Software

  • CLRProfiler V4 Released – David Broman highlights the release of the CLRProfiler V4, a free profiler whcih will help identifiy memory issues with your applications, and provides a reference implementation for those who are interested in implementing their own profilers. This version supports .NET 2, 3, 3.5, and 4 (and requries .NET4 to run), supports and understands CLR side by side instances, and allows profiling of Silverlight 4 applications. Full source for the profiler is lso available.
  • Release: Spark v1.5 – Robert Greyling (and the rest of the team) pushes out the latest version of the Spark View Engine. Version1.5 now includes improved support for HTML5, adds powerful binding functionality which helps you maintin the look of your HTML Code while binding values into the HTML, along with supporting ASP.NET MVC 3 and.NET 4 (as well as .NET 3.5 and MVC2)
  • Release: xUnit.net 1.7 – Brad Wilson releases xUnit.net 1.7, the latest update to this .NET unit testing framework which adds ASP.NET MVC 3 support, new assert statements, output capture for inclusion in reports, and improved MSBuild integration along with a number of bugfixes
  • ReSharper 5.1.3: Visual Studio IntelliSense bug fix release – The JetBrains team announce the release of RaSharper 5.1.3, a bugfix update which changes the behaviour of ReSharper and the Visual Studio native Parameter Information and auto-complete disabling on file open.

Information

  • Windows Azure Showcases Customer Momentum on its One-Year Anniversary – The Windows Azure team highlights the first Anniversary of Windows Azure, which was released publicly 1 year ago.
  • Windows Azure Emulators On Your Desktop – Buck Woody talks about emulating Windows Azure on your local development machine using the emulators included in the Windows Azure SDK.
  • Take the Plunge into Windows Azure with WAPTK – January Edition – Jonathan Rozenblit highlights the January release of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit, an update which brings further content to the kit including updates to and new labs tutorials, along with a number of new demo scripts.
  • Introduction to Object Oriented Programming Concepts (OOP) and More – Nirosh has made a minor update to his nice article on Object Oriented Programming Concepts, design patterns, and UML – well worth reading if you’ve never seen it before.
  • "Silverlight for Windows Phone" free 157 page eBook – Greg Ducnan highlights a free ebook written by Puja Pramudya which takes a introductory look at building Silverlight applications in C# which target the Windows Phone 7 platform.
  • Using DbContext in EF Feature CTP5 Part 7: Local Data – Arthur Vickers continues with his series of posts looking at the enhancements to DbContext in the CTP5 release of Entity Framework Features. This part looks at the use of Local Data via the context’s Local property which allows you access to data already loaded without further queries to the database.
  • Minting new Internet Media Type Identifiers – Sebastien Lambla takes a back to basics look at the concepts of Internet Media Types (MIME), an important concept in the world of REST, looking at the considerations you should make when creating a new one.
  • OData and Windows Phone 7 Part 2 – Mike Ormond continues with his look at consuming OData feeds on the Windows Phone 7 platform with part two of this series, looking at consuming the TwitPic API to retrieve images, and explores a little use of Blend to help create a nice UI to display the images in.
  • Unknown C# keywords: params – Chris Skardon takes a back to basics look at a C# keyword he feels doesn’t get used as often as it might, illustrating the use of params in a couple of cases.
  • Reactive FlickR Searching – Mike Taulty takes a look at consuming the Flickr API using the Reactive Extensions for .NET, exploring Flickr API and looking at how Rx can help make consuming complex APIs easier to understand.

Community

  • mvcConf – the Virtual ASP.Net MVC Conference – The mvcConf team have unveiled the agenda for the second mvcConf virtual event to be held on Tuesday 8th February. The content is spread over 4 rooms and 9 time slots, offering a great range of MVC related content, including a keynote address from Scott Guthrie.
  • Session voting is now open for SQLBits 8 – Simon Sabin announces the opening of session voting for the SQLBits 8 conference. This is your chance to shape the content of the free Community day on Saturday 9th April, so if you are planning on attending, get voting for what you’d like to see.
  • 8th Feb – Gojko Adzic, Long term value of acceptance tests – Agile Yorkshire host welcome Gojko Adzic for a session which will look at the long term benefits of acceptance testing, based on feedback from over 50 teams who adopted this practice. The event is on Tuesday 8th February and his being held at Old Broadcasting House in Leeds.
  • Cloud Evening Meeting – 15th Feb 2011 – The ‘Cloud Evening’ user group welcome Mark Rendle and Steve Plank for a double session event where mark will be looking at running 3rd party software on the Windows Azure platform, and Steve will be exploring integration of Active Directory with Azure and Office 365
  • TechDays 2011 – the physical event – Phil Cross highlights the plans for the second UK Techdays event being run by Microsoft in London on 23rd-25th May 2011, where once again there will be 2 tracks of content across the 3 days, along with evening events each night.