Software

  • General availability for the Windows 7 Beta to end – The Windows 7 beta download period has been extended to February 10th, so if you haven’t already grabbed the beta release you still have a couple of weeks.
  • Pragmatic Internet Explorer 8 (RC1) Testing – The rumours were true, and Internet Explorer 8 RC1 has now been released to the wild. Available in over 25 languages this release is aimed at getting final wide spread testing of what may actually become the final release. As usual, Virtual Machines are available for testing purposes, or you can actually install it on your own machine.
  • Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Beta Released – The Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Beta has been released on the Download Center, bringing with it a number of new features such as Fail Over Clustering, live migrations and support for larger hardware.
  • Fast Reflection Library – Jeffrey Zhao shares a reflection helper library aiming to help improve performance of reflection operations used by things like Object Relation Mappers

Information

  • Video: ASP.NET MVC – Show me the code! – Steve Sanderson shares the video footage from his Developer Developer Developer 7 talk on ASP.NET MVC – I attended this session and throughly enjoyed it, and these videos give a great idea of how this type of event actually is to attend.
  • Framework Design Guidelines: Avoiding custom delegates – Brad Abrams continues his series sharing some of the wisdom in the Framework Design Guidelines book – this post discusses why you should use Func<> and Action<> delegates where ever possible over defining your own.
  • Javascript Array Fun – Rick Strahl looks back at a bug in some JavaScript and reminds us that Arrays in JavaScript can be a little different to how you might be expecting.
  • Ignoring Testing can be Explained, but Never Excused – Chris Missal looks at a number of reasons often given as to why ‘automated testing is mandatory’ is not a common policy in our industry. Interesting reading, and a number of good comments on this post.
  • Captcha cracking in JavaScript with Canvas and neural nets – Ajaxian highlights some of the incredible stuff that people are achieving with Javascript – defeating Captcha’s using Javascript, the HTML 5 canvas and some OCR techniques.
  • When is a postback not a postback? – Just because it looks like a post back and tastes like a post back doesn’t mean it actually is a post back, Barry Dorrans explains why
  • How do you know your tests are good? – Laila Bougria looks at how Test Driven Development can give you better certainty that your tests are good.
  • CodePlex 2008 – A Year in Review – Sara Ford looks back at how 2008 treated the CodePlex site, looking at visitor number, top projects, and features introduced
  • Back To Basics: Reference Counting Garbage Collection – Abhinaba Basu continues his series on Garbage Collection with a look at reference counting techniques for keeping track of objects in scope.
  • Enterprise Library 5.0 kick-off! Spend your $100 wisely! – The Enterprise Library Team are getting ready to start working on Version 5, and are looking to the community to get suggestions for what to include using the virtual $100 method to allow you to show preference for features.

Community

  • SQLBits Session voting – Simon Sabin announces that the session voting for the SQLBits 4 conference to be held in Manchester, UK on 28th March 2009 is now open. This is where you as an attendee get to shape the conference you will be going to. Simon also notes that 4 of these sessions will be streamed live – excellent news for those who might not be able to make it in person.

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