The Morning Brew

Software

• Spec Explorer 2010, Release 3.2 Now Available! - Robert DuWors of the Spec Explorer Team announces the latest release of Spec Explorer 2010. This release targets Visual Studio 2010 Professional and higher, and brings with it a number of new features, including automation support, improved documentation, a new wizard for creating models, and a Choice API which adds better support for alternative responses in the application under test.
• RIA Services Release Candidate 2… - Deepesh Mohnani highlights the release of the Second Release Candidate release of the .NET Rich Internet Application (RIA) Services, a release which is compatible with the Silverlight 4 RTM and Visual Studio 2010 RTM.
• MonoMac Bindings: Blending Cocoa and .NET on OSX - Miguel de Icaza highlights a new release from the Mono Project, a side project which makes building Cocoa based applications which run on OSX using C# and .NET but with functionality bound to the native OSX functionality.
• Castle Windsor - Silverlight 4 binaries - Giorgetti Alessandro shares built assemblies of his Fork of the Castle Windsor IoC Container which will run under Silverlight 4.

Information

• Tekpub MVC 2.0 Starter Site - Rob Conery announces the release of the Tekpub MVC 2.0 Starter Site, released under an open source license, this is the sample application for the Tekpub ASP.NET MVC training series developed along with Steve Sanderson.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - New Release and Joins - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript, highlighting a new release for the Extensions and takes a look at the Join functionality of the library which takes multiple event streams and synchronises and combines them
• Learn Windows Phone 7 Development in 7 Minutes Each - Bruce D. Kyle highlights a series of 7 short Windows Phone 7 video tutorials looking at various aspects of Windows Phone 7 development.
• That No SQL Thing: Document Databases - usages - Ayende continues his series of posts on NoSQL databases, discussing the uses for Document Databases, focusing on why you might want to use one in your application
• Optional Parameters in C#4, C#3 and VB.Net, With a Side Order of IL Quirks - Steven Robbins digs into the IL behind Optional and Named parameters looking at this new functionality of C# and exploring how it works behind the scenes
• Every Binary Tree There Is - Eric Lippert explores Binary trees, looking at testing a routine that operates over binary trees by testing all possible trees, setting a couple of challenge questions at the end of the post (there are already plenty of comments discussing this one, so check them out too)
• Form Management: Tight Or Incorrect Coupling Can Cause Hard To Find Bugs - Derick Bailey shows a simple looking piece of code which contains an application crash bug along with memory leaks, and discusses why it is so important to decouple process from UI to help avoid these type of problem.
• Effective exercises for teaching TDD - Gojko Adzic shares a collection of links to Test Driven Development Teaching exercises, and discusses what makes a good TDD teaching exercise.

Community

• DDD South West - Registration for DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West 2.0, a free community event to be held in Bristol on Saturday 5th June opens at 10am today. The DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper series of conferences are a wonderful set of events, and I have the pleasure of joining the conference as a speaker. Registration is sure to fill up quickly, so make sure you register early if you want to attend.
• Service Broker (Intro + Guidance), Indexing (Selection, Usage, Fragmentation etc…), Normalisation, Surrogate Keys - Locking considerations - UK SQL Server User Group are running an event at Microsoft’s Reading Campus on Wednesday 21st April, where Tony Rogerson will talk on the subject of Sets, Normalisation, Surrogate keys and Referential Integrity, and Neil Hambly will look at the Service Broker and Indexing. The event is free, and starts around 6pm.

Charity

• Team Hanselman and Diabetes Walk 2010 - Well known developer and all round good guy Scott Hanselman is going to be taking part in the Diabetes Walk 2010, and is aiming to raise $50,000 for charity. If you are in a position to help out in this aim, please give generously.

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Software

• SharePoint 2010 reaches RTM! - The Microsoft SharePoint Team announce the RTM (Release to Manufacturing) release of SharePoint , along with Office,2010 Visio 2010 and Project 2010. There will be a virtual launch event held on 12th May
• Office 2010 Reaches RTM! - Takeshi Numoto talks about the Office 2010 RTM release milestone, giving the details of the availability of office in volume licensing and retail stores
• MonoTouch 3.0 - Miguel de Icaza announces the release of MonoTouch 3.0, which brings support for the new features of iPhoneOS 4.0, along with a few other new features. This release is technically a preview, and requires that you have the Apple iPhone 4.0 SDK installed
• Moonlight 3 Preview 6 - Miguel de Icaza also highlights the latest preview release of Moonlight, the Mono Project’s Silverlight Implementation
• Silverlight 4 Released - Scott Guthrie gives his usual overview of a new release, looking at the various bits of the Silverlight 4 release, linking to further details from other members of the team
• CSLA 4 Preview 4 available - Rockford Lhotka releases a preview release of his CSLA 4 Application Framework. This preview release almost contains the full range of functionality that will be in the final release, and requires Visual Studio 2010 with optional dependencies on Silverlight 4

