The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing: Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Support RTW - Jason Zander highlights the RTW release of Visual Basic support for building Windows Phone 7 Silverlight application, and in this post Jason links to the downloads and walks through the creation of a simple Tip Calculator application.
• VB Goes Mobile: Announcing "Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools - RTW" - Lisa Feigenbaum and the VB.Net team announce the release of the Windows Phone 7 tooling for VB, linking to the various announcements from across Microsoft and to the downloads for English, Spanish, French, German and Italian localisations.
• Azure SDK 1.3 and Visual Studio Tool Released! - ‘tonyguid’ highlights the release of the Windows Azure SDK 1.3 and updated tooling for Visual Studio which adds support for hosting of custom VHD images, full IIS support in WebRoles, Remote desktop access, role configuration and deployment support, along with a lot more.
• MefContrib 1.0.0.0 sees the light of day! - Andreas Håkansson highlights the 1.0 release of MefContrib, a community project to add functionality to the Managed Extensibility Framework. The library adds a number of new catalog types, along with integration with Unity and a custom export provider which allows you to take control of instance creation.
• BCL Extensions Source Code released on CodePlex - Frans Bouma highlights the release of the BCL Extensions and Algorithmia libraries from Solutions Design (the creators of LLBLGen) as open source on Codeplex. The BCL extensions are a suite of .NET 3.5 extension methods which add a variety of functionality to core BCL types. Algorithmia will be released later in the week and is a collection of algorithm and data structure implementations.

Information

• UKSnow Silverlight - An Rx powered Twitter, Bing Maps mashup - I, like many others in the UK, woke to a covering of snow this morning, and Colin Eberhardt here highlights his Silverlight port of the #UKSnow application which uses Silverlight, Bing Maps, the Reactive Extensions and Twitter to create a useful (and timely) mashup.
• Bit twiddling: What does warning CS0675 mean? - Eric Lippert takes a look at bitwise operations between signed and unsigned numbers and the meaning of the compiler warning CS0675
• Beginning F#: Positive Discrimination - Ian Voyce discusses Discriminated Unions in F#, attempting to demystify their use for outsiders to to functional programming, looking at how discriminated unions can be applied to standard Object Oriented problems.
• Part 2 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers. - Michael Crump continues his Silverlight Tricks and Tips series of posts with five more tips covering Out of Browser Notification Windows, Isolated Storage, StringFormat to format data in XAML, changing start up page, and the GridSplitter control.
• Control name prefixes are the work of the devil and other religious debates - Troy Hunt discusses the issue of naming UI controls with a name prefix (ala txtMyTextBox), looking at the pros and cons of doing so, and the various arguments from each side of the debate.
• Index Selection and the Query Optimizer - Benjamin Nevarez shares a extract from his forthcoming "Inside the SQL Server Query Optimizer" book, looking at the way the SQL Server query optimiser decides which indexes to use to boost query performance.
• JSMentors.com - The Mailing List to Learn JavaScript in a Professional and Courteous Environment - Rey Bango highlights the launch of JsMentors, a new mailing list for developers to discuss JavaScript as a language with other knowledgeable developers

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Software

• Introducing Nancy, a lightweight web framework inspired by Sinatra - Andreas Håkansson announces his new Open Source project, a web framework inspired by the Sinatra framework from the Ruby world. This project brings that style of web programming to the .NET world, which aims to operate well on both IIS/.NET and Mono/FastCGI

