The Morning Brew

Well this week has been a busy week, and after a flurry of announcements it is now time for the community to get to work on exploring the new technologies released this week - I look forward to an interesting few weeks of posts going deeper into the specific technologies.

PDC

• PDC2008 Quick Video Link List - Greg Duncan gathers together the video and presentations for all the PDC sessions into one simple list, and even shows how he compiled the list using a bit of VB and the HTML Agility Pack - this is practically 2 posts for the price of one!
• C# 4.0 New Features Part 2.1 - default parameter intrigue - Justin Etheredge continues his series of posts looking a the new features of C# 4.0. In this followup post to part 2, Justin expands on a comment left on a previous post to explain why default parameters are implemented the way they are.
• A Quick Waddle Around Oslo - David Ing talks about his impressions of Oslo based on the sessions attended at PDC
• Windows Azure Back End - Dominic Green looks into what goes on behind the scenes with Windows Azure’s backend
• First Look at Windows 7 - Tejas provides a quick run through of some of the first things you notice about Windows 7
• Azure Services Training Kit – Now available - Neil Hutson highlights the availability of the Azure Services Training Kit PDC Preview release, containing 11 hands on labs for Azure

Software

• Add-in to attach ASP.NET debugger - Achintya Jha shares a simple Visual Studio Add-in which makes it a one click process to connect the VS debugger to the ASP.NET Worker Process
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack October 2008 Available For Download - SQLDenis highlights the availablilty of the SQL server 2008 Feature Pack release for October 2008. This pack conatins a huge array of goodies for anyone working with SQL 2008
• Generator Studio released on CodePlex - Ryan Schreiber announces the pre-beta release of Generator Studio, a code generator based on NVelocity primarly aimed at generating Castle ActiveRecord classes
• XNA Game Studio 3.0 is here! - XNA Game Studio 3.0 has not RTM’d. This game development tool now allows submission of games to Xbox LIVE Community Games, along with a host of other new features.

Information

• Update on LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities Roadmap - The ADO.NET Team explain the future Roadmap for Linq to SQL and Linq to Entities / Entity Framework, raising a number of concerns in the developer community (in follow up posts below and the comments on this post) that Linq to SQL may now be a dead end. Hopefully the situation will be clarified in the near future.
• LINQ To SQL Gets Kicked to the Curb… Needs A Good Home! - David Hayden talks about the ADO.NET Team’s announcement about Linq to SQL and Entity framework / LINQ to Entities, suggesting that ‘care in the community’ might be the best thing for Linq to SQL
• Microsoft kills Linq to SQL - Ayende responds to the ADO.NET teams announcement on the future of Linq To SQL and Entity Framework / LINQ to Entities
• My stored procedure "best practices" checklist - Aaron Bertrand shares his best practices for developing stored procedures covering both coding style (casing, formatting etc) along with some coding best practices (good use of NOCOUNT etc)
• Refactoring Service Dependencies to Separated Interface - Billy McCafferty talks about performing a refactoring to split out service dependencies to a separated Interface, along with a discussion of why you would want to do it and also a worked example of performing the refactoring.
• Bulk Data Operations With NHibernate’s Stateless Sessions - Davy Brion looks at how Stateless Sessions in NHibernate afford memory use benefits when performing bulk data operations.
• Authorization in ASP.Net MVC using XML Configuration - Jigar Desai looks at building a means of securing ASP.NET MVC actions behind authorised roles using XML configuration and an HTTPModule
• Enforcing Your Domain Model With Spec#: Part 1: Introduction And The Non-Null Operator - Lasse Eskildsen starts a series looking at Spec#, and how it can be used as a means of enforcing your domain model
• Ever Wonder Why You Never Get Full Code Coverage? - Jason Bock dives down into the IL to look at why 100% code coverage can be an impossible thing to achieve.
• Gotcha: ASP.NET and exceptions in asynchronous threads - J Kealey talks about how unhanded exceptions in asynchronous threads can cause devastating results in your web application, causing IIS to restart the application
• Visual Studio 2008 Regular Expression Editor - Anthony Grace talks about one fo the more hidden features of Visual Studio, a rudimentary Regular Expression editor
• WPF + M-V-VM + NHibernate + NHibernate Validator = Fantastic Four! - Paulo Quicoli talks about combining Windows Presentation Foundation, NHibernate, NHibernate Valdiator and the Model View ViewModel pattern to make great applications in this Code Project Article.
• Developing Custom Controls in Silverlight 2 - Imran Shaik gives a nice tutorial article on building Custom Controls in Silverlight2 complete with code in both VB.NET and C#
• If you’re going to reformat source code, please don’t do anything else at the same time - Raymond Chen talks about a common problem of developers reformatting code (which on its own is a good thing) along with making functional changes - this leads to a horrible experience for anyone reading the differences via version control, so please don’t do it!
• New Release: patterns & practices Acceptance Test Engineering Guide (BETA1) - J.D. Meier highlights the release of a new Guide from the Patterns and Practices team covering acceptance testing
• Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices (white paper) + Agile Development Showcase - Fernando García Loera talks about the release of another new Patterns and Practices guide covering Agile development in distributed teams.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 - Neil Hutson highlights the announcement of Windows Server 2008 R2 release, adding a number of improvements over the original Windows 2008 in a number of areas. more details in the post and linked reviewers guide.

