TWC9 - Silverlight 4, Win 7 Driving, Editable MVC Routes, F# Missile Launcher

• Silverlight team - Silverlight 4 for Facebook
  • Interesting because: It's a beautiful app that shows off Silverlight 4 features, including Out-of-browser support
• CodePlex team - CodePlex now supports native Mercurial
  • Interesting because: Mercurial is a popular distributed version control system (DVCS) and Brian Harry who runs the TFS team said that "I fully expect that we will be adding distributed version control to TFS"
• Nic Fillingham - Help Desk with Chris Pirillo pilot aired on Channel 9
  • Interesting because: The feedback from the show was mostly positive and Chris plus some Windows gurus worked well.
• Bertrand Le Roy - Server-side resizing with WPF
  • Interesting because: If you need to dynamically create images on the server-side in ASP.NET, you should use WPF instead of GDI+ 
• Pete Brown - Win 7 Driving using the Windows Sensor and Location API and WPF 4
  • Interesting because: Pete built a demo that plots his GPS coordinates on a x-y grid (vehicular etch-a-sketch) and Pete discusses changes in the location API for the RTM of .NET Framework 4.
• Tina Wood - 157 PowerPoint Templates
  • Interesting because: Chances are you're not the best PowerPoint designer so being able to look through a series of reusable nicely design slides will make your life easier.
• Walter Ferrari - Excel file viewer in Silverlight 4
  • Interesting because: You can visualize Excel data in Silverlight and it's a working example of how to read xlsx files.
• Justin Angel - What you can do with Silverlight 4 COM+ support, via Lester Lobo
  • Interesting because: It's the best summary of what you can do, including read/write to any file, run an exe, add to startup, execute SQL, use Text-to-Speech, and more
• Scott Guthrie - Extensible Output Caching with ASP.NET
  • Interesting because: Output caching now supports extensibility so you can create your own output-cache provider.
• Phil Haack - Two ways to do Editable routes - FileSystemWatcher (full trust) and App_Code
  • Interesting because: The filesystemwatch method enables you to not have to restart your app domain to add/edit routes and the comments provide good alternatives to different ways to have editable routes.
• Jason Haley - How to query Azure log tables with LINQPad
  • Interesting Because: Using LINQ on data tables makes it easy to sort and filter your log file data
• Eric Lippert - The difference between a destructor and a finalizer
  • Interesting because: A destructor is deterministic (you know when memory is collected) a finalizer is non-deterministic (the garbage collector decides when to clean up), and the C# spec incorrectly uses the term destructor while the CLI spec correctly uses the term finalizer.
• VB Team - What didn't get into VB10 - A future wish list
  • Interesting because: The VB team wants your feedback on which features are the most important and why.  
• Coding4Fun - Louis Ingenthron - Making an Ocean with XNA
  • Interesting because: Walks through how to simulate an ocean in XNA including using high-level shader language (HLSL) 

Picks of the week

• Dan's pick: Chris Smith - F# Missile Launcher with speech synthesis and facial recognition, via Coding4Fun
• Brian's pick: Code Project - Tamir Gal - SharpPcap - Packet capture Framework for .NET