• EF 4.3 Released - The Entity Framework Team announce the release of Entity Framework 4.3. The 4.3 release brings the Code First Migrations functionality (previously the subject of many CTP releases) into the main Entity Framework product. This is combined with a number of other changes including Data Annotations support on non-public members, improved configuration via app/web.config along with numerous other bugfixes and improvements.

Information

• EF 4.3 Code-Based Migrations Walkthrough & EF 4.3 Automatic Migrations Walkthrough - Rowan Miller of the Entity Framework Team walks through the two different use cases for the migrations support included as a part of the Entity Framework 4.3 release, showing how you can use the code first capabilities to migrate your database between versions, and looking at how some of the process can make use of the automatic migrations.
• Building Windows for the ARM processor architecture - Steven Sinofsky continues with the story of Windows 8 with a discussion of the building of a Windows for the ARM processor. Windows on ARM (WOA) will run on a new style of personal computer on the ARM processor architecture, will run Metro style applications, and will include desktop versions of Word Excel PowerPoint and OneNote. Also included in the post are a number of pictures and video of the new style Windows.
• SignalR : Best thing since slice bread? - Sacha Barber discusses SignalR, a relatively new and exciting project, explaining what it is, what it is useful for and how its used, illustrating with a simple example (full source available for download).
• Asynchronously Load HTML Templates For Backbone Views - Derick Bailey discusses the importance of making sure complex client side web applications download quickly to the client, and looks at how you can have Backbone.js view templates loaded asynchronously to help keep application load performance good.
• HTML5 made easy with HTML5 Cheat Sheets for tags, event handler attributes, and browser support - Alice Pang highlights some cheat sheets for HTML 5 Developers from the folks at InMotion Hosting. The cheat sheets cover the tags, event handlers ad browser support of the various HTML5 features.
• The Development Pendulum - John Sonmez discusses what he refers to as the ‘Development Pendulum’, the nature of our industry to oscillate from one extreme to the other on most topics, and how this action drives the industry forward.
• Now vendor prefixes have become a problem, want to help fix it? & Vendor Prefixes - about to go south - Christian Heilmann and Remy Sharp discuss a recent meeting of the W3C CSS working group where the notion of supporting the -webkit vendor prefix in other browsers was discussed.
• Free "Introduction to Reactive Extensions"on-demand video training available, with 8 sessions and growing - Greg Duncan highlights a nice work in progress resource from ‘Mr Bool’ AKA Ayad Boudiab looking at the Reactive Extensions for .NET. There are currently 8 parts available in video form looking at various aspects of the Reactive Extensions in use.

Community

• Selenium, a UI testing paradigm with Nathan Gloyn - The .NET Developer Network User Group welcome Nathan Gloyn for a session on testing your web UI’s using Selenium at the University of West England (Near Bristol) on the evening of Wednesday 22nd February
• NxtGenUG - Event: Web Caching 101 - Seb Lambla will be visiting the Oxfordshire NxtGenUG User group on the evening of Tuesday 6th March where he will be delivering his session on the uses of Web Caching to help your sites perform and scale better.

• The State of NuGet - Phil Haack breaks some of the blogging silence on NuGet and gives an update on what the project has been up to recently, highlighting the project status page, the issue tracker which details many of the changes coming in 1.7, and also the Jabbr chat room which is the ideal place to go to discuss all things Nuget (and plenty of other topics too)
• Modern Web Development - Part 4 - Debugging - Shawn Wildermuth continues his series of posts covering his re-discovery of web development, and looking at how it has changed from web development of old. This post explores the art of Debugging looking at how you can use browser features and extensions to enable you to successfully debug client side code and styling.
• jQuery Tip #2 - Manipulating the DOM in a Loop - Dan Wahlin continues with his jQuery Tips series with a look at using jQuery to add elements to the page, discussing the performance impacts of the different ways of achieving this.
• Potential pitfalls to avoid when passing around async lambdas - Stephen Toub discusses the use of async lambdas and anonymous methods with the Task Parallel Library, discussing their use, before looking at some of the subtle bugs that incorrect use can introduce.
• WF3 Types Marked Obsolete in .NET 4.5 - Jurgen Willis of the WorkflowTeam discusses the decision to mark the WF3 implementation ‘System.Workflow’ as obsolete in the forthcoming .NET 4.5 release, and also highlights some resources to aid anyone migrating a WF3 app to WF4
• Connection Pool Fragmentation: Use Federations and you won’t need to learn about these nasty problems that come with sharding! - Cihan Biyikoglu discusses how the new SQL Azure Federations functionality makes sharding your data within multiple databases much easier, and reduces the number of connections to databases required
• Using the Battery API - Part of WebAPI - Robert Nyman discusses the Battery API which allows web applications running in Firefox on Windows, Linux and Android to access details about the battery life of the device its running on, allowing your application to respond suitably. Some interesting uses detailed in the comments.
• C# Needs Seqs - Chris Eargle discusses the use of the IEnumerable<T> interface as a great way of working with sequences, and proposes the introduction of a seq<T> keyword/data type in C# to allow easier access to a type which is pretty core to most development.
• Windows Phone 7.5 : Working with Azure Storage Table - Wriju takes a look at the use of Windows Azure Storage to fulfil the storage needs of Windows Phone applications, sharing some code to illustrate it in use.
• Windows Phone Fast Application Switching and Page State - Dhananjay Kumar discusses the improvements in Windows Phone Mango to the Fast Application Switching, and how it relates to Page State
• OSS Rules of Engagement - Jimmy Bogard shares his feelings on the debate about OSS development and community comments / complaints, sharing his 4 rules of engagement for Open Source Software
• Visual Studio 11 not 2011 - Daniel Moth highlights a subtlety of the current naming for the next release of Visual Studio - the fact that it currently is being referred to by its Version Number, and not the year of release.
• Using PowerShell v3 to consume the StackOverflow JSON API - Doug Finke follows on from a post included yesterday about using JSON.NET to consume the Stack Overflow API, instead taking a look at consuming it using PowerShell 3

Community

• standards-next.org - Mobile and devices - standards>next are running an event in Manchester on Saturday 3rd March looking at the future of web standards when applied to mobile and other devices. The event is being held at the John Dalton Building of Manchester Metropolitan University from 1pm to 6pm. The event is free, but registration is required, and at the time of writing there are still 11 tickets available
• In The Brain of Itamar Syn-Hershko: RavenDB - The London .NET Usergroup and Skills Matter join forces for an eventon the evening of Tuesday 28th February where they welcome Itamar Syn-Hershko, a core developer on the RavenDB project to discusses how RavenDB Indexes data, and to discuss Map Reduce, MultiMap, Live Projections and much more.

