The Morning Brew

Software

• Agatha 1.0 Beta 2 Is Out - Davy Brion announces the release of the second beta of Agatha 1.0, the open source version of his workplaces Request Response Service Layer implementation, with improvements to logging, IOC support, examples and the introduction of Unity support for both standard and Silverlight.
• T4MVC 2.6: MVC 2 Areas support - David Ebbo announces the 2.6 release of his T4 Template linrary for ASP.NET MVC which introduces support for MVC2 areas allowing you to break up your application into a related sections each having their own models, controllers and views

Information

• Microsoft AJAX CDN - Now with SSL Support - ScottGu highlights the new support for SSL connections on the Microsoft AJAX CDN which hosts common JavaScript files in the cloud for you to utilise in your sites for improved performance and reliability. The introduction of SSL support now means that the CDN can be utilised for parts of your site which run under SSL without any securiity warnings
• T4 Toolbox: Automatic Template Transformation - Oleg Sych looks at making T4 templates automatically re-generate when one of the files they are based on changes ensuring the generated output is always up to date, making use of the Visual Studio Custom Tool Support
• Custom value types are like buses - Jon Skeet talks about the proliferation of value type objects which have been created for his porting Joda Time to .NET
• Paging Records Sucks - Use jQuery to Scroll Just In Time - Rob Conery shows how you can easily implement infinite scrolling in your applications to avoid the ‘next page’ pattern, and improve your user experience using ASP.NET MVC and some jQuery
• CQRS - Trying to make it re-usable - Mark Nijhof talks about his efforts to make his Command Query Responsibility Separation sample reusable, and along the way discusses Convention over Configuration
• BDD with MSpec and Rhino Auto Mocks (part 3) - Jon Hilton continues series of posts on BDD with the MSpec library and Rhino Mocks. In this 3rd part he look at the context and creating the mocks and stubs and setting expectations using Rhino Mocks
• Wrapping up the StructureMap Automocking Container - Richard Cirerol looks at wrapping up the StructureMap automocking container into a more intention revealing interface for use with his MSpec Tests
• From Go to Deploy, hosting your website and data on Azure "How To" - Greg Duncan highlights a nice piece from Brandon Werner which runs through the process of setting up a personal ASP.NET MVC based site on the Azure cloud using a nice step by step process
• MEF has landed in Silverlight 4. We come in the name of extensibility - Glenn Block gives the low down on what the Managed Extensibility Framework being included in Silverlight 4 means for developers of RIA applications, giving some nice simple explanations of some of the core concepts
• Integrating Your IOC Container With Agatha - Davy Brion talks about the work he has done in Agatha to allow it to work with your IOC Container of choice, along with the reasons he didn’t use the Common Service Locator, and how he ended up achieving this support
• Albacore: All A-Twitter With A New Logo, Tag Line, And URL - Derick Bailey talks about some of the non-code recent developments on the Albacore project (.NET Tasks for Rake) including a new website, discussion group and logo
• IIS URL Rewrite - rewriting non-www to www - Scott Forsyth looks at using the IIS7 URL Rewrite tool to redirect users who forget the www. at the start of a websites URL to the full URL looking at a couple of ways of achieving the same effect
• Database Change Management with Tarantino - Ryan Kelley runs through his setup of the Tarantino Database Change Management tool to help solve his database versioning problems (which probably closely match your database versioning problems too)
• Git guts: Merging and rebasing - James Gregory continues his series of posts looking at the Git version control tool and how it works. This part takes a look at the merging functionality of Git

1 Comment »

As expected, today was a low post count edition due to yesterday being Thanksgiving in the US. I expect normal levels to return on Monday.

