The weekly SyncToBlog: #6

A long overdue “brain dump” of stuff that I found interesting.

Development related:

• WPF vs Silverlight A detailed look at the differences (and similarities) between the two. “Size vs features, full trust vs sandboxed”
• Changes to the compatibility modes in Windows 7 – new to me. Meet “RunAsHighest”
• A nice drill down into Azure Table Storage, REST and the ADO.NET Data Services Story -
• Interested in ORM? Then IMHO you have two main choices right now. The ADO.NET Entity Framework (.NET 3.5 SP1 and above) and NHibernate. Check out https://www.summerofnhibernate.com/ for lots on the latter.
• IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit Beta – a free toolkit that helps Web developers, hosting providers, and server administrators improve their sites’ relevance in search results by recommending how to make them more search engine-friendly.
• Did you spot that we dropped Workflow from .NET Services v1?
• Nice real world story of a Ruby on Rails based company that switched from Google to Bing for their site search. Lots of detail – worth a scan.
• Tweet from inside the MMO game Warcarft with another great OSS project. Check out the C# on Codeplex.
• July CTP of Windows Azure SDK released.
• Short article on Entity Framework 4.0 from Developmentor
• Virtual roundtable on Windows 7 Application Compatibility
• Windows 7 E best practices for ISVs. Will your application work on Windows 7 E? Probably – but you had best read this :-)
• Mapping stored procedure results to a custom entity in the ADO.NET Entity Framework v1 – nice hack to do this :)

Other:

• Lifehacker Essential Free Windows Downloads A fine list indeed – contained some of my old favourites plus gave me some new ones.