Software

  • December release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available now. – ‘Jialiang’ highlights the latest All-In-One Code Framework release. This ever growing collection of samples which demonstrate various technologies has been updated with a number of new samples in both C# and VB.NET covering ASP.NET Features, Office Development, Windows Shell, Web Browser controls and networking.
  • Windows Azure AppFabric CTP December release now available – The Windows Azure AppFabric Team announces the release of the December Windows Azure AppFabric CTP which brings further enhancements to the Acess Control Service.
  • The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit December Update Available for Download – Wes Yanaga highlights the latest update to the Windows Azure Platform Traning Kit which consists of a range of hands on labs, demos and presentations, and this release specifically includes a number of new presentations on the service buss, Azure Connect, SQL Azure, low latency web apps, and also has all the demos updated to the Azure SDK 1.3.
  • Enter Hawkeye – Dru Sellers announces Hawkeye, a service monitoring tool which hosts its own web server allowing you to monitor the health of services. Full code is available on GitHub

Information

  • New Windows Phone 7 Curriculum available! – Required Verbage – my garbage collector – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Andrew Sithers highlights the release of the Windows Phone 7 curriculum for Computer Science written by Rob Miles and edited by Andrew. The material is code first, and gives introduction to the Phone, Silverlight, VS2010, and look at UI Design in SIlverlight, consuming data, writing CNA applications and is available as a handbook and series of labs and presentation decks.
  • Exploring Reactive Extensions – Testing – Alex Ullrich continues his series of posts on the Reactive Extensions for .NET, looking at testing and mocking of code that works with observable event streams.
  • jQuery Templates with ASP.NET MVC – Hajan continues his series of posts on jQuery Templates with a worked example in ASP.NET MVC which illistrates their use ina real world case.
  • Razor, Nested Layouts and Redefined Sections – Marcin Dobosz follows up on his earlier post on option sections and default content in the Razor view engine with a look at using sections across nested and complex layouts
  • Force VS to garbage collect – Cameron Skinner shares a key press combination which causes the Visual Studio IDE to perform a forced garbage collection of the CLR in the VS environment which can be very useful when testing code which integrates with the IDE
  • Slightly lighter than HashSet<WeakReference> – HashSet<GCHandle> (an experiment) – ’tilovell’ looks at the use of GCHandle structs over WeakReferences for implementing large collections, discussing the memory behaviour, and some of the features of GCHandle.
  • EF Feature CTP5: Validation – Pawel Kadluczka, a developer on the Entity Framework Team discusses the validation features introduced in the Entity Framework Feature CTP 5 release, discussing the background and implementation of the validation, and looking at the validations use in a variety of different scenarios.
  • A Feature-driven Comparison of Entity Framework and NHibernate – Self-tracking entities – Dino Esposito continues his series of posts comparing and contrasting Entity Framework with NHibernate, discussing the Entity Framework Self Tracking Entity feature and looking at the closest equivalent in NHibenate
  • Historical Perspective of ORM and Alternatives – Ken Downs takes a look back at the history and origins of the Object Relational Mapper paradigm and how it sits alongside the altermatives to ORM.
  • Sharding with SQL Azure – Michael Thomassy shares a whitepaper on creating a sharded data architecture with SQL Azure, discussing the theory, benefits and challenges and introduces the key concepts
  • What to Read to Get Up to Speed in JavaScript – Rey Bango collates the wisdom from the JSMentors list’s discussion on books for learning JavaScript, collecting together the collectives recommendations for the best books to look at.

Community

  • In The Brain Session: Intro to RavenDB – Ayende will be visiting SkillsMatter in London on the evening of Tuesday 18th January 2011 where he will be giving an ‘In the Brain’ session on RavenDB.