The Morning Brew

IMPORTANT: ASP.NET Security Vulnerability

If you run ASP.NET websites, you need to pay attention to the contents of this section:

• Microsoft Security Advisory (2416728): Vulnerability in ASP.NET Could Allow Information Disclosure - The official Microsoft Advisory about the publicly reported ASP.NET encryption attack which can result in private data disclosure. At the time of writing there is no fix available, so the recommendation is to implement the workaround involving the use of custom error pages.
• Important: ASP.NET Security Vulnerability - Scott Guthrie discusses the issues surrounding the vulnerability, the workaround, and also highlights forums for raising questions about this specific issue.
• Fear, uncertainty and and the padding oracle exploit in ASP.NET - Troy Hunt looks into the exploit which enables this vulnerability, discussing what is meant by an ‘Oracle Attack’ (nothing to do with Oracle Databases), shares the video showing what can be achieved by an attacker using this exploit against .NET Nuke and discusses the workaround
• ASP.NET Custom Errors Security Flaw - Steve Smith takes a look at the steps to protect yourself using the official workaround.

Software

• Pex and Moles v0.94: MSBuild support for Moles - Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces the latest release of the Pex and Moles project which brings with it support for the inclusion of support for Moles in MSBuild, removing the requirement to check in generated code allowing the tooling to run well under TFS.
• jQuery UI on the Microsoft CDN - Stephen Walther highlights the inclusion of jQuery UI 1.8.5 on the Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network, a free to use CDN for a variety of JavaScript libraries, offering you a way to increase the performance of your sites by including common resources from the public CDN
• Windows Phone Training Kit has been updated - Alex Yakhnin highlights the release of an updated version of the Windows Phone 7 Training Kit, updated to reflect the changes in the RTM version of the developer tooling.

Information

• Best Practices for ASP.NET MVC - The ASP.NET and Web Tools Developer Content Team share a collection of ASP.NET MVC best practices based on a document from Ben Grover. This post covers best practices for Models, Views, Controllers, Routing, Extensibility, Testability, Localisation and Globalisation, Security and Performance.
• Published Software Design Patterns For Everyone Ebook - Anoop Madhusudanan releases an collection of a number of his blog posts on Patterns as a 30 page e-book. The e-book looks at the creation of a ‘Soccer Engine’ and looks at how patterns can be applied to a variety of development problems .
• Code rant: Implementing a "Money" type in an ASP.NET MVC and NHibernate application. - Mike Hadlow re-visits the Money example from Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development book, exploring its implementation in an ASP.NET MVC application with an NHibernate data access backend
• Inversion of control (IOC containers) .NET IOC patterns - Viacheslav Agafonov explores the concepts of Inversion of Control, discussing the variety of implementation of Inversion of Control Containers discussing their performance, looks at the importance of their use in providing good testability, and exploring a simple implementation of an IoC container
• Dependency injection options for Windows Workflow 4 - Rory Primrose discusses two options for bringing Dependency Injection to the world of Windows Workflow
• Non-iterable collection initializers - Jon Skeet discusses some limitations of Collection Initializers which can force you to partially implement the IEnumberable Interface, and proposes a couple of better alternatives which could be implemented in the language (or possibly as AOP).
• Writing Windows Shell Extension with .NET Framework 4 (C#, VB.NET) - Part 1 - All-In-One Code Framework Team take a look at creating a Windows Shell Extension using managed code, and explore a simple sample which adds an extension to the context menu.
• Silverlight, Out-Of-Browser and Multiple Windows - Mike Taulty explores the possibility for multiple windows in a Silverlight Application, looking at communication between multiple instances of an application to simulate MDI, and looks at the further complications of Out of Browser support.
• Windows Phone 7 Developer Tips and Tricks - Tim Heuer shares a collection of tips and tricks tweeted by Jeff Wilcox on the subject of Silverlight Development on the Windows 7 Phone
• Cloud + Device: Combine the power of Windows Azure, IE 9, and Windows Phone 7 - Part 1 , Part 2 & Part 3 - The Windows Azure Technical Forum Support Team discuss the importance of the Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Phone 7 releases last week to the vision for Azure, and how they support the principle ‘The cloud wants smarter devices’
• Refactoring Step-Wise vs Wrapping and Delegating - John Sonmez takes a look at two processes for refactoring code to remove static method dependencies, discussing which is the better technique

