Weekly Review: 17th February 2013

What a busy week this has been! Compared to last week, this week has seen announcements aplenty.

• Writing unit tests for MVC and Web API can be a pain. There are a number of different ways one can mock the HTTP context. This week Youssef Moussaoui created a fantastic post detailing the different ways for an ASP.NET Web API Service. This is definitely worth a read if you practice TDD.
• One of the often under-used features of .NET is the use of the resource file to manage string constants. The devcurry guys have a great getting started article on the resource file with ASP.NET MVC.
• Have you seen Durandal yet? This is another JavaScript framework that helps make various other libraries such as Knockout, Sammy and RequireJS play nicely together. If you want to get to know more about this new library then Stephen Walther has just the post for you.
• As JavaScript is becoming more and more popular it becomes more and more important that we write fast, memory-efficient JavaScript. Addy Osmani has a great post on this very subject.
• Do you use NuGet? If so, Phil Haack points out an unexpected caveat of packages that supply source code rather than dll's when used within other NuGet packages.
• Staying with NuGet, this week the NuGet team announced a new workflow process for changes as the recent management of issues has been an issue in the OSS project.
• This week's DotNetRocks is a roundtable on Web API with Glenn Block, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen and Darrel Miller. It's a great listen, with some of the main players driving Web API forward.
• Another DotNetRocks podcast was released this week. This time with Yan Cui on building games in F#.
• 37 Signals announced the release of the official Basecamp for iPhone app. This is a must-have app if you use Basecamp.
• The Basecamp app was created using RubyMotion, in a follow up post the 37 Signals guys explain how they created their new app.
• This week has been a busy week for 37 Signals; they have also announced the details of their next book: REMOTE: Office Not Required Check out the post for more details.
• SourceTree is being ported to Windows, if you want to try the beta you can request early access here.
• Following on from some of my recent blog posts about Azure, this weeks Hanselminutes is with Caitie McCaffrey talking about how Halo 4 uses Azure.
• Do you ever need to get the MIME type from a file? A new extension is available in ASP.NET 4.5 for just that. Have a look a the the MSDN documentation for more information.
• With last week's release of Discourse, Robin Ward, one of the Discourse developers, discusses why Discourse uses emberjs.
• Further to last week's post, Rowan Miller concludes his series on extend and customising code first models.
• Finally this week, GitHub announced the release of Boxen. This looks a great way to automate and manage Macs within a team. Check out the Boxen homepage for more details.

If you want more up-to-date links feel free to follow me on twitter @lancscoder as I tweet links throughout the week.