Windows 7 RC Publicly Available
The release candidate has arrived!  And it’s valid until March 1st!  The beta, however, begins shutting down on June 1st (less than a month for those who can’t read the title of this blog post).  If you’re running beta, get it.  Upgrading from beta to RC is described here, but it is not recommended. 

Storing MVC views in a database
Phil Haack has a good article on storing your ASP.NET MVC views in a database and rendering them without requiring full-trust.  This could be very useful for any system that needs to support customization, such as a CMS or blog. 

MVC best practices video
I confess that I haven’t watched this yet, but it’s queued up for viewing during lunch today!

EditArea
This thing is so cool that I’m cross-listing it here and on Delicious.  It’s turns an HTML text area into a rich-text editor for code.  That’s pretty hot.

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Two weeks, then school is out.  Sadly I’m going to miss my thesis defense deadline, but not by much.  By the end of May, I should still be a free man, which means more posts (maybe).  In the mean time, here are links that I missed over the last week:

Windows 7 RC
The release candidate should be here on the 30th.  That’s great news.  I’m really digging the beta.  I would switch from XP to Windows 7 *today* if there was going to be a supported upgrade path from the pre-releases to the final release (there is an upgrade path, apparently, but it isn’t supported).

Visual Studio 2010 Beta Coming??  Learn more here.
I didn’t realize we were so close to the 2010 release.  It seems like just yesterday I was installing the Visual Studio 2005 beta.  *sighs*  Anyway, read up on all the new things that are coming so that you won’t be behind (like I am).

Good MVC Advice
Jimmy has some really sound advice on building applications with ASP.NET MVC.  There are a lot of things I hadn’t thought about, such as using a single “InputFor” extension that intelligently figures out what to render based on what it is rendering.  Very slick.

Nvigorate Improving
Alex has made a lot of progress over the last month on Nvigorate.  I’m very happy to see “fluent mapping API” on the completed-work list. 

ELMAH ELMAH ELMAH
I’m late to the ELMAH rocks party, but “ELMAH rocks!”  How did such a cool tool stay hidden for so long?  Coincidentally, this is exactly what the delayed podcast I was supposed to co-host was going to address: gems that the community did not know about.

Ayene on ActiveRecord
Here’s a rare chance to see/hear Ayene in action as he discusses Castle ActiveRecord at Oredev.

Need to build test objects?  Use NBuilder!
Just found this little tool.  I wrote something similar for my employer, but this looks quite a bit better/more powerful.

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Some of these links are late since I was in meetings the entire second half of last week, but all are still worth a look if you missed them:

WPF Glass Effect
Want the Aero glass look in your WPF application?  Well, now you can get it with just a few lines of XAML.

9 Golden Rules of Visual Design
If you are a good developer, then you (probably) suck at visual design.  Here are some rules you can follow to make your interfaces less terrible.

Getting started with NHibernate and Fluent Mapping
This is a very nice tutorial on getting up and running with NHibernate using the fluent mapping API.  I’m still a Castle ActiveRecord fan, but the fluent mapping API is a huge step up from the verbose, run-time validated XML configuration that NHibernate uses by default.

ReSharper 4.5 Released
The new version of ReSharper is out!  It looks like they fixed the XAML issues I was running in to.  Sadly Agent Smith hasn’t been updated yet, but overall, 4.5 is worth the upgrade.

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Despite buggy designers, I’m digging WPF.  There are a few things that feel obtuse, where I think a more web-like approach to XAML would have been better, but it’s light years beyond WinForms.  Anyway, a couple of WPF links for you today:

WPF/Silverlight and MVVM
Edward has a link roundup (with screenshots) of tutorials to help you learn MVVM with WPF. 

XAML Power Toys
Found via Edward on Twitter.  Adds a bunch of commands to Visual Studio 2008, such as extracting styles from properties, generating view models, generating forms automatically… good stuff!

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More ASP.NET MVC “Recommendations”
Again, I think it’s still a little early to be claiming anything as a best-practice yet, but here are some more ideas you might want to consider.

ASP.NET MVC Ninjas on Fire Black Belt Tips
Phil Haack did a session at MIX this year with that title.  I haven’t finished the video yet, but so far, it looks pretty promising.  Plus it has slides with flaming ninjas, which is awesome.

MvcContrib and jQuery datatable
Here’s a very simple walkthrough of using MvcContrib with jQuery to create a rich table experience. 

