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  • Debate: Public Fields and Naming Conventions

    Jeff Atwood's blog post earlier this week has stirred up debate in the .NET community on properties vs. public fields and naming conventions for .NET. After first suggesting to use public variables in place of properties, Jeff retracted this suggestion. Also at issue, using case to distinguish public properties vs. m_ or _style-prefixes, and SCREAMING_CAPS constant declarations.

  • Opinion: Flex can transform the user experience on the web

    Adobe's Christophe Coenraets, recently blogged on how Flex can transform the user experience on the web. The Flex SDK was recently made free, and combined with the ubiquity of the Flash VM, Flex could have a potential to be the platform of choice for ajax-style rich web development. Christophe stressed a number of features that are not unique by themselves yet valuable when used together.

  • New Atlas Control Toolkit Released

    Microsoft has released a new version of the Atlas Control Toolkit with 5 new controls: DynamicPopulate populates an element with HTML content from the server, FilteredTextBox prevents unwanted characters from being entered, PagingBulletedList adds paging to a bulleted list, PasswordStrength provides feedback about password strength as entered, and Rating displays a "4 out of 5 stars" interface.

  • Ruby Compilation on .Net Maturing

    John Gough, a professor at Queensland University of Technology, talked about his team's work with Ruby .Net compilation at the recent Microsoft Lang.NET 2006 Symposium.

  • New Article on ASP.NET ViewState Intricacies

    Dave Reed has written an article on Truly Understanding ViewState that describes exactly how to plan ASP.NET control initialization and creation when working with child controls, dynamically added controls or when developing custom controls. Proper ViewState usage will keep page sizes smaller, leading to much greater performance and scalability for ASP.NET applications.

  • Microsoft Releases MSDN Library as Free Download

    Microsoft has released the MSDN Library as a free public download. The library was previously only available to MSDN subscribers, though most of the information was already available through the MSDN website. The Library is current as of May 2006, and will be updated with future versions for free download.

  • Microsoft Counting On Scrum and XP

    When Microsoft launched SQL Server 2005 last fall, ending a five-year wait for major revisions, Steve Ballmer acknowledged "It's been a bit long in the making, we're committed to a much closer cycle time."eWeek reports that they will do this using agile development methodologies, such as XP and Scrum. Yet they won't mandate methodology, stressing product quality instead to encourage improvement

  • CaptainHook, Free .NET Hook Manager For Subversion Released

    Veloc-it has built a new plugin (hook) framework in .NET, CaptainHook, for those using the Subversion version control system. Subversion "hooks" are scripts that are triggered when a particular version control event happens, such as committing a set of changes. These hooks execute by defeault as perl scripts, but CaptainHook allows a .NET application to be run for more complex processing needs.

  • Reviews Mixed on Google's New Project Hosting Service

    Last week Google announced a new hosting service for open-source projects. Developer comments around the web have been mixed. Some developers have been impressed with the service while others feel underwhelmed.

  • Microsoft to Release NDoc Killer

    According to an MSDN Forums post, Microsft is preparing to release a Community Tech Preview (CTP) of Sandcastle (Documentation Compiler), its answer to NDoc, the open-source generator for documentation from XML code comments.

  • .NET Live from Redmond Presentations Coming in Aug/Sept

    The .NET product teams at Microsoft have announced a second series of Live Meeting presentations for .NET developers, "Live From Redmond", taking place throughout August and September. The presentations are technical in nature, rather than a marketing pitch for various new Microsoft products, as they come directly from the Product Team members at Microsoft.

  • Microsoft Acquires Winternals: Good or Bad News for Developers?

    Microsoft has acquired Winternals, the company behind windows tool site Sysinternals.com which hosts dozens of low-level system tools for monitoring and security, including the popular Process Explorer, Filemon, and Regmon. Will application developers be helped or harmed by this merger?

  • Best Practices for Planet-Scale Software Updates

    A new Microsoft research paper has examined data from billions of Windows update queries from 300 million computers using the Windows update service in order to learn about the traffic characteristics of software patch distribution and also examine alternative architectures (P2P and caching) to support planet-scale software updating.

  • Use Modeling to Communicate Between IT and Business

    Communicating business requirements, operations structures, and technical solutions between IT and business people with different backgrounds has always been a challenge. The first book in the Architect Resource Library from the Microsoft Architectural Strategy Team shows how to use models to overcome this challenge: Dynamic Modeling: Aligning Business and IT.

  • SharpDevelop Version 2 Released

    The SharpDevelop team has released SharpDevelop 2.0 final, the open-source IDE for .NET development. This release add integrated debugging support, the "Go to Definition" option, "Find References", and support for several common refactorings.

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