Information

• Quick introduction to Pex - Gunnar Peipman gives a brief overview of the functionality available to MSDN and academic users in the Pex Library/tooling, showing how it can analyse code to discover problematic value combinations and uncover errors.
• Time-travel with .NET or DateTime, DateTimeOffset and the lost DST hour - Greg of the BCL Team discusses the complications of the Daylight Savings Time clock change, discussing some of the complications and bugs that this time change can introduce into our applications, along with sharing some recommendations for handling the clock change well.
• Revisiting Normalization and De-normalization - Kenneth Downs discusses the concepts and reasons for using Normalisation and De-normalisation of your database schema arguing from a database perspective of the importance of good normalisation.
• RavenDB - Image Gallery Project (XVIII) - Adding Edit Functionality (II) - Rob Ashton continues his series looking at building a real world Image Library application using ASP.NET MVC and the RavenDB Document Database
• Compile your asp.net MVC Razor views into a separate dll - Chris van de Steeg walks through the process of building C# code for Razor view files allowing them to be compiled into a DLL making it possible to ship views as you would compiled code.
• Getting The Route Name For A Route - Phil Haack discusses the use of the name of a route and how its not exposed as standard, along with showing how you can obtain (and modify) the name of a route using a set of Extension Methods.
• All-In-One Code Framework Code Sample Index - The All-In-One Code Framework Team have been publishing indexes of the many samples which make up the All-in-one Code Framework, covering a huge range of technologies including Windows Shell, COM, Visual Studio Extensibility, WPF, IIS, Azure, and much much more.
• Developing applications for Windows Phone 7 - Intro - Rafal Kwiek kicks off a new series of posts on building applications on the Windows Phone 7 platform, looking at both Silverlight and XNA applications. The discussion of the Download and installof the tools and the first screencast looking at writing a Hello World application are already online
• A Brief Introduction to F# - Mike Ormond shares a guest article from Mark Bloodworth giving an introduction to the F# programming language giving a simple introduction to doing things in this functional language.
• Finding Controls in a Master Page with jQuery - Steve Wellens discusses a variety of techniques for locating and working with controls in master page templates from client side code using jQuery.

Community

• VIDEO: Mark Rendle’s Talk at the inaugural Cloud Evening - ‘Planky’ highlights the availability of the video recording from the first Cloud Evening User group event, featuring Mark Rendle discussing the new features of Windows Azure announced at PDC.
• BDD with “TickSpec“ talk - Phillip Trelford highlights the availability of the video recording of his session on TickSpec, and Tomas Petricek’s on Concurrency with Agents from the F#unctional Londoners event last week.
• PostSharp Training Day, London - Gael Fraiteur highlights the availability of free places on a training day focusing on Aspect Oriented Programming with PostSharp - an all day event to be held on Thursday 2nd December in London.

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Software

• Demo of Image Optimizer - Mads Kristensen has released his image optimizer Visual Studio 2010 Extension available now on the Visual Studio Gallery (and source available on CodePlex), and has recorded a video screencast showing the extension in operation.

Information

• NHibernate and Mapping Aggregates - Ian Nelson discusses the use of Formulas in NHibernate Mappings to retrieve counts of child entities in collections without loading the full collection, and looking at alternatives to this approach.
• Adding a design mode to your MVC app - Derek Fowler shares a technique for having a design mode in your ASP.NET MVC Application using ‘design mode’ controllers which return fake data, making it possible to style and view Views that make up parts of complex processes (like checkouts) without having to got through the application processes.
• Difference between int.Parse and Convert.ToInt32: - Jalpesh Vadgama looks at two different ways of converting a value to an int, highlighting the subtle difference between the two techniques
• Gold Nugets - Tyler Brinks has created a site which allows you to rate and comment on the publicly available NuGet packages. the site consumes the NuGet OData feed so should always be up to date, and provides a useful resource for checking out what others think of a particular package.
• How do you prefer getting bundles of technologies? - ‘Tatworth’ highlights a poll from Scott Hanselman enquiring about how developers prefer to get technologies bundled together. Take a moment to give you opinion.
• How to consume a web service from within SQL Server using SQL CLR - ‘maspeng’ looks at how the CLR support in SQL Server enables consuming external web services from within SQL Server. I’m not sure how much of a good practice this is, but its certainly interesting.
• All-In-One COM Code Samples - The All-In-One Code Framework Team highlight the samples from within the All-In-One Code Framework which relate to COM

Community

• Developer Day Scotland 2011 - Date Announced - Scottish Developers announce the plans for Developer Developer Developer Scotland 2011 which will follow the familiar Developer Developer Developer Comminuty Conference format and will be a free Saturday event held at Glasgow Caledonian University on 7th May 2011. I’ve really enjoyed this event in the past am looking forward to visiting Glasgow for the event next year.
• Oredev Talk - Greg Young highlights the availabiliy of video from his Øredev session on ‘Things to Make You a Better Object Oriented Programmer’, joining the ~25 other videos from this year’s conference currently on the Øredev channel on Vimeo
• Tech-Ed 2010 - Download the presentation videos free - Ray Fleming highlights the availability of the videos from the TechEd Europe 2010 conference. A quick look at the site suggests that there are ~300 videos from this year’s conference now available.

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Happy Thanksgiving to all those celebrating today!

