QCon London 2010 report: fix your code, adopt simplicity, cool .NET things

I’m just back from QCon London, a software development conference with an agile flavour that I enjoy because it is not vendor-specific. Conferences like this are energising; they make you re-examine what you are doing and may kick you into a better place. Here’s what I noticed this year.

Robert C Martin from Object Mentor

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Windows Phone 7 incompatibility may drive developers elsewhere

Microsoft’s Charlie Kindel has blogged about the Windows Phone 7 development platform.

As widely leaked, the new mobile device supports Silverlight and XNA; Kindel also mentions .NET, but since both Silverlight and XNA are .NET platforms, that might not mean anything additional.

The big story is about compatibility:

To deliver what developers expect in the developer platform

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Microsoft .NET gotchas revealed by Visual Studio team

The Visual Studio Blog makes great reading for .NET developers, and not only because of the product it describes. Visual Studio 2010 is one of the few Microsoft products that has made a transition from native C++ code to .NET managed code – the transition is partial, in that parts of Visual Studio remain in

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Mono Tools for Visual Studio: code on Windows, run on Linux

I have just com across Mono Tools, a Novell add-in for Visual Studio that lets you test Mono compatibility. It adds a Mono menu which has options to run locally or remotely in Mono, analyze for compatibility issues, and create deployment packages. No sign of Mac support, which is a missed opportunity, but understandable given

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Visual Studio 2010 RC arrives with go-live license

Microsoft has made the Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2010 available for download to MSDN subscribers. From tomorrow (10th February) the same release will be available to everyone. There is a go-live license so you can use this in production if you wish, though if the full release comes in April as planned, it hardly

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What’s new in Visual Studio 2010 – more than you may realise

I’m beginning to think Microsoft has under-sold Visual Studio 2010. Of course it is a huge product, as I observed back in October, especially since it includes a major new release of the .NET Framework as well as updated tools, but I thought I had discovered most of the significant new features. Still, when I

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The end of Code Access Security in Microsoft .NET

In the early days of .NET I remember being hugely impressed by Code Access Security. It gave administrators total control over what .NET code was permitted to run. It’s true that the configuration tool was a little intimidating, but there were even wizards to adjust .NET security, trust an assembly, or fix an application –

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Silverlight 3 is out

Microsoft has released Silverlight 3, though some pieces of the platform are still not done – it seems there is always something to wait for.

There are links to the tools developers and designers need to install here:

http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/

Note that Expression Blend and Sketchflow are still at Release Candidate stage.

The .NET RIA services, a server-side piece that

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