The Morning Brew

Another day, another significant Microsoft Announcement, so today we have a special section dedicated to the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 announcements.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0

• Microsoft Unveils Next Version of Visual Studio and .NET Framework - The official Microsoft Press Release regarding VS2010 and .NET framework 4, focusing on what seems to be a key area, Application Lifecycle Management.
• What’s next for Visual Studio and .NET FX? - Somasegar talks about the key focuses and priorities of the Visual Studio and .NET framework teams looking forward to VS2010 and .NET 4
• Microsoft Announces Visual Studio 2010. Developers Respond. - CIO.com has a great article about VS2010 and .NET 4.0, getting responses from a number of Developers about the news.
• Visual Studio Team System 2010 Week on Channel 9! - The agenda for a week of all things Visual Studio 2010 on Channel 9, starting with the announcement, and moving on to Business Alignment, Software Quality and Team Foundation Server on Friday.
• Visual Studio Development and Database Edition are one - Grant Holliday focuses on one part of the VS2010 announcement - it looks like anyone who owns Visual Studio 2005/2008 Team or database edition will get to use both products from 1st October
• Shining the Light on Rosario - Brian Harry talks about the details of the VSTS plan, and about the three pillars and how the new product supports them.

Software

• NHibernate 2.0.1.GA is released - A point release of NHibernate, fixing a few bugs, making a few improvements and including some patches.
• A Web Based Sequence Diagram Editor - Dev102.com highlight a useful looking Web Based Sequence Diagram Editor, which generates sequence diagram images from simple textual representations.

Information

• My MVC Starter Template - Rob Conery shares his own version of the default ASP.NET MVC site template, with slightly different organisation and some useful features out of the box it looks like it might be a good starting point for new sites.
• Common issues found in code review - Ayende shares some interesting pieces of code, showing how each can be improved by using language features better or making the code clearer.
• Object Oriented F# - Creating Classes - Matthew Podwysocki goes back to F# Basics, starting new series on the object oriented features of F#, looking at creating classes in this part.
• IComparer vs IEqualityComparer - Keyvan Nayyeri thinks about searching and sorting collections, and looks at the two interfaces involved, IComparer and IEqualityComparer
• Introducing Lucene.Net - Andrew Smith gives a brief introduction to using Lucene.NET for full text indexing

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The big news this weekend is the announcement that Microsoft will be shipping an unaltered version of jQuery with ASP.NET MVC and future releases of their developer tools. In honour of this, today sees a temporary new section for jQuery, and therefore a longer than usual edition of the Brew.

jQuery

• jQuery and Microsoft - ScottGu gives the news of the new alliance between Microsoft and jQuery talking about the plans for shipping the library and tool support., along with future development plans.
• jQuery, Microsoft, and Nokia - John Resig posts on the Offical jQuery site to give the jQuery side of the announcement. The other significant news in this post is that Nokia are also adopting jQuery for their widget platform.
• jQuery to ship with ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio - Scott Hanselman talks about the announcment, and look at the Tool support and gives an example of jQuery with other parts of the ASP.NET stack.
• jQuery now officially part of the .NET developer’s toolbox - Bertrand Le Roy talks briefly about interoperation between ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery, and how they are complementary technologies, good for different parts of the equation.
• jQuery As Built-In Part of ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio - Keyvan Nayyeri is excited by the prospect of built in support for jQuery in ASP.NET MVC.
• Introduction to jQuery Article posted - The Microsoft / jQuery announcement was timed ideally for Rick Strahl, who has just published the first part of a two part series on jQuery Client Side Scription.
• jQuery and Visual Studio BFF - Rob Conery remarks how hopefully this alliance will help the public opinion of Microsoft’s intentions towards Open source Projects
• Microsoft to add jQuery in Visual Studio: Why I think it’s great - Laurent Bugnion gives another view on the Microsoft / jQuery announcement, considering how companies who don’t usually like Open Source will react to this.
• jQuery finds its way into Microsoft and Nokia stacks - Ajaxian covers both the Microsoft and Nokia jQuery announcement.

