Knockout 2.0.0 released – Steve Sanderson announces the release of Knockout v2.0.0, a major upgrade to this library for building rich MVVM JavaScript user interfaces. This version was originally planned to be called 1.3, but the desire for Semantic Versioning and the amount of changes made it worth calling a V2. Check out Steve’s post for details of all the new features and improvements.
Windows Phone 7.5 Training Kit – Daniel Egan highlights the release of the updated Windows Phone 7.5 Training Kit, available in two formats, basic and advanced. The basic kit (unsurprisingly) contains introductory content to all the key development features and APIs, with the advanced labs centring around adding more complex features to real world applications samples.
WPFSpark gets all V1.0! & Windows Forms Toolkit v0.2… A little WinForm love for the holidays… – Greg Duncan highlights two control libraries, one for WPF and the other for Winforms. WPF Spark has now reached the milestone 1.0 release, adding a bunch of new controls to the library in the process, and the Windows Forms Toolkit shows that WinForms development is alive and kicking with some nice user experience controls.
Information
Mono in 2011 – Miguel de Icaza takes a look back over 2011 from a Mono Project point of view, highlighting some major changes to the alternative .NET platform, both organisationally and also in technology terms.
Taking a look at the Windows Simulator in Visual Studio 11 – Michael Crump takes a look at the emulator included in Visual Studio 11 which allows you to work with and debug Windows 8 Metro style apps. Michael walks through the features of the emulator, discussing its use and highlighting the emulator features for simulating multitouch.
New Developer Centers on WindowsAzure.com – Peter Laudati highlights the newly updated Windows Azure Developer site which now adds (and makes more prominent) a number of new technologies supported on Windows Azure.
Continuous Delivery – Adding an Automated Interface Test Stage – Eli Weinstock-Herman presses on with his series on Continuous Delivery taking a look in this post at setting up the continuous integration / build environment to run automated user interface tests.
Building Apps and deploying them from GitHub – Joe Stagner highlights a new facility on GitHub allowing you to host your Mozilla Apps (HTML 5 browser based applications) directly off your GitHub repository for the project.
Introduction To Designing For Windows Phone 7 And Metro – Daniela Panfili discusses the design of Windows Phone and Metro applications, discussing colours, controls, icons and animation in this Smashing Magazine article.
Mango Sample: Portable Assemblies – Jerry Nixon continues his Mango Samples series with a look at the use of portable assemblies to allow you to consume the same assembly from Silverlight, Phone and regular .NET code.
Community
SQLBits 10 – the official UK SQL Server 2012 Technical Launch Event – Sara Allison highlights the SQL Bits 10 event which is being held in London at the end of March. This event is also doubling as the UK launch event for SQL Server 2012, and features 2 pay for conference days, and the usual Saturday community day.
