August 2010
Monthly Archive
The Morning Brew #669
Posted by Chris Alcock on 20 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- S#arp Architecture 1.6 Released! – Billy McCafferty – Devlicio.us – Just the Tasty Bits – Billy McCafferty highlights the release of S#arp Architecture 1.6, the project which is now under the stewardship of Alec Whittington in this release sees the introduction of FluentNHibernate 1.1, caching of NHibernate Configuration and improvements to client side validation for CRUD forms. This version is also the last to support Visual Studio 2008 / .NET 3.5 with the team’s nev release being 2.0 targeting VS2010
- F# Windows Phone 7 (Silverlight) Templates Now On Visual Studio Gallery – Don Syme highlights the release of some F# based templates for creating Windows Phone 7 applications using Silverlight and F#
- Announcing YUI 3.1.2: Critical Security Update for All YUI 3.1.x/3.2.0pr1 Users – The Yahoo User Interface team announces an important security release for anyone using their YUI library versions 3.1.x and 3.2.0pr1
Information
- RequestValidation Changes in ASP.NET 4.0 – Rick Strahl talks about a change made in ASP.NET 4 to how the Request Validation works, with a new attribute required in the web config to maintain backward compatibility with how it behaved in previous versions
- How to switch between HTTP and HTTPS in ASP.NET MVC2 – Jeff Widmer looks at how you can make ASP.NET MVC 2 switch to HTTPS for pages where you require security, and looks at the more difficult aspect of switching back to the non-secure side after that work has been completed
- Must Windsor track my components? – Krzysztof Kozmic talks about the lifecycle management of of components created by the Windsor container, and looks at why you would want the container to manage this, illustrating with a discussion of the Unit Of Work in a Web Application
- Developing a (very) Lookless Silverlight Radial Gauge Control – Colin Eberhardt walks through the creation of a gauge control for Silverlight, sharing the XAML and code for every stage so you can see the process he took, and providing the full working control with source code as a download
- Introducing the new Silverlight 4 themes – Tsitsi Gora highlights the new themes for Silverlight 4, Cosmopolitan (code name Metro), AccentColor and Windows7 (OS compatible theme) which provide a nice way of making sure your applications UI is consistent.
- Analyzing Silverlight Memory Usage: Part 1 – Obtaining Measurements – Mike Cook of the Silverlight Performance Team takes a look at the various tools available to help you establish what memory is being used and how inside your Silverlight applications, exploring Windbg, HeapMonitor and VMMap
- The 4-contact points of software development – Brett Schuchert discusses the importance of observing the correct process of TDD, and to only tackle one aspect of the process at a time.
- Design Through Testability – An Example – Karl Seguin discusses how you can gain better design by refactoring your code to be more testable through a simple example.
- Dynamic LINQ Part 2 (Evolution) – David Fowler continues his exploration of merging the .NET 4 Dynamic functionality with LINQ to provide a means of creating LINQ queries for existing providers based on dynamic input, sharing a partial implementation as a library you can use.
Community
- MonoTouch and MonoDroid! – The Manchester NxtGen User group have Chris Hardy visiting them on Wednesday 15th September to talk about the use of MonoTouch and MonoDroid to build mobile applications for Android and IPhone/iPad
- Windows 7 WPF MultiTouch Story – NxtGen Cambridge continue the touch related theme with an event on Tuesday 21st September featuring Guy Smith-Ferrier talking about multitouch development in WPF
- Project Phoenix – Developer generosity rises from the ashes of the economy – Rachel Hawley highlights the great project launched by Arnie Rowland which aims to make use of un-employed / under-employed developers by getting them working on real world IT projects for charitable organisations in return for receiving some great software free of charge.
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The Morning Brew #668
Posted by Chris Alcock on 19 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- LightSwitch Beta 1 Available to MSDN Subscribers! – The Visual Studio LightSwitch team announce the release of LightSwitch Beta 1 for MSDN Subscribers, Everyone else will have to wait until the public beta on 23rd August
- Sync Framework 2.1 Available for Download – The latest release of the Sync Framework brings with it all the good stuff from the v2.0 release, supplementing this with support for synchronisation to SQL Azure, along with support for the SQL 2008 (and SQL Azure) table valued parameter, and much more
Information
- The First Hour With Lightswitch -BETA- – Michael Washington gives a run through of what he managed to achieve in LightSwitch in the first hour from running the installer to creating a simple application.
- Debugging Tips with Visual Studio 2010 – Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts looking at the new features introduced in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 with this post looking at the debugging experience, recapping a few old features along with some of the new
- Drop 1 of the "Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide" from Microsoft Patterns & Practices. – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the Patterns and Practices Team offering guidance and suggestions for structuring you Windows Phone 7 development, looking at both client development and Cloud based backends in Azure.
- Learn Windows Phone 7 with the "Jump Start" Course – Joey deVilla highlights the release of 10 hours of video of training for Windows Phone 7 Development from Andy Wigley and Rob Miles. These videos look at the development of applications for the phone in both Silverlight and XNA, looking at the whole process from ‘File> New Project’ to marketing on the Market Place.
- Fade Into You [Code to easily animate orientation changes for Windows Phone applications now supports fade, too!] – David Anson shares another transition for moving from one orientation to another in a Windows Phone 7 application, where the transition is made by fading from one view to another. Full code is provided.
- Reactive Extensions for .NET ( "stuff happens" ) – Mike Taulty explores the Reactive Extensions for .NET, highlighting a number of great resources for getting up to speed on Rx, along with exploring some code examples of some of the features of Rx
- Clay: malleable C# dynamic objects – part 2 – Bertrand Le Roy looks at the use of the Clay dynamic object library and how it answers his requirements outlined in the first part of this series on dynamic objects for View Models in Orchard.
- Updated summary of our recent ebook giveaways – Microsoft Press shares a list of their recent free ebook releases (mostly previews of sections of books) covering a range of topics from Visual Studio 2010, through Windows Phone 7, to Virtualisation.
- Once Again: Comments In Code Aren’t Necessarily Bad – Davy Brion continues the debate on comments in code, following on from a number of recent posts on the subject. Looks like some discussion is breaking out in the comments to this one.
Community
- Don Syme is in town! – F#unctional Londoners Meetup Group (London, England) – The F#unctioanl Londoners User Group is being visited by Don Syme who will be talking on (you guessed it) F# on the Thursday 9th September 2010 at SkillsMatter
- The New Brighton ALT.NET Wiki – Mike Hadlow announces the creation of the Brighton ALT.NET Wiki, the home for information about the Group and its regular meetings.
- Early Bird is Open for the Patterns and Practices Symposium – John Papa highlights the opening of the Early Bird registrations for the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Symposium to be held in Redmond on the 18-22 October 2010. With a number of great looking sessions planned across a variety of technologies this $699 early bird offer looks like an excelent deal.
- WPUG.NET: Second Meeting – register now! – The Windows Phone User Group will be holding their second meeting on Wednesday 25th August at the Theodore Bullfrog, in London. This event will feature Matt Lacey and Mike Ormond, discussing a variety of Windows Phone Development topics.
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The Morning Brew #667
Posted by Chris Alcock on 18 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, 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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