Information

• A Reading Guide To Becoming A Better Developer - Davy Brion shares his recommended reading list (and order) of books to help make you a better developer. All of the books mentioned are the best in their field, and there are some additional recommendations from Davy’s readers in the comments section
• Supporting multiple submit buttons on an ASP.NET MVC view - Maarten Balliauw shares a neat technique using a custom attribute derived from the ActionNameSelectorAttribute to allow ASP.NET MVC to make decisions about which action to call allowing you to have two submit buttons on a form, each doing different actions when called.
• Getting Started with Entity Framework 4 - Lazy Loading - Eric Nelson continues with his series on the Entity Framework 4 with a look at its support for lazy loading entities, a common ORM feature which was missing from the V1 release of Entity Framework
• Writing a profiler for Silverlight applications Part 1 - Gabriel Schenker begins a new series looking at using Mono Cecil to add instrumentation code into assemblies to allow them to be profiled, focusing specifically at profiling Silverlight applications. This first part introduces Mono Cecil and looks at how it work generally with any .NET Assembly
• Extending ASP.NET MVC 2 Templates - Kazi Manzur Rashid explores the ASP.NET MVC 2 Templates and the DisplayFor/EditorFor functionality, looking at extending the ModelMetaData to provide improved templating support for real world applications. Full sample code is provided
• TDD: Testing delegation - Mark Needham talks about the evolution of his testing style when testing delegation based code, looking at how he now perfers stubs to full mocks in this situation
• Reconsidering Code Coverage - Bj Rollison discusses the issue of Code Coverage in testing, looking at the various metrics, and discussing the usual question of is high test coverage a good measure of the depth of testing
• In search of simplicity, quality and tranquillity in software engineering : Kernel Debugging Day 1 - Interesting snippets of information for debugging in the trenches - Willy-Peter Schaub shares the knowledge he gained from the first day of a course on Kernel Mode Debugging, looking at crash dumps, how they are obtained, and some of the key debugger commands

Community

• Brighton ALT.NET Xmas Dinner, Wednesday 16th December, 7:30pm at Pizza Express - Iain Holder announces the plans for the Brighton Alt.Net Xmas event, a Christmas feast of pizza combined with good tech conversation, what could be better
• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Follow-up - Recording of Mark Nijhof on CQRS @ E-VAN 18 November 2009 - Jan Van Ryswyck posts details of how to get a better quality recording of the European Virtual Alt.Net session from Mark Nijhof on Command Query Responsibility Separation.

No Comments »

With Today being Thanksgiving Day in the US (Happy Thanksgiving folks) I expect tomorrows edition will be a small one due to a lack of content.

Software

• T4MVC now has a real home and a dedicated forum! - David Ebbo announces the new official home of his T4 Template project for ASP.NET MVC, making use of CodePlex and ASP.NET Forums
• GraffitiCMS Going Open Source - Lee Dumond highlights an announcement from Telligent that GraffitiCMS will be being released under an open source license on 11th December

Information

• The client script loader is cool - Mike Ormond highlights a nice dependency graph of the various parts of the ASP.NET Ajax library, and shows how the script loader makes it easy to get just the bits your need
• ASP.NET 4.0 ScriptManager Improvements - Dave Reed talks about the ASP.NET 4.0 ScriptManager, looking at the various new features introduced in the .NET 4 time frame, including Content Delivery Network support, the ability to disable the Microsoft.Ajax requirement, simple assembly name support and ScriptResourceMapping
• Silverlight and RIA Services: Implementing Search - Brad Abrams follows on from his PDC talk with a look at adding the search functionality to his PDC demo application, implementing search against the backend data store, along with bookmarkable URLs for search results
• Handling 64-bit assemblies during obfuscation - Paul Mason continues his series on obfuscation and his NCloak project with a look at a problem he encountered using his existing work with 64bit assemblies
• Taking advantage of Table Variables NOT being transactional - application logging files within a transaction and keeping what’s happened - Tony Rogerson shares a useful tip for logging your actions in SQL Server when you roll back transactions, by taking advantage of table variables which are not subject to rollback you can still get your logging out after rollback
• Temporary procedures : T-SQL - ‘jamiet’ highlights the ability to create temporary stored procedures in much the same way you can create temporary tables in SQL Server. This is a useful trick for those helper procedures we all write and often forget to remove after use
• Including custom client-side validations in your ASP.NET MVC app - Thomas Weller posts a sidebar about including your own custom client side JavaScript for validation, looking at how you can map that back to the domain model via a custom validation
• Git’s guts: Branches, HEAD, and fast-forwards - James Gregory talks about commonly understood version control principles such as branches and shows how GIT handles them slightly differently than most people expect
• Going Interactive with the Reactive Extensions - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the Reactive Framework with a look at the System.Interactive assembly and how this aims to port much of the functionality of IObservable to IEnumerable via extension methods
• Introduction to TestApi - Part 5: Managed Code Fault Injection APIs - Ivo Manolov talks about TestApi’s support for altering the behaviour of executable code to make simulation of certain faults possible showing a sample use of this technique
• The Purpose, Revealed - Eric Lippert follows on from his previous posts talking about the reason this work was needed and how the compiler handlers semantic analysis of calls with named arguments
• Looking Around at Circular References in MEF - James Eggers explores the way the the Managed Extensibility Framework handles dependencies which have circular references which are injected into a constructor

