Congratulations to all the new and renewed Microsoft MVPs who are on the 1st April renewal cycle. I’m pleased and proud to say I was among those renewed, and am looking forward to my second year as an ASP.NET MVP.

Software

  • Fluent NHibernate 1.2 released – James Gregory announces the release of Fluent NHibernate 1.2, the Fluent interface for configuring NHibernate. This release brings its NHibernte compatibility up to 3.1, introduces some new features for diagnostics, access strategies and IEnumerables. This release is also available as a NuGet Package
  • Introducing developwithpassion.specifications – Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo introduces his developwithpassion.specifications testing library, built on top of Machine.Specifications and Machine.Fakes
  • AgFx now on CodePlex – Shawn Burke announces the launch of the AgFx website on CodePlex and their first release. This library helps building data connected Windows Phone 7 applications providing data retrieval functionality, caching, reference data, broadcast messaging features.

Information

  • FluentMigrator getting started – Sean Chambers gives an introduction to the FluentMigrator Library, a Database schema maintenance framework which has you place your migrations into a standard C# class and providing Up and Down grade support
  • Shake Gestures Library- A Windows Phone Recipe – Arik Poznanski shares a discussion of the use and creation of the Shake Gesture Library for Windows Phone, allowing you to have actions in your code triggered by shaking the device.
  • Compound Assignment, Part Two – Eric Lippert confuses everyone with an April Fools continuation of his Compound Assignment series. In this post Eric takes an April Fools look at some changes to make it possible to support additional compound operators.
  • Little-known gems: Atomic conditional removals from ConcurrentDictionary – Stephen Toub shares a little know feature of the .NET4 Concurrent Dictionary which allows for the removal of elements in an atomic way
  • Debugging Series: Symbol Server – Cameron Skinner continues his debugging series with a look at the use of the Symbols and Source Server to obtain debugging symbols and source code for use while debugging your code which adds considerable information to the debugging experience
  • NHibernate Id Generator With Suffix – Ricardo Peres shares a custom implementation of an NHibernate Id Generator which applies a suffix to the identity generated, showing how easily this types of functionality can be implemented using the extension points available.
  • Customizing ASP.NET MVC’s Required Property Validation Messages – Davy Brion investigates providing convention based validation messages for ASP.NET Required Field Validations, sharing a new subclass of the RequiredAttributeAdapter class which implements this type of behaviour.

Community

  • Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Robert Greyling on Spark View Engine on 12 April 2011 – Jan Van Ryswyck announces the next European Virtual Alt.Net Usergroup meeting, to be held on Tuesday 12th April at 7pm GMT (8pm UK) featuring Robert Greyling on the Spark View Engine for ASP.NET MVC and Castle MonoRail.
  • C#5 and FluentValidation – DevEvening – The DevEvening Usergroup turns 3 years olf this month, and is celebrating with 2 talks on Wednesday 27th April. Talk 1 is going to be provided by Jeremy Skinner, who will be giving the lowdown on the FluentValidation library. Jeremy will be followed by Jon Skeet delivering a session on the Async / Await functionality to be included in C#5
  • Advance warning: ‘Julian on JavaScript’ analysing underscore.js on Monday – Julian Bucknall will be delivering another part of his series of Webnairs on JavaScript today (Monday 4th April) at 10:00 AM PDT. In this session, Julian will be focusing on the code of Underscore.js, exploring what we can learn from it to improve our JavaScript.

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