The Morning Brew

Software

• Caliburn 1.1 on Windows Phone 7 - Nigel Sampson looks at getting Caliburn the MVVM framework for WPF and Silverlight to compile and run on the Windows Phone 7 Platform, combining it with the Ninject DI / IOC library and providing a.zip of the built package.
• An F# Silverlight MVVM Multi-Project Template - Daniel Mohl shares another F# based project template, this time creating a MVVM implementation in Silverlight and F# with both the source and packaged template available to download.

Information

• ILMerge to the Rescue? - Dru Sellers discusses the use of ILMerge to combine .NET assemblies into one single assembly making adding references and distribution easier, discussing the benefits for encapsulating dependencies of your code.
• ASP.NET MVC Filters and Statefulness - Brad Wilson discusses how you can handle state in your MVC Filters where there may only be one instance of your filter for all requests, looking at the use of Context.Items and Session for storing the associated state for each request and user.
• More on Zip in .NET - Richard Lee, who is a developer intern on the BCL Team discusses some of the feedback received about working with Zip files in .NET, and looking at some of the scenarios people raised in the discussion and how the new features will support them.
• UtilityVsStrategicDichotomy - Martin Fowler discusses two different types of IT system, utility systems which just have to work well, and strategic systems where the system needs to make a difference to the business and where being better than the competition is important.
• Using Event-Based Components for Library Development - Ralph Westphal continues looking at event based architectural design and explores how it can apply to developing libraries, illustrating with and example.
• Graph Colouring, Part Five - Eric Lippert continues his graph colouring adventure with a look at colouring heavily connected graphs where there are lots of connected sub graphs
• ASP.NET MVC 3: Using multiple view engines in same project - Gunnar Peipman continues looking at ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 examining the support for multiple view engines in a single project with a simple example showing two view engines running side by side
• Troubleshoot ASP.NET Errors Remotely - while Appearing Local - Scott Forsyth shares a neat trick using the URL Rewrite 2.0 library to fake the REMOTE_ADDR HTTP Header value so your requests look like they are coming from the local machine to enable you (And only you) to see detailed error reports remotely while still serving friendly errors to other users of the site
• Cancellation with .NET 4 (Part 1) - Christian Nagel takes a look at the framework capabilities for cancelling async work in the pre-.NET 4 , showing there was no standard way of achieving this and setting the scene for his next part in the series to explore the .NET 4 solution to this.
• VS 2010 Web Deployment - Scott Guthrie continues his epic series of posts about the .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 release with part 25 looking at the Web Deployment improvements in 2010, including improvements to publishing, packaging of web apps and databases and web.config transforms
• Introduction to TestApi - Part 8: Object Comparison API - Ivo Manolov continues his series of posts looking at the TestApi library of helper APIs for developing tests for software. In this part Ivo explores the Object Comparison features of TestApi showing how the make complex object comparisons easier to create and report on differences
• Windows Phone 7 - First Impressions - Scott Hanselman takes a first look at the Windows Phone 7 Developer phone, sharing his initial impressions as he got up and running with the device, sharing a video showing the phone in operation.

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Software

• Migrating ASP.NET MVC 2 applications to ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 - Eilon Lipton releases an updated version of his ASP.NET MVC Project Converter which now enables upgrades from ASP.NET MVC 2 to ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1. The new version of the tool requires that you have .NET 4 on the machine and takes backups of the project as it upgrades it.
• Microsoft XAML Toolkit CTP - July 2010 - Brian Chapman highlights the imminent release second CTP release of the Microsoft X
  AML Toolkit (imminent as it has not yet been posted up on the projects
  code.MSDN site). This release includes improved Silverlight support, increasing the support to Silverlight 3 and 4, along with Windows Phone 7.
• Microsoft XAML Toolkit CTP - July 2010 - Brian Chapman highlights the immenent release second CTP release of the Microsoft X
  AML Toolkit (iminant as it has not yet been posted up on the projects
  Code.MSDN site). This release includes improved Silverlight support, increasing the support to Silverlight 3 and 4, along with Windows Phone 7.
• TFS 2010 updates coming to a download site near you - Brian Harry gives a heads up on a number of service releases for TFS which fix bugs, improve the quality of components and improve the general experience of using the product.

