The Morning Brew

Monday is a Public Holiday here in the UK, so in keeping with Morning Brew tradition there will be no Morning Brew post on Monday, with a larger post on Tuesday next week. Have a good weekend everyone.

Software

• Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh! - The Windows Phone Developer Blog announce the release of the April CTP refresh of the Windows Phone Developer Tools. The main feature of which is support for the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010. Other significant changes are an OS update for the emulator, improved documentation, along with a number of other changes and improvements
• Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools April 2010 Refresh - Tim Heuer shares some more details of the Windows Phone Developer Tools Refresh, including a work around for a common problem, and details of the Expression Blend integration.
• Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh and XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP Refresh now available for download - Aaron Stebner joins in the announcing of the CTP refresh of Windows Phone Developer tools, along with highlighting the updates to XNA Game Studio 4.0 which is included in the release.
• MooTools 1.3b1: A ‘Slick’ release - Ajaxian highlights the release of the first Beta of the MooTools 1.3 JavaScript library, including a new quicker and better tested pure JavaScript selector engine
• LINQ to GPU (with Brahma) - Greg Duncan highlights the Brahma open source library which allows .NET 3.5 / C#3 applications to perform parallel streaming computations across a variety of processors using LINQ syntax to specify the work.

Information

• Every Program There Is, Part Two - Eric Lippert continues his series looking at generating test programs using the tree like nature of programs to help. This part looks at a simple programming Context Free Grammar for working with numbers performing addition.
• Your Visual Studio 2010 Dream Machine - Brian Harry discusses the optimum hardware for developing using Visual Studio 2010, discussing what his suggested specification would be, and looking at how VS would utilise certain aspects of the machine.
• Download and Share Visual Studio Color Schemes - Scott Guthrie highlights the StudioStyles.info site which provides a way of sharing and creating custom Visual Studio Colour Schemes.
• My first VS2010 Extension - Christiaan takes a step by step look at creating a simple Visual Studio 2010 Extension for the NArainge tool
• Unbounded concurrency - Ayende explains why the challenge code he posted the other day was broken, caused by particular times taken for the individual operations being parallelised, and the increasing use of threads as the process progresses.
• Download SQL Server 2008 R2 Express (Database Size Limit Increased to 10GB! ) - Aamir Hasan provides the download link for the Express Edition of SQL Server 2008 R2, along with pointing out a 2.5 x increase in the maximum database size in this edition.
• jQuery Micro Optimizations - Ajaxian features some things you can do to micro optimise your jQuery code. The list, originated by Corey Hart, includes a number of code related things you can do, along with recommendations of functionality to avoid for performance reasons.
• Can’t hit breakpoints in a plug-in or can’t debug .NET 2.0/3.0/3.5 from a mixed mode .exe project with Visual Studio 2010? - Andrew Hall takes a look at mysterious problem when debugging where sometimes the symbols won’t be loaded, and explains why this can occur due to the two debugging engines included, one for .NET 4 and the other for .NET 2/3/3.5.
• The Ted Neward F# Folding Challenge - Richard Minerich shares a Functional Programming Code Kata learning exercise from Ted Neward, looking at an easy imperative solution, and the more challenging functional solution.
• Visual Tooling Will Make You Go Blind - Rob Conery takes a look at Visual Tooling, and how he feels that command line tools are often better for productivity, sharing a simple cheat sheet for working with Mercurial from the command Line.
• How I do VCS - ‘Wes’ shares his list of rules, recommendations and best practices for working with Version Control systems.

Community

• Brighton ALT.NET Beers. 7pm Tuesday 4th May at The Skiff - Mike Hadlow shares the details of the next Brighton Alt.Net Beers event, to be held at its usual venue of ‘TheSkiff’, with proceedings starting at 7pm on Tuesday 4th May.

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Based on further feedback (and my own experiences in putting The Morning Brew together it seems the delay in posts making its way to your feed reader is down to FeedBurner. Hopefully the situation will improve soon.

