The Morning Brew

Software

• General availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 – Daniel Walzenbach highlights the release to the general public of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 with this post which contains links to the downloads for all editions (Shell, Ultimate, Premium, Professional, Express[C#, VB, C++, Web Dev]) along with the standalone framework download, an other related downloads. My experiences downloading last night were pretty good, with all the bits I grabbed downloading at a good rate.
• All-In-One Code Framework : All-In-One Code Framework Release 2009-10-18: Brief introduction of new samples – ‘colbertz’ highlights the 18th October Release of the All-In-One Code Framework. This library of code gives samples of a vast array of Microsoft technologies in a form that should be easy for you to utilise in your applications
• IronPython and IronRuby CTPs for .NET 4.0 Beta 2 – Harry Pierson highlights the release of new CTP of IronRuby and IronPython which run against the .NET 4 Beta 2 release
• Microsoft Windows: Windows 7 – The other obvious news for the day is the official launch of Windows 7. My RSS reader was full of posts about this this morning however I’m not going to be giving it that much coverage, despite it being bigger than Harry Potter (Windows 7 breaks Amazon UK pre-order volume record, ousts Harry Potter)
• Unsure about upgrading to Windows 7? Tools to help – Brian Groth highlights some useful tools to help determine if your machine and peripherals are suitable for Windows 7

Information

• 77 Windows 7 Tips – Jas Dhaliwal gives you 77 things to try out with your newly installed Windows 7 gathered together from a number of sources
• Interesting findings in the diff between .NET Fx v4 Beta1 and Beta2 – Patrick Smacchia points his NDepend tool at the Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases of the .NET Framework 4 and discusses the details of the changes that it identifies between the two, and it would seem that there are a lot of changes since beta 1
• Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010 (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) – Scott Guthrie continues his VS2010 / .NET 4 series of posts with a look at some of the changes that have been made in Visual Studio 2010 to make moving about your code base easier. I actually saw Scott demonstrating these features at the Guathon event in Manchester last month, and they look like really good enhancements to the basic product
• What’s New in the BCL in .NET 4 Beta 2 – Justin Van Patten of the BCL Team highlights the significant new features of the Base Class Library with the Beta 2 release, looking at features such as complex numbers, Observable collections, new System.Environment features and a whole lot more
• New Visual Studio 2010 Built-in C# Snippets Cheat Sheet – John Sheehan has produced a simple but effective ‘Cheat Sheet’ for the Visual Studio 2010 code snippets detailing what each of them is and how and where you can utilise them
• Indexed Properties in C# 4.0 – Kirill Osenkov shows off one of the less well known features of C#4, the ability to use indexed properties created in other technologies as indexed properties without having to call the awkward get_Value and set_value functions. This should vastly improve writing COM Interop code
• Visual Basic "HowDo I" Videos – The Visual Basic Team are producing two series of videos one focusing on the 2010 VB language features, and the other on using VB within the Visual Studio IDE
• Getting Started with Visual Studio 2010 IntelliTrace: Hello IntelliTrace! – Habib Heydarian highlights another of the exciting Visual Studio 2010 features, IntelliTrace which allows you to record the execution of a .NET application and later on replay it, and also looks at the Historical Debugging capabilities in his post The future of debugging is here! Visual Studio 2010 now supports stepping back in the debugger.
• Mozilla and Microsoft work together on WPF\ClickOnce plugins – Brad Abrams talks about the recent decision to have FireFox block the ClickOnce add on for security reasons, and talks about the interaction between Microsoft and Mozilla
• Duck Typing with Castle – Elton Stoneman highlights a useful library from David Meyer which allows you to achieve duck typing by way of clever use of the Castle Dynamic Proxy.
• Some Smaller Features in the Latest Release of F# – Don Syme talks about a number of the smaller new features of the F# release available as a part of VS2010/.NET 4 and as a standalone for VS2008/.NET 3.5.
• Extension Methods to Make Thread Safe WPF Programming Easier – Simon Knox shows how some simple Extension methods can take away a lot of the clutter required to correctly update a WPF UI when your application is multi-threaded. The same principle could also be used for WinForms apps.
• Force .NET application to run in 32bit process on 64bit OS – Gabriel Schenker highlights a few places where you have to change settings to get your web applications to run in 32bit mode when your OS is a 64bit OS.
• Visual Studio Myths – busted wide open – Eric Nelson and the rest of the UK Developer Evangelist team share a Silverlight application which aims to dispell a number of common myths about the different versions of Visual Studio and peoples reluctance to upgrade

