Software

  • Announcing The End of The Free Promotional Period for Windows Azure AppFabric Caching – The Windows Azure Team give a reminder of the end of the promotional period for the AppFabric Caching Service, and announce the official pricing for service use for billing periods starting from 1st August. Prices range from $45 a month for a 128MB Cache, through to $325 for a 4BG cache, with a number of Azure Platform offers including the 128MB cache in the package.
  • NLog 2.0 has been released! – The NLog team announced the release of Version 2.0 of their logging library last month (and somehow I missed the announcement at the time). The version 2.0 release focused on adding support for new platforms including Silverlight, and Windows Phone, along with various improvements to the underlying architecture and te Developer experience.

Information

  • Introduction to Unity Application Block 2.1 – Niko Schuessler gives a nice introduction to the Unity Application Block which provides dependency injection functionality as a part of the Patterns and Practices Application blocks. In this article Niko gives some background and walks through some of the introductory use cases and the code required to make them work.
  • Techniques, Strategies and Patterns for Structuring JavaScript Code – The Prototype Pattern – Dan Wahlin continues his series of posts looking at JavaScript programming, taking a look at how the prototype pattern which is baked into the language can be used to improve your code, building on his example from last time.
  • Javascript code quality, as part of your build – Romain Prieto highlights JsHint, a JsLint clone which addresses a number of user issues which can make working with JsLint difficult. In this post Romain takes a look at configuring and including the tool as a part of your build process.
  • HTML5 Part 1: Semantic Markup and Page Layout – Jennifer Marsman kicks off a new series of posts this week looking at the various aspects of HTML5. In this first part Jennifer explores the notion of semantic markup and how HTML5 provides markup elements to better express your page in semantic markup.
  • Creating an HTML 5 Game – Part 2 – Moving Stuff Around – The South Africa Developer and Platform Group Blog is featuring a series of posts looking at creating a game in HTML 5 and JavaScript. This second part takes a look at capturing keypresses and moving elements on screen in response.
  • Explore the Browser User-Agent in Windows Phone Mango – ‘jhealy’ takes a peek at the construction of the Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) web browser user agent string
  • Windows Phone 7 : Using Local Database for Application – Wriju takes a look at using Windows Phone 7’s Isolated storage and Linq to Sql to provide database functionality for your Windows Phone applications
  • Unix Fight! – Sed, Grep, Awk, Cut and Pulling Groups out of a PowerShell Regular Expression Capture – Scott Hanselman takes a look at using PowerShell to parse and read values from files from the command line, exploring how easy it is to read values from good well-formed XML, and taking a look at other techniques you can use when your files are less well formed (or not even XML).
  • LaxCraft – Sample MVC3 Site – James Coleman discusses the creation of a real world ASP.NET MVC3 application for managing and tracking a youth lacrosse team, making use of Dependency injection, Razor Views, Open ID and the ASP.NET MVC 3 platform. Full code is available over on CodePlex.
  • ViewData or ViewBag – Avoid Dependency Pollution in ASP.NET MVC Controller – Kazi Manzur Rashid takes a look at the ViewBag / ViewData and its use in carrying values from controller to view, exploring the use of child actions to populate the values we require in the ViewData to avoid having bloat in our main primary controller, allowing it to focus on only what its main purpose is.
  • Creating a Silverlight 5 Helper for ASP.NET MVC3 Razor – Pete Brown takes a look at creating a ASP.NET MVC 3 Razor helper to make it easy to include Silverlight applications within your ASP.NET MVC application, walking through the process step by step.