Software

• CSLA .NET 3.6 for Windows and for Silverlight Beta 1 released - Rockford Lhotka announces the Beta 1 release of Version 3.6 of his application framework package, now available for both Windows and Silverlight

Information

• Properties - A False Sense of Encapsulation - Jan Van Ryswyck talks about how having too many properties is a bad thing, breaking encapsulation and leading towards having an Anemic Domain Model, illustrating along the way with some code examples.
• Preventing third-party derivation, part one - Eric Lippert talks about a fascinating feature of the CLR, the ability to create public classes which can’t be inherited from outside their own assembly. I have to admit it took two looks at the class to realise what was going on (I’m only half way through my coffee so might not be fully awake yet), but its a neat (and potentially very frustrating) trick.
• ASP.NET MVC Request Flow - Justin Etheredge takes a visual look at the flow through classes that make up the way that ASP.NET MVC processes the request.
• Parallel Stacks for multi-threaded debugging - Daniel Moth proposes a solution to making it easier to view stack traces in multi threaded code.
• WPF Application Quality Guide v.0.3 Released! - Ivo Manolov announces the third preliminary release if the WPF Application Quality Guide, which now includes information on globalization and localization testing.
• Calling JavaScript functions in the Web Browser Control - Rick Strahl looks at calling javascript functions from an application hosting the page in a Web Browser Control
• Hibernating Rhinos #9 - Application Architecture - Ayende posts up two new episodes of his Hibernating Rhinos screen casts. The first (#9) is about application architecture, and the second (#10) is all about writing ‘Production Quality Software’. Both are very interesting, although I did find that the audio was rather quiet.
• Simplicity is key to successful unit testing - Karl Seguin talks about how the usual code quality rules apply to unit tests as well, resulting in better quality tests, and more reliability and resilience to changes in the system.
• Unit Testing decoupled from Design == Adoption - Roy Osherove continues the debate on Unit Testing practices and adoption, outlining some more of the reasoning behind his previous post.
• Writing non-thread-safe code - Tim Stall talks about non-thread safe code, delving down into the lower levels to explain how problems arise.
• Can you refactor to MVC? - Kyle Baley considers if it is possible to refactor an existing site to run on ASP.NET MVC. I suspect it would be possible, however if its worth the considerable effort is the question I’d ask.
• How do we write test automation for ASP.NET? - Federico Silva Armas of the Asp.Net QA Team talks about how the ASP.NET QA team use NexusLight to create automated tests of the ASP.NET Platform.

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Looks like there are a number of related releases today…

Software

• Silverlight 2 Release Candidate Now Available - ScottGu gives the lowdown on the new Silverlight 2 Release Candidate 0 release.
• Expression Blend 2 SP1 Preview Released - The Expression Blend team announce a preview release of the forthcoming Service Pack 1 for Expression Blend 2, more details behind the link.
• Updated WPFPerf Performance Profiling Tools for WPF - The WPF Performance Team announce an update to the WPF Profiling Tools. Unsurprisingly these look very visually appealing, as well as very useful.
• Introducing SemanticEngine.NET - Mads Kristensen has been busy working on a Semantic Engine for generating various semantic formats (like FOAF, XFN, and other microformats), and in this post announces his first release of the library on Codeplex.

Information

• What is the Managed Extensibility Framework? - Glenn Block highlights some great posts on the Microsoft Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)
• Strategy Pattern With Ninject - Steve Smith continues looking at avoiding dependencies by using design patterns with this look at the strategy pattern using Ninject.
• KB957541 is my favorite hotfix - Ayende reveals that the problem introduced in .NET 3.5 SP1 which <a href="http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2008/08/13/How-.Net-3.5-SP1-broke-Rhino-Mocks.aspx">"prevents Rhino Mocks working with languages like F#, C++ and Spec#</a> now has a hot fix and this fix will be shipped out with Windows Update at some point in the future.
• The Weekly Source Code 34 - The Rise of F# - F# has really started gaining momentum, and this week Scott Hanselman looks at the language from Microsoft Research as a part of his series ‘The Weekly Source Code’. As usual, Scott gathers together some great information and takes a look at some code.
• jBlogMvc : part 1 Building the Administration Area - Amr Elsehemy continues his series on building a blogging engine in ASP.NET MVC. This part focuses on the administration behind the scenes, and is accompanied by another code drop.
• Shared Hosting & The Bleeding Edge - Christopher Bennage reminds us all that our hosting environment can have a significant impact on development, and talks a little about Partial Trust environments and getting a site to work on that setup.
• ASP.NET Tip: How to avoid creating a GC Hole - Tom, of the ASP.NET Debugging team talks about Garbage Collection Holes, giving details of what they are and how they can be caused, along with why they are bad the your ASP.NET site.

