Many thanks to everyone who offered their congratulations, thanks, tweets and re-tweets for yesterday’s milestone edition. Special thanks to David Brown for contributing Blog Badge button which I’ve now inserted into the rotation. I’m hopeful that the amount of community noise that was generated yesterday pushed the subscriber numbers past the 5000 mark (I was very close on edition 499) so I await FeedBurner’s stats to update with baited breath.

Software

Information

  • ADO.NET Data Services Update Released – Yesterday I highlighted the release of ADO.NET Data Services, and today Ricardo Peres highlights the what was new in that release with an overview of new features and improvements
  • Getting Started with the Data Services Update for .NET 3.5 SP1 – Part 1 – Alex James of the ADO.NET Data Services team begins a series of posts taking a a step by step run through the new features of the new ADO.NET Data Services release. The team also have release notes for the new release which link back to blog articles discussing the new features and improvements.
  • ASP.NET MVC 2 RC – Validating Credit Card Numbers – Jacques Eloff explores the validation support in ASP.NET MVC2 RC with a look at the thorny problem of Credit Card Number validation
  • Update on Debugger Perf – Brian Harry gives an update on the performance improvements that have been made to Visual Studio 2010 since the beta 2 release by means of a video showing the performance difference, and it looks to be a significant improvement
  • The Siege Project: Siege.ServiceLocation, Part 4 – Integrating Siege.ServiceLocation with ASP.NET MVC – Marcus Bratton continues his series on his Siege.ServiceLocation project with a look at how you can consume it in ASP.NET MVC, and in the final part of the series provides A guide to getting started with Siege.ServiceLocation with a downloadable quickstart sample of code to allow you to get started
  • Extending ASP.NET MVC – Replacing the View Engine – Mike Ormond explores ASP.NET MVC Extensibility with a look at the process of replacing out the default View Engine with the Spark View engine, showing the installation and configuration required. In his next post ‘A Bit About Spark‘ Mike looks at some of the features of the Spark engine, and how you can use it.
  • Using LINQPad with NHibernate – Alan Northam shows how you can use LINQPad, the easy to use tool which allows yo to query LINQ providers, to query NHibernate entities with a little bit of setup involving DLL references, namespace imports and a little boilerplate setup code.
  • Why static classes are evil! – Maciej Gre? shares an amusing look at why static classes are evil, taking the explanation out of the standard software development view and illustrating with people examples.
  • Walkthrough: Test-Driven Development with the Entity Framework 4.0 – The ADO.NET team share a step by step walk through of the process of working with the Entity Framework 4 in a Plain Old CLR Object (POCO) way using Test Driven Development practices
  • JavaScript Part 1 – hello JavaScript! – "fallenrogue" has a series of posts looking at JavaScript as a language, currently running to 4 parts, looking at the language, the prototype way it works, the standard types, and the this operator. Be sure to check out all 4 parts (and don’t be alarmed and think part 2 is missing, for some reason it comes before part 1 in the blogs index)
  • GPGPU and x64 Multicore Programming with Accelerator from F# – Satnam Singh talks about the recently released preview of Accelerator V2 which allows F# to run code on the GPU and x64 multicore systems. This post is quite a complex one, and I think I’m going to have to read it twice to properly understand it (probably not one for the mathematically phobic)

Community

  • Edge UG January: SOLID & SharePoint 2010 – The EDGE Usergroup based in London see in the new year with an event on the 20th January focusing on the SOLID principles with a session delivered by Ian Cooper, and Dave McMahon looking at SharePoint 2010