Catching up on all the great posts from last week and the weekend with a heavy dose of //Build/ content, along with the non-build links that missed out on being included last week.

//Build/ Related

Software

  • Released: Project Silk Client-Side Web Development for Modern Browsers – Karl Shifflett announces the official release of Project Silk – a guidance package for the creation of rich web based experiences using modern web development technologies and techniques. This release comes on the end of a series of preview releases where we have been able to watch the team build the guidance package and the supporting sample application.
  • Announcing Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 Beta – Stathis Papaefstathiou announces the beta release of the first beta of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4. The major features of this release involve integration of Kinect based functionality for improved Human Robot Interaction, and a Silverlight based CCR Programming model.
  • Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets 2.0 have been released! – Michael Washam announces the release of a new version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets. This version 2 release adds a number of new and updated cmdlets for improving the Deployment, diagnostics capabilities of Azure from your PowerShell command line.
  • Now Available: The Service Bus September 2011 Release – Clemens Vasters announces the September 2011 release of the Azure Service Bus. The new release improves capabilities in Pub/Sub messaging, enables load balancing capabilities for Intra Application messaging, supports Asynchronous Cloud Eventing and Event Driven Service Oriented Architectures
  • WebMatrix v2 Beta is out… – Greg Duncan highlights the announcement from Simon Tan of the Beta release of WebMatrix V2. This release sees a significant development in the product, and brings with it a range of great new features for development using PHP, JavaScript, and .NET, including NuGet support, and improved data management options and features. Be sure to check out the linked New features document for all the new bits.
  • PlayStation Suite SDK beta coming in November, offering new games in spring 2012 – Engadget highlights the forthcoming Sony PlayStation Suite which will support the use of C# to program games for the various Sony games platforms,

Information

  • ASP.NET MVC 4: New template for web applications, ASP.NET MVC 4: New mobile web application template &ASP.NET MVC 4: Display modes – Gunnar Peipman explore the new ASP.NET MVC 4 application template, giving a preview of the layout, and discussing how it makes better use of CSS and HTML(5), and provides a mobile friendly version before moving on to look at the new Display Modes feature allowing you to conditionally render different views to mobile devices, discussing how you can simulate and test this behaviour using your desktop browser and looking at creating custom display mode rules.
  • Demystifying the Windows 8 Grid Application – Bil Simser takes the wraps off the Metro Grid Application Template included in the Visual Studio 11 Preview release, exploring the structure of the template and how and what each part does.
  • Windows 8 : Metro’s Grid Application – what, how and when ? – Jonathan Antonie also explores the new Windows 8 Metro Grid application template included in Visual Studio 11, looking at the UI Experience and exploring the creation of a sample application using the template.
  • Metro .NET Framework Profile (Windows Tailored) – Sasha Goldshtein discusses the parts of the .NET API which are exposed to the new Metro Style applications, discussing what is in and out, some of the possible work around available to getting at other bits of the framework, and their effects of App Marketplace compliance.
  • NHibernate Pitfalls: Fetch and Lazy, SELECT N + 1 & Merge – Ricardo Peres continues his series focusing on some of the possible problems you as developer can run into using the NHibernate ORM with a look at the condusion around Fetch and he problem of Select N+1 when retrieving complex object graphs, and discusses merging entities back into the session and the backing data store from outside the current Session.
  • Windows 8 – An OS of two halves – Colin Eberhardt shares his thoughts on the Windows 8 dual UI experience, from both a developer and end user perspective, discussing the confusion the two UIs may cause, and how we have to be careful to select the right UI for our applications.
  • Using System.Reflection.Emit in a Windows 8 Metro style Application – Jason Bock discusses the use of Reflection.Emit in Metro applciation by way of including a .NET Class Library to do the reflection emit work, hard coding the reference to the class library assembly, and discussing the probable impact of this technique on your ability to get the Metro application into the market place.
  • Creating Data-driven web apps using ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms – Kalyan Bandarupalli takes a look at the new model binding functionality available in ASP.NET WebForms 4.5 Preview, looking based upon Damian Edwards session at //Build/
  • Extending configuration in OpenRasta 2.1 – Sebastien Lambla discusses some changes to OpenRasta 2.1 which make extending OpenRasta’s configuration API easier and also support writing extensions for 2.1 which will continue to function in OpenRasta 3.0
  • Effective Xml Part 1: Choose the right API – Pawel Kadluczka starts a series of posts looking at the different APIs provided for working with XML data and documents and looking at whcih approach is best suited to which scenario.
  • The .NET Dictionary – Simon Cooper takes a look at the implementation of the humble .NET Dictionary class, looking at the internal structure used by the dictionary to keep track of items.
  • Creating simple and complex animations with JQuery in ASP.Net applications – Nikolaos Kantzelis discusses animations using jQuery, sharing some samples which illustrate varying levels of complexity of animation
  • What is the cost of try/catch – Ayende discusses one of the misunderstandings people commonly have with try/catch exception handling – that there is actually no performance penalty in using Try / Catch in your code unless exceptions are thrown.

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