Software

  • TFS Integration Platform Updated (Mar ’11) – Brian Harry highlights the official binary release of the TFS Integration Platform’s March release, now available on the Visual Studio Gallery. This release is a bugfix release with an impressive number of fixes included giving a boost to the stability of the product.
  • Masked Input Plugin 1.3 – Josh Bush announces version 1.3 of his jQuery Masked Input Plugin. This release fixes a number of bugs and now comes with a suite of tests, along with a better minification resulting in a slightly smaller filesize.

Information

  • Encapsulation: You’re Doing It Wrong – Derick Bailey discusses the Object Oriented Programming Principle of Encapsulation (AKA Information Hiding), looking at some of the myths of encapsulation and discussing ‘Doing it right’
  • Jeff Wilcox’s "Metro" design guide for developers, v1.00 – Jeff Wilcox shares a nice guide to making your Windows Phone Application conform to the Metro look and feel, highlighting the important things to do to get that consistent look and feel.
  • Metro In Motion Part #2 – "Peel" Animations – Colin Eberhardt is also digging into the Metro look and feel, showing in this post how you can achieve the peel application exit animation in your own applications as a transition.
  • Effective Tests: A Test-First Example – Part 1 – Derek Greer presses on with his series on Effective Tests with an introduction to Test Driven Development, and a worked example of using TDD (and a bit of behaviour driven development) to develop some functionality.
  • Scaffolding Actions and Unit Tests with MvcScaffolding – Steve Sanderson continues his series on the use of the MvcScaffolding NuGet package with part three, looking at how the Scaffolding can help with the creation of Actions and Unit Tests by using the provided methods to Scaffold the stub implementations of both into your code.
  • Modifying the default code generation/scaffolding templates in ASP.NET MVC – Scott Hanselman is also focusing on how you can be more efficient when using templating, looking at how you can customise the templates used for code generation in ASP.NET MVC, including a recording of his ASP.NET MVC 2 Ninja Black Belt Tips video where he discusses this concept.
  • Optimizing Regex Performance, Part 3 – Ron Petrusha continues his long running series about Regular Expression Performance over on the BCL Team Blog. This part focuses on the performance of capturing and non-capturing groups in your Regular Expressions.
  • Webinar wrap-up: Julian on JavaScript IV: Good code, bad code – Julian M Bucknall follows up on his Webinar series on JavaScript with a post looking at examples of good and bad JavaScript to illustrate the points from the series
  • Associations in EF 4.1 Code First: Part 2 – Complex Types – Morteza Manavi continues this series with a look at the mapping of Complex Types using Entity Framework Code First, discussing the definition of Complex Types, and looking at the implementation of mapping using Code First.

Community

  • Monads! European Virtual ALT.NET Tuesday 29th March – Tonight (Tuesday 29th March) sees Mike Hadlow presenting his Monads talk to the European Virtual Alt.Net Usergroup. The event kicks off at 7PM GMT (Don’t forget we are now on British Summer Time – GMT+1) and will certainly be an interesting presentation.