Software

• StreamInsight LINQPad Driver - The StreamInsight team highlight the support in LinqPad for StreamInsight giving a nice lightweight environment for trying out StreamInsight queries
• FREE 30-day Azure developer accounts! Hurry! - Brian Loesgen highlights the (US Only sadly) free 30 day trial Windows Azure Accounts, obtainable without having to supply any payment information, and giving you access to multiple Azure instances, storage, 2 SQL Azure databases, AppFabric transactions, and 3GB of in and out data transfer.
• WebFormContrib - Web Forms more like ASP.NET MVC - Deran Schilling, inspired by MvcContrib, has put together a library which helps make ASP.NET WebForms development a little more like MVC. Full source and binary distributions are available.

Information

• Is NoSQL for me? I’m just a small fish - Hadi Hariri talks about the applicability of NoSql data stores when you are ‘a small fish’, discussing the benefits that they bring to solving development and post development problems.
• What is a code review and why is it important? - Jeffrey Palermo and Glenn Burnside discuss the content and importance of Code Reviews in your development process, and discussing their importance in reviewing if the application is staying within the original vision in ongoing projects.
• Streaming over HTTP with WCF - Glen Block discusses sending large files over WCF via HTTP, pulling together the whole story looking at building a service using streaming, and looking at how this can be combined with ASP.NET MVC 3 RC
• Moq Sequences Revisited - Phil Haack revisits the topic of mocking successive calls to a method and having it return a sequence of objects, sharing an improved extension method which supports throwing of exceptions.
• Windows 7 - tasks vs thumbnail buttons - Kate Gregory discusses the uses for the Windows 7 Tasks and thumbnail buttons which appear off the menu for task bar buttons
• Implementing Undo-Redo with Aspects - Gael Fraiteur takes a look at using Aspect Oriented Programming techniques using PostSharp to implement Undo / Redo functionality on methods using an attribute.
• Enhanced String Handling - Avi Farah explores parsing and evaluating strings which contain replacement expressions which are evaluated at runtime and included in the strings - a bit like String.Format on steroids.

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Software

• Updates for Internet Explorer 9 Beta - The Internet Explorer 9 Team announces updates to the Internet Explorer 9 Beta which addresses stability of the beta in general. This update will be distributed via the standard Windows Update process.
• David Reveman lands GPU acceleration for Moonlight - Miguel de Icaza highlights the completion of the work to add GPU acceleration to the Moonlight, the Mono port of Silverlight. David Reveman has been busy working on bringing hardware acceleration to 3D transforms, surface rendering and pixel shaders, and his changes are now available in the main source tree and daily builds.

Information

• Asynchrony in C# 5, Part Eight: More Exceptions - Eric Lippert continues his series looking at the C#5 Async CTP, continuing his exploration of how exceptions work, discussing 4 types of exception, exogenous, vexing, boneheaded and fatal exceptions.
• Back to Basics: Understanding IoC - John Sonmez continues his back to basics look at Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection / Inversion, and in this part focuses in the Inversion Of Control side with a look at Interface Inversion.
• BIN Deploying ASP.NET MVC 3 with Razor to a Windows Server without MVC installed - Scott Hanselman discusses Bin deployment of ASP.NET MVC 3, looking at what this is, the options for doing it, and shares a neat (and unsupported) all in solution to make it easier to do this.
• Multi-lingual web applications using ASP.Net 4 - K. G. Sreeju Nair discusses the creation of webpages which are localised into English and Arabic, showing the various ASP.NET features that make this easier including local and global resources, and automatic right to left support.
• RavenDB - The Image Gallery Project (XVI) - Adding Edit Functionality (I) - Rob Ashton resumes his series on building an Image Gallery application using ASP.NET MVC and backending the system on RavenDB. This part looks at creating a rich editing experience for the records in the system.
• Working with GIF images in Windows Phone - Jaime Rodriguez discusses the decoding of GIF images on the Windows Phone 7 platform where there is no native support for this format, discussing the use of two of the most popular libraries comparing the results.
• Debugging SQL Queries, Functions, & Stored Procedures with SQL Management Studio’s Integrated Debugger - Doug Rathbone reminds us all that debugging can be performed in the database too, allowing you to step through stored procedures from within Management Studio.
• Tic-tac-toe - Phillip Trelford highlights the Visual Studio 2010 Support for creating Silverlight applications in F#, and shares a simple sample application with a suite of BDD tests in TickSpec, giving a taste of what you can learn at the F#unctional Londoners event tomorrow.
• But who’s going to set up their own email server? - Raymond Chen shares another amusing Microsoft story from the past, providing a useful reminder about trusting information from external sources.

