Shorter edition than planned today…I was slightly hampered in production by video driver crashes and the associated blank screen every 30 seconds, all followed by my first Windows 8 RTM blue screen of death!

Software

  • WCF Data Services 5.5.0 Release – The WCF Data Services team announce the offical release of the WCF Data Services 5.5.0, released via NuGet. The release includes a major re-enhancements of the URL Parser, and implementation of Public Data Providers, as well as over 40 bugfixes
  • ReSharper 8 EAP Build: JIT Edition – With just days to spare on the expiry of the last EAP the JetBrains team announce their latest EAP edition of ReSharper, featuring more refactorings, XAML Grid inspection and refactorings and much more.
  • EF6 Beta 1 Available – Rowen Miller announces the availability of the first beta release of Entity Framework 6, with runtime available via NuGet and tooling as a download from the Download Center, and a significant number of enhancements and changes since the early alpha releases.

Information

  • Getting up to speed with Katana – Jon Galloway discusses the basics of OWIN and Katana before diving into why these are significant and exciting things for Web Developers, highlighting resources to learn more including whitepapers Channel 9 content.
  • What the meaning of is is – Eric Lippert explores the is operator in C#, discussing some of the slightly stranger aspects of its behaviour with nulls, and looking at what the operator actually means.
  • A typical effect of setting CopyLocal = true – Patrick Smacchia discusses the default CopyLocal=true on assembly references in the Visual Studio project structure, looking at why he considers it to be somewhat evil
  • Code Review Checklist and Guidelines for C# Developers – Mohammed Hameed shares a good list of things we as developers should be checking in our code reviews. I would argue that a many of these should probably be checked by the developer working on te code prior to code review too.
  • How to debug silent crashes in .Net – Samual Jack takes a look at how you can go about debugging and diagnosing serious crashes in .NET applications where your application level error handling is not able to catch the error