2011 4th January

Stuff we talked about (numbers are the votes that the topic got):

8 How do you deal with unreproducible, intermittent bugs - especially out of memory exceptions?
To find out what why a process is failing in production the Windows Debugging toolkit, specifically WinDbg, is your friend. Complex yes, but with a few simple commands you can find out where the memory was allocated when a process died. The adplus script will monitor a specific process and create a dump file when an expception is raised.
Tess Ferrandez has a series of posts on debugging. And Johan Straarup has good tips about hunting expceptions.

7 Now we have NuGet and OpenWrap, what's the next big thing missing from the .NET ecosystem?
.NET could do with a really nice cloud based app platform like Heroku. It looks like several are in development: Moncai

7 Can we ban null values?
Null References The Billion Dollar Mistake

7 Monotouch, Monodroid, Mono

7 Anyone have a Netdueno? Or played with Micro Framework?

7 IIS alternatives? How to write a scalable web application?
This is an excellent presentation showing how LMAX massively scaled their infrastructure by carefully considering processor architecture. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/LMAX. There's also a lot of interest at the moment in single threaded evented IO for scaling web applications. E.g. Node.js Manos. There's a good discussion on herding code about Manos. I (Mike) wrote a post about alternative web frameworks.

6 Structuring large JS apps?
My (mike) post about javascript classes

6 What new gadgets did you get for Xmas?
Korg M50

6 Is the .NET GC really a good thing?

Stuff we didn't have time for:

5 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' How to overcome reluctance to upgrade to VS2010 among managers?

5 NuGet / OpenWrap

1 What unit testing frameworks are available for Javascript?

1 What do you want to do with perfect computer vision?

1 What CMS? For very small websites?