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It looks like PDC is starting to wind down (just as I get my process for summarising/link blogging it sorted), and the big hit in terms of posts seems to be C# 4. Today marks a return of some PDC specific sections, and another large edition of the Brew.

Software

• The Web Deployment Tool Beta 2 is now available! - The IIS Team announce the release of the Web Deployment Tool Beta 2 with a number of new features for packaging your application.
• "Geneva" Beta available now - The Geneva team announce the availability of Geneva, a platform for simple user access based on claims based authentication. The release includes bits for developers, infrastructure guys and also cardspace integration.

Information

• .NET Framework 4 Poster - No major framework release would be complete without a good poster, and Brad Abrams shares a poster produced in conjunction with Addison Wesley for .NET 4, available in PDF and Silverlight deepzoom.
• NH Prof: Teaser - Ayende teases us all with a screen shot of the NHibernate Profiler he has been workin on. I’m really looking forward to seeing this tool for my self as it looks like it will be a lot easier to work with then the debug log and SQL profiler
• Zip Compressing ASP.NET Session without changing your code using a Session provider. - Albert Pascual follows on form Scott Hanselman’s post last week about zipping session information putting together an implementation using Session Provider to avoid having to change any implementation code
• ASP.NET MVC and NHaml - Sergio Pereira takes a look at NHaml for the views in ASP.NET MVC looking at some of the advantages and disadvantages of using it.
• Is Code Coverage Really All That Useful? - Kevin Pang talks about code coverage, and if it really is a useful metric. Good discussion seems to be going on in the comments too.
• MSDN Magazine November 2008 - The November edition of MSDN Magazine is now online which this month focuses on Security
• Comparing Hash Table Implementations Performances - Patrick Smacchia looks atht the performance of different hashtable implementations including a number of screenshots from his profiling tool showing the different performance aspects of each implementation.
• NHibernate: Identity columns that are not the primary key - Bil Simser looks at having identity columns in the database which are not the primary key of the table, and how you can work with this situation in NHIbernate.
• Advances in .NET Type system: Type Equivalence Demo - Misha Shneerson looks at some of the new interop functionality in CLR V4
• jBlogMvc : part 3 Themable View Engine, Archive and Filtering by year, month and day - Amr Elsehemy continues his series on building a blogging engine in ASP.NET MVC, in this part themeing is added, along with an update to beta 1 of ASP.NET MVC

PDC Session Bloggers

There are a number of bloggers who are live blogging sessions from PDC 2008, here are a few of the best I’ve come across

• Paul Gielens - Paul has been producing nice posts for the sessions he attends, complete with hand drawn diagrams and slides. I wonder if they are paper drawn or tablet PC drawn?
• Bill Evjen - Bill has notes for a number of sessions from PDC
• JohnPapa.net - John Papa has some notes form the keynotes from day 1 and 2.
• Joseph Guadagno - Joseph has been doing a nice job of live blogging the talks, even managing to get source code written in his posts.
• Ryan Rinaldi - Ryan has been blogging sessions from PDC as he attends them

Azure

• How to create and Publish your first Windows Azure application - Olav Tollefsen walks through the process of getting yourself up and running with Azure, from setting up the development environment to publishing your first application.
• Windows Azure Walkthrough: Simple Blob Storage Sample - Jim Nakashima steps through the process of storing information in Azure with plenty of screenshots and code samples included in the post