Information

• New C# Yellow Book Now Available - Rob Miles releases an updated version of his free C# Programming ‘Yellow Book’. This updated edition has an improved structure, new content on threading and collections. This 197 page book is used as a part of the University of Hull’s First Year programming course, and is an excellent introduction to the language.
• Microsoft XAML Toolkit CTP - July 2010: Silverlight Features, FxCop Rule Authoring, XAML DOM - & FxCop Integration - Brian Chapman explores some of the features of the XAML Toolkit CTP, looking at the improved Silverlight support, the manipulating XAML using the XAML DOM, and integrating and creating FxCop rules for XAML
• MVC 3 - first look - Arun Mahendrakar shares his first impressions of the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview release, running through some experiments with the framework and sharing the sample code.
• Integrated StructureMap container for the MvcServiceLocator in ASP.NET MVC 3 - Thang Chung takes a look at using the new ASP.NET MVC Service Locator support to integrate the Structure Map Inversion of Control / Dependency Injection container into an ASP.NET MVC application.
• ASP.NET MVC 3: Using HttpStatusCodeResult & Creating HttpStatusCodeResult with view based body - Gunnar Peipman continues exploring the new Action Results in the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 release with a look at HttpStatusCodeResult which allows you to return a specific HTTP status code, and explores how you can do this with also returning some page content from a view.
• Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development Screencasts - Mark Needham discusses the Test Driven Development Screen casts from Kent Beck, published by the Pragmatic Programmers, discussing some of the things he noticed watching Kent doing TDD, and looks at the ‘Call your shots‘ technique where your announce what the test will do before you run it, and also looks at a common TDD mistake when Testing collections
• WCF by Example - Introduction, Chapter I - Baseline, Chapter II - Repositories, Chapter III - Response ,Chapter IV - Transaction Manager & Chapter V - Contexts - Enrique Albert presents a series of articles on building a WPF client application calling WCF services backed by NHibernate data access. Currently at 5 chapters + introduction (with more parts to follow) this CodeProject article series walks through the creation of a 3 tier (Rich Client, Application Serice, Data Storage) application.
• LINQ and N-ary Cartesian Products - Ian Griffiths starts a series of posts looking at producing n-ary Cartesian Products using LINQ. This problem space has been discussed before by Eric Lippert, however Ian indicates that he came to a slightly different solution.

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Special Section included today for the chatter about the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 release.

ASP.NET MVC3 Preview 1

• ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 Released - Phil Haack announces the the release of the first Preview of ASP.NET MVC 3. This preview release requires ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 in order to operate, and includes a the Razor View Engine (in CSHTML), makes use of the Service Locator for hooking up to Dependency Injection Frameworks, supports the .NET 4 Data Annotations and Validations and improves the tooling for multiple view engine support.
• Introducing ASP.NET MVC 3 (Preview 1) - Scott Guthrie does his usual in depth preview of the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 release, showing an overview of the new features in his screenshot rich way.
• ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 Released - Channel 9 Video and Hanselminutes Podcast 224, Oh My! - Scott Hanselman paid a visit to Phil Haack (and Morgan his an intern on the ASP.NET team) to discuss the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 Release, and some of the other stuff they are working on and here provides the video on Channel 9, and also his latest podcast goes into more detailed discussions of the MVC release
• Brad Wilson: ASP.NET MVC 3 Service Location, Part 1: Introduction, Part 2: Controllers, Part 3: View Engines/View Pages & Part 4: Filters - Brad Wilson does a 4 part blog series looking at the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 Service Locator functionality, exploring the background to its use and looking in detail at how it works for Controllers, Views and View Engines and Filters
• ASP.NET MVC 3: Using HttpNotFoundResult action result - Gunnar Peipman takes a look at one of the new ActionResults types in ASP.NET MVC 3, showing how you can use the HttpNotFoundResult type
• ASP.NET MVC 3: New ViewModel is dynamic ViewData - Gunnar also looks at how the ASP.NET MVC3 Preview 1 takes advantage of the .NET 4 Dynamic support with the addition of the ViewModel property of a controller allowing you to use dynamic objects in your views.
• ASP.NET MVC 3 and MEF sitting in a tree… - Maarten Balliauw takes a look at using the new ServiceLocator support in ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 to make use of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) to provide Dependency Injection capabilities.

