The Morning Brew

Software

• S#arp Architecture 1.5 Beta 1 released - Alec Whittington announces the latest beta release of S#arp Architecture which upgrades the foundation to ASP.NET MVC2 RTM, along with updating to jQuery 1.4.2, NHibernate 2.1.2.4 and later builds of Fluent NHibernate, and the Castle Project items, along with a number of bugfixes
• Windows XP Mode now accessible to more PCs - The Windows 7 Team announce a significant change to the Windows XP Mode functionality which removes the requirement for Hardware Virtualization Support, opening it up to users of less powerful computers
• Employee Info Starter Kit (v4.0.0) - Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Version Available - Mohammad Ashraful Alam shares the news of an updated edition of a previously well received ASP.NET Starter Kit application, which has now been updated to utilise a number of the new .NET 4 features such as Named Parameters, Tuples, Entity Framework 4, along with some of the new VS2010 features.
• Telerik announces native controls for Silverlight 4 Release Candidate. - Telerik have updated their Silverlight Control library for the Silverlight 4 RC build, along with the update they have also taken advantage of the newly announced Microsoft Siverlight Analytics Framework to allow their controls to interact with your analytics.

Information

• How to deal with nulls - Greg Gigon talks about the pain of null checks and looks at the Maybe Pattern, Empty Object Pattern and the Null Object Pattern, all of which provide ways of working which avoid the use of null.
• Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight - Scott Guthrie gives his usual expose of a new technology treat, taking a (slightly MIX 10 delayed) look at the new tools and technology for building applications for the Windows 7 Phone using Silverlight.
• An even better way to run T4MVC: a VS AddIn - David Ebbo gives an update on the running of T4MVC templates as a part of the build process highlighting an update from Wayne Brantley who has created a Visual Studio Addin which improves on the previous Macro being used. David also updates on the possible removal of the previous hack which achieved a cruder version of this.
• SVG in IE9 Roadmap - The Internet Explorer Team talk about their commitment to standards and interoperability, exploring their integration of the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics ) standard, and also talking about The New JavaScript Engine in Internet Explorer 9
• Events get a little overhaul in C# 4, Part III: Breaking Changes - Chris Burrows continues a series exploring the changes to the event system in C#4 discussing a new compiler warning and a new compiler error, along with a couple of other minor changes which may catch you out when building existing code.
• Visualizing large code bases with VS2010 - Cameron Skinner highlights a video from Chris Lovett which demonstrates a number of the new VS2010 features to help you explore and visualise large code bases. This stuff looks really useful, and is something I think I need to have a play with.
• Do not name a class the same as its namespace, Part Four - Eric Lippert continues his discussion on reasons why you should not name a class the same as its containing namespace, looking today at the case where the reason for the namespace is to separate two classes with the same name.
• Creating a dynamic proxy generator - Part 1 - Creating the Assembly builder, Module builder and caching mechanism - Sean McAlinden begins a new series looking at the building of a dynamic proxy generator which will be able to create create dynamic proxies for know types. This first part is quite code heavy and sets up some of the foundations to build the dynamic proxy support on top of.
• Interested in Silverlight 4? Here’s a free Silverlight 4 Training Course and downloadable materials - Greg Duncan highlights the availability of a Silverlight 4 RC based training course offered on Channel 9 which addresses both the new features and the core of Silverlight.

Community

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Updated: A rogue typo crept into today’s DDD South west announcement - Session Proposals are most certainly open and the entry is now corrected.

Software

• The Reactive Extensions for JavaScript Released - Matthew Podwysocki highlights the release of the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript as a Microsoft DevLabs project, and takes a look at another sample application using the extensions to bring two APIs together into one JavaScript powered application.
• Free URL Rewriter
  - Microsoft release the IIS URL Rewrite 2.0 Module in both x86 and x64 forms providing a rules based pattern matching engine for remapping URLs at the web server level, including content inspection and re-writing, full HTTP header access, and sample rules for reverse proxy configurations.
• MockingBird meets WCF in v2.0 RC - Santosh Benjamin announces the release candidate release of MockingBird 2, with the inclusion of a WCF Message Interceptor which adds support for mocking WCF responses using the same simulation support. RTM release is expected to be in late April.
• The Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework Released at Mix - Michael S. Scherotter shares the news of the release of the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework, announced this week at MIX10. This collection of Silverlight controls allows interaction with a number of the most common web analytics frameworks allowing you to track your users around your Silverlight application.
• Bundler Now Supports Css And .less - Justin Etheredge announces a updated release of Bundler (previously known as JavaScriptBundler) which now supports combining of JavaScript along with CSS and .less files
• Announcing the OData Explorer - Phani Raj highlights the new OData Explorer application which is a Silverlight application (both in browser and out of browser) which allows you to explore OData data direct from the source.