Information

• Windows API Code Pack - Past, Present, and Future - Yochay Kiriaty gives some background on the Windows API Code Pack, which brings a managed code API for underlying Windows API functionality, and seeks feedback to help them improve the product.
• Managed Extensibility Framework Overview - Shen Chauhan of the UK Microsoft Consulting Services team gives a nice introductory overview of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), looking at why you might want to use it and showing a simple example
• Constructors and Value Types - Ron Petrusha of the BCL Team looks at the use of constructors with Value Types (structs) in the .NET Framework, showing examples in VB.NET and C#
• Process for Securing Web Sites and Applications - Aamir Hasan shares a useful check list of things you can do to secure your web applications focusing on the Server related aspects of the process.
• Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC: Contextual controller injection - Jimmy Bogard continues his series on ASP.NET MVC and Dependency Injection with a look at injecting some of the property based dependencies of the Controller base class
• ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Templating - Brian Mains takes a look at the Dynamic Data based Templating support included in ASP.NET MVC 2, which allows you to create templates for certain objects which can be used across your application via a simple call to the DisplayFor / EditorFor methods
• MonoTouch and Apple’s Section 3.3.1: Two Theories - Miguel de Icaza shares two theories about the change in Apple’s terms and conditions for iPhone Development, which impacts the MonoTouch project by restricting the languages applications may be programmed in.
• Challenge: What killed the application? - Ayende shares another of his puzzling ‘why does the application crash’ puzzles. Lots of possibles in the comments so far.
• Mocking the Unmockable: Using Microsoft Moles with Gallio - Thomas Weller looks at using the Microsoft Moles Framework, and how you can use it to mock almost anything, and shows it in use with the Gallio test framework
• DRY Violations May Indicate A Missed Modeling Opportunity - Derick Bailey looks at how the a violation of the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle can sometimes suggest that there is something wrong with your application model, and shows an example of turning a violation into a better design
• RavenDB - An Introduction - Ayende & Paul B take an introductory look at the Raven DB document database in the CodeProject article, looking at the setup of the Raven DB server, and introducing using it from C# code.

Community

• Community For MVC.Net: The MvcContrib Grid Component - The Recording of last nights C4MVC virtual event is now available, and sees Jeremy Skinner show the ASP.NET MVC Contrib Grid, which allows you to quickly build tabular data UI in your ASP.NET MVC applications
• Party with Palermo, Tech Ed 2010 save the date! - Jeffrey Palermo announces the date and venue for his TechEd 2010 New Orleans Party with Palmero event. These events are a great way of getting to meet other conference attendees, and the admission is typically one business card.
• Cambridge GeekBeers (Summer of 2010 ) #2 - The Cambridge .NET Developer’s User Group announce the dates for the second Cambridge GeekBeers event, based on the AltNetBeers style events, this event contains 4 slots for focused attendee defined topics, along with an opportunity to network with fellow developers over a beer (or two)

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A few people have reported that The Morning Brew has been taking a long time to show up in Google Reader this week - I’ve been publishing at my usual time, so I suspect something out of my control is causing the delay. To that end I will be announcing each post on Twitter as soon as its posted, so follow @calcock for the updates.

Software

• Mono’s C# Compiler as a Service on Windows. - Miguel de Icaza announces a preview of the latest bits of C# from the Mono Team. This preview release now allows you to use the Mono C# compiler on the .NET Framework, use the Mono C# REPL shell against the .NET Framework, and embed the Mono Evaluator in your C# applications. Miguel also outline their plans for the future.
• Windows Embedded Standard 7 RTM has Shipped! - The Windows Embedded Blog highlights the RTM release of Windows Embedded Standard 7. This release beings some of the more consumer facing functionality to the product, for devices such as meda centre systems, set top boxes and Televisions.
• StreamInsight 1.0 Released - Roman, of the StreamInsight Team, highlights the release of StreamInsight 1.0, Microsoft’s complex event processing system which is a part of the SQL Server 2008 R2 product suite.
• Visual Studio goes international - Somasegar shares the plans for releases of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 for the international audiences, with existing translations in French, German, and Japanese, and planned releases from Microsoft in a number of additional languages, with some community language packs also planned,

Information

• Breaking through the class sealing - Jason Crease goes back to basics and examines the C# Sealed keyword in its uses against classes and methods and properties, looking at why you might want to use sealed, and what you can and can not seal.
• Start your NGen… A four part NGen walk through - Greg Duncan highlights a great series of posts about the use of the NGen native image generator, and its use in VS2010 / .NET 4
• VS2010 AddIn for setting Break-points on partial function names - Naveen shares an implementation of an Addin for Visual Studio 2010 which allows you to set break points on partial function names in managed code
• What on Earth is a Lambda Expression? - Simon Ince goes back to basics and explores the concepts behind the Lambda expression in response to an increase in questions from developers about them
• Read all of ASP.NET MVC 2 in Action now while you wait for the printed book - Jeffrey Palermo announces the completion of the newly updated ASP.NET MVC 2 in Action, updated to the Version 2 release of ASP.NET MVC, and highlights the availability of the full manuscript in their version control system, released under a creative commons license.
• Debugging a classic ReaderWriterLock deadlock with SOSex.dll - Tess Ferrandez looks at debugging deadlock problems surrounding the use of ReaderWriterLocks, working through a sample problem using Windbg and SOS.
• 6 important .NET concepts: - Stack, heap, Value types, reference types, boxing and Unboxing - Shivprasad koirala explores a number of crucial concepts in understanding stack and heap memory allocations, along with exploring the performance implications of boxing and unboxing.

