The Morning Brew

Software

• Windows Azure Tools and SDK July 2009 CTP - Jim Nakashima shares the news of the July 2009 CTP release of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK. This release brings in support for multiple web or worker roles, TFS support and a number of stability improvements. Be sure to check out the two posts linked at the end of Jim’s post (also by Jim) which go into more detail on two of the new features.
• Adventures of a ‘Devigner’ : Blacklight v4 for Silverlight 3 Released - Martin Grayson announces the release of Backlight 4 which now targets Silverlight 3, bringing a few new controls, and improvements to existing controls.
• WiimoteLib 1.8 Beta 1 Posted - Brian Peek announces the beta release of WiimoteLib 1.8 the .NET library taht allows you to use your Wii remote with your .NET applications. This release brings support for MotionPlus.

Information

• Fast Forward: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 - Bruno Terkaly takes a look at some of the new .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 features in WPF and parallel programming in this detailed and screenshot/diagram rich post
• Asynchronous programming in .NET survey - Josh Phillips of the Parallel Extensions Framework team appeals to the community to help them improve support for asynchronous programming by filling in a short questionnaire on Asynchronous Programming Model and Asynchronous Methods. If this stuff is something you care about go give them your opinion and help shape the future of .NET
• Create NHibernate classes using T4 - Brendan Kowitz looks into using T4 templates to generate classes based on NHibernate Mappings. This is something that can be useful, and a few years back I wrote a Visual Studio custom tool which generated .NET classes from hbm files, so this is an interesting evolution of the idea
• Comparing doubles can produce unexpected results - Kirill Osenkov reminds us to be aware of strange rounding issues when working with double precision numbers, and talks about a safer means of comparison.
• New NCL Features in .NET 4.0 Beta 2 - The Network Class Library Team who look after the contents of the System.Net namespaces talk about some of the new features that will be being introduced in beta 2 of .NET 4, including enhancements to SSL Policy, Sockets, the SMPTClient, and HTTPWebRequest to name just a few
• Unshackling IE8 Performance - Eric Law takes a look at some fo the common problems which cause Internet Explorer 8 to rune in a suboptimal way, a number of which apply to IE7 too.
• Internet Explorer’s Cache-Control Extensions - Eric Law also shares some information about the extensions to Cache-Control included in Internet Explorer
• Comparing Design Patterns in Ruby and C#: The Observer Pattern - John Miller continues a series of posts on Design Pattern comparisons in C# and Ruby with a look at the Observer Pattern, looking at the raw implementation in both languages, and also looking at where the languages make it easier to implement the pattern
• Finding undisposed objects - S. Senthil Kumar introduces ‘Undisposed’ a tool he created to help identify undisposed objects in your code using the CLR profiling API to monitor finalisation of objects
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  What does an OutOfMemoryException in .NET (on 32 bit) really mean? - Robert Bogue takes a look at the actual meaning of a .NET Out of Memory exception and shares a few tips on things to do if you get out of memory exceptions without actually being out of memory on your machine
• Iterator blocks Part Four: Why no yield in catch? - Eric Lippert continues his series on iterator blocks and the yield keyword with a look at why you can’t yield in the catch block of an iterator.
• Monitor your ASP.NET Cache API Behaviour - Simon Ince shares some good information on the monitoring you can do to watch the ASP.NET Cache, and to establish how effectve your caching is.

Community

• IronRuby Session - Video and Slides - Ben Hall shares the video and slides from his Vista Squad presentation on IronRuby delivered last week. I’ve been enjoying watching a number of the Vista Squad presentations, and the are building up quite a library.