Software

• HQL Language Service for Visual Studio - HQLAddin is a new open source project from ‘jfromaniello’ which aims to bring IDE support for writing NHibernate HQL queries inside the Visual Studio IDE. Currently at an alpha 1 release it supports HQL syntax checking and highlighting, with intellisense the next big feature planned.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC: Adding client-side validation to ValidatePasswordLengthAttribute - Stuart Leeks looks at the ValidatePasswordLength validator provided in the Account support in the ASP.NET MVC 2 project template, and looks at how you can go about adding support for client side checking of this validation rule.
• Mercurial workflows: mainline workflow - Jimmy Bogard continues his series of posts on workflows in the new batch of Distributed Version Control Systems with a look at setting up a mainline workflow in Mercurial
• Structured Systems Analysis & Design UNISA studies – Chap 1 - Mark Pearl starts a new series of lecture notes from his studies at UNISA, with this series on Structured Systems Analysis & Design. This first part introduces the key definitions, looks at the skills and role of the systems analyst and related careers.
• Ultimate Developer PC 2.0 - Part 3 - UPDATE on Building a WEI 7.9 and RFC for building a GOM (God’s Own Machine) - Scott Hanselman gives an update on the build of his ultimate developer machine comparing some performance figures and real world performance figures from compiling NHibernate 3, along with discussing the different Windows experience scores as the machine was configured and drivers installed.
• The Segment and Sequence Project Iterators - Paul White explores some fo the query optimisation that SQL server can do to your queries which utilise the top operator to retrieve the first X records from a result set, working from a very simple case looking at the execution plan, through to more complex versions of the query, and a discussion of two of the less well known execution plan operations related to top.
• Silverlight and WCF RIA Services (6 - “Validation) - Mike Taulty continues his series on Silverlight and the WCF Rich Internet Application (RIA) Services with a worked example of introducing validation to your application, starting out with a blank project and showing the full process with plenty of sample code and screenshots.
• Iterate, damn you! - Jon Skeet takes a look at a simple piece of code that does not do what you might think, and shows why mutable value types can cause rather a lot of confusion, along with showing how you can work around this particular problem.

Community

• MVCConf Videos Posted! - Darcy Lussier highlights the release of the session videos from last weeks mvcConf virtual conference, so if you missed out on any of the sessions this is your opportunity to see the great content from the event.
• CodeBetter/Devlicio.us/LosTechies MSDN Ultimate Giveaways - Tuna Toksoz - Devlicio.us - Just the Tasty Bits - Tuna Toksoz announces a scheme for distribution of some of the MVP MSDN licenses provided to Microsoft MVPs to be distributed amongst the community. A number of the bloggers from devlicio.us CodeBetter and LosTechies have combined their licenses and are looking for open source projects which are in need of the software that the MSDN license provides.