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Recording of Neil Robbins on NoSQL @ E-VAN 26 April 2010 - If (like me) you missed Neil Robbins doing his NoSQL talk at the European Virtual Alt.Net User group earlier this week, the recording of the session is now available to view online (or download)
• Azure eBook Update #1 - 16 authors so far! - Eric Nelson gives an update on the planning for the community written Windows Azure eBook, with a list of the articles currently planned or agreed, and they are still on the look out for new proposals for articles, or authors for some of the suggested topics.

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Software

• Axum for Visual Studio 2010 RTM is here! - The Axum team announce that the 0.3 release of Axum is now available, and supports Visual Studio 2010 RTM. Axum is an incubation project of the DevLabs team at Microsoft which aims to bring a message passing style of programming to .NET
• The Open Data Protocol .NET Framework Client Library - Source Code Available for Download - Shayne Burgess of the WCF Data Services Team announces the availability of the source code for the OData Protocol .NET Client Library for .NET 3.5 SP1 and Silverlight 3, licensed under an Apache 2.0 license and available from Codeplex.
• TFS 2010 Power Tools have released - Brian Harry highlights the availability of the TFS Power Tools for the 2010 RTM Release, and outlines the changes in the product since the 2008 release (as a number of Power Tool features are now core product features)
• Visual Studio 2010 Report Viewer Available - The Innovation Showcase Blog highlights the availability of the Report Viewer Control for Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 applications allowing your .NET apps to show reports from Reporting Services versions up to SQL2008R2 level.
• NCover 3.4: .NET 4 Support And More - The NCover Team announce the release of NCover 3.4, their latest versions now supporting .NET 4.0, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Core, along with the latest MSTest and NUnit Releases

Information

• Using the Concurrency Visualizer to Understand and Optimize UI Responsiveness - ‘majac’ takes a look at how the Visual Studio 2010 Concurrency Visualiser allows you to easily see and identify UI responsiveness problems caused by blocking on the UI Thread
• Visual Studio Profiler Team Blog : VS2010: Silverlight 4 profiling - Maxim Goldin blogs on the Profiler Team Blog about the process for profiling Silverlight 4 applications using the Visual Studio 2010 Profiler, showing the required command line commands to start a profiling session of you Silverlight application hosted in IE.
• Box Selection and Multi-Line Editing with VS 2010 - Scott Guthrie continues his series looking at the enhancements ing VS2010 / .NET 4 with a look at some IDE changes allowing for box selection and multi-line editing within the Visual Studio IDE, showing the best of it in a short video.
• Back to the basics: constants vs read-only fields - Luis Abreu revisits a core concept in C#, the difference between ReadOnly and Constant fields
• C# Extension Methods - To Extend or Not To Extend… - James Michael Hare discusses the power and responsibility at comes with using Extension Methods, looking at some ‘cute’ but not necessarly correct uses of Extension methods, along with exploring some more responsible uses.
• Currying vs Partial Function Application - Mike Hadlow looks at the definitions of Currying and Partial Application, illustrating the concepts with some simple F#
• Every Program There Is, Part One - Eric Lippert moves on from Binary Trees to look at applying the same techniques to Programs, allowing vast arrays of test cases for compilers to be generated using similar principles
• Calculating Fibonacci numbers with .Net 4.0’s BigInteger - Christiaan takes a look at calculating large Fibonacci Numbers using the new .NET 4 BigInteger class from VB to produce the results
• Dynamically Read, Compile, and Run Source Code From a Text File - James Atkinson looks at dynamic compilation of VB and C# code from text files at runtime to allow you to allow users extend your application with their own custom code.
• Brad Wilson: Writing an FxCop Task for MSBuild - Brad Wilson talks about the building of an MSBuild task for running FXCop 2010 as a part of your build process, ans shares the source to the Task.
• Say Goodbye to NAnt and MSBuild for .NET Builds With IronRuby - Justin Etheredge takes a look at removing the XML from his build process by using IronRuby with Rake, and Albacore to provide a code based build process
• Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC: Controllers - Jimmy Bogard look at the support for Inversion of Control Containers in ASP.NET MVC, discussing the additional work you have to undertake, beyond the framework support, to take the most advantage of IoC in your ASP.NET MVC projects
• VS launcher for F# web apps - Mauricio Scheffer looks at the configuration required to allow you to Develop and Debug F# Web Projects in Visual Studio 2010.