• Modernizr 2.5: Supercharged for 2012 - The Modernizr Team announce the release of Modernizr 2.5, their latest and biggest update ever. The new release includes a vast array of additional feature detects, the support of a full test suite. There are also a few backwards compatibility breaks to be aware of before your upgrade.
• Visual Studio Unit Testing Extensions v1.2.0.0 - Jeremiah Clark announces the release of the Visual Studio Unit Testing Extensions 1.2.0.0, a library which adds extension methods to make more readable test when working with the Viausl Studio Unit Testing environment. This release includes additional assertion methods

Information

• When "ExecuteSynchronously" doesn’t execute synchronously - Stephen Toub continues his posts digging deeper into the Task Parallel Library discussing today the TaskContinuationOptions enum which lets you specify how your continuation runs after a task occurs
• 15 Designing Windows Phone Icons - Arturo Toledo discusses at length the guidelines and design strategies for the creation of Icons for Windows Phone 7 Applications as a part of his 31 Seeks of Windows Phone Metro Design series.
• Mango Sample: Give your app the Finger! - Jerry Nixon continues his Windows Phone 7.1 Mango series looking today at making XAML elements movable on the screen using touch and drag. Jerry also shares a video of creating an Azure based Windows Phone App in his post A Cloud-based Phone App in 5 Minutes.
• Backbone.js And PhoneGap Sample App - Ben Forta highlights some recent posts from Christophe Coenraets looking at building HTML5 CRUD applications using Backbone.js, and also showing how backbone,js can be used with PhoneGap to create cross platform mobile applications.
• Rewriting My "Guaranteed Callbacks" Code With jQuery Deferred - Derick Bailey takes a look at jQuery ‘deferred’ objects and ‘promises’ and looks at how they can be applied to some existing code of his for running callbacks when collections are loaded in Backbone.
• Send me a patch for that &
• Kiss The Ring… - Both Ayende and Rob Conery respond to Hadi Hariri’s post included in yesterday’s edition discussing community expectations of open source and providing patches and feedback. More opinions, and most certainly interesting reading
• jQuery Tip #1 - Defining a Context When Using Selectors - Dan Wahlin shares the first post in a new series looking at jQuery and sharing tips on its use. This post focuses on the use of selectors in jQuery, looking at some of the less well common ways of selecting elements.
• Using JSON.net to consume the JSON Stack Overflow API - Jonathan Creamer takes a look at consuming JSON powered APIs using .NET code, looking at the JSON.NET library as probably the best way of consuming such data, and exploring its use consuming the StackOverlfow API.

Community

• Building HTTP services with ASP.NET Web API in MVC 4 Beta - The Community For MVC (C4MVC) have a Virtual Usergroup meeting today, 8th Feb, 12-1PM CST which will be looking at the Web API which is included in the ASP.NET MVC4 Beta. Daniel Roth will be discussing the concepts and looking at building RESTful applications using it in the session.
• NxtGenUG - Event: World Domination: ASP.NET MVC - The Cambridge NxtGenUG group welcome Guy Smith-Ferrier for a session on ASP.NET MVC on the evening of Tuesday 6th March at Microsoft Research Cambridge. In the session Guy will look at the localisation of your ASP.NET MVC applications, sharing his wealth of knowlege on the subject.
• WPUG presents #NotAtMWC12 - The London based Windows Phone User Group will be meeting on the evening of Tuesday 28th February for an event looking at the wider world of mobile, including discussions of the goings on at MWC in Barcelona.

Software

• ServiceStack/Bundler - Demis Bellot shares Bundler, a Compiler, combiner and minifier for Less, Sass, CoffeeScript and JavaScript files in which bundling is done at compile time. The implementation is in Node.JS and ships with a Windows node.exe, and is available as a Nuget package for easy inclusion in your projects.

Information

• What is "binding" and what makes it late? - Eric Lippert discusses another of those terms that get banded about which people often have the wrong impression of its meaning. This post explores the concept of binding (in the compiler sense) and takes a look at the concept of late binding.
• FromAsync(asyncResult, …) vs FromAsync(beginMethod, …) - Stephen Toub demystifies another aspect of the Task Parallel Library looking at the two overloads of the FromAsync helper method to convert async begin/end methods to Tasks, discussing the scenarios in which you would use each.
• .NET phone number validation with Google libphonenumber - The AppHarbor team blog shares a piece on the tricky business of telephone number validation, looking at the use of the Google libphonenumber, and more specifically the .NET port from Patrick Mézard, which consists of years’ worth of experience parsing telephone numbers all over the world.
• Web Dev .NET: Differences Between jQuery .bind() vs .live() vs .delegate() vs .on() - Elijah Manor takes a look at four similar jQuery methods (.bind(), .live(), .delegate() and .on()), discussing the use of each, with examples, and helping to explain which one you should be using in which scenario.
• Submit a patch - Hadi Hariri discusses the role of complaining in the software world, discussing how it is generally responded to in the commercial software world, before talking about the open source world, where ‘complaints’ are often less well responded to, sharing an opinion on what can be done to improve matters.
• 3 Stages Of A Backbone Application’s Startup - Derick Bailey discusses the standard method for startup code in Backbone based JavaScript applications, and shares how his Backbone.Marionette addon makes use of application initializer callbacks with added benefits
• The Commodore 64 Emulator: Emulating Pointers in a sandbox when the real thing is not allowed - Pete Brown discusses some of his recent work on his Commodore 64 Emulator, written to run in Silverlight, and drawing on the Frodo C64 Emulator written in C and C++. In this post Pete discusses how he worked around the use of pointers in the C / C++ version when porting to .NET, and specifically Silverlight where unsafe code is not officially allowed.
• Implementing a Code Action using Roslyn - Brian Rasmussen of the C# Team discusses how the Roslyn Services API allows you to manipulate and correct code issues in within Visual Studio from an extension, illustrating with an example which replaces use of Count() > 0 with .Any
• Previous Web Architectures & Web-app model quandary` - Paul Hammant discusses the web architectures of the past, looking at the evolution of web based platforms and the technologies and implementation styles used throughout the ages, before focusing on the current trend for micro web frameworks

• Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games Updates - Nathan Totten announces the latest update to the Windows Azure Tookit for Social Games, a collection of code, samples, and libraries which give you a jump start in building your own games backed onto Azure.
• Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework 2012 January Sample Updates - Jialiang Ge announces the release of the All In One Code Framework January 2012 update, containing a further 8 code samples on Windows Azure, Directory Services, Hyper-V, TFS, WDK, and Windows SDK

Information

• Know Thine Implicit Allocations - Stephen Toub discusses some fo the performance work that the Team have put in on the Task Parallel Library in .NET 4.5, looking at some of the specific performance tweaks and behaviours they encountered. Stephen also shares a look at Building a custom GetOrAdd method for ConcurrentDictionary<TKey, TValue> in another post.
• 4. 1st Class Functions - Dorian Corompt continues this series discussing the practices and principles behind Functional Programming. This post discusses the concept of First Class Functions. Looking at and giving examples of some of their properties.
• The Microsoft C++ Compiler Turns 20! - The Visual C++ Team Blog celebrate the 20th Birthday of the Microsoft C++ Compiler, looking back over some of its history and looking to the future in the form of the VS11 release.
• From C# to C++, the short guide that isn’t (all that short) - Greg Duincan highlights a short (12200 words) guide to C++ for C# Developers from Michael B. McLaughlin.
• Streaming live results to a web site using MSMQ/Duplex WCF/SignalR/jQuery - Sacha Barber takes a look at building a system to stream live results to a website using a combination of technologies ranging from the familiar (MSMQ) to the new (SignalR), explaining and illustrating the use of each in this CodeProject Article.
• HTML5 Web Workers: Classic Message Passing Concurrency - Sasha Goldshtein discusses the concurrency provided by JavaScript Web Workers in HTML5, looking at how they have re-invented concurrency on a platform with no existing implementations.
• A year in review with CQRS - John Teague takes a look back on a year working with an application architected with a CQRS style which went from inception and requirements in January, through to a first release in June, and shares the experiences of him and his team.
• Taking the Single Responsibility Principle Seriously - Ralf Westphal discusses the application of the Single Responsibility Principle, one of the SOLID Principles, looking at how it can be used to improve the quality of code in this article for DeveloperFusion