C# 4

• Dynamic in C# - Sam Ng looks at the new dynamic type functionality, including a look at what happens at compile time and runtime
• C# 4.0 - Named and Optional Parameters - Behind the Scenes - Matthew Podwysocki continues his look at C#4 new features with a look under the hood on Named and optional Parameters
• Generic Variance in C# 4.0 - Nate Kohari looks at the variance of generic types in C#4
• C# Future - Home - This MSDN Code site looks to be a great resource for anyone wanting to get up to speed with C#4 as it contains a vast array of code samples and documentation available to download.
• C# 4.0 Duck Typing and mocking extension methods - Melvyn Harbour looks at the dynamic type functionality in C#4 with a view to helping with testing and mocking of extension methods.
• LINQ Farm: Covariance and Contravariance in C# 4.0 - Charlie Calvert looks at the new Covariance and Contravariance Functionality of C# 4 using lambda expression delegates
• CodeThinked | C# 4.0 New Features Part 1 - dynamic keyword - Justin Etheredge starts a series of posts looking at the new features of the C#4 language, based on the recently released CTP. In this first part Justin looks at the new Dynamic Types functionality.
• C# 4.0 New Features Part 1.1 - dynamic keyword second look - Justin continues by looking at the performance of working with objects stored with the the dynamic keyword, showing that while performance isn’t as good as static typing its still better than other ways of achieving the same thing.
• C# 4.0 New Features Part 2 - default and named parameters - Justin Etheredge continues his look at the new C#4 features with a look at default and named parameters

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Another bumper edition today, and I completely ran out of time preparing the Brew this morning so with all that is left over from today I’m sure that tomorrow will be even larger !

Software

• Silverlight Tools - The Visual Studio integration for Silverlight has hit a final release, including support for both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express
• Enterprise Library 4.1–October 2008 - There is a new release of the Enterprise library - Version 4.1 (or October 2008). This release supports both VS2008 and VS2008 SP1, and also includes the Unity 1.2features.
• Silverlight Toolkit - The Silverlight Toolkit was announced in yesterday’s PDC keynote, and provides a number of controls, components and utilities which aren’t included in the main Silverlight release. This is the CodePlex site for the library where there are samples of the 12 new controls, along with access to the binary download and source.
• Announcing IronPython 2.0 VS10 CTP - Mohamed Meligy highlights a release of IronPython specifically for use in Visual Studio 2010 CTP, allowing you to try out some of the new dynamic language interoperability features.
• WPF Toolkit is live - DataGrid, Ribbon, and Calendar preview versions - As announced in the Keynote yesterday, there is a new WPF Control Toolkit, including a DataGrid, Ribbon and calendar controls. The Toolkit requires .NET 3.5 SP1
• Announcing Sync Framework v2 CTP1 - Rob Tiffany announces the release of the first CTP of the Wync Framework V2 - a framework providing easy means to synchronise data using providers, with providers for file system, ADO.NET and Feeds provided. This release contains a number of new feaures, as outlined in this post.
• SonicFileFinder 2.0 released - Jens Schaller announces the release of SonicFileFinder 2.0, a free add-in for Visual Studio which provides quick searching for files with some useful actions on the found file.
• SQL Server 2005 SP3 Beta Release - Nosheen M Syed announces the beta release of SQL server 2005 SP3, for those who like to live on the cutting edge, as this release is intended for testing use only.