No Comments »

Software

• Announcing PostSharp 2.0 CTP 2 - The PostSharp team announce the release of their second CTP of PostSharp 2.0. This updated release brings support for .NET 4 / Visual Studio 2010 and Mono 2.4, and is set to expire on 1st February 2010
• NHibernate 2.1.2 - Released on Sunday with very little noise in the community, NHibernate 2.1.2 contains a couple of minor changes, improvements and bugfixes over the previous 2.1.1 release

Information

• Now Available: Final PDF of the Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, Second Edition - J.D. Meier announces the release of the final PDF of the Patterns and Practices Application Architecture Guide Second Edition. This release is also available in HTML and Printed (via Amazon) formats and is supported by a CodePlex knowledge base
• Data Services Release Plan Update - Mike Flasko of the ADO.NET Data Services Team talks about their plans for the release of ADO.NET Data Services 1.5 as a Framework Update rather than a side by side release for .NET 3.5 and how it will be included directly in the .NET 4 release.
• Silverlight Salmagundi - Joey deVilla shares a comprehensive list of the new features of Silverlight 4 with links to Tim Heuer’s resources on each features, alogn with the links to the required and optional tool installs to get you working with Silverlight 4, and some video content to help you learn
• Application Accessibility Testing - Ivo Manolov talks about testing your WPF and Silverlight applications for accessibility compliance, reviewing what accessibility means, what APIs are provided and a process and details of tools to test the different areas of compliance
• What’s new for editor extenders in Beta 2? - Noah Richards of the Visual Studio Editor Team highlights the new features of the Visual Studio Editor which can be utilised for extensibility, and how it differs from the previous incarnation
• An Engineer’s Guide to DNS - Yahoo! Developer Network follow on from their article on Bandwidth a few months ago with this indepth look at what the Domain Name System is all about, and how it relates to software engineers
• Getting Started with Entity Framework 4 - Complex Types and Entities - Eric Nelson presses ahead with the 4th part of his series looking at the Entity Framework 4 which looks at the use of complex types in the Entity Data Model Designer. Eric also answers a common question in his post QandA: Is the ADO.NET Entity Data Model designer fixed in .NET 4?
• Tap into the power of the Windows 7 Taskbar - Paul Foster looks into the various Windows 7 taskbar integrations which are made possible and easy using the samples in the Windows 7 API Code Pack
• Windows 7’s solution to beta software - Jeffrey Palermo shares a useful tip for anyone running Windows 7 who wants an easier way to test beta software with less risk to their main Windows install
• Populating Hierarchical Data Using Model Binders in ASP.NET MVC Application - Mohammad Azam explores the use of ASP.NET Model Binders to work with nested entities such as a customer with multiple addresses. Sample project for the code discussed is also provided
• Dynamic objects and ReSharper - Hadi Hariri shows how working with the .NET 4 Dynamic types is made much easier using ReSharper in Visual Stuidio 2010
• The joy of MSpec - Mike Hadlow takes a first look at using the MSpec framework to write behavioural tests for his code and finds he really likes the syntax
• Use Dependency Injection To Simplify Application Settings - Patrick Steele looks at how you can use Dependency Injection to decouple your configuration by inserting a class between your configuration consuming code and the means of access to the config and have that class supplied by Dependency Injection.