Community

• Microsoft UK Tech Days - The UK TechDays site has been updated to include video and resource content from the 5 days with both the Developer and IT Pro content now available to view online, allowing you to catch up if you missed out.

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Software

• Announcing Fiddler 2.2.9 - Eric Lawrence announces the latest release of the Fiddler Web Debugger which includes a number of new features, along with some significant performance and architectural improvements. Eric also announces the new Fiddler Blog, the new home for news about all things Fiddler
• S#arp Architecture 1.5 released - Alec Whittington announces the release of S#arp Architecture 1.5, the first release since he took stewardship of the project, which introduces ASP.NET MVC2 support, VS2010 using .NET 3.5 support, along with updates to all the libraries which make up the project.
• Pex 0.91 is out! - Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces the latest release of the Pex Automated white box testing project from Microsoft Research. This release can be found on MSDN, the Visual Studio Gallery and the Microsoft Research Project site, and brings VS2010 RTM support and x64 support, along with the usual improvements and enhancements.
• Microsoft StyleCop going open! - Greg Duncan highlights the news that Microsoft StyleCop is going to be moved to the Open Source Microsoft Permissive License (MS-PL), and the project will move to being hosted on CodePlex with full code available.

Information

• Don’t overlook Enterprise Library 5.0 Migration Guide - Grigori Melnik talks about the Enterprise Library 5 release, and highlights a valuable piece of guidance included which will help with migrating your projects to the new release from versions 3.1, 4.0 and 4.1.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - Going Parallel with ForkJoin - Matthew Podwysocki continues his Reactive Extensions in JavaScript series with a look at how the latest Reactive Extensions Release enabled parallel programming in JavaScript using the Fork/Join pattern
• What is New in ASP.NET 4.0 Code Access Security - Xiaohong Tang of the ASP.NET QA Team looks at the changes to Code access Security (CAS) in .NET 4 and how it relates to ASP.NET
• Exploring UnhandledException in .NET and Watson buckets - Naveen takes a look at the undocumented Windbg SOS extension function !WatsonBuckets, and looks at how you can obtain additional information using the CLR hosting interface to debug exceptions.
• A Gentle Introduction to WCF - Martin Rue takes an introductory look at Windows Communication Foundation WCF, looking at the basics of creating, hosting and consuming WCF services in .NET
• A gotcha for those Fluent interfaces - Rob Ashton talks about a tricky gotcha when creating fluent interfaces using the lambda based GetProperty implementation
• The Agile Visitor - Derek Greer talks about an implementation of the Vistor Pattern which combines it with the Strategy pattern to help avoid some of the Single Resposibility violations which can occur in the standard visitor pattern,
• First 3 ASP.NET MVC for the Rest of Us Videos - Joe Stagner shares the first three videos in his ASP.NET MVC For the Rest Of Us videocast series, sharing almost 1.5 hours of content starting from the first principles of ASP.NET MVC.
• First three NHibernate quickstart tutorials available - Bob Palmer announces the publication of the first three NHibernate quick start tutorials, starting with the basics of NHibernate in part 1, and moving on to look at the repository implementation in part 2, and the mapping of object relations in part 3.
• WCF RIA Services - Hands On Lab - John Papa goes through the step by step process of building his Silverlight 4 Launch demo application, looking at the implementation of the WCF services back end and binding the data to the Silverlight UI.
• Game programming in F# with Silverlight and WPF) - Windows Live - Brian McNamara shares the details of building a simple game using Silverlight, WPF and XAML and F# to implement a breakout clone in 400 lines of code - impressive stuff,

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Software

• First wave of localized VS 2010 releases - Brian Harry highlights the release os the first of the localised Visual Studio 2010 releases on MSDN, now available in Japanese, German and French