Information

• PDC 2008 – Looking at Future - Keyvan Nayyeri provides a nice summary of yesterdays Day 2 Keynote talking about Windowws 7, Developer tools, the Live Framework and Office 14
• Live Mesh : Welcome to Beta - Live Mesh, a tool from Microsoft which allows you to easily access your data and services in a variety of ways, along with synchronisation of data to the cloud is going into beta this week. The significant new feature in the beta is the inclusion of Windows Mobile and Mac Clients.
• Welcome to Live Services and the Live Framework - One of the significant announcements yesterday at PDC was the new Live Services and Live Framework which sit on top of Windows Azure
• Windows 7 Developer Guide Is Now Available - The Windows 7 Blog for Developers announces the release of the Windows 7 Developer guide which highlights significant new features (including the SEcnic Ribbon, Multi Touch, etc). More details in the post and document - I think this blog might be one to keep an eye on over the coming months.
• A first look at Windows 7’s pre-beta PDC release - Ed Bott of ZDNet provides some details on what is coming in Windows 7, along with a nice collection of screenshots
• Named and Optional Arguments in C# 4.0 - Matthew Podwysocki looks at the new C# 4 features, and how they interact with F#
• My View of C# 4.0 - Omer van Kloeten gives his impressions of the new C# Features, and isn’t entirely convinced about a number of them.
• Oslo - Martin Fowler talks about his impressions of Oslo, Microsoft’s Model Driven Software implementation. Interesting reading
• MVC Storefront Preview 1 Available - Rob Conery has taken some time to package up a preview release of his MVC StoreFront project which is the source for his great screencast series. The preview requires VS2008 and ASP.NET MVC Beta 1
• Letter from Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft - This email (sent to the Industry Executive subscribers) from Steve Ballmer about the new Azure platform (mainly marketing spiel) is being blogged about all over the place,
• New Silverlight controls suite delivered by Microsoft #PDC08 - Laurent Bugnion shows the new Silverlight Controls released yesterday at PDC, and talks about getting up and running with them in your SIlverlight 2 projects.
• Closure Tip - Peter Ritchie looks at at some of the dangers of mutable variables when combined with closures in both C#2 and 3
• New Release: patterns & practices App Arch Guide 2.0 Beta 1 - J.D. Meier announces the release of the Patterns and Practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0 Beta 1, a 5 part, 24 chapter guide to help you to make good architectural and technical choices, along with choosing the correct patterns and practices.
• Using Intellipad to create your first M model - The Intellipad Team Blog show how Intellipad can be used to create "M" models. This is also the first set of screenshots I’ve seen with any quantity of "M" code. The Intellipad IDE was previously described as emacs.net, and glancing at the other posts in the team blog looks like it could become a very useful tool.
• "Oslo" Modeling Language Team Blog - The Oslo Modelling Language, Codenamed "M" now has its own blog, yet another one to keep an eye on post PDC
• LukeH’s WebLog : F# on Windows Azure - LukeH shares Visual Studio templates for F# cloud services using Windows Azure allowing you to use F# to create Azure services easily

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Yesterday marked what is being hailed as ‘The Dawn of the Third Age’ of computing at Microsoft, with the public announcement and release of Microsoft Windows Azure, taking Microsoft deeply into the world of Cloud computing.

As predicted yesterday, today’s edition of the Morning Brew is an absolute monster, with special sections dedicated to PDC specific content, Visual Studio 2010/.NET 4.0, Oslo, and of course Azure. In addition to this I’ve attempted to keep the core of the Brew, as despite what the Microsoft Community might think there were other things going on yesterday other than PDC, so Information and Sotware sections feature as usual

PDC

• PDC2008 Professional Developers Conference October 27-30, 2008 - The official PDC site is the best source of information about the PDC, with links to the latest videos from channel 9
• Windows Live ID Becomes an OpenID Provider - The official announcement and technical details for the Windows Live ID Open ID Provider, including links to the CTP release
• ANNOUNCEMENT: Live ID OpenID Provider technical preview + see the screencast - Angus Logan talks about the Live ID Open ID provider announcement, and shares a screen cast which shows the experience.
• Session = "The Future of C#" - Joseph Guadagno shares his notes from Anders Hejlsberg session on C# 4

Microsoft Windows Azure

• Azure Services Platform - Microsoft’s official Azure site, containing links to the key parts of the platform and documentation.
• Getting Started: Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio - The Cloud Computing Tools Team has a nice post gathering together the downloads, tools and some information about the tools and SDK
• A Lap Around Windows Azure - Paul Gielens shares some notes of Azure, including the details of the contents Technology preview available to PDC attendees.
• Welcome Windows Azure - PDC Day 1 Keynote Recap - Jim O’Neil gives a nice summary of who said what in the PDC keynote, along with links to the speakers and any related technology that was demoed.
• .Net Services Team Blog : Welcome to .NET Services! - The Azure announcement is accompanied by a number of new sites and blogs, this one is focused on the Microsoft .NET Services (of which Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow Services) are the ones which have been released as a CTP.
• Azure: Microsoft .NET Service Bus - Clemens Vasters writes one of the longer and more detailed looks at Azure, taking about a number of the key components and technologies
• Windows Azure – Getting Set Up - Dominic Green talks about the setup of the Azure SDK, and what components you require as pre-requisites
• Microsoft Unveils Windows Azure at Professional Developers Conference - The official press release announcing Microsoft Windows Azure, their new cloud based services platform.
• On Demand Stream of Ray Ozzie Keynote - So much of the content for PDC is bring streamed, and you can catch the KeyNote from yesterday by Ray Ozzie on demand, and watch as Azure how announced

