The Morning Brew

Software

• Pex 0.21.50115.2: Bugs fixes and Stubs renamed to Moles – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces the release of the latest version of Pex which fixes a number of bugs from previous releases, along with a migration to moles being the heart of the framework (and a corresponding rename for Stubs)
• Web Client Guidance Drop #6 Available on Codeplex – Blaine Wastell highlights the release of Drop #6 of the Web Client Patterns and Practices Guidance Package. This release includes some updates to the reference implementation application, along with a number of new guidance documents.
• Introducing MicroModels – the smallest ViewModels for WPF – Paul Stovell shares his small Model-View-ViewModel framework, which offers an interface which makes use of typedescriptors to define collections, properties and commands. Full source and binaries are available.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 2: Model Validation – Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts on ASP.NET MVC2 with a look at the new validation functionality using DataAnnotations, taking a look at the full process from enabling the functionality, to implementing client side validation, to extending the functionality and saving back to the database
• Editable Routes – Phil Haack looks at using dynamic compilation to allow you to edit routes in your ASP.NET MVC applications without having to recompile the whole application
• Create First Silverlight Application – Karl Shifflett continues his series of posts on Silverlight and WPF with a run through of the creation of a simple Silverlight Application, showing off the capabilities of the Designer in Visual Studio 2010
• C#: A functional solution to a modelling problem – Mark Needham takes a look at a more functional solution to a common modeling problem of running different functions in different input cases.
• First encounters with Reactive Extensions – Jon Skeet explores the Reactive Extensions, giving a quick tour of some of the functionality, and wondering if he is trying to push the library in a direction it was not intended to go in
• Is There A Good Reason To Hide Inherited Members? – Davy Brion looks at the language functionality which allows you to hide inherited members by supplying your own implementation, and highlights some of the pitfalls in doing this.
• Pair Programming session – Mark Nijhof talks about a recent good pair programming experience, and follows up with a post (Pair Programming continued) which looks at some of the factors and facilities required to make pairing a success.
• 10 Advanced Windsor Tricks – 4. How to register and use decorators – Mike Hadlow presses on with his 10 Castle Windsor Container IOC tricks, with this part looking at Windsor’s support for the decorator pattern, 5. The Startable Facility which looks at the functionality which allows services which last the application lifetime to be started upon registration, and 6. The Event Wiring Facility exploring the (slightly ugly) event registration syntax.
• Reducing Code Coupling – Inversion of Control – Grant Palin takes a look at Inversion of control, and looks at how it solves the problems of code coupling discussing the general functionality provided by Inversion of Control libraries rather than focusing in on a particular one.
• Dependency Injection Inversion – ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin talks about Dependency Injection, and how if used incorrectly it can result in the Dependency injection Framework being spread all over your codebase, and Bob shows some techniques which help avoid this.
• Coding: Missing abstractions and LINQ – Mark Needham looks at encapsulating the business logic that often leaks out with the power of Linq, capturing it inside classes rather than having Linq statements dotted around your code.
• Hey Microsoft, Our Databases Aren’t Services! – Davy Brion makes an appeal to Microsoft to stop making frameworks which loosely turn databases into remote services without all the usual architectural features of remote services.
• Eagerly loading entity associations efficiently with NHibernate – Ayende takes a look at eager loading of entities, looking at how Entitiy Framework and NHibernate perform their queries to achieve this.

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Software

• jQuery 1.4 Released – The 14 Days of jQuery – The jQuery Team announce the release of jQuery 1.4 in celebration of the projects 4th Birthday. A lot of the focus of this release has been on further improving the performance of the library, with the core functions receiving a performance boost in this release, along with new features such as easy setters, improved JSON support and much more.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Launch Date is Monday 12th April – Eric Nelson highlights the official release date for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4, and points UK users to the source for information on the Launch events to be held in the UK.
• ActiveRecord 2.1 released – Markus Zywitza highlights the release of Castle ActiveRecord which brings the dependencies up to date, along with new features for primary key type detection, and read only field support.