Information

• Take Control Of Web Control ClientID Values in ASP.NET 4.0 - Scott Mitchell takes a look at how .NET 4 allows you to take better control of the client side id generated for ASP.NET Web Forms Controls
• ASP.NET 4.0 Part 13, A New Output Caching Provider Model - Dan Maharry continues his series looking at the range of new features in ASP.NET 4 with a look at the new output caching provider model which allows you to hook up custom caching solutions allowing you to break the cache out of the main worker process.
• Application Events: Modeling Selection vs De-Selection as Separate Events? - Derick Bailey discusses the use of and additional de-selection event in addition to the standard selection when working in an event aggregation style to provide a better way of working than saying that the value null was selected.
• More Standards Documentation Available - The Internet Explorer Team share a raft of preliminary conformance documents outlining how Internet Explorer 7 and 8 conform to a number of standards ranging from JPEG compression to PICS rating services.
• Should a professional developer always use TDD? - ‘Cellfish’ highlights notes from a fishbowl session chaired by Emily Bache discussing the question ‘Should a professional developer always use Test driven Development?’, and follows up on the topic with some of his thoughts on the subject
• Using .NET 4.0 Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) along with application ETW - Naveen talks about using .NET 4 Event Tracing for Windows, and combining the captured data with other application traces to build up a picture of what is going on inside you application in terms of Garbage Collection and object allocations as our code progresses.
• Free ebook: Programming Windows Phone 7 Series (DRAFT Preview) - Microsoft Press highlights the availability of a free draft preview e-book edition of Charles Petzold forthcoming book on Windows 7 Phone programming. The preview consists of 6 chapters and 153 pages of introductory content on the platform, Silverlight and XNA support.
• Defragging Your Indexes - Anu Chawla shares an explanation of how SQL Server indexes get fragmented, and talks about the process of de-fragmenting them to gain application performance.

Community

• SQLBits - The 6th Sets - 16 Apr 2010 - London - Registration for the free community run SQLBits 6 event is now open. The SQLBits event is to be run on Friday 16th April in London, the day after the SQL 2008 R2 launch event which is a part of the UK Techdays event series. All the SQLBits events I have attended have been very worth while, so I encourage you to register and attend if you can.
• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West 2.0 - Proposed Sessions - Session Proposal for the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West event to be held on 5th June 2010 are (not typo corrected) now open. If you are interested in speaking at the event you have until 22nd March to submit your session proposal on the site, with voting on sessions to begin on 29th March.

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Introduced a MIX10 special section today to gather together all the MIX related news.

MIX 10

• MIX10 Day 2 Keynote - IE9, OData and Azure - Alvin Ashcraft gives a nice summary of the goings on in the MIX10 Day 2 Keynote in this article for DZone
• HTML5, Hardware Accelerated: First IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers - The Internet Explorer Team yesterday released the first preview of Internet Explorer 9 at the MIX10 Conference. This new release includes further standards work including HTML5 support, along with drastic improvements to the JavaScript engine, along with Hardware graphics acceleration. The team are also committed to updating the preview approximately every 8 weeks meaning there will be constant visibility of the new features / improvements as they develop. The IE Team also outline a little more about the preview process in their posts About the Platform Preview, and talk about the IE9 Platform Preview Feedback process.
• Announcing the OData SDK - The WCF Data Services Team (formerly the Astoria team) announced the release of the OData SDK providing libraries for interacting with OData datasources in .NET 3.5 & 4, Silverlight 4, JavaScript, PHP, Java, Objective-C and Windows Phone 7 as well as server support for .NET 3.5 and 4. The OData website OData.org updated, gives clues about future SQL Azure enhancements - as reported here by Jamie Thomson, and Scott Hanselman released his Hanselminutes Podcast 205 - Open Data Protocol (OData) with Pablo Castro who is the brains behind the OData standard.
• Announcing Sesame Data Browser - Fabrice Marguerie announces the preview of the Sesame Data Browser, a tool which consumes OData data and allows you to explore the structure and content of the Data.
• Microsoft, jQuery, and Templating - Stephen Walther discusses Microsoft’s increasing support of and contributions to jQuery as announced in Scott Guthrie’s Day 2 MIX10 Keynote address. Stephen also discusses what this means for the other Microsoft JavaScript libraries like the ASP.NET Ajax Library and Ajax Control Toolkit.
• "Build Your Own MVVM Framework" is Online - Rob Eisenberg highlights the availability of the video, slides and sample code from his MIX session on MVVM. This one day turn around is great for non-conference attendees as there are already a huge number of session videos freely available for us to catch up on what we missed.

