Sam Gentile's Blog (if (DeveloperTask == Communication && OS == Windows)

VS 2010/.NET Framework 4

• Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms - Client IDs (VS2010 and .NET Framework Series) - I am behind on these. This is ScottGu's sixteenth in a series of blog posts on the new release. In this installment, he that talks about some of the important changes made to make Web Forms in ASP.NET 4 generate clean, standards-compliant, CSS-friendly markup. Specifically, he covers the work we are doing to provide better control over the “ID” attributes rendered by server controls to the client.
• Optional Parameters and Named Arguments in C# 4 (and a cool scenario with ASP.NET MVC 2) - #17 in a series of blog posts covers  two new language feature being added to C# 4.0 – optional parameters and named arguments – as well as a cool way you can take advantage of optional parameters (both in VB and C#) with ASP.NET MVC 2.
• New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output in ASP.NET 4 and MVC 2) - #19 covers small, but very useful, new syntax feature being introduced with ASP.NET 4 – which is the ability to automatically HTML encode output within code nuggets.  This helps protect your applications and sites against cross-site script injection (XSS) and HTML injection attacks, and enables you to do so using a nice concise syntax.
• JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010 - #20 covers some of the nice improvements coming with JavaScript intellisense with VS 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express.  You’ll find with VS 2010 that JavaScript Intellisense loads much faster for large script files and with large libraries, and that it now provides statement completion support for more advanced scenarios compared to previous versions of Visual Studio.
• "Dogfooding" VS 2010 and .NET 4 - Soma provides and overview of the dogfooding process that DevDiv used and how it helped shape the product
• BCL CodePlex Site Launch - The BCL team launched a  CodePlex site to host samples, previews, and prototypes.  You can find it at http://bcl.codeplex.com. This is a site for the BCL Team to get features to customers to try out without requiring a Beta or CTP of the .NET Framework.  
• Visual Studio Tip of the Day Start Page - Extension #3 - Sara Ford talks about a useful VS2010 extension that allows you to get Visual Studio 2010 Tips inside your IDE.

.NET 4 Parallel Programming

• Parallelism Coverage in the April 2010 MSDN Magazine - The April 2010 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available, and it has several nice articles that highlight the new parallel programming support in Visual Studio 2010.  Check out Doug Turnure's "Better Coding: Better Coding with Visual Studio 2010" and Sumit Kumar's "Visual C++: Exploring New C++ and MFC Features in Visual Studio 2010".
• ParallelExtensionsExtras Tour - #6 - ConcurrentExclusiveInterleave - Taub continues to talk about the TPL extension library available on CodePlex.

Windows Azure/AppFabric

• The Windows Azure platform AppFabric April 2010 Release is Live - The AppFabric team blog notes the release and In addition to improvements in stability, scale, and performance, this release addresses two previously communicated issues in the March billing preview release.