The Morning Brew

Software

• WikiPlex 1.4 Released – Matt Hawley announces the release of WikiPlex 1.4, the wiki engine behind the CodePlex wiki. This release consists of a .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 release, with the sample website implemented in ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight 4 support by default, ability to include Vimeo videos and a number of other bugfixes.

Information

• An effective testing strategy – Jimmy Bogard shares some details of how a recent project he worked on structured their automated testing to minimise the requirement for manual QA team testing of the application, discussing the break down of types of tests they had, the quantities of tests of each type, and some other testing and development practices relating to large projects
• Quality Assurance – Jeffrey Palermo, Blake Caraway and Eric Hexter of HeadSpring discuss how they handle Quality Assurance, discussing the importance of having responsibility for quality in every team member, how you don’t need testers to have quality assurance, and also the importance of Full System Tests.
• Upgrading to Windsor 2.5 (Northwind) – Krzysztof Kozmic shows the process of upgrading an existing code base to use the latest Castle Windsor 2.5 release, illustrating by upgrading the Sharp Architecture project explaining the steps along the way
• New! Unit Testing Asp.NET Applications with Pex and Moles Tutorial – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux highlights a new tutorial document from the Pex and Moles team which walks through the process of creating isolated tests for ASP.NET code using the Moles and Pex libraries
• Search and Navigation Tips/Tricks with Visual Studio – Scott Guthrie continues his series exploring the featues of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 with his 27 instalment. In this post Scott explores some of the less known Visual Studio search features such as incremental search, Find Usage, Navigate Backwards / Forward and many more.
• iPhone to Windows Phone 7 Tutorial – #0 – Jesse Liberty begins a new series of posts looking at providing you with the basic information to be a Windows Phone 7 Developer, approaching it from the point of view of a developer who has worked with iPhone development. This introductory post sets the scene, and introduces some of the key concepts.
• Learning F# for C# developers – Bill Morrissey starts a series lookin at F# from the point of view of a C# developer, and in this first post looks at a hello world example, and starts to explore types, whitespace and comments
• PSSCor2: Object Inspection Commands, Part 2 – Sasha Goldshtein continues with his look at thePSSCor2 debugging extension looking in this part at some of the commands and output relating to exploring objects which live on the heap.
• "Getting Started with UML" DZone Refcard – Greg Duncan highlights the latest RefCard quick reference card from DZone. This card, created by James Sugrue provides a 6 page overview to the key concepts of UML.
• Degrees of Breaking Changes: Optional Parameters in C# 4.0 – Bill Wagner looks at the level of consideration you should give to Optional Parameters included in your API, looking at the effect a change of default value on code that is compiled against your library.
• LightSwitch: Initial thoughts & Profiling LightSwitch using Entity Framework Profiler & Analyzing LightSwitch data access behavior – Ayende takes a peek under the covers of LightSwitch, looking at the development experience, application performance and the way it does data access using his Entity Framework Profiler.
• What were you doing 15 years ago today? The launch of Windows 95… – Eric Ligman reminds us that yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the release of Windows 95 and looks back at the Microsoft of 1995. Raymond Chen also shares a memory of the Apple perspective in Windows 95 in his post ‘Windows 95: It sucks less‘

Community

• Irish Open Spaces Coding Day III – Saturday 11th September sees the 3rd Irish Open Spaces Coding Day, being held in Enterprise Ireland’s offices in Dublin. The main focus of the event is .NET development, although other technologies are welcome to join in, and the day consists of getting into groups various interest based and writing some code collaboratively – a great opportunity to work with a range of developers and learn lots.

