Software

  • jQuery 1.4.1 Released – Hot on the heels of jQuery 1.4 comes the 1.4.1 release. This is mostly a bug fix release with other 20+ bugs addressed in the release, which also includes some API changes to address gaps in the product.
  • IronJS – IronJS is a new project which aims to bring an ECMAScript 3 engine to the .NET framework via the Dynamic Language Runtime, and is built on .NET 4 Beta 2. The current version implements most of the ECMA standard, and the code should be considered alpha quality.
  • "Test Scribe" Test Plan Tool Released for VSTS 2010 – David Baliles highlights the release of TestScribe a tool which connects to Visual Studio Team System and allows documentation to be generated in the form of a Word document from the test plans held in VSTS.

Information

  • Measuring the Performance of Asynchronous Controllers – Steve Sanderson explores the use of Asynchronous Controllers in ASP.NET MVC 2 taking a look at their performance under heavy load, along with looking at some of the things that can catch you out when using them.
  • .NET 4.0 and System.Threading.Tasks – Justin Etheredge explores the new .NET 4 tasks multi-threading functionality, showing how it improves on the best solutions currently available in pre .NET 4 code
  • Using the Domain Service in ASP.NET Applications – ‘morebits’ shares some early documentation for the WCF RIA Services on how to access the domain services from an ASP.NET Web page, taking a step by step approach through the creation of a simple sample.
  • Use Sensible Long-Lived Cache headers – Eric Lawrence talks about the Cache Control Max Age response header, and how by choosing very large numbers (larger than the spec allows) you may cause your items to not be cached at all.
  • KISS Your ASP.NET MVC Routes – K. Scott Allen looks at the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) rule and how you should apply that to your ASP.NET MVC Routing rules.
  • Why are unused using directives not a warning? – Eric Lippert addresses a common question about the using directives which import namespaces, and why unused ones do not generate any form of compiler warning.
  • Don’t Use Try/Catch – Karl Seguin discusses whether you should be catching exceptions at low levels in your code or allowing them to bubble up higher, and talks about how you should never catch and ignore exceptions.
  • A Kick in the Monads – Creating Extended Builders Part III – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts on F# Monads and expression builders with a look at implementing While and For loops and the use of yield.
  • jQuery Code Does not have to be Ugly – Steve Wellens takes a look at writing cleaner more understandable jQuery code.
  • Call for a Programming Language – John Sonmez considers how programming might be if things like Dependency Injection were baked into the language, along with a few other enhancements and illustrates with his new make believe language Tea# which shows these features in operation.
  • Being an Evil Genius with F# and .NET – Chris Smith shares his slides and notes from a recent presentation at the CodeMash Conference where he looked at using F# and .NET to become an evil genius. This has to be one of the more inventive sessions I’ve heard about, and I like the way Chris has hooked the concept into all his real F# examples.
  • Chrome OS the Web based OS of 2010? Nah, Win 3.11 🙂 – Ajaxian highligihts an entirely web based implementation of Windows 3.11 created using XHTML 1.0 strict, JavaScript and Ajax. Pretty impressive stuff, and performs as well as I remember Windows 3.11 working on my old 386.

Community

  • Next European VAN on 08 February 2010 – The Europe Virtual ALT.NET season kicks off on 8th February with a session from James Gregory (most well known for Fluent NHibernate) talking on the Git Distributed Version Control application, focusing on getting started with Git.
  • Aspect oriented development – The NxtGen Usergroup have Steve Strong visiting in April this year and he will be giving a talk on Aspect Oriented Programming at the Hereford branch of the NxtGen UG.