jQuery 1.3 and the jQuery Foundation – jQuery 1.3 has been released, adn includes a whole new CSS Selector engine, changes to the events system, and the removal of browser sniffing amongst a host of other changes. This announcement also details some other changes going on at the jQuery Project.
January 2009 CTP of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK released – Jim Nakashima announces the release of the latest Community Technology Preview release of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio and the Azure SDK. This release addresses a number of top bugs along with some new and improved features.
Introducing ‘Mockingbird’ – Santosh Benjamin announces the alpha release of MockingBird, his web service mocking tool to assist in development when the real web service is not available or does not yet exist.
Announcing FsCheck 0.4 – The latest update for FsCheck, the F# port of Haskell’s QuickCheck, which allows for automatic testnig of your F# code using a wide range of randomly generated cases
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How do you know your code works? – Chad Myers explores the four types of additional code he writes (above and beyond the actual production code), and talks a little about each type.
The Story of the Lazy-Loading Lunchbox – Dylan Beattie explores a number of software development concepts using analogies with his life as a child and his school lunchbox and rucksack. Excellent reading, and some novel explanations of interesting concepts.
A new breed of magic strings in ASP.NET MVC – Jimmy Bogard identifies the heavy use of Anonymous Types in ASP.NET MVC as an instance of ‘magic strings’, and looks at alternatives to this.
Automatic vs Explicit Properties – Eric Lippert explores a readers concerns about automatic properties and using them inside the implementing class rather than using the private backing fields.
Avoid object initializers & the using statement – Ayende highlights a problem with using object initialisers with the using statement, and how an exception in any of the properties being set will cause the object to not be disposed correctly.
Named Formats Redux – Phil Haack follows up his recent post on Named Format String replacements with two reader submitted solutions to the problem.
Windows Azure – Breaking It Down – Justin Etheredge shares his intial thoughts, based on a few days experimentation, on Azure and the Live, .NET and SQL Services
Behavior-Driven Development with NBehave – Dmitri Nesteruk explores Behaviour Driven Development using NBehave and MUnit illustrated with a simple bank account example.
Using PostSharp without installing via the MSI – Scott Wojan briefly outlines the steps required to get PostSharp working without actually installing it, allowing you to make your projects more portable and reduce the dependency of having to install the framework.
Astonishment Principles and Framework Behavior – K. Scott Allen illustrates the Principle of Least Surprise with a before and after example using the .NET XML functionality and the new XML API based on XElement.