Oslo

• Oslo Developer Center - Micorosoft Code Name Oslo is the platform for Model Driven Applications, and yesterday its Developer Centre lauched. Here you can learn about the Oslo Framework, and the M language.
• Oslo SKD - The CTP SDK for Oslo is also available now - this is a direct download link.
• The Oslo Developer Center: Letter from the Editors - Chris Sells Kent Sharkey give the lowdown on the different parts of Oslo in this nice introduction
• MODELS remixed. - The Connected System Division released their new website about Oslo yesterday.

Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4.0

• Download details: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP - Microsoft have opened up the latest CTP of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 to the general public, although at a 7GB download and requiring 23gb of diskspace this Virtual Machine takes serious commitment. My download has just finished extracting and I’m hoping to fire it up later today!
• 2010 Feature Preview for TFS : VSTS 2010 - David Starr shares his notes from the PDC session on Visual Studio 2010 features
• Visual Studio 2010 - Ayende shares his first impressions of Visual Studio 2010, exploring (with screenshots) a number of the new features which will ship with 2010

Software

• Announcing the WCF REST Starter Kit! - Kent Brown announces the release of the Windows Communication Foundation REST starter kit on CodePlex. This release is a preview of what is to come in WCF 4.0, allowing you to try out the proposed features now.
• Downloading jQuery - jQuery JavaScript Library - The latest release of JQuery now includes a release which is the Visual Studio documentation release of JQuery, showing the first influence of Microsoft on JQuery.
• Practicing patterns : Prism V2 – Drop 4 - Erwin van der Valk announces the release of Prism Version2 Drop 4 on CodePlex. This update to the Composite Application Guidance package for WPF and Silverlight includes some features ported back from V1 and also a new form of composition called Top Down Composition.
• Windows Embedded Standard 2009 Releases! - The Windows Embedded team announce the RTM release of Windows Embedded Standard 2009, the latest generation of Windows XP embedded
• SubSonic MVC Addin Updated for Beta 1 - Rob Conery announces an update to his SubSonic MVC Addin which creates scaffold like MVC code for Linq to SQL data access, has now been updated to produce ASP.NET Beta 1 code.
• What’s New for Performance Profiling Tools for WPF - I believe this is a new update to the Windows Presentation Foundation Profiling tools, a great looking (visually as you’d expect for a WPF product) and feature rich set of tools for working with and identifying performance issues in WPF
• CodeRush Xpress announced and available - Julian M Bucknall, CTO of Developer Express announces the release of a joint venture with Microsoft. Code Rush Express is a free refactoring tool (drawing on functionality in Code Rush and Refactor! Pro) which works in all non-express edition Visual Studio, and best of all is FREE!
• Announcing CTP2 of Microsoft project code name "Velocity" - Velocity, the Microsoft project to create a distributed cache has reached its CTP2 release, as announced at PDC yesterday. This new release has a bunch of really good sounding features including x64 support and a number of Availability and Performance related changes.
• The GDR RC Is Here! - Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR has gone to release candidate, as announced by Data Dude at PDC

Information

• Not at the PDC? Participate Virtually Here! - Jason N. Gaylord highlights a website which aims to coordinate a Virtual conference using Microsoft Shared View, Live meeting and Twitter, with a number of interesting non-pdc sessions.
• Batching NHibernate’s DML Statements - Davy Brion looks at the batching of statements in NHibernate allowing NHibernate to send multiple statements to the database in a batch thus cutting down the round trip time dramatically when executing large numbers of statements,
• Testing Hibernate mappings: Where to test from? - Mark Needham ponders the testing of (N)Hibernate Mappings and looks at three types of test you can apply
• Programmatically managing Virtual Server using C# - Saurabh Singh taks about programatically controlling Virtual Server 2005 virtual machines, showing how you can power up, down restore, etc all from the comfort of C#.
• Writing a good Debug.Assert - Marcelo talks about the use of Debug.Assert, what its for and how to use this relatively unknown (in my experience) feature of the platform.
• Silverlight 2 and Localisation/Globalisation - Mike Taulty takes a look at Internationalisation in Silverlight applications
• Announcing CodeRush Xpress for C# - Mark Miller - Mark Miller looks at a number of the features of Developer Express’s new Free refactoring tool
• Specifying Injection Constructor using Unity Fluent Interface for Loose Coupling and POCO - David Hayden looks at how the Unity IOC framework determines which constructor to call when creating instances of an object, and shows how you can influence this decision with attributes.
• Composing Statements with Expression Trees in .NET 3.0 - Chad Myers explores Expression Trees in preparation for a talk at the Alt.Net workshop, sharing an illustrative example along the way.
• Software + Services: The Greater Sum - Yesterday saw a number of new Microsoft websites getting launched, and following the Azure site, I think this is another of the key ones.