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Software

• Class Designer PowerToys for Visual Studio 2010 is Released - ‘wanglie1986′ announces the release of the Class Modelling Power Toys for Visual Studio 2010. These tools improve the experience of working with the class designer in 2010 providing features like pan/zoom functionality, improved formatting support, HTML Export, and nested type creation
• FluentValidation 1.3 Released - Jeremy Skinner announces the release of FluentValidation 1.3 his C# based validation library with a Fluent Interface, available for Silverlight and standard .NE, with the Silverlight build now targeting Silverlight 4, with improvements to the testing support, NotEmptyValidator, cascade and When/Unless. Jeremy also outlines the future plans for FluentValidation 2.0
• YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release 1: Touch Event Support, Gestures, Transitions, CSS Grids, ScrollView, Uploader, and More - Eric Miraglia announces the preview release of the Yahoo User Interface library 3.2.0, available to download or hosted on the Yahoo CDN, this release provides an early look at some of the features they have planned for the actual 3.2.0 release
• ASP.NET dynamic language support is open source - Jimmy Schementi announces the release of the supporting library for ASP.NET dynamic languages support under the Apache License (Version 2) meaning that the library is now Open Source
• SQLCop A Tool To Highlight Potential Problems With Your Database - SQLDenis announces the first release of SQLCop, an FxCop like tool which will inspect your database and report on any potential problems it finds, along with providing information on resolving the issues

Information

• Rx on the server, part 2 of n: Asynchronous StreamReader - Jeffrey van Gogh continues his series looking at the use of the Reactive Extensions for .NET on the server side looking at how the reactive extensions can help make the synchronous StreamReader into an asynchronous implementation.
• The Boy Scout Rule - Hans-Eric discusses the Boy Scout Rule for software as popularised by ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin looking at its role in your software development process and some of the benefits it brings.
• Graph Colouring, Part Four - Eric Lippert continues his series on graph colouring with a look at colouring the South America map, looking at representing the geographic relations between countries and applying the solver to work out the colourings
• The Future of .NET Open Source Software Delivery - Rob Reynolds discusses the current approach to .NET package management, and outlines how the nu project helps solve these issues making it easier to get the dependencies you need.
• LINQ to JS - ‘nmarun’ looks at the use of the LINQ to JS JavaScript library which brings some of the power of LINQ to browser based programming allowing you to work with Enumerable collections in JavaScript as you can on the server side, illustrating with some sample use cases.
• How To Build Custom Rake Tasks; The Right Way - Derick Bailey shares the simplest way of creating a Rake task implementation, learnt the hard way during the development of his albacore project
• Code Contracts and Automated Testing are pretty much the same thing - Patrick Smacchia discusses Code Contracts, an new addition to the .NET tool set in .NET 4, and looks at how they are actually very similar to automated testing practices.
• Designing on different levels of abstractions with Event-Based Components & Improving the Event-Based Components Desktop Calculator - Ralph Westphal continues his series of posts exploring using Event based design practices to design software, sharing a worked example based on a calculator

Community

• Glasgow Scot Alt.Net beers - The Scotish Alt.Net group announce their Alt.Net Beers event to be held in Glasgow on the evening of Friday 6th August, where much beer be consumed and development will be discussed
• Going to the MVP summit next year? Why not sign up with GeekGive? - Barry Dorrans highlights a GeekGive event being organised for around the MVP Summit in February 2011 where volunteers will work with Northwest Harvest in Seattle to help feed the hungary.
• YouTrack for OSS Projects - Hadi Hariri announces the availability of a hosted JetBrains YouTrack instance for people running open source projects. The installation is being hosted along side the CodeBetter TeamCity instance which currently build many popular open source projects from their version control systems.

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Software

• Good morning #NHibernate 3 … - Fabio Maulo tweets the release of NHibernate 3.0.0 Alpha1 available in both Binary and Source from SourceForge this version sees the usual bugfixes and improvements, along with new features such as Lazy Loading of individual columns, alias delimiting in generated SQL and improved support for DetachedCriteria use with IStatelessSession. There is also a breaking change in the handling of null values in maps / dictionaries
• An intro to what OpenWrap is - Seb Lambla takes the wraps off Open Wrap, his latest project and an answer to those package management problems we’ve all encountered. OpenWrap is designed to make obtaining the correct version of libraries easy be it at development, deploy or runtime.
• CSLA 4 release - Rockford Lhotka announces the official release of his CSLA 4 application framework which now in includes support for .NET 4, Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010. This a major upgrade from the version 3 release, and as such includes a number of major new features and improvements, along with the occasional breaking change, so be sure to read the changelog.
• Web Farm Framework 2 Beta released - Chris Alexander highlights the release of the Web Farm Framework 2 Beta, a system which makes it easy to scale out your web applications in both configuration and deployment. The Web Farm Framework is based on the Web Platform Installer and Application Request Routing and handles the complex cases of deploying web applications across a farm of servers.

