Almost exactly one month ago, we released the Release Candidate for ASP.NET MVC 3. And today we learn why we use the term “Candidate”.

I don’t normally post lists of links as it’s really not my style. But there’s a lot of great NuGet blog posts I want to call out so I thought I’d try my hand at it.

Sometimes, despite your best efforts, you encounter a problem with your ASP.NET MVC application that seems impossible to figure out and makes you want to pull out your hair. Or worse, it makes you want to pull out my hair. In some of those situations, it ends up being a PEBKAC issue, but in the interest of avoiding physical harm, I try not to point that out.

UPDATE: 2011/02/13: This code is now included in the RouteMagic NuGet package! To use this code, simply run Install-Package RouteMagic within the NuGet Package Manager Console.

A question I often receive via my blog and email goes like this:

A while back I wrote about mocking successive calls to the same method which returns a sequence of objects. Read that post for more context.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names – Chinese Proverb

Note, this blog post applies to v1.0 of NuGet and the details are subject to change in a future version.

My team has been hard at work the past few weeks cranking out code and today we are releasing the second preview of NuGet (which you may have heard referred to as NuPack in the past, but was renamed for CTP 2 by the community). If you’re not familiar with what NuGet is, please read my introductory blog post on the topic.

Today we’re releasing the release candidate for ASP.NET MVC 3. We’re in the home stretch now so it’ll mostly be bug fixes and small tweaks from here on out.

This month’s Scientific American has an interesting commentary by Scott Lilienfield entitled Fudge Factor that discusses the fine line between academic misconduct and errors caused by confirmation bias.

It was a dark and stormy coding session; the rain fell in torrents as my eyes were locked to two LCD screens in a furious display of coding …

The polls have closed and we now have a new name for our project, NuGet (pronounced “New Get” and not “Nugget” and not “Noojay” for you hoity-toity) which had the most votes by a large margin.

Just a quick follow-up to my last posts about naming NuPack. Looks like the community is not content to sit back and let the project be labelled with a lame name. I’ve seen a couple of community inspired names created as new issues in the CodePlex issue tracker.

There are only 2 hard problems in Computer Science. Naming things, cache invalidation and off-by-one errors.

UPDATE: The new name is NuGet

Note: Everything I write here is based on a very early pre-release version of NuGet (formerly known as NuPack) and is subject to change.

A couple days ago I wrote a blog post entitled, Running Open Source In A Distributed World which outlined some thoughts I had about how managing core contributors to an open source project changes when you move from a centralized version control repository to distributed version control.

In my last post, I described how we’re trying to improve and streamline contributor guidelines to make it easy for others to contribute to NuGet.

When it comes to running an open source project, the book Producing Open Source Software - How to Run a Successful Free Software Project by Karl Fogel (free pdf available) is my bible (see my review and summary of the book).