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Looks like this week is going to be a busy week Brew wise with a huge number of really good posts over the weekend, and I suspect this is only the start of it with it being PDC this week! There will be a few of the weekends posts making it into the brew tomorrow as I simply had too many today! Full on PDC coverage will start tomorrow, and I can feel a special section about to be created for the week.

Software

• Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET Framework 3.5 Released! - Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET Framework 3.5 are released, providing enhanced graphing capabilities to both web and desktop applications developers
• IronPython 2.0 Release Candidate - Harry Pierson announces the release of IronPython 2.0 Release Candidate, so final release can’t be far off.
• StructureMap 2.5 is Released! - Jeremy D. Miller announces the release of StructureMap 2.5, a Dependency Injection / Inversion of Control library with a number of nice features Significant in this release is some new documentation of the public interface, along with a whole host of other features.
• Rapid UI Mockups with Balsamiq - Aaron Jensen highlights a great looking simple tool for quickly mocking up UI prototypes. It exists as a free web app (with nag screens), or in paid for desktop formats.

Information

• PDC 2008: New .NET Logo - Scott Hanselman shares the new look .NET logo
• Exploring NHibernate Statistics, Part 1: Simple Data Fetching - Davy Brion takes a look at the Statistics feature of NHibernate 2.0, allowing you to obtain all kinds of useful information about the work your NHibernate Sessions and SessionFactory are doing.
• Can’t get to PDC? You can still catch the keynotes… live… - Greg Duncan points out that we (the unfortunate ones who are not at PDC) can still keep up to date with what is going on by watching the keynotes live over the web.
• Intellisense Luv for a Friday - Dave Burke shows one of the nice features of the Intellisense in Visual Studio 2008 - this is so clever and shows that they really do try to make Intelisense as useful as posisble
• Further Examination of .NET Framework Features Survey - Keyvan Nayyeri talks about the conclusions that can be drawn from the results of Scot Hanselmann’s recent survey on .NET technologies used.
• Simple AOP Example Using Castle DynamicProxy 2.0 - David Hayden looks at the Aspect Oriented Programming capabilities of Castle Dynamic Proxy showing how you can have your code run before a methods code.
• Application Domains - Ricardo Peres looks at using Application Domains to run your code with additional restrictions, covering creation, and unloading of application domains as well as creating instances in the application domain and calling methods.
• Simple Cryptography Block - Steve Sheldon shares a short chunk of code to encrypt and decrypt values - a useful resource as I always find the crypto APIs confusing to work with so having a simple reference piece is very useful
• ASP.NET MVC Tip: Dependency Injection with Unity Application Block - Shiju Varghese look at using the Unity Application Block to do Dependency Injection in an ASP.NET MVC Application.
• ReSharper Jedi – FizzBuzz in under 4 minutes - Chad Myers shows how good Resharper really can be by doing a Test Driven Development version of Fizz Buzz in 4 minutes without a mouse, using a number of ReSharper’s useful features.
• Using IronRuby To Implement Dynamic Business Rules - Justin Etheredge continues his series on Domain Validation with a look at using IronRuby to implement scripted rules which can interact with the C# code.
• Pex now a DevLabs project - Nikolai Tillmann announces that Pex is one of the first projects to be hosted on DevLabs, the new Microsoft site for software developer innovations, and along with this also makes Pex available as a Visual Studio 2010 (with the non-2010 version still available on the Microsoft Research site).
• ASP.NET MVC Storefront Part 23: WebForms and Dynamic Data - Rob Conery continues his screencast series with episode 23. In this part Rob talks with J Sawyer who has taken the ASP.NET MVC Store Front and created a web forms based front end along with a Dynamic Data powered admin site.
• Solving complex parsing tasks with RegexTreeer - Sergey Stoyan looks at implementing complex parsing solutions using the RegexTreeer library to build a tree of regular expressions to parse complex input.
• .NET Projects: Code Coverage with NCover - Grant Palin looks at the setup and working with NCover (and associated tools) to generate code coverage information for your projects. Plenty of screenshots and description of the process are included to get you going

