Software

  • NCrunch 1.38b Released! – Remco Mulder annouces the release of NCrunch 1.38b, the latest release of the continuous test runner. This release addresses performance issues in the previous release, along with support for Visual Studio 11 Beta, along with new features such as Custom Engine Modes for controlling which tests run and when, Improved impacted test analysis and a number of more minor fixes and improvements
  • New features in Web Workbench – Ivan Towlson of MindScape announces their latest release of Web Workbench, a Visual Studio Add-in which adds a variety of web development productivity features. This release improves the Visual Studio 11 Beta integration, adds collapsible outlining to CoffeeScript files, enhances file importing capabilities in Sass and Less, and addresses a number of more minor issues. As usual, this version is available for free, with a pay for ‘pro’ edition available.
  • KnockoutCS – Michael L Perry shares KnockoutCS a dependency tracking framework for Silverlight 5 which is inspired by the JavaScript based Knockout.js framework. The Library is available from NuGet, and full source is hosted on GitHub.
  • Sencha Touch 2.0 – Built for Amazing Apps – The team at Sencha announce the release of their latest major version of Sencha Touch, a library for building HTML5 based applications for multiple platforms. Major goals for this version were improvements to the speed of the framework, including startup speed, and closing the gap between native and browser based applications.

Information

  • Introduction to the ASP.NET Web API – Stephen Walther takes a look at the ASP.NET Web API, walking through the process of using the Web API to power client side AJAX behaviours for reading, creating an updating data records.
  • WCF or ASP.NET Web APIs? My two cents on the subject – Ido Flatow shares his thoughts on the factors which play into the decision as to which framework to use for your integration API, looking at the pros and cons of both WCF and the new Web API, and the different scenarios they are best suited to.
  • What’s new in WCF 4.5? WebSocket support (Part 2 of 2) – Ido also shares the second part of his look a the Web Sockets API support in WCF 4.5, looking at creating and calling a simple web sockets service.
  • Why Visual Studio 11 Requires Space on the System Drive – Heath Stewart discusses why the Visual Studio 11 Beta installer requires quite a considerable amount of disk space on the system drive of the target machine
  • Optimizing the .NET Framework Deployment Experience for Users and Developers – Brandon Bray discusses the experience for uses of Windows 8 who attempt to run applications which use versions of .NET not currently installed on their machine, comparing to the behaviour of Windows 7, and sharing numbers about the uptake of versions of .NET.
  • Windows 8 Consumer Preview is out! Ready to write an app? – Dave Isbitski discusses developer readiness for creating applications on Windows 8 Consumer Preview, highlights a number of resources, including video, SDK, Visual Studio 11 beta, and guidance in what has changed since the //build preview, to help you get started developing on the platform
  • RabbitMQ for Windows: Building Your First Application – Derek Greer continues his series looking at the use of RabbitMQ on Windows and from .NET, in this part looking at the high-level concepts of message queues, and looks at creating a first simple application.
  • LINQ for F# – Jonathan Allen highlights one of the new features fo F#3, the inclusion of Linq syntax into the language using query { } syntax , along with highlighting a few other new features including Type Providers, Portable Libraries and auto implemented properties
  • Structure and Organization of CSS – K. Scott Allen discusses the organisation and structuring of CSS files making a number of suggestions to help keep your styles in check and well structured, thus avoiding problems down the line with massive increases in complexity.
  • Unit testing with Coffeescript – Colin Mackay takes a look at unit testing CoffeeScript using the QUnit JavaScript testing framework, running Coffeescript directly in the browser rather than precompiling
  • Tabs versus spaces: Spaces won – Jimmy Bogard sparks debate on one of the classic programmer arguments, regarding the use of tabs or spaces for indenting in source code.

Community

  • NxtGenUG – Event: Introduction to DDD – The NxtGenUG in Oxford welcome Ian Cooper for a session on Domain Driven Design on Tuesday 3rd April. The session will look at the concepts introduced by Eric Evans, exploring how these allow us to model a domain, and create better domain models.