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Software

• IKVM 0.38 Release Candidate 0 - Jeroen Frijters announces the first Release Candidate of IKVM 0.38. IKVM is a Java virtual machine that runs under Mono and the .NET Framework.
• SequenceViz 0.9 :: WPF based Sequence diagram viewer - Nauman Leghari announces a new release of SequenceViz, an application that allows users to construct UML Sequence diagrams. This update means that the program now uses WPF to draw the diagrams removing some of the issues caused by the old SVG + IE solution.
• PipelineTesting v1.2.0.0 Released - Tomas Restrepo announces the release of PipelineTesting v1.2.0.0, a library to help the unit testing of pipeline component, schema and that actual pipelines in BizTalk 2006

Information

• ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support Refreshed! - Jimmy Schementi walks through the recent ASP.NET Dynamic Language support release, showing (using plenty of screen shots) the construction of a simple web app in Python.
• Why you REALLY need to think about your interfaces - Brian Genisio talks about a problem he ran into with an existing interface, and how if the original developer had put some more thought into the interface before it was set in stone solving this problem would have been a lot easier
• Guidelines and Coding Standards Complete List Download - Pinal Dave puts together a short document covering Coding Standards and best practice guidelines for developers working in SQL.
• Five Tips for Floating Point Programming - Floating point numbers are strange things, and many developers forget their quirks. In this article John D. Cook looks at the five most important things to consider when working with floating point numbers.
• Browser Rendering Differences and Browser Resets - Rick Strahl examines the rendering differences between browsers that drive developers potty. Rick then explains the solution to this problem, using CSS Browser resets to ensure that every browser sets out at the same point before applying your CSS.
• Use jQuery with ASP.NET with jQuery.noConflict() - Steve Michelotti shows how, using a neat feature of jQuery, the Microsoft AJAX javascript library and jQuery can happily co-exist in the same page.
• "Zermatt" Resources for Developers and Architects - Rick Rainey rounds up a good collection of links on ‘Zermatt’, the forthcoming framework for claims based identity from Microsoft.
• How NOT To Optimize LINQ Statements - Nick Berardi tells of an unsuccessful attempt to optimise the SQL produced by Linq to SQL by changing the query. Optimisation is always the hardest part of using any ORM.

Coffee

• Off Topic: Latte Printer - Latte Art goes high tech with the ability to print designs on to the top of your drink - this looks really cool - I wonder if we will see these in the real world.

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Seeing lots of interest in Google’s Android across the developer community - not surprising since they are going to give away $10million to developers targeting the platform.

Software

• Krypton 3.0 Released - Component Factory announce the release of Version 3 of their WinForms control library. Licences start at $299.
• Refreshing ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support - Phil Haack announces the release of an update to his other project at Microsoft, ‘ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support’ brings DLR/IronPython support to ASP.NET. Currently only IronPython is supported, but future releases will also contain IronRuby support.

Information

• Learning and craftsmanship - Ian Cooper (who it was very nice to meet briefly at the Alt.NET UK Conference) follows on from Roy Osherove’s recent post about TDD adoption by talking about how he adopted TDD, and how he teaches others to adopt the practices. Ian closes on a a key point - you don’t have to master every part of something before starting using it.
• How Not To Compromise Security Through ASP.NET Validators - Adam Tibi shares a number of things to check to help enhance the security of your sites
• Delegate Type Inference in C# - Noah Coad looks at the evolution of Delegates in C# and how Type Inference makes them even nicer.
• Understanding State Pattern - Mars Rovers - Sean Feldman looks at the State Pattern with an example based in the Mars Rover providing the background to his implementation.
• SharpZipLib Versus 7-Zip for Large File Sets - Rob Reynolds looks at implementing large file set zipping using two of the most common Zipping libraries - useful reference should you ever need to compress files.
• Aggregating Aggregates and UNION vs. UNION ALL - John Paul Cook looks at some SQL techniques for combining aggregate queries, along with some gotchas that can catch out the un-wary developer.
• I love FirstOrDefault - Chris Brandsma shows how Linq’s FirstOrDefault extension method can improve your code.
• Reading Erlang: Inspecting CouchDB - Ayende continues his examination of Erlang with an in-depth look at CouchDB, complete with some translations of the concepts into C# to help us .NET guys out
• Update on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Windows Update - Scott Hanselman shares details of the plans for distributing .NET 3.5 SP1 via Windows Update, answers a number of questions you may have, and lists a number of known issues/bugs.
• Getting rid of spaghetti code in the real-world: a Case Study - Patrick Smacchia shows how NDepend can help analyse, identify and improve code in the real world
• Bumper-Sticker API Design - Joshua Bloch shares some API design best practices in short concise statements

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I varied my coffee drinking this morning by trying Nescafe’s Instant Espresso from their ‘Collection’ range, which is surprisingly nice (however I’m not going to link to their site as its the slowest bit of flash I’ve seen in ages).