No Comments »

Software

• Windows Embedded Standard 2011 CTP2 is now available! - The Windows Embedded Team announce thier second CTP release of Windows Embedded Standard 2011. This update includes the usual bugfixes and improvements along with a new Static Dependency Analyser, and packages for Anti-Malware, DVD, PhotoViewer, Fax and Scan, and a few more
• Announcing: Reflector Addin Toolkit on Codeplex - Jason Haley announces the first additions to his CodePlex Project Reflector Addin Toolkit which includes utilities and examples for building Reflector addins, including VSTemplates, explanatory diagrams, and helper scripts
• Migrating ASP.NET MVC 1.0 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta (updated!) - Eilon Lipton updates his utility to convert ASP.NET MVC 1 projects to ASP.MC 2 Beta. This update now better handles the JavaScript files in your projects, along with improving the way the reference to ASP.NET MVC Beta 2 is included, and some UI improvements to the application.

Information

• Building High Performance Web Applications - James Senior looks at some of the new features in the ASP.NET Ajax Library, linking to the official content on each subject, and also highlights a white paper he prepared with Dan Wahlin about using these new features to speed up your ASP.NET Applications
• Automatic Null Checks - Alois Kraus suggests a new operator (and attempts to get some support for it on Connect) for better dealing with null values, and shows some other alternatives you can use to provide similar functionality using extension methods.
• A View into the Behavior of Your Parallel Application : Learning to Write in Parallel - ‘jarapp’ of the Concurrency Visualizer team shows how they had a little fun making words in the thread view using a little sample application. This is quite similar to a demo at SQLBits using SQL to make the 96 cores of a UniSys test machine write words in task manager - good fun
• ux musings : Windows System Color Theme for Silverlight - Corrina, Tsitsi, Vidya, and Susan talks about the work they have been doing on building a theme mapping for Silverlight to use the underlying Windows colour scheme, further adding to the accessibility support in Silverlight.
• Connecting Your Tests to an Implementation - Nico Kicillof of the Spec Explorer Team talks about the two way you can connect your generated tests to the implementation in Spec Explorer, and also discusses Static vs. Instance-Based Models, another significant design decision which is influenced by your choice of connection.
• OMG, Better Rake (for .net)! - Steven Harman highlights the work being done by Derick Bailey on implementing real Rake tasks for .NET builds as a part of the Albacore project.
• Deploying A Web Application with Git and FTP - Rob Conery looks at deploying web applications using the best solution he has found so far, the Git Version Control System and FTP.
• Silverlight 4 Beta - Using Silverlight as Drop Target - Brian Lagunas looks at using a Silverlight application as a target for drag and drop operations, allowing you to drag files into the application and have it process it. Brian provides source for this Silverlight 4 Beta sample, and also discusses a neat UI features for Text Trimming
• Facebook Connect Action Filter for ASP.NET MVC - Jim Christopher (beefarino) shows how you can use ASP.NET MVC Action Filter attributes to utilise the Facebook Connect User Identity and profile data services in your ASP.NET MVC applications
• Enabling the ASP.NET Ajax script loader for your own scripts - Bertrand Le Roy looks at how you can utilise the features of the ASP.NET Ajax script loader to load your own scripts taking advantage of the lazy load, parallel loading and dependency management
• IIS SEO Toolkit - Crawler Module Extensibility - Carlos Aguilar Mares looks at the Extensibility of the IIS SEO Tookit in this first post in a series. This Post looks at the extensibility of the Crawler Module, showing how you can add new features to the crawler to report on, in this case, images.
• Hitting the upper limit of foreign key constraints - Jimmy Bogard talks about an interesting problem his team ran into surrounding strange messages from SQL about running out of stack space, and how it eventually traced back to the number of foreign key constraints in the Database.
• Always write a spec, Part Two - Eric Lippert follows up from his previous post about specifications with a look at what was wrong with his specification mentioned in the previous post
• Silverlight: Universal GUI toolkit - Miguel de Icaza talks about the Silverlight 4 Beta announcement at PDC, and discusses what it means for desktop applications and the Moonlight project
• Getting your OSS binaries with Horn - Hadi Hariri highlights the latest developments of the Horn project, probably the easiest way to get the correct versions and builds of the various open source .NET libraries. Horn how has a server based component which is being hosted by the kind folks at iMeta, making it even easier to get the correct builds of the things you need.
• Can I talk to that William fellow? He was so helpful - Raymond Chen recounts the story of the time when Bill Gates answered a support call (a little over 20 years ago) in this amusing, yet true, anecdote.

