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"In case you are not aware, a developer preview version of Visual Studio vNext has been released yesterday. I just played an hour with it and it seems that performances are finally here! The same way I skipped Vista to jump from XP to Wnd7 that I love, I am (as much as I can) skipping VS2010 and I'll jump from VS2008 to VS2012 that I'll hopefully love. A few random notes:"

"As a result of writing the post: Edit Test Case properties directly from the test runner of Microsoft Test Manager I asked one the ALM MVPs, Terje Sandstrom, to also look at one of the most requested Visual Studio Update 1 features - but an area I didn't have a post on yet: Grouping in the new Unit Test Explorer. He takes a look and by morning sends me this post and indicates he wants to do three more in this series! "

"One of my favorite creations over the past year has been this.Log(). It works everywhere including static methods and in razor views. Everything about how to create it and set it up is in this gist. How it looks public class SomeClass { public void SomeMethod() { this.Log().Info(() => "Here is a log message with params which can be in Razor Views as well: '{0}'".FormatWith(typeof(SomeClass).Name)); this.Log().Debug("I don't have to be delayed execution or have parameters either"); } public static void StaticMethod() { "SomeClass".Log().Error("This is crazy, right?!"); } } "

"What really blew me away about Rx is how it allows you to handle complex async interactions declaratively. No need to chain callbacks together or worry about race conditions. With Rx, you can easily compose multiple async operations together. It's powerful."

"Like many developers, I happen to be a fan of using uniqueidentifier columns as primary keys on database tables (as opposed to the other common practice of using integers). While I don't do this all the time, in many cases I think it just makes sense, especially when the records in and of themselves don't share a "sequential" relationship to one another. I understand this is a rather controversial topic in some circles; with good arguments on both sides. Quite frankly, whether you personally agree with this practice or not is beside the point. For the purposes of this discussion, it's just important that you understand two things: one, that this done all the time; and two, that this scenario was not properly supported under Entity Framework V1."

" SQL Sentry Plan Explorer is a FREE tool that builds upon the graphical plan view in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to make query plan analysis more efficient. It is a lightweight standalone app that contains many of the plan analysis features introduced in SQL Sentry v6. It does not require a collector service or database. "

"Returns information from, or expressions based on, each row affected by an INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, or MERGE statement. These results can be returned to the processing application for use in such things as confirmation messages, archiving, and other such application requirements. The results can also be inserted into a table or table variable. Additionally, you can capture the results of an OUTPUT clause in a nested INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, or MERGE statement, and insert those results into a target table or view."

"In this blog post I'm going to write about the Entity Framework 4.3 Database migration and how to use it without using Code-First or Entity Framework as an OR-M at all."

"I've written before about one kind of memory leak the .Net Garbage Collector cannot protect against: those caused by event handlers keeping objects alive beyond their best-before date. Daniel Grunwald has a very comprehensive article on CodeProject explaining the problem in depth, and giving a number of solutions, some of which I've used in the past."

"What social authentication solutions are available for .NET developers? What are their features? These are questions I was looking to get answered. I've provided my findings in this article, which focuses primarily on active solutions, that have compatibility with ASP.NET MVC. I've listed four solutions: a direct DotNetOpenAuth implementation example (several exist), SimpleSocialAuth, SocialAuth.NET, and a third-party, API-based solution called Janrain Engage."

"The 32-bit and 64-bit development story on Windows seemingly never stops causing problems for developers. It's been a decade since 64-bit processors have started popping up in the Windows consumer environment, but we just can't get it right. If you forget some of the gory details, here are a couple of reminders:"

"Parser combinators are an idea that I enjoy every time I go back and look at again. They are an approach to building parsers by composing very simple atomic parsers into bigger and bigger units which can ultimately express real world grammars. This idea has been particularly popular in functional languages where the parsers can naturally be thought of as functions from input strings to parse trees, and composition of parsers is just function composition. This approach often leads to a simple syntax which makes the resulting parsers pleasantly declarative in that internal-DSL kind of way. "

"Productivity is the hallmark of programming with managed code. So often productivity boils down to figuring out why something isn't working - diagnostics. The CLR provides one of the best foundations for diagnostics. In this post, Richard Lander - a program manager for the Common Language Runtime - shows how more than just developers can now track down root causes for problems. -- Brandon"

"Mighty Moose is from this point forward free. Not "free in beta" or "free with a bunch of functionality turned off" but free (license is being updated as I write this). We announced this rather quietly at NDC."

"Duration - 19 months to complete a blog series, for crying out loud! Content - approaching 50,000 words, not including all the discussion in comments. Effort - some of the posts, such as transport layer security, probably approached 100 hours of reading, trialling, experimenting and finally, writing and proofing. This is why there was a four month "hiatus" before that post!"

" Initializr is an HTML5 templates generator created by Jonathan Verrecchia to help you getting started with a new web project based on HTML5 Boilerplate. Initializr will generate for you a clean customizable template with just what you need to start! "

"A few months ago, I described a workflow that lets you use NuGet without committing the packages to source control. This has been a very popular workflow, and generally works quite well."

"I recently wrote a Type.GetInstance() extension method, and used the opportunity to play around with Expression Trees, which I'd recently read up on in C# in Depth. Here's the set of extension methods I came up with, which allow you to quickly create an instance of a Type from the Type itself; like this:"

" Send requests to your app to trigger server-side processes or pull data from any public resource for your app to process "

"Harness the power of Dropbox to connect your app to almost any computer, smartphone or tablet, plus the web. Easy online storage for your mobile or web app and a growing audience of more than 45 million users True cross-platform support for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and the web Simple sharing for files and folders, file versioning, search and more"