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Software

• Welcome NHibernate 2.1.0 - The NHibernate Team announce the GA release of NHibernate 2.1 GA, along with the news that the NHibernate 2.1.x releases will be the last releases to target .NET 2.0
• IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module 2.0 beta released - Steve Schofield shares the news that the beta release of the IIS7 URL Rewrite Module 2.0 has been released by the IIS team. Available as a standalone install or through the Web Platform Installer this rules based rewriting engine allows you to customise URLs as well as modify the content of responses
• jQuery Ribbon RC 1 released! - Mikael Söderström announces the first official release of his JQuery Ribbon UI Control bringing the Ribbon UI into browser based applications

Information

• Two ways to use T4 templates: support code vs. one-time generation - David Ebbo looks at the two types of use of T4 Templates, exploring their use in one off code generation to build files you will keep and modify, and support code generation, where you generate code which you will consume, but not modify
• Demeter Helps You Fend Off the One True Constant: Change - John Teague examines one of the advantages of the Law of Demeter, the fact that you end up with less coupling of components, allowing you to respond to change more easily.
• .NET Binding Redirects - Updating Referenced Assemblies Without Recompiling Code - Rob Reynolds takes a look at assembly redirects, which allow you to replace assemblies with different versions using only configuration to make your application continue to function.
• Demystifying the ASP.NET MVC Project Type - Kevin Rohrbaugh digs into the internals of the ASP.NET MVC Visual Studio Project Type, looking at the References, conventions, and configuration
• F# - Succinct, Expressive, Efficient Functional Programming for .NET - InfoQ share video and slides of a talk from Don Syme, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, from QCon on the F# Language, providing an introduction to F# and functional programming along with a look at how functional programming is influencing programming in general
• Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 8: WCF Based Data Source - Brad Abrams continues his series of post on Silverlight 3 RTM and the .NET RIA services with a look at putting a WCF Service in between the database and the application. If you’ve been following this series closely you will notice that part 7 has been skipped, but Brad will be posting this part in due course
• Lessons in Software from Mike de Libero - Mike de Libero shares 10 important lessons in software development. A lot of them are the standard stuff, however some of these touch onto more than just the code and procedure
• StrictMock vs. DynamicMock: What are You Testing Here Anyway? - Jimmy Bosse talks about Pair Programming, and Test Driven Development, and in particular about the choice of Mock object used in tests and the decision about which type to use.
• NHibernate 2.1 and Collection Event Listeners - Jan Van Ryswyck looks at the newly released NHibernate 2.1 new feature of new event listeners for collections which allow you to implement things like one shot delete as shown in this post
• Extension methods - ForEach statement - Sujith K Jagini looks at the uses of extension methods in extending classes and interfaces with custom functionality in this introductory level post with a good worked example
• HTML5 Drag and Drop in deeetail - Ajaxian highlights the work by Les Orchard on the HTML 5 Drag and Drop functionality which can be used today in FireFox 3.5. Drag and drop has always been difficult to get to work in web applications, and from the shortness of the code involved this HTML 5 functionality looks really useful

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET, July 20th - A reminder about the European Virtual Alt.Net event for this week - Ian Robinson and Jim Webber will be talking on REST, SOA and much more from 7pm (UK).
• Alt.NET Bristol Beers #1 - Another quick reminder about the first Alt.NET Bristol Beers event, to be held 6pm tomorrow night at the Portcullis, Clifton, Bristol BS8 4LE
• LIDNUG: Silverlight Ready for Business and .NET RIA Services Presentation - Brad Abrams will be talking on Silverlight for business applications, and the . NET Rich Internet Application Services ‘at’ the Virtual Linked In .NET User Group on 30th July. Sadly the 8pm PDT will make the talk too late for most folk in Europe, but if you are able to watch it should be an interesting one.

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Software

• WikiPlex - An Embedded Wiki Engine - Matt Hawley announces the first public release of WikiPlex, the re-write of the original wiki used in CodePlex which is released under the MS-PL license
• Dryad/DryadLINQ and Project Trident Released - Matthew Podwysocki highlights two of the Microsoft Research software releases announced at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, Project Trident to scientific workbench for processing scientific data using C# and workflows, and Dryad / DryadLINQ tools for running Linq queries across a large number of machines as Distributed data parallel computing
• Encrypt Your Web.config, Please - ‘Yet Another WebDev Blog’ shares a neat utility which makes it much easier to encrypt your web.config files

