Links of the Week April 13th 2007
First let me apologize for missing the links last week, I was on vacation in the early part of the week and I think many others were out last week as well. There were not many things that caught my eye by last Saturday, but I think we made up for it this week.
Enterprise Library 3.0 Released! – I am particularly excited about this link because I have really found the Enterprise Library to be especially useful to rapidly develop reliable applications over the past five years or so. There are enhancements to many of the existing blocks and some new features (blocks and factories) that I am looking into.
First is the Validation Application Block, which if you are familiar with CSLA you will have an easy understanding of the principles in play here. If you are unfamiliar the Validation Blocks give you an easy way to apply Meta tags to your methods to define validity rules for your application.
I have not fully grasped the application of the Policy Injection Block, but my first impression is a simple workflow or business rule engine for your application. The Application Block Software Factory looks exciting because it will help us create our own Application Blocks and I fully expect a good line of blocks to hit the .NET community in the coming months because of this. For information on this visit Tom Hollander’s Blog and the Enterprise Library home page.
ASP.NET AJAX Security – This has been a concern for me since I got my first in person exposure to AJAX at the May 2006 Atlanta Code Camp. Evidently the ASP.NET AJAX framework seems to be pretty secure.
Network Load Balancing for ASP.NET 2.0 – Rick Strahl has a good article, in this case about ASP.NET and Windows 2003, but the principles apply to ASP.NET 2.0, etc. This was of particular interest to me in troubleshooting the problems I was having with the pre-compiler on an application rolled onto a web farm recently.
Setting the MachineKey – On the topic of a Web Farm you must synchronize the MachineKey setting on each server in the farm.
Windows Workflow Web Starter Kit – Up to this point I will be honest I have done nothing with Workflow, WCF, WPF and CardSpace yes. I hope to check this started kit out in the coming month or so.
CardSpace from WPF/E – Interesting read. I will most likely not be a big WPF/E guy for a while, but I do like the principles behind CardSpace and want to see how it is being applied.
CardSpace and WCF – Another application of CardSpace with another 3.0 technology by Michelle Leroux Bustamante.
Setting Visual Studio Web Sites to run on a fixed port – I wish I had thought of this about 12 months ago.
10 great Tools for .NET Developers – I have my list, but here is another. I would not even consider the NUnit link, I still do not see the real purpose of Test Driven Development in the .NET world, we have way too many advanced tools compared to the Java folks.
Visual Studio Tips – This is an older site, but it has some useful tips and tricks for getting the most out of Visual Studio
.NET and Visual Studio Hot Fixes – With my TypeCasting problems I became all too familiar with the HotFix world of Microsoft Support this past month. Scott Guthrie discusses many of this HotFixes on his blog and I recommend we all read and become familiar with the symptoms of these problems.