What do your read?

The other day I was surprised to learn that two fellows I work with didn’t know the Microsoft MSDN Magazine. Experienced C#/.NET developers! I was shocked :shock:! One of the most valueable information sources for serious Windows/.NET/WinFX/(any other Microsoft technology) developer and people I hold in high regard don’t know about it. How could they survive? It turned out that one of them at least new the predecessors (System Journal) and accidentially stumbled over the german MSDN Magazin – which I didn’t know either. But bad enough, though. They also didn’t know some of the valuable blogs that are available, so I thought perhaps I should share a list of my “most valuable information sources” 😀 …Please keep in mind that I keep this list purely .NET related.

English magazines:

• Highly recommended: “msdn magazine” is available online http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/ and offline (paperware). This is the medium Microsoft uses to for in-depth articles of current and future technologies. The authors are from the “Who is Who?” list in the Microsoft developer community (usually MS employees or people with close MS connections). The online stuff goes back to 1996 so it may even suit IT archeologists ;-).

Blogs:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis: Aaron talks about LUA (“Least-privileged User Account”) and other security stuff
• http://blogs.msdn.com/brada: Brad talks about Atlas, WinFX, and .NET (not exactly new stuff but valuable directions and comments); he also gives good PM tips (“PM” like project manager…).
• http://blogs.msdn.com/cbrumme: Chris knows about CLR internals (GC, AppDomains, etc.). Unfortuantely he got a little lazy lately… .
• http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom: Ricos blog is named “Rico Mariani’s Performance Tidbits” Der Name ist Programm! as we say in german. He may be THE performance guru at Microsoft.
• http://weblogs.asp.net/cazzu: Noteable XML with .NET and Ajax, but other stuff as well. Daniel also contributes to the Mvp.Xml project (http://www.xmlmvp.org/).
• http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu: All about ASP.NET and adjacent topics (Atlas, LINQ, …). If I had sorted this blog list by relevance rather than alphabetically, this blog would be the first one.

German magazines (call it “regional information”):

• The dotnetpro http://www.dotnetpro.de/ is probably the best german magazine (and not just because I published some articles there ;-), http://www.dotnetpro.de/articles/author1006.aspx), yet it is only available as subscription, not in stores.
• There is a german translation of the msdn magazine (http://msdnmag.de/). For some time this was a section within the dot.net magazine but it just became a magazine of its own. I don’t know yet if this is a full translation or just a selction of articles. (“Das Abonnement des MSDN Magazin – Deutsche Ausgabe umfasst 6 Ausgaben, die aus 12 Ausgaben der US-Version des MSDN Magazine zusammengestellt sind.”)

There may be other blogs (OK, there are other blogs), but they didn’t attract me yet. May it be because they didn’t live up to my expectations, because they adressed the wrong topics, or simply because I overlooked them (shame on me). Anyway, this list is my personal reading list and I hope I could point you to the information source you needed but missed yet. Perhaps you can share your reading tips with me.

That’s all for now folks,
AJ.NET

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