Information

• Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 6: Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) - Brad Abrams continues his series on rebuilding his Mix9 Silverlight Demo in Silverlight3, in this part responding to some reader feedback about passing Data Access Layer entities across to Silverlight, and replacing them with pure DTO entities
• Custom XML Serialization of a .NET class - Robert Bogue gives a very simple 5 point guide to implementing your own custom XML Serialisation.
• Google Talk (GTalk) Autoreply using .NET - Shoban Kuma looks at interfacing with the Google Talk Instant Messaging system using the agsXMPP .NET library to write a simple auto responder.
• How to: Use CAT.NET v1.1 as a Visual studio Add-In to identify security flaws within managed code - Syed Aslam Basha looks at how you can use the CAT.NET tool to analyse your code for security flaws, and also provides a code sample which contains lots of flaws which you can use to learn about the tool - also interesting to read the code and play spot the flaw manually
• TDD Anti-Patterns - I came across a couple of people linking to this article from 2006 by James Carr which lists a number of TDD related anti-patterns. Some of the names are rather light hearted, but the problems they describe are quite serious
• Mocking indexer getters with Moq - Bertrand Le Roy, in a follow up to a previously linked post, takes a look at mocking indexer based getters using the Moq mocking framework, which includes an important use of a Lambda to ensure you get the return you want from the mock.
• How to serve the same data in Json, Xml or Html with Asp.Net Mvc revised - Mark Jensen shares some code to allow you to easily return data in a number of different formats in ASP.NET MVC (rather like the way rails does). This code is destined for the mvccontrib project, so expect to see it used in lots of places.

Community

• Presentation Patterns for Virtual ALT.NET in August: You pick the topics - Jeremy D. Miller will be giving presentation on Presentation Patterns to the Virtual Alt.Net usergroup in early August and is looking for the community to shape the talk by suggesting the patterns they would like to hear about

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Software

• It is done… S#arp Architecture 1.0 RTM - Billy McCafferty announces the RTM release of his S#arp Architecture 1.0 project which provides a solid foundation to build ASP.NET MVC & NHibernate powered applications
• Security Tools : Anti-XSS Library 3.0 RTM - Anil announces the release of the Anti-Cross Site Scriptiing library 3.0 RTM release, which is binary compatible with the previous releases, but brings a number of new features and supporting materials
• SubSonic 3.0.0.3 Is Released - Rob Conery makes another significant bug fix release to SubSonic 3, and also outlines his plan for how development will continue on the V3 releases
• Pex v0.15.40714.1: Better performance, less Bugs… - Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces an updated release of the PEX testing platform. This update is a performance and bugfix release, with no new features included

Information

• Branch-Per-Feature Source Control. Introduction - Derick Bailey starts a new series on Source Control, specifically looking at the idea of having a branch of source code for every feature being created. In Part 1: Why he looks at traditional approach, and the many down sides of working this way, and looks at how Branch Per Feature addresses those problems
• Beautiful Windows 7 Reference App - Kate Gregory highlights a Photo Viewer application which exploits the concept of XP2Win7 which allows you to have an application ‘light up’ in Windows 7 and utilise the new features of the OS
• The Anemic Domain Model Pattern - Greg Young explores the cases where the Anemic Domain Model is not an anti-pattern, defining 5 points to consider whose answers may point to the anemic domain being good for the problem you are solving
• Having Fun with the New Editor in VS 2010 - Kirill Osenkov plays with the possibilities what the new WPF editor in Visual Studio 2010 brings, along with highlighting a number of excellent resources about the new editor.
• MOQ Mothers - David Starr talks about using ObjectMother to create test instances of his entities using Moq Stubs, to make it easy to create valid and invalid entities for testing purposes
• Resource Files and ASP.NET MVC Projects - K. Scott Allen looks at some of the sticking points with localization and internationalization in ASP.NET MVC applications
• An Overview of Partial Classes and Partial Methods - Scott Mitchell gives an overview of the Partial Classes and Partial Methods functionality introduced in the last two .NET releases
• Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 5: Astoria, Add Service Reference and WinForms - Brad Abrams continues his series updating his Mix09 sample application to Silverlight3. In this part Brad adds an ADO.NET Data Service, and hooks that into his Silverlight application, and goes on to share the same Application logic an use it in a WinForms app
• Storage Size And Performance Implications Of A GUID PK - Derick Bailey looks at the effects of choosing different size / Data types as a primary key on both the number of unique values and the size they occupy on disk

