The Morning Brew

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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