Software

• Pex 0.7 Released - Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of version 0.7 of Pex (Program EXploration) the framework for generating unit tests from parameterized unit tests. 0.7 is a bugfix and enhancement release.
• The Snippet Designer is Released!!!! - Matthew Manela announces the release of a project he started as an intern in the summer of 2006. Snippet Designer aims to make it easy to create new and explore snippets for Visual Studio
• SQLite for ADO.Net 1.0.59.0 Released - Greg Duncan highlights the latest release of SQLite for ADO.NET, a great embedded database. I experimented with SQLite a while back and was very happy to find that NHibernate worked well with it, and this post has just reminded me of that (which will probably help with a little project I’m working on)

Information

• Commented-Out Code and Broken Windows - Jan Van Ryswyck talks about code quality, and that warning sign of commented out code.
• Jeremy’s First Law of Continuous Integration - Jeremy D. Miller gives one rule for CI, and follows up with a larger list in Jeremy’s Other Laws of Continuous Integration, and closes with Jeremy’s Penultimate Law of Continuous Integration.
• PDC2008 Hard Drives, Services, Windows 7, and More - Mike Swanson gives some of the details of what people can expect of PDC 2008 - Despite not attending, I have a feeling that October 26-30th will be a very busy week for me and the Morning Brew judging by what I’ve been reading about the event this year.
• Arrays considered somewhat harmful - Eric Lippert talks about the bad aspects of Arrays, and looks at some instances where they really are not a good choice. Eric makes a set of very good points here, and I will think twice when using arrays in the future to ensure I’ve considered these points.
• Designing Erlang# - Ayende is reading about Erlang, and starts expressing the ideas of Erlang in some C# Code - a great way of assisting .NET Devs t understand the basic ideas behind the Erlang way of doing things.
• Inside F#: How does functional programming affect the structure of your code? - An interesting article from Brian who is a Dev on the F# Team, talking about how functional programming changes the structure of your code, looking at the effects at three different levels.
• Why SOLID? GIMME AN L! - Dave Laribee continues his series on SOLID principles with a look at the Liskov Substitution Principle.
• Flattening The Learning Curve - Your Input Needed - Tim Barcz also weighs in on the issue of adoption of TDD and unit testing.
• Testify - Roy Osherove’s recent post seems to have got people talking about the difficulties they encounter adopting TDD and getting others to adopt TDD. In this Post Tony Rasa talks about his experiences, and the comments include contributions from others, well worth reading.
• My wish-list for F# - Laurent Le Brun assembles a wish list of features for F#, containing some interesting ideas.
• Passing objects to SubControllers - Matt Hinze gives a code example of using the new ASP.NET MvcContrib feature, SubControllers

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Looks like the .NET blogging crowd have been busy this weekend…

Software

• A Graph Tree Drawing Control for WPF - A useful looking WPF library for drawing tree graphs with auto layout. I think the source code might be interesting reading for me as I’m trying to get into WPF.
• QuickGraph 3.0 - Jonathan ‘Peli’ de Halleux has upgraded his Graphing library to C#3 and .NET 3.5, making changes to the API to take advantage of Extension methods and delegates
• ScrewTurn Wiki 3.0 Alpha2 - ScrewTurn Software announce the release of the second alpha of their Free and Open Source Wiki Software
• Released: CodeIt.Right Build 1.1.08262 - SubMain announce the release of CodeIt.Right 1.1, a major upgrade to their Static Code Analysis + Automatic Refactoring tool. This release brings in support for .NET 3.5 along with a host of other new features.