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Software

• Announcing Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools - Somasegar announces the official release of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools allowing the creation of Silverlight and XNA based applications for this new Phone Operating System. Other posts on this subject:
  • Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Released - Scott Guthrie gives you a peek at the RTM tools, highlighting a number of related resources and blog posts
  • Announcing the Windows Phone 7 Release, WP7 Silverlight Toolkit and XNA 4.0! - Pete Brown highlights the release and shares the breaking changes made since the beta release from the release notes
  • Final Windows Phone Tools Released Plus Extra controls - Martin Beeby gives a preview of the various controls that make up the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools
• Pining for Windows Phone 7 controls? We got ya covered! [Announcing the first release of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit!] - David Anson announces the release of a new Silverlight Toolkit CodePlex project, the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit, which adds a number of great looking controls to the arsenal of controls for development on the phone devices.
  • Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 - Tim Heuer also highlights the Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 release
• XNA Game Studio 4.0 Available for Download! - The XNA Game Studio Team highlight the release of XNA Game Studio 4.0, released in tandam with the Windows Phone SDK this new version allows development of PC, XBOX and Windows Phone 7 games
• Final versions of Windows Phone Developer Tools and XNA Game Studio 4.0 now available for download - Aaron Stebner provides download links (including direct download links) to various forms of the Windows Phone 7 tools and XNA Game Studio
• Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework 1.4.6 Released - Michael S. Scherotter announces the release of the latest cut of the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework. Version 1.4.6 adds support for use on Windows Phone 7
• WebShell, new web applications framework - Hisham Elbreky announces the first release of WebShell, a web applications framework which takes a restful approach to MVP, and aims to support multiple web platforms

Information

• Building a Bing Web and Image Search App for Windows Phone 7 Using Blend and Silverlight - John Papa highlights the latest episode of Silverlight.TV where Kirupa Chinnathambi walks through the process of building a Bing Search and Images application for Windows Phone 7
• From start to finish with the final version of Visual Studio Tools for Windows Phone 7 - Michael Crump shares screenshots and his initial experiences of the RTM version of the Visual Studio support for Windows 7, running through the installation and creation of a simple application
• Dependency Injection into Controller Actions in ASP.NET MVC - Marcus Bratton talks about the use of Dependency injection in the Siege framework, looking at how dependencies are injected into MVC controller Actions, and talks about the conditional dependency injection in his post Contextual Awareness - Making your container behave intelligently
• Is is as or is as is? - Eric Lippert discusses the ‘is’ and ‘as’ operators in C#, showing both in use, and explaining how they relate.
• C#/.NET - Two Things That Only Initializers Can Easily Do… - James Michael Hare looks at Initializer support in C# for populating collections and properties of objects , looking at some specific uses of this for initalizing static members.
• Geekly ever after: Code Access Security Cheat Sheet - Bruno Marques offers a cheat sheet for Code Access Security in .NET 3.5 focusing on Declarative and Imperative permission handling.
• What is object oriented programming really all about? - Robert Pickering takes a look at what is meant by Object Oriented programming, sharing the three most important concepts, and looks at how these relate to Functional Programming
• Real World Monitoring and Tuning ASP.NET Caching - Steve Smith takes a look at monitoring the cache usage of your ASP.NET websites, looking at the relevant performance counters and how they relate to each other, and discusses some possible resolutions to caching problems,
• Download Internet Explorer 9 Product Beta Guide - Rob Margel highlights the Internet Explorer 9 Product Beta Guide, an 80+ page document discussing all the new features of the IE9 beta

