Software

  • jQuery UI 1.8 adds position, button, autocomplete, new widget factory, lighter core – The jQuery UI Team announce the release of jQuery UI 1.8. Available in three forms, starter, developer and theme pack this new version of jQuery UI adds 5 new plugins, 1 new effect and a huge number of bugfixes and improvements, along with reducing the size of some of the files.
  • JetBrains to Launch dotCover EAP Next Week – JetBrains announce their new product dotCover, a code coverage tool which integrates tightly with Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010 and Resharper, providing feedback on test coverage. Initial Early access releases will be available from next week.

Information

  • Checklist for Developing Message-Based Systems – Billy McCafferty follows on from a previous post earlier in the month to discuss a checklist of questions that it is helpful to know the answers to when working on building a message based architecture. These questions provide a framework to guide the development of your architecture, and the answers provide valuable documentation of the design.
  • Web Test Authoring and Debugging Techniques for Visual Studio 2010 – Ed Glas explores the Web Test / Web Performance Test functionality of Visual Studio 2010, giving some background to how the testing works, looking at some of the common pitfalls / mistakes, and talking about the new features introduced in the 2010 release.
  • GenesisEngine: Don’t Get Domain Objects From The Container – Eric Lee takes a look at one of the Inversion of Control / Dependency injection anti-patterns and shows how you can avoid the multi stage initialisation by using the factory pattern to correctly create your entity and satisfy its dependencies.
  • Entity Framework 4.0 – Part4: How to use your own POCO’s – Sven shares part 4 of a series looking at Entity Framework, looking at the new Plain Old CRL Object (POCO) support introduced in Entity Framework 4, showing the method of working illustrated by a simple console application.
  • Introducing IE9’s User Agent String – The Internet Explorer Team talk about the constituent parts of the Internet Explorer 9 User Agent string
  • Upgrading Suteki Shop to ASP.NET MVC 2 – Mike Hadlow shares his experiences of upgrading an ASP.NET MVC project to the ASP.NET MVC2 release edition using the Solution Converter by Eilon Lipton, and talks about the manual changes he needed to make to fix the post upgrade issues.
  • Garbage Collection in IE7 heavily impacted by number of JavaScript objects and string sizes – Andreas Grabner talks about performance impacts of having large numbers of JavaScript objects, and large amounts of string data in scope, and how it makes a significant performance difference in Internet Explorer 7.
  • Creating a Performance Baseline – Part 1 – Anu Chawla shares soem useful information on the Performance counters to monitor to establish a performance baseline for SQL Server, explaining the key ranges for values from each counter.
  • Leveraging expression trees to unit test ViewModel classes – Jeremy Alles looks at how you can use Expression Trees to shorten the code required to test view model properties, working from the verbose manual method, to his expression tree method. Full source is provided.

Community

  • Free Windows Azure event next Monday in London (29th March) – Eric Nelson highlights a free all day Azure event to be held in London next week. Spread over three tracks this event covers a number of aspects of Azure from PHP / Ruby support though to the commercial model for Azure, and is targeted principally at startups, although Eric suggests that it would be of interest to anyone.
  • Canadian Developer Connection : David Laribee on Thursday’s "Ignite Your Coding" – Tomorrow Evening UK (2pm Eastern) sees the Ignite Your Coding live webcast featuring David Laribee talking on the concept of Technical Debt, looking at ways of paying back the debt, and taking questions from the audience.
  • Unveiling Raven DB – Ayende announces that he will be giving a talk on the evening of 28th April at SkillsMatter in London where he will be giving his Raven DB Document database project its first public ‘unveiling’. The Event is free to attend, but registration is required. Ayende also gives a sneak peek at some of the UI for Raven DB in his post ‘First look at Raven DB‘

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