• NCrunch 1.37b Released! - Remco Mulder announces the release of NCrunch 1.37b, containing a raft of fixes for reported issues, along with some interesting new features regarding debugging, performance metrics, code coverage, keyboard shortcuts and much more.
• Fluqi - Ease using jQuery UI with ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC - Fluqi is an interesting library which straddles the server and client, providing APIs for applying jQuery UI widgets to your application in a fluent manner. The library is open source, and hosted over on GitHub
• NuGet Project Uncovered: Burro - Jason Jarrett is continuing his series of posts looking at some of the hidden gems of the NuGet packages feed. Today’s post looks at Burro, a project to parse build output. Be sure to check back through Jason’s posts for the rest of his hidden gems.
• Rename Visual Studio Window Title extension for Visual Studio 2010 - The ‘Visual Studio add-ins, extensions and tools’ blog highlights a useful looking Visual Studio Extension for anyone who, like me, often has more than one copy of a project open in different Visual Studio Instances - this extension adds more path information to the window title allowing you to beterr distinguish between IDE instances.

Information

• [Special Edition] It’s Kinect day! The Kinect For Windows SDK v1 is out - Dan Fernandez and Greg Duncan highlight the release Kinect For Windows and the 1.0 release of the SDK, before Dan goes on to walk through Installing and Using the Kinect Sensor and discusses Setting up your Development Environment, both in video
• Kinect for Windows now available! Information and resources for you. - Eric Ligman shares a nice collection of links relating to resources about the Kinect for Windows product and SDK.
• Await, SynchronizationContext, and Console Apps: Part 3 - Stepjhen Toub continues his series looking at SynchronizationContext and its use with async methods, in this part looking at using it to run async methods which return void rather than Task
• Coding in Marble - Rico Mariani looks at the coding style of code which uses Promises, exploring different ways of representing such code to make it more elegant.
• Rx - DistinctUntilChanged - Bnaya Eshet continues his series of posts looking at the various methods of the Reactive Extensions. This post explores the DistinctUntilChanged operator
• WP7: CLR Managed Object overhead - Abhinaba Basu discusses the memory overhead of objects on the Windows Phone platform looking at the structure of objects in memory and looking at how different types of object are stored.
• New Tools in My TDD Arsenal - Alexander Beletsky highlights some of the recent additions to his tools used for Test Driven Development, highlighting NCrunch, NSubstitute and FluentAssertions.
• CSS3 3D Transforms in IE10 - Jennifer Yu of the Internet Explorer team discusses 3d Transformations in CSS3, discussing how the effects are implemented in IE10, and highlighting some demos.
• JavaScript File & Folder Structures: Just Pick One - Derick Bailey takes a look at the various different approaches to managing the files that make up your JavaScript, discussin a few and showing how he structures his client side MV* code.
• Node.js, Require and Exports - Karl Seguin is also discussing the organisation of JavaScript, in this case how you structure code in Node.js, and its module per file approach, looking at the use of Require and Exports.
• Slides, Notes and Recordings for Week 1 and 2 of #6weeksazure are all now available - Eric Nelson highlights the availability of recordings, slides and notes for the first two weeks of 6 weeks of Azure, a series of virual events for UK ISVs to gett them up and running on the Windows Azure Platform.

Software

• Kinect for Windows is now Available! - The Kinect for Windows team announce the release of Kinect for Windows, along with the version 1.0 of the Kinect for Windows SDK and runtime. These new devices have close focusing capabilities and will work with Windows 7 and 8, with the SDK providing for raw sensor streams, skeletal tracking, speech and audio and also offering an improved API.
• Why Serenade.js? - Jonas Nicklas introduces Serenade,js, a new client side MVC implementation in JavaScript. In the post Jonas discusses why he created the library, and looks at some of its key features
• Say hello to Bootstrap 2.0 - Mark Otto introduces the next major release of BootStrap, the Twitter front end toolkit for developing websites. V2 responds to the feedback on the previous version, updates documentation completely, introduces a 12 column grid system, adds new JavaScript plugins, and much more.
• jQuery 1.7.2 Beta 1 Released - The jQuery team announce the first beta release of jQuery 1.7.2, which addresses bugs reported in previous versions. This latest beta is available via the jQuery CDN.

Information

• The Web is the new Terminal: Are you using the Web’s Keyboard Shortcuts and Hotkeys? - Scott Hanselman discusses the use of keyboard shortcuts in web based applications, showing how you can add hotkeys to your web application, and looking at how a number of well known sites have implemented their hotkeys.
• Get Started with Node.js + Windows Azure: Resources - Peter Laudati shares a nice collection of resources about all aspects of working with Node.js on the Windows Azure platform, covering getting up and running with Node,js on Azure, the sue of online IDEs, MongoDB, IISNode, and a number of more general Node.js resources.
• MSDN Magazine - February 2012 - The February edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online, featuring articles on Async Programming in C++ using PPL, Building consumer device applications using Windows Azure, ASP.NET MVC Model Binding, HTML5, Windows Workflow 4.5, Nuget, Knockout.js, and much more
• February’s PragPub magazine - The Pragmatic Programmers have released their February edition of PragPub magazine, with articles this month looking at tips for agile leaders and freelancers, Scala, and all the usual editorial content
• Prompts and Directories - Even Better Git (and Mercurial) with PowerShell - Scott Hanselman also looks at how you can improve your use of command line version control systems using Powershell, and some community extensions.

• Umbraco 5.0 RTM is on CodePlex, ready for download - The Umbraco team announce the RTM release of V5.0. This release is a major milestone for the project, taking the key features of 4.7 and re-writing on the ASP.NET MVC stack, allowing use of Razor, along with the core CMS functionality.
• Debugger Canvas 1.1 is Released! - Kael Rowan announces the 1.1 release of the Debugger Canvas extension for Visual Studio. The release addresses a number of bugs, improves performance and also includes some new features including the ability to turn the canvas on or off during debugging, view multithreaded code on canvas, navigate more easily through code and view recursive calls side by side.
• StyleCop 4.7.7.0 released - Tatworth highlights the release of StyleCop 4.7.7.0 which includes compatibility with the Visual Studio 11 preview release and ReSharper 5.1, 6.0, 6.1 and 6.1.1, along with addressing further bugs.