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Software

• MonoDevelop 2.4.1 is out - Miguel de Icaza highlights the latest release of MonoDevelop the Mono Project’s IDE for .NET Development across multiple platforms. This release brings support for .NET 4 projects, improved OS integration with Mac OSX and Windows along with improvements to XBuild project support.
• 20 Interesting WPF Projects on CodePlex (Some for Silverlight too) - Pete Brown highlights 20 of the best WPF (and Silverlight) projects hosted on CodePlex, breaking them down into various categories (Application Frameworks, Application Templates and Window Management, Controls and Toolkits, UX, Themes and Tools) and giving summaries and an indication of their activity.

Information

• Making your own ViewEngine with Markdown - Ben (@BuildStarted) explores the implementation of a custom ASP.NET MVC View Engine, walking through his implementation of a view engine based on the MarkDown language
• You’ve got questions; I’ve got dumb looks [PDC10's Channel 9 Live Windows Phone 7 Q&A session available online and offline] - David Anson highlights the availability of the Windows Phone 7 Question and Answer session from PDC 2010 featuring an expert panel of Dan Fernandez, Jeff Wilcox, Peter Torr and David himself.
• Asynchronous C# and F# (III.): How does it work? - Tomas Petricek continues his series comparing the Async implementation in the C#5 CTP and F# taking a look at the implementation under the hood in the compiler.
• The Dark Art of Logging - Yohan Liyanage discusses the importance of Logging in your applications, and talks about when and what to log. The context for this article is Java, although the techniques (and logging libraries are very similar across all platforms.
• Listing common SQL Code Smells. - Phil Factor gathers together a list of common Code Smells in SQL based code, things which you should avoid, and should set warning bells ringing when reviewing code.
• jQuery Selectors (Attributes and more filters) - Bipin Joshi looks at the various attribute selectors available in jQuery, showing some of them in use, and looks at the use of filters to further control the selection.
• Part 1 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers. - Michael Crump kicks off a new series of posts sharing short tips for Silverlight Development. This first post contains 5 tips covering frame rates, isolated storage, line breaks in text boxes, embedded fonts, and handling network connectivity.
• A Feature-driven Comparison of Entity Framework and NHibernate-2nd Level Caching - Dino Esposito continues his series exploring the differences and similarities between Entity Framework and NHibernate, turning attention to second level caching in this part.

Community

• DDD Windows Phone 7 Event Videos - Mike Ormond highlights the first batch of videos from the Windows Phone 7 day event held in Manchester last month, providing access to the content if you missed the event. Sessions currently available include the event introduction, getting started with the tools, and a session on creating an application using Cortexica’s visual search API. The rest of the sessions will be released shortly.
• Dynamic Alchemy: Dynamic c# - The Hereford branch of the NxtGenUG welcome Mark Rendle and his talk on Dynanic programming in C#4 to their January meeting to be held on Monday 10th January 2011 kicking off at 7pm.
• Concurrent programming with F# agents in London - Tomorrow (Wednesday 24th) evening sees the next meeting of F#unctional Londoners, where Phil Trelford will be delivering a session on Behaviour Driven Development with TickSpec, and Tomas Petricek will talk about Writing concurrent applications using agents. The event is hosted at Skills Matter, and starts at 7pm.

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Software

• OpenWithTest 0.4 Released - Matthew Manela announces the release of v0.4 of his Visual Studio 2010 extension which provides a way of opening both your test and implementation code files in the development environment
• FluentPath 1.0 - Bertrand Le Roy announces the 1.0 release of FluentPath, a fluent interface over the System.IO namespace, available over NuGet and also as a project on CodePlex.

