Last month Interesting Stuff (January 2011)

Well, I'm starting off here with something I intend to do regularly, post an entry with links and maybe some very short descriptions/reminders of things that I've been reading lately and that I'd like to keep track of. It's mainly something for my own reference/future use, but anyway could be of some use to someone else out there.

I should have posted this some weeks ago, so these entries correspond to what I was reading/working with in last January:

• Groovy:
  Implementing Interfaces with Closures, Maps and coercion
  
  Why we don't need anonymous inner classes in Groovy
  


• .Net:
  Good points on using implicit typing (var) vs explicit typing in C#. It adds meaning, it's not just a matter of "wrist friendliness".
  
  Internal calls in .Net assemblies (yes, those methods for which Reflector is no longer your friend cause they are implemented in native code:
  MethodImplOptions.InternalCall attribute, which indicates (MSDN link):
  Specifies an internal call. An internal call is a call to a method that is implemented within the common language runtime itself.
  
  Benefits of the ExpandoObject, and a thorough article on them.
  Something a bit weird about the ExpandoObject is that to get access to a property in a ExpandoObject using a string (indexed access) you need to cast it to IDictionary. It's a bit weird, the reason is a because it does an explicit implementation of IDictionary, instead of
  a implicit implementation. The explanation for this decision is not clear to me:
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/598714/implicit-vs-explicit-interface-implementation.
  Asp.Net MVC 3 (and much more) is out!!!. IIS Express 7.5 works great and is an independent download now, not need to download the whole WebMatrix thing as previously needed.
  


• Technology:
  The recent announcement by Microsoft explaining that Windows 8 will run on ARM, SOC architectures has caused quite a stir and speculation.
  
  The fact that I've known of Arduino since its first steps (one friend of mine was an early adopter), made me unaware of how terribly popular it has turned lately, taking it away from the MegaFreak land and bringing it to the "Fun for the masses" land. This is a good documentary. Diving into this a bit more I've ended up with some slightly different and pretty interesting stuff: .Net Microframework, Netduino and similar boards, some first impressions and crazy ideas.
  

A good sentence by Eric Lippert to finish this post:
The art of coding is figuring out what the right level of abstraction is for the audience.