Community

• NxtGenUG WP7 Launch - The NxtGenUG in Coventry will be holding a Windows Phone 7 themed evening on Monday 25th October 2010 with talks on XNA and Windows 7 Phone development
• VBUG London: Introducing Windows Phone 7 - VBUG London are holding a Windows Phone 7 event on the evening of Tuesday 12th October where Matt Lacey will be giving an introduction to development on the Windows Phone 7

Coffee (and servers)

• How I Make Coffee and Servers - Brent Ozar discusses how he makes his coffee, giving a tour of his tools of choice, and discusses how his choice of tool on any given day is similar to his choice for server hardware between physical and virtual.

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Software

• Putting sites at the center of the browsing experience, using the whole PC: IE9 Beta Available for Download - Dean Hachamovitch of the Internet Explorer 9 team announces the release of the public beta, giving a tour of the features and improvements you can find, The launch of this beta yesterday generated lots of blog posts, here are just a few of the many good ones:
  • Internet Explorer 9 Beta has Arrived! The Features that Matter to Me as a Developer - Rey Bango
  • Finally we have a Download Manager in IE!! - Rahul Johri
  • IE9, Site Specific Browsers, and adding your own Jump List Items to Pinned Tabs - Scott Hanselman
  • IE9 Beta Minor Changes List - Eric Lawrence
  • Internet Explorer 9 Beta - what’s new for developers? - Rachfcollier
  • Internet Explorer 9 Beta Features and Benchmarks - Michael Crump

Information

• Rx on the server, part 5 of n: Observable ASP.NET - Jeffrey van Gogh continues his series of posts looking at the use of the Reactive Extensions for .NET on the Server side. This part takes a look at using IObservable in your ASP.NET Applications
• MushMud.com - High Level Architecture - David W Martines takes the covers off MushMud.com, a music sharing community, and shares how the website is structured and architected using ASP.NET MVC and Domain Driven Development style of development
• Cool eBook of the Day - ‘Threading in C#’ - Greg Duncan highlights a comprehensive eBook from Joseph Albahari available in PDF and HTML format covering all the key aspects of developing multithreaded code in C#
• PSSCor2: Miscellaneous Commands - Sasha Goldshtein continunes exploring the PSSCor2 debugging extension, looking in this post at the !SaveModule, !SaveAllModules, !DumpAllExceptions, and !DumpRuntimeTypes commands
• ASP.NET MVC 3 CTP1 View Improvements - Ashic Mahtab shares a (his first) screencast looking at the changes and improvements in ASP.NET MVC3 CTP1 for working with your views, focusing on the new Razor ViewEngine
• .NET String Formatting Cheat Sheet - Dylan Beattie shares a Cheat Sheet for the multitude of String Formatting options available in .NET, based on a guide to string formatting from Steve Tibbett.
• Making DSLs in F# at DevTalk.net - Dmitri Nesteruk takes a look at building a Domain Specific Language using the F# language, building a sample based on project management.
• Reversing assignment statements with Find and Replace in VS 2010 - Darren Fieldhouse shares a useful tip which demonstrates the power of the Visual Studio Search and Replace, showing how you can easily reverse assignment statements.

Community

• Windows Phone 7 - Manchester - 7th October 2010 - DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper present a free all-day event on the Windows 7 Phone platform hosted in Manchester on the 7th October. Registrations are now open, and are filling up fast.
• Visual Studio 2010 Events & Live Meetings - Microsoft UK Developer Tools Team - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - ‘RichE’ highlights a number of Visual Studio related events, some in person (and in the UK) on Application Lifecycle management and the Ultimate SKU and a few Virtual Events looking at Testing, Team Explorer, and the Ultimate SKU.
• DevTeach videos online - free - Kate Gregory highlights the availability of the Videos from the DevTeach Conference earlier this year for free, Kate’s two sessions (on the Windows API Code Pack and Lighting up an XP Application) are joined by an impressive collection of sessions includes many well know speakers.