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Software

• LightSwitch Public Beta 1 Now Available! – The Visual Studio LightSwitch team announces the release of the first public beta of LightSwitch, the Rapid Line of Business application development tool.
• SQLCop update Version 1.1 – George Mastros highlights an update to the SQLCop project, an FxCop like tool for your SQL Server database, which will inspect and report on possible problems. This version includes a number of bugfixes to improve the experience (especially in use in partially connected environments)

Information

• LightSwitch Beta1 Now Available, Building Your First App – Jason Zander follows on from the LightSwitch public beta release with a walkthrough the process of building your first application using the new tooling in a step by step guide. Matt Thalman also explores LightSwitch in his post Authentication Features in Visual Studio LightSwitch taking a look at the different authentication possibilities in LightSwitch applications.
• A Developer’s Roadmap to Windows Phone 7 Launch Timing – The Windows Phone 7 team announce the plan for the run up to the Windows Phone 7 Launch, outlining some of the key dates and sharing links to some resources.
• PSSCor2: Object Inspection Commands, Part 1 – Sasha Goldshtein begins a series of posts looking at the PSSCor2 debugging extensions released by Microsoft a while back, and providing a number of useful additions to the core SOS debugger
• Database assisted denormalization – Ayende explores some possibiliies for denormalisation of data in a relational database using features of the SQL Server engine, looking at a variety of ways of solving the blog post and Number of posts problem examining the performance of the queries used. Interesting discussion breaking out in the comments.
• ASP.NET MVC with JQuery Validation and ValidationSummary – Imran Baloch looks at combining the Validation summary control with the jQuery Validation library to provide feedback clientside for the validations being performed on a page
• What is the difference in <:%: variable%> and <%= variable%> in ASP.NET MVC? – Jeffrey Palermo reminds of the introduction of the <%: blah %> syntax, explaining its difference from the traditional <%=blah%> syntax, and highlights a subtle difference between VS2008 and VS2010 ASP.NET MVC templates
• The ThreadPool is dead – Josh Twist looks at the improvements offered by the Task Parallel Library over the Threadpool in .NET 4, suggesting that TPL is the way to go for parallel code in .NET 4
• IObserver and IObservable – A New addition to BCL – Abhishek Sur looks at the IObserver and IObservable interfaces that are now a part of the .NET Base Class Library, looking at how they can be derived from the duality with IEnumerable / IEnumerator and illustrating their use with a simple example
• Lessons Learnt – Each Application Should Be Shipped With a Set of Diagnostics Tools – Marek Blotny discusses the importance of providing good logging and diagnostics tools for applications that you develop highlighting a number of key areas to consider
• Log Reporting Dashboard for ASP.NET MVC – ‘daffrey’ looks at combinging the output from ELMAH, Health Monitoring, Log4Net and NLog into a useful ASP.NET MVC based diagnostics / log reporting tool in this CodeProject article
• Heisenbug of the Day: IIS 7.0 Discarding POST Data From Firefox 3 when using Custom 404 Handlers – Dylan Beattie looks at an annoying issue with IIS7 handling 404 errors with FireFox 3 as the web browser posting small amounts of data, explaining how he investigated the problem and the tools used, along with sharing the workaround they ended up implementing
• Capturing Page Load Times – FiddlerScript to the Rescue – Robert Bogue looks at a use of the scripting capabilities included in the Fiddler HTTP diagnostic Proxy, showing how you can use it to capture the load time of all your pages in your application and log them to a file.

Community

• JAOO Aarhus 2010 Free Event – Oren "Ayende" Eini: "NoSQL Databases" and Nikhil Kothari – The Jaoo conference and .NET Usergroup will be hosting a free event in the early evening of October 5th in Aarhus, Denmark where Ayende will be presenting a session on NoSQL Databases, and Nikhil Kothari will be discussing Silverlight. If you are attending the JAOO conference this is a great free event for your evening.

