New and Notable 226

Comments and trackbacks are back on after a futile battle with spam. I'll see how long it goes this time. OK, so I got over 20 spam messages on old topics within the 1st half hour. I am now trying to get Community Server to only turn on comments for "new" topics. Any ideas on cutting down on this spam?

In the meantime, I would like to hear from you dear readers more on what you would like to see here. I know I don't have a lot of time but I would like to write occasional pieces of original content in addition to the New and Notable. A lot of readers love New and Notables and I do try to comment on the items as much as possible but there is nothing like fresh content. Ideas?

ASP.NET MVC/Silverlight

• I absolutely dig all the energy that is going on in the ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight space. This deserves a post of its own but the Web programmers have all the energy and momentum over the Smart Client devs right now and I am wondering if its pretty much over for Smart Clients except in niches. In other words, is there enough richness in ASP.NET AJAX and Silverlight to render the point moot? You know that's huge when you see my last 10 years as an OCC Smart Client Guy, CAB Guy, and a former Groove guy. That's what I am seeing in customers, community, and elsewhere. So, since I haven't written a proper ASP.NET or Web app since 2002 (did a lot of ASP+ and ASP.NET in 2000-2002), maybe I better catch up :)

• So speaking of ASP.NET MVC, Rob Conery has a great post, ASP.NET MVC: Securing Your Controller Actions

• It just keeps getting better:

  Great New Silverlight Control Skins

• Krzysztof and Mircea, have come up with design guidelines for LINQ related features.

• Speaking of LINQ, we all now it's wicked cool (as they say in Boston), but what about performance? What about good design? What about proper separation of concerns? Aren't you scared that developers will return to what they did in Access/VB/FoxPro days and just "embed" SQL in the UI? I am not personally so worried about the performance issues since I used Wilson and NHibernate the last 2.5 years and prefer a rich domain object, but I can't think of anyone more qualified than Bob Beauchemin to look at these issues which he has done in a six part series. Part 1 is here and 2 is here. You can follow the rest from there.

PowerShell/Windows SDK

• Nanda Lella's from the Windows SDK team is asking for feedback for the next version of the Platform SDK. Specifically, she asks whether a PowerShell-based build environment (as opposed to the current CMD-based one) would be a welcome addition to the SDK. My first reaction is, well, Duh! Of course! :) I could also say, why hasn't this happened already? So, yes, like my good friend Tomas, this lack has totally prohibited me from making PowerShell my default shell. I hate doing what I did in this post. It should all be PowerShell, end of story.