Community

• Linked .Net Users Group - Presentations - Last Nights Scott Guthrie live chat was a great opportunity to get to hear about all the developments discussed at PDC, along with getting Scott’s view on where things are going to be going in the future. The recording of this session is now up, so if you missed it live you can catch up

1 Comment »

I had a great time at SQLbits this weekend in South Wales, it was nice to meet up with friends old and new, and to learn a thing or two about SQL along the way. Congratulations to the organisers for another excellent event.

Software

• MockingBird v1 RTM - Santosh Benjamin announces the release of MockingBird V1, a set of tools for mocking web services, providing a useful tool for testing, and for developing against web services based on WSDL alone with no concrete implementation.
• Lot’s of new software for IIS, ASP.NET, AJAX and PHP this week - ‘BillS’ highlights a number of releases from PDC week for the Microsoft Web Platform, including a number of IIS add-ins and some PHP on Windows related additions
• TestApi v0.4 Released! - Ivo Manolov announces the release of TestApi v0.4 a collection of test supporting Apis, and the 0.4 release brings a number of new APIs for detecting memory leaks, object comparison, test text string generation.
• PDC09 Session Downloader - Frank La Vigne shares a simple tool to download all the PDC videos from the PDC site. The program offers limited support for resuming, as it will download any missing files without overwriting any existing files. Bear in mind that these videos are pretty big, so ensure you are on a fast unmetered connection before downloading. Frank has also released the PDC09 Downloader Source Code for his program
• IronRuby - Release: 1.0 RC1 - The IronRuby Team release V1.0 RC1 on CodePlex. This release. So far I’ve only seen mention of this release on Twitter, so don’t have any details of what is new / changed in this release
• T4MVC 2.5.01: added support for Html.RenderAction and Html.Action - David Ebbo releases the latest minor update to his T4 Template Library for ASP.NET MVC which adds in support for the two new ASP.NET MVC 2 beta features Html.RenderAction and Html.Action

Information

• RIA Services: A DomainService IS A WCF Service - Add Service Reference - Brad Abrams talks about how a RIA Domain Service is actually a WCF Service, following on from his PDC talk, and looks at using a Domain Service to query, retrieve and save data.
• What’s all this nonsense about Katas? - ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin talks about the recent interest in coding Katas, talking about the origin of this use, and the reasons you might want to do them, afterall may other professionals practice, and also talks about performing katas
• Let’s write a simple .NET 4 Location-aware application! - Gavin Gear demonstrates the use of the .NET 4 location services which allow you to obtain the location of the user if they have a supported GPS unit.
• WPF TreeView Memory Consumption and Performance - ‘PermanentTan’ shows a useful attribute of the WPF TreeView which allows you to drastically reduce the memory use of the TreeView, especially useful for large TreeViews
• Keeping CSS Files DRY with .less - K. Scott Allen explores the use of the .less CSS library based on the LESS for Ruby implementation, which allows you to apply the DRY principle to your CSS by having Variables, Mixins, Operations, and Nested Rules which get expanded by a custom HttpHandler
• T4 Templates and the answer to life, the universe and everything - Eric Nelson continues his series of post on the Entity Framework 4 with a look at the Text Template Transformation Toolkit (AKA T4 Templates) and their use in EF4. Eric also highlights Tangible T4 Editor - a life saver - an addin which brings good syntax highlighting and intellisense to VS2010
• Validating business objects with AOP (3: UI with ASP.NET MVC + xVal) - Thomas Weller continues his series on Aspect Oriented Programming based validation using the ValidationAspects library for PostSharp. This part of the series looks at feeding the validation back in the UI of the application using ASP.NET MVC and xVal
• Unit Testing and Integration Testing in business applications - Omar Al Zabir shares a number of examples and practices which, when applied, can help to produce tests for N-Tier applications which add confidence
• CQRS - The Domain Events - Mark Nijhof discusses the role of Domain Events in Command Query Responsibility Segregation code, showing their role in managing the state changes of the aggregate roots
• The trouble with soft delete - Richard Dingwall talks about the different techniques for implementing Soft Deletes, looking at the use cases, and some software patterns which offer similar capabilities
• NHibernate and Composite Keys - Anne Epstein takes a look at the use of composite keys when working with NHibernate, highlighting some of the problems they can cause and showing how you can get them working
• Command Line Parsing with Mono.Options - New addition to Devlicio.us, Rob Reynolds shows how the Mono.Options library brings powerful command line argument parsing to your .NET command line applications
• Combining NHibernate, NH Spatial and SQL Server 2008 Fulltext Queries - Jak Charlton shares some details of how he got NHibernate working with the NHibernate Spatial additions, and Sql2008 Full Text searches
• Caliburn Hello World - Christopher Bennage shares a HelloWorld example of using the Caliburn UI showing how to get up and running with the patterns in the library

