Software

  • Visual Studio 2010 Professional – $250 off and get an MSDN Essentials subscription offer – Eric Ligman highlights the online availability of a good offer to get you Visual Studio 2010 and a 12 month MSDN Essentials subscription for $549, which seems like a pretty good deal, although I’m unsure if you can order it from outside the US.
  • Start-PowerShellPoint – John Robbins shares a neat looking PowelShell script which provides the core functionality of presentation software (ala PowerPoint) from the comfort of your console window.
  • Migrating ASP.NET MVC 1.0 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM – Eilon Lipton announces the release of his ASP.NET MVC Application Project Upgrader tool which will now take your ASP.NET MVC project up to the ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM level (which has yet to be released).
  • Deleporter: Cross-Process Code Injection for ASP.NET – Steve Sanderson shares a neat experimental library which provides a means for an external process to feed code into an ASP.NET application, intended for integration testing to allow the tests to set up mock data, etc in the ASP.NET from the test runner process.

Information

  • We moved your ASP.NET website cheese, in a good way – Scott Hanselman announces the first in a series of updates to the ASP.NET Website, refocusing the site on the core concepts of getting started, getting the software, hosting your application and participating in the community. Another Microsoft website to get a make over yesterday was theMicrosoft TechNet site
  • When "Activator" is just to slow – ‘JoeGeeky’ takes a look at the relative performance of the Activator for creating new instances of objects, a common use case in IoC container, and other reflection based code, and shows how better performance can be obtained using lambda expressions.
  • Strengthening your domain: Encapsulated collections – Jimmy Bogard continues his discussions on building better domain models with a look at why in general you don’t want to expose collections as it affords the consumer of your code too much flexibility, and shows how you can better express your domain model’s intent by encapsulation.
  • Getting Started With CI Using Hudson For Your .NET Projects – Bob Cravens talks us through the process of getting up and running using the Java powered Husdon Continuous Integration Server to build and manage .NET projects in this nice screenshot rich step by step post.
  • POCO Template Code Generation Options – Sheetal Gupta of the Entity Framework Design Team talks about the recent release of templates for working with Entity Framework and Plain Old CLR Objects (POCO), and set out various options for taking these template forward, soliciting community feedback on the team’s ideas.
  • FluentPath: a fluent wrapper around System.IO – Bertrand Le Roy sharse a Fluent interface implementation which wraps the common and dated System.IO API functions. Full code is available and licensed under a BSD license.
  • Debugging .Net framework source code within Windbg – Naveen shows how you can debug into the .NET Framework source from your own applications using the Windbg debugger, allowing you to set breakpoints in the framework code
  • Programming Practices: Part 1 – Watching from a distance – Brian Harry begins a series of posts talking about how he codes, in this first part talking about the way he tends to work and some of his core principles and techniques, and in his second post ‘Programming Practices: Part – Thoughts on TDD‘, he shares his thoughts on Test Driven Development, discussing how he dislikes Test Driven Development mechanisms, however likes the overall aims of TDD. Despite its seemingly inflammatory statement this is a very interesting read to hear one of the other sides to the argument.
  • Guest Post: Using IronRuby and .NET to produce the "Hello World of WPF" – Eric Nelson hosts another guest post on his blog, this time from Edd Morgan who talks through creating a simple WPF application using IronRuby