You're Doing it Wrong

Eileen Rumwell (who needs to turn comments on at her blog) recently asked the question, "Where do you get your .NET information?"  Its an interesting question; one that applies across just about every profession but is of significant importance for developers.  Information changes so quickly that relying on printed material is a liability.  So where do good developers go to find the answers to their questions?  For me, there's three primary places.  Blogs, books and Google.

I consider regularly reading programming blogs to be a class I attend daily.  This "class" primarily consists of reading posts from about 50 different feeds that are relevant to my interests.  blogs.msdn, CodingHorror and DotNetKicks are among these.  Although not a primary resource, I do consider books to be still important in keeping abreast of things in the programming world.  Often I use books as a less frequently used resource for research.  Often this consists solely of reading books related to work.  For example, the last book I read was the Mythical Man-Month; I'll be reading a book on implementing Agile with VSTS next.  My third source of information is primarily for quick searches.  Often this consists of taking five minutes to search for information on a specific, well defined topic, related to a task I'm currently programming or a subject I'm posting about.  These searches take place in three places:  VS help, Google web search and Google groups search.  Which I do in what order depends on the task and where I am.  In VS, the help gets my first attention.  When that fails (as it often does), I go to google groups.  Almost always someone has had the same question that I have and has posted it on Usenet.  Google Groups is the best place to search Usenet to get clues as to possible answers, if not the answer itself.  Once I have a better understanding of the problem and its possible solutions, I can refine this knowledge by continuing to search the web.  There's a higher percentage of crap in a web search, but I often can refine it by specifying a site (i.e., site:msdn.microsoft.com) or -negating -specific -words -that -indicate -useless -websites. 

Anyhow, that's a quick overview of what I do.  I'm always open to finding more useful sources of information.  Post yours here!

Programming Post by: McGurk at 01:50 PM | 3  Replies | Reply
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