Information

• Prism 2.0 - First Drop - David Hill announces the first (pre)release of Prism 2.0. Looks like the team have been hard at work since making their V1 release.
• Avoiding Dependencies - Steve Smith looks at the Facade and Strategy Patterns as a way of avoiding dependencies to help with development and testing.
• MvcContrib - now with SubController support for ASP.NET MVC - Jeffrey Palermo announces the inclusion of support for SubControllers within the ASP.NET MVC MvcContrib add on library.
• Goodbye mocks, Farewell stubs - Roy Osherove talks about the difficulties people have in adopting Test Driven practices, and looks at what can be done to make mocking easier for people, along with suggesting an alternative name which he believes makes the ideas clearer.
• Interfaces and isolation - Jimmy Bogard follows on from Roy’s post, discussion how his mocking skills progressed, and the proposed name ‘isolation’
• Silverlight and WPF - Sharing Library Projects - Mike Taulty looks at techniques which allow you to share code between WPF and sliverlight applications, the first being a create a copy, the second being some cleverness with build targeting
• Cosmos - C# Open Source Managed Operating System - Cosmos is an Operating System Kit, that allows you to write code in C# (or any .NET language that compiles to IL) and then Cosmos post compiles down to machine code allowing you to run the program as a real operating system. This looks like a lot of fun, and hopefully I’ll find some time to have a play with this.
• What is your strategy for becoming a better developer? - Justin Etheredge asks his readers what they are doing to make themselves a better developer, shareing two of his own ideas, and announces a competition to win copies of The Pragmatic Programmer for the best replying entries.
• What is your strategy for becoming a better developer? - Ryan Lanciaux continues on the same theme, giving his tips for becoming a better developer.
• ASP.NET MVC Beta1 in a few weeks and v1 by end of year - Simone Chiaretta sets a lot of developers minds racing as to which end of year ScottGu meant when talking about the final V1 release of ASP.NET MVC
• Introducing the "Dirty Little Secrets" Screencast - Shawn Wildermuth announces his new screen cast series, aiming to share some of the interesting things he’s learned in a twice monthly 10-15 minute format. The first episode covers creating a slide out panel in Silverlight 2
• ViewState management using AOP - PostSharp4ViewState - Another interesting use of AOP techniques. Szymon Pobiega looks at using PostSharp to create an easy way of persisting values to and from viewstate in web controls.
• Introducing jBlogMvc - Amr Elsehemy sets out on a new development series, this time looking at building a blogging engine in ASP.NET MVC and JQuery.
• Threading Basics: Race Conditions, Part 1 - Jason Olson gives an example of a race condition, in the hope of raising developer awareness to this type of problem
• SharePoint for Developers: 3. Introduction to SharePoint Data Structures - Gunnar Peipman continues this series on SharePoint development looking at the key data structures (lists, fields and content types).
• Herding Code Episode 18 - Functional Programming and F# - My favourite functional programming blogger, Matthew Podwysocki, is featured on the latest edition of the Herding Code Podcast, talking on Functional programming in both C# and F#.

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Software

• Introducing Blacklight - our new (Silverlight) CodePlex project - Martin Grayson announces the start of a new project to gather together great Silverlight (and other technologies it would seem) controls, samples and visuals. This could become a really useful resource - especially for the design challenged like me.
• Free Silverlight Controls And Tools For Brighter Websites - WebResourcesDepot have put togehter a list of free Silverlight Controls, ranging from data grids to image viewers to video players - a good resource if you are on a tight budget.

Information

• Codebehind Files in ASP.NET MVC are Evil - Steve Smith talks about the existence of Code Behind Files for ASP.NET MVC Views, looking at both the good and bad aspects of their existence.
• ASP.NET Designer Control Problem in VS 2008 SP1 - Rick Strahl has been having some problems with the Visual Studio Designer, and in this post talks about the common causes of these problems. Unfortunately for Rick, none of these are the solution to his problem, and he has to restart Visual Studio to fix - does anyone have any ideas?
• Windsor Config Parameters With Non-Primitive Types - Tim Barcz shows how you can initialise a component with parameters of more complex types using the Windsor Container XML Config.
• jQuery and JavaScript Coding: Examples and Best Practices - I know that a number of .NET folks are really getting into JQuery, so this best practices list from Smashing Magazine will be of interest to a number of people.
• Storing Contextual Data in Web and non-Web applications - Context gets used a lot in Web Applications as a place to store some information, and in this post Joel Varty shows how you can achieve similar things for your non-web applications
• Running jQuery QUnit tests under Continuous Integration - Joshua Flanagan talks about combining QUnit with NUnit and WatiN to allow your CI Server to perform unit tests on JavaScript.
• What’s the Difference Between Dispose() And Close()? - Tyler Holmes talks about the differences (and similarities) between the Dispose method and the Close method.
• Some Managed/Unmanaged Exception Tricks - Steve Hawley talks about some of the problems he had in tracking down a strange bug, and gives a very useful tip for getting the last exception when debugging.
• Point distance, imperative vs. functional style - Edgar Sánchez compares a function program in F# and a C# equivalent for finding the point closest to another point, and compares the brevity of the implementations.
• Web-Application Framework - part V - Enter into Catharsis - adding new Entity - Radim Köhler looks at how the Catharsis uses the Guidance framework to make adding a new entity to the framework simpler and involve less code authoring.
• Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part VI - Framework Architecture - Radim Köhler follows up part 5 by talking about the underlying architecture of the Cathasis Web Application Framework in part 6 of this series

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