Community

• Code for Windows 7 contest… - Mithun Dhar highlights a Windows7 based programming competition which could net you a free trip to PDC, a pile of cash and the opportunity to present at PDC
• What’s New in CLR v4 (.NET Framework 4) from the CLR Team - Ramaraju P highlights a live meeting presentation from the .NET 4 CLR team, looking at Garbage Collection, NGEN and Performance. This event is to be held this Friday (17th) at 10AM PST, so it is early evening for any UK / Europe based devs

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Information

• Confirming Commercial Availability and Announcing Business Model - The Windows Azure Team announce the pricing model and Commercial Availability of the Windows Azure Platform with discounts available to partners and MSDN Premium subscribers to receive access to development and testing environments
• The Law of Demeter Is Not A Dot Counting Exercise - Phil Haack digs into the Law of Demeter, looking at what its definition is, and how that law should be applied, calling on a great many posts by others on the subject to re-enforce his point.
• "Geneva" Single Sign On Gets New Names - Bruce Kyle highlights the new names for the various parts of the Microsoft Geneva Identity Framework
• Take the .Net 4 Beta1 survey - The CLR Team are running a survey of developers opinions on the CLR4 in .NET 4 Beta 1, looking to gain insight into satisfaction with the new CLR, and how easy upgrading and creating applications is proving to be
• F#: A day writing a Feedburner graph creator - Mark Needham has been experimenting with using F# to analyse his Feed Burner statistics, and along the way has looked in to Wrapping .NET library calls to make functional composition easier.
• .NET 2.0+ ActiveX Controls Part 2 - Controlling Internet Explorer via IWebBrowser - Rick Minerich picks up his series on .NET 2 and ActiveX controls with a look at using COM interop to gain control of Internet Explorer
• Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 4: SEO, Export to Excel and Out of Browser - Brad Abrams continues his series updating is Mix09 sample application to Silverlight 3 with a look at the Search Engine Optimisations using Sitemaps and URL links, and looks at creating Export files for use in Excel along with the Silverlight 3 out of browser support
• Bling: a WPF Framework/Declarative Strongly-Typed DSL for Quick Expressive C# WPF Apps - Kirill Osenkov highlights Bling, an open source project from Sean McDirmid of Microsoft Research, which is a C# library which allows you to easily work with images, animations, interactions and visualisations in WPF
• More On SubSonic’s Simple Repository - Rob Conery provides a short screen cast on the SimpleRepository which is included in SubSonic 3
• Just say no to ‘Poor Man’s Dependency Injection’. - Chad Myers weighs in on the use of Dependency injection in sample applications such as NerdDinner with this post recalling a mailing list post on the subject, and in The usual result of Poor Man’s Dependency Injection looks at the effects down the line of taking the poor mans approach to Dependency injection and the decisions you end up having to make. Finally Jimmy Bogard shares his views on when dependency injection is appropriate in his post When is Poor Man’s Dependency Injection appropriate? -
• Lessons Learned: A Grand Post-Mortem - Billy McCafferty shares a very interesting set of real world views on a number of topics relating to development methodology
• LINQ to SQL and Transactions - Rick Strahl takes a look at using transactions in your Linq to Sql code by way of the TransactionScope and the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator

Community

• SQLBits goes West - Martin Bell announces the next and bigest event in the SQLBits conference programme, to be held 19th - 21st November in Newport, Wales, The Thursday and Friday will be pay for days, with the Saturday being the standard free conference
• Online Book Club - Time to vote - Europe Virtual ALT.NET folks are looking to start a virtual online book club, and are looking for a decision from the community as to which book to start with