Community

• Barcamp Liverpool 6th - 7th December 2008 - Barcamp has arrived in Liverpool, with a 2 day event happening in December. Having attended and enjoyed the Manchester Barcamp I highly recommend this event to anyone who can make it.

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Software

• Small Basic - A new Labs project from Microsoft labs, Small Basic has been in development on and off for a year. The idea behind Small Basic is to bring the fun and simplicity of writing code back, recapturing the fun and easy we used to program on the early 8bit home computers.
• NCover 3.0.2 Beta is now available - 1 day on, and the NCover team are on their 3rd beta release of NCover 3

Information

• Encapsulation: Entities, Collections And Business Rules - Derick Bailey talks about encapsulation of business rules in your business entities, rather than letting the functionality out into controllers or forms, and shows a solution to the problem.
• New MassTransit Screencast and Sample - Chris Patterson shares a screencast on the WebServiceBridge sample in MassTransit, showing how it works, and how it makes low coupling possible in web services for the publish / subscribe functionality.
• Application Idle - DaveyM69 looks at techniques to detect when a WinForms application is idle (for the purposes of logging a user out) in this Code Project Article.
• ASP.NET: Alternatives to Dynamic Controls - Part 2 - Adam Pooler continues his series looking at alternatives to creating controls dynamically in code, looking in this part at persisting values between postbacks.
• Troubleshooting ASP.NET issues with HTTPERR logs - Tess Ferrandez reminds us all of a very useful (and often forgotten) log file to help diagnose ASP.NET (and other Web server) errors.
• TODO.txt 2008 Ultimate Team Edition - Tobin Harris talks about his favourite way of achieving Collaborative Issue Management - use a text file as it ticks a lot of the boxes for such a requirement.
• Big Day for Amazon EC2: Production, SLA, Windows, and 4 New Capabilities - Significant things are happening for Amazon EC2 - its finally out of beta, and (more interestingly for us .NET folks) Windows and SQL Server are being made available (in a beta form) on the platform.
• Architecting .NET Web Applications for Scale & Performance (A Practical Guide) - A nice article which remains quite practical, covering working on large projects, managing development teams along with scaling and performance.
• What I want from an ORM - Colin Jack talks about some features he’d like to see in Object Relational Mapping software in the future.
• ASP.NET Patterns every developer should know - Alex Homer looks at some common patterns for ASP.NET, offering some implementation and usage notes for them.
• Custom Exceptions: When should you create them? - Jared Parsons shares some rules you should consider before creating your own exceptions

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Software

• Announcing the NCover 3 Beta Program - NCover release Beta 1 of NCover 3, a Code Coverage tool for .NET
• Pex 0.8 Released, featuring Code Digger and Stubs - One day after showing off the interesting forthcoming functionality of Pex, Nikolai Tillmann announces that Pex 0.8 is released. This release includes the Code Digger (mentioned in yesterday’s Brew), along with Stubs, and a number of bug fixes.