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Software

• Castle Windsor (incl. Core with DynamicProxy and Dictionary Adapter) v2.5 final is out – Krzysztof Kozmic announces the official final release of Castle Windsor v2.5. This release targets .NET 3.5 (SP1), .NET 4, .NET 4 Client Profile, and Silverlight 3 & 4. This release sees some minor improvements over the beta 2 release of a month ago and there is one sample application (a Silverlight 4 app) which illustrates some of the new versions features
• Getting Started with PowerConsole – Bil Simser takes a look at PowerConsole, a Visual Studio 2010 add-on available from the Extension Manager which brings PowerShell right into the Visual Studio Environment, allowing you to explore, manipulate, and query the IDE environment from a command line.
• Visual Studio ALM Rangers – Visual Studio Database Guide "ships"… Cowabunga! – Willy-Peter-Schaub highlights the release of the latest Visual Studio ALM Rangers Guide, the Database Guide which looks at Database Projects in detail, giving guidance for Solution and Project Management, Source Code and Configuration Management, External Changes, Build and Deploy, along with database testing and deployments.

Information

• .NET Micro Framework – More blinking LEDs – Szymon Kobalczyk takes a look at the new .NET Micro Framework development board called ‘Netduino’, a board which is pin compatible with the very popular Arduino boards. Szymon discusses the hardware, and then shares a couple of simple projects for working with LED segment displays, complete with the code to run it.
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Pt. 5 – IResult and Coroutines – Rob Eisenberg continues his series exploring the features of his Caliburn Micro Framework taking a look at its support for Coroutines allowing you to execute part of a routine, pause, go do something else and return to where you left off.
• Rx on the server, part 3 of n: Writing an observable to a stream – Jeffrey van Gogh continues his series exploring the uses of the Reactive Extensions in Server Side Code with a look at writing the values of an observable to disk asynchronously
• Bending Time with the Reactive Extensions – Scott Weinstein looks at the support for custom schedulers in the Reactive Extensions allowing you to test time dependent reactive code without having to wait for the time to elapse.
• How to change the default browser in Visual Studio programmaticly with PowerShell and possibly poke yourself in the eye – Scott Hanselman looks at finding a way of switching the default browser used by Visual Studio mid-session using some PowerShell and registry monitoring, reminding us that programs and computers are not black boxes, we can poke around inside and make some powerful discoveries
• Animation with the HTML Canvas Tag and the IE9 Preview in Expression Web 4 – Little-endian – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – ‘gsmith’ walks through the creation of a simple animation using the HTML Canvas element in Internet Explorer 9, stepping through he JavaScript required to work with the element.
• Want to pack JS and CSS really well? Convert it to a PNG and unpack it via Canvas – Chris Heilmann highlights a slightly crazy idea from Jacob Seidelin, packaged up into a script by Alex Le. The idea is to use PNG’s lossless compression to compress CSS and JavaScript, send it to the browser via the canvas element, and then decompress it on the client.
• Website diagnostics page to diagnose your ASP.NET website – Omar Al Zabir looks at the creation of a self diagnostics page for your web applications, testing the various requirements for the application, and reporting their state in the hosted environment back to you.
• Using Different Resources for Windows Phone 7 Themes – Ivan Suhinin looks at serving different resource content to your Windows Phone 7 application dependent on the theme the user of the phone has the device set to, building on some earlier work from Derik Whittaker.
• Storing and playing media on Windows Phone 7 – Tim Heuer looks at implementing a download of a audio file, storing it for later playback on the Windows Phone 7. This post walks through the simple sample application, and full code is available to download.
• MSR Rex – Christian Bitter takes a brief look at the Microsoft Research project Rex, a tool to explore regular expressions. Christain looks at a sample of its use where it can generate sample data for a given regular expressions
• Anatomy of the T4 Text Template – Doug Holland gives a simple guide to the way that T4 templates are constructed, showing how easily you can create templated code using the T4 system.
• Maintenance-Free Mocking for Unit Testing with EntityFramework 4.0 – Rab Hallett looks at the creation of a low maintenance set of Mocks for working with Entity Framework data models, generating the code for the mocks using T4
• Roll your own mocks with RealProxy – Derek Fowler takes a look at using the RealProxy class from the .Net Remoting part of the framework to construct his own simple mocking framework. Full source is available on GitHub
• Technical Debt- Don’t Let it Kill Your Projects – Gary Short gives an overview of his talk on Technical Debt, giving some key information on managing debt, identifying debt and removing debt.

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