An Interesting List of Development Stuff (April 2014)

In this month’s installment of the Interesting List of Development Stuff, we take a look a quite a few announcements that were made at Microsoft’s Build conference, articles to help you figure out if you are over-thinking your development projects or if you are simply blaming the guy that was there before you, the Heartbleed bug, Javascript, open-sourcing, New Orleans and much, much more.

Knowing Too Much to Code

It’s not very often that we associate experience with in inability to get something done, however it may be the case in what Scott Hanselman calls “Analysis Paralysis”. In this blog post, Scott discusses how more experienced developers might “over-think” many sometimes simple applications and make them far more complex than they need to be. He reminds us to ask ourselves “are we going to need that” throughout the development process to help curb this paralysis from affecting our productivity.

From “Potent Potables” to the Human Genome


Although it isn’t directly development-related, it’s always fun to see what development can actually result in. Any fans of Jeopardy should remember the cerebral beat-down served by IBM’s Watson to trivia wizards : Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter (primarily thanks to its insane robot buzzer reflexes). However, it now appears that Watson is now on our side and it’s opponent is a nasty one : cancer.

IBM hopes that Watson will be able to analyze millions of medical records and find correlations between cancer patients that might be impossible for human analysis to discover. Hopefully, this data-first approach may lead to new treatment methods and may help Watson solve one of our generations most challenging questions : finding a cure to cancer.

Extensions. Extensions Everywhere!

In his talk at Build this year, Mads Kristensen discussed the myriad of different tools and extensions available for Visual Studio that can help developers be more productive and in general make their lives easier. The list has extensions that cover a wide variety of topics such as productivity, templating, styling and more. I would highly recommend checking it out to see if you discover anything that makes you say “I’ve been looking for something like that!”.

And the Two Become One : Durandel and Angular Converge!

In this article, the creator of Durandel, Rob Eisenberg discusses the differences and similarities between Durandel and the popular Angular Javascript frameworks in hopes of providing a response to “Which one should I use?”. He covers an ideal framework that merges many of the stronger features from each framework and how this convergence will help shape the futures of both of the respective libraries.

Change Your Password. Probably.

One of the largest stories of this month has been the uprising of a nasty bug known as Heartbleed. The Heartbleed bug itself is a vulnerability within the popular OpenSSL cryptographic library and it basically leaves systems using it “exposed” and allows virtually anyone access to any secrets that might be housed behind the normally secure SSL walls if exploited.

If you are unsure if you might need to change your password or if you would like an idea at the popular systems that were affected, you may want to check out this link which details many popular sites to determine if you need to change your password. Additionally, you will want to ensure that you don’t change your password until the affected site has been properly patched and their certificates have been renewed.

Since this is a .NET specific blog, I will note that if you are using IIS then you have nothing to worry about as Microsoft uses schannel to handle all of its SSL needs.

Meet New Orleans.

This has nothing to do with the city in my home state and has everything to do with building highly-scalable Azure based applications. In this article, the ASP.NET team reintroduces project “Orleans”, which provides an approach to building high-scale applications using a service-based model. The project was used heavily within the popular Halo game series to help it achieve its massive scalability needs. It’s openly available currently, so you can head over an visit the project on CodePlex and check out if it may fit the bill for the needs of one of your current or upcoming projects.

Building Javascript Applications like a Superhero!

If you like Javascript and you have a strong desire to build them like a superhero, then this might be just the thing for you. The team at Superhero.js compiled a huge assortment of  resources relating to building and maintaining large-scale Javascript applications, organizing your code and utilizing the appropriate patterns, testing your applications and much, much more.

Introducing IdentityManager

In this post, security guru Brock Allen introduces his most recent creation : IdentityManager, a tool to help manage user identity data through the new ASP.NET Identity or his own MembershipReboot library. IdentityManager provides an extremely easy to use interface that should replace the recently departed ASP.NET Web Site Administration tool that many developers were extremely fond of in Visual Studio 2012. It supports user creation, password changes, e-mail, phone, claims and much, much more.

Passing the Blame.

Shamoon Siddiqui discusses why the latest developer at your company might seem like a wizard when compared to your previous developer. This piece covers a wide array of reasons why developers shouldn’t always be compared to one another or why one shouldn’t be necessarily blamed for decisions that were made at the time (hindsight is 20/20). It’s a solid article for any developer that can often be caught blaming others for their decisions without necessarily knowing what it was like being in their shoes.

The .NET Foundation and Open-Source

Another major announcement at the Build conference was the introduction of the .NET Foundation, a collection of open-source technologies and Microsoft’s development framework. It was established to help foster community involvement, collaboration and development with regards to open-source applications and to help bolster the relationship between Microsoft and the open-source community.

A wide range of Microsoft’s technologies within the .NET stack have already been open-sourced such as ASP.NET MVC, SignalR, Web API and even the powerful Roslyn compiler-as-a-service. If you want to dig around the source and see how some of the technologies were established, visit the link above and dive into the technology of your choice.

Additionally, the entire source of the .NET Framework is available as well that interests you and can be accessed through the Reference Source site here.