Software

• Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office Released - Automate Office documents without Office - Greg Duncan highlights the v2.0 release of the Open XML SDK, which builds on the Open XML DSK 1.0, and includes LINQ querying support and functional style document construction
• MVVM Light V3 released at #MIX10 - Laurent Bugnion announces the release of his MVVM Light Toollkit V3, which supports Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend 3 with Silverlight 3 and WPF 3.5SP1, and Visual Studio 2010/ Expression Blend 4 Beta with WPF 3.5sp1 and 4, along with Silverlight 3 and 4 RC. Laurent also shares teh details of the new features and changes in his post What’s new in MVVM Light V3

Information

• Why does Visual Studio 2010 convert my projects? - Richa Prasad the Program Manager responsible for the Visual Studio Projects System talks about why Visual Studio 2010 needs to convert projects on opening, and discusses the possibilities for round tripping project files in future releases.
• Testing a WPF UI using Ruby, Cucumber and WiPFlash.dll - Ben Hall explores testing a WPF application using a new WPF automation library called ‘wipflash’ created by Liz Keogh. Ben looks at working with this library from his favoured testing language IronRuby and combines it with the Cucumber framework.
• How to Drink at the Twitter Firehose and not Drown - Gary Short looks at consuming the ‘firehose’ Twitter JSON feed which contains all the public Twitter messages being sent, looking at a queue based pattern for processing these messages, and takes a look at extracting statistical data from the tweets.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - Composing deeper - Matthew Podwysocki presses on with his series on Reactive JavaScript with further translation related examples of composition of functions combining with Async operations, along with a plug for Erik Meijer’s MIX10 session on the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript.
• Lambda-passing style for access to resources with lifecycles - Alex Scordellis shows a technique using lambda expressions to perform operations with resources with particular lifecycles can mean that your code is simpler, and your can control the use of the resource much better.
• C# Proposal: Compile Time Static Checking Of Dynamic Objects - Paulo Morgado proposes an extension to the new C# dynamic functionality to allow dynamic types to have some static like type checking by allowing you to provide a contract/interface to which the dynamic type will conform. This sounds a lot like reducing the functionality of dynamic down to simply duck typing, which in certain circumstances would be useful.
• REST: Resources, URI’s and Representations - Cory Isakson introduces 3 of the key concepts in the Representational State Transfer (REST) style of architecture, aiming to show the REST at its fundamental level is simple to understand.
• If You Must Rewrite - Tim Ross shares some of his real world experience of why you shouldn’t embark on a rewrite project, along with some helpful hints to make your life less painful if you do get involved in a rewrite project.

Community

• UK Tech Days (w/c 12th April in London) Update - Mike Taulty highlights the UK Techdays events, and introduces a new feature on the Techdays site which lists the Techdays ‘Fringe’ events which are taking place across the UK during the same week. Most are evening events, and all are worth checking out.
• Getting Started With nServiceBus on VAN Mar 31 - Zach Young announces the next Virtual Alt.Net which sees Bernard Kowalski talking on nServiceBus. This virtual event is free to attend, and takes place on 31st March 2010 @ 8pm UTC (GMT-5)

