Apologies in advance for this week’s lengthy list…too much good stuff to whittle it down much. If this keeps up, I’ll have to post lists twice a week!

• Carlos Bueno talks about the value of being a "full-stack programmer": http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2010/the-full-stack/ (As someone with a math background, I love the cartoon at the beginning of this article.)

• Free, two-day "boot camps" offered in many location get you up to speed on developing on Windows Azure: http://www.windowsazurebootcamp.com/

• Vijay Rajagopalan, principal architect on Microsoft's Interoperability Team, talks about talks about establishing "long term community connections" in an interview on LinuxForU.com: http://www.linuxforu.com/views/%E2%80%9Cmicrosoft-is-working-towards-establishing-a-long-term-community-connection%E2%80%9D/

• Gonzalo Ayuso provides real-life examples of closure usage in PHP 5.3 (be sure to read the comments...good discussion): http://gonzalo123.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/real-life-example-of-closure-usage-with-php5-3/

• Paul Reinheimer has an excellent post on profiling with XHGui: http://phpadvent.org/2010/profiling-with-xhgui-by-paul-reinheimer

• Joey Rivera posts a tutorial for using the Facebook Graph API: http://www.joeyrivera.com/2010/facebook-graph-api-app-easy-w-php-sdk/

• Giorgio Sironi continues his series "Practical PHP Testing Patterns" with a look at assertion messages: http://css.dzone.com/books/practical-php-testing/practical-php-testing-patterns-12

• Johannes Schlüter talks about the possibility (probability?) of a "progress upload mechanism" built in to the next version of PHP: http://schlueters.de/blog/archives/151-Upload-Progress-in-PHP-trunk.html

• How to create Doctrine 1-style soft deletes in Doctrine 2: http://codeutopia.net/blog/2010/12/04/how-to-create-doctrine-1-style-soft-delete-in-doctrine-2/

• Dan Jones uses PDO as an example of smart design to avoid vendor lock-in: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dtjones/archive/2010/12/06/vendor-lock-in-or-ignorant-design.aspx

• Rob Allen shows how much faster PHP 5.3 is than 5.2: http://akrabat.com/php/php-5-3-is-quicker-than-php-5-2-2/

• In an interview, Angie Byron talks about how she got involved in the Drupal community and offers her thoughts on being an influential woman in the Open Source world: http://www.port25.ca/2010/12/08/dev-profile-angie-byron/

• A step-by-step guide in pictures for installing Joomla on Windows Azure and SQL Azure: http://www.hooduku.com/blog/joomla-on-windows-azure.html

• A short manual for running Moodle 2.0+ with MS SQL Server: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Using_the_Microsoft_SQL_Server_Driver_for_PHP

• Food for thought on SQL vs. NoSQL: http://blogs.technet.com/b/andrew/archive/2010/12/09/sql-or-no-sql.aspx

• PHP Manager v1.1 for IIS is now available: http://ruslany.net/2010/12/php-manager-1-1-available-in-web-pi/

• Jason Gilmore offers 10 PHP tricks for manipulating associative arrays: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/associative-array-manipulation/Jason_Gilmore12092010.php3

• Rafael Dohms offers his thoughts on how Microsoft is making PHP development easier: http://blog.rafaeldohms.com.br/2010/12/09/how-microsoft-is-making-php-development-easier/

• Lorna Mitchell clears up confusion around calling static methods dynamically: http://www.lornajane.net/posts/2010/Declaring-Static-Methods-in-PHP

Have a great weekend!

-Brian

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