Pick of the week: Scott Hanselman’s 2009 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows

General

• Finding the Needle in the Haystack: Digg’s Sammy Yu talks about how Apache Solr powers the Digg search. (source: Digg blog)
• 8 Techniques to Find Problems in Your Unit Tests Within 30 Seconds: Roy Osherove points out some simple sanity checks for your unit tests.
• Don’t Delete – Just Don’t: Udi Dahan argues that maybe we shouldn’t be deleting data in our applications.
• Booting from a VHD: Charlie Calvert walks us through one of the cooler features in Windows 7 – booting from a VHD!
• New Features in CTP2 of ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 Explained: Nuno Filipe explains in more detail the new features in CTP2 of the next version of ADO.NET Data Services.
• CodeRush vs. ReSharper: Jason Irwin is doing a very in-depth comparison of the two most popular coding add-ins for Visual Studio. After 2-3 weeks of testing the results are pretty surprising.

Web Development

• Silverlight 3 File Transfer Application: Giovanni Montrone shows how you can build a little chat application with file transfers.
• Simplify Iteration in Your MVC Views: Steve Sanderson takes a stab at simplifying the markup needed to iterate through a collection in ASP.NET MVC.
• Reducing ViewState Size: Davy Brion investigates compressing ViewState by extending ASP.NET WebForms.