Back on the usual posting schedule today – and the 2012 review post will make an appearance later this week.

Information

  • When in doubt, turn on Tracing – Scott Hanselman reminds us of the importance of taking a look under the hood using Tracing in order to better understand, and in this case diagnose problems occurring in what appear to be a black box, highlighting the ASP.NET Tracing functionality as a top tool in this area ASP.NET Devs.
  • Life without distributed transactions – Udi Dahan discusses the important role of distributed transactions in messaging based systems, looking at the problems that distributed transactional allow us to solve more easily, highlighting where a lack of transaction support brings additional complexities to solutions as you have to solve the problems your self.
  • TypeScript Grammar – John Papa discusses the language grammar of the TypeScript language, looking at how it introduces its enhancements with regard to typing and variable declarations on top of the standard JavaScript language, and how the grammar supports more advanced features such as type inference.
  • ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Expression Builders – Ricardo Peres discusses the use of Expression Builders in ASP.NET Web Forms to allow you to declaratively set properties on controls using custom code in the builder to encapsulate the data obtaining.
  • Entity Framework Code First: Always disable AutoDetectChanges when importing data – Matteo Tontini highlights the importance of disabling automatic change tracking in Entity Framework (and also applies to other ORMs too) when performing build insertions using the ORM to avoid substantial performance penalties as the ORM attempts to keep track of large number of entities and scan them for changes.
  • YAGNI and Professional Code – Jesse Taber discusses the very important ‘You Ain’t Gonna Need It’ principle, and how it enables the shipping of Minimum Viable Product, and discusses how it needs to be tempered against the production of professional code in ensuring that the application produced is supportable, debugable and understandable.
  • A quick tutorial on the Update-Package command – Luan Nguyen shares a short tutorial looking at the various command line options for the NuGet ‘Update-Package’ command
  • Windows 3.1 simulated in a browser (really) – Greg Duncan highlights a fun HTML based rendition of Windows 3.1 which runs in the browser – run it full screen to go back in time 20 years and experience a (quicker than at the time) early version of Windows.

Community

  • NxtGenUG – Event: MVC4 Real World – Harvey Kandola will be presenting at the Hereford NxtGenUG Usergroup event on Monday 14th January, where his session will look at how Countersoft have adopted and made use of the features of ASP.NET MVC 4 and other technologies to build their ISV products.