Topics:  Free MS ebooks, Xamarin podcast, cloud server in 55 sec., squash your PNGs, Heartbleed fallout, RDP from Android.

• Former co-worker @_Shakeel passed along some free e-books being offered by Microsoft Virtual Academy.
• @munificentbob announced his free online book, Game Programming Patterns.
• I keep finding more and more Xamarin community resources. This week it was their podcast on SoundCloud.
• Also, useful for cross-platform development: Notes on Using Various PCL Profiles with Xamarin (via @WindowsAppDev)
• Cloud hosting service DigitalOcean advertises you can spin up a new “droplet” (i.e. VM) in 55 seconds, and has what looks to be a pretty reasonable pricing structure.
• Do you know what your TRAQ score is? Online comic Devil’s Panties (“not satanic porn!”) has a good write up about their ad revenue tanking after improperly getting flagged as an adult site.
• If you’re working on web pages be sure to check out these handy CSS tips.
• In the wake of Heartbleed the OpenBSD community is refactoring OpenSSL “one arcane VMS hack at a time.” (via Dan)
• Meanwhile, a security firm reports many Android apps (mostly games) are vulnerable to Heartbleed and most scanning apps are doing it wrong, but don’t tell us which ones are doing it right. (via Re/Code)

Tools, etc.

• Color Scheme Designer is a great online tool for generating/exploring color palettes.
• And while we’re talking design, Scott Hanselman reminds us to squish our image files – Trimage is a handy app to do that on Linux, Windows and Mac.
• Did you know Google has a Remote Desktop tool for Chrome? Well, now it’s available for Android too.

Projects, etc.

• Less than 30 days left in the FoodStats app fundraiser. We’re at $250 now. Pledge as little as a $1 or as much as you feel like – every little bit helps. Or just help spread the word: Use the share buttons on the campaign site or give this easier-to-remember URL to friends, family and those who might be interested: http://tiny.cc/foodstats
• Released an initial alpha version of Commit Message Editor – a simple, cross-platform GUI editor for commit messages in Git. The goal is to provide a light-weight editor with key features useful for writing commit messages. (This was a request from my friend and former co-worker Jonathan.)

The Weekly roundup is my regular post of interesting and useful things I’ve found or done over the last week.

Topics: Computer yoga, OneNote API, BitCoin explained, WordPress for PhpStorm, hosting service for .NET, personal data protocols, git prompt.

• A short How to do computer yoga while sitting at your desk.
• Unlike many Microsoft products, I actually like OneNote. Now there’s an API, and I absolutely love APIs.
• Scott Hanselman’s interview with Steve Beauregard provided the best description of BitCoin and the tech around it that I’ve heard so far.

Tools, etc.

• Looks like the next version of the PhpStorm IDE (currently in Early Access) has some pretty nice support for developing and debugging WordPress plugins.
• Considering AppHarbor as a simple, basic cloud-hosting service for .NET applications.
• Reviewing some of the word needed on Diaspora* led me to Tent – “a protocol for personal data and communications.“
• Want a better prompt for git on Linux? There’s a Github repository for that.

NOTE: I’m moving the posting day/time for the weekly roundup to Monday morning. Hopefully that will make it a little more visible as well as giving me the weekend to wrap up the content.

• The current stable version of Entity Framework (EF6) now supports mocking the database context – which is allowing me to update the CtcApi so that unit tests do not require the database.
  • Oh, and if you’re working with the Entity Framework you should be using LINQPad. Even if you don’t use EF, it’s still a great minimalist C# editor/compiler – test out snippets of code outside of the complexity of your project.
• Code for Seattle – “Developers, designers, data geeks, leaders, artists, and idea-makers who help Seattle government and civic organizations adopt open web technologies.” (via Seattle Transit Blog)
• Did you know you can use your Android smartphone to contribute to distributed research projects now? (via GeekWire article)
• Microsoft has a new online source code browser (beta) for the parts of the .NET Framework that have been open sourced.
• Read an old, but interesting interview with the CEO of a very successful, commercial WordPress forms management plugin on how licensing under the GPL has been beneficial for them.
• Game Developerz sounds like a fun new card game – comes recommended by a former boss, co-founder of Humongous Entertainment. Its Kickstarter has a little over a month to go.
• On the job-hunting front, GET /api-jobs looks like a useful stream of API-related job postings from a variety of sources.
• If you’re a C# developer interested in learning – or even just curious about – Python, I highly recommend the JetBrainsTV video Python for the C# developer.

Tools

• Friend of a friend, Robert shared MTR – a better traceroute for *nix. I also found WinMTR; unfortunately there’s not a Chocolatey package available.
• I’m not quite as late to this party as Eli is, but certainly late enough to have missed Scott Hanselman’s post about SlowCheetah. Previews for my Visual Studio configuration transforms? Yes please! (Scott’s most recent blog post is also very much worth reading and sharing.)
• I’ve recently needed to start watching my blood glucose levels. Today I discovered Nutritionix, which provides free nutrition information (including calculators for many restaurants) and an available API. Access to the API includes a free tier and they state that freeware mobile apps can get a bump in that access for no charge.

Projects, coding, etc.

• We’ve been migrating a lot of college sites to a newly-established WordPress platform. This week I’m getting familiar with Gravity Forms to help with that effort. (PHP)
• Been helping out (and working towards the offered bounty) a Stackoverflow user having trouble programmatically writing to Active Directory. (C#)