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Software

• The Silverlight 4 Release Candidate - René Schulte highlights the MIX10 announcement of the release of the Silverlight 4 Release candidate, sharing a high level overview of the new features in version 4. Tim Heuer joins in with his post A guide to what has changed in the Silverlight 4 RC - in which he provides the key lnks to download the tools and takes a more detailed look at a number of the new features. ’snoutholder’ also highlights the release of Silverlight 4 RC documentation available online or as an offline takeaway CHM in the post Docs for Silverlight 4 RC now available
• Introducing Windows Phone 7 Development Tools - Soma Somasegar shares the announcement of the development platform and tooling for developing on the Windows 7 phone. Dan Maharry also shares a number of related links including some ebook links in his post Windows 7 Phone Dev Tools And Docs Now Available
• Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP and XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP now available for download - Aaron Stebner give the Windows Phone Development tools some more coverage, and also contributes a number of resources for the XNA Game Studio 4.0 RC which was also released yesterday.
• Enterprise Library 5.0 is near: Beta 2 is out! - Grigori Melnik shares the news of the second beta release of the Enterprise Library 5.0. This release includes a substantial number of bugfixes and some improvements to the configuration tool.
• VsVim Update Released (Version 0.7.2) - Jared Parsons announces the latest release of VsVim his VIM emulation for Visual Studio provided by way of a Visual Studio Extension. This release responds to user requirements and bugfixes, and has full source available on GitHub

Information

• What is map/reduce for, anyway? - Ayende continues on from his previous visual explanation of Map/Reduce with a look at some of the situations where the map/reduce pattern is applicable, and others where it is not
• SubSonic Migrations Without SubSonic - Rob Conery talks about the changes made to SubSonic migrations, and why they aren’t included in SubSonic 3, showing how they have been moved into their own project and are now open to use by anyone regardless if they use SubSonic.
• "The F# Survival Guide" - "…the first book you read in your F# journey…" - Greg Duncan highlights a great looking introduction to F# written by John Puopolo with Sandy Squires and available as a web based ebook, introducing the core concepts of F#.
• Prism, A Look Ahead - The Patterns & Practices Client Team set out their plans for a Prism Version 4 release in September 2010, and talking about their testing and findings of running Prism 2.1 on .NET 4 / Silverlight 4 Release candidates.
• Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Index - Brad Abrams kicks off an updated series of posts on Silverlight RIA applications updated for the Version 4 Release candidate. The linked post is the index, and so far 3 parts out of 15 have been completed.
• Semantic Code: Migrating From A Chatty Interface To A Simple One With A Data Transfer Object - Derick Bailey takes a look at using a Data Transfer Object to change how you work with an interface which is ‘Chatty’ (requires lots of calls), and outlines why doing this can gi ve you significant advantages.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - Wikipedia Lookup - Matthew Podwysocki shares another example of the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript in operation, looking at using them to create an autocomplete example using Wikipedia as the datasouce.
• Poll on Entity Framework 4 - one year on - Eric Nelson re-issues his Entity Framework 4 poll for 2010 to provide a comparison set of results against those provided in 2009 to see how far the platform as come in terms of knowledge and awareness.
• Do not name a class the same as its namespace, Part Three - Eric Lippert shares the 3rd part in his series of posts on naming of classes in namespaces talking about the process of creating naming hierarchies and why we as humans do it, along with why having an interior node with the same name as a parent represents a failure of classification.

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Software

• Ms-PL Source Release for System.Web.Mvc 2 - Phil Haack announces the source code release of ASP.NET MVC2, which as usual is released under the Open Source Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL)
• NHibernate symbol & source server support - Ayende highlights the inclusion of Symbols for NHibernate on the SymbolSource Servers to allow you to debug into NHibernate source code more easily.