Information

• Solution Navigator: Killer replacement for Solution Explorer - Gunnar Peipman highlights one of the most popular components of the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools, the Solution Navigator which gives an improved implementation of the Solution Explorer including search and filtering capabilities.
• Prototypes and Inheritance in JavaScript - Scott Allen writes about Inheritance and Prototypes in JavaScript on the Script Junkie section of MSDN, exploring the concepts behind prototypes and how you can construct objects using the new operator and constructor functions.
• Event-Based Components – Leaving the beaten path of canonical object orientation - Ralph Westphal discusses the difficulties in designing even a simple system using traditional Object Oriented design processes, and looks at the use of a more event based process for design.
• VS 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts for C#, VB, C++, F# Now Available in Letter (8.5×11in) and A4 (210×297mm) Print-Ready Sizes - Lisa Feigenbaum announces the release of a new set of Keyboard short cut cheat sheets for Visual Studio 2010 in a number of different language based editions. These new sheets are designed for printing on standard sized paper, and now include only the keyboard short cuts, no annoying clip-art images.
• Table Per Hierarchy Inheritance in Entity Framework & Mixing Table Per Hierarchy and Entity Splitting - Gil Fink on .Net - Gil Fink explores the Table Per Hierachy Inheritance approach available in Entity Framework illustrating with a step by step example in this CodeProject article, and follows up on one of the questions with a blog post looking at combining Table Per Hierarchy with Entity Splitting techniques into one model.
• Entity Framework 4 "Code-First": Custom Database Schema Mapping - Scott Guthrie continues looking at the Code First approach to Entity Framework with a look at how you can customise the way data is saved to the database by overriding the default persistence mapping rules with your own to allow you to use a custom database schema, illustrating with an example based on the Nerd Dinner sample application.
• ASP.NET MVC: Using dynamic type to test controller actions returning JsonResult - Gunnar Peipman looks into using the .NET 4 dynamic support to help test anonymous types returned as JSON data from ASP.NET MVC Controllers
• Degrees of reality in sample code - Jon Skeet highlights his latest article which looks at overloading in C#, and discusses the difficulty of creating good example code for articles, and how its important to define the scope of the example as to whether it is giving an example of a technique or showing a good example of its use.
• Rendering with XNA Framework 4.0 inside of a WPF application - Nick Gravely shares his experiments in including XNA based content inside of a WPF based application using public and supported APIs, sharing the code that achieves it.
• How do you test asynchronous code? Part I & Part II - Stefan Lieser writes about testing asynchronous code in your applications successfully, looking at the use of mocks to fake via constructor injection, and exploring the use of tools like TypeMock Isolator to mock using the profiler API when you don’t have the ability to control the method used.
• Principles 2: Principles of Software Testing - Ivo Manolov shares 6 less discussed high level principles for testing software (Hight Test Stability, High Test Performance, Minimum Dependencies, Fundamentals, Test Development Principles and Continuous Training), giving each an introduction and then fleshing out the definition with some interesting discussion.
• Technical Debt around release time - Mark Needham discusses technical debt management by way of a nice analogy from J.B. Rainsberger, comparing two different approaches to Cleaning the Kitchen and Cleaning the Garage.

