Announcing the release of Codename "Dallas" CTP3! – ‘elisaj’ of the Dallas Team announces the 3rd CTP preview release. This updated CTP includes support for Basic Authentication, enhanced querying of OData Content, Add Reference support in Visual Studio, along with a variety of other enhancements to make development easier.
Information
Migrating your application from CTP2 to CTP3 – ‘elisaj’ shares some advice for developers who wish to update their Dallas based applications from the CTP2 release to the new CTP3 release
Looking ahead: Panorama and Pivot controls for Windows Phone developers – Jeff Wilcox takes a detailed look at the new Panorama and Pivot navigation controls which will be included in the next release of the Developer Tools, showing samples of how the controls work, along with the XAML code to utilise them
How do I get the reference count of a CLR object? – Raymond Chen continues CLR week with a discussion of Reference counting, how the garbage collector uses a simple version of this to decide if things can be collected, along with looking at cases where there may be garbage but no references to examine.
Playing with Entity Framework Code Only – Ayende takes an initial look at the Code Only functionality of the Entity Framework, setting about creating a simple example of its use as a regular developer would, discussing his findings as he goes.
Blocking Collection and the Producer-Consumer Problem – Alexandra Rusina continues her series on parallel programming with a look at the concurrent collections available as a means of thread-safe data storage in .NET 4, taking a look at the use of the BlockingCollection and the producer consumer pattern
Is That Closure or Inheritance? – Chris Eargle continues his exploration of accessing private members of one class from a nested class, looking at some variations which illustrate the true nature of this relationship.
Garbage Collection Notifications in .NET 4.0 – Abhishek Sur looks at garbage collection in .NET 4, and shows how you can register with the Garbage collector to get notification when objects are garbage collected.
Nearly 22 years ago – Brett Schuchert shares a PDF version of his 1988 book on Data Processing, an interesting blast from the past – we’ve certainly come a long way since then. Brett also discusses the story behind the book.
Community
Real-world Dynamic .NET & OpenWrap – DevEvening have an event in Woking on Thursday 26th August (6:45pm start) where Mark Rendle will be talking on the subject of Dynamic Support in .NET 4, and Seb Lambla will be discussing his OpenWrap Package Management / Export Management system.
VBUG Bracknell: SQL Server CLR and Data Tier Applications – VBUG Bracknell are meeting on Tuesday 7th September for an event where Colin Leversuch-Roberts will be presenting a session on CLR functions vs TSQL functions in the database, and Neil Hambly will be talking about Data Tier Applications (DAC).
Interested in becoming a Windows Azure MVP? – The MVP program is looking for good developers with experiences of the Windows Azure Platform to become the first batch Azure MVPs. If you are such a person, or know someone who is, get in touch – contact details in the post.