We’re closing in on the new year; it’s hard to believe the next time we put together a best-of it will be 2012! It’s been a fantastic year thus far and November was no exception. We’ve had a lot of fresh blood join the ranks lately, as well as a few familiar faces who’ve come back for more, hot .Net action!

Speaking of fresh blood, Dave Donaldson of Max Foundry jumped in to help us sift through last months articles and pull out the gems. In addition to Dave helping us with our picks, an article from the Max Foundry blog also made it to our list this month! For more goodness from the Max Foundry blog, check out their recent article on responsive web design.

Check out our picks after the jump!

We’ve been seeing fantastic growth, month after month at DNK. October was no different with great articles and even more participation from the community. We’ve seen an increase in the number of comments on articles, as well as an increase in authors coming to DNK to join in on the discussion on their work. In case you haven’t been around in a while, you should know that we bring you the best articles DNK has to offer in a blog post each month. However, someone has to decide which articles are truly the best, not necessarily just the most popular. If you want in on the action let us know! We’d love to get your input!

Without further ado, here are the best of the best from October!

September brought us another 500+ submissions, and once again we’ve put a number of our community members to the task of picking the very best. This time, in addition to sharing 8 of the top articles from last month, we’re going to also share some of this month’s hot topics.

So we’ve been through all of the submissions for August and here’s the best stuff from that we found from over 500 submissions last month that you have to read.  If you have the chops and want to help find the best stuff with us next month let us know and we’ll put you on the discussion list.

But before you jump into the best there’s a couple posts from our sponsors which we think are excellent.

Profiling cubed: Profiling SQL and disk activity with .NET code Sponsored by Red-Gate

Introducing the LOB Chronicles – Building a CRM Demo Sponsored by Telerik

And now on with the results:

http://dotnetkicks.com/database/Every_NET_Developer_Should_Know_Their_Database_Well_Enough

• While the article is brief, it postures that every developer should know their database from a competitive standpoint. While that is just one of the many reasons, I feel the ensuing discussion kicked off by Vijay is arguably more valuable. It brings to light reasons for knowing your database that matter to every developer.
• The article also includes a ton of links for those wishing to learn more about SQL Server

http://dotnetkicks.com/aspnet/SignalR_The_ASP_Net_alternative_to_Node_js_Socket_IO_NowJS

• Node.js and Socket.IO + Nowjs are big, big names in the industry right now. Whether it’s needed or not, scalability is all the rage these days and ASP.Net has been left in the dust. Now there’s an answer for asynchronous signaling in ASP.Net and I feel this is going to be a big technology in the .Net world in the coming future. This will be an important technology for .Net programmers to learn.

http://dotnetkicks.com/aspnet/How_to_Implement_2_Step_Verification_in_ASP_NET_MVC

• Security on the web is and always will be important, but with more and more business being done online, and people’s personal and business lives merging online, it’s become extremely important for websites to take the burden of security out of the hands of their users and step up their measures. Proper two-factor authentication is a proven and convenient way to do so, but implementing it is sort of a crapshoot. With the world of online security in its infancy (username/password combinations are not secure, yet are the only form of authentication available for nearly all major websites), it is hard for developers to find the resources required to implement this form of security. Along comes this article by Mr. Nayyeri which not only explains how one would go about implementing this form of security, but also provides working/tested code to do so. This article is an example of the type of resources that Dotnetkicks should strive to provide and separate from the crowd.

http://dotnetkicks.com/wpf/The_Top_5_WPF_and_Silverlight_Gotchas

• WPF / Silverlight applications are stateful and allow us to hold state in the form of complex data structures. This post illustrates five common memory leak problems while developing WPF / Silverlight applications. The good thing about the post is that it helps us understand why the memory leaks and then gives us a solution of how to fix the memory leak.  It’s a very interesting read.

http://dotnetkicks.com/altnet/Dependency_Injection_Framework_Speedtest

• This post compares the performance of the major Dependency Injection (DI) Frameworks – Spring.Net, Castle.Windsor, Autofac, StructureMap, NInject, and Unity framework. The methodology involves comparing the time taken to retrieve the object instance for all the popular DI frameworks. Both the methodology used as well as the test results are interesting to know.

http://dotnetkicks.com/csharp/There_s_a_Proxy_In_My_Boots_Entity_Framework_POCO

•  This explains one of the problems in using Entity Framework – the problem of cloning objects. It explains the problem in detail and provides a solution to do deep cloning of entity objects.  Another superb post on the DNK Blogs, this one from Drew.