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Software

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit – October Preview (aka VS2010 B2 version) released – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Training Kit, newly updated to take into account the changes in Beta 2. This kit includes presentations, hands on labs and demos covering C#, VB, F#, Parallel extensions, WCF, WPF, WF and much much more

Information

• Code Contracts Preview: Invariants – Dino Esposito continues his DotNetSlackers article series on the Code Contracts functionality of .NET 4 with a look at the use of invariants and looking at the role they play in inheritance and also in the class design process
• VS10 Beta 2 From an ASP.NET MVC Perspective – Phil Haack talks about the ASP.NET MVC 2 inclusion in Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 Beta 2, highlighting the significant features, and talking about upgrading projects to VS2010
• 31 Days of Refactoring eBook – Sean Chambers shares the PDF E-Book edition of his Refactoring Blog Series posted back in August kindly produced by Simone Chiaretta
• Testability Of Date-Dependent Code – Davy Brion talks about two common techniques to enable the reliable testing of Date based code either by providing the date obtaining routine with a service which can be overridden for testing, or by routing all calls for dates through a custom static method which can be provided with dates to return
• Strongly Typed ASP.Net MVC Helpers – Sean McAlinden shows how you can create strongly typed helper methods for use in ASP.NET MVC Views by using lambda expressions to specify what are often magic strings in the standard framework helper methods
• Set up Spring.Net IoC with ASP.Net MVC – Sean McAlinden also shows how you can utilise the Inversion of Control Container from Spring.Net in ASP.NET MVC by extending the default controller factory to create controllers through the Spring container
• MVC 2 Areas and Containers – K. Scott Allen also argues for the use of DefaultControllerFactory as a base class for your own controllerfactory implementations as it includes a lot of the namespace identification routines that support areas, and allow your controllerfactory to make use of that without any work
• Microsoft Ajax Minifier VS YUI Compressor – Ajaxian compares the newly released Microsoft Ajax Minifier with the more established Yahoo YUI Compressor, looking at the differences between the minification techniques used by each.
• Fixing the Visual Studio Add Reference Dialog – Quickly add a Project Reference – Brian Schmitt shares a macro which provides a quicker way to add interproject references between projects in the same solution by bypassing the standard Visual Studio 2008 References dialog
• SQLite Nunit & Fluent Nhibernate – Test your data access layer – Dan Watson shares a number of code snippets which utilise SQLite and Fluent NHibernate to allow you to test your data code by using an in-memory database rather than the slower out of process fully relational database to provide you with quick running tests.
• Writing Extension Methods in F# to Use in C# – David Morton shows that you can create extension methods in F# code and utilise them in your C#, perhaps providing a nice simple way of integrating and introducing functional F# code into your traditional C# projects
• How to create your own virtual machine. – ‘icemanind’ shares a tutorial on CodeProject which looks at how you can create a virtual machine written in C#, providing an interesting insight into how virtual machines are implemented and work
• To Brace or not to Brace in C# ifs and other Constructs – Peter Kellner asks one of the great coding style questions of all time, ‘do I have to use braces with that?’

Community

• Community For MVC.Net – Mid Oct Live Meeting – Tonight (UK) sees the Community for MVC.Net have their mid October live meeting. This meeting starts at 12 noon CST, which makes it early evening here in the UK. The speaker this time round is Jimmy Bogard talksing about testing the UI

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In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last 18 hours, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 went to Beta 2 release yesterday, so today we have a special section devoted to the information about that release

