I had a splendid weekend up in Glasgow, Scotland this weekend attending DDD Scotland 2011 and other associated drinks and dinners. My thanks to all the organisers and speakers for another fantastic event. I will be gathering together the ‘conference review’ and ‘slides and samples from my talk’ posts for inclusion in The Morning Brew later this week, so if you have posted one of these please let me know.

Software

  • New Release: ReactiveUI 2.3 – Paul Betts announces the release of ReactiveUI 2.3, a project which brings an MVVM implementation which is tightly integrated with the Reactive Extension for .NET, recently featured on the HanselMinutes podcast. This release brings compatibility with the latest release of the Reactive Extensions from Microsoft
  • EasyNetQ, a simple .NET API for RabbitMQ – Mike Hadlow follows on from his comparison of Message Queue implementations with the production of a .NET API for Rabbit MQ, releasing his code on GitHub and discussing its use.
  • MVVM Light V3 on NuGet (now with WP7 support) – Laurent Bugnion announces the release of a NuGet package for MVVM Light v3 which now includes support for its use in Windows Phone 7 Projects

Information

  • Eduasync part 1: introduction – Jon Skeet kicks off a new series of post exploring the Async functionality currently available in the C#5 Aync CTP, digging down into how such functionality works, and illustrating with plenty of code samples.
  • A Fluent Backwards Design – Jeremy Likness explores the process of creating a Fluent API, working from the desired fluent API as the start point and looking at how you go about implementing that API
  • Compare ? Equals, Invariant ? Ordinal, readers of this blog ? everyone else, and so on…. – Michael Kaplan takes a look at the various different methods of testing equality of a string, discussing the concepts of equality, lexicographic vs. linguistic, invariant vs. ordinal and invariant vs. culture-specific
  • Practical NoSQL – Solving a Real Problem with MongoDB and Redis – Karl Seguin takes a look at how solving common programming problems using a NoSQL implementation requires a different way of thinking, exploring a few different ways of creating a leaderboard backed with MongoDB.
  • PostSharp from Download to Demo tutorial – Greg Duncan highlights an article from Christophe Geer on the PostSharp AOP framework, giving an introduction to its use, some of the common problems that AOP is good for solving, including sample code to illustrate.
  • Recent Additions To My NHibernate Examples – Davy Brion has been hard at work creating a number of examples of different NHibernate features for his forthcoming training course, and is sharing code these samples on GitHub, giving a great resource enabling you to easily see how certain features are used.
  • May’s MSDN magazine is out now – Rachel Collier highlights the May edition of the MSDN Magazine, including articles on SharePoint, writing debugger extensions, the Azure AppCache service, Windows Phone 7 Location based programming and much more.
  • White Paper: Flex, Silverlight or HTML5? Time to decide… – Colin Eberhardt shares a whitepaper discussing the various options for Rich Internet Application Development, outlining the background of the different options, the deployed base of required plugins / browsers, and the various features of these technologies.
  • Getting Started with the HTML 5 Canvas – Dan Wahlin takes a look at the HTML 5 Canvas looking at reasons you shoudl consider using it, and looking at the JavaScript API for drawing on the canvas.
  • Galactic: Building a 3D Solar System with HTML5 – Seth McLaughlin shares a discussion of the creation of the Internet Explorer 9 Galactic test drive sample application which uses the HTML 5 Canvas and graphics acceleration capabilities of Internet Explorer 9 to provide a 3D view of the solar system
  • Pushing Code to NuGet – Rob Conery shares a nice clear breakdown of the steps required for building a NuGet package for some of your code and publishing it on the NuGet.Org server.
  • NuGet Package of the Week #6 – Dynamic, Malleable, Enjoyable Expando Objects with Clay – Scott Hanselman continues his NuGet Package of the Week series with a look at the Clay package, a library for working with dynamic types, building on the support in C#4 to provide a more powerful experience when working with complex uses of dynamic.
  • The Secret to NuGet’s Success. You! – Phil Haack discusses the community aspect of the open source development of NuGet, discussing both the community contributions to the code base and the user community, along with his desire to get more people involved.

Community

  • DDD South West 3: The "Getting Started In .NET" Track – Guy Smith-Ferrier highlights the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper SouthWest ‘Getting Started in .NET’ Track, a great introduction to the various facets of .NET Development from professional .NET Trainers. If you know someone who is making the shift to .NET then this (yet another) reallly good reason for them to attend DDD South West
  • DDD speaker training day, 27 May, Bristol – Rachel Collier highlights an all day event for speakers being held on the 27th May at UWE near Bristol. The session will focus on presentation and public speaking skills with well-known speakers and community leaders on hand to share their knowledge on planning, presenting, doing demos and explaining concepts. The event is open to everyone, with preference being shown to those presenting at DDD South West and new community speakers
  • Announcing GeekGive, TechEd 2011 edition – Pla.NET Southeast! – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Glen Gordon highlights the next GeekGive event to be held in conjunction with TechEd 2011 in Atlanta. This event will be supporting the Peoplestown Revitalization Corporation who are working to make the Peoplestown neighbourhood a clean and desirable place to live. I thoroughly enjoyed taking part in the last GeekGive event, its a great way to start the conference, so if you are attending TechEd I encourage you to give it a go.
  • NxtGenUG – Event – Being Magically Dynamic – Mark Rendle takes a trip down to Southampton on Thursday 16th June to present at the NxtGenUG chapter in Southampton, looking at the use of the dynamic keyword in C#, showing how it can bring answers to a number of the ‘I wish I coulds’ that people encounter in static typed development.