IronPython – Download: 2.7.1 Beta 3 – The IronPython Team announce their 3rd and final beta release of IronPython 2.7.1, and requires .NET 4 or Silverlight 4 for installation and use. This release updates the standard library to match CPython 2.7.2, adds some more modules to the installation, along with addressing reported issues.
C#/.NET Toolbox: Creating a "Safer" Task Dispose() – James Michael Hare continues his .NET Toolbox series looking at generic utility code he has written to help his development, sharing a look at some simple code which helps better handle disposal of Task Parallel Library Tasks, and results in cleaner code.
Modernizr.js – K. Scott Allen kicks off a series of posts looking at what the Modernizr JavaScript Library actually does to make HTML5 work better in legacy browsers, looking at how ti forces browsers to acknowledge HTML elements it doesn’t understand.
FOWA London – Get excited and build things (and a browser panel) – Christian Heilmann shares his Keynote address slides and audio from the Future of Web Applications conference in London, and shares notes from Dan Horner on a browser panel discussion with representatives of Chrome, IE, Opera and Mozilla – an interesting read, and shows some of the differences in approach of the different browser vendors.
Windows Phone 7.5 Cheat Sheet: Beyond Mango SDK – Toolkits and Controls – Kevin Ashley shares a second Windows Phone Mango Cheat Sheet which takes a look at the controls available as standard, and via the Silverlight Toolkit, as well as looking at some of the supporting tools such as NuGet, and other Frameworks and control libraries for the platform.
Avoid Testing Implementation Details, Test Behaviours – Ian Cooper discusses one of the key concepts in Test Driven Development, drawing on sections of Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development book and discussing the importance of the different states of the Test Driven Development Process.
Three pillars of Unit Tests – Pawel Olesiejuk discusses three factors which will affect the success of your Unit Tests, discussing Trustworthiness, Maintainability, and Readability.
SortedDictionary and SortedList – Simon Cooper takes a look at two specialist collection classes which provide sorted ordering, discussing how they work under the hood and their Memory and performance characteristics.
Community
WPUG drinks with Nokia – The London Windows Phone Developers User Group extend an invite from Nokia to join them for a Drinks reception after their Symbian to Windows Phone developer transition event on Monday 10th October at the Emirates Stadium.