In case you missed it due to its different tagging, yesterday I published a rather later than planned ‘Afternoon Tea’ edition with lots of community news, a competition to win a place at the Skills Matter / London .NET Usergroup Progressive .NET Tutorials.

Software

  • Aug ’11 TFS Power Tools coming soon – Brian Harry gives a sneek peek at the features of the August 2011 TFS Power Tools extension which will be coming out of testing soon. This update contains a number of long standing feature requests, including login support in the shell extension, work item search, UI based rollback, build automation utilities, and much more
  • NHibernate 3.2 Released – Ricardo Peres highlights the recent NHibernate 3.2 release, giving pointers to the downloads, source, release notes and issue tracking, along with highlighting the key new features of the release.

Information

  • Overmocking – Brendan Enrick discusses the act of overmocking, where developers, wearing their mocking goggles, refactor out dependencies in legacy code without considering if the dependency should even be in the method or class in the first place, over looking a number of other development principles in the process.
  • Realtime Webcam Sudoku Solver – Bojan Banko takes a fascinating look at using image recognition to capture a sudoko puzzle via web camera before solving the puzzle in code. Full source and binaries are available for this project and will make for interesting reading.
  • Turning stories from good to great – Jenny Wong discusses the art (and science) of writing good user stories to give a good basis for the application you are going to write based on these user stories.
  • How to Break Down a Backlog – John Sonmez discusses the decomposition of an agile backlog, discussing breaking down the tasks on the backlog, getting good information to support the items and inform estimates before creating a real detailed backlog.
  • Load-balancing partitioner with work stealing, part one – Dzmitry Huba discusses the role of partitioners in Parallel LINQ and how different types of partitioner can be used in different scenarios, before sharing an implementation which makes use of work stealing techniques to keep idle workers busy.
  • Silverlight and Synchronous Network Calls – Mike Taulty goes against his principles by taking a look at blocking the UI thread while making network calls in Silverlight applications, using it a s good illustration of why th API for such service calls is usually manifested as Aysnc.
  • C# Async Examples in F# – Part 1 – Chris Marinos kicks off a series of posts looking at reformulating Bill Wagner’s 101 Async Samples from C# to F#, starting off with a simple example, and discussing some of the key implementation details of the F# version.
  • Working with HTML Fragments in jQuery – ‘More Tech Tips’ shares some useful information for anyone working with HTML fragments in jQuery, discussing creating elements and tricks for avoiding unnecessary requests for images, iframes, etc when trimming HTML snippets down.
  • .Net DI container speed test – Philip Mat explores the relative performance of the most popular Dependency Injection frameworks for .NET, taking a look at AutoFac, Castle.Windsor, StructureMap, Spring.NET, Ninject, and Unity.

Community

  • UK Connected Systems User Group – August 2011 – The UK Connected Systems Usergroup are meeting on Tuesday 23rd August at Hitachi Consulting in London for two sessions from Sam Vanhoutte exploring Windows Azure AppFabric – with the first session exploring the capabilities of the Azure AppFabric Service Bus and the second session on building and deploying composite applications with Azure.
  • NxtGenUG – Event: Performance: An American Dream – The NxtGenUG in Cambridge welcome Kendall Miller for a session on some of the laws which govern software performance on Tuesday 18th October at Microsoft Research.
  • 10 Secret Unit Testing Tips to Become Agile – Senthil Kumar highlights a vendor neutral webinar from TypeMock looking at 10 unit testing tips which whill help you become more agile on Thursday 25th August 14:00 UTC / GMT.

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