Information

• Debugging Large ViewState - Zach Kramer look into dealing with large ASP.NET viewstate, working out what is in there any why it is so large
• .NET Reflector: Soup to Nuts - Andrew Clarke gives a comprehensive run through of the features and techniques for working with Reflector, the tool originally by Lutz Roeder, now acquired by RedGate.
• The Weekly Source Code 35 - Zip Compressing ASP.NET Session and Cache State - Scott Hanselman looks into compression of Session and Cache items to gain significant additional storage of items. Looks like a useful technique when working on a Memory bound/CPU idle server.
• October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight - ScottGu provides his regular link post of WPF, ASP.NET and Silverlight content. About 75% of the links have not been featured in the Brew, so there is some good stuff there.
• Survey RESULTS: What .NET Framework features do you use? - Scott Hanselman shares the results of his recent survey on .NET features in use - the results look pretty much how I expected they would.
• Singletonitis - Sean Feldman talks about a common affliction, having singletons / static classes when you don’t really need them, and shows how you can remove them from your application, along with the benefits of doing so.
• DDD and Complexity - Colin Jack talks about the complexity of DDD, and how you can gain many of the advantages of DDD by adopting parts of the process / not following it to the letter.
• Where are the DDD sample applications? - Jimmy Bogard talks about why there are no real example applications for Domain Driven Development.
• C# Generics when working with Enum - johanvw shows how use of generics can make working with Enums a little easier
• Using Reflection To Extract Values From a Static Class - Adam Pooler delves into reflection on static classes by looking at an example of accessing items from the HTTPContext using reflection.
• Covariance and Contravariance in delegates - Elroy Dsilva examines tow interesting delegate features, illustrating with examples of each.
• Astoria futures: offline-enabled data services - Pablo Castro, software architect for the Astoria project at Microsoft talks about some of the early planning and thinking for offline functionality.
• Attaining IE8 Site Compatibility - Short Reference - Alexander Strauss talks about getting your website to work correctly in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8

Community

• Developer Day Registration is open - Ian Cooper announces that registrations for DDD 7 are open, and within 4 hours all the places were gone. They are still accepting registrations for reserve list places, which is worth registering for as there are usually a number of people who register and drop out.
• MIX09 | Web Design and Development Conference, March 18 – 20, 2009 - Registration is now open for the US MIX09 event, with early bird discounts of $200

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Software

• CopySourceAsHTML 3.0 has been released - Jan Schreuder highlights the availability of Version 3 of CopySourceAsHtml, a Visual Studio plugin which copies source from VS into nicely formatted HTML - ideal for code samples on blogs.
• LiveRun - a VS plugin to see the output of your program immediately - Lucian Wischik shares a neat plugin for demos which captures the current text buffer and compiles and runs writing the output to a window - ideal for those short demos in talks.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC Beta Source Code Release - I forgot to include this one yesterday - the sources for ASP.NET MVC Beta are now available on CodePlex
• Sneak Preview: Code Digger — The New Pex Experience - Nikolai Tillmann talks about a forthcoming feature of Pex which will examine existing code which has no tests and generate some tests by analysing the method. This looks really interesting, I can’t wait to try this out.
• C# Yellow Book - Rob Miles and the University of Hull share a PDF book which is used as the basis of their first year programming course. This is a nice introduction to both programming in C# as a language.
• CarTrackr - Sample ASP.NET MVC application - Maarten Balliauw shares a complete ASP.NET MVC sample application running on Beta 1, which makes use of a number of ASP.NET/ASP.NET MVC features, best practices, etc.
• Pex It: The File System, Abstraction, Mocking , Modeling - Jonathan de Halleux talks about how Pex can help with testing against the file system, looking at a implementation of the IFileSystem interface propsed by Brad Wilson which allows Pex to do its magic.
• Caliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and Silverlight - Caliburn , a framework for developing WPF and Silverlight applications, which provides implementations of a number of common UI patterns has found a new home on CodePlex
• Mass Transit - Part 2 of N - Tim Barcz continues his series looking at Mass Transit, an open source messaging system. In this part he looks at one of the supplied samples which come with Mass Transit.
• AjaxWorld Talk: Building a Great Ajax application from Scratch - Brad Abrams provides a huge blog post which walks through the creation of them demo application he presented at AjaxWorld. Lots of screenshots along the way, and a download of the source for the demo application are included.
• Almost IQueryable with NHibernate HQL - Tobin Harris looks at Linq’s IQueryable and NHibernate IQuery and attempts to find a middle ground when working with Hibernates HQL queries (as Linq for NHibernate is not finished yet)
• View Model Inheritance - Torkel Ödegaard talks about how he is using inheritance between views to provide common functionality in views in a base view and have the individual pages views inherit from this to get the functionality.
• Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know - Stephen Walther shares some simple tricks and tips for working in the IDE - most of them will probably be familiar to you, but its always worth checking, you never know what might save you some time.
• Back to Basics – The Default Keyword in Generic Code - Gil Fink talks about one of the less well know parts of generics, the default keyword which allows an instance of a generic type to be obtained.
• Different ways how to escape an XML string in C# - Mladen Prajdić shows 4 different ways of escaping special characters in XML

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