Software

  • NuGet 1.3 Released – Phil Haack follows his own advice (release early, release often) and announces the release of NuGet 1.3. This update, which includes updates to NuGet.exe and the Package Explorer, is available as an update in the Visual Studio Extension Manager and also can be self updated using ‘NuGet.exe u’. This release includes a number of new features, including easier package creation, caching to improve the performance, and commands for easy access of web-based information about packages.
  • Announcing YUI Compressor 2.4.6 – The Yahoo User Interface team announce the release of YUI Compressor 2.4.6. This latest update to their tool for minifying and compressing CSS and JavaScript focuses mainly on CSS features, including a JavaScript CSS compressor implementation, support for more CSS features, bugfixes and improvements to tests and documentation, along with a new batch mode allowing multiple files to be processed in once call to the tooling.
  • FluentTime: a fluent interface in C# for working with dates and times – John Hume shares FluentTime, a library which provides a fluent interface for working with dates an times, providing some nice natural language esq expressions when performing operations on dates and times.

Information

  • Sync Your Visual Studio Environment Through THE CLOUD – Matt Honeycutt takes a look at combining the ExtensionSync Extension, with DropBox, and using the Pepper Extension to synchronise your Visual Studio environments accross multiple machines via cloud based storage
  • Effective Tests: A Test-First Example – Part 4 – Derek Greer continues his worked Test Driven Development example looking at how Test Driven Development supports the continued development of your software examining the feedback from integration of the example into a GUI and QA testing and showing how TDD supports handling these changes with more worked examples looking at the issues and their resolution.
  • Why is this not thread safe? – Ayende takes a look at some seemingly thread safe code and highlights that while it all looks OK there is actually thread safety issues lurking due to some the behaviour of the Dictionary’s ContainsKey method, and that the details are in the MSDN documentation.
  • CSS Sprites and the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Library – Scott Mitchell takes a look at the web performance technique of using CSS Sprites to improve the loading performance of your website, and explores the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization library which provides the server side support to enable your easy use of this technique.
  • Understanding Differences in Hardware Acceleration through Paintball – Seth McLaughlin takes a look at the Paint Ball Test Drive Sample which uses sprites (in the more traditional sense) and the Canvas to draw its key graphical elements, looking at the performance of these techniques across the common modern browsers.
  • IE Pinned Sites Part 4: How to implement Jump List Tasks – Jennifer Marsman is part way through a series of posts looking at the Internet Explorer 9 Pinned Sites functionality, continuing in this post looking at the implementation of custom jump list tasks.
  • Moles and Linq to SQL: Mocking Linq to SQL Behavior & Using Moles with DLR (dynamic) – Javier Arguello takes a look at the use of Moles as an isolation/mock framework allowing you to mock out Linq To Sql functionality and return your own custom test data, illustrating with a simple example. Javier also shares a configuration change which enables Moles to work with DLR based code.
  • Dynamic properties in Silverlight 5 – David Catuhe shares a translation of a section of his French article on Silverlight 5 beta, exploring the use of dynamic types with Silverlight, looking at their use in C# and binding in XAML
  • Silverlight 5 Beta Rough Notes – Markup Extensions, Implicit Data Templates, Ancestor Relative Binding, Silverlight and IE9 in Windowless Mode & Binding to Dynamic Properties – Mike Taulty continues his series of posts sharing some rough notes on the new Silverlight 5 Beta features, exploring the creation of custom markup extensions in XAML, Implicitly applied data templates, Binding support for dynamic types and for relative data source binding, and exploring the power of windowless Silverlight in Internet Explorer 9 and Silverlight 5

Community

  • Hacking Education: A Contest for Developers and Data Crunchers – Scott Guthrie highlights a competition, for which he and Scott Hanselman are judging the .NET category, from the DonorsChoose.org charity website. The competition is looking for inovative uses of the open data that the site provides. The .NET category has some great prizes, and there are categories for other languages and platforms as well.
  • .NET Open Source Community – CodePlex / GitHub Comparision – jwanagel blogs on the CodePlex blog discussing the size of the .NET Open Source community, drawing upon project statistics from CodePlex and GitHub

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