Pick of the week: IP and Non-Competes for Employees

General

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1: Go get the first beta of the next version of Visual Studio!
• Microsoft Set To Announce Commercial Availability of Windows Azure at PDC This Year: Alin Irimie has some news about launch of the Azure Services Platform.
• Parallel Tasks – New Visual Studio 2010 Debugger Window: Daniel Moth shows off a new debugger window for working with tasks, which are now a full fledged member of .NET.
• Preview of ReSharper for Visual Studio 2010 Coming Soon: A sneak peak of the next version of ReSharper taking advantage of the new IDE features of Visual Studio 2010.
• Sneak Preview – Entity Framework 4.0 Testability Improvements: The ADO.NET team previews a number of enhancements in vNext of the Entity Framework that result in better testability.
• POCO in the Entity Framework: Part 1 – The Experience: What good is an announcement without a demonstration? The ADO.NET team shows us what POCO in the Entity Framework currently looks like.
• Friends Don’t Let Friends catch(Exception): Lee Dumond reminds us why you should only catch exceptions that you are prepared to handle.
• .NET Framework 4.0 – Using System.Lazy<T>: Gunnar Peipman demonstrates how to use the Lazy<T> class in .NET 4.0 for lazy initialization.
• A First Look at Moq: Brett Schuchert outlines how Moq is a different animal from other popular mocking frameworks.
• Protecting Against XML Entity Expansion Attacks: Tom Hollander explains what an XML entity expansion attach is and how to protect yourself.
• Why Isn’t My Encryption.Encrypting: Jeff Atwood exposes a rather stupid ‘feature’ of .NET’s SymetricAlgorithm implementation.

Web Development

• Project Descry: Learn what it takes to make effective visualizations, starting by taking a look at a set of open source, web-based examples.
• ASP.NET MVC for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1: Phil Haack explains the current state of ASP.NET MVC in the first beta of Visual Studio 2010.
• Don’t Use Response.End() with OutputCache: Rick Strahl shares a recent d’oh moment.
• ASP.NET MVC Domain Routing: Maarten Balliauw dives deep down into ASP.NET MVC to extend it to include route data in the domain in addition to the application path.
• 15 Free Functionality and Load Testing Tools for Web Applications: An excellent list of free functionality and load testing tools.
• Web Design Industry Jargon – Glossary and Resources: A very extensive and complete glossary and resources for web designers and developers.
• I’m Committed to Two Tool Development: Jesse Liberty points out that Visual Studio and Blend each have their own strengths and weaknesses, and there is no single tool that provides all of the bells and whistles.