Community

• LIDNUG: Online chat with me Monday Nov 23rd - Scott Guthrie highlights the Linked In .NET User Group’s virtual event to be held today 11:30am PST where Scott will be talking about the new things announced at PDC, and will be taking questions on anything.

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Slightly less PDC content than I was expecting today, no real announcements, just more detail about what has been release.

I’m really looking forward to the SQLBits goes west community event this weekend - if you happen to spot me there please come over and say Hi.

PDC

• Videos :: Microsoft PDC09 - Videos from a number of the sessions at PDC are available on the PDC website for on demand viewing mostly in WMV and WMV High quality formats with the odd one in MP4. Slide decks are also available for most.
• ASP.NET MVC 2 Custom Validation - Phil Haack continues his series of posts looking at the new features of the ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta released at PDC. In this post Phil explores custom validation using a worked example to show how you can build attributes to implement your validation rules and how the framework utilises them. Phil Haack is also the featured guest on show 188 of Hanselminutes where Scott Hanselman talks with him about the beta release
• News on the ASP.NET Ajax Library Beta - James Senior highlights the release of the ASP.NET Ajax Library Beta and discusses how this is the first Microsoft project contributed to the CodePlex Foundation, how the Ajax Control Toolkit was merged into the ASP.NET Ajax Library, and the future of the library. James also points at a number of other posts about the various features the library offers
• Silverlight 4 beta released at #PDC09 - Laurent Bugnion talks about the Silverlight 4 Beta and the new features and asks a question that is on most peoples lips - ‘what happens with WPF?’
• Rundown of Silverlight 4 Beta Features and 6 Hands on Labs - Adam Kinney highlights 6 newly posted hands on labs for Silverlight 4 features such as the WebCam support, image browser, out of browser, and rich text editor.
• Using WIF on a WCF Client - The “Geneva” Team Blog discusses the use of Windows Identity Framework (WIF) with Windows Communicator Foundation (WCF), looking at the extensions that have been made for working with Security Token Services
• The PDC Is Over; Here Comes the SDP - Sasha Goldshtein provides an index post to all his PDC session postings and highlights the Sela Developer Practice, an Israel based event in December which aims to bring the content of PDC to Israeli developers
• Silverlight 4 Security Overview White Paper - Nick Kramer shares a white paper on the security implementation in Silverlight 4 which discusses the way security is implemented along with a glimpse into the reasoning for the way certain features work.

Software

• Introducing: The Agatha Project - Davy Brion gets permission from his employer, Item Solutions, to release their implementation of the Request Response Layer as a project called Agatha.
• .NET Reflection Made Fast & Simple - Fasterflect 1.1 Release - Buu Nguyen announces the release of Fasterflect 1.1 a library which provides reflection capabilities with simpler code usage and enhanced performance over the standard .NET reflection.

