The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing the F# 2.0 Standalone Tools Update (for .NET 2.0, 4.0 and other CLI Implementations) - Don Syme announces the release of the F# 2.0 Standalone Tools for .NET 2.0, 4.0 and other CLI implementations (such as Mono). This release brings the latest F# into the hands of all developers as this is the completely free tooling based on the Visual Studio Shell.(both 2010 and 2008)
• JavaScript Fluent Html Builder - An interesting project on CodePlex which brings a fluent style interface to the creation of HTML in JavaScript, giving much more readable code that the traditional string concatenation
• AutoMapper upgraded to .NET 4 and VS 2010 - Jimmy Bogard discusses his decision to branch AutoMapper into a legacy .NET 3.5 version (which will receive bugfixes only) and to push forward and upgrade the main branch of the project to .NET 4, discussing the process (version control and upgrade) in this post.

Information

• WCF Web Services The Easy Way - Justin Etheredge takes a look at the easy path to WCF web services, including JSON based services, showing that WCF doesn’t have to a hard quagmire of configuration.
• IE9, Opacity, and Alpha - Ted Johnson talks about the introduction of the CSS3 Colo(u)r Module into Internet Explorer 9, showing an example of the use of the Opacity control and Alpha filter
• NHibernate 3.0 QueryOver Syntax is the Bee’s Knees - Bobby Johnson shares a couple of queries which illustrate the NHibernate 3.0 QueryOver feature which brings a typesafe Extension Method / Lambda Expression based API to the Criteria API
• Hydrating Objects With Expression Trees - Part III - Paulo Morgado rounds out his series of posts on using Expression Trees to create and populate entities with a look at the relative performance of each of the methods he discussed, concluding that in his test case the Member Initializer method is the most performant.
• Exploring List capacities and growth on the Windows Phone - Jeff Wilcox takes a look a the way in which the Generic List collection class goes about sizing its self on Windows Phone 7, briefly discussing the memory limiations that phones place us under as developers, and showing how the list behaves as you add items.
• Pulling out the Switch: It’s Time for a Whooping « Making the Complex Simple - John Sonmez takes a look at the different types of switch statement that there are, looking at what the most appropriate refactoring for each is, considering the cases Data to Data, Data to Action and Data to Multiple Action.
• Runtime PivotViewer collection creation - Timmy Kokke runs through using the PiviotViewer control in Silverlight applications, obtaining data from a web service, using HttpHandlers to redirect the control’s calls for data to your custom code.
• Why I Love NServiceBus - Jonathan Oliver discusses his like for NServiceBus as a pragmatic solution to distributed computing problems in the .NET space, comparing it to a variety of other solutions to the same problem from elsewhere.
• Bending Linq Syntax to your will - Mike Hadlow looks at some of the more generic (and mind bending) uses of Linq showing how it can be used for much more than just IEnumerable and IQueryable.

Community

• Windows Phone 7 for Developers - The NxtGen User Group’s Abingdon branch have Matt Lacey talking on Windows Phone 7 on Tuesday 19 October, giving an overview of the platform and looking at the developer experience. NxtGen events are free to members, and non-members are allowed to attend 2 meetings for free, so if you are in the area you really should check it out.

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Post number 666 today, and instead of the obvious set of jokes about ‘The Number of the beast’, I prefer to think of some of the mathematical beauty like the fact that 666 = 1 +2 +3 … + 35 + 36 (666 (number))

• Visual Studio 2010 runs faster when the Windows Automation API 3.0 is installed - David Berg posts a useful tip on the Developer Division Performance Engineering blog about how to make Visual Studio 2010 run quicker on Windows XP machines by installing version 3 of the Windows Automation API (replacing the earlier version that is there) which speeds up the display and processing of the Intellisense drop downs.
• Problem Resolution: Installing Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Beta - John Papa shares some problems he had installing the latest version of the Windows Phone 7 Developer tools beta, showing how he worked around the problem with the installer (and along the way showing some useful install debugging processes)
• NSubstituteAutoMocker for StructureMap - Christiaan creates a NSubstitute automocking functionality for the StructureMap IOC container, showing tests and implementation of this support and discussing its creation
• Hydrating Objects With Expression Trees - Part II - Paulo Morgado continues exploring the use of Expression Trees to populate objects with data, taking a look in this post at building the complete object combining construction of the object and data population into a single expression.
• Clay: malleable C# dynamic objects - part 1: why we need it - Bertrand Le Roy begins a series of posts looking at the Clay library for C# whihc allows you to easily construct complex dynamic types in C# as you do in other languages. In this first part Bertrand sets the scene by discussing his needs for a dynamic view model.
• I don’t want your stinkin’ code comments - Robert Greyling follows on from Jesse Liberty’s post on not using code comments, with the suggestion that Tests (unit or BDD specifications) can stand in for code comments, however if you don’t have these then comments are a good idea, especially where there are lots of levels of abstraction in the code.
• HTML5Rocks Gets Awesomer - Ajaxian highlights the latest updates to the HTML5Rocks site from Google, a site which explores all the features of HTML5, looking at browser compatibility, guides for implementing HTML 5 concepts such as video, off-line data, etc
• Getting Started with WCF 4”, the Refcard… - Greg Duncan highlights the latest RefCard from the folks over at DZone. This card covers version 4 of the Windows Communication Foundation looking at key areas of configuration, contracts, binding, etc
• Restraining Order Granted for Microsoft’s C-Sharp Compiler - Rob Conery takes a light hearted look at ‘Compiler Driven Development’
• A variation on Matt Moloney’s Undo/Redo "Memento" pattern - Don Syme builds on an implementation of Undo / Redo by Matt Moloney to give a nice example of using F# to implement a common code pattern in an elegant way

Community

• "Unplugged" online chat with me this Wednesday - Scott Guthrie returns to the LIDNUG virtual meeting room for another of his ‘Unplugged’ chats where he takes questions from developers and answers them to the best of his ability. I’ve listened to a number of these ‘talks’ in the past and have always found them very interesting.
• My Windows Phone 7 Slides from the London DDD Guathon Event - Mike Ormond shares his slides on Windows Phone 7 Development from last week’s Guathon event held in London

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Software

• Announcing IE9 Beta Launch, coming SEPT 2010 - Jon Box highlights the announcement of the Internet Explorer 9 Beta release, planned fro September 2010
• Patch released for growing Find and Replace window - Gill Cleeren highlights the availability of a patch for an annoying issue in Visual Studio 2010 where the find box increases in width by 16 pixels each time it is opened
• jQuery Mobile Announced; Touch-Optimized Web Framework for Smartphones & Tablets - Dion Almaer over at Ajaxian highlights the announcement of jQuery Mobile, an effort to improve jQuery support across mobile browsers, along with a specialise UI library for use on phones.
• Visual Studio Add-in for Windows 7 Taskbar extras - Kate Gregory highlights the improved Visual Studio 2010 and Windows 7 integration offered by the Win7 Taskbar Extension created by Dmitry Sitnikov which brings a number of Windows 7 Features to life within Visual Studio 2010.
• Extended WPF Toolkit - New ColorPicker Control - Brian Lagunas announces another new control added to the ever growing Extended WPF Toolkit CodePlex project. The Colo(u)r Picker provides a friendly UI for users to select colours, allowing hue, alpha and colour selection.
• Caliburn.Micro Project templates - Rudi Grobler shares some project templates for working with the Caliburn.Micro framework for WPF, Silverlight and WP7. These templates are distributed via the Extensions functionality in Visual Studio.

Information

• NHibernating a WCF Data Service - Pablo M. Cibraro takes a look at wiring WCF Data services up to an NHibernate data storage back end, looking at the implementation of IUpdatable for storing data back into NHibernate entities.
• Back to school : Getting to know F# - Mehfuz’s WebLog - Mehfuz takes a quick look at F#, showing how it can be used to create types with methods, and explores simple unit testing of these methods in F# using Telerik JustMock
• Really, Really, Big Numbers with BigInteger in .NET 4.0 - Paul Kimmel explores the .NET Framework’s support for large numbers via the BigInteger class, illustrating its use in performing calculations to find square roots of large numbers.
• Coding Without A Net - Coding without comments - Jesse Liberty discusses a constraint he recently introduced to his coding where he avoids all forms of comment in his code, aiming to make his code as self explanatory as possible.
• Two different ways to create bad logic in unit tests - Roy Osherove discusses a ‘test smell’ where logic which is likely in the system under test is repeated inside the test case, illustrating with a simple example of string concatenation.
• ASP.NET MVC 3: Using HttpNotFoundResult in controller tests - Gunnar Peipman shows how the new HttpNotFoundResult in ASP.NET MVC 3 really helps with the testability of your controllers by removing the need to test against the HttpContext and Response objects.
• An alternative repository - Michel Grootjans takes a look at an improved implementation of a repository pattern for NHibernate which provides a nice way of encapsulating querying. Full code is available for download.
• ASP.NET MVC meets HTML5 - Gunnar Peipman also explores the support for HTML5 in ASP.NET MVC provided by Dean Hume’s ASP.NET MVC HTML5 Helpers Toolkit which provides HtmlHelper methods for rendering HTML5 controls.
• Validating Data in Silverlight 4 Applications - IDataErrorInfo - Dan Wahlin takes a look at the improvements to validation provided in Silverlight 4, and ho the IDataErrorInfo provides an alternative to the traditional Exception based validation provided in earlier versions.
• Git, TortoiseGit, Github and the rest - Christiaan takes a look at getting up and running with Git and related tools from the point of view of wanting to gain access to the source code to an open source project hosted on GitHub.
• Hydrating Objects With Expression Trees - Part I - Paulo Morgado explores using expression trees to populate arbitrary entities with data, looking at building compiled expressions using reflection and then applying them to newly created objects to fill them with data.
• MSDEV Offers Free Developer Training for Windows Phone 7 in Seven Minutes Each - Bruce Kyle highlights a series of 7 minute videos providing some very focused training on specific areas of the Windows Phone 7 development story from the MSDEV site, along with providing a number of other links to related SDKs and other training content
• Windows Phone Design Day Recordings - Jaime Rodriguez shares the videos from a recent Windows Phone 7 Design Day, an invite only event for partners and agencies which looked at design best practices for the new Windows Phone devices

Community

• Announcing NHDay final Agenda - Simone Chiaretta announces the finalisation of the agenda for the first NHibernate Day, to be held on 9th October in Bologna, Italy. The Agenda looks to be really good, and there are still a few places available.
• Code Challenge - Win a Gyroball - Thycotic Solutions are running a coding contest, offering a GyroBall toy as the prize for the randomly picked correct solution. Entries are allowed from across the world, but only those in the US can win the Gyroball.

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Update: Fixed broken link to NSubstitute post below - thanks to David Pendray for the heads up

Software

• MockingBird v2 RTM - Santosh Benjamin announces the second major version of MockingBird, a set of tools for mocking web services, providing means of implementing web service clients with just the WSDL (no service implementation). This new version has a vast number of improvements and new features as outlined in this post.
• SQL Server Migration Assistant for MySQL Released - Microsoft add a Migration Assistant for migrating MySQL wor SQL Server / SQL Azure to its line-up, joining those for Oracle, Sybase, Access and PowerBuilder
• New version of the Windows Azure AppFabric SDK available for download - Windows Azure AppFabric - Announcements - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - The Windows Azure AppFabric Team announce an updated version of the Windows Azure AppFabric SDK which addresses a bug in the Service Bus
• Extended WPF Toolkit - New RichTextBox Control - Brian Lagunas highlights a new WPF Rich Text Box Control which has bee added to the Extended WPF Toolkit project hosted on CodePlex. Brian also gives an overview of this control in use

Information

• More Versioning Fun With Optional Arguments - Phil Haack looks at some further confusions and subtle bugs that Optional Parameters can introduce into your API when you come to change the API in the future, looking at how overloads with required parameters and signatures with optional parameter can collide.
• Dojo Deferred and the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - Matthew Podwysocki looks at the integration between the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript and the Dojo Toolkits dojo.Deferred, showing how you can take Deferred and turn it into Observable to consume the rich functionality of the Reactive Extensions
• The Weekly Source Code 56 - Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - Code Contracts, Parallel Framework and COM Interop - Scott Hanselman takes a look at the less well publicised features of .NET4 via the Code provided in the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Training Kit, highlighting the usage of Code Contracts, improvements to COM Interop, and the Parallel Extensions.
• Check out NSubstitute - (Corrected URL) Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo highlights the NSubstitute project started by some of the Alumni from his Develop With Passion training course. NSubstitute is a Mocking Framework which aims provide a nice succinct natural language syntax for common mocking operations, with the more complex features of mocking frameworks also available
• I’m Taking a Break — StoryTeller and StructureMap users please read - Jeremy D. Miller outlines the future for a number of his Open Source projects while he takes a break from out of hours coding, including a request for volunteers to help out with StructureMap documentation and examples for a variety of technologies
• How can I find all objects of a particular type? - Raymond Chen takes a look at a world where you could easily get access to all the objects of a specific type that are currently instantiated in the runtime, including some of the more disruptive things that this would allow.
• VC++, C#, VB.NET Coding Guideline of All-In-One Code Framework - The All-In-One Code Framework team share their coding standards documentation for the All-In-One Code Framework project. Due to the nature of the project his 80+ page document outlines coding standards across a wide range of technologies, and should provide a good basis for your own coding standards.
• Getting Started with MonoTouch - Marcus Bratton takes a look at what is required to get up and running with the MonoTouch library for developing iPhone and iPad applications, working from the required tools through to deploying your application on a device.
• LightSwitch Architectural Overviews - Jason Zander gives a high level overview of the architecture that LightSwitch is built upon, and the LightSwitch Team take a more detailed look at the architecture in The Anatomy of a LightSwitch Application Series Part 1 - Architecture Overview & Part 2 - The Presentation Tier -
• Do Developers Have Enough Time to Keep Their Skills Up-To-Date? - Mitchell Pronschinske shares results from a survey of (Java I think) developers showing the breakdown of what they spend their time doing, and what they wished they could spend their time doing.
• Some detail behind the CodePlex move to TFS 2010 - Brian Harry talks in more detail about the recent CodePlex upgrade to TFS 2010, sharing the structure of their implementation, along with some of the reductions in hardware they were able to make.
• ASP.NET Hosting Guide - ASP.NET 101 shares a useful guide to some of the things to consider when choosing hosting for your ASP.NET applications, discussing the typical offerings hosting companies have, along with some of the things to watch out for.

Community

• Want to hear us talking about security and our roadmap? - Ray Fleming highlights an events tour around the UK over the next few months in a variety of cities in the UK, where Microsoft Experts will be running sessions on the Microsoft Roadmap, Software Assurance, Trustworthy computing and security, Software Asset Management and licensing.
• GeekGive to Team Up with Northwest Harvest at MVP Summit 2011 - Lonnie Webb blogs about the MVP Summit / GeekGive collaboration on the The Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog. On the weekend of the MVP Summit, Geek Give will be doing community outreach work in the Seattle area and are encouraging visiting MVPs to get involved.

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Software

• Announcing the release of Codename "Dallas" CTP3! - ‘elisaj’ of the Dallas Team announces the 3rd CTP preview release. This updated CTP includes support for Basic Authentication, enhanced querying of OData Content, Add Reference support in Visual Studio, along with a variety of other enhancements to make development easier.

Information

• Migrating your application from CTP2 to CTP3 - ‘elisaj’ shares some advice for developers who wish to update their Dallas based applications from the CTP2 release to the new CTP3 release
• Looking ahead: Panorama and Pivot controls for Windows Phone developers - Jeff Wilcox takes a detailed look at the new Panorama and Pivot navigation controls which will be included in the next release of the Developer Tools, showing samples of how the controls work, along with the XAML code to utilise them
• How do I get the reference count of a CLR object? - Raymond Chen continues CLR week with a discussion of Reference counting, how the garbage collector uses a simple version of this to decide if things can be collected, along with looking at cases where there may be garbage but no references to examine.
• My new home page, rejuvenated [Updated collection of great Silverlight/WPF/Windows Phone Data Visualization resources!] - David Anson shares a comprehensive collection of links to overviews, tutorials, articles and discussions relating to various Silverlight and WPF Data Visualisation / Charting methods.
• Playing with Entity Framework Code Only - Ayende takes an initial look at the Code Only functionality of the Entity Framework, setting about creating a simple example of its use as a regular developer would, discussing his findings as he goes.
• Blocking Collection and the Producer-Consumer Problem - Alexandra Rusina continues her series on parallel programming with a look at the concurrent collections available as a means of thread-safe data storage in .NET 4, taking a look at the use of the BlockingCollection and the producer consumer pattern
• Is That Closure or Inheritance? - Chris Eargle continues his exploration of accessing private members of one class from a nested class, looking at some variations which illustrate the true nature of this relationship.
• Garbage Collection Notifications in .NET 4.0 - Abhishek Sur looks at garbage collection in .NET 4, and shows how you can register with the Garbage collector to get notification when objects are garbage collected.
• Nearly 22 years ago - Brett Schuchert shares a PDF version of his 1988 book on Data Processing, an interesting blast from the past - we’ve certainly come a long way since then. Brett also discusses the story behind the book.

Community

• Real-world Dynamic .NET & OpenWrap - DevEvening have an event in Woking on Thursday 26th August (6:45pm start) where Mark Rendle will be talking on the subject of Dynamic Support in .NET 4, and Seb Lambla will be discussing his OpenWrap Package Management / Export Management system.
• VBUG Bracknell: SQL Server CLR and Data Tier Applications - VBUG Bracknell are meeting on Tuesday 7th September for an event where Colin Leversuch-Roberts will be presenting a session on CLR functions vs TSQL functions in the database, and Neil Hambly will be talking about Data Tier Applications (DAC).
• Free talk at Yahoo on the 27th about the software revolution that is JavaScript - Chris Heilmann highlights a free event to be held on the 27th August at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale Campus where Douglas Crockford will be talking on the subject of ‘Loopage’ and JavaScript. Sign up is required for this event.
• Interested in becoming a Windows Azure MVP? - The MVP program is looking for good developers with experiences of the Windows Azure Platform to become the first batch Azure MVPs. If you are such a person, or know someone who is, get in touch - contact details in the post.

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Software

• Announcing the Mindscape NHibernate Designer - Mindscape release a visual designer for NHibernate based models, based on a similar design to their LightSpeed ORM tooling, providing access to common object mapping features, along with Model to Database and Database to model synchronisations. 14 day trial version is available, with the full version costing $249, but until Friday 4pm you can save 50% with a discount code.

Information

• One Good Reason to Upgrade to .NET 4.0 - Elton Stoneman looks at the Parallel Extensions included in .NET 4, sharing a sample which makes use of these extensions to show the kind of dramatic performance increases it can easily bring to your applications.
• .NET Debugging and C++ Debugging Resources - Sasha Goldshtein shares a good list of software tools and documentation regarding debugging both .NET and C++ based code categorised and drawn from a variety of sources
• Versioning Issues With Optional Arguments - Phil Haack looks at the use of the .NET 4 Optional Parameters and Named Parameters as a means of helping the versioning of your API’s discovering that this technique doesn’t work well due to the way that the compiler works with optional parameters, and thus you should be very careful when using this feature.
• Are Private Members Inherited? - Chris Eargle discusses a particular interview questions about inheritance of private members, showing that the specification does allow this to happen in particular circumstances (nested classes).
• Everybody thinks about CLR objects the wrong way (well not everybody) & When does an object become available for garbage collection? - Raymond Chen continues CLR week with a follow up on the comments from his previous day’s post looking at Auto-disposal based on scope, and how the CLR works differently to unmanaged code. Raymond then continues the story with a look at when objects become eligible for garbage collection on the CLR.
• IoC patterns - partitioning registration - Krzysztof Kozmic looks at the organisation of your component registrations within an IoC Container, suggesting that if you keep registration code granular it will make it easier for new developers to identify the types being used in a certain context
• Coding4Fun - Part 1 of the Windows Phone Picture Effects App and Roadmap - René Schulte highlights the release of his article on Windows Phone 7 on the Coding4Fun site. The article explores the process of writing a Windows Phone 7 picture effects application, with full source available licensed as MS-PL
• A F# Silverlight Template - Daniel Mohl releases another F# project template, this time for Silverlight, which is now available from the online templates section in Visual Studio 2010.
• Exploring FubuCore: Convert a string value to any type of .Net class with the ObjectConverter - Jeremy D. Miller begins a new series of posts looking at the FubuCore library of utility functions which is a part of the FubuMVC project, but has applications outside this project. This first part explores the ObjectConverter implementation.
• Xaml Toolkit: Manipulation of Xaml - Lester looks at the use of the Xaml Toolkit for sanitizing Xaml Code copied from an application, and how it makes it easy to remove elements which refer to methods, events, etc which are not available in a particular context.
• Using DynamicObject to implement general proxy classes - ‘OlliFromTor’ explores using the Dynamic Object in .NET 4 to wrap any type with implementations of common interfaces such as INotifyPropertyChanged, IEditableObject, etc in this CodeProject Article.
• Bankers Rounding in Math.Round Method - Vikram Lakhotia reminds us all that it is dangerous to assume anything about methods, highlighting that the standard numerical rounding in .NET may not do what you assume it would, and shows the way of instructing it to do the rounding you require.

Community

• SQL Social - Kent - Jamie Thompson announces the first SQL Social event to be held in Maidstone, Kent, UK on the eventing of 18th August. This inaugural event features Dave Ballantyne giving an overview of PASS, Neil Hambly talking on the subject of Replication, and Allan Mitchell looking at Complex Event Processing.
• FubuMVC at C4MVC Tomorrow (Now Today) - Jeremy D Miller will be presenting an online brown bag session today (Wednesday) beginning at 12pm CDT (6PM BST by my calculations) looking at FubuMVC, its differences from MS MVC, its integration if IoC and Composition and their configuration features.

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Software

• Introducing Observal - Paul Stovell shares a new library called Observal, extracted from a recent project this library provides easy means for tracking and responding to changes in entities and collections which are part of complex or deep hierarchies.
• FastSharp 2.0 - Matt Manela shares the latest version of FastSharp, a lightweight IDE for trying out simple pieces of code in C#, F# or VB.NET
• TiltContentControl for Windows Phone - Jeff Wilcox shares another un-official piece of code for Windows Phone 7, this time mirroring the tilt behaviour of the standard UI controls in the Operating System and brings that capability to your applications in Silverlight.

Information

• IronRuby and the Reactive Extensions Together Again - Taming User Input - Matthew Podwysocki continues exploring the integration for IronRuby with the Reactive Extensions for .NET, addressing some of the concerns about IronRuby’s future, and exploring the use of Throttle to slow down user input to manageable levels.
• Optional named parameters work pretty well - Bertrand Le Roy follows on from Rob Conery’s post linked to yesterday with a look at using optional and named parameters to handle a similar situation in a more strongly typed way.
• Redlining C#’s Dynamic Features - Rob Conery continues looking at making C# more dynamic using a variety of techniques to make more areas completely dynamic, in a way similar to that of Ruby and Python.
• Running RavenDB on Azure - Mark Rendle takes a look at getting the RavenDB Document Database up and running in a Windows Azure worker role, sharing his fork of the RavenDB source which adds the ability to run on Azure, and explains how he did it.
• Windows Azure-Compatible NoSQL Databases: GraphDB, RavenDB and MongoDB - Roger Jennings takes a look at various efforts to get other NoSQL / Document Database up and running on Azure, rounding up posts from various sources discussing the process.
• Sprite and Image Optimization Framework & DotNetNuke - Rob Chartier explores implementing the new Sprite and Image Optimization Framework from the ASP.NET Team inside a DotNetNuke site, showing a useful example of how this works and can easily be integrated.
• HTML5 Support In Visual Studio 2010 - Raihan Iqbal looks at the support for HTML5 in Visual Studio, showing how you can get IDE support and validation by moving an XSD for HTML5 into the correct location in your VS install.
• An example of packaging web application containing database upgrade SQL file - Xinyang Qiu walks through the process of packaging a Web Application along with a database upgrade script using the datanbase project features of Visual Studio 2010
• Programmatically Invoke the C# Compiler - Doug Holland shares a simple example showing how you can dynamically compile C# code at runtime, checking for errors and warnings and ending up with an assembly you can use as usual.
• Getting the Silverlight Toolkit Controls to work on WP7 - Derik Whittaker shares a method of getting the Silverlight Toolkit Controls compiled in a form you can then use on the Windows Phone 7 version of Silverlight
• Code Coverage: Did we run the right tests? - Bj Rollison continues an exploration of Code Coverage from a testing point of view, highlighting how it is easy to achieve high code coverage in real tests without actually testing sufficient cases to find problems in that code.
• Searching and skimming code - ’stevencl’ highlights an interesting paper about how developers orient themselves in unfamiliar code and go about trying to fix bugs
• Everybody thinks about garbage collection the wrong way - Raymond Chen kicks off his CLR week of posts with a look at some of the misconceptions about Garbage Collection, and what that can mean for you as a programmer. Check out the comments for further discussion.
• How to Post Code To Your Blog and other Religious Arguments - Scott Hanselman takes a look at the various different methods of embedding code samples in your blog posts (a common problem for Developer-Bloggers) examining the pros and cons of each method.
• Common Programmer Health Problems - Garry Shutler highlights a good article from Zed Shaw on the many health problems associated with being a Software Developer, and suggesting things you should do to help avoid them.

Community

• Calendar: Upcoming Meetup list - Canary Wharf .NET User Group (London, England) - The Canary Wharf .NET Usergroup will be meeting on the 18th August at 6:30pm where Neil Foster will be sharing the Microsoft roadmap for High Performance Computing, with Steve Harris showing how HPC techniques can be applied to Excel. The Group will also be meeting on the 1st September for a look at Expression Blend for WPF Developers where Sam Bourton will be guiding you round the tools.
• MSDN Firestarter Events Coming Soon - Chris Bowen highlights a series of events across the US for developers interested in learning about the latest Microsoft offerings in Cloud, Web and Client technologies
• Register for DevCon London, the European conference on .NET technologies - The UK MSDN blog shares a 30% off discount code for the DevCon London conference. Standard conference rates range from the £349 1 day early bird, through to £699 for all three days, so this discount is substantial.

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Software

• ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 - Source Code for ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 is now available via the CodePlex site, along with the source for the ASP.NET MVC 3 Futures project.
• Albacore v0.2.0 Preview 2 Is Available - Derick Bailey announces the second preview of the 0.2 release of Albacore, the .NET build task library for Rake. This release includes a lot of the changes discussed in the Preview 1 release notes, along with significant under the hood changes, and improvements for its use as a basis to create new tasks.
• ASP.NET Sprite & Image Optimization Framework Intro in WebForms - Craig Shoemaker - Craig Shoemaker highlights the release of preview of the Sprite and Image Optimisation Framework from the ASP.NET Team, bringing a number of improvements to the techniques available for image delivery on your ASP.NET pages
• Hot Fix Released for the Issue of Visual Studio 2010 Crashing When Switching to the Design View - Anh Phan of the Visual Web Developer Tools Team highlights a hot fix release which addresses the problems some users have encountered when switching to the design view on complex page layouts.
• Help Viewer 1.0 SDK now available! - Paul O’Rear announces the release of the Help Viewer 1.0 SDK which allows you to interface with the new Help system included in Visual Studio 2010.
• TFS Integration Platform - after much dog fooding, the first fully supported product has been released - Willy-Peter Schaub announces the 1.0 release of the TFS Integration Platform, available now from the Visual Studio Gallery. This release is the team’s first supported release, and contains a variety of tools and adapters to connect TFS to other tools, and to help with migration and import.
• Version 3.5 of the Performance Testing Quick Reference Guide Available - Ed Glass highlights the Version 3.5 release of the Performance Testing Quick Reference Guide from Geoff Gray, with a range of new performance testing content ranging from Performance Counters to Network Emulation.

Information

• Start spreading the news…: the future of Jimmy and IronRuby - Jimmy Schementi talks about his decision to leave Microsoft, and what this means from his point of view for the IronRuby Project which he was working on. The community has been quick to react to this post with a variety of responses regarding the future of the IronRuby project:
  • Is IronRuby being un-funded just the tip of an iceberg? - Simone Chiaretta
  • A Snowball’s Chance In Hell : IronRuby - Karl Seguin
  • IronRuby, A Match Made In… - Justin Etheredge
  • "Bring out yer dead!" *clang - Derick Bailey
  • IronRuby and IronPython are NOT dead - John V. Petersen
• NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0 - Ayende takes a look at the LLBLGen Pro 3 Obect Relational Mapping tool’s support for NHibernate, bringing a friendly GUI tool to managing the mappings of entities, taking a look at the process and generated code.
• NHibernate Linq Eager Fetching - Mike Hadlow takes a look a the new NHibernate Linq Provider’s support for Eager fetching of entities, showing it in operation and highlighting a few gotchas along the way.
• "Creating High Performance Silverlight Applications for Windows Phone" - 1 zip, 6 samples and 26 pages - Greg Duncan highlights the release of documentation and samples which provide tips for producing better performing Silverlight code for the Windows Phone 7 Devices. Also, congratulations to Greg on his Seventh Blog-aversary!
• Understanding the Role of Commanding in Silverlight 4 Applications - Dan Wahlin explores commanding in Silverlight 4 implementations of MVVM based applications, aiming to answer many of the frequently asked questions he hears on the subject when presenting MVVM.
• MVP In Silverlight/WPF: Automated Tests & Conclusions - Davy Brion rounds out his series on MVP over MVVM as his pattern of choice for Silverlight and WPF development with a look at testing the samples created, and wraps up with a short conclusion.
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Pt. 4 - Working with Windows Phone 7 - Rob Eisenberg continues his tour round his Caliburn Micro framework with a look at the specifics of using the framework with the Window Phone 7 and takes a look at some of the specific workarounds required to get up and running here.
• Data access is contextual, a generic approach will fail - Ayende discusses the use of Entities, DTO and View Models as a part of a real world system showing why each may be needed, and illustrating with a sample.
• Going asynchronous - AOP made easy with Event-Based Components - Part III - Ralf Westphal continue exploring Aspect Oriented Programming with his concept of Event Based Components taking a look at how this approach can enable asynchronous programming
• WatinN to automate browser and test sophisticated ASP.NET AJAX sites - Omar Al Zabir explores using the WatiN automated UI Test library to test ASP.NET sites which make heavy use of Ajax and jQuery in this Code Project Article.
• Templates Galore: Live Templates - Hadi Hariri takes a look at one of the less well know ReSharper features, the Live Template and Macro features which take the basic concept of Snippets (ala Visual Studio) to the next level providing sophisticated templating support in the IDE.
• Don’t Parse That XML! - John Sonmez argues that you shouldn’t need to manually write XML parsing code these days, and should lean on the framework support available to allow you to access XML as strongly typed objects, exploring doing this in .NET , Java and Android platforms
• Getting rid of null checks in property chains with - but not limited to - AutoMapper and S#arpArchitecture - Sandor Drieënhuizen takes a look at how expressions can help improve the readability of your code when it comes to null checking, sharing a helper method which uses this technique to give a clear and simple solution to the problem.
• Flexible Method Arguments in C# 4.0 Using Dynamic Trickery - Rob Conery takes a look at using the C#4 dynamic features to provide a VB (of old) and Ruby like way of passing arrays of arguments into methods.
• Mock framework challenges in F# - Vagif Abilov takes a look at a variety of mocking projects / products exploring how well they work when it comes to mocking in F#.

Community

• What Can You Build in 1k of JS? - Ajaxian highlights a contest from Peter van der Zee for you to build the most impressive demo possible in 1k of JavaScript. Closing date is 10th September.

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