Community

• Touch Me, Stretch Me, Squeeze Me: The Windows 7 WPF Multi-Touch Story - Guy Smith-Ferrier introduces his new usergroup talk on making use of the Windows 7 Multi-touch features in WPF applications, due to debut at VBUG Bristol on Wednesday 11th August, and also at the Cambridge Next Generation User Group on Tuesday 21st September
• mvcConf slides and code posted - Jimmy Bogard shares access to the slides and code from his mvcConf session on Refactoring your controllers into leaner implementations and John V. Petersen also shares his demo code and slides in his post Powerpoint and Code Demos from my MVCConf Presentation

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Software

• MSDN: Double the Azure - Somasegar announces the doubling of the length of the MSDN Subscription Windows Azure Benefit, taking MSDN Subscribers complementary account to 16 months
• New Features in Fiddler 2.2.9.9 Beta - Eric Lawrence announces the beta release of Fiddler 2.2.9.9 which contains a number of new features and fixes including Regex support in Find, improved session compare, and some improvements to the SyntaxView inspector add-in
• Dojo 1.5 is Out and it’s Feature Packed! - Rey Bango over on Ajaxian highlights the release of version 1.5 of the Dojo JavaScript Framework, with a number of improvements to the Dijit UI library, HTML 5 and CSS3 feature support, along with some new features for mobile web apps.
• MVVM Light Hotfix for Windows Phone 7 developer tools beta - Laurent Bugnion announces a hot fix for his MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1. The hot fix updates the templates to support the reorganised assemblies of the latest Windows Phone 7 SDK beta.

Information

• Rx on the server, part 1 of n: Asynchronous System.IO.Stream reading - Jeffrey van Gogh starts a series of posts focusing on the use of the Reactive Extensions on the Server side, providing a different view on the topic than is provided in many client side tutorials for Rx. In this part Jeffrey looks at using RX to read a file.
• Improving testability with the Castle Dictionary Adapter - Ben Hall takes a look at the Castle Dictionary Adapter, soon to become a core part of Castle Windsor (in the 2.5 release), showing how it can be used to help break dependencies on the ConfigurationManager and provide a typed mockable interface onto the untyped values in the dictionary.
• Testing Routing and URL Generation in ASP.NET MVC - Brad Wilson shows how you can implement good tests for your incoming and Outgoing ASP.NET MVC routes, showing example tests and providing stub implementations for the dependencies
• Driving CRUD screens with BDD - Gojko Adzic talks about the use of Behaviour Driven Development to drive the development of Create Read Update Delete (CRUD) screen
• Graph Colouring with Simple Backtracking, Part Three - Eric Lippert continues his exploration of Graph Colouring taking a look at the implementation of a simple backtracking algorithm to solve the problem.
• 10 Commandments of Usability - David Laribee kicks off a series of posts looking at Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Commandments of Usability, looking at how they can be applied to software development. This first post is a introduction, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.
• Extension Methods and the Debugger - Jared Parsons looks into the occasional strange behaviour of the Visual Studio Debugger when looking at evaluating (or not evaluating) extension methods, discussing its cause due to lazy loading of assemblies.
• Windows Phone 7 Design Resources - UI Guide and Design Templates - Sean Jenkin highlights the recently released Windows Phone Developer Tools, along with the Version2 release of the UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7 and the Design Templates for Windows Phone
• C# Fundamentals: Combining Enum Values with Bit-Flags - James Michael Hare follows on from one of his earlier back to basics posts on enums, taking a look this time at the use of Enums as Bitwise values and the use of the Flags attribute
• Automate and Improve Your Database Maintenance Using Ola Hallengren’s Free Script - Brad McGehee highlights the Database Maintenance scripts from Ola Hallengren which provide a comprehensive suite of maintenance stored procedures which will help you perform the vital maintenance that DBAs recommend to keep your database in tip top condition.
• PowerShell Cookbook (site, not book)- Short, simple yet still sweet - Greg Duncan highlights the PowerShell Cookbook website (nothing to do with the O’Reilly book) which provides a nice collection of bite sized selection of tips and how-to mini-articles starting out at the installation and looking at common use cases for PowerShell scripts.

