Software

  • Download: Service Bus – The service buss components of Windows Azure are now available to download, allowing you to run your own instance(s) of the Service Bus on your own machines outside the cloud. (Great news for anyone wanting to scale out SignalR across multiple servers).
  • Office Development with Visual Studio 2012 and "Napa" – S.Somasegar highlights the release of a preview of "Napa" the Office 365 Development Tools and the new Office Develloper Tools for Visual Studio 2012 as a part of the preview of Office 2013.

Information

  • Should C# warn on null dereference? – Eric Lippert takes us on another voyage into the decisions made in implementing the C# compiler, discussing why the compiler does not warn about null deferencing when it does warn about unreachable code.
  • Breaking Changes In Argument List Evaluation In C# 5.0 – Paulo Morgado highlights a breaking change between C#4 and C#5 regarding the use of expressions as parameters to method calls, illustrating with a simple example.
  • Building Real-time Web Apps with ASP.NET WebAPI and WebSockets – Youssef Moussaoui takes a look at how you can make use of WebSockets in .NET 4.5 and Windows 8 / Windows 2012, looking at a simple example of the client side and server side code.
  • Using the ASP.NET Web API UrlHelper – Ron Cain takes a look at the use of the UrlHelper class to provide the hok up from URL to ApiController method, sharing a sample based on the latest nightly build of WebAPI to illustrate its use.
  • Designing the Windows 8 touch keyboard – Steven Sinofsky shares an interesting post from Kip Knox discussing the design process for the Windows 8 Touch Keyboard, including sharing some of the research performed and the early versions of the on screen keyboard.
  • Clean up your MVC app with SignalR – Yngve Bakken Nilsen takes a look at how SignalR can be used in regular ASP.NET MVC Applications to provide an alternative to the standard ways of doing client to server communications, potentially improving the readability of your code.
  • Developer Democracy – Phil Trelford discusses the power of developer democracy, highlighting DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper session voting (including a plug for my proposed session – thanks Phil), The usergroup community (F#unctional Londoners Meetup Group specifically), and UserVoice community voting for F# related support in tools such as ReSharper and MonoDevelop.