Information

• A reminder of the usefulness of Git - Mark Needham talks about an interesting local use of Git to allow him to easily switch to a setup which allows him to debug through the source of libraries used in his projects.
• A better way to auto-run T4MVC when you build - David Ebbo talks about a better solution to determining when to run T4 templates during the build process, and polls the community on if the T4MVC project should keep the hacky solution now that there is a better alternative.
• Bidirectional Integrity: IEnumerable and read only Entity properties - Sean Blakemore follows on from Jimmy Bogard’s recent post on Encapsulation of Collections to strengthen the domain model, with a look at the potential for an explosion of internal methods, and looks at adding items to IEnumerable collections without the need of the internal methods in Jimmy solution.
• ASP.NET 4.0 Part 12, Routing Helper Functions - Dan Maharry continues his series on ASP.NET 4 new features with a further look at routing, and the new Routing helper functions, making it easier still to work with routes
• Map / Reduce - A visual explanation - Ayende gives a worked example of the famous Map / Reduce method of working, illustrating with diagrams to explain the technique
• Visual Studio 2010 Concurrency Profiling And Parallel Programming - ‘SQLDenis’ takes a look at some of the concurrency and parallel support in Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 illustrating with some example pieces of code to calculate Pi (as yesterday was Pie Day (3.14).
• Happy Pi Day and Monte Carlo Method - Can Erten also highlights Pi day with a look at using the Monte Carlo Method to calculate Pi in F#
• Moles: Dig It? - Martin Rue talks about the Microsoft Research Project Moles and their use in improving the testing of a system, by way of a story of strange behaviour in an imaginary banking system.
• Asp.Net MVC 2 Areas - Chris Brandsma takes a brief look at the ASP.NET MVC 2 Areas functionality, showing how they are hooked up and discussing their use.
• New, But Not So Obvious, Features in .NET 4.0 - Galilyou highlights a few of the less well known about new features being introduced to the .NET Framework in V4, including new string functions, and lazy loading support.
• ParallelWork: Feature rich multithreaded fluent task execution library for WPF - Omar AL Zabir shares a parallel work library for use in WPF projects which provides a fluent interface for queueing work to be run in parallel, including support for running work immediately, running work after a time period elapses, and allowing you to stop parallel work.
• C# 101: Virtual Function Members Vs Abstract Function Members - ’silvercrux’ shares a nice simple clear definition of the difference (and similarity) or abstract and virtual methods.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - From Blocking to Async - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript with a look at changing to an asynchronous way of working using the library to make this transition easy, and hinting at when the library may be released.

Community

• UK AzureNET User Group: Phoenix from the Flames - The UK Azure Usergroup revive themselves for an evening of talks attached to the end of the UK TechDays event being held in Thursday 15th April in the Fulham Broadway, London Vue Cinema. The UK TechDays week is shaping up to be a real good one with lots on offer beyond the official content.
• Watch Microsoft MIX10 Live Keynotes March 15 & 16 - ‘Dr. Z’ highlights the live streaming of the Keynote presentations from MIX10 from speakers Bill Buxton, Scott Guthrie, Dean Hachamovitch and Joe Belfore. The keynotes kick off at 9am PDT (GMT-9)
• Measuring real-world application usage in Visual Studio 2010 - Tomorrow sees the next Linked In .NET User Group virtual event which sees Terry Clancy and Sebastian Holst talking on the application analytic capabilities of Visual Studio 2010, and related 3rd party projects. The event starts at 11am PST

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Software

• ASP.NET MVC 2 Released! - Phil Haack announces the RTM release of ASP.NET MVC 2. This release will work for both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 RC (although it a little more tricky to install there). Scott Guthrie also weighs in on the release with his announcement post ‘ASP.NET MVC 2 Released‘ talking about some of the key features of the V2 release, and Scott Hanselman highlights a number of resources to help you learn more in his ASP.NET MVC 2 Released announcement post.
• WikiPlex v1.3 Released - Matt Hawley announces the latest release of WikiPlex, the Wiki engine that runs the Wiki on CodePlex. This release comes with all new and improved documentation, along with support for embedding Channel 9 videos and syntax highlighting for PowerShell code.
• Policies for PostSharp 1.5 Legacy - Gael Fraiteur outlines the support plans for the existing free PostSharp 1.5 release now that the PostSharp library is moving to being a commercial library.

