Introduced a MIX10 special section today to gather together all the MIX related news.
MIX 10
- MIX10 Day 2 Keynote – IE9, OData and Azure – Alvin Ashcraft gives a nice summary of the goings on in the MIX10 Day 2 Keynote in this article for DZone
- HTML5, Hardware Accelerated: First IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers – The Internet Explorer Team yesterday released the first preview of Internet Explorer 9 at the MIX10 Conference. This new release includes further standards work including HTML5 support, along with drastic improvements to the JavaScript engine, along with Hardware graphics acceleration. The team are also committed to updating the preview approximately every 8 weeks meaning there will be constant visibility of the new features / improvements as they develop. The IE Team also outline a little more about the preview process in their posts About the Platform Preview, and talk about the IE9 Platform Preview Feedback process.
- Announcing the OData SDK – The WCF Data Services Team (formerly the Astoria team) announced the release of the OData SDK providing libraries for interacting with OData datasources in .NET 3.5 & 4, Silverlight 4, JavaScript, PHP, Java, Objective-C and Windows Phone 7 as well as server support for .NET 3.5 and 4. The OData website OData.org updated, gives clues about future SQL Azure enhancements – as reported here by Jamie Thomson, and Scott Hanselman released his Hanselminutes Podcast 205 – Open Data Protocol (OData) with Pablo Castro who is the brains behind the OData standard.
- Announcing Sesame Data Browser – Fabrice Marguerie announces the preview of the Sesame Data Browser, a tool which consumes OData data and allows you to explore the structure and content of the Data.
- Microsoft, jQuery, and Templating – Stephen Walther discusses Microsoft’s increasing support of and contributions to jQuery as announced in Scott Guthrie’s Day 2 MIX10 Keynote address. Stephen also discusses what this means for the other Microsoft JavaScript libraries like the ASP.NET Ajax Library and Ajax Control Toolkit.
- "Build Your Own MVVM Framework" is Online – Rob Eisenberg highlights the availability of the video, slides and sample code from his MIX session on MVVM. This one day turn around is great for non-conference attendees as there are already a huge number of session videos freely available for us to catch up on what we missed.
Software
- Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office Released – Automate Office documents without Office – Greg Duncan highlights the v2.0 release of the Open XML SDK, which builds on the Open XML DSK 1.0, and includes LINQ querying support and functional style document construction
- MVVM Light V3 released at #MIX10 – Laurent Bugnion announces the release of his MVVM Light Toollkit V3, which supports Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 3 with Silverlight 3 and WPF 3.5SP1, and Visual Studio 2010/ Expression Blend 4 Beta with WPF 3.5sp1 and 4, along with Silverlight 3 and 4 RC. Laurent also shares teh details of the new features and changes in his post What’s new in MVVM Light V3
Information
- Why does Visual Studio 2010 convert my projects? – Richa Prasad the Program Manager responsible for the Visual Studio Projects System talks about why Visual Studio 2010 needs to convert projects on opening, and discusses the possibilities for round tripping project files in future releases.
- Testing a WPF UI using Ruby, Cucumber and WiPFlash.dll – Ben Hall explores testing a WPF application using a new WPF automation library called ‘wipflash’ created by Liz Keogh. Ben looks at working with this library from his favoured testing language IronRuby and combines it with the Cucumber framework.
- How to Drink at the Twitter Firehose and not Drown – Gary Short looks at consuming the ‘firehose’ Twitter JSON feed which contains all the public Twitter messages being sent, looking at a queue based pattern for processing these messages, and takes a look at extracting statistical data from the tweets.
- Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Composing deeper – Matthew Podwysocki presses on with his series on Reactive JavaScript with further translation related examples of composition of functions combining with Async operations, along with a plug for Erik Meijer’s MIX10 session on the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript.
- Lambda-passing style for access to resources with lifecycles – Alex Scordellis shows a technique using lambda expressions to perform operations with resources with particular lifecycles can mean that your code is simpler, and your can control the use of the resource much better.
- C# Proposal: Compile Time Static Checking Of Dynamic Objects – Paulo Morgado proposes an extension to the new C# dynamic functionality to allow dynamic types to have some static like type checking by allowing you to provide a contract/interface to which the dynamic type will conform. This sounds a lot like reducing the functionality of dynamic down to simply duck typing, which in certain circumstances would be useful.
- REST: Resources, URI’s and Representations – Cory Isakson introduces 3 of the key concepts in the Representational State Transfer (REST) style of architecture, aiming to show the REST at its fundamental level is simple to understand.
- If You Must Rewrite – Tim Ross shares some of his real world experience of why you shouldn’t embark on a rewrite project, along with some helpful hints to make your life less painful if you do get involved in a rewrite project.
Community
- UK Tech Days (w/c 12th April in London) Update – Mike Taulty highlights the UK Techdays events, and introduces a new feature on the Techdays site which lists the Techdays ‘Fringe’ events which are taking place across the UK during the same week. Most are evening events, and all are worth checking out.
- Getting Started With nServiceBus on VAN Mar 31 – Zach Young announces the next Virtual Alt.Net which sees Bernard Kowalski talking on nServiceBus. This virtual event is free to attend, and takes place on 31st March 2010 @ 8pm UTC (GMT-5)