Information

• Eliminating Comments: the Road to Clarity - John Sonmez talks about the role of comments in our code, and examines the assertion that comments should be unnecessary, and that good clear code should be completely readable without comments, illustrating with some examples
• Sending JSON to an ASP.NET MVC Action Method Argument - Phil Haack follows on from Javier Lozano’s post from last week with a look at using the support ASP.NET MVC Futures library to perform the sending of JSON to controller actions.
• A Simple JSON Model Binder - Javier follows up with a simple custom implementation of the JSON Model Binder, and shows this in this post.
• Moving Suteki Shop from Linq-to-SQL to NHibernate - Mike Hadlow has been porting his Suteki Shop Open Source ASP.NET MVC E-commerce application from Linq-to-Sql to the NHibernate ORM, and has now completed this work, and along the way learning some interesting things about NHibernate and Get<T> vs Load<T> and sub types
• Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) Explained - Jeremy Likness posts a long but valuable article on the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern, looking at the structure, reasons why you should use it, and showing an example implementation
• Visual Studio 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts Poster - Suprotim Agarwal highlights some Visual Studio keyboard shortcut posters, available as PDFs for Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++ and Visual F#
• C# 4.0: Alternative To Optional Arguments - Paulo Morgado continues his exploration of the new C#4 release, looking in this post at the alternatives to optional parameters when implementing interfaces which are to be consumed from other versions of the framework. Paulo also turns his attentions to Dynamic Programming and COM Interop Improvements
• Strings and F# Immutable Lists - Robert Pickering talks about Immutability in programming, looking at its place and use in strings and lists, and discusses the performance aspects of using immutability in your F#
• SilverLight 4, RIA Services, MEF and MVVM, oh my… A four part series from the mind of Shawn Wildermuth (updated for VS2010/SL4 RTM) - Greg Duncan highlights an updated version of a series of posts from Shawn Wildermuth which addresses an number of the key concepts in Silverlight 4 development, now updated for the RTM release
• Double Dispatch is a Code Smell - Derek Greer talks about the Double Dispatch form of the Strategy pattern, discussing why it exists, and how it can be used, and showing alternatives which may be better.

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Had another enjoyable evening at the UK Techdays Fringe event last night, hosted by the UK AzureNET Usergroup (details of their next meeting in today’s community section).

Software

• Silverlight 4 released. Availability of tools announcement - Tim Heuer announces the release of Silverlight 4, providing links to where you can get everything, along with answering some common questions about the release.
• Alive and kickin’ [New Silverlight 4 Toolkit released with today's Silverlight 4 RTW!] - David Anson (Delay) announces the release of the April 2010 Silverlight Toolkit, which adds support for the Silverlight 4 RTM, and outlines the new features in this release. If you are new to this library be sure to checkout the previous releases release notes for details of other features.
• AutoPoco 0.4 released - features features features - Rob Ashton announces version 0.4 of AutoPoco, improving the conventions used in the library, and adding inheritance support, the ability to call methods, and a number of new data sources for your properties.
• AutoMapper source moved to GitHub - Jimmy Bogard gives an update on the source hosting for the AutoMapper project, moving the active repository to GitHub

