The Morning Brew

Software

• May 2011 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit – Stephen Walther announces the May 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, available now on CodePlex. This release addresses the ModalPopup and AsyncFileUpload controls, resolving 34 reported issues, along with improvements including animation support.
• Localized Releases of ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update – Phil Haack announces the release of Localised versions of the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tooling Update, now available in French, German, Italian, Japanese, Chinese (both Simplified and Traditional), Korean, Russian and Spanish
• Microsoft to Acquire Skype: Combined companies will benefit consumers, businesses and increase market opportunity. – Yesterday, in an $8.5 billion announcement, Microsoft announced that they would be purchasing Skype and bringing Skype to XBox and Kinect, Windows Phone, whilst maintaining Skype’s standalone versions for other operating systems.
• Regex Hero (no, not you, the free Silverlight based Regex tester, library Regex Hero) – Greg Duncan highlights Regex Hero, a Silverlight application which provides a simple Regex IDE implemented in Silverlight, allowing you to test your regular expressions, and obtain code snippets for running the regex in your C# / VB.NET applications. Also included is a community sourced library of regular expressions for common use cases.

Information

• Task Parallel Library: 6 of n – Sacha Barber continues his series of posts exploring the Task Parallel Library (TPL). In this post Sacha finishes looking at the Task Parallel Library, and moves on to the Async Functionality which will be available in vNext of the mainstream .NET Languages, exploring the second CTP release, looking at how async/await re-writes your code to implement the rich async functionality.
• Testing SSL and HTTP Compression in your ASP.NET web sites with IIS Express – G. Andrew Duthie looks at how IIS Express makes it possible to easily run and test your web applications on your desktop machine using real IIS functionality like SSL Certificates and HTTP compression.
• Validating Data in ASP.NET MVC Applications – Bipin Joshi explores the optiosn available for validation in your ASP.NET MVC 3 applications, exploring adding validation errors to ModelState, using the Data Annotation Attributes, looks at the IDataErrorInfo and IValidatableObject Interfaces, and client side and remote validation.
• IE Pinned Sites Part 8: How to implement a Flashing Taskbar Button – Jennifer Marsman continues her series looking at the features available to pinned Internet Explorer Sites, looking at the ability to make the task bar icon flash to attract the user’s attention when actions occur in your pinned application.
• Silverlight 4: Convert Text to Speech – Pravinkumar Dabade takes a look at how the elevated trust and COM interop functionality of Silverlight 4 allows you to create applications which include features like Text To Speech.
• Silverlight 5 Beta Rough Notes: Low Latency Sound Effects – Mike Taulty continues his Rough Notes series of posts exploring the Silverlight 5 Beta release, taking a look at playing sound clips using the Low Latency Playback, exploring the situations where this functionality is a requirement and illustrating with an example.
• Don’t comment your code! – Aron Woost discusses the various practices of commenting in code, looking at a range of commenting examples, which in his opinion range from annoying to evil. Some good discussion of this one in the comments of this one too.
• Tinyweb Series: 2 Building APIs – Martin Rue continues his series exploring his Tinyweb project. In this second part Martin discusses the various return types available and what they are useful for, and explores using the framework to construct HTTP based APIs

Community

• NxtGenUG – RavenDB gives RDBMS the bird – The Hereford NxtGenUG welcome Rob Ashton for a session exploring the RavenDB NoSQL / Document Database on Monday 13th June. In the session Rob will explore the use of Document Databases, MapReduce in LINQ, and look at the differences between RavenDB and other document database implementations.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #849