Announcing the F# 2.0 Standalone Tools Update (for .NET 2.0, 4.0 and other CLI Implementations) – Don Syme announces the release of the F# 2.0 Standalone Tools for .NET 2.0, 4.0 and other CLI implementations (such as Mono). This release brings the latest F# into the hands of all developers as this is the completely free tooling based on the Visual Studio Shell.(both 2010 and 2008)
JavaScript Fluent Html Builder – An interesting project on CodePlex which brings a fluent style interface to the creation of HTML in JavaScript, giving much more readable code that the traditional string concatenation
AutoMapper upgraded to .NET 4 and VS 2010 – Jimmy Bogard discusses his decision to branch AutoMapper into a legacy .NET 3.5 version (which will receive bugfixes only) and to push forward and upgrade the main branch of the project to .NET 4, discussing the process (version control and upgrade) in this post.
Information
WCF Web Services The Easy Way – Justin Etheredge takes a look at the easy path to WCF web services, including JSON based services, showing that WCF doesn’t have to a hard quagmire of configuration.
IE9, Opacity, and Alpha – Ted Johnson talks about the introduction of the CSS3 Colo(u)r Module into Internet Explorer 9, showing an example of the use of the Opacity control and Alpha filter
NHibernate 3.0 QueryOver Syntax is the Bee’s Knees – Bobby Johnson shares a couple of queries which illustrate the NHibernate 3.0 QueryOver feature which brings a typesafe Extension Method / Lambda Expression based API to the Criteria API
Hydrating Objects With Expression Trees – Part III – Paulo Morgado rounds out his series of posts on using Expression Trees to create and populate entities with a look at the relative performance of each of the methods he discussed, concluding that in his test case the Member Initializer method is the most performant.
Exploring List capacities and growth on the Windows Phone – Jeff Wilcox takes a look a the way in which the Generic List collection class goes about sizing its self on Windows Phone 7, briefly discussing the memory limiations that phones place us under as developers, and showing how the list behaves as you add items.
Runtime PivotViewer collection creation – Timmy Kokke runs through using the PiviotViewer control in Silverlight applications, obtaining data from a web service, using HttpHandlers to redirect the control’s calls for data to your custom code.
Why I Love NServiceBus – Jonathan Oliver discusses his like for NServiceBus as a pragmatic solution to distributed computing problems in the .NET space, comparing it to a variety of other solutions to the same problem from elsewhere.
Bending Linq Syntax to your will – Mike Hadlow looks at some of the more generic (and mind bending) uses of Linq showing how it can be used for much more than just IEnumerable and IQueryable.
Community
Windows Phone 7 for Developers – The NxtGen User Group’s Abingdon branch have Matt Lacey talking on Windows Phone 7 on Tuesday 19 October, giving an overview of the platform and looking at the developer experience. NxtGen events are free to members, and non-members are allowed to attend 2 meetings for free, so if you are in the area you really should check it out.