Information

• jQuery 1.4 Released: The 15 New Features you Must Know – James Padolsey writing for nettuts+ looks at the 15 key new features of the new release of JQuery.
• jQuery 1.4 API Cheat Sheet – Future Colours offer an updated jQuery cheat sheet for the 1.4 release, available in HTML, PDF and JPEG formats
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit (Jan. 2010 Release) – ‘Dr Z’ highlights the January 2010 release of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit, which contains presentations, demos and hands on labs for the whole range of .NET from C#4 to F#, Parallel extensions to WCF
• How can I disable batch compilation for my ASP.NET web pages so that the first user accessing the web site doesn’t experience slow performance? – Reuben Frost highlights a useful web.config setting which can help improve the startup time of your ASP.NET application by deferring some of the compiling until the first request for that page.
• WPF & Silverlight Designer : Setting Up Visual Studio for WPF and Silverlight Development – Karl Shifflett talks about configuring Visual Studio 2010 for working with Silverlight explaining to tools available, and suggesting which to enable. A video accompanies this post.
• WPF Extensibility Hacks – Preview 1 – Few interesting Triggers and Actions for WPF, Invoking Triggers based on Conditions etc – Anoop Madhusudanan shares the source and talks about the features of Wex a port of the Silverlight Project Slex to full WPF.
• A Field Guide to WPF Presentation Patterns – Paul Stovell talks about the three main patterns that are used for presentation using WPF and looks at how you can identify which pattern is being used.
• 2010 Survey Results: What .NET Framework features do you use? – Scott Hanselman shares the results from his survey late last year on the .NET Framework features that people are using
• The Rx Framework By Example – Phil Martin takes a look at the Reactive Extensions for .NET illustrating with real examples in this CodeProject article
• Why Can’t I Access A Protected Member From A Derived Class? Part Six – Eric Lippert picks up an old series based ona reader question about access to protected members, completing an answer given in a previous post (Which you will need to read to know what is going on)
• F#: Refactoring to sequence/for expressions – Mark Needham continues looking ways of migrating from the imperative way fo coding in F# and look at the use of sequences in F#

Community

• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 8 – Registrations – Registration for the 8th DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper event to be held at Microsoft Reading at the end of the month opens today (15th) at 13:00 GMT. This free event is a very popular one, and usually ‘sells’ out very quickly, so you will need to be quick if you wish to attend. Once all the spaces go there is usually a waiting list situation, so don’t loose heart if you don’t get in on the first registration.

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A little bit of a career focused edition today as there were a larger than usual number of posts around that topic today I thought I’d feature it today at the end of the post.

Software

• Gordon: Flash Runtime Implemented in JavaScript – Ajaxian highlights some work by Tobias Schneider in creating a Flash runtime which runs in the browser, and is written completely in JavaScript and HTML5 – impressive stuff, and I particularly like the name too.
• DotNet JQuery (DNJ) : new features in version 0.4.0 – Alaa-eddine KADDOURI shares the latest version of this ASP.NET Control library which adds controls for the common jQuery Controls such as Sliders, Accordion, tabs, panels, etc, making it easier to work with these jQuery controls in Visual Studio.

Information

• Visual Studio 2010 Tricks and Tips – Zain Naboulsi picks up Sara Ford’s daily Visual Studio tip posting responsibilities, and looks to be off to a good start. This looks like on that will be worth keeping a regular eye on.
• 10 Advanced Windsor Tricks – 3. How to resolve arrays – Mike Hadlow continues his series of posts on Advanced Windsor Container use with a look at how you can get Castle Windsor to resolve arrays of services when you have multiple components registered for that service.
• Take your MVC User Controls to the next level – David Ebbo takes a look at making ASP.NET user controls more like Render Helpers when working with ASP.NET MVC
• Fooling the Query Optimizer – Ben Nevarez shares some useful tricks which allow you to find out what the query execution plan will look like when your tables have different (larger) numbers of rows.
• Favor – Help Us Test .NET 4 Beta 2 on Windows Update (WU) – Scott Hanselman asks for community help in testing the Windows Update deployment of the .NET 4 Client Profile, before its release. In order to do so, you will need a machine without any .NET 4, and you have to edit the registry to make Windows Update show it
• Limitations of MVC2’s ModelValidatorProviders – Jeremy Skinner talks about some of the problems he ran into working with the ASP.NET MVC 2 ModelValidatorProvider API when trying to write a provider for the FluentValidation library.
• The Weekly Source Code 47 – ASP.NET 3.5 Dynamic Data: FilterRepeaters and Dynamic Linq Query Generation – Scott Hanselman resumes his Weekly Source Code series with a look into some of the ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 Dynamic Data features

Careers Special Feature

• Career Advice For Young Developers, Part 2 – Davy Brion shares some advice for up and coming developers keen on advancing up the Software Development Career ladder
• Selling Yourself: Why? (Part 1) – John Sonmez talks about the very difficult skill of selling yourself and your skills, and follows up with a <2nd Part looking at ways of marketing yourself
• If You’re Graduating Soon, Consider Working For The ASP.NET Team – Since today seems to be a careers oriented edition, Phil Haack and the ASP.NET Team are looking for a fresh graduate to bring into the team, and are also looking for a Ninja Quality Assurance person.

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