Community

• mvcConf recap: (M)egacool (V)irtual (C)onference - Brian Schroer shares his thoughts on mvcConf, the free virtual ASP.NET MVC conference held yesterday. I also enjoyed the parts of the conference I was able to watch (the time zones made it a little tricky for me) and am looking forward to watching the recordings when they are released.

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Software

• CTP1 of Microsoft Project Code-Named "Houston" now available - The SQL Azure team announce the first CTP release of Project "Houston", a silverlight based tool for managing your SQL Azure databases. As with any CTP software the may be bugs, and the release notes include a number of know issues (many with workarounds), and if you find any other bugs be sure to let the team know.
• Project Houston CTP released - try it out with brentotweets - Jamie Thomson shares some read only credentials for a SQL Azure database which you can use to have a play with the new Project Houston CTP release.
• Test Drive Project "Houston" CTP1 with SQL Azure - Roger Jennings shares screenshots of the new Houston CTP release running against one of his SQL Azure instances
• SMSToolkit - .NET SMS server - Microsoft Research India release a software library which will turn any PC + Windows Mobile 5 phone into a full SMS Server. The library includes documentation and samples showing how it can be consumed easily form a variety of languages and programs.

Information

• The MVVM Pattern Is Highly Overrated - Davy Brion discusses what he sees as some bad aspects of the MVVM pattern, focusing on how it doesn’t correspond to many of the principles usually held in high regard in software development. Lots of interesting discussion in the comments on this one.
• The Big Boy MVC Series - Part 25, Going Postal: ActionFilters, Moq, ModelState, Oh My! - Evan Nagle has hit part 25 of his comprehensive series on ASP.NET MVC. This post gathers together a number of themes from previous posts exploring the use of Moq, ModelState and TempData to implement the Post-Redirect-Get pattern fully, along the way providing links to further details on these topics.
• WPF 4 Series: Getting Started - Ted Hu begins a series of post on the WPF Team blog looking at the new features of WPF4. This part links out to a number of great introductory posts on the subject from people like Scott Guthrie and Pete Brown, and the series will continue with some deeper dives into the specific features
• Clean Coding, The Cheat Sheet. Starts SOLID and gets better from there… - Greg Duncan highlights a cheat sheet for Clean Code, based on the book by (Uncle) Bob Martin. The Cheat Sheet fits all the key concepts (and brief descriptions) onto a single page, and looks like a useful quick reference for the book.
• Debugging .NET – mystery between DEBUG versus RELEASE within windbg - Naveen Srinivasan continues looking at WinDbg, and in this post explores some of the differences in debugging experience between Debug and Release illustrating with a simple example.
• Most IDEs offer poor support for many common development tasks - ’stevencl’ discusses the poor job that current Integrated Development Environments do for may of a Developers most common tasks, such as Debugging and discovering the implications of a change, discussing and linking to some of the research which backs this up.
• New Hands On Lab - Introduction to WF4 - Ron Jacobs announces the release of an updated Hands On Lab for Windows Workflow 4, packaged up using the newly released FeatureBuilder into a VSIX package and distributed via the Visual Studio Gallery.

Community

• mvcConf - the Virtual ASP.Net MVC Conference - A reminder to anyone who is planning on attending mvcConf that today is the day. The event kicks off at 8am CDT (which by my calculations is 2pm BST), so if you registered don’t forget to turn up, and lets make this a great virtual conference.
• A new conference in town - DevCon London 27th to 29th September - Eric Nelson highlights a new Developer Conference to be held in London, UK on the 27th to 29th September. DevCon draws on the experiences in running BASTA, one of the leading European .NET conferences, bringing a number of great speakers and topics to the UK. Prices range from £399 for one day to £699 for all three days, and there is a £50 early bird reduction if you book before the 13th August
• Free JustCode, JustMock licenses for all Thursday webinar attendees - Zain Naboulsi highlights an offer from Telerik or all attendees to their Q2 2010 What’s New webinar event. Virtual Attendees will receive free licenses for their JustCode and JustMock products.