Information

• One ASP.NET Sneak Peek: Elegant Web Forms and Snowballs in Hell - Scott Hanselman highlights some of the cool improvements coming in the various aspects of the ASP.NET platform, focusing on some of the exciting things happening for WebForms.
• Modern Web Development - Part 3 - Shawn Wildermuth continues his series looking at modern web development, exploring CSS in this post. Shawn discusses how CSS can be awkward, and how CSS can be made better by using dynamic stylesheet languages like SASS and LESS to enhance the generation of CSS rules via nested styles, mixins and variables.
• How to force Nuget not to update log4net to 1.2.11 - Krzysztof Kozmic talks about the updated Log4Net release which uses a new signing key, and how this is causing issues with lots of projects which have used Log4Net in the past via NuGet and are now having problems, exploring how to tell NuGet to use a specific version of a package.
• Ngen or not? The rules haven’t changed very much since 2004 - Rico Mariani gives a very nice concise explanation of the situations where you will gain performance by using ngen to generate native images for your applications assemblies.
• Free ebook: Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (second DRAFT preview) - Microsoft Press share the second draft preview of a forthcoming title on SQL Server 2012 which includes 6 out of the 12 chapters that will be in the final book - a great resource to have, and free.
• Announcing the SQL Server 2012 Early Adoption Cook Book - Roger Doherty highlights the SQL Server 2012 Early Adoption Cook Book TechNet wiki whcih contains links to a variety of information on SQL Server 2012 from both teams at Microsoft and their partner organisations.
• Visual Studio 2010 UML Design Pattern Toolbox Items Extension - Giles Davies shares a Visual Studio extension which adds the Gang of Four design pattern to the UML Toolbox in Visual Studio, and then goes on to discuss how the extension was created.
• CodeBuild: 15 Best Practices for Exception Handling - Cagdas Basaraner shares 15 best practices for handling exceptions in code - the post has is a bit Java based but a lot of the principles apply more generally, some interesting discussion in the comments.
• Event Handler Memory Leaks, Unwiring Events, and the WeakEventManager in WPF 4.5 - Pete Brown discusses the use of events in your code, focusing specifically on their use in WPF applications, and how they can be a cause of memory leaks, before discussing one of the new features in WPF4.5 makes implementing a solution much easier.
• Installing Mono on Windows - Paul Stack discusses his desire to get TeamCitySharp working on Mono, and to that end takes a look at getting a Mono environment up and running on a Windows machine.

• Beta release of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) SDK for Windows Phone - Lee Stott highlights the release of the Amazon Web Services SDK for Windows Phone allowing you to consume the range of Amazon Services (S3, SimpleDB, SQS Cloud Services) from the comfort of a sensible Windows Phone compatible API. Lee highlights a good set of resources for getting up and running with the library including video content from Channel 9.

Information

• Anonymous Types Unify Within An Assembly, Part Two - Eric Lippert continues his discussion of anonymous types within assemblies, and the unification of types which contain the same definition.
• Currying vs partial function application - Jon Skeet discusses the differences between the functional programming concepts of currying and partial application, looking at doing both in C# when programming in a more functional programming style.
• Hazards of Converting Binary Data To A String - Phil Haack picks up on an interesting group of questions on StackOverflow discussing how you can represent binary data as a string, and looking at the implications of the encoding used as to what it does to the data being encoded, and how it can result in changes to the actual bytes being written.
• About Orchard Governance and Microsoft - Bertrand Le Roy discusses the recent change to the Orchard project, and how the project which was initiated by Microsoft has now been formally handed over to the community in a more complete way than many company created open source projects have been in the past.
• The new OpenEverything organization - While on the topic of Open Source project involvement, Sebastien Lambla discusses some of the organisation changes for the OpenEverything (OpenWrap, OpenRasta, OpenFileSystem,…) projects and how he is now focusing his involvement.
• From Concept to Code in 6 hours: Shipping my first Windows Phone App - Scott Hanselman walks through the creation of his very first Windows Phone 7 Application, from concept to application in 6 hours, sharing the key bits along the way.
• 31 Weeks of Windows Phone Metro Design - #5 Choosing between Panoramas, Pivots and/or Pages. - Arturo Toledo is into week 5 of his 31 post series looking at all aspects of Windows Phone Metro design. This post takes a look at the three key UI concepts beginning with ‘P’ - Panorama, Pivots and Pages, looking at their use and how they are similar to other more familiar design concepts.
• The Big Dummies Guide for Windows Phone Developer Resources - Bil Simser shares a great collection of Windows Phone development resources, ranging from articles, frameworks, design concepts, training, to marketing and monitzation of applications.
• Winning on the Marketplace: The differentiation game - Paul Laberge discusses how you can make your applications stand out in the Windows Phone Marketplace, including how some application feature will make users love your application all the more.
• Introducing Apache Hadoop Services for Windows Azure - Roger Jennings discusses the use of Apache Hadoop Services on Windows Azure, looking at and highlighting some posts on the concepts and product, before walkig through two tutorials, and highlighting plenty of further resources.
• Find the jQuery Bug #3: Give Me Truth - Elijah Manor is running a series of posts looking at common bugs found in jQuery consuming code, and discussing what the problem is, and how you can resolve the issue.
• Testing a jQuery Plugin with ExpectThat and Mocha - Dan Mohl continues discussion of his ExpectThat library for CoffeeScript / JavaScript assertions, looking in this post at the application of the library in testing a jQuery Plugin
• Using SpecFlow to drive Selenium WebDriver Tests - Eli Weinstock-Herman discusses the use of SpecFlow combined with the Selenium WebDriver to provide a way fo executing tests derived from human readable requirements, running through the process from scenario to working test

Community

• SQL Bits X - The Biggest SQL Event in Europe - Sara Allison highlights the SQL Bits X SQL Server event and the associated training days. SQL Bits is a great conference, with SQL experts from all over the world, and this event is particularly special as it also doubles as the UK launch event for SQL Server 2012. Spaces are limited (although it is a large limit) and registrations for both the ‘pay for’ conference / training days and the Free Community Day are currently open.
• NxtGenUG - Event - Straighten Spaghetti with C# 5 - Jon Skeet takes a trip to Microsoft Research in Cambridge on Thursday 16th February for the NxtGenUG where he will be delivering a session on how C#5 and the new async functionality can help straighten out complex spaghetti code. Be sure to register early for what is bound to be a very popular event.

• jQuery Mobile 1.0.1 Released - The jQuery Mobile team announce the release of jQuery Mobile 1.0.1, their first maintenance release which brings support for the Samsung bada platform and UCBrowsers on the Android platform, along with a number of other bugfixes and enhancements.
• IcedCoffeeScript - IcedCoffeeScript is a fork of the main CoffeeScript which adds a number of additional features, most notably await and defer keywords which extend the power of the language with respect to asynchronous control flow, implementing continuation passing style, much like C#5.
• Umbraco CMS - Download: Umbraco CMS 5.0 RC 3 - The 3rd Release candidate of Umbraco CMS V5.0 is now available on CodePlex. This release candidate is likely to be the final one before a production release later this week, so is a great opportunity to get your hands on the new stuff first.
• Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games Version 1.2.2 Released - Nathan Totten announces the release of 1.2.2 of his Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games. There are no new features over the 1.2.0 beta, but this release is considered to be a stable one, and includes some perforamcne tweaks and improved use of AutoFac for dependency injection.