Information

• Links to .NET Framework 4 deployment guides - Aaron Stebner highlights the MSDN Deployment Guides for .NET 4, giving you all the details of the various means of supplying the .NET Framework to your customers
• The .NET Framework 4 Installer Improvements - Peter Marcu takes a look at the improvements to the installer of the .NET Framework, comparing back over the 3.5 release, and .NET 4 beta and RTM versions, talking about the ways the improvements were made.
• What’s new in T4 in Visual Studio 2010 - Gareth Jones takes a look at the vast number of improvements in the T4 Templating provided in Visual Studio 2010, looking at them from the point of view of Template Authors and CustomTool builders.
• What happens to C# 4 optional parameters when compiling against 3.5? - Tales from the Evil Empire - Bertrand Le Roy talks about how the C#4 optional parameters feature degrades when you compile against .NET 3.5, and how you may need to offer additional constructors/methods with other overloads.
• How to Migrate Your .NET 3.5 App to .NET 4 - Bruce D. Kyle highlights the MSDN Migration documentation which details known differences from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4 in various technology areas to help you in the migration process of moving your applications from 3.5 to 4.0
• POSTing JSON Data to MVC Controllers - Javier G. Lozano takes a look at using jQuery to create JSON data and post it to an ASP.NET MVC Controller to perform actions on your web pages without a page refresh.
• Cyclomatic Complexity - What Is It and Why Should You Care? - Julias Shaw takes a look at the Cyclomatic Complexity software metric, which provides an indicator of how complicated a particular piece of code is. Examples here are in Java, however the concept and discussion applies to all languages
• Unit Testable WCF Web Services in MVVM and Silverlight 4 - lobodan Pavkov takes a look at building Webservices using WCF and consuming them for MVVM development in Silverlight 4 with particular consideration to making the implementation clean and testable. This one is a pretty long article, exploring some key technologies with plenty of code to look at (All of which is available for download)
• C# TDD Videos - You asked for them - Brett Schuchert shares some rough cuts of a C# version of his TDD video series (originally in Java)
• Using VS2010 to edit F#; source code (and a little LOGO EDSL) - Brian McNamara talks about the Editor support in Visual Studio 2010, and provides a link to the screencast showing this, along with the sample Embedded Domain Specific Language (EDSL) shown in the video.

Community

• UK AzureNET User Group: The Power of Three - The UK AzureNET User Group announce their next event, to be held on the evening of Thursday 27th May, in the Microsoft London offices. This event sees 3 talks, looking at Azure apps in Java, Patterns for Windows Azure, and a look at Risk Metrics, a real Azure based application. Round that off with plenty of swag and pizza and you have a fine event.

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Had a really good evening at the UK Techdays Fringe Open Source on .NET event last night, 5 great mini presentations, followed by some good conversations in the bar afterwards.

Software

• Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects Beta - Available Now - The Visual Web Developer Team announce the release of a beta of Web Deployment Projects for VS2010. This beta release preserves the functionality of Web Deployment projects from VS2005/2008, supplementing the new VS2010 MSDeploy functionality, and allowing developers to continue working the way they are used to in VS2010.

Information

• My History of Visual Studio (Epilog) - Rico Mariani updates his personal history of Visual Studio, talking about the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010, where his involvement with the product ends
• WF4 - Guess the number game! - Mark Pearl takes a look at the improvements in Windows Workflow 4, and shows how you can use WF4 to create applications in a flowchart, a way which might enable less technical users to do a lot of the programming via the WF designer.
• Injecting services into entities - Jimmy Bogard follows on from his series on Strengthening your Domain with a discussion of the options for injecting services to domain entities, and why this is usually a bad idea.
• Guarding against CSRF Attacks in ASP.NET MVC2 - Scott Kirkland looks at a way of forcing the inclusion of Anti-Forgery tokens from the Cross-site Request Forgery protection library, enforcing the requirement that all forms supply this token to avoid any CSRF security holes.
• Introduction to TestApi - Part 6: Text String Generation API & Part 7: Memory Leak Detection API - Ivo Manolov continues exploring the functionality offered in TestApi, looking first at the support TestApi offers for generating string data to test particular cases in your application, and follows up with a look at how TestApi can help detect memory leaks in your applications, illustrating with an example.
• ThreadPool performance you can see - ‘toub’ illustrates some of the improvements in the .NET threading performance in .NET 4 showing a simple example which performs drastically better with added CPU Cores than it did it .NET 3.5
• Got Training? How about 15′ish hours of free (reg-ware) VS2010, C#, VB and ALM training from AppDev? - Greg Duncan highlights a great training offering from the AppDev team which will educate you for free in the new features of .NET 4 and VS2010, along with the new Application Lifecycle Management tools. Registration is required.
• Quick Thoughts on Eventual Consistency - Greg Young takes a look at eventual consistency, looking at how it can be explained to the business, and how you can evaluate the costs of implementing such a solution to your users and availability/scaling.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - Aggregation Part 2 - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript with a look at the other Aggregate operations supported by the Aggregates library (Max, Min, Final, Count, etc)
• Anonymous Types In C# Are A Crippled Hack - Derick Bailey takes a peek over the fence at how the Java folks do their Anonymous functions and encounters what he considers to be a better way than the C# equivalent. Interesting discussions breaking out in the comments on this post.
• nRoute: Now, More Wholesome - Rishi Oberoi talks about the latest release of nRoute, the message passing framework for Silverlight and WPF. This new release adds a huge range of new features as outlined in this detailed post which can now be used in WPF, Silverlight and also on the Windows7 Phone.
• Same Markup: Writing Cross-Browser Code - Tony Ross talks about the best practices for detecting the browser functionality on offer in the different browsers, and how feature detection is the best way, rather than detecting the actual browser and particular version and assuming the functionality available.
• Free, as in free, eBook - Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (direct download, no reg required) - Greg Duncan highlights a free eBook edition of Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 by Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner a ten chapter 200+page ebook looking at the Data Administration and Business Intelligence functionality.

