I had a great weekend away in Glasgow at Developer Developer Developer Scotland 2010, it was very nice to catch up with various acquaintances both old and new during the conference and evening socials. Many thanks to the organisers for another great event.

Software

  • ADO.NET Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 – Refresh – Shayne Burgess highlights the release of a refresh update for ADO.NET in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 which fixes a number of issues users have experienced with the SP1 update.
  • Agatha 1.1 Is Out – Davy Brion announces the 1.1 release of his Agatha community project which implements at Request Response Service Layer on the NET stack. This release includes a number of changes, including support for NInject, a server side caching layer, updates to its library dependencies, along with improvements to Silverlight support and much more.
  • S#arp Architecture 1.5.2 released – Alec Whittington announces the release of S#arp Architecture 1.5.2, a bugfix release which addresses issues discovered in the 1.5 RTM release. This has a number of fixes for the templates used by S#arp architecture along with a few other fixes.
  • Html Agility Pack 1.4.0 Released – Jeff Klawiter announces the release of version 1.4.0 of the HTML Agility Pack. This release freshens the API with the introduction of generic lists to replace array lists, fixes a number of bugs, and adds a number of other subtle features.
  • News about NAnt – Daniel Marbach shares some news about the future of the NAnt build tool, and highlights the release of the NAnt 0.90 RC1 release.
  • SolutionConverter – Arthur Liberman shares an implementation of a tool to convert solution and project files between different versions and editions of Visual Studio, supporting versions from 2002 rights through to 2010. This Code project article includes the project, code and discussion about the creation of the application.

Information

  • That No SQL Thing: Scaling Graph Databases – Ayende continues his series of posts looking at NoSQL database systems, continuing by looking at the scaling aspects of Graph databases, answering the common reader question of Why do I need that again?, and also looks at Graph DB Sharding Strategies: Gravity
  • Playing with RavenDB – A Precursor – Rob Ashton has been exploring the Raven DB project created by Ayende, outlining his initial thoughts on the project in this post, and goes deeper into the getting started topics in his next post ‘RavenDB – An Introduction
  • Careful with those enumerables – Sergio Pereira looks at the increasing use of IEnumerable<T> as a return value from and API, and shows how, unless you are careful, you may cause some interesting bad performance characteristics in your application.
  • Using NetModules for Reducing Compilation Costs – Sasha Goldshtein looks at a little remembered feature of the .NET C# compiler, the ability to compile code into NetModules and then combine these into a final executable / Class library
  • ASP.NET and F# (I.) – Creating MVC web applications in F# – Tomas Petricek takes a look at creating Web Applications using F# and ASP.NET MVC, talkign through the application structure, the ways of implementing the component parts of an MVC application (Model, Controller, etc) in F# and shares a sample solution and Visual Studio 2010 Project template to allow you to have a go too.
  • The Power of Enum – John Sonmez talks about the use of Enums in your code to make APIs more intention revealing and control the possible inputs to functions.
  • Make your XML strongly-typed: Because you can, and its easy – Doug Rathbone suggests that rather than doing complicated XML parsing you might want to consider making use of the XML Serializer in .NET to allow you to convert from the XML document to a structured strongly typed object structure, allowing you to write easier to understand code.
  • If you’re still using Xml configuration with StructureMap, I need your help – Jeremy D. Miller is performing some significant work on the internals of Structure Map, and is looking at the possibility of clearing out some of the legacy aspects of the XML Configuration and would like some user feedback to help in making the decisions.
  • Easy creation of code generators in Visual Studio 2008 – Sebastian begins a series of posts looking at making code generators for use in Visual Studio 2008, beginning with this first part looking at creating Visual Studio Packages
  • Use Extension method to write cleaner code – Fredrik Normén takes a look at how extension methods can be used to make code cleaner and more readable, showing a worked example taking a piece of code and introducing extension methods to simplify it.

Community

  • LIDNUG: Scott Guthrie Talks Shop V – The Linked In .NET User Group welcome Scott Guthrie back for the 5th time to talk about anything and everything Microsoft Developer related. This free, virtual event will take place on Thursday 13th May at 10am PST (early evening in the UK)
  • LIDNUG: Effective Silverlight with SharePoint 2010 – Sahil Malik – A second Linked In .NET User Group this month sees Sahil Malik talking on the uses of Silverlight within Sharepoint applications, with this free virtual talk targeting Sharepoint developers which takes place on Tuesday 25th May at 11am PST