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Software

• IE9 Beta launch: are you excited? - Today (Wednesday) sees the launch of Internet Explorer 9 Beta, a significant improvement over previous versions in terms of performance and web standards. The Launch is being streamed live, and details can be found in the Internet Explorer team’s blog post IE9 Beta Webcast: Tune in
• dotCover 1.0 and dotTrace 4 Performance are Released! - JetBrains announce the official release of dotCover 1.0 and dotTrace 4 their code coverage and profiling tools for .NET which integrate into Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and 2010. Licences for both memory and performance profiling together are £577, with dotCover having introductory rates starting at £38 and there are time limited trial versions available. Anyone who purchased after December 2008 is also entitled
• Download details: Microsoft Lync 2010 SDK Release Candidate (RC) - Microsoft released the Release Candidate of the Microsoft Lync 2010 SDK. Lync is the new name for Office Communications Server and this SDK allows you to write code to interact with this server product

Information

• Making history explicit - Gabriel Schenker looks at introducing creating a history of entities as a domain concept using a Versioned Entity base class to provide the core of the functionality, illustrating with an example based on Cages in a Zoo.
• What is Functional Programming? Part 3, Recursion - Christopher Bennage continues his Functional Programming exploration series with a look at Recursion, looking at how Functional Programming can help make Recursion easier and less scary.
• Color Indicator for Code Changes - Track Changes in Visual Studio 2010 - Abhijit Jana highlights one of the less know IDE features, the subtle colour indicator which shows when code has been changed, and looks at the introduction of a third colour state to indicate undo’d code in Visual Studio 2010.
• Why CodeRush Templates? - Rory Becker talks about the use of templates / code generation to create code to improve developer efficiency, looking at a variety of methods for templating, ranging from the Clipboard to tools such as CodeRush.
• A Few Thoughts On IoC, An Idea For A different Type Of Container, And A Lot Of Questions - Derick Bailey muses on the use of Inversion of Control containers, some of the things that it forces us as developers to do and thinks about some possible improvements to the IOC way of working
• Getting the Property Name From a Property Expression - Mike Hadlow takes a look at getting the name and path to a property from an expression, showing how it can be achieved in a more functional style making use of Linq and yield.
• Using timer based Unit of Work and Command classes to measure repositories performance - Gunnar Peipman’s ASP.NET blog - Gunnar Peipman looks at measuring the time operations composed of multiple objects and steps take to complete, looking at the use of Command and Unit of Work patterns
• Have you seen your new look UK MSDN homepage? - ‘Rachfcollier’ highlights the newly refreshed MSDN UK Homepage, newly updated to bring it in-line with the look, feel and organisation of the main US site.
• pexforfun.com: IntelliSense, High Score List, Publishing, Dynamic Ranking, Live Feed - Nikolai Tillmann highlights an update to the PexForFun.com website which introduces a number of new features to the site. The site now has code completion in the browser, a high score list, publishing of coding duels, ranking and a live feed
• Query expression syntax: continuations - Jon Skeet looks at the Linq Query Expression continuation feature, something which is less well known amongst developers, and provides a nice way of making your code simpler and more concise
• Returning paged results from repositories using PagedResult<T> - Gunnar Peipman looks at using a PagedResult class which allows you to easily return particular pages of results from large data sets returned from repositories looking at applying it to NHibernate and Entity Framework
• Automate your DotNet configuration files - Florian Drevet looks at a technique for making it easy for developers to have custom configuration per developer / machine using NANT to make changes to the configuration as needed

Community

• VBUG Newcastle:Getting Started with jQuery - VBUG Newcastle host George Adamson on the 25th October 2010, where he will be giving an introductory talk on jQuery

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Software

• Sysinternals Suite 2010 Refreshed - All the latest versions, one 12.4MB zip.. - Greg Duncan highlights the latest update to the SysInternals Suite, the collection of all the SysInternals tools in one convenient package, freshly updated yesterday.
• Windows API Code Pack v1.1 Released! - Arik Poznanski highlights the release of the latest edition of the Windows API Code Pack v1.1. Released at the end of August, this update contains bugfixes, along with implementations of Shell Object Watcher, Preview Handler APIs and Thumbnail Handler APIs