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Update: Thanks to Dan Atkinson for the comment that pointed to an updated MVC Contrib release- looks like the original link’s release was removed, so I’ve updated the post with the updated release.

Software

• MVCContrib - Release: MVC2 2.0.34.0 Updated: MVCContrib 2.0.36.0 for MVC2 (RTW) - Eric Hexer has pushed out a new release of the ASP.NET MVCContrib library which brings additional features to the ASP.NET MVC engine. This release includes some changes to Portable Areas support, along with the usual bug fixes.
• "FAKE - F# Make" and NaturalSpec released - Steffen Forkmann highlights the release of updated versions of FAKE 1.0, the F# Make implementation and NaturalSpec 1.0, both of which target the F#2 release and the Release Candidate and RTM editions of Visual Studio 2010.
• Back to the future! - New version of the VB6 InteropForms toolkit is released!! - The Visual Basic Team share a new release of the VB6 InteropForms toolkit which has been updated to support both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 whcih provides a means of developig controls and forms in .NET and consuming from VB6 applications
• Download details: Microsoft Sync Framework - An update to the Microsoft Sync Framework is now available, and this service pack release contains bug fixes for a number of know issues, along with changes to expose the public change tracking API in SQL Compact (with an associated performance impact)

Information

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Released - Scott Guthrie gives his usual overview of the latest release from Microsoft, sharing the key features of the .NET 4 / Visual Studio 2010 RTM products, and providing links to further information on the new bits.
• 602 Pages of pure and complete VB’ness, the Visual Basic Language Specification 10.0 - Greg Duncan highlights the release of the Visual Basic 10.0 language specification, 600+ pages of detailed implementation information about the VB language in its latest form
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - Aggregation Part 1 - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts on the Reactive Extensions for Javascript with a new sub-series on Aggregation, exploring the functionality which allows us to apply custom functions to the items in an observable, and obtain the combined results, exploring the use of the Aggregate, Any and All operators
• Wha’s happening? Loosely coupled events - Phillip Trelford takes a look at nice ways of handling loosely coupled events from an event broker in a way similar to the Reactive Extensions provide for CLR events, illustrating with some F# examples.
• Metroline: A VS2010 Color Scheme - Thomas Restrepo shares a dark colour scheme for Visual Studio 2010, his first created specifically for use in Visual Studio 2010
• SOSEX v4.0 Now Available - Steve Johnson announces the release of an update SOSEX Windbg extension taking its version to 4.0 and adding in support for .NET 4 compiled code. Both 64 and 32 bit editions are available.
• Connect - The .NET CLR team talk about how they go about handling Connect issue reports, so, if you have cause to file an issue report, you will know the likely process they go through
• MSDN Partner Benefits for Visual Studio 2010 - Mikael Svenson investigates the Visual Studio 2010 offerings available to partners of different levels, which depending on your organisations partner status could net you up to 35 licenses of Visual Studio 2010 Premium with associated MSDN Subscriptions
• Visual Studio 2010 MSDN Subscriptions installs the trial version? (directions on Activating Visual Studio 2010 Trial) - Charles Sterling talks about some confusion about the Web Install of Visual Studio 2010 fro MSDN Subscribers installing a trial version, and shows how you can activate the trial using the product keys in the ISO release.
• WordPress says the Network Solutions hack is not their fault. - Barry Dorrans talks about a recent hosting security incident at Network Solutions which illustrates (and mis-reports) the need for encrypting connection details in text config files, and talks about how you can do this on the .NET platform.
• How to implement UI testing without shooting yourself in the foot - Gojko Adzic discusses a three level approach to building good automated UI tests, along with talking about how you can achieve this, and the types of tools needed.
• Beginning Silverlight - Layout Part 1 & Part 2 & Styles - Neil Knobbe explores the layout and styles functionality in Silverlight, providing a introductory series of posts which will get you up to speed on the Silverlight way of working.
• MVC Portable Areas Enhancement - Embedded Resource Controller - Steve Michelotti takes a look at using the ASP.NET MVC Contrib portable areas functionality with embedded resources exposed through the Embedded Resource Controller allowing you to package your area and its associated assets in the one DLL.

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Yesterday saw the release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 RTM, and today sees the inclusion of a special section in the Brew dedicated to this and related release news.

Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4 Release

• Visual Studio 2010 Released - Scott Hanselman rounds up the Visual Studio 2010 Launch news, featuring download links, articles about the new functionality, along with MSDN related content.
• Some VS2010/.Net4 and related Training Kits (to give you something to download until VS2010 is available) - Greg Duncan highlights some .NET 4 / Visual Studio 2010 Training Kits which can be downloaded for free, and will give you a taste of the functionality while the VS ISO is downloading
• F# 2.0 Released as Part of Visual Studio 2010 - Don Syme highlights the launch and inclusion of F# 2.0 in the Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 release, along with the release of a standalone installer for Visual Studio 2008 users
• ASP.NET 4 - Breaking Changes and Stuff to be Aware of - Scott Hanselman highlights 3 common breaking changes that people are running into with ASP.NET 4 and provides a link to the full breaking changes document.
• Visual Basic 2010 Samples Updated for RTM - Greg Duncan highlights updated samples for Visual Basic 2010 which cover a number of application areas including Data, LINQ, Security, TabletPC, WCF, Winforms and much more.
• Announcing the release of Entity Framework 4 - The Entity Framework Team talks about the new features of Entity Framework 4, which shipped yesterday along with .NET 4, highlighting the major improvements in the product across the areas of Development, Architecture and Data Access.
• What’s New for Performance in WPF in .NET 4 - The WPF Performance and .NET Framework Client Profile team talk about the improvements made to performance in WPF in the .NET 4 release with a look at UI Automation improvements, Graphics and text improvements.
• Upgrading Visual Studio 2010 & Upgrading from TFS 2010 RC to TFS 2010 RTM done - Martin Hinshelwood runs through the steps involved in upgrading from the Release Candidate to the full RTM versions of Visual Studio 2010, and TFS 2010 in these two screenshot rich step by step posts.

Software

• Launch: Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta - Eric Havir of the Microsoft Surface Team announces the release of the Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta which brings a number of the Microsoft Surface controls to PCs which support Touch.
• ReSharper 5.0 Is Out! - JetBrains are one of over 50 partners who launched new releases of their Visual Studio related tools yesterday. This new release integrates with Visual Studio 2010 (along with 2005 and 2008), and provides a bunch of great new features over the 4.5 release). Free Upgrades for recent purchasers of V4,5 are available, along with 30 day trials versions.
• CodeRush Xpress for C# and VB - DevExpress have updated the free CodeRush Xpress release to add support for Visual Studio 2010, bringing quality tools to help refactor and improve your code to the latest IDE version, along with keeping support for VS2008 and 2005.
• IronRuby- Release: 1.0 - The IronRuby team ship version 1.0 of IronRuby, representing a major milestone in the development of Ruby on the .NET Platform
• Profiler subscriptions are now available - Ayende announces the subscription based licensing costs for the NHibernate Profiler, 12EURO / $16 per month gives you a rolling license, with free upgrades for as long as you continue paying.
• psake v4.00 - James Kovacs announces the release of psake 4.0, a build automation tool built on PowerShell. This release adds .NET 4 and x64 support, along with nested build support and much more.
• QueryUnit 0.0.0.8 - Trust No One - Davide Mauri announces an update to his QueryUnit project which allows you to unit test the queries in your Business Intelligence projects adding better string handling, and new asserts in the form of NotEqualTo, Greater and Less.
• JustMock is here !! - ‘Mehfuz’ highlights the first pre-releases of Telerik JustMock an new mocking and proxy library which follows the Arrange - Act - Assert format. The final product is planned for a Q2 release.

Information

• Easy And Safe Model Binding In ASP.NET MVC - Justin Etheredge takes a look at making model binding in ASP.NET MVC a little safer by controlling what you expose using a view model, and looks at solutions to re-binding the data to the actual model
• Ignoring parentheses - Eric Lippert explores another interesting area of the C# specification, looking at the theoretical differences which could be caused by additional parentheses in return statements.
• Simple-MongoDB - Part 1, Getting started - Daniel Wertheim begins an introductory series of posts looking a the MongoDB NoSQL database solution, also exploring his simple MongoDB driver
• Visual Studio Performance Testing Quick Reference Guide (Version 2.0) Published - Ed Glas highlights an update to the Visual Studio Performance Testing Quick Reference Guide taking its version to 2.0. This 150 page document contains lots of background on the performance testing capabilities of Visual Studio along with a number of HowTo articles.
• C# 4.0: Covariance And Contravariance In Generics - Paulo Morgado takes a look at some of the theory behind Co and Contra-Variance in supporting Generics, sharing a set of rules for their implementation in C# and .NET
• Coupling Is Your Friend - Derick Bailey talks about the role of Coupling in development, and how it isn’t always something evil which you need to get rid of.

Community

• Webinar on Obfuscation and Encryption this Thursday (4/15/2010) - Jason Haley will be co-presenting with Eran Dror at a virtual meeting organised by LIDNUG (the Linked-In .NET User Group) on the 15th April at 11:00am PDT (early evening in Europe) on .NET Code Protection using Secure Team.
• Next European VAN on 26 April 2010 - The European Virtual Alt.NET Usergroup have a presentation from Neil Robbins on introductory concepts behind the NoSQL debate. The talk is the first of a series on NoSQL, and is being held on Tuesday 26th April, beginning at 7:00GMT (Don’t forget to adjust for British Summer time / Daylight savings)

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So today is launch day for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 - is everyone suitably excited? I’m going to be at the UK Launch Event in London, so if you are too, and spot me, come and say hello.

Updated: Another HTML Glitch swallowed Mark Needham’s link below, and mangled the DDD Down under one, now fixed, thanks for the comment ‘RSS Subscriber’ highlighting it.

Software

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Available: Silverlight 4 will release to Web this week - The official word from Microsoft on the availability of this weeks launch technologies, VS2010 and .NET 4 available now, Silverlight 4 later this week.
• Announcing availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 - Somasegar shares the news of the official release of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework version 4, highlighting the launch events, and the streaming version of the keynote.
• Download details: F# April 2010 CTP - F# gets its April Community Technology Preview update, along with a version number of 2.0.0. The release includes both the F# compiler and the Visual Studio 2008 integration
• Introducing jLight - Talking to the DOM using Silverlight and jQuery. - Timmy Kokke announces his latest project, to provide easy means of interacting with the browser from Silverlight using jQuery on the browser side. This project provides helper methods for interactions in JavaScript using the jQuery library, with very jQuery like syntax.

Information

• JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010 - Scott Guthrie hits post number 20 on his series of posts looking at the improvements for Web Developers in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. This article focuses on the improvements made to VS for the JavaScript Developer, focusing on Intellisense functionality.
• What is a Domain Event? - Greg Young look to clear any confusion aboutthe term ‘Domain Event’, defining what he considers the term to mean in a form suitable for his book and training course material. Some interesting suff in the comments of this one too.
• Why diversity and choice are good things - Rob Ashton discusses his motivations for creating AutoPoco, discussing other projects in the area, and outlining where he sees AutoPoco as being different / adding new value.
• What key [binding] does what again? The "Visual Studio 2010 Keybinding Cards" for C++, C#, F# and VB - Greg Duncan highlights some great looking keyboard quick reference cards from Microsoft for the functionality exposed for C#, C++, F# and VB developers in Visual Studio 2010.
• Moving to Visual Studio 2010 free e-book - Guy Barrette highlights the availability of a free Draft Preview of a Microsoft Press book on migrating to the new Visual Studio 2010 release from Visual Studio 2003, 2005 and 2008
• TDD in the Real World, Part 1 & Part 2 - Jeremy Jameson shares his thoughts on Test Driven Development (TDD), looking at high level concepts in Part 1, and moving on to show an example walking through the process in Part 2.
• ECMA 2010 Common Language Infrastructure Public Draft - Miguel de Icaza highlights the release of the Working Drafts of the ECMA 335 specification for the Common Language Infrastructure Standard
• Where we are with acceptance testing and our BDD journey today - Ian Cooper talks about the writing, structuring, and organisation of tests, sharing thoughts which span across the technologies used for such tests, looking at the difference between unit tests and stories, and discussing what should be tested.
• Do you have an Action Plan to Tackle your Technical Debt? - Derik Whittaker talks about the concept of Technical Debt, and looks at how you should keep track of you technical debt , and plan to pay back some of this debt.
• Documentation with Sandcastle - a notebook - Jon Skeet:looks at generating API documentation from assembly metadata and XML comments using the Sandcastle documentation generator project
• That No SQL Thing - Document Databases - Ayende talks about the key concepts of document databases, and looks at building queries against these datastores.
• Coding: Maybe vs Null Object patterns - Mark Needham discusses the Maybe pattern, comparing it to the Null Object pattern, showing an implementation of Maybe in use

Community

• DDD Down Under - Barry Dorrans highlights the début of the Developer Developer Developer conference in Austrailia. The event, to be held in Melbourne, follows the same conventions as teh UK events, and currently speaker submissions are open, with registrations opening later today.
• Making the Most of the Reactive Extensions for .NET - The Virtual Alt.NET group have Scott Weinstein presenting on the Reactive Extensions for .NET on 21st April. This event is geared up for US based developers, as the event starts at 8pm GMT-5, which makes it early hours of the morning for UK based devs.

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Next week I’m going to be attending a number of London based events (UK Techdays, Techdays Fringe events and SQL Bits), and as always with these events I’m looking forward to meeting up with my fellow developers, so if you see me out and about, come over and say Hi.

Update: Fixed a problem with the HTML between Krzysztof Kozmic and Jimmy Bogard’s links in todays edition which resulted in them being merged together

Software

• Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 - The The Visual Basic Team talks about the plans for release of Crystal Reports for VS 2010, which will now ship outside of the main release. The beta for this new version will begin next week, and the product will still be free for Visual Studio users.

Information

• jQuery, ASP.NET, and Browser History - Stephen Walther looks at adding support to your AJAX powered web applications for providing back button and browser history support, along with bookmarkable urls, demonstrating with a real application example.
• "Dogfooding" VS 2010 and .NET 4 - Somasegar talks about the internal process of ‘Dogfooding’ the Visual Studio and Team Systems products internally at Microsoft, sharing some impressive numbers from the VS Team’s TFS installation
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - A Separation of Concerns - Matthew Podwysocki continues his exploration of the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript, talking about the plans for the next release to separate out the areas of functionality within the library and also shows an example integrating with the Dojo framework.
• Build your conventions - Krzysztof Kozmic continues exploring the ideas of Convention over Configuration, taking a look at the things in strongly typed languages which support building frameworks around conventions.
• Strengthening your domain: Domain Events - Jimmy Bogard continues his series on building better domain models with and exploration of the concept of Domain Events to provide the means for developers to know when things happen within the domain model.
• Currying with C# - Garry Shutler shares his notes on Currying in C# inspired by the discussions at the Brighton Alt.Net Beers event earlier in the week.
• Precision and accuracy of DateTime - Eric Lippert talks about the difference between accuracy and precision, looking at the capabilities of the DataTime data type in these areas, and using these means to explain why the StopWatch class is a better choice for measuring time elapsed.
• New iPhone OS License Threatens 3rd Party Languages - Larry O’Brien highlights some new Terms and Conditions included in the Apple iPhone OS4 release which casts question over the use of C# and the MonoTouch library for iPhone application development.
• The Practical Guide to Multithreading - Part 1 & Part 2 - Ajay Vijayvargiya explores the principals and practices of Multi-threaded programming in this two part CodeProject Article, showing solutions for common multi-threaded problems in C# and C++.
• Parallelism coverage in April 2010 MSDN Magazine - The Parallel Programming with .NET Blog highlights the April edition of MSDN Magazine which looks at a number of Parallelism topics.

Community

• YUI Theater - Douglas Crockford: "Crockford on JavaScript - Part 5: The End of All Things" (94 min.) - The Yahoo! User Interface Team share the video footage of the final part of Douglas Crockford’s series of talks on JavaScript, exploring the future of JavaScript, and talking about security in the browser.
• Your testing tendencies: Survey results - Dahlia Bock shares the results from the recent survey on Testing, linked to from this blog a few posts back, with results which look quite encouraging, with positive responses about how much automated testing people are performing.

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