I recently discovered a very cool project on NuGet - FluentAssertions. This is a really funky little library that vastly improves assertions in your unit tests, whether you are using NUnit or MsTest.

Some people are naturally pre-disposed to being highly productive. They start their days with a clear and reasonable intention of what they plan to do, and then they work diligently throughout the day, sticking to their plans, focused on accomplishing their most important priorities, until the day ends and they've achieved precisely what they had expected. Each day moves them one day closer to what they intend to accomplish over the year. I am, unfortunately, not one of those people.

Apple's new MacBook Pro follows the fine tradition of the iPhone 4 and third-gen iPad in that it has a super high-resolution Retina display: a 2880 x 1800 panel with an amazing 220 pixels packed in per inch. It's an incredible display. In fact, it's such an incredible display that it actually has about one million, seven hundred thousand pixels more than it needs to satisfy Apple's definition of Retina, leading some to claim that those pixels are all going to waste. Nothing could be further from the truth.

TechEd Europe 2012: how different is developing a Metro app for Windows 8 from building a WPF application? Well, not very different at all, as you can see in this presentation. There are some differences, but there are not really any new or difficult concepts.

TechEd Europe 2012: great talk about SignalR, the lightweight messaging system that allows you to have a real-time connections between clients or between the client and the server. Imagine visiting a web page and having everything you do appear instantaneously in the browsers of all other users that are visiting that page. Think chat clients, collaborative editing, etc.

TechEd Europe 2012: a whirlwind overview of the many new features in the upcoming release of the .NET framework.

TechEd Europe 2012: typically, we write down requirements somewhere and then use it as the starting point for development. In the talk we see how these two worlds can come closer together: a requirement can be a failing test that development has to fix.

TechEd Europe 2012: LightSwitch is an application framework from Microsoft that takes much of the repetitive code you write in a typical application out of your hands. Very impressive. It comes with a Silverlight and a HTML5 client.

TechEd Europe 2012: maybe not the most professional of talks, but it gets the point across of how to do estimation and project management using Scrum.

TechEd Europe 2012: one of the best talks of the conference. If you love coding, you will love this talk about dealing with streams of events using the Reactive Extensions framework.