Last Months' interesting stuff (May-June 2011)

As I've been pretty busy lately and haven't had much time for posting, I'll put together the interesting stuff of the last 2 months in a single entry:

• Pretty interesting "article" (well, it's an answer in StackOverflow, but it qualifies as an article for me) about the implementation (and negligible performance differences) between ViewBag and ViewData


• One more of the many jQuery tricks that I've learned lately:
  jQuery, .text() will remove all nodes inside the node, if I just want to remove a text node but respect its siblings use .contents():
  Stackoverflow discussion


• Deferred is one of those jQuery novelties from some months ago which I read about some time ago but that I didn't have time to fully understand. Last week I could spare some minutes to read some related stuff and get a clearer idea of what it can be useful for and how it works:
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4869609/how-can-jquery-deferred-be-used
  http://www.erichynds.com/jquery/using-deferreds-in-jquery/
  Moreover, this time I found the jQuery documentation on the subject pretty well done
  
  In short, think of deferred as Observable Execution Units with several events to which you can queue your callbacks. These queued functions will get called once the Execution unit gets resolved.
  


• Even when you more or less know how to implement something it's good to check how others have done it (that way you're reminded of that beautiful Function.prototype... idiom that I had seen for first time years ago in the prototype.js code, for example for bind)
  A good article on JavaScript memoization



• It's not that I'm a fan, but I like people that do amazing, innovative things, and I love companies who treat their workers as human beings deserving a worthy salary that allows them to carry on their lives with dignity... so well, this said I can proudly state that I very much like Microsoft.
  In the last years they've been taking very wise decisions one after another, creating some of the most innovative programming languages and technologies, approaching the Open Source community and contributing to it, hiring some incredible developers....
  In this direction, some great news for all the Microsofties out there:
  Eric Gamma (one of the GoF guys) has joined MS
  Microsoft will be exponsoring Node.js for windows
  Version 1.0 of the Reactive Framework has just been released. I'd read something about it last year, when the initial releases came into life, and it seems really interesting. One more thing to my list of things I want to give a try.
  


• This collection of JavaScript gotchas is a real must. Even very experienced JavaScript developers will find something useful there for sure


• I had no time for writing a full review after watching it, so I just will briefly mention here that Unknwon is an excellent thriller, a pretty good story with good action. Moreover, it's set in Berlin, and I love watching films set in places that I've been lucky to pay a visit, cause it brings me tons of good memories.