Software

  • AutoPoco v0.1 Released – Rob Ashton shares his Easter Weekend’s work in the form of AutoPoco, an object factory which produces Plain Old CLR Objects (POCO) using a fluent interface, the ideal solution to the ‘Object Builder’ problem, providing a nice way of producing populated business objects for test cases.
  • SonicFileFinder 2.2 released – Jen Schaller announces an updated version of SonicFileFinder, his Visual Studio Add-in which enables efficient file searching across your projects. This release adds compatibility for Visual Studio 2010.
  • Expression Web 3 SP2 Released – Chris Eargle highlights the release of Service Pack 2 for Expression Web 3, talking about a number of the issues which are resolved by this release

Information

  • Windows programming: The "works on my machine" syndroma – Patrick Smacchia talks about a number of common and less common problems he has run into as a developer of desktop Windows based software written in .NET, caused by operating system level issues. Well worth reading.
  • Infinite Scroll WebSites via AutoPagerize – Hacky, but the beginning of something cool – Scott Hanselman takes a look at an implementation of the ‘infinite page’ where new content keeps loading into the bottom of the page as you scroll. There are implementations in JavaScript, but Scott’s focus here is on the browser extensions which make this a ‘built in’ feature once installed.
  • Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers, and Implicit Line Continuation support with VB 2010 – Scott Guthrie takes a look at some of the new features makin their way into Visual Basic in the .NET 4 / VS2010 release time frame, exploring Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers and the implicit line continuations.
  • 20% more bugs? Or 20% less features? – ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin follows on from the discussions on last nights European Virtual Alt.Net meeting on Software Craftsmanship, suggesting that rather than deliver buggy software with 100% of the features, reduce the number of features by your bug level and have bugfree / quality code. I expect the comments will result in interesting reading on this one.
  • Extreme Programming (XP) at a Glance – J.D. Meier gives an overview of the Extreme Programming Practices, along with a number of related links to resources about XP
  • Getting Started with Lean Software Development – DZone have published another of their ‘Refcardz’, a short 6 page reference document, in this case on Lean Software Development. This Refcard is more like an article on the subject, but covers all the essential groundings.
  • Branching Strategies: Handling Dependencies Between Branches – Derick Bailey continues his exploration of Version Control Branching best practices with a look at a number of the common dependency types which can occur between branches, looking at things you can do to help resolve them.
  • A Custom ASP.NET MVC Model Binder for Repositories – Mike Hadlow shares a simple model binder implementation which creates an populates domain entities in one step, allowing you to cut out the view model when you don’t need any of its features.
  • First round playing with Memcached – Shaun Xu takes a look at the setup and getting started with coding against the Memcached distributed cache running on Windows.
  • Basic Defensive Database Programming Techniques – Alex Kuznetsov talks at length about some of the strategies and techniques you can employ to program defensively against the database, showing, with code, ways of enforcing assumptions and protecting your database from un-intended side effects from bad user queries.
  • A .NET Developer Guide to: MongoDB and NoRM – Howard van Rooijen takes a look at NoSql databases, and shows how to get up and running with the MongoDB database on Windows, and explores the NoRM projects attempts to make its use easy for .NET Developers.
  • testing NHibernate mappings – Over Easter, Mike Hadlow has been porting his Suteki Shop ASP.NET MVC application from LINQ-to-Sql to NHibernate, and in this post shares a generic approach to testing NHibernate Mappings for correctness.

Community

  • MVC Virtual Group will have Phil Haack the ASP.Net MVC Program Manager, on Wed 4/7 12pm CDT – Eric Hexter highlights today / tonight’s Community 4 MVC.Net virtual event featuring Phil Haack, Program Manager for the ASP.NET MVC product, talking on new ASP.NET MVC2 features. By my calculations, viewers in the UK need to tune in at 6pm (but don’t trust my early morning mental timezone calculations, check for yourself)
  • VBUG Reading: Visual Studio 2010 Mini Launch – The VBUG Reading team are hosting a Visual Studio 2010 Launch event on Tuesday 13th April at the local Pizza Express. Join them for discussion of the new features over a pizza, along with a few demos.
  • Introducing Selenium 2 – London Selenium Users Meetup Group are meeting somewhere in London (venue TBC) on the Tuesday 20th April to take the covers off the new Selenium 2 release, with Dave Hunt, David Burns and Simon Stewart presenting the new features.
  • Edge UG: April Silverlight 4, MEF and Reactive Framework – The Edge User Group present their 2nd event of the month in London, with John Donnelly presenting on the Reactive Framework and Mike Taulty taking a look at Silverlight 4 and MEF.