Information

• Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy - Scott Guthrie continues his epic series looking at the new features of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4, putting web deployment under the microscope stepping through the use of the Microsoft Web Deploy, a server based solution to making it easier to deploy and publish your web applications
• Using the Accelerometer on Windows Phone 7 - Dave Edson and Greg Hogdal take a look at using the Accelerometer included in all Windows Phone 7 devices from your own code, discussing the data ranges returned from the device, the event stream data is provided by, and some techniques for working with accelerometer data.
• Interoperable HTML Parsing in IE9 - Jonathan Seitel of the Internet Explorer 9 Team discusses the role of the HTML Parser in making a good DOM, and takes a look at the improvements made in Internet Explorer 9
• Web Standards: from Working Draft to Recommendation - Adrian Bateman (also of the IE9 team) discusses the importance of Web Standards, and the process of these standards becoming actual standards, illustrating the process that the drafts must go through to be ratified.
• Just because summer is over, it doesn’t mean we still can’t play in the sand … Sandcastle that is - Greg Duncan highlights a detailed article from Michael Sorens which looks at the use of SandCastle to produce documentation from your code using the XML documentation comments, working through the process and configuration to help you produce great documentation.
• Is That the Right Version of Mscoreei.dll? - The CLR team discuss a trick they used to help reduce the number of reboots required in installing versions of the .NET Framework which results in you seeing .NET 4 DLLs in use in .NET 2 processes.
• Reducing AutoResetEvent’s Synchronization Overhead - Liran Chen takes a look at the performance of AutoResetEvent, and looks at providing an alternative implementation which performs better.
• EF Caching with Jarek Kowalski’s Provider - The ADO.NET team highlight the caching and tracing tool kit from Jarek Kowalski which plugs into the Entity Framework, and in this post they run through the use of it from obtaining the extension, to implementing it in your code.
• A Quick guideline for Microsoft Windows PowerShell Part-1,Part-2, Part-3. & Part-4 - Md. Marufuzzaman provides a useful introduction to PowerShell, starting out with a look at scripting in PowerShell, combining Powershell with VBScript and .NET functions, interacting with other programs via COM APIs, and working with .NET
• How to Unit Test a WorkflowService - Ron Jacobs continues his series looking at unit testing Windows Workflow, exploring the testing of WorkflowServices in this post.
• Encapsulation in JavaScript - ‘After2050′ shares a useful reference to encapsulation in JavaScript, illustrating namespaces, singletons, public and private methods in a simple example.
• Dependency Injection - BlackWasp shares a nice back to basics / introduction to the concepts behind Dependency Injection

Community

• UK Windows Azure Online Conference date change - now 8th October - Steve Plank announces a date change for the "Microsoft Online Cloud Conference: the TechDays team goes online" conference along with sharing the full outline of the agenda across the three virtual tracks. Registration for this free virtual event is now open.

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Software

• FiddlerCore Update - Fiddler Web Debugger - Eric Lawrence annoucnes an update to the Fiddler Core project, bring the inclusion of FiddlerCore4.dll, the .NET 4 compiled version of the Core of this very useful HTTP debugger.
• Release of Windows Server AppFabric Architecture Guide - Yasser Abdel Kader highlights the release of the Windows Server AppFabric Architecture Guide, a guide to properly architecting applications to run on AppFabric and handle enterprise level loads. This 25 page guide addresses a range of topics offering best practice advice

