This Week’s Link List (December 10, 2010)

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