Software

  • Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio (March 2011) SDK 1.4 – Patrick Butler Monterde highlights the release of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio March update, taking the SDK Version to 1.4. This package brings tooling to Visual Studio to support creation, configuration, build, run and debugging of cloud based services running on Windows Azure.
  • Mindscape – Phone Elements Giveaway – Mindscape are in the process of giving away a huge number of free licenses to their Phone Elements Windows Phone 7 Controls library, a $299 value. At the time of writing there are ~750 licenses remaining, to claim one for yourself all you need is to give your email and you will recieve a promo-code for a free license.
  • IE9 to Launch on Monday 14th – Martin Beeby reminds us that Today (Monday) is the release date for Internet Explorer 9 – due to be officially released at the MIX conference. This post also contains a video from Dean Hachamovitch and Ryan Gavin of the IE team thanking those who took part in the Beta and release Candidate cycle providing helpful feedback to help shape the final product.

Information

  • Free Video Training: ASP.NET MVC 3 Features – Scott Guthrie highlights the extension of the free access to Pluralsight’s ASP.NET MVC video training series, now extended to 18th March. The series, made up of 6 parts, totalling over 3 hours of detailed content presented by Scott Allen is a great way of getting a handle on the new features of ASP.NET MVC3.
  • Simplify your Visual Studio 2010 Toolbar and Free Your Mind – Scott Hanselman suggests that a more zen-like development experience could be yours with the removal of clutter which you don’t use from your IDE environment, sharing a few simple tips to give yourself that focused clean IDE experience.
  • The Wisdom and Magic of Strings – Rob Conery sets about rediscovering the original meaning of the term ‘magic strings’ in computer programming, looking at and discussing some of the meanings that this term has taken on over the years.
  • Saving your API key with nuget.exe – David Ebbo shares a useful NuGet tip provided by a feature from Matthew Osborn which allows you to save your NuGet API key using the SetAPIKey command, making it much easier to push packages from the command line client up to the public NuGet servers.
  • Package Manager Console For More Than Managing Packages – Steve Michelotti takes a look at some of the alternative uses for the Package Manager Console for Visual Studio which is a part of NuGet, looking at how having this PowerShell based command line in the IDE allows you to access the full power of the IDE simply
  • Entity Framework Week Part 5: Concluding Thoughts – Ian Nelson wraps up his series of posts looking at Entity Framework Code First coming to it with considerable experience working with NHibernate. In this post Ian looks at the positive and negatives of his experience gained during a week working with EF.
  • Fun with HTML5 Canvas, WebSocket, JQuery and Asp.net. End-result : A live white board on a web page! – Al-Farooque Shubho looks at the creation of a shared whiteboard application utilising the HTML5 Canvas and WebSockets APIs using jQuery, with a backend in ASP,NET in this CodeProject article.

Community

  • NxtGenUG – S.O.L.I.D as a Rock … – The Essex chapter of the NxtGenUG welcome Nathan Gloyn and his session on the SOLID principles to their usergroup on the evening of Wednesday 27th April. Nathan delivered this session recenlty at DDD 9 where it was well recieved, and this is a great oppotunity to see it in a usergroup setting.