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

Topics: Diversity in tech, crypto, online verification, Windows pkg management, .NET Foundation, a better RSS reader, tutorials, taking credit cards, debugging mod_rewrite.

• New Mozilla CEO, who supported anti-marriage equality efforts, has stepped down.
• Watched a good, if old, overview of how to create a data-driven application in Visual Studio – in under 10 minutes.
• According to @shanselman Azure Websites now supports Java and Tomcat.
• Khan Academy has what looks to be a good course on cryptography.
• The New York Times has a well-written, comprehensive article about the technology industry’s bro’ problem.

From the //Build/ developer’s conference

• OneGet is a new effort at package management on Windows that builds off and extends the work Chocolatey started. It sounds like they’ve got the right ideas for moving in the direction we need to go.
• Microsoft announced new .NET Foundation to oversee(?) all the parts of .NET that have and will be open sourced.I think this approach is the right way to do this.

Tools, etc.

• Signed up with Keybase – a new service that facilitates public/private key-pair (e.g. PGP, GnuPG) encryption and verification. You can find my public key at https://keybase.io/shawns. And if you’re interested in signing up I have some invites – just give me the e-mail address you want me to send them to.
• If you’re still consuming RSS like me InoReader is a wonderful new online feed reader. The free tier gives you unlimited feeds and one filter rule along with folders that have their own feed, light & dark themes and an API.
• Looking at using Stripe – simple online payments for developers – to accept credit cards directly for supporting my work.
• Thanks to Dan for passing along this handy tool for debugging your Apache mod_rewrite rules.

Projects, etc.

• Published some SSH and GnuPG tips in my tech knowledge base.
• Re-published Understanding Binary and Hex tutorial I wrote many years ago.
• I now have a TrustCloud profile, which measures my “trustworthiness” online and assigns me a Trust Score – kind of like a credit score. You can see my Trust Card to the right.

Topics: MS tech webinar, image multi-tool, call for developers, code review tools, PhpStorm.

• I’m not planning to go to //build, but am thinking about seeing if I can convince work to let me watch the day-long Building Blocks: Initialize() Jump Start to get up to speed on the current state of Microsoft techniques.
• The QUnit website not only has a good Introduction to Unit Testing tutorial, but it’s a great discussion of how and why to organize your Javascript code in a more object-oriented way.
• Job seekers, heard about Freelancer this week from our intern. What I found particularly interesting is that in addition to listing Projects they also have a category called Contests.
• If you’re looking for an open source project to help with:
  • A Mac port of the wonderful AxCrypt for Windows has put out a call for developers. (C#, Mono)
  • The site Up For Grabs maintains a list of projects with “curated tasks specifically for new contributors”. (via @shanselman)

Tools

• Not only might PicPick become my new go-to screenshot tool, but it also has a color picker, magnifier, ruler, whiteboard and more. A veritable Swiss Army tool of quick image management.
• Review Assistant, by Devart, is a Visual Studio extension I plan to evaluate for our team; code reviews are something we want to do, but have struggled with finding the right process.
• For PHP development I continue to be more and more impressed with the PhpStorm IDE. This week I discovered that it includes support for integrating with a number of issue tracking services.

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#)

Just finished watching the ReSharper Secrets video on the JetBrainsTV channel on YouTube. Several good tips there. Definitely worth watching. The presenter spends the bulk of the time talking about Annotations – which are how ReSharper works a lot of its magic and are now available to us for decorating our own code. He closes by sharing a few of his own favorite features he thinks are not very well known. I didn’t know most of them.