runtime

Microsoft is developing library that is going to streamline concurrent programming. You can watch it and read about it The library is still a little bit messy for me but it seems to be interesting. Especially I like the idea that you can execute an action only when two or more values are available and you do not have to check it. The library will tell you when it happens. But once again API is not very handy and it needs to be improved.

Who is the best coder?

It's obvious - Poles
:)

Keep DRY

I hate "copy and paste" operation when I code. Today I found out what the official name of avoiding this activity is. DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself.