Happy New Year Everyone, many thanks for your kind comments on the 2011 review post, and many congratulations to the new and renewed January MVPs. Now on to today’s links….

Software

  • Last Thursday’s out of cycle update from Microsoft – Tatworth highlights the important security update for ASP.NET released over the Christmas period which addresses a newly announced security vulnerability. As today is the first day back after Christmas for many (especially those in the UK) today is a good day to review your requirements for installing this patch.
  • xUnit.net 1.9 – Hot off the press, the xUnit.net team have just released xUnit.NET 1.9, supporting async unit tests (using .NET 4.5 or Async CTP), generic theory methods, new assert methods, theory parameter names included in display names and much more.
  • ReSharper 6.1.1 Early Access – The JetBrains team announce the early access preview of ReSharper 6.1.1, a release which will be made officially early this year, and addresses known and reported issues with ReSharper 6.1
  • StatLight v1.6 is Out – Jason Jarrett announces the release of StatLight 1.6, tooling which allows you to run your Silverlight Tests on your Continuous Integration environment. This release contains some pretty major internal refactoring, including the introduction of IOC, as well as supporting Silverlight 5.
  • Status Update on SpecsFor.Mvc – Matt Honeycutt discusses some of the changes he has been making to this SpecsFor.Mvc project in response to real world use in a mobile web project, and is now looking for some feedback on the changes from the community.

Information

  • SOLID JavaScript: The Liskov Substitution Principle – Derek Greer continues his series looking at the application of the SOLID principles to JavaScript. This part takes a look at the meaning and application of the Liskov Substitution Principle to JavaScript where there isn’t the traditional OO inheritance.
  • JavaScript for C# developers: the Module Pattern (part 1) &part 2 – Julian M Bucknall kicks off a series of posts on JavaScript from the point of view of C# developers with a look at the module pattern, introducing the use of the module pattern in Part 1 and exploring how parameters can be used with the Module Pattern, and explores the Tightly Augmented Module Pattern and the Loosely Augmented Module Pattern.
  • Reducing Backbone Routers To Nothing More Than Configuration – Derick Bailey continues his discussions of Backbone Routing, responding to a readers comments about his routes being pass through calls, and looks at replacing the route callback functions with direct use of the methods on the other object.
  • Structuring Unit Tests – Phil Haack discusses his currently favoured way of structuring and organising his unit tests, a practice he picked up from Drew Miller (who in turn picked them up from Brad Wilson and Jim Newkirk), showing how he uses nested classes to group similar tests together.
  • Structuring your Unit Tests, why? – Ayende follows on from Phil’s post discussing how he cares less about the structure and organisation of tests, focusing on the internal structure of the tests instead.
  • Story in bddify – Mehdi Khalili continues his series looking at the use of his newly ‘1.0’ed bddify library. In this part Mehdi looks at how you can introduce the concept of a story into your behaviour tests.
  • Rx – Window – Bnaya Eshet continues his series looking at the use of the Reactive Extensions, taking a method by method approach. In this post Bnaya explores the Window function, explaining its use and purpose.
  • Event Centric: super-charge your model with domain events to enable business intelligence – Daniel Cazzulino continues looking at the use of domain events to power business intelligence, exploring the raising of domain events in your domain code.
  • IIS7 & Self-elevating PowerShell – Ian Battersby shares the significant chunks of his PowerShell scripts which automate the ‘cradle-to-grave’ test environment which deploys their web application to a clean environment for use in continuous integration and automated testing. The post discusses elevating PowerShell to allow IIS7 configuration, site creation, file copying and the setting of permissions.
  • Agile’s Coming of Age – David Starr discusses the current state of agile practice adoption, reviewing the overall world view of agile and looking at each of the key principles discussing the adoption, before looking to the challenges which still remain.

2011 Retrospectives, 2012 Predictions

As I didn’t include any of these in my 2011 in review post I thought I should include some today: