Software

  • Windows Embedded Standard 2011 CTP2 is now available! – The Windows Embedded Team announce thier second CTP release of Windows Embedded Standard 2011. This update includes the usual bugfixes and improvements along with a new Static Dependency Analyser, and packages for Anti-Malware, DVD, PhotoViewer, Fax and Scan, and a few more
  • Announcing: Reflector Addin Toolkit on Codeplex – Jason Haley announces the first additions to his CodePlex Project Reflector Addin Toolkit which includes utilities and examples for building Reflector addins, including VSTemplates, explanatory diagrams, and helper scripts
  • Migrating ASP.NET MVC 1.0 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta (updated!) – Eilon Lipton updates his utility to convert ASP.NET MVC 1 projects to ASP.MC 2 Beta. This update now better handles the JavaScript files in your projects, along with improving the way the reference to ASP.NET MVC Beta 2 is included, and some UI improvements to the application.

Information

  • Building High Performance Web Applications – James Senior looks at some of the new features in the ASP.NET Ajax Library, linking to the official content on each subject, and also highlights a white paper he prepared with Dan Wahlin about using these new features to speed up your ASP.NET Applications
  • Automatic Null Checks – Alois Kraus suggests a new operator (and attempts to get some support for it on Connect) for better dealing with null values, and shows some other alternatives you can use to provide similar functionality using extension methods.
  • A View into the Behavior of Your Parallel Application : Learning to Write in Parallel – ‘jarapp’ of the Concurrency Visualizer team shows how they had a little fun making words in the thread view using a little sample application. This is quite similar to a demo at SQLBits using SQL to make the 96 cores of a UniSys test machine write words in task manager – good fun 🙂
  • ux musings : Windows System Color Theme for Silverlight – Corrina, Tsitsi, Vidya, and Susan talks about the work they have been doing on building a theme mapping for Silverlight to use the underlying Windows colour scheme, further adding to the accessibility support in Silverlight.
  • Connecting Your Tests to an Implementation – Nico Kicillof of the Spec Explorer Team talks about the two way you can connect your generated tests to the implementation in Spec Explorer, and also discusses Static vs. Instance-Based Models, another significant design decision which is influenced by your choice of connection.
  • OMG, Better Rake (for .net)! – Steven Harman highlights the work being done by Derick Bailey on implementing real Rake tasks for .NET builds as a part of the Albacore project.
  • Deploying A Web Application with Git and FTP – Rob Conery looks at deploying web applications using the best solution he has found so far, the Git Version Control System and FTP.
  • Silverlight 4 Beta – Using Silverlight as Drop Target – Brian Lagunas looks at using a Silverlight application as a target for drag and drop operations, allowing you to drag files into the application and have it process it. Brian provides source for this Silverlight 4 Beta sample, and also discusses a neat UI features for Text Trimming
  • Facebook Connect Action Filter for ASP.NET MVC – Jim Christopher (beefarino) shows how you can use ASP.NET MVC Action Filter attributes to utilise the Facebook Connect User Identity and profile data services in your ASP.NET MVC applications
  • Enabling the ASP.NET Ajax script loader for your own scripts – Bertrand Le Roy looks at how you can utilise the features of the ASP.NET Ajax script loader to load your own scripts taking advantage of the lazy load, parallel loading and dependency management
  • IIS SEO Toolkit – Crawler Module Extensibility – Carlos Aguilar Mares looks at the Extensibility of the IIS SEO Tookit in this first post in a series. This Post looks at the extensibility of the Crawler Module, showing how you can add new features to the crawler to report on, in this case, images.
  • Hitting the upper limit of foreign key constraints – Jimmy Bogard talks about an interesting problem his team ran into surrounding strange messages from SQL about running out of stack space, and how it eventually traced back to the number of foreign key constraints in the Database.
  • Always write a spec, Part Two – Eric Lippert follows up from his previous post about specifications with a look at what was wrong with his specification mentioned in the previous post
  • Silverlight: Universal GUI toolkit – Miguel de Icaza talks about the Silverlight 4 Beta announcement at PDC, and discusses what it means for desktop applications and the Moonlight project
  • Getting your OSS binaries with Horn – Hadi Hariri highlights the latest developments of the Horn project, probably the easiest way to get the correct versions and builds of the various open source .NET libraries. Horn how has a server based component which is being hosted by the kind folks at iMeta, making it even easier to get the correct builds of the things you need.
  • Can I talk to that William fellow? He was so helpful – Raymond Chen recounts the story of the time when Bill Gates answered a support call (a little over 20 years ago) in this amusing, yet true, anecdote.

Community

  • Linked .Net Users Group – Presentations – Last Nights Scott Guthrie live chat was a great opportunity to get to hear about all the developments discussed at PDC, along with getting Scott’s view on where things are going to be going in the future. The recording of this session is now up, so if you missed it live you can catch up

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