Information

• Have you met arguments.callee? - Sergio Pereira takes a look at a little know JavaScript feature which allows you to get a reference to an anonymous functions from within that function, making recursive anonymous functions possible.
• Windows Azure Application Patterns - J.D. Meier shares 11 common patterns for web based applications running on Windows Azure in the form of component level diagrams illustrating the relationships between components.
• The Architecture of Full Hardware Acceleration of All Web Page Content - Ted Johnson of the Internet Explorer 9 team discusses the architecture which has enabled full hardware accelleration of web pages in Internet Explorer 9.
• Adventures in Repetitive Code & More Boilerplate Code Removal - Mike Hadlow shares a couple of nice tips for removing some of the more repeatitive bits of code taht we as developers write, making more sucinct clearer code using Lambdas and extension methods to achieve this
• Chained null checks and the Maybe monad - Dmitri Nesteruk looks at addressing the ‘repeated null check’ problem in code using extension methods and generics to implement maybe monadic functionality in this CodeProject article
• Find out how long your method runs - Gunnar Peipman continues looking at the techniques for measuring the time your code takes to run, looking in this post at a helper class for measuring method calls.
• MVVM so easy a n00b can do it (Silverlight4) - Michael Crump shares a worked sample for introducing the MVVM style of development in Silverlight.
• The Magical Input Queue Of T (aka InputQueue<T>) - Clemens Vasters explores a useful class which is a part of the WCF Samples, the InputQueue<T> which is a code version of an internal framework class which is actually very useful when working with WCF.
• Maximizing Productivity with the Visual Studio 2010 Silverlight Designer - Dan Wahlin looks at a number of features of the Silverlight visual designer included in Visual Studio 2010 which help improve developer productivity, exploring improvements to grids, data binding and styles,
• MVC Turbine and MVC3 - Javier G. Lozano talks about the future of ASP.NET MVC in the form of Version 3, and how the features included in this impacts his ASP.NET MVC Turbine project

Community

• 2010 Poll: Which Isolation Framework do you use in .NET? - Roy Osherove issues his yearly poll about the Mocking / Isolation frameworks people are activly useing in their projects. If you have a spare 30 seconds go fill out the poll.

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Software

• Seeing Code Contracts in Intellisense NOW! - Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux highlights a great little Visual Studio Extension which brings the Code Contracts details of the code you are consuming into the Intellisense at consume time.
• TFS Power Tools September 2010 - It is fresh off the press and solves one of our Rangers HOL headaches - Willy-Peter Schaub highlights the release of the September 2010 release of the TFS Power Tools. The main changes for this release are the ability to take backups of your TFS setup on a scheduled basis, improvements to working with version controlled files and folder in Team Explorer, and a command line tool for working with version control, team projects and work items.

Information

• Great News for MonoTouch Users - Miguel de Icaza discusses Apple’s change of heart about the technologies thy officially allow you to build iPhone and iPad applications in, and how that is a great result for MonoTouch, the Mono way of writing applications in C# / .NET and having it run on the Apple hardware.
• What is Functional Programming? Part 2, Currying - Christopher Bennage continues his series of posts on Functional Programming with a look at the concept of currying, addressing the theory and looking at some implementation in F#
• Common mistakes made when measuring the speed of code - Gunnar Peipman discusses some of the common things that developers get wrong when measuring the performance of code, from imprecise timing measurements, measuring too much code, to testing in debug mode. Gunnar then takes a look at an Experiment: List<T> internals and performance when adding new elements - providing an application of these theories and revealing some interesting numbers about the performance of List<T> under a variety of use cases.
• Old school tree display - Eric Lippert outlines a coding challenge to create an old fashioned ASCII Art style tree view, giving the structure of a tree, and a method signature and leaving you to have a go before reading his own answer.
• Optimizing Silverlight Applications for Windows Phone 7 - Rohan Thakkar takes a detailed look at making your Silverlight applications run as optimally as possible on the Windows Phone 7, looking at graphics, images, XAML and threading
• C#/.NET Five Final Little Wonders That Make Code Better (3 of 3) - James Michael Hare rounds off his series of posts on 5 different things that can make your code better with a look at implicit typing, LINQ Extension Methods, general Extension Methods, the System.IO Path methods and Delegates.
• Unit Testing Workflows - Testing Activities with Bookmarks - Ron Jacobs continues looking at the WorkflowTestHelper exploring how it allows you to test activities which use bookmarks to obtain data for the activity.
• Simple REST API Versioning Using MEF and MVC - Nick Berardi takes a look at using MEF to allow his ASP.NET MVC REST API to support two versions of the API concurrently
• Design-Time Friendly ViewModels with MEF - Jeremy Likness looks at how MEF can provide a way of having a simple design time View Model with the full featured ViewModel used at runtime, illustrating this by taking an existing application, refactoring to MVVM and adding design time viewmodels through MEF.
• Silverlight Globalization Namespace Comparison Updated For Silverlight 4 - Guy Smith-Ferrier shares an updated comparison of the Silverlight (now version 4) System.Globalization classes to those in the full .NET Framework
• The "Windows Sysinternals Primer: Process Explorer, Process Monitor, and More" from TechEd 2010 North America - Greg Duncan highlights a presentation from TechEd 2010 about the SysInternals tools, looking in detail at how they can be used to investigate a number of different scenarios, giving you a view of the range and use of the tools.