Information

• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs of Software Development - Scott Hanselman turns psychologist and discusses the hierarchy of needs looking at applying them to the practices of software development
• Don’t Rely Solely On jQuery’s "keyup" Event - Derick Bailey discusses how relying on the keyup event for change detection in browser input boxes can get your in to trouble when the browser’s auto complete kicks in.
• Perils Of Lambda Capture - Artur Laksberg discusses some of the confusion which arises from the capture of local variables in lambda expressions, especially when the lambdas are used for async code.
• Creating Files through BlobBuilder - Sharon Newman of the Internet Explorer Team discusses the implementation and use of the File API in Internet Explorer 10 which allows developers to read and write files on the client.
• MSDN Magazine February Issue Preview - Michael Desmond gives a teasing taste of what is coming in next month’s MSDN Magazine, due out online shortly.
• Found: Windows Azure Document Treasure Trove! - Peter Laudati highlights a collection of real world Windows Azure Guidance which covers a wide range of Azure topics, from Authentication to storage, via use of PowerShell, Dynamic scaling, and much more.
• Action, Func, void and unit - ‘Flatlander’ discusses the different types of Standard Delegate types which are included in the .NET Framework, looking at the lack of interchange-ability between the types, and looking at how F# provides a contrast to this.
• Engineering Management: Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3? - A fascinating post on Quora discussing via analogy why it is that estimation in software development (and travel by foot over long distances) can be so inaccurate.

Community

• Manchester Meetup. V5 presentation by @mattbrailsford from @Umbraco. - Manchester Umbraco Meetup - The Manchester Umbraco Meetup welcome Matt Brailsford of Umbraco to their February event, taking place on the evening of Wednesday 29th February, which will explore the new features of V5 of Umbraco.

Software

• Announcing SQL Azure Data Sync Preview Refresh - The Windows Azure Team announce the release of a refresh to the preview of the SQL Azure Data Sync. SQL Azure Data Sync provides a means for you to synchronise data between your on premise databases and those in the cloud, and this refresh addresses a number of issues customer raised, including making it available in all Azure datacentres
• Rockford Lhotka - CSLA 4 version 4.3.0 alpha available - Rockford Lhotka announces the alpha release of his CSLA 4 v4.3.0 application framework. The major feature for this release, in addition to the usual bugfixes, is some significant performance improvements to the MobileFormatter which supports serialisation on Silverlight and Windows Phone platforms.
• NuGet Project Uncovered: Anna - Jason Jarrett continues his series of posts looking at interesting projects hosted on the NuGet Feed. This post gives a short introduction to Anna, a HTTP Server library based around the Reactive Extensions,

Information

• C#/.NET Little Pitfalls: Implicit Zero To Enum Conversion - James Michael Hare continues his ‘Little Pitfalls’ series with a look at how a constant zero value can be converted to result in the use of an overload of a function you might not expect
• Modularity And Security In Composite JavaScript Apps - Derick Bailey discusses securing client side applications and preventing users from accessing functionality they are not allowed on the client by making clever use of the module pattern to control the functionality delivered to the client.
• (Ab)Using Conventions To Enforce Good Practices - Davy Brion shares a neat trick using Fluent NHibernate conventions which will help force developers to specify the lengths of strings in the mapping ensuring optimal database performance.
• 3. Pattern Matching - Be Explicit - Dorian Corompt continues this series looking at the various aspects of Functional Programming, in this post exploring the use of Pattern Matching, illustrating its use in F# and discussing some best practices for its use.
• SqlBulkCopy for Generic List<T> (useful for Entity Framework & NHibernate) - Jarod Ferguson discusses the use of SQL Bulk Copy to provide a quick and efficient way of getting large volumes of data into SQL Server data tables
• MVVM on MVC: HTML is not XAML - Jeremy Likness discusses the MVVM pattern, some of its benefits and explores how well it fits with HTML development using libraries like Knockout.js
• Understanding SQL Azure Throttling and Implementing Retry Logic - Scott Klein discusses the throttling behaviour of SQL Azure and looks at how you should handle throttling and the retry capabilities you need to bake into your data access to account for it.
• One reason why HTML5 gaming is limping along - Christian Heilmann discusses the disservice that the conversion of games from other platforms to HTML5 based implementations, discussing the disadvantages of this conversion approach rather than writing on the platform from the start, illustrating with discussions of the plight of Commodore 64 games in their later years.
• Happy birthday Commodore 64 - Marcin Dembowski highlights the 30th birthday of the Commodore 64, the computer which started it all for me, and for many others I suspect.
• The HTML5 History API and ASP.NET MVC - Dan Maharry shares an extract from the Manning book HTML5 for .NET Developers which discusses the use of the HTML5 History API.

• PhoneThemeManager: allow your app to have the Light, Dark, or Inverted theme with 1 line of code - Jeff Wilcox shares a library for Window Phone 7 Mango which allows you to have your application use the light theme even if the device is set to dark theme, allowing you to give you applications a contrasting look, much like the built in Mail application does. The library is available on NuGet in both source and binary format, and code is also available on GitHub.
• NuGet Project Uncovered: NFeature - Jason Jarrett continues his series of posts looking at some of the interesting recent additions to the NuGet package feed, highlighting NFeature, a library which provides support for Feature Toggles.

Information

• Event Centric: storing and consuming events - Daniel Cazzulino continues his series of posts discussing the various aspects of event sourcing, taking a look in more detail at the storage of the domain events in an event store and how you can go about consuming them.
• Structure your code by feature - Urs Enzler discusses an alternative approach to structuring your code, looking at structuring it based on feature / requirement, building more structure on top of the standard layered approach and easing maintainability in the long term.
• Implementing resource oriented controllers in ASP.NET MVC - Pablo M. Cibraro discusses the tendency for ASP.NET MVC controllers to be used as a grouping of actions to share URL structures, and looks at an alternative which allows your controller to be simpler and better observe the SOLID principles.
• Solving Real-world Theming Challenges with MVC4 and Sass - Harvey Kandola discusses the lack of theming support in native ASP.NET MVC, and shares his solution to this building upon Sass and utilising some useful IDE extensions to make working with Sass and CSS better.
• Windows Communication Foundation 4.0 - Simplified Configuration Feature - Melissa Amanna highlights one of the key improvements made to WCF in .NET 4, an improvement to the amount of configuration required for your services.
• MicroFinance App, Creating the Front End - Sara Allison shares a piece from Matt Robinson discussing a proof of concept application using HTML5 Canvas, Modernizr and Knockout.js which he was involved in the creation of.
• Debugging IndexedDB Applications - Israel Hilerio discusses and shares the IDBExplorer tool that the Internet Explorer team use to help debug client side code which makes use of the IndexedDB data storage features.
• Software Release Management - Why You Can’t And Shouldn’t Force People to Use the Latest Version - Rob Reynolds discusses the variety of factors which you need to consider when dealing with versioned software releases, looking at the many reasons why people may choose not to use your latest and greatest version.
• Rant: That’;s Not Rest - Derick Bailey wades into the world of REST, a topic which has more than its fair share of confusion about what it actually is and how it should be correctly implemented. Derick shares a collection of resource (and has updated the post with addition ones people suggested).
• Building a large text file editor - Part I - Costin Boldisor kicks off a two part series looking at some of the concepts behind the creation of a text editor which can handle large files, discussion the concept of a revision stream in this first post.
• Deploying "Cloud Numerics" Sample Applications to Windows Azure HPC Clusters - Roger Jennings walks through the process of deploying a sample application of the new Microsoft ‘Cloud Numerics’ platform onto Windows Azure in this step by step post.
• Now, more than ever, you need a designer - Pete Brown discusses the value that a good UX designer can bring to your project, looking back at the history of UX design in software development and highlighting the importance of getting designers involved early in a project.

