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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