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Software

• Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework New Samples Updated on 2010-09-06 - The All-In-One Code Framework Team give the lowdown on their September Release giving an overview of the new samples for Shell Extensions in managed coded, samples for Windows Azure, Samples for change tracking entities without proxies, and programmatic detection of the Bitness of a process

Information

• Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework - Scott Guthrie gives a detailed introduction to the first preview release of the Microsoft Web Farm Framework which provides installation, configuration and synchronisation of ASP.NET applications between multiple servers and load balanced environments running IIS7.
• CQRS Info - Following on from his post on the meaning of CQRS and the difficulty of finding good information, Greg Young has set up a new site called CQRSInfo.com which houses video and documents from his training sessions and links to other good CQRS content.
• Getting Started with Node.js on Windows - Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at JavaScript on the server side exploring getting up and running with Node.js on Windows.
• Fun with Rx - Sacha Barber takes a look at the Reactive Extensions for .NET 4 sharing a number of demos exploring the use of Rx for drawing, handling form events, making async web service calls and looks at exporting IObservables using the Managed Extensibility Framework.
• Using the Visitor Pattern with Domain Entities - Mike Hadlow shares an implementation of the Visitor Pattern which works with domain entities to gather information from all the entities in a hierarchy, answering a real world business requirement.
• Death to Windows Services…Long Live AppFabric! - Brian Ritchie takes a look at the support in AppFabric for hosting long running processes / services witihin IIS, looking at the benefits of doing so and stepping through a simple implementation.
• A better way for service threads - Jeff Krebsbach discusses a common ’sleep work’ pattern used in Windows services, discussing the problems with such an implementation and showing an alternative implementation which behaves better.
• Data Binding with DbContext - Rowan Miller looks to get community feedback on the Entity Framework Teams designs for increasing the number of usage scenarios supported for developers working with DbContext and DbSet, giving us a preview of some of the proposed functionality and the ability to feed back into their design process.
• Debugging Common Canvas Issues - Elizabeth Ford and Jatinder Mann of the Internet Explorer Team share a number of things you should check to ensure that your Canvas based code will operate optimally in Internet Explorer 9
• Experimenting with enterprise level bus messaging - Sacha Barber takes a detailed look at implementing an Enterprise Service Bus application sample using NServiceBus. Lots of detail in the article, and the full code for the sample application is provided
• Dynamic objects and the Facebook C# SDK - Nathan Totten discusses how the Dynamic features of C#4 have helped make their latest open source ‘C# Facebook SDK’ more resilient to change and easier to consume.

Community

• Visual Studio 2010 ALM Events (UK) - Mike Taulty highlights a number of Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management events being held throughout the UK (29th Sept in Reading, 5th October in London, 19th October in Birmingham and 9th Nov in Edinburgh). These events are free to attend, however places are limited and registration is required

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