Update: As correctly pointed out by Dweeberly in the comments, today’s edition should have been #473 rather than #474. In order to keep the numbering correct, I’ve re-numbered today’s post to #473, however permalinks will be maintained. Tomorrow’s post will be #474. Sorry for any confusion

Software

  • SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP Released – Vidhya Sagar highlights the release to MSDN subscribers of the November SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP, with general availability of this CTP release on 11th November. If you experiment with it and fid a bug, don’t forget to report it through Connect
  • Announcing the RTW release of Application Request Routing V2 for IIS7.0 – Don Raman highlights the final release of the Application Request Routing module Version 2 for IIS 7 which allows for an IIS server to act as a proxy forwarding on requests to application servers based on routing rules based on headers, load balancer rules, etc
  • Canadian Developer Connection : The Facebook/.NET SDK – Joey deVilla highlights the release of Version 3 of Microsoft’s Facebook SDK (The Facebook Developer Toolkit), which now has official support status from Facebook. his library provides the simlest way to build Facebook enabled applications on the .NET framework
  • Microsoft Acquires Teamprise technology – David Jung shares the news (and related links) that Microsoft have aquired Teamprise bringing their tools which allows for Non-Visual Studio users to access TFS servers inside Microsoft.
  • Magellan – Paul Stovell announces Magellan, a framework to build navigation based WPF applications easily using the MVC pattern ontop of WPF, with behaviours , transitions and commands to navigate between pages along with integration with Composite WPF. In addition to all this, there is also a nice set of documentation / tutorial available

Information

  • Fields and virtual members – Jimmy Bogard talks about problems he encountered using fields to back virtual properties, and looks at using automatic properties, ending on the question ‘are there any valid reasons to keep using fields for holding state?’ – check out the comments for some answers
  • Aleviating Memory Fragmentation in Mono – Miguel de Icaza talks about the work being done on a compacting garbage collector for Mono, and highlights a call for testing of Mono’s new Compacting GC
  • Dependency Injection 101 – Billy McCafferty runs through the principles and practices of dependency injection in this nice introductory article, with just the right blend of code and narative (and pictures of robots!). Billy also highlights a similar article Dependency Injection For Dummies by Kevin Pang which gives another angle on the subject
  • Asp.Net MVC JavaScriptView – Chris Brandsma shares his implementation of a JavaScriptView for ASP.NET MVC providing a means of building JavaScript outside of the page content but with the ability to get all the paths correct within the JS content
  • Legacy Code: Sensing – Mark Needham talks about Michael Feathers’ concept of Sensing within legacy applications, looking at the changes needed to check that a piece of code is doing what we expect, showing tests, some legacy code and the refactorings he used.
  • What is BDD (Behaviour Driven Design)? – Garry Shutler looks at the question of ‘What is BDD?’ exploring some of the BDD myths, the origins and key concepts of BDD. Check out the comments for an interesting discussion with Neil Robbins too.
  • Getting started with BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) in .NET – Tom Janssens takes a look at working in a BDD way with this CodeProject article exploring BDD testing using his own BDD framework called Aubergine.
  • F# Language Details (Gotchas) – Chris Smith explores some of the common mistakes people make when working with F#, looking at the confusion that can be caused with overrides to Equals and Not Equals, along with the differences in performance of different types of range expression
  • Tip 42 – How to create a dynamic model using Code-Only – Alex James looks at how you can work without a strongly typed Context derived from object context using Entity Framework, and how this allows for dynamic models through code only support
  • .NET Generics and Code Bloat (or its lack thereof) – Carlo Colombo digs under the hood of .NET Generics, looking at how they are implemented at the IL level, and shows techniques using the debugger to dig into and understand what is going on behind the scenes
  • NHibernate – Cross session operations – Ayende takes a look at using entities across sessions using detaching to disassociate the entity from the current session, and how this can sometimes cause problems due to violations of the uniqueness of entities in the identity map
  • Use Google’s Closure Compiler in C# – Mads Kristensen provides a simple class to access Google’s Closure Compiler Service, allowing you to get the benefits of this ‘Compiler’ in your applications

Community