July 2010

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #648

Posted by on 22 Jul 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

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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The Morning Brew #647

Posted by on 21 Jul 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

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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The Morning Brew #646

Posted by on 20 Jul 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Announcing Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 – Aaron Bjork highlights the release of the RTW version of Visual Studio Scrum 1.0, a process template for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server allowing your development process to follow the Scrum practices while using TFS. John Bristowe shares some more information, including some screen shots in his post Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0
  • Town Crier – An open-source e-mail templating engine for .NET – James Freiwirth releases Town Crier, an email templating solution which provides an easy means of creating mail-merged emails from templates, with a nice clean API. Full source is available on the project’s GitHub page.
  • A free tool from Microsoft Learning: LCDS v2.5 – Microsoft Learning release the latest version of their Learning Content Development System, a tool for creating interactive online courses including games, assessments, demos and other interactive activities.

Information

  • The Duality of Object and Event references – Tomáš Pet?í?ek examines the concept of mathematical duality, and sows how it can apply in programming by looking at the duality between objects and events, showing what this means for Garbage collection
  • On the use and misuse of patterns – Rockford Lhotka talks about the use of patterns, how they are useful to us in giving us a common frame of reference for discussions, and some of the things you need to ensure if you are going to make use of patterns
  • Technical Debt – Andrew Stopford gives a brief overview of the concept of Technical Debt sharing two diagrams that explain the causes of Technical Debt and the cost of Technical Debt.
  • SolidQ Journal – New monthly SQL Server reading material – Greg Low highlights a new online publication from Solid Quality Mentors on SQL Server and related subjects. The first edition is out now, and consists of 56 pages of well produced content available as a PDF.
  • Events and Delegates Under The Hood – Jesse Liberty takes a back to basics look at the role of Delegates and Events in Silverlight programming in C#, illustrating with a worked example.
  • Windows Phone 7 in-depth preview – With the release of the latest beta of the Windows Phone Developer Kit there has been renewed interest in the Windows Phone Platform, and Engadget have a indepth look at the actual implementation on a device.
  • Absolue Beginners Guide to Entity Framework – Michael Yaroshefsky uses his perspective as a newcomer to the .NET space to explore Entity Framework from this point of view walking through the types of experimentation a first time user may do.
  • Debugging an OOB Silverlight Business Application – Deepesh Mohnani shares a work around to make it easier to get debugging support for Out Of Browser Silverlight applications
  • Upcoming changes to AntiXSS – Barry Dorrans talks about the changes to support more language character sets which will be included in a future release of the AntiXSS library and talks a bit about Unicode in explaining the change

Community

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