Information

• Exploring Spark View Engine for ASP.NET MVC - Part 3 - Al Nyveldt has been taking a look at the Spark view engine this week with three posts on the subject. This 3rd post gives a glance into Conditionals, Viewdata and Iteration, the previous posts exploring the role of the view engine and getting started with basic markup and master layouts
• Take 2: Why we use SOLID in static languages and how we get the same functionality for cheap in dynamic languages - Ryan Svihla continues his discussion of how development practices change when working with dynamic languages by looking at how the SOLID principles are provided for in dynamic languages
• Always write a spec, part one - Eric Lippert talks about the art of writing technical specifications of how code should work, illustrating how the process can go with a recent compiler related example which contained bugs in the specification
• 30 “Quick Hit” Videos for folks that couldn’t join us at PDC - Joe Stagner shares 30 short videos offering previews of various ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 features which give a taste of the features being demoed at PDC
• Design Patterns Are Not Outdated - Steve Rowe picks up a theme which has been cropping up suggesting that some of the design patterns are solving out dated problems, and Steve sets about explaining why this isn’t really the case
• ASP.NET MVC and Windows Azure (November 2009 edition) - Jim Nakashima looks at how the latest release of the Microsoft Azure Tools for Visual Studio make it much easier to run ASP.NET MVC applications on the cloud
• Getting Started with Entity Framework 4 - Templated Code Generation - Eric Nelson continues his series of posts on the Entity Framework 4 with a look at its use of T4 templates to generate the necessary code from the Entity Data Model.
• More debugging videos and a Resource List from my TechED and Oredev sessions on debugging asp.net applications - Tess Ferrandez shares a number of resources from her recent presentations on debugging ASP.NET applications, along with highlighting some other sessions she enjoyed at those events
• ASP.NET 4.0: Writing custom output cache providers - Gunnar Peipman takes a look at a new ASP.NET 4 feature - the ability to implement your own output caching via a provider interface, showing a complete working example (source provided)

Community

• Developer Day Scotland 2010 - Scottish Developers announce the free Developer Day Scotland event for 2010 to be held on the 8th May 2010 at Glasgow Caledonian University. Along with announcing the event the are also issuing a call for speakers for the event so iof you want to present get your sessions abstracts in. I attended last year’s event and enjoyed it immensly
• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Recording of Mark Nijhof on CQRS @ E-VAN 18 November 2009 - Jan Van Ryswyck makes available the recording of the Virtual European Alt.Net Meeting from earlier this week where Mark Nijhof spoke about Command Query Responsibility Segregation

2 Comments »

PDC is really getting into its swing, and so are the bloggers - lots of really good content for Today’s edition.

PDC

• Silverlight 4 Beta - The big developer news out of PDC yesterday has to be the Silverlight 4 Beta. This beta release includes a number of much wished for features including improved out of browser experience (with the ability to interact with the file system, clipboard, etc), webcam and microphone support, video recording, mousewheel support, support in Google Chrome. Developer interest will also focus on the CLR improvements allowing the same compiled output to run on Desktop and Silverlight , WCF support and better UI controls.
• Silverlight 4 Beta is out - and the Toolkit has it covered! [Silverlight Toolkit November 2009 release now available for Silverlight 3 and 4!] - ‘Delay’ talks about the Silverlight 4 Beta announcement and the Silverlight Toolkit release the goes with it adding in the support for all the new Silverlight 4 features
• Silverlight 4 Beta - A guide to the new features - Tim Heuer has a large post which goes into more detail on the new Silverlight 4 features, and Mike Taulty has series of posts on Silverlight 4 starting with Silverlight 4: Beta Announced at PDC detailing the announcement, with the rest of the series of 25+posts available on his blog’s Silverlight tag
• An Early Look At IE9 for Developers - Internet Explorer 9 was another forthcoming technology previewed yesterday at PDC, which brings improved standards compliance (ACID Test and CSS3), improvements to performance of JavaScript and page rendering, along with offloading graphics intensive work to the hardware GPU
• Welcome to WCF RIA Services Beta! - Brad Abrams highlights the WCF Rich Internet Application Services beta which goes hand in hand with Silverlight 4. This release brings the RIA Services under the wing of the WCF Family and provides better means for Silverlight applications to consume data exposed as WCF, Data Serices, and OData.
• Office 2010 Beta is Now Available! - Microsoft Office 2010’s public beta release was announced at PDC and is available in 7 different languages currently.
• SharePoint 2010 Public Beta is now available for download - Another public beta release is SharePoint 2010 which is also available for download now, and for developers has the great feature that it will now install on non-server class opperating systems. VHD versions of the beta will be available soon
• Surface SDK Workstation Edition now available for download! - UK Academic Team Blog highlights another PDC public release, the Microsoft Surface SDK Workstation Edition (Free) which allows surface applications to be developed using a normal PC and a simulator using multiple mice allow you to test surface apps on the PC before deploying to a real surface device
• PDC 2009 Day 2: Keynote, Steven Sinofsky - Sasha Goldshtein has been doing some very good coverage of the sessions at PDC he has been attending, well worth checking out for detail on the sessions on parallel, Windows 7 and the keynotes
• Port Bridge - Clemens Vasters talks about the Azure AppFabric Port Bridge, which uses the Azure Service Bus to enable the construction of distributed applications providing seamless communication between applications located in different locations and those in the cloud