• Json.NET - Download: Json.NET 4.0 Release 6 - The JSON.NET Team announce their latest release - 4.0 Release 6. This version adds line numbers to deserialization errors, additional BinaryReader/BinsaryWriter constructor overloads on BSON Readers / Writers, along with fixse for a number of issues.
• Introducing Dragonfly &#8211; another .NET HTTP server - Louis DeJardin introduces a new .NET HTTP Server implementation which provides the OWIN functionality to allow it to act as an application host. The intention of this projects is to provide another reference implementation to validate OWIN and the Gate implementation.
• dotTrace 5.0 Performance Early Access Program - Hadi Harari announces the openign of the Early Access Program for dotTrace version 5.0. This is an opportunity for you to get your hands on the latest pre-release version of dotTrace, and for you to help feedback on the product and assist the development team.

Information

• Inside the Concurrent Collections: ConcurrentQueue - Simon Cooper continues his series of posts looking at the internal implementations of the various Concurrent Collections introduced in .NET 4.0. This post explores the Concurrent Queue, looking first at the non-concurrent queue, and seeing how the concurrent one differs, before deriving some key concurrency principles from the implementation.
• Advanced APM Consumption in Async Methods - Stephen Toub discusses how you are able to consume an existing Asynchronous Programming Model implementation without first wrapping it in a task, an advanced approach which reduces some of the overheads of the task wrapping approach.
• NuGet Project Uncovered: PineCone & NuGet Project Uncovered: xizzle - Jason Jarrett highlights two NuGet packages as a part of his NuGet Project Uncovered series which aims to look at interesting and less well known projects which have recently been released as NuGet Packages.
• Picking a domain for CQRS Journey RI - Grigori Melnik feeds back some of the initial findings and thinking following the Patterns and Practices CQRS questionnaire, discussing one of the key questions - what domain should the reference implementation cover.
• Windows Azure and Cloud9 IDE at Node Summit - Glen Block highlights the work undertaken in getting Node.js running as a platform on Windows Azure and summarises the goings on at the NodeSummit, giving particular attention to the use of the Cloud9 web based IDE which can be used to develop and deploy Node.js based applications straight to Windows Azure, as demonstrated by Scott Guthrie.
• Some Thoughts On Functional JavaScript - Derick Bailey shares some of his experiments writing Functional Style code in JavaScript, looking at how some of the key fundamental principles of Functional Programming can be implemented using JavaScript.
• Resources for getting started with Backbone.js - Jarod Ferguson shares a great collection of resources about Bakbone.js which will help you go from zero to hero with this client side framework.
• Get involved in Open Source today - How to contribute a patch to a GitHub hosted Open Source project like Code 52 - Scott Hanselman highlights the Code52 project which is aiming to develop a new application each week of the year, and with 3 interesting projects under their belt already is certainly one to watch. Scott discusses how you can get involved with open source projects like this by running through the process of submitting a patch to a project hosted on GitHub.
• Add HTML5 Geolocation plus Bing Maps into ASP.NET MVC views - Rachel Appel discusses the use of the Bing Maps API in your ASP.NET MVC views, walking through the getting started and consuming some of the basic features of the API
• "A Lap Around Windows Phone 7.5" webcast now available on-demand - Paul Laberge highlights the availability of the video recording of his ‘A Lap Around Windows Phone 7.5′ webcast from last week. This is 3 hours of content looking at how to build applications on the Windows Phone 7.5 platform, from idea to marketplace.
• If I can build a phone app anyone can: Changing the keyboard and IsNumeric - Susan Ibach continues her Windows Phone Development series which is exploring some of the common questions which arise in Windows Phone development. This post looks at adding validation to inputs and controlling which mode the onscreen keyboard appears in.

Community

• SQL Server 2012 launches March 7th… with a free virtual launch event - Greg Duncan highlights the SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch Event which is taking place on Wednesday 7th March, offering range of learning opportunities with SQL server team members and partners, along with the change to engage with the community and win some prizes.

• Anonymous types unify within an assembly, Part One - Eric Lippert fulfills an old promise to show an example of anonymous type unifying within an assembly in this new series of posts, showing how the C# specification allows for use of the same anonymous types in differnent locations are combined into a single type within an assembly.
• Modifying Code with Project Roslyn - Jason Bock takes a look at using Project Roslyn to modify source code, looking at the removal of region elements from a code file, and integrating this with Visual Studio.
• Using Async for File Access - Alan Berman takes a look at the use of the new Async / await functionality in C#5 to perform file access in a non-blocking way to help maintain responsiveness and improve the performance of your applications.
• SOLID JavaScript: The Dependency Inversion Principle - Derek Greer completes his series of posts looking at applying the SOLID principles to JavaScript code, taking a look at Dependency Inversion in this post, looking at the theory behind dependency inversion and how it can be implemented in JavaScript.
• Javascript and CSS Minifying/Bundling with the Microsoft.Web.Optimization Nuget package - Frédéric Harper takes a look at implementing compression and minification of JavaScript and CSS Resources using the Microsoft.Web.Optimization NuGet package
• NuGet Project Uncovered: An Introduction to the Series - Jason Jarrett kicks off a new series of posts looking at some of the interesting packages which are being published via NuGet. This first post introduces the criteria used to select the packages which will feature in the series.
• HTML5 And Internet Explorer: Modernizr To The Rescue! - Derick Bailey discusses the use of Modernizr to make your HTML 5 web applications work with older browsers by way of the shim implementations which patch the missing functionality into browsers, illustrating with a real world example of its use.
• Please ship your next Windows Phone app with GZip: speed requests 50-80% - Jeff Wilcox highlights GZipWebClient library by Morten Nielsen which brings GZip Compression capabilities to your Windows Phone applications allowing them to retrieve compressed data and benefit from the performance improvements.
• Mythical man month : 10 lines per developer day - Patrick Smacchia discusses the use of LoC (logical lines of code) to measure development performance, and how the actual numbers of lines of code we craft on average over the long term is surprisingly low, sharing example stats from his NDepend project to illustrate.
• Skip Intro - CSS3 is the new Flash - Scott Hanselman looks back at the evolution of Flash and other browser plugins which supplement browser capabilities and takes a look to the future where angle brackets will likely rule the roost in these areas with HTML5 and CSS3 bringing a lot of the capabilities developers and users require.

Community

• Slides and notes from Monday 23rd January #6weeksazure sessions now available - Eric Nelson highlights the availability of the slides and webinar notes form the first day of the 6 weeks of Azure virtual learning event.

• Boo-yah!!! Caliburn.Micro v1.3 RTW is Here - Rob Eisenberg announces the release of Caliburn.Micro v1.3, the latest release of this MVVM framework for Windows Phone 7 Mango, Silverlight 5 and WPF. This release also includes basic MVVM support for WinRT / Metro apps, improves the ViewModelLocator/ViewLocator implementation along with addressing issues from previous releases and improvements to the API.
• IE10 Compat Inspector - The Internet Explorer Team announce the release of the IE10 Compat Inspector, a JavaScript based testing tool which will allow you to verify that your sites and applications will work correctly in IE10. The tool consists of a single JavaScript reference, which can be manually inserted into your pages or added via the use of Fiddler.

