Question

I posted this community wiki in the hopes of creating a thread of expertise. My question is thus … ‘Where do the experts go to learn about the newest coding techniques?’.

I’m basically looking for the leading/bleeding edge of architecture, design, development and theory.

I know conferences and trade shows are probably the best venues to see the latest and greatest, but for those on a limited budget (of both time and money) such as myself, I’m looking for websites that I can read in the evenings that will keep me current on what’s new in the world.

I program mostly in C# but the websites need not be geared towards C#.

Answer 1

Blogs

• Martin Fowler, the best starting point I think. (http://martinfowler.com/)
  • articles like ‘Consumer-Driven Contracts: A Service Evolution Pattern’, ‘Mocks Aren’t Stubs’, ‘Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern’ (http://martinfowler.com/articles.html)
• David Hayden (http://www.davidhayden.com/)
• Reflective Perspective, a good daily feed (http://blog.cwa.me.uk/tags/morning-brew/)
• Ayende (http://ayende.com/Blog/)
• Eric Lippert – Works on the language. Sometimes read about new C# features before they’re announced elsewhere.
• Scott Hanselman

Journals

• The Architecture Journal (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/architecture/bb410935.aspx) And what’s a great option – you can order free, paper based copies!
• MSDN Magazine (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/default.aspx)

Community

• Codeproject.com, short and large articles
• pnpguidance.com, tutorials, blogs and articles

Real applications and devteams

• pattern&practices home: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/practices/default.aspx, and P&P products
• SCSF, the Smart Client Software Factory home. Learn about desktop enterprise systems. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480482.aspx)
• WCSF, the Web Client Software Factory home. Learn about busines(process) oriented web architecures. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb264518.aspx)
• Enterprise Library