Software

  • MvcContrib- an Outer Curve Foundation project – The team behind MvcContrib respond to the ASP.NET MVC 3 release with an update to the ASP.NET MvcContrib library bring it in line with the ASP.NET MVC 3 release.
  • Open source .NET and Mono web services framework – The team behind ServiceStack announce version 1.75 of ServiceStack, a high performance Open Source .NET REST framework which supports working with XML, JSON and SOAP based services. Full source code is available on GitHub.

Information

  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Performance – on par with MVC 2 – Marcin Dobosz explores the performance of ASP.NET MVC 3, comparing it against MVC2, focusing on the Requests Per Second throughput, looking at 4 scenarios including ASP.NET MVC2 sites running on the V3 runtime.
  • HTTP Modules versus ASP.NET MVC Action Filters – K. Scott Allen discusses how to decide whether to implement your functionality as an ASP.NET HTTP Module of ASP.NET MVC Action filter, highlighting the differences between the two.
  • Silverlight and HTTP and Caching, OH MY! – Ayende discusses the issues he has encountered with caching of HTTP Responses on the Silverlight platform finding that cache control mechanisms don’t seem to be being honoured, and shares a workaround.
  • Improving Asynchronous Tests for Silverlight – Christopher Bennage explores asynchronous tests on Silverlight as a part of his testing of RavenDB, and shows how he used the coroutine syntax from Caliburn to help simplify the tests syntax.
  • Deploying, but without those pesky test files! – Chris Skardon discusses how you can edit the Project File on your Silverlight projects to avoid shipping your Silverlight Tests with your application.
  • Start Building an International Application for Windows Phone 7 (Part I) – ‘Jnnet’ kicks off a series looking at building applications for the Windows Phone 7 which are available with a UI in multiple languages.
  • Windows Phone 7 Guides for IT Pros (and Developers) – Mike Ormond highlights a series of guides intended for IT Professionals which look at various aspects of the Windows Phone 7 OS, features, certificates and services. Many of the guides contain useful information for developers too.
  • Geocoding and Routing with Bing Maps – Mike Battista look at using the Bing Maps Web Services to obtain geocoding information for places and routing information to plot journeys between places, sharing sample code to make use of this functionality on the Windows Phone 7 devices.
  • Not as easy as it looks & Not as easy as it looks, Part Two – Eric Lippert discusses the complexities of creating the eliminate variable refactoring in Visual Studio, highlighting some of the scenarios which cause complications, and follows up in the second part with some further cases where the language makes it hard to implement this refactoring.
  • Internals of Extension Methods – Abhishek Sur takes a look behind the scenes at how the .NET Framework supports Extension Methods, looking at the IL that gets created when we use the Extension method syntactic sugar.
  • Leveraging .Net 4.0 Framework Tools For Encrypting Web Configuration Sections – Sam Abraham takes a brief look at configuring the ASP.NET feature for encrypting (and decrypting) the Web.Config file.
  • A Feature-driven Comparison of Entity Framework and NHibernate – Queries – Dino Esposito continues his series looking at the differences and similarities between HNibernate and Entity Framework, examining their respective implementations of querying
  • Working with Pinned Sites – Israel Hilerio talks about the Internet Explorer Pinned Sites feature which allows web application to exist as first class application on the Windows Task Bar, and discusses the APIs available to developers to interact with task bar features from their web applications.

Community

  • Book Club – February 2011 – The Pragmatic Programmer – Scottish Developers kick off a new series of book club events which will oscillate between being hosted in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The first event will be discussing ‘The Pragmatic Programmer, from Journeyman to Master’ and will be held in Glasgow on the evening of Wednesday 2nd February. In March the book club will be looking at ‘RESTful Web Services’ with the event held in Edinburgh.

Humour