Over the years, I've had the pleasure (and sometimes pain) of being involved in writing and maintaining the internal coding standards documents for nearly every company I've ever worked for. I still have vivid memories of many bloody internal disputes over some really silly things  - where the curly braces should go - whether or not to use underscores in front of member variables. I firmly believe you need them to keep a consistent level of code quality and to this day I will still dig in and fight for this cause. The biggest lesson I've learned:

"It doesn't matter what the standards are, as long as you have them and everyone agrees to adhere to them!"

I present to you the latest incarnations of my efforts: a zip file containing C# and VB.NET editions of my reference coding standards. I've been holding these for the holidays so that I could share a little something extra with my readers as the year winds down. I certainly don't expect everyone to agree with my standards but I hope by posting these, you can get a head start towards documenting your own.

Grab them. Customize them. Share with your friends.

Translated editions:

Portuguese by Eduardo Costa

You might want to take a look at Oxite. It's the content management and blogging engine used to host the MIX conference website and online community.

In their own words:

Oxite is an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites. We know this because it runs MIX Online.

It's designed to be developer friendly and at first glance looks like a very clean architecture and implementation. I've been toying with the idea of giving my blog a refresh and I have not yet had a chance to take the ASP.NET MVC Framework through it's paces. I think I'll download Oxite and take it on a test ride over the holidays. Stay tuned to hear how it goes.

Some cool new things on the net to share:

A poem about architects (translated from French). How sweet. Written by Philippe Kruchten of "4+1 Views of Architecture" fame.

IASA IT Architect Skills Library

One way to approach your career goals is assess your current skill level and build a career roadmap to round out your overall skill set. A good place to start is the IASA skills library. Here's an overview of the skill sets that architects should posses. IASA has also compiled a list the individual skills within those skill sets. I recommend picking some that you are interested in and find ways to gain mastery - formal training, role change, new or more challenging projects, etc.

This is an online knowledge base for architects designing high scalability websites. It features links to case studies of all the big sites: YouTube, Google, Flickr, Amazon, and more. Invaluable resource if you need ideas on how to scale. Thanks to my buddy Ken Sipe for pointing this one out to me.

Microsoft StyleCop

For those of you who do code reviews, this one should come in handy. Think of it as FxCop for code style and formatting. It analyzes C# source code to enforce style and consistency rules. Can be run from inside Visual Studio or via MSBuild.

Search twitter for particular keywords and this app will determine how many people are tweeting about it and whether they saying things that are positive, neutral, or negative. A love little innovations like this.

Awesome tool to build beautiful word clouds from a block of text. Here's an example taken from this blog posting.

In a way, I'm grateful for those "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads. It's forced Microsoft to take a hard look at our perception with consumers. It's also forced us to get off our butts and start focusing on innovation. I've highlighted World Wide Telescope ahd Photosynth in past goodie bags. These are very cool innovative applications but aren't necessarily meant for general consumers. Yesterday we released AutoCollage and I think this is one product that everyone who takes pictures will enjoy using. I can see myself using it for presentations as well as slideshows and home videos. It takes a directory of images, identifies those that it finds interesting (faces, high contrast, plus other top secret heuristics) and automatically generates a beautiful collage.

Give it a try. I think you'll find creating and sharing these collages with your family and friends very rewarding.

Here are some cool things I've encountered recently that I thought I would share....

Here's some analysis done on the .NET framework, showing a nice dependency graph and provides some interesting observations about the architecture of the framework. Also provides advice on analyzing your own code base.

A Napkin PC? Holy crap! Here are some really cool and groundbreaking ideas. You have to see them to believe them.

No one knows for sure who's going to be the next king of the search hill. These new search interfaces caught my eye because of their elegance. I'm glad companies are still pushing the envelope. The old white and blue screen is getting boring.

Stop reading now and go watch the 3 minute demonstration. Really...go watch it now!. This IS the future of online multi-user applications. The simplicity and elegance of the real-time multi-user experience is a real breakthrough. Stay tuned for a follow up post from me on this one. I've got some ideas about how they implemented the architecture to achieve this and I'll be exploring them in detail here real soon.

Just heard about this from Chris Williams, the XNA user group leader in Minneapolis. For a limited time, Caligari (a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft) is giving away the latest version of their TrueSpace product for free, including all their training videos. This was the first 3D modeling package I ever used. It's easy and fun to use and can produce stunning results. Give it a try!