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Software

• MEF Preview 6 Available - Nicholas Blumhardt announces the release of the 6th preview of the Managed Extensibility Framework, bringing it closer to RTM, and also introducing MEF for Silverlight, along with a bunch of other new features across the board.
• Office 2010: popcorn previews - Yesterday was a big Office 2010 day, with the products going into technical preview. The Inside Office Blog has a number of screencasts of the new products in action, and in the InfoPath Team’s post Install the Office 2010 Technical Preview and win an Xbox 360 Elite! they have the details of the Preview Programme and also an incentive to get it installed

Information

• Throw away and rebuild or refactor from within - Derik Whittaker discusses on of the great programmer debates, should you start over and rebuild a product or should you refactor it from the inside?
• A programmers secret weapon: the humble to-do list - Richard Dingwall talks about one of my favourite Programmer Productivity tips, keeping a simple to-do list.
• Using NHibernate for Legacy Databases - Jan Van Ryswyck examines some techniques for dealing with legacy databases when working with NHibernate
• Easier Multithreaded Debugging - John Robbins shares some Visual Studio macros which help make debugging multi threaded programs a little easier by allowing you to make your breakpoints stop on particular thread ids
• Building a Presentation Framework with Prism for Silverlight - John Papa talks about his presentation framework he has constructed using Prism for Silverlight, in this post exploring the concepts of the framework, with future posts to look at the actual code
• User Interface Patterns - Greg Malcolm writes up a talk he gave at ColArc looking at the common User Interface patterns in use in software development, exploring MVC, MVP, Presenter-Abstraction-Control, Hierarchical MVC, and Model-View-ViewModel.
• AspPathGuru: A little T4 love for ASP.NET WebForms - David Ebbo brings some of his T4 expertise to WebForms with a template which allows yo to load controls using LoadControl using strongly typed names rather than string filenames
• Lambda Expressions: A C# 3.0 Language Enhancement - ‘logicchild’ explores Lambda expressions in this Introductory article for CodeProject
• Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 2: Rich Data Query - Brad Abrams continues his series of posts updating his sample application to Silverlight 3 and the July RIA services update. In part 2 Brad looks at the data querying and retrieval, and in Part 3 explores authentication
• Why There’s Nothing Wrong With Dependency Injection in NerdDinner - Tim Barcz responds to last weeks post from Jimmy Bogard talking about the the good points of the NerdDinner Dependency Injection implementation
• Test Doubles: My current approach - Mark Needham talks about his current test double methods, looking at his uses of Stub objects, Fake Objects, mock objects and dummy objects

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Software

• Silverlight 3 Released - ScottGu gives his usual post release run down of the new and significant features in Silverlight 3, the Silverlight 3 Visual Studio Tools and Expression 3.
• Silverlight Charting gets an update - and a TreeMap! [Silverlight Toolkit July 2009 release now available!] - ‘Delay’ announces an updated release of the Silverlight toolkit for July 2009 which supports Silverlight 2 and 3, and introduces a rather nice treemap control
• Silverlight 3 and CSLA .NET 3.7 - Rockford Lhotka announces an updated build of his CSLA.NET framework updated for the latest Silverlight release and sporting a new new version number
• xUnit.net 1.5 CTP 2 - Brad Wilson announces the second community technology preview of xUnit.NET 1.5. This release contains significant changes to the GUI Runner, which is looking pretty good.