Software

• MSpec v0.3 - Aaron Jensen announces the release of MSpec 0.3, introducing a new assertion library, removing the dependence on NUnit / XUnit, runners for Resharper 4+ along with a number of other features. Aaron also put out a Call for help with MSpec looking for some help with the documentation for the project, so if you fancy helping out drop him a line.
• HTML 5 intellisense and validation schema for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer - Visual Web Developer Team share a new HTML 5 validation schema which can be installed into Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web developer to give validation and auto complete for HTML 5 elements in markup
• Simply Buttons - Ajaxian highlights the Simply Buttons JavaScript library from Kevin Miller which provides a simple way of having beautiful buttons in your web applications across all the main web browsers
• A new update to Windows API Code Pack (v 1.0.1) - Mahmoud highlights an updated release of the Windows API Code Pack, the library which provides easy access to enhancements offered by later versions of Windows from .NET Code. Kevin Griffin provides a nice introduction to the library in his post Enhancing your applications for Windows 7

Information

• Html.RenderAction and Html.Action - Phil Haack talks about two new additions to the Core ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta release. Both of these have been in the futures assembly for a while and allow you to call an action from within a view and have the resulting rendered output returned to the response stream or as a string.
• Tip 44 - How to navigate an OData compliant service - Alex James shares some details on how you go about moving round an OData data service in the form of a cheat sheet looking at locating records, moving through records, ordering, etc
• How to create a custom workflow activity for TFS Build 2010 - Jim Lamb explores in detail how you can create workflow based activities for use inside the TFS Build process in 2010, starting with File New, right through to the deployment process
• NHibernate Event Listener Registration With Fluent NHibernate - Rob Reynolds looks at Event listeners in NHibernate and delves into how you go about registering them when you are using Fluent NHibernate rather than the more traditional XML config
• Applications As Composition Of Services - William Bartholomew talks about how thinking of applications as s composition of a number of services can give great rewards in testability, better OO programming, and revealing and controlling dependencies
• I’ve written a book on Testing ASP.net Web Applications - Friend of the Brew, Ben Hall, highlights the release of his book, co-authored with Jeff McWherter which looks at the complex world of testing web applications in all styles of testing (Integration, automated, acceptance, performance, etc). Congratulations Ben
• Validating business objects with AOP (2: persistence with NHibernate) - Thomas Weller continues his series looking at validation using the Aspect Oriented ValidationAspects library for PostSharp. In this part Thomas looks at wiring the validation into the persistence when persisting with NHibernate
• Why does SubSonic’s SimpleRepository ‘Add<T>’ return a decimal instead of an int? (Part 2) - Jesse Taber digs into the SubSonic projects source code to see why it add method returns decimal rather than the more expected Int, and learns some useful facts about the SQL SCOPE_IDENTITY function and ADO type conversion
• Introduction to the Reactive Framework Part V - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the Reactive Framework with a look at how the framework makes writing asynchronous processes easier
• Reducing friction as a standard operating method - Ayende talks about the notion or reducing the friction in the development process to make work easier and much more efficient
• A Brief Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for .NET, Rx - ‘wesdyer’ shares s simple getting started guide for the Reactive Framework, starting with File New Project, and working through a number of simple samples.

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