Free Scrum and XP book

I have just downloaded a free book about Scrum and XP from the trenches and added it to my TODO list.

Get the download from InfoQ.

http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

ReSharper 4.1 Released

Jet Brains have a minor point release to one of my favourite productivity tools ReSharper.

Since installing it I have noticed that my memory footprint for devenv.exe is much much smaller and the whole IDE and coding experience feels noticeably snappier with Visual Studio.NET 2008 SP1.

Hopefully I will notice the same benefits when I next switch back to coding with Visual Studio.NET 2005.

For further details on the release you can visit the release notes page on the Jet Brains site.

http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/releaseNotes41.html

Google Chrome

A new web browser has arrived. Google Chrome has just been released in beta.

Here are my initial thoughts:-

• The installer worked and it imported all of my Firefox settings without a problem.
  
• The design is simple and clean and feels less cluttered than IE or Firefox.
  
• The tabs work really well and each tab sits within its own process so that hopefully any pages or sites that would normally crash the entire browser will only require the tab closing and thus not losing any work or pages that you have left open.
  
• It is really fast! It launches faster than IE and renders faster than Firefox. The rendering engine appears to be WebKit rather than the Mozilla engine.
  
• It's small! By that I mean that it's memory footprint in task manager is at least 3 times smaller than my Firefox footprint and that is with just the one tab open.
  
• I already miss my Firefox extensions!

So far so good.

I shall be testing all the sites I've worked on and actually use it as my main browser for a little while.