Information

• That No SQL Thing: Document Database Migrations - Ayende presses on with his NoSQL article series, taking a look at data migrations in Document Databases, showing how changes to the schema can be achieved with Document databases vs standard RDBMS
• Every Tree There Is - Eric Lippert follows up on his previous post about binary trees, looking at the answer to his challenge question on the number of trees possible of size n, looks at generating binary trees and talks about applications of this generation
• A Guide to Parallel Programming - Drafts of Preface and Chapters 1 & Drafts of Chapters 2 and 5 - Ade Miller highlights the availability of the first three chapters of the Patterns and Practices Team’s book on Parallel Programming looking at the background to parallel programming, working with parallel loops and futures and continuations.
• Digging into the NET Parallel Framework - Kevin Jones looks at how easily you can convert non-parallel code into parallel code using the Parallel.For method to support parallelism of loop operations.
• SQL 2008 R2 RTM’s check out the free training - David Lean highlights a collection of training materials available from Microsoft under the guise of the SQL Server R2 Digital Tour which includes, resource kits, developer training kits, ebooks, and videos/webcasts covering the range of new features in the product.
• A (Re)Introduction to Patterns - Jason Hogg begins a new series looking at the role of patterns in cloud and service based systems, and in this opening part takes a look at how patterns differ from other forms of guidance that are available.
• Contributing to OSS, a Git Bootcamp - Karl Seguin takes a look at setting up Git to access the code for Open Source Projects, something which is increasingly important as more and more projects move to using Git repositories.
• Portable Area excerpt from MVC2 in Action - Eric Hexter shares an extract from the book he is a co-author (along with a number of other well known ASP.NET MVC people) about ASP.NET MVC2, sharing a section on the Portable Areas functionality.
• Using Unity Part 1 & Part 2 & Part 3 - ‘nmarun’ has been looking at using the Unity Application Blockl to implement common Inversion of Control practices, and in these three parts looks at setting up the container, explores type aliases, and looks at lifecycle management.
• Expressive Code: Good Variable Names Instead Of Magic Values And Calculations - Derick Bailey talks about introducing variables in place of magic number to aid code readability (even at the expense of adding some lines of code)

Community

• Upcoming talk: ‘OMG! Someone broke the Internet!’ - Manchester, May 19th - James Lewis will be speaking at the Throughtworks Manchester Geek Night on the 19th May 2010 on the subject of building large scalable internet applications using REST and Resource Oriented Architectures

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Software

• SQL Server 2008 R2 RTM - Robert Bruckner highlights the RTM release of SQL Server 2008 R2. R2 represents a significant amount of development of the product, introducing a number of new features across the various editions.
• SQL Server 2008 R2 Released (RTM) - Download it or try the Hosted version from PASS! - Jacob Sebastian also features the SQL Server R2 RTM Release, with download links to the product, along wtih some documentation (in ebook format), some videos and highlights a hosted preview from PASS which will let you try it out without installing.
• SQL Server 2008 R2/SQL Server 2008 R2 Express RTM/RTW Today - Greg Duncan also focuses on the SQL Release, highlighting the Express edition release, and associated supporting tools
• DiffPlex 1.1 Released - Matt Manela highlights a minor update to the DiffPlex project, taking the version to 1.1, and improving the performance of this Diffing library for Silverlight and HTML based applications.
• WF State Machine Activity Pack CTP1 Released - Alan Ko, Program Manager on the Windows Workflow team shares the news of the release of the first CTP of the Windows Workflow State Machine Activity Pack, bringing support for statemachine activities to WF4. Full source and installs are available for this from the CodePlex site.
• Goodbye Teamprise, Hello Team Explorer Everywhere - Martin Woodward talks about the new Team Explorer Everywhere product, and how it relates to the acquisition of TeamPrise by Microsoft and what provisions are being made for existing Teamprise customers.