Information

• Why Do I Keep Seeing This Mistake? - Kevin Kline highlights a sloppy, but all to common, practice of doing too much unnecessary work inside a loop.
• Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 1: Navigation Basics - Brad Abrams updates the example which was a part of this MIX09 talk on “building business applications with Silverlight 3”. In this part Brad steps through building the navigation and themes
• Cheesy ASP.NET MVC Project Upgrader for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 - Scott Hanselman talks about the ASP.NET MVC release which goes with Visual Studio 2010 beta 1, and what is going to happen with beta 2, along with providing a simple upgrader program for VS2008 ASP.NET MVC projects to work in VS2010
• Modeling DSLs with F# and Units of Measure - Matthew Podwysocki talks about the Soccer-Fun functional programming challenge, and looks at Units of Measure in F#, and how thy can be applied in the Soccer-Fun problem.
• Code Deodorants for Code Smells - Nick Harrison looks at the term ‘Code Smells’ and in particular the problem of inappropriate intimacy between objects, looking to solve this code smell with the application of a ‘Code Deodorant’ in the form of ’separation by interface’
• NEric discovers Dimecasts - a great resource for none-Microsoft .NET technologies and tools - Eric Nelson highlights the excellent DimeCasts screen cast series as a great place to get your alternative .NET technologies fix.
• A (less) simple include for ASP.NET - Bertrand Le Roy continues looking at simple methods of including common contents with an enhanced version of his include function for ASP.NET
• LINQ to SQL - Detach Entities. Free source code and programming help - Shannon Davidson and ejsmith explore how you can detach objects from the LINQ to SQL Data Context using PLINQO
• Continuous Integration: Community College Discussion - Mark Needham highlights some key points discussed in a recent Community College event about Continuous Integration
• Lessons From My First Attempt At Bringing Agile Into A Non-Agile shop - Ryan Svihla talks about his experience brings agile practices into a non-agile development environment, focusing on the key areas, and looking at what worked and what didn’t
• How we handle application configuration - Joshua Flanagan talks about how he is managing configuration settings in a type safe, no magic strings, test and tool friendly way, showing it in use and explaining how it works under the hood
• Bart’s Control Library - Not What You Think It Is - Part 0 - Bart De Smet starts a series of posts on the syntax of the C# language, how it is possible to map c#3 programs back to equivalent C#2 programs, and how LINQ fits in with that. Bart starts off with a look at the If Statement, and moves on to look at while loops and non-local returns in Part 1. I have to confess I’ve not fully read these two articles yet, but from a quick glance I think I’m going to need to read them twice to understand them

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Software

• SilverLight 3 has RTW’ed (aka. It’s done, released, baked, RTM, gold, what are you waiting for go get it, etc, etc) - Greg Duncan highlights the release to web release of Silverlight 3. Officially the release is today, however from a number of accounts it would seem that the release process started yesterday
• ReSharper for Visual Studio 2010 (Preview) - JetBrains begin making preview releases of ReSharper for Visual Studio 2010, great news for those (like me) who have developed a ReSharper addiction
• SubSonic 3.0.0.2 Is Released - Rob Conery provides another bugfix release of his SubSonic ORM, taking the version number to 3.0.0.2. This relase also contains a few new features too.
• ScrewTurn Wiki Version 3.0 RC1 Is Out - ScrewTurn Software announce the first release candidate build of Version 3 of their free and open source Wiki Software

Information

• Free Ebook Developers Developers Developers Developers - Derek Hatchard highlights a free e-book of articles from Microsoft’s ‘{You Shape} It’ campaign. Covering topics such as working with brownfield code, C# features you should be using, creating installers, and much more its a worthy read
• A simple include for ASP.NET - Bertrand Le Roy follows on from his previous post on master pages with a simple extension method which can be used in place of masterpages if you don’t require designer support
• C# And Accepting Parameters. - ‘webdev_hb’ looks at two different ways of passing unknown numbers of parameters into your methods in this Code Project article
• Reuse: Is the Dream Dead? - Kirk Knoernschild looks at the reasons why we arn’t getting huge re-use out of our code despite that being one of the guiding principles in development for a considerable time
• Parallel.Invoke() vs. Explicit Task Management - Cristina Manu looks at the differences between Parallel.Invoke and using Parallel Tasks in the Parallel Extensions Framework, and looks at when you should use each
• Building a 3-Tier App with Silverlight 3, .NET RIA Services and Azure Table Storage - Modesty Zhang writes about the creation of 3 tier applications using Silverlight and Windows Azure table storage giving a good run through of the code required

Community

• ScottGu ASP.NET MVC Session Video Available Now - Mike Ormond shares the video he took of Scott Guthrie’s talk at Vista Squad on ASP.NET MVC

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