FireQuery 0.3 – A FireBug plugin for jQuery

The excellent FireBug web developer plug-in for Firefox has itself got a plug-in called FireQuery that targets and helps debug  jQuery with some additional functionality.

Could be worth a look.

Catharsis 1.2 – Best Practise ASP.NET MVC & NHibernate

When I have time I will look at the Catharsis project based on an article that I read on code project.

Initial thoughts are that there are similarities to the sharp-architecture project by Billy McCafferty  that I’ve blogged about previously.

UI Design Patterns

While I am more of a developer than a designer, I do care about the user interface to applications as quite often it does not matter how clever or beautiful you business logic, data access layer and database schema are if the end user does not like using your application or does not like the look of it then the whole project can be deemed a failure.

The UI layer is just as important as the rest of the application if not more so.

Quite often I use design patterns in my code to solve problems and it’s nice to know that there are common UI design patterns as well.

Today I read a great article that lists some common UI patterns, I especially like the Lazy Registration pattern.

Improving performance and scalability with DDD

Domain Driven Design or DDD is something that I have been reading a lot about recently and trying to practise in some of my pet projects and today I came across an excellent post that discusses improving performance ,scalability and distributed systems.

Well worth a read if you have the time.

Velocity Administration Console

Microsoft have been working on a scalable in-memory application cache project called Velocity. It is similar to the popular open source memcached project and the commercial ScaleOut StateServer Software product.

I have taken a quick look at ScaleOut StateServer and have been very impressed with it’s ease of use, performance and the administration tools that it provides.

Today I noticed that Gil Fink has written a cool velocity administration console that adds a nice windows forms front end over the powershell scripts that seem to drive Velocity.

It looks worth taking a look

Free Scrum and XP book

I have just downloaded a free book about Scrum and XP from the trenches and added it to my TODO list.

Get the download from InfoQ.

http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches

ReSharper 4.1 Released

Jet Brains have a minor point release to one of my favourite productivity tools ReSharper.

Since installing it I have noticed that my memory footprint for devenv.exe is much much smaller and the whole IDE and coding experience feels noticeably snappier with Visual Studio.NET 2008 SP1.

Hopefully I will notice the same benefits when I next switch back to coding with Visual Studio.NET 2005.

For further details on the release you can visit the release notes page on the Jet Brains site.

http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/releaseNotes41.html

Google Chrome

A new web browser has arrived. Google Chrome has just been released in beta.

Here are my initial thoughts:-

• The installer worked and it imported all of my Firefox settings without a problem.
  
• The design is simple and clean and feels less cluttered than IE or Firefox.
  
• The tabs work really well and each tab sits within its own process so that hopefully any pages or sites that would normally crash the entire browser will only require the tab closing and thus not losing any work or pages that you have left open.
  
• It is really fast! It launches faster than IE and renders faster than Firefox. The rendering engine appears to be WebKit rather than the Mozilla engine.
  
• It's small! By that I mean that it's memory footprint in task manager is at least 3 times smaller than my Firefox footprint and that is with just the one tab open.
  
• I already miss my Firefox extensions!

So far so good.

I shall be testing all the sites I've worked on and actually use it as my main browser for a little while.

Microsoft Virtual Earth ASP.NET Control - CTP Release

Microsoft have a .NET control wrapper around the their virtual earth API. There is a good video here that demo's the control.

This is CTP so you cannot use it on production websites unfortunately.

runat != "server"

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/customize/designer.aspx?clear=true&number=286179670#