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Software

• T4MVC 2.6.20, and upcoming T4MVC talk at MvcConf - David Ebbo announces the release of T4MVC 2.5.20, building on the last few minor bug fix releases, this release contains a new feature written by Evan Nagle which provides a new simpler way of rendering partials. David also highlights the content of his talk at the mvcConf virtual conference later this week.
• Fresh Mono Baked -
  Miguel de Icaza highlights the release of Mono 2.6.7 which introduces a number of bugfixes and a few new features such as the inclusion of ASP.NET MVC 2 as a part of the package along with upgrades to their LINQ to SQL and msdbuild implementations
• Mono’s Git Migration - Miguel also shares the details of the plan to migrate the Mono Project version control repository to GitHib on the 22nd July
• Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework Updated - Michael S. Scherotter announces the release of an updated Silverlight Analytics Framework which now contains support for the Windows Phone 7, Silverlight Media Framework 2, along with support for WebTrends in Silverlight 4, WPF and Windows Phone and Google Analytics for WPF and Windows Phone
• Semi final release - Windsor 2.5 beta 2 (now with Silverlight support) - Krzysztof Kozmic announces the second beta release of Windsor 2.5 which now includes support for Silverlight 3 and 4, along with the inclusion of the Synchronize Facility and a number of bugfixes (along with all the improvements in Beta 1).
• NValid - A Fluent Business Logic Validation Library for .NET - NValid hits the 0.9 mark bringing light weight validation to .NET languages, providing 20 standard validation rules out of the box along with a friendly chaining API for checking he validity of your entities
• Feature Builder 1.0 Released! - Michael Lehman announces the release of the Feature Builder 1.0 Visual Studio Power Tool which makes it easier to create Visual Studio Extensions for Visual Studio 2010.

Information

• Turning JSON into a ExpandoObject - Nick Berardi looks at using an ExpandoObject to wrap data returned as JSON to provide a nicer interface to the data than a dictionary of values.
• System.Lazy<T> and the Singleton Design Pattern - James Michael Hare explores the singleton pattern and looks at how the .NET 4 Lazy functionality provides a means of ensuring that your singletons are able to be created lazily in a safe way.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - Error Handling Part I - Matthew Podwysocki continues his epic series on the Reactive Extensions, focusing in this part on the methods of handling errors when working in a reactive way with the JavaScript Reactive Extensions
• Writing plug-ins for ReSharper: Part 2 of N - Hadi Hariri resumes a series of posts looking at creating plugins for ReSharper. In this part Hadi look at the creation of a QuickFix style plugins.
• Using MEF with Castle Windsor - Sara Stephens explores integrating MEF with the Castle Windsor IOC container to allow you to spread the registration of types in the Windsor container across multiple projects helping to reduce coupling. Sara includes the code and a screencast which explains the concept and code.
• Back to the basics: conversion operators -
  Luis Abreu continues his back to basics series of posts with a look at the conversion operators which allow you to convert objects of one type into another type, explaining the details of how they are implemented along with providing code samples to illustrate
• .NET Hidden Gems - Memory fail points -
  Salva Patel starts a new series of posts looking at some of the small less well know features of the .NET Framework. This first post in the series looks at the MemoryFailPoint class which allows you to get access to large chunks of memory in your application
• How To - UppercuT and Gems - Rob Reynolds runs through the process of getting the UppercuT build tool to produce Gem packages, the support for which has been added to the latest version.

Community

• mvcConf - the Virtual ASP.Net MVC Conference - The full Schedule for mvcConf the virtual conference for ASP.NET MVC which is happening on Thursday 22nd July i now available, and at the time of writing Registrations are open again, so if you are looking to attend (virtually) get on over to the site.

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