Information

• Modern Web Development - Part 2 - Shawn Wildermuth continues his series looking at the world of modern web development, taking a look at the structuring and architecture of your JavaScript in this second part in this series of 10 posts.
• Introducing Microsoft Codename "Cloud Numerics" from SQL Azure Labs - Roger Jennings rounds up a collection of resources on the recently released Microsoft Codename ‘Cloud Numerics’ project for performing numerical calculations on a large scale using Windows Azure.
• Visual Studio 11 ALM Advances - S.Somasegar wraps up the 5 post series on Visual Studio 11 he has been posting since the //Build conference with a look at the key Application Lifecycle Management features of Visual Studio 11
• Rx - Exception Handling - Bnaya Eshet continues his series of posts looking at the reactive extensions, looking at how you should handle exceptions occurring when working with observable streams of events. Also well worth checking out the previous two posts from Bnaya where he took a look at async / await and error handling.
• Mango Sample: a Secondary Tile in 5 Minutes - Jerry Nixon continues his series exploring the various features of Windows Phone 7 and the techniques for developing with them with a looking at the support for secondary tiles which allow you to present information to the user before they launch your application.
• The flowchart of the IE rendering modes - Chun Liu shares a flowchart originally created by Henri Sivonen which explains how the browser gets into the various rendering modes based upon a variety of settings and page content.
• Aggressive Inlining in the CLR 4.5 JIT - Sasha Goldshtein discusses the CLR JIT compiler’s inlining support, and highlights some new capabilities included in .NET 4.5
• F#, WebSharper, JavaScript, HTML5, Mobile etc - Don Syme gives a catchup on the world of F# and the happenings over the Christmas break, including the releasing of WebSharper as open source, compilation of F# to JavaScript, and some of the recent Azure releases.
• Speaking of Dev video resources… UserGroup.tv (with ‘State of .NET - The Road to Windows 8′ now available) - Greg Duncan highlights UserGroup.tv, a community site which aggregates recorded Usergroup presentations and materials. The site has a fantastic range of content covering all kinds of developer topics and is well worth checking out.
• Await, SynchronizationContext, and Console Apps & Implementing a SynchronizationContext.SendAsync method - Stephen Toub discusses how async / await attempts to ‘bring you back to where you were’ with a look at some of the goings on under the covers of the framework in the form of the SynchronizationContext and TaskScheduler.

Community

• PacMan Kata - Phil Trelford highligjhts the first meeting of the F#unctional Londeners Meetup Group on Thursday 26th January at Skills Matter. The event will be a Code Kata event looking at the the PacMan kata.
• NxtGenUG - Event - MicroORMs: Making data access - The Coventry NxtGEnUG welcome Ian Russel for a session on Micro ORMs on Monday 30th January. In the talk, Ian will explore the world of the MicroORM showing where they can be useful and how much functionality they provide with such little code and configuration.
• Teched Europe 2012 Registration now open - Lee Stott highlights the opening of registrations for TechEd Europe, running from 26th - 29th June 2012 in Amsterdam. The Early Bird discount price of 1695 Euro runs until 31st March, after which the price rises to 1995 Euro.

Software

• Announcing OData T4 for C#, Preview 1 - WCF Data Services Team Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Ahmed Moustafa of the WCF Data Services Team announces the first preview release of OData T4 for C#, T4 Templating for Add Service Reference for OData Services. This release works alongside the October 2011 CTP release of WCF Data Services, and give you a preview and ability to feedback on this feature which will eventually be in the main product.
• RaptorDB - The Key Value Store V2 - CodeProject® - Mehdi Gholam shares and discusses RaptorDB 2.0, a key value NoSQL database whcih makes use of MGIndex and MurMur2 Hashing. Full Code is available, alongside this detailed CodeProject article which discusses the implementation.
• A framework for building of WP7 application - Ilya Builuk shares a detailed look at his PhoneCore library for implementing Windows Phone 7 applications. The library provides a framework for building applications including features for Navigation, Dependency Injection, Configuration, Tracing, and much more. Full source and binaries along with sample applications are available from CodePlex

Information

• Getting Started with Windows Azure - Scott Guthrie continues his discussions of the Windows Azure in this blog series, discussing the options to get you started with Azure including a look at the signup process and discussing the 3 month trial options.
• C#, Async, Limits, oh my! - Peter Ritchie explores the limits of Async in C#, discussing how Async implements a state machine with integers representing the states, discussing how he generated 45GB C# Code file to probe the absolute limits.
• Abusing the Microsoft Research’s Touch Mouse Sensor API SDK with a Console-based Heat-map - - Scott Hanselman discusses the Microsoft Touch Mouse and the recently released Touch Mouse Sensor API SDK from Microsoft Research, exploring the use of the API to read data from the mouse and visualising it, along with pondering the possibilities this could be put to work in.
• PhoneGap now fully supports Windows Phone - Architects Rule! - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Bart Vande Ghinste highlights the level of completeness now offered by PhoneGap for targeting Windows Phone 7 devices, discussing the general coverage, and some of the plugins which enhance the integration with various aspects of the phone, along with highlighting a number of resources for learning more.
• Mango Sample: Delete Dramatically - Jerry Nixon continues his Mango Windows Phone samples series with a look at the implementation of another ‘must have’ animation, exploring the removal od data from a list.
• How Wikipedia uses HTML5 to save bandwidth - Jef Claes discusses how Wikipedia are making use of the HTML 5 support for SVG in browsers to render images such as flags and saving bandwidth along the way.

Community

• Into testing? Want to learn? Come to Testfest 2012 - Sara Allison higlights Testfest 2012, a 1 day event organised by the folks at Testing Stuff. The event isn’t going to be a traditional conference, with a mix of exhibit, discussions and a lack of Powerpoint silides. The event is on Wednesday 22nd February, at the Brighton Metropole, and tickets are priced very reasonably at £60.

• Announcing Visual Studio Achievements Beta - The Team over at Channel9 announce the beta release of Visual Studio Achievements, a fun extension which brings an element of game play to writing code
• Visual Studio Achievements - Remember Kids They’re Just For Fun - Bil Simser discusses the Visual Studio Achievements, and reminds us that they are just for fun, rather than reflecting best practices in all cases

Information

• Testing framework is not just for writing… tests - Krzysztof Kozmic discusses an alternative use for the testing frameworks we use, using them as a way of easily running sample code.
• What’s new in WCF 4.5? Improved streaming in IIS hosting - Ido Flatow is now on part 9 of a series of posts spanning back to September looking at the new features of WCF4.5. This post looks at streaming support in WCF when hosted on IIS, allowing better performance and memory use characteristics.
• Mango Sample: The ApplicationBar’s Secret Blend? - Jerry Nixon continues his series of articles looking at sample applications to demonstrate various features of Windows Phone Mango taking a look in this post at the Application Bar and looking at creating an Application Bar in both Expression Blend and Visual Studio.
• An analysis of SOPA and PIPA Protest "Blackout" HTML and CSS techniques - Scott Hanselman takes a look at the variety of methods which websites used yesterday to black out in protest of the SOPA and PIPA acts

Community

• Microsoft IE6 Migration - Tarun Arora highlights the Microsoft IE6 Migration Roadshow events. These events, in conjunction with various partners, are taking place in February, March and April in Manchester, Chalfont St. Peter, London, and Reading. The idea behind the events is to help IT departments understand the issues with migration and why the need to perform migration
• Join me for a developer webcast for Windows Phone 7.5 - Paul Laberge’s Windows Phone 7.5 Developer webcast is today (January 19th) at 1PM EST / 10am PST. This web cast runs for 3 hours, looking at implementing a variety of Windows Phone features into your applications. The even better news is that the session will be recorded and made available after the event!

