Just got back from our trip to latest Japan yesterday morning. On previous trips, I ate really great Yakitori, ate Blowfish and lived to tell about it, celebrated the new year, , learned about ritual suicide and played around with sharp swords, visited a temple in the midst of old Tokyo, and visited the hotel from Spirited Away.

I had a bit of a rough start to my first Tech-Ed Hong Kong last week. Pretty much every day while I was in Japan, I dutifully pulled out the laptop (despite my lack of internet connection) and made sure it still worked fine.

Where have I been? ;) You probably heard the news already from the GU already, but just in case, we will be shipping JQuery with Visual Studio. ASP.NET MVC will have the privilege of being one of the first products to include JQuery. I am glad we finally announced this because I got tired of stifling my mouth everytime someone suggested we just include JQuery. :)

The internet access I had at my mother-in-law’s last time I was in Japan turned out to be a fluke. I am at a Japanese Manga and Internet cafe (because those three things go so well together) right now typing this out. I’ve received a lot of comments and questions via my blog and once I get to Hong Kong, I will do my best to answer.

This afternoon we released a refresh of our DLR/IronPython support for ASP.NET, now called “ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support”, on our CodePlex site.

If you happen to be in Asia around October 8-10, I’ll be speaking at Tech-Ed Hong Kong. Come by and say hi. I’m giving three talks, one on each day.

First of all, I want to congratulate Jeff Atwood, Joel Spolsky, and their team for the release of StackOverflow.com. If you haven’t tried it out, I highly recommend giving it a shot. Be prepared, it’s addicting.

UPDATE: The MVC Futures assembly, Microsoft.Web.Mvc is available on CodePlex.

This is one of them “coming of age” stories about how a lowly method becomes a full fledged Action in ASP.NET MVC. You might think the two things are the same thing, but that’s not the case. It is not just any method gets to take the mantle of being an Action method.

Download the MSI and Release notes here.

I admit, up until now I’ve largely ignored the BDD (Behavior Driven Development) Context/Specification style of writing unit tests. It’s been touted as a more approachable way to learn TDD (Test Driven Development) and as a more natural transition from user stories to the actual code design. I guess my hesitation to give it a second thought was that I felt I didn’t need a more approachable form of TDD.

As Scott wrote last week, using a punny title I have to admire, he and I (among many others) were both the subject of a DoS (Denial of Service) attack. Looking through my logs, it looks to actually be a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack coming from multiple IP addresses.

A commenter to my last post asks the following question,

I wanted to clear up a bit of confusion I’ve seen around the web about ASP.NET MVC and the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. ASP.NET MVC was not released as part of SP1. I repeat, ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 does not include ASP.NET MVC.

In Preview 2 or Preview 3 of ASP.NET (I forget which), we introduced the concept of Action Filters. Sounds much more exciting than your run-of-the-mill LayOnTheCouchMunchingChipsWatchingInfomercialsFilter, that I originally proposed to the team. Thankfully, that was rejected.

One feature of Windows Live Writer that Subtext supports is the ability to edit your post slug? What is the URL slug associated with a blog post? What is the URL slug?

It’s been a long time coming, but we are finally ready to release Subtext 2.0. As I mentioned in April (was it that long ago!?), this is scaled down a bit from our original 2.0 plans. But even so, we have a lot of new goodness in here. It’s not just a bug fix release, though there are plenty of those too.

In his Practical Review of ASP.NET MVC, Josh Charles provides a helpful review of ASP.NET MVC from a Rails developer’s perspective. It seemed fair and balanced, and the end result is that there’s room for improvement, which we’re taking to heart.

A while back I talked about how testable code helps manage complexity. In that post, I mentioned one common rebuttal to certain design decisions made in code in order to make it more testable.