To obtain a quick snapshot of your current energy management strengths and challenges, go to http://www.hpinstitute.ca/assessments_free.html

http://www.Prezi.com for making presentations. Free for 100 MB.

http://www.websequencediagrams.com for generating sequence diagrams.

http://creately.com/ for online diagrams and collaboration.

http://www.gliffy.com/ for flow charts.

Please let me know if I missed any obvious ones or if you notice any incorrect comparisons.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1041687/learning-a-language-while-on-a-project

I would like to mention ALT.NET here

Self-organizing, ad-hoc community of developers bound by a desire to improve ourselves, challenge assumptions, and help each other pursue excellence in the practice of software development.

So in the spirit of ALT.NET, it is challenging but useful to reach out of your comfort zone to learn new languages. Some things that really helped me are as follows:

1. Understand the history behind a language or script. Knowing evolution helps a lot.
2. Pick the right book. Research StackOverflow and Amazon.com to find the right book to help you ease the growing pains.
3. OOP is fairly common in most of the mature languages, so you can skip many of the chapters related to OOP in many books. Syntax learning will be a gradual process. I commonly bookmark some quick handy guides for that.
4. Read as many community forums as possible to understand the common pitfalls of the new language.
5. Attend some local meetups to interact with the community and share your pains.
6. Take one pitch at a time by building small not so complicated applications and thereby gaining momentum.
7. Make sure you create a reference frame for what you need to learn. Things like how security, logging, multithreading are handled.
8. Be Open minded, you can be critical, but if you hate something then do not learn that language.

Finally, I think it is worthwhile to learn one strong languages like C# or Java, one functional language and one scripting language like ruby or python.

These things helped me tremendously and I think it will help all software engineers and architects to really gear for any development environment.

   1:  /* This is a simple hello world program */

   2:   

   3:  /* Includes the systems file Foundation.h that has some 

         specific classes. */

   4:  #import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

   5:   

   6:  //Begin Execution

   7:  int main (int argc, const char *argv[])

   8:  {

   9:     /* For now, the below code is mainly for memory 

          management. Reserves space in memory. */

  10:     NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

  11:     /* NSLog is a function that displays the argument you 

          pass along with some other information.*/

  12:     NSLog (@"Hello World");

  13:     //Release the allocated memory pool

  14:     [pool drain];

  15:     //Terminate the execution of main. 

  16:     return 0;

  17:  }

Since my current background is C#, I am quite happy to find the delimiter ‘;’ is the same in Objective-C;). However what is unsettling to me is the whole memory management. I got really comfortable with .net garbage collection. Commenting style is pretty much the same as others. I mixed up the commenting style to show both styles are possible. Microsoft looks like a saint to me compared to Apple when it comes to forcing me to develop on a MAC. Anyway’s, I will be sharing more code samples, more information in the coming days as I progress through my quest to build the greatest IPhone App.

Firstly the book which everyone considers a bible for IPhone development is Programming in Objective-C 2.0, by Stephen G. Kochan. It is currently in its second edition.

Next are some favorite sites, tips that I collected to get myself started on IPhone development.

IPhone Development: 12 Tips To Get You Started

CS193P - Cocoa Programming | Announcements(Stanford Course)

iCodeBlog

Cocoa Is My Girlfriend

AppsAmuck IPhone Development Tutorials and Examples

Cocoa with Love

http://www.iphonesdkarticles.com/

CocoaLab

Hopefully, all these tutorials will help me build my first IPhone App.

So, my next steps are as follows:

• Setting up a development environment.
• Become a registered IPhone developer.
• Create a list of best practices for IPhone app development.
• Study architectures of existing apps to gain better understanding.

Here is the image (size to fit my blog)

Here is the Avatar version -

I have started liking Expression Design, seems very simple to use.

Rob Connery is building a storefront using ASP.NET MVC. He has over 26 webcasts and blog posts, documenting the building of an e-commerce storefront using ASP.NET MVC. He uses Domain-Driven-Design and other design patterns to build his storefront. I recommend his entire series for anyone starting out on ASP.NET MVC.

Scott Guthrie on ASP.NET MVC. I don’t think ScottGu needs any introduction.

Phil Haack is the Project Manager on the ASP.NET MVC project. He gave a great presentation at MIX’09 called Microsoft ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC): Ninja on Fire Black Belt Tips. He followed it up with a blog article on his site where he uses JQuery Grid with ASP.NET MVC.

Scott Hanselman gave a great presentation at MIX’09 demonstrating his nerd-dinner application built on ASP.NET MVC.

Stephen Walther has a series dedicated to ASP.NET MVC. He provides some great tips, sample code and much more on his blog.

Related Links

• Learn ASP.NET MVC with Videos, Tutorials, and Examples.
• Free ASP.NET MVC eBook Tutorial.
• Example App at http://www.codeplex.com/nerddinner
• Nerddinner on codeplex.
• Mobile Device Browser Files on codeplex.