Software

• Announcing Visual Studio 2010 and .NET FX 4 Beta 2 – Soma Somasegar announces the latest evolution in .NET4 / Visual Studio 2010, the Beta 2 release. This release is currently available to MSDN Subscribers, and will become generally available to the general public on Wednesday. More details on this to be found in today’s special .NET 4 / Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 section below
• ReSharper Early Access Program – JetBrains have made their first publicly available nightly build of Resharper 5.0. This is pre-release software, and the first release at that, so its likely to be a little shakey, but will be interesting to see what they have planned. Currently this seems to be a VS2008 only release
• IIS Media Services 3.0 Released – BillS IIS Blog has the lowdown on the newly released IS Media Services . This free download plugs into Windows 2008 / 2008R2 and provides a means of delivering true HD video streams with real time monitoring. Also available is teh Smooth Streaming Player Developer Kit which supports the video streams in Silverlight
• Sync Framework 2.0 Available for Download – LarenC of the Sync Framework team highlights the release of Sync Framework 2.0. This release builds on the previous version, making it easier to achieve more complex scenarios and extends the number of built in data providers to support more data sources.
• SharePoint 2010 – Yesterday also saw the announcements of SharePoint 2010 at the Sharepoint Conference. This post details a number of the new features that will be included. My blog won’t be offering much coverage of Sharepoint as its not a technology I work with, however for those wanting more information Arpan Shah has gathered links to a few suitable resource sites in his Welcome to SharePoint 2010 post
• Silverlight (and WPF) Data Visualization classes unsealed [Silverlight Toolkit October 2009 release now available!] – ‘Delay’ highlights the release of the October 2009 Silverlight Toolkit, whos most significant feature is support for Visual Studio 2010, along with common drag-and-drop support for Silverlight within the browser following the WPF API
• Migrating ASP.NET MVC 1.0 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 – Eilon Lipton shares a useful tool which converts Visual Studio projects from ASP.NET MVC 1 to the ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Preview 2

Information

• Mapping From IDataReader/IDataRecord with AutoMapper – Jan Van Ryswyck talks about the use of a patch he submitted for AutoMapper which allows mapping to and from data readers meaning you can easily remove a lot of boilerplate mapping code in those situations too.
• .NET Reflection: The untouchable? No, not at all. – Vikas Burman talks about how the ‘Reflection is slow’ argument that may developers have as their default view point can mean that you miss out on a lot of powerful functionality
• Dynamic lookup operator, aka duck typing in F# – Laurent Le Brun talks about duck typing in F# using the Dynamic Lookup Operator
• .NET Hang Case study: The danger of locking on strings – Tess Ferrandez shares more of her debugging wisdom with a look at an interesting problem you can encounter if you lock on strings in your application, offering some advice for the best way to do locking
• C# Frequently Asked Questions : Dynamic in C# 4.0: Creating Wrappers with DynamicObject – Alexandra Rusina looks at how you can create wrapper class functionality using DynamicObject in .NET 4
• My History of Visual Studio (Part 10, final) – Rico Mariani closes out his Visual Studio Series of posts with a look at the innovations in the Visual Studio 2010 release
• How to render the same template on the server and client with minimal redundancy – Tales from the Evil Empire – Bertrand Le Roy digs deeper into the templating support of the Microsoft Ajax Library, and shows how you can minimise the duplication between Server-side and client-side templates.
• What is this thing you call ‘thread safe’? – Eric Lippert looks into what is meant by Thread Safety, giving a basic introduction to the key concepts involved
• F# October 2009 CTP/Beta2 – F# + Rx Together At Last – Matthew Podwysocki talks about the new F# release which brings together F# and the reactive framework for the first time. This release is available as a part of the VS2010 Beta 2, and also as a standalone CTP release against VS2008

Community

• ScottGu Manchester Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Video – Mike Taulty shares the video footage from the Guathon event held in Manchester last month. This post contains the footage of Scott Guthrie’s talks on Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4, and ScottGu Manchester Silverlight Video contains the video for Scott’s Silverlight talk

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Beta 2 Release

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 – Scott Hanselman gives a good general overview of what is new in the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 release covering the key enhancements to the product
• VS2010 Beta 2 Installed on a Previous Beta 1 System – Sam Gentile shares a few details on uninstalling the previous Beta 1 build of Visual Studio 2010
• WF4 Changes Between Beta 1 and Beta 2 – ‘mwinkle’ talks about the changes made to Workflow between the .NEt 4 Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases
• Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Videos Galore – Lisa Feigenbaum shares a barage of Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 resources including a good number of videos on the new features of the languages and IDE
• VS2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 Announced! – Elisa Flasko gives the lowdown on what is new in Beta 2 for data access, covering Entity Framework and ADO.NET
• ‘First-time Experience’ with Arch Tools – ‘camerons’ shows off some of the new Architecture related features of Visual Studio 2010
• Visual Studio 2010 beta 2: a quick web tour – Pietro Brambat explores the Web development features of VS2010 looking at ASP.NET WebForms, Silverlight 3 and ASP.NET MVC 2
• F# in Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 is now available ( plus matching F# CTP Update for VS2008) – Don Syme talks about the inclusion of F# in the Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 Beta 2 release.

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