Information

• Exploring Reactive Extensions - IObservable and IObserver - Alex Ullrich gives an introduction to the use of the IObservable and IObserver interfaces which make up the Reactive Extenions, with full source in VS2008 format for his sample.
• Pedant Corner: Clarifying IoC, DIP and DI - Mike Hadlow follows up from his previous post on Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection and the Dependency Inversion Principle looking at the meanings of these terms.
• Asynchrony in C# 5, Part Seven: Exceptions - Eric Lippert takes a trip into the weird and wonderful world of exception handling in the new Async CTP of C#5
• NuGet Package Transformations - Phil Haack discusses the two types of transformation (Config and Source) available for use in your NuGet packages which allows the package to make changes to files on installation, illustrating with an example from the ELMAH package
• Named Routes To The Rescue - Phil Haack discusses how giving all your ASP.NET routes names and using those names when generating URLs can make life much easier for you and how it allows you to work around some of the complications of routing with WebForms.
• Creating Twitpic client using ASP.NET and OData - Gunnar Peipman takes a look at consuming OData feeds with a look at the TwitPic OData feed and building a simple ASP.NET application to view the data.
• Reducing Code by Using jQuery Templates - Dan Wahlin takes a look at the recently released jQuery Templating functionality developed by the (ASP.NET?) team at Microsoft, showing it in use and discussing the use of the key template tags.
• Progress reporting in C# 5 async - Nicholas Butler looks at how you can return status of how the task is progressing out of routines running using the C#5 CTP Async functionality in this CodeProject article.
• Aimee.NET - Refactoring Lucene.NET: Setting up the Project - Matthew Dennis shares the progress on setting up the Aimee.NET library a refactoring of the Lucene.NET, discussing the background to the project, the structure of the project files and the tests.

Community

• Upcoming Web Camps - Scott Guthrie highlights the Web Camp series of one and two events occurring all around the world covering ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Web Matrix, OData, and much more.

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Software

• Lync Server 2010 Developer Training Kit Available Now! - With the launch of the Lync Communications Platform this week, the team also released the SDK for Lync 2010 which allows you to write software which interacts wit the various components of Lync
• F# source code structural colorizer available - Brian McNamara releases his F# Depth Colorizer plugin which brings highlighting of the nesting depth of F# code to the Visual Studio IDE

Information

• The first Commandment: Thou shalt not reference the IoC container! - Mike Hadlow talks about one of the key concepts in the use of Inversion of Control Containers in your code, the principle that you don’t reference the container in your own code. Interesting discussion in the comments of this one.
• Going through presentation hell - make sure you check your existing apps when you install ASP MVC 3! - John V. Petersen highlights a gotcha which can catch you out when you install ASP.NET MVC 3 and then work on an ASP.NET MVC 2 project.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: DateTime is Packed with Goodies - James Michael Hare continues his ‘Little Wonders’ series with a look at some of the nice features of the DateTime class looking at the construction of date time instances, operations on date times, and formatting of date times.
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Part 6d - A "Billy Hollis" Hybrid Shell - Rob Eisenberg continues his tutorial series of posts on his Caliburn Micro framework for building WPF / Silverlight / WP7 applications. In this post Rob looks at creating a shell for applications based on a sample application from Billy Holllis.
• A curious guide to browsers and the web - The Google Chrome Team celebrate the 20th anniversary of the concept of the World Wide Web with an beautifully illustrated guide to the technologies involved.
• HTML5 - Netscape/IE 3 all over again? - Gojko Adzic discusses his concerns that the enhanced meaning of the term HTML5 and the APIs that are springing up from the different browser might result in a similar problem to that of the mid 90′d Netscape vs IE incompatibilities.
• Caching of, in, and around your Silverlight application (part 1) - Kevin Dockx kicks off a series looking at the various different cachings that can occur in the execution of your Silverlight application, either through the way the plugin works, or the way your application is written. This first post discusses the caching of the actual application XAP and Assemblies
• Windows Phone 7 Development for Absolute Beginners - Mike Ormond highlights a new series of Windows Phone 7 resources from the Channel9 team which form a series on Windows Phone 7 Development for Absolute Beginners.

Community

• F#unctional Londoners Meetup Group, next Wednesday, 24th Nov - Don Syme highlights the next F#unctional Londoners Functional Programming User group event to be held on the eveing of Wednesday 24th November. This event sees Phil Trelford presenting on TickSpec a BDD framework for C# and F#, and Tomas Petricek on concurrent applications using agents in F#.
• Free Webinar: Be a legacy code unit test ninja with Typemock Isolator - Roy Osherove highlights a free Webinar to be held on Tuesday 23rd November where he will be working through using TypeMock Isolator to write some tests for some horrible an seemingly un-testable code.
• FREE technical update event on Windows Azure, SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Phone 7 and more on the 25th Nov - Eric Nelson highlights the free technical event being run by the UK ISV Team taking place on the afternoon of the 25th November, where there will be technology drill-downs on Windows Phone 7, Azure and SQL Server 2008 R2.

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