Information

• VS 2010 Debugger Improvements (BreakPoints, DataTips, Import/Export) - Scott Guthrie takes a look at the improvements made to the debugger in Visual Studio 2010 showing via screenshots how you can use Breakpoint labels, Pinned DataTips and import/export of breakpoints and DataTips to improve your debugging productivity
• Setting up Visual Studio 2010 to step into Microsoft .NET Source Code - Raj Kaimal runs through the steps required to get Visual Studio 2010 to allow you to step into the .NET Framework Source Code by configuring the symbol server.
• That No SQL Thing: Modeling Documents in a Document Database - Ayende continues his series on NoSQL Databases with a look at how you can correctly design a data model for a Document Database, using his standard Blog based domain as an example.
• Simple-MongoDB - Part 2, Anonymous types, JSON, Embedded entities and references - Daniel Wertheim continues his series on using the MongoDB database with his Simple-MongoDB driver, looking at the concepts and use of Anonymous types, JSON, Embedded documents and References.
• NoSQL with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC - Part 2 - Shiju Varghese also continues looking at MongoDB using NoRM and ASP.NET MVC, in this post focusing on a Domain Entity which has a complex deep object graph. Supporting code for this series is available from CodePlex.
• Back to (Parallel) Basics: Do you really want to do that? or Why doesn’t the new Parallel.For support BigInteger? - Scott Hanselman, with some help from Stephen Toub, answers a readers question on why the Parallel.For function does not support the use of BigInteger, and discusses the amount of time it would take to iterate over a number this big.
• The Web Protection Library, plugins and naming - Barry Dorrans discusses the proposed implementation for a plug-in architecture for the Web Protection Library, using MEF under the hood, to allow developers to extend the WPL with additional functionality.
• Resource Usage: IoC Containers And Large Object Graphs - Updated: Link was broken, now fixed Derick Bailey looks at controlling the resource usage of the AutoFac Inversion of Control Container when satisfying large dependency graphs, and there seems to be some discussion in the comments about how other IoC containers achieve similar.
• Top 25 security issues for developers of web sites - Andrew James shares the top 25 Web Application security issues as found by CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) using their general ranking. Well worth reading and informing yourself of these types of software defects.

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Software

• Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 Released! - Grigori Melnik highlights the release of the latests edition of the Microsoft Enterprise Library, a collection of application blocks which provide the Patterns and Practices implementations of common application functionality such as data access, logging, caching etc.
• SQL Server Modeling CTP (November 2009 Release 3) for Visual Studio 2010 RTM Now Available - Chris Sells shares the news of an updated CTP release of the SQL Server Modelling functionality which includes M, Quadrant, etc. This updated November 2009 CTP release targets the Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 RTM release, with no other changes.

Information

• C# Language Specification 4.0 Download - David Hayden highlights the availability of the document which specifies the C#4 language, now available as a download on MSDN in HTML and Word Document format.
• That No SQL Thing: The relational modeling anti pattern in document databases - Ayende continues his series on Document Databases with a look at how modelling data in Document Databases differs drastically from data modelling in RDBMS, and how if you attempt to do it the same way you will encounter numerous pain points.
• Towards a Smaller .NET 4 - Details on the Client Profile and Downloading .NET - Scott Hanselman talks about the .NET Client Profile, looking at the size of it and the various full .NET Framework installs, sharing some links to great resources for further details of how they made it small, and showing developers where they can get it for redistribution in their applications.
• The Busy Developer’s Guide to SQL Server Modeling - Shawn Wildermuth gives an overview of the SQL Server Modelling functionality in this MSDN article, showing the steps involved in a simple modelling exercise.
• New Silverlight 4 Training Kit Available - The Public Sector DPE Team highlight a new Silverlight 4 training kit over on Channel 9 which consists of 8 modules, with 25 videos and numerous hands on labs, dealing with the full range of Silverlight 4 features.
• Code Contracts fails to find CodeContracts.targets after install & Validating Collections with Code Contracts - Derik Whittaker highlights an issue upon creating a new project in VS2010 with the latest version of Code Contracts installed, and goes on to look at applying Code contract conditions to collections
• Tip/Trick: Fix Common SEO Problems Using the URL Rewrite Extension - Scott Guthrie looks at how the URL Rewrite extension of IIS can help in resolving common SEO issues as identified by the SEO Toolkit, exploring some scenarios from a report, and showing step by step how to resolve those issues.
• Application Recovery and Restart C# Quick Reference - Arik Poznanski looks at the Windows API Code Pack functionality which allows you to save application state and have the application restart and recover if it crashes. This functionality is available from Windows Vista and beyond
• A Tour of Various TPL Options - Igor Ostrovsky highlights a paper from Joseph E. Hoag which looks at the various options available to help you control the execution of parallel tasks in the Task Parallel Library.

Community

• Register now for the FREE UK Microsoft Azure Self-paced Interactive Learning Course, starting May 10th - David Gristwood and Eric Nelson have been working to put together a Self Paced Azure Platform learning course which, over 6 weeks from Mat 10th will introduce you to the core concepts of the Azure Platform.
• Call for authors for new eBook on the Windows Azure Platform - Eric Nelson is also working on creating an E-Book of community articles on Azure, and needs your help to create the content. If you have an interest in a particular area of Azure and feel you could write a 400-800 word article on the subject, get in touch and you could end up being an author on the book.

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