Really looking forward to the Developer Developer Developer South West conference this weekend – if you spot me there come and say hello!

Software

  • NDepend V4 – Code Query and Rule over LINQ – Patrick Smacchia announces the release of version 4 of NDepend, his software analysis tooling. This version, 2 years in the making, brings support for Visual Studio 11, a new API which allows you to build your own analyzers and code querying using a Linq syntax, along with working on the performance and useability of the tool.

Information

  • Continuous Value Delivery with Visual Studio 11 ALM & My Favorite Features: Creating Storyboards with PowerPoint – Jason Zander kicks off a new series of posts looking at the features in Visual Studio 11 ALM which support Continuous Value Delivery, sharing a video of a presentation he gave on the subject at the ALM Summit. Jason also explores the functionality which Visual Studio 11 adds to PowerPoint to allow you to story board applications.
  • 3 Key Software Principles You Must Understand – Chris Peters discusses three of the most important software development principles, looking at DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself), KISS (Keep it simple stupid), and YAGNI (You ain’t gonna need it), looking at what the principle is, how it applies, and how you can go about adhering to it.
  • Two ways to work with HTTP responses in ApiController, HttpResponseMessage and HttpResponseException – Glenn Block looks at the difference between the use of HttpResponseMessage and HttpResponseException in ASP,NET WebAPI
  • Attribute based routing in ASP.NET Web API – Filip W. discusses the use of the updated AttributeRouting library (available from NuGet) which adds attribute controlled routing to your ASP.NET WebAPI projects. In this post Filip walks through its use in defining the routes to your controller methods as attributes on the methods themselves.
  • Windows 8, .NET, Async, Await, What’s Going On? – Mike Taulty discusses how the async and await keywords are new to many developers attending the Windows 8 Developer camps, and highlights some of his own content regarding them, along with a really nice article on the Windows 8 Developer blog from Stephen Toub.
  • Being productive in the background – background tasks – Hari Pulapaka (and a collection of collaborators) discusses background tasks in Windows 8 Metro Style Applications, looking at how you can create and schedule these tasks, along with discussing the limits applied to background tasks in terms of CPU and network resource.
  • Windows 8: Top 10 Reasons why I choose XAML over HTML5 – Jerry Nixon shares 10 reasons he believes that XAML is the best choice for Windows 8 development, discussing, amongst others, resolution independence, binding, debugging features of Visual Studio and the power of Expression Blend.
  • Kevin LaBranche – Getting started with Mercurial for a small team – Kevin LaBranche kicks off a series looking at getting a team up and running with the Mercurial Distributed Version Control System. So far he has posted 4 parts, looking at the decision to use Mercurial over Git, Installation and configuration of Mercurial, the basics of the Mercurial workflow, and the setup of a Mercurial Repository.