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ASP.NET MVC Goes Open-Source
The source has always been available, but now it’s MS-PL, which means you can take it, modify it, redistribute it, whatever you want.  That’s good news for the Mono crew!

ASP.NET MVC Futures
Maarten has a nice write-up summarizing some of the things that are available in ASP.NET MVC Futures.  None of this is officially ‘production ready’, but that’s been true of MVC in general up until recently.  Use at your own risk, but there’s some really handy things in there.

ASP.NET MVC Best Practices?
I think it’s still a little early in ASP.NET MVC’s lifetime to be claiming “best practices”, but here are some recommendations that are (probably) good advice.

10 C# Keywords To Avoid
Thankfully I don’t use these (at least not very often).  Well, except for ‘goto’.  I don’t know how you write enterprise systems without using ‘goto’ a lot! </sarcasm>

And yes, I have completely missed the mark on making useful posts this week.  School + work is killing me (seriously).  Useful posts should increase once the semester is over.

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Oh crap it’s April Fools Day.  The gimmick articles are out in force!

Internet Explorer Stops Sucking!
Ok, that one is pretty obvious.  I mean, Internet Explorer *not* suck?  Impossible, I say!

.NET 4.1 Features
Thankfully we don’t have to worry about this coming true.

Ayende has forsaken us!
Abandon ship!  Everyone out of the universe!

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ASP.NET Futures Feedback
MS is requesting feedback to help guide the construction of ASP.NET vNext.  If you want to complain, now is the time!

XNA News
Somehow I missed that the Game Developer’s Conference was last week.  Lots of cool news related to XNA in this post.

NVigorate Improvements
Alex has posted some sample code of the improved query API for NVigorate.  I really like that it’s strongly-typed now.  NVigorate is shaping up to be a very solid package.

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Visual Studio 2010 Architect Edition
AJ has a walk through of some of the new features in the Architect edition of Visual Studio 2010.  As much as everyone loves to hate on UML, there are a few things that it’s very useful for, so I’m glad to see that Visual Studio will support it.

MvcContrib 1.0 Ships
Apparently that happened on Wednesday last week, but I missed it.  Whoops.  If you are doing MVC development, check out their toolkit before you dig in.  They’ve got helpers and extensions that can really help simplify MVC development.

64 core screenshot
This article is pretty cool, but the best part is a screenshot of task manager on a 64-core box.  I want one.

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Json.NET 3.5 Update
Beta 3 of the Json.NET library is now available.  I’ve used Json.NET for serialization objects in ASP.NET MVC with great success. 

ASP.NET Menu + IE8 == SURPRISE!
Yeah, who knew that IE8 would cause problems?  To be fair, the ASP.NET Menu really produces awful, terrible, horrendous, other-negative-adjective HTML, so maybe IE isn’t to blame on this one.  On the plus side, there is a patch.  On the downside, you have to install the patch.

.NET’s Large Object Heap
Andrew Hunter has a very informative post about memory management in .NET.  I run into problems with the large object heap causing OutOfMemory errors quite frequently since I deal with information retrieval, which involves working with (sometimes very large) documents.  As it turns out, I didn’t really understand exactly what was going on until I read this article.  Thanks, Andrew!

Microsoft (Dis)connect?
Ayende has a very valid complaint about Microsoft Connect.  As one of the commenters pointed out, the problem could be that the right eyes aren’t the ones reviewing issues raised on Connect.

Microsoft releases Infer.NET Beta
Infer.NET is a .NET API for machine learning.  I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, but it sounds very interesting.  According to the short video, they have developed it to be scalable to very large data sets (millions of objects), which is neat.  I’d love to see a real .NET alternative to Java’s Weka; maybe this can serve as a building block along that front.   

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Ian Cooper on NHibernate
Ian has made several posts about NHibernate basics (and beyond).  If you like NHibernate, check them out, and remember that Castle ActiveRecord is built on NHibernate, so most of the same principles apply.

Roy Osherove Critiques Unit Tests
If you don’t know who Roy is, you probably haven’t been doing unit testing in .NET for very long.  He’s been a bit quieter since he joined the Typemock team (or maybe Twitter is to blame), but he’s started reviewing the unit tests for various open-source projects.  Very cool stuff!

…

And that’s about it.  Quiet start to the week… 

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