• Coding
  • Coffee Break! Progamming Resource-mania

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.
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.
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.
6 days later
17 days later
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
5 days later
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/
5 months later
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
16 days later
2 months later
2 months later
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/
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
19 days later
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/
10 days later
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.
17 days later
9 days later
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
2 months later
13 days later
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