I’m over in Bellevue, nr. Seattle, WA this week for the MVP Summit 2011, so if you are in town for the event, or a local and fancy meeting up give me a shout on Twitter (@Calcock). I spent Saturday morning helping out at North West Harvest at the GeekGive community event, where I had a great time packaging green beans destined for those in need in Washington State, and was captured on camera sporting interesting head gear by Barry Dorrans (thanks for that Barry ;-))
Software
- jQuery 1.5.1 Released – The jQuery Team announce the release of jQuery 1.5.1, a minor bugfix release on top of the 1.5 major release. The final edition of this release is now available bot for direct download and also on the Content Delivery Networks from Microsoft and Google.
- Announcing a new Free Windows Azure Platform Trial offer – Eric Nelson highlights a new Trial Offer from the Windows Azure Platform. This trial now includes an increased compute hours allowance (750 hours) along with 500mb of data transfer in and out, 500mb storage, 10000 storage transactions, 100000 AppFabric Access Control transactions and a 1gb Web Edition SQL Azure database. This trial offer runs through to 30th June.
- Phoney Windows Phone 7 Project Now Available! – Shawn Wildermuth announces Phoney, a Windows Phone 7 project template which contains a selection of his helper classes for working with Windows Phone 7. Available on CodePlex and also as a NuGet package, Phoney contains a number of controls, converters and helpers for common Windows Phone features, and this 0.1 release includes ObservableObject, PhoneLogger, FadingMessage and BitlyHelper classes.
Information
- Never Say Never, Part Two – Eric Lippert takes us on another adventure exploring how compilers know if a method will ever exit, looking at cases which can confuse compilers, and exploring the power of a compiler which could accurately identify methods which exit without returning in solving and an all mathematical problems
- Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 45 – Conclusion and List of Posts – Jon Skeet wraps up his epic series on re-implementing Linq to Objects with a summary and table of contents linking to all the posts in the series. If you’ve not ben following this one as its been being posted now would be a great time to catch up with a facinating read (just allow yourself plenty of time).
- C# Compiler as a Service Update – Miguel de Icaza gives an update on the feature level of the Mono C# Compiler as a Service library showing how it is now capable of working with full class definitions in addition to its ability to evaluate expressions and statements,
- How To Find Out Which NuGet Packages Depend on Yours – Phil Haack discusses the dangers or renaming a packages ID in NuGet, and looks at how it is possible to identify if other packages rely on the ID of your package as a dependency using the power of the OData feed.
- New features in WebActivator 1.3 – David Ebbo discusses the enhancements in the WebActivator NuGet Pacakge which allows packages to introduce source code which runs on application startup to the project when they are installed, looking at support for code after Application_Start, support for Code in App_Code, and the use of start methods outside ASP.NET, all included in V1.3.
- .NET Client Profile Support in NHibernate 3 – James Kovacs discusses the lack of .NET Client Profile support in NHibernate 2.x, and looks at how introducing this support into NHibernate 3 (and similarly in your own applications) is not as simple as it might seem.
- Covariance and contravariance in .NET 4.0 – Matt Harrington shares an 8 minute screencast based on a presentation he gave at the San Francisco Bay .NET User Group last year on Co- and Contra- variance in .NET 4
- Design Patterns Series: The Decorator Pattern (with a real-world soccer example!) – Max continues his series of sport themed examples of Design Patterns with a look at the Decorator Pattern using an example from the world of Soccer (or Football if you’re from my part of the world)
- Tests are your airbag – Krzysztof Kozmic discusses the importance of having a good test suite in allowing you to work quickly, easily and safely with code, highlighting the importance of the concepts of when and why in testing as well as what code you are testing.
- MVC Architecture for JavaScript Applications – Peter Michaux discusses the use of the MVC pattern in JavaScript Development, giving background on the pattern, some resources, and looking at a native implementation (sans framework) in JavaScript
- ASP.NET MVC Ajax CSRF Protection With jQuery 1.5 – Justin Etheredge looks at implementing Cross Site Request Forgery protection for his Non-POST ajax calls, borrowing functionality from the ASP.NET MVC 2 source, and implementing client side code in jQuery
Community
- An Afternoon With Glenn Block – Scotish Developers welcome Glen Block for an afternoon event on Saturday 12th March at StormID’s Leith Offices on the edge of Edinburgh, where Glen will be delivering a session on his current work, followed by an chalk and talk Question and Answer session on anything you fancy.
- Webinar: Julian on JavaScript II – objects, objects, objects – Julian Bucknall will be presenting his second JavaScript Webinar on Monday 28th Feb (today) starting at 10am PST where he will be looking at the use of objects in JavaScript.
- Save the Date – Windows Phone 7 Tech.Days Online Conference – Mike Ormond highlights the plans for a Windows Phone UK TechDays online event on Thursday 24th March which will feature two tracks, one focusing on Silverlight for Phone and the other on XNA. The event will be running from mid afternoon (3pm) until late evening (8:30pm) both GMT, and features a great looking lineup of topics and speakers
- Writing about Windows Phone 7 Development – Mike Ormond is alos looking for willing authors to help contribute to a free e-book on Windows Phone 7 Development. There is a proposed outline of the book, and Mike is looking for further volunteers to contribute sections towards it, already with a good uptake. This is a great opportunity to get involved in a valuable community addition.
- How to decrease risk when designing integrated systems with Sarah Taraporewalla – Canary Wharf .NET User Group – The Canary Wharf .NET User Group welcome Sarah Taraporewalla for a session on reducing the risks involved in working on systems which connect to other systems on Wednesday 2nd March