Software

• Gate 0.2.1 implementation of OWIN online at NuGet - Louis DeJardin announces the 0.2.1 release of the Gate implementation of OWIN (the Open Web Interface for .NET). Gate is a reference implementation of the standard for connecting web servers and web applications, and is available as a NuGet Package
• SisoDb v9.0 Released - Daniel Wertheim announces the V9 release of SISODB, a free and open source document oriented provider for SQL Server and SQL CE 4 Databases. This release includes compatibility with SQL 2012 Express RC0, a new indexing structure in the database and some initial work to support future plans for providers which do not support transactions.

Information

• January 17th What’s Happening Around Visual Studio - Jason Zander gives an update on the last few months from the point of view of the Visual Studio team, giving a nice recap of the significant events and releases over the past few months including the Roslyn CTP, Azure SDK, TFS on Azure, TFS Power Tools and the ALM Summit.
• Modern Web Development - Part 1 - Shawn Wildermuth kicks off a new series looking at the evolved state of Web Development and sharing some of the experiences he has had building FirstInked. This first part focuses on the changes in the art of web development in the past 10 years.
• 10 Things ASP.NET Developers Should Know About Web.config Inheritance and Overrides - Jon Galloway shares 10 key tips to understanding the way in which web config values are inherited and set in a variety of different (yet common) situations. Essential reading for anyone doing any web development beyond the most basic ASP.NET sites.
• Utilising MEF to self-register HTTP modules - Tom Pipe discusses how he used the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) to register HTTP Modules in his application without configuration in web.config, using attributes on the type to locate the modules and have them loaded using the DynamicModuleUtility.RegisterModule() method to register them with ASP.NET.
• Restful WCF / EF POCO / UnitOfWork / Repository / MEF : 1 of 2 - Sacha Barber kicks off a new two part post series looking at constructing a RESTful service layer using best practices and the Microsoft technologies WCF, Entity Framework, MEF and the repository pattern. This post focus on all the key technology and implementation with a forthcoming second part looking at the creation of a consumer application.
• Speech Recognition - Exploring Grammar Based Recognition - Robert Lucero has been exploring the use of Speech Recognition in your own applications, in this post discussing the use of grammar to control the words recognised, illustrating with a sample application. Be sure to check out Robert’s other posts on this topic too.

• Coded UI Tests : WPF Utilities - Jonathan Antoine shares a collection of helper methods for Coded UI Tests to help when working with Tree View, List View, and general control instances, along with simpler expand, collapsem invoke and select helpers.

Information

• What is the defining characteristic of a local variable? - Eric Lippert discusses the actual meaning of a ‘local scope variable’, looking at some of the common misconceptions and implementation details which often get swept up into the definition.
• Struct vs. Class, Safety vs. Speed - Bill Wagner discusses some points and questions which were raised at CodeMash about the use of Structs in place of classes for performance, looking at a couple of different scenarios and rules about the use of structs.
• Eduasync part 19: ordering by completion, ahead of time… - Jon Skeet continues his eduasync series exploring the ordering of the results of tasks exploring the implementation and a sample which illustrates it in operation
• Building the next generation file system for Windows: ReFS - Steven Sinofsky and the Windows 8 team are still innovating away, and in this post Steven discusses the new file system ReFS based on the ideas behind NTFS and additional customer requirements, which is to be included in server editions of Windows 8.
• Approval testing - value for the money - Krzysztof Kozmic discusses some of the common problems with automated testing, including the burden of test code which adds little value, and introduces the concept of Approval Testing, a practice he has been using on recent projects, looking at an example from the Windsor project to illustrate the practice.
• How Do You Pick Open Source Libraries? - Dany Brion discusses some of the things he considers when attempting to pick an open source library from the vast array available to solve a particular problem.
• Marines vs. Boy Scouts - Chris Brandsma discusses the two common approaches to working on an existing code base, the ‘get in get out’ marine approach and the “Leave thing better than you found them” Boy Scout approach, discussing that both have disadvantages when used inappropriately.

Community

• Skills Matter : London .NET User Group : Gain Trust and Crea - Garry Shutler will be presenting a session for the London .NET User Group at SkillsMatter on the softer skills of Gaining Trust and Creating Change within organisations. The session is on the evening of Monday 30th January

• Fluent Assertions 1.7.0 has been released - Dennis Doomen announces the latest release of this Fluent Assertions library. 1.7.0 Contains new functionality for checking collections of types for particular methods and attributes, XElament and XAttribute assertions along with bugfixes from the previous version. The library is available via NuGet.
• EF 4.3 Beta 1 Released - The ADO.NET Entity Framework Team announces the release of the first beta of Entity Framework 4.3, the final planned public release before RTM. This release brings the Code First migrations into the main EF package, along with improvements to CodeFirst Migrations, and a variety of bugfixes for the DbContext API and CodeFirst.
• DBDeploy.Net 2 - Robert May announces DBDeploy.NET 2, a complete re-write of the original DbDeploy which adds support for deployment to SQL Azure.

Information

• Autocorrecting unknown actions using the Levenshtein distance - Jef Claes takes a look at ‘autocorrecting’ calls to actions where the user gets the name of the action (on the URL) incorrect, taking a look at how ASP.NET MVC works internally, exploring the Levenshtein distance algorithm, and putting them both together into a neat solution.
• A quick look at MetroRadio: quick spacing, margin, and icon tips for Windows Phone devs - Jeff Wilcox discusses some of the slight UX issues in a real world Windows Phone application, exploring both the actual application and looking at spacing and alignment and looking at how the application is displayed in the marketplace.
• Comparing Strings in Unit Tests - Phil Haack discusses some of the pain in Unit testing when comparing strings, and how the output from the assert method is often less than useful in identifying what is wrong. Phil shares a simple method which supplements the output with a breakdown of the strings. Be sure to check out the comments for discussion of other techniques and libraries of helper asserts.
• JavaScript Performance - Steve Souders shares slides and discussion from his recent talk at the San Francisco JavaScript Meetup where he looked at the implementation of the Google Analytics Async loader discussing its performance impacts.
• Understanding CoffeeScript Comprehensions - Karl Seguin discusses the role of Comprehensions in CoffeeScript, illustrating their use with a simple example.
• Unable to cast transparent proxy to type <type> - Rick Strahl discusses some of the difficulties you may encounter when working with code which loads types into different AppDomains, highlighting the use of the .NET Fusion Log Viewer for help in diagnosing issues when loading assemblies.
• Input Parameters in Fluent API - Mehdi Khalili continues his series looking at his bddify library. This part of the series looks at how the library handles input parameters when working with the Fluent API allowing your test methods to be parameterised and to have the BDD scenario output reflect these values.
• FAQ on Task.Start - Stephen Toub answers 8 commonly asked questions on the Task.Start method, discussing what the method is useful form how it differs from Task.Factory.StartNew, the role of Task.Result, and using tasks in your API.

Community

• New year, new venue and making more money! - The London based Windows Phone User Group welcome Alan Mendelvich to a new venue for a talk on making money with your Windows Phone 7 Applications on Tuesday 31st January.
• Event: Straighten Spaghetti with C# 5 - The Cambridge NxtGenUG Chapeter welcome Jon Skeet for a session looking at making clean clear straight forward code using C#5 and the new Async support on the evening of Thursday 16th February 2012.