Software

  • Moonlight 4 Preview 1 is out – Miguel de Icaza announces the release of the first preview of Moonlight 4, the Mono Project’s implementation of Silverlight for Linux. This preview release brings some of the features of Silverlight 4 to the Moonlight platform, with more still to come.
  • Three Months and Ten Days – Miguel also highlights the release of Mono 2.10, the latest evolution of the Mono platform which now includes a new profiler, VB.NET support for V2.0 and v4 profiles, performance improvements in SGen, Cecil, support for ASP.NET MVC 3, a new C# compiler backend, and lots more.
  • Windows 7 SP1 RTM available for MSDN and TechNet customers – SQLDenis highlights the release of Windows 7 (and Windows 2008 Server R2) Service Pack 1, available now to TechNet and MSDN Subscribers. General availability will be on 22nd February 2011.
  • Free WPF controls from Mindscape! – The folks over at MindScape have released three controls available for free which target WPF Developers. The Controls, (Coverflow, AutoCompleteBox and PromptDecorator) have been released to celebrate the release of their commercial controls library WPF Elements 4.0.

Information

  • Massive: 400 Lines of Data Access Happiness – Rob Conery talks about his simple Dynamic based data access library, implemented in 400 lines of open sourced code (also available as a NuGet package). Rob discusses the key design choices made in the development of this library in this very interesting post.
  • Unit of Work in Rich Clients – Paul Stovell takes a look at the Unit of Work pattern, and how you should implement it in Rich Client applications, briefly discussing the implementations in Linq to SQL, Entity Framework, and NHibernate, along with discussing how this can fit in with MVVM frameworks.
  • Get/Load Polymorphism in NHibernate 3 – James Kovacs takes a look at the polymporphic behaviour of NHibernate 3 in loading objects which are part of an inheritance graph, discussing some of the limitations of its support.
  • Notes on Building Razor Views – K. Scott Allen explores the building of views implemented in Razor to help you identify syntax errors in the view at build time rather than runtime, walking through the process of enabling this feature.
  • Caching items in Orchard – Bertrand Le Roy shares a look at the Orchard Open Source CMS project’s cache API, which is built on top of the standard ASP.NET cache, but gives a nicer developer experience.
  • Using Windows Azure AppFabric Cache (CTP) – Panagiotis Kefalidis explores the Windows Azure AppFabric Cache, looking at the CTP release, and stepping through configuration and utilisation of the cache from your code in this CodeProject article.
  • SQL Azure Reporting Limited CTP Arrived – Shaun Xu takes a look at the CTP release of SQL Azure Reporting walking through using it for the generation of a simple report.
  • AppHarbor – Azure Done Right AKA Heroku for .NET – Rob Reynolds highlights AppHarbor, a cloud based hosting, akin to Azure, but actually running on Amazon’s cloud offering. Where AppHarbor excels is in its deployment support, allowing you to deploy your application by pushing directly from your version control system much like Heroku.
  • 5 Ways That Postsharp Can SOLIDify Your Code: Caching – Matthew Groves continues this 5 part series looking at how PostSharp’s AOP functionality can help you achieve SOLID code. In this part, Matthew takes a look at implementing caching
  • IE9 No-Reboot Setup and the Windows Restart Manager – Eric Lawrence takes a look at how the Window Restart Manager makes it possible for IE9’s setup to not require a Reboot, and looks at how you can make your applications work with the Restart Manager.