Software

  • March CTP ("CTP4") of Visual Studio Update 2 now available – Charles Sterling announces the availability of the March CTP of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, including the new HTML Client for LightSwitch, improved diagnostics and debugging for Sharepoint 2013, along with a bunch of improvements for Team Foundation Server
  • CTP4 (March) of VS/TFS 2012 Update 2 is available – Brian Harry digs a little deeper into the new features included in the CTP4 of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 specifically focusing on the Team Foundation Server features.
  • Now Available: Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 – Somasegar announces the release of the Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012, allowing development of Office integration in your applications, both online and offline
  • Announcing a New Preview of the LightSwitch HTML Client – The Visual Studio LightSwitch team discuss in detail the new HTML Client included in the CTP4 Update for Visual Studio, allowing applications to be run on mobile devices just using the web browser, and also to be published to Sharepoint.
  • Announcing NCLDR (Alpha) – Guy Smith-Ferrier highlights the first Alpha release of NCLDR a port of CLDR to .NET. CLDR is the Common Locale Data Repository and contains rich information about cultural elements such as number, date, and other formatting, and contains a huge amount of culture more than the basic .NET System.Globalization framework does.
  • jQuery 2.0 Beta 2 Released – Dave Methvin announces the second beta release of jQuery 2.0. This version of jQuery depreciates a lot of old functionality (as did 1.9) and also drops support for IE6,7 and 8

Information

  • Windows Azure Updates: Android Support, SQL Reporting Services, Active Directory, More… – Scott Guthrie announces the latest selection of new features added to the Windows Azure platform including further improvements to Mobile Services, SQL Reporting Services, Active Directory, storage and much more.
  • Monads, part four – Eric Lippert continues his exploration of Monads, looking at building on the previous patterns to more general operations on monadic types, continuing building the definition and requirements for a Monadic type.
  • Test Better – Phil Haack discusses the art and science of testing, and the importance of actually testing the applications you work on by using the application, as while unit tests give a certain sense of safety and security that your code works, its not until you actually try using it that you know if it really does.
  • Should websites be required to publicly disclose their password storage strategy? – Troy Hunt continues discussion of the storage of passwords by web applications discussing some recent security breaches, and the legal and other implications of the breaches.
  • Free Xamarin Studio and Free Chapters 1-4 Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C# – Wallace B. McClure discusses the recent releases from Xamarin, including the free starter Xamarin Studio which allows you to try out the functionality of their frameworks, along with the release of the first four chapters from ‘Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C#’ providing a useful guide to help you get started.

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