Information

• Code Bubbles - A very interesting coding UX - John V. Petersen highlights a research project from Andrew Bragdon looking at an alternative ‘way’ for the IDE to operate. Check out the video demo of ‘Code Bubbles’ for a glimpse of a possible future for the programmers best weapon the IDE
• A Visual Look At The LINQ SelectMany Operator - Justin Etheredge takes a look at the very powerful SelectMany LINQ operator illustrating the way it works using a series of simple diagrams, and talking about how it is different from other LINQ operators
• IHttpModule Gotchas - The Init() Method Can Get Called Multiple Times
  - Dominic Pettifer talks abotu the HttpModule implementation in ASP.NET and highlights the fact that multiple instances of a single HttpModule can exist in your applications, meaning that the Init method may be called multiple times, and shows how you can use a double check locking strategy to avoid doing unnecessary Init work multiple times.
• A Thoroughly Modern Developer - Peter Gillard-Moss discusses what he considers to be the key traits for a good developer in this new decade, casting out the stereotypes of old and introducing his ‘Thoroughly Modern Developer’
• Advanced Castle Windsor - generic typed factories, auto-release and more - Krzysztof Kozmic takes a look at a simple example of a Command-Handler messaging application to explore having generic typed factories returned from the Windsor container, and discusses automatic releasing of transitive components.
• WebForms vs MVC (again) - Karl Seguin discusses the points made in the latest ASP.NET Website video on choosing between ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC, discussing each of the benefits put forward for both technologies in the videos
• Do not name a class the same as its namespace, Part Two - Eric Lippert continues his discussion of why it is bad to have a type with the same name as its containing namespace with an example about generated code, and how the code many generators create can easily be broken by bad naming.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - Composing Callbacks - Matthew Podwysocki continues his exploration of the JavaScript Reactive Extensions with a real example building on the concepts previously discussed. This worked example looks at combining Ajax calls using callbacks and the Reactive Extensions to perform translations using the Microsoft Translator API.
• Entity Framework 4 - Modified Self-Tracking Entity framework that supports Code-Only and Persistence Ignorance - Adriaan de Beer shares some extended templates based on the Entity Frameworks standard Self Tracking templates, which add a number of extensions to the base offering, and shows them in use in a sample project

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Software

• Visual Studio 2010 Professional - $250 off and get an MSDN Essentials subscription offer - Eric Ligman highlights the online availability of a good offer to get you Visual Studio 2010 and a 12 month MSDN Essentials subscription for $549, which seems like a pretty good deal, although I’m unsure if you can order it from outside the US.
• Start-PowerShellPoint - John Robbins shares a neat looking PowelShell script which provides the core functionality of presentation software (ala PowerPoint) from the comfort of your console window.
• Migrating ASP.NET MVC 1.0 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM - Eilon Lipton announces the release of his ASP.NET MVC Application Project Upgrader tool which will now take your ASP.NET MVC project up to the ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM level (which has yet to be released).
• Deleporter: Cross-Process Code Injection for ASP.NET - Steve Sanderson shares a neat experimental library which provides a means for an external process to feed code into an ASP.NET application, intended for integration testing to allow the tests to set up mock data, etc in the ASP.NET from the test runner process.

Information

• We moved your ASP.NET website cheese, in a good way - Scott Hanselman announces the first in a series of updates to the ASP.NET Website, refocusing the site on the core concepts of getting started, getting the software, hosting your application and participating in the community. Another Microsoft website to get a make over yesterday was theMicrosoft TechNet site
• When "Activator" is just to slow - ‘JoeGeeky’ takes a look at the relative performance of the Activator for creating new instances of objects, a common use case in IoC container, and other reflection based code, and shows how better performance can be obtained using lambda expressions.
• Strengthening your domain: Encapsulated collections - Jimmy Bogard continues his discussions on building better domain models with a look at why in general you don’t want to expose collections as it affords the consumer of your code too much flexibility, and shows how you can better express your domain model’s intent by encapsulation.
• Getting Started With CI Using Hudson For Your .NET Projects - Bob Cravens talks us through the process of getting up and running using the Java powered Husdon Continuous Integration Server to build and manage .NET projects in this nice screenshot rich step by step post.
• POCO Template Code Generation Options - Sheetal Gupta of the Entity Framework Design Team talks about the recent release of templates for working with Entity Framework and Plain Old CLR Objects (POCO), and set out various options for taking these template forward, soliciting community feedback on the team’s ideas.
• FluentPath: a fluent wrapper around System.IO - Bertrand Le Roy sharse a Fluent interface implementation which wraps the common and dated System.IO API functions. Full code is available and licensed under a BSD license.
• Debugging .Net framework source code within Windbg - Naveen shows how you can debug into the .NET Framework source from your own applications using the Windbg debugger, allowing you to set breakpoints in the framework code
• Programming Practices: Part 1 - Watching from a distance - Brian Harry begins a series of posts talking about how he codes, in this first part talking about the way he tends to work and some of his core principles and techniques, and in his second post ‘Programming Practices: Part - Thoughts on TDD‘, he shares his thoughts on Test Driven Development, discussing how he dislikes Test Driven Development mechanisms, however likes the overall aims of TDD. Despite its seemingly inflammatory statement this is a very interesting read to hear one of the other sides to the argument.
• Guest Post: Using IronRuby and .NET to produce the "Hello World of WPF" - Eric Nelson hosts another guest post on his blog, this time from Edd Morgan who talks through creating a simple WPF application using IronRuby

