Coffee Break! Progamming Resource-mania

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If you're anything like me, during your coffee breaks you'd be researching new technologies or libraries. In this topic, i'll be adding the resources i investigate every now and then.

Feel free to add your own.

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ASP.NET MVC

Home - http://www.asp.net/mvc/

If you're familiar with design patterns, MVC (Model/View/Controller) should be no news to you. If you're familiar with django, ruby on rails, jboss seam or any other web framework that follow the MVC pattern, you'll find this quite interesting as it was solely based on those frameworks and tends to learn from their mistakes.

If you already use ASP.NET, this is the way to go.
If you're planning on going the RESTful awy, this is the way to go.

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Doing things the "Workflow Way"

Screencast: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/10-4-Episode-16-Windows-Workflow-4/

The enhanced workflow engine in .NET 4 incorporates what is called "Expressions", enabling you to builld your applications the "Workflow Way". Take a look at the screencast linked above to find out more.

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F#

Screencast: http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/10-4/10-4-Episode-17-F-Intro/

In short, Microsoft's attempt at a functional language. If you're familiar with Haskell, Scala, Nemerle or any other functional languages, this would be trivial to you. If you're not, then while watching this screencast, try to forget everything you've learned in your university and think mathematically.

F# will be included in VS 2010.

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Functional Programming

Article - http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html

An interesting read for those of you who want to climb up the developer food chain.

Ayman

Web Dev

The well known: http://www.w3.org/ - Which you can use as a web developer as a reference for the latest web standards, in addition you can make use of the valuable HTML, CSS, etc... validations there.

http://www.w3schools.com/ - Which is initially made for those willing to learn a new language for web development and even start learning web development on their own through the tutorials. The site has tutorials for many languages and technologies such as XML, XHTML, CSS, DHTML, Javascript, SQL and many others. The tutorials at the beginning are mainly targeted for n00bs though :P :P

Ayman

Game Dev

Game Dev for all game developers who would like to get the latest news about game develpment, such as new engines and all also you can find resources there that can help you in your game programming, you can also get connected to a big community of game developers to share your game with and even find game development jobs there... http://www.gamedev.net/

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FRP applied in C# - Reactive LINQ

Article - http://tomasp.net/blog/reactive-ii-csevents.aspx

An interesting article covering Reactive LINQ in C#. Example uses a mini maze game as a showcase of how you can process events using LINQ.

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WPF 4.0 New Features and Improvements

Aside from the WF 4.0 Overhaul, .NET 4.0 comes with a bundle of improvements and new changes for the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Blog Post by Scott Guthrie - http://tinyurl.com/yhdvlzv

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PrimeFaces

Yet another JSF based library, enjoy the showcase.

Showcase: http://www.primefaces.org:8080/prime-showcase/ui/home.jsf

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Java Closures

One of the main reasons i lost interest in java a couple of years ago is due to the lack of closures. There is a high probability of it hitting Java7. Here's an article that explains the problem, debate and solution.

Article : http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-06-2008/jw-06-closures.html?page=1

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Compass

Compass (and SASS) is a gift to all Web Designers/Developers. Develop your CSS with style!

Watch the screencast.

Home: http://wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass/

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Fluent NHibernate

Tired of ugly nhibernate mapping files (.hbm.xml) ? You'd much rather use attributes to map your model to your table but you seriously don't want to pollute your model? The third alternative is using Fluent NHibernate! Keep your models clean!

Home: http://fluentnhibernate.org/

rolf

XHP

This is a PHP variant.

Instead of doing

echo "<div>something</div>"

You will be doing

echo <div> something </div>

The HTML will be parsed as XML, and PHP will not compile if it is not well formed. This also allows you later on to do DOM transformations on the output, since it will be stored as a DOM document instead of a string buffer.

This technology was created and is used by Facebook, along with an PHP-to-C compiler which they use to gain 50% performance.

Here is Rasmus Lerdorf's take on the subject:
http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/54-A-quick-look-at-XHP.html

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IxEdit

Adding cool interactions in websites has always been a pain to developers and designers. If you're not a big fan of coding JS and no knowledge whatsoever in jQuery or other javascript libraries, IxEdit is for you!

Watch the screencast.

Home: http://www.ixedit.com/

nader-sleiman

http://jung.sourceforge.net/

A very good and efficient Java library for Graphs , its rich with plenty of algorithms that can be useful for graphs programming which can be in turn, used in Artificial Intelligence algorithms and plenty of other stuff.

The library includes popular and some costume algorithms with heuristics ,some popular algos:
A*path, Dijkstra's, Force-Directed Graphs with subs and supers , etc..

Enjoy.

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Microsoft Server AppFabric

At long last, Microsoft releases an application server! Windows Server AppFabric is a set of integrated technologies that make it easier to build, scale and manage Web and composite applications that run on IIS.

Home: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/ee695849.aspx

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Microsoft WebMatrix

Are you new to the web programming world? Interested in getting started with web development using ASP.NET or PHP? how about starting with some templates like Wordpress, Drupal or the lot? WebMatrix will minimize the effort needed to get started, modifying and even deploying websites! And it's less than 15mb!

Home: http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/

Article: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/06/introducing-webmatrix.aspx

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Expression Based DSL in Groovy 1.8 (GEP3)

Groovy with it's neat tricks (example) to build light DSL have a scheduled implementation of GEP3 for it's 1.8 version. Take a look at the example and notice how simple it is to create a great DSL with minimal lines of code.

Specification

Example

Beautiful Presentation on DSL

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Unobtrusive Javascript and then some

With the vast changes applied to Rails 3, a new feature has been implemented (more like refactored) to take advantage of html5 custom attributes. Html is now cleaner.

Screencast