Best Anti-virus For Software Developers?

As anyone who’s looked into the performance impact of anti-virus software knows, protection from internet STD’s requires the use of parasitic utilities that significantly hinder performance and productivity, yet going without isn’t an option under most IT policies. Thus a question is born, what is the best anti-virus software for developers?

Due to the difficulty in benchmarking the real-world performance impact of AV little empirical data is available beyond “that one felt slow but this one felt faster.” Following is the best resources I’ve found on the topic, to be updated as I uncover more.

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1305709/slowdown-of-microsoft-visual-studio-due-to-different-virus-scanner
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/111226/least-intrusive-antivirus-software-for-development-pc
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1404999/development-machines-and-anti-virus-policy
• http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/02/choosing-anti-anti-virus-software.html

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Going No-SQL with MongoDB?

Caught a fascinating .NET Rocks podcast this morning discussing MongoDB, a NON-relational dbms. Kind of like honest politicians, the possibility of such a thing is theoretically possible but not something you expect to ever actually see. I’m still not sure I have my head wrapped around how to best use it, but it’s hard to argue with the (claimed) vastly improved performance and scalability over traditional RDBMSes!

Interesting little sidenote, apparently the original paper that described the relational database model was published 40 years ago, maybe it is time to look at more advanced approaches…

Combining the best features of document databases, key-value stores, and RDBMSes.

MongoDB (from “humongous”) is a scalable, high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database. Written in C++, MongoDB features:

* Document-oriented storage (the simplicity and power of JSON-like data schemas)

* Dynamic queries

* Full index support, extending to inner-objects and embedded arrays

* Query profiling

* Fast, in-place updates

* Efficient storage of binary data large objects (e.g. photos and videos)

* Replication and fail-over support

* Auto-sharding for cloud-level scalability

* MapReduce for complex aggregation

* Commercial Support, Hosting, and Consulting

MongoDB bridges the gap between key-value stores (which are fast and highly scalable) and traditional RDBMS systems (which provide structured schemas and powerful queries).

via Home – MongoDB – 10gen Confluence.

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VS2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions

This looks fun, I’d like a chance to give it a go sometime.

Today, the team released Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions – a new power tool to measure the performance of the portions of web applications that execute JavaScript inside the web browser.

VS2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions

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