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Software

• Open Source WPF UML Design tool - Omar AL Zabi shares a WPF based editor for the plantuml UML diagram generation tool which allows you to create nice UML diagrams using a simple language. The editor contributes with a text editor, and easy creation and management of the graphic representation generation. Full details of the implementation and source are available in his Code Project article PlantUML Editor: A fast and simple UML editor using WPF

Information

• Profiling Apps 1 of N: The MVC ActionLink - Hadi Hariri starts a new series on performance and profiling applications, talking about some of teh dangers of premature optimisation, and moving on to looking at profiling a simple ASP.NET MVC Action Link sample using the dotTrace profiler
• Analysing and measuring the performance of a .NET application (survey results) - Laila Lotfi shares some results from a survey published in December which looks at how developers monitor performance of their applications in development
• .Net, Native, P/Invoke marshaling just like magic… "Marshaling with C# Pocket Reference" (Think ‘Marshalling Guide for the Busy Dev Guy’) - Greg Duncan highlights a great resource on Marshalling and interop between managed and unmanaged code in C#. The first 3 chapters of this e-book are currently available in HTML with the rest to follow shortly, and also be available in PDF/XPS format too.
• Creating a Lazy Sequence of Directory Descendants in C# - Chris Sells shows that Lazy Sequences implemented in clear simple code is not just the preserve of the functional languages, showing a simple implementation in elegant C# making use of the Yield statement.
• ASP.NET 4.0 Part 11, Configuring Routing Is Easier - Dan Maharry continues his voyage round the new features of ASP.NET 4 with a look at the introduction of Routing to the WebForms, showing the process of getting up and running with routing in web forms applications.
• State Pattern Misuse - Greg Young takes a look at a common misuse of the state pattern using polymorphism, compares it to an implementation using individual classes, and shares a simple rule for deciding which implementation is right for your situation.
• Do not name a class the same as its namespace, Part One - Eric Lippert takes a look at one of the Framework Design Guidelines about type and namespace naming, looking at why the advice is given, the types of problems you can get into and something of a work around.
• Versioning REST Services - Scott Seely takes a look at various strategies for providing versioning in REST based web services looking at version parameters, and URL versioning
• The 8th Phase - Karl Seguin follows up on a post from early last year adding in a further phase of unit testing, which talks about life beyond the ‘unit’ test, and how integration tests add a lot of testing value to your tests.
• Video of My Last Iteration Planning Meeting with CodePlex - Sara Ford share a valuable insight into how the CodePlex team do agile development in this video recording of her last iteration planning meeting before moving on to pastures new.

Community

• Videos of developer sessions at Oredev (including mine on .net debugging) - Tess Ferrandez highlights the availability of the Oredev conference session videos from last year’s conference, including the video of her session on .NET Debugging.
• LinkedIn .NET User Group Online Presentation Tomorrow - Gaiaware are presenting their Gaia Ajax framework to the Linked In .NET User Group today (10th March) at 11am PST, and are also giving away 5 full annual subscriptions to Gaia Ajax to randomly chosen attendees.
• Edge UG @ UK TechDays: Functional Programming on .NET with Oliver Sturm - The EDGE Usergroup are tacking an event of their own onto the end of the Tuesday Microsoft TechDays event. This session is open to both TechDays attendees and non-attendees, and is to be hosted at the same venue in the evening, and sees Oliver Sturm present on Functional Programming on the .NET Platform.
• Douglas Crockford: "Crockford on JavaScript - Episode IV: The Metamorphosis of Ajax" (93 min.) - The Yahoo User Interface blog share the latest instalment of Douglas Crockford’s talk series on JavaScript, with this 4th episode talking about the DOM and Css and how it leads into Ajax.

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