The Morning Brew

Software

• HTML5, and Real World Site Performance: Seventh IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers - The Internet Explorer Team announce the availability of their 7th preview release of Internet Explorer 9. This release brings performance improvements to the JavaScript engine, and this post discusses the improvements in performance and the effect it has had on the benchmarks.
• Extended WPF Toolkit: New DateTimeUpDown control - Brian Lagunas highlights the new DateTimeUpDown control that makes up part of the Extended WPF Toolkit, an opensource community controls project building controls for use in WPF applications.

Information

• Windows Forms Developers: Tell me about your applications - Pete Brown is looking into easing the transition from WinForms to WPF and Silverlight for Developers and their applications, and to that end is looking for your input to help get a picture of the types of applications still being created and maintained in WinForms.
• Thumbnail Previews in the IDE Navigator - Zain Naboulsi shares a registry change which will bring the previews of files in the ctrl+tab navigation window back to Visual Studio 2010. This feature was disabled in the latest IDE version, but can be easily re-enabled.
• Three T4 Cheat sheets (General Overview, @Template Details and Examples) - Greg Duncan highlights 3 Cheat Sheets covering aspects of T4 Templates from Robery MacLean. The cheat sheets are provided in PDF format and cover the key concepts in T4 , the @template directive and a set of examples.
• XDT (web.config) Transforms in non-web projects - Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi looks at using the XDT Web.Config transformations in other project types via the MSBuild task for performing the transform illustrating with an example of using them in a WPF application.
• WCF How To - Configuration Based Activation - Ron Jacobs talks about the support in WCF and WF in .NET 4 for having service endpoints which do not require .svc files on the file system.
• ScriptHelper - For MVC and WebForms projects - ‘Glav’ shares a helper library which makes managing the various dependencies of JavaScript libraries and Plugins (for instance the jQuery Validation plugin) and provides a simple way of adding these dependencies to a page in one method call.
• No More Magic Strings! Presenting: @string.of - Arik Poznanski shares a useful helper method which helps you to eliminate ‘magic’ strings from your code when you are actually refering to something which has a well defined name in your code.
• Authorization With RoleManager For Claims Aware (WIF) ASP.NET Web Applications - Alik Levin walks through the creation of a basic ASP.NET application which uses the RoleManager for authentication providing Claims Aware Authentication using the Windows Identity Foundation

Community

• IE9 Chakra JavaScript Team Hosting a Q&A Session Tomorrow - Rey Bango highlights an open Q&A session via Twitter with the Internet Explorer JavaScript Team happening today (18th Nov) between 9-11am PST
• Linked .NET Users Group Hosting ScottGu this Friday (19/11) - Mike Taulty reminds us of the Linked In .NET User Group’s unplugged session with Scott Guthrie, where Scott answers questions from the audience on all things Developer at Microsoft.

No Comments »

Software

• Update: Process Explorer v14 - The Sysinternals team announce a new major update to the Process Explorer tool. This new version introduces disk and network monitoring, further memory and CPU statistics and much more.
• Sync Framework 4.0 October 2010 CTP Refreshed on 11/16 - Sreedhar Pelluru of the Sync Framework Team highlights the release of a CTP refresh whcih brings two new features to the framework, a wizard UI for working with SyncSvcUtil and a sample application for the iPhone showing how to build offline applications on that platform.
• SharpVectors - SVG# Reloaded: An Introduction - Paul Selormey discusses his SharpVectorGraphics (AKA SVG#) library which is a project on CodePlex which aims to provide libraries for working with SVG on Windows and WPF.

Information

• Updates to the Microsoft CDN - Scott Hunter gives an update on the status of the Microsoft CDN which now hosts jQuery 1.4.3 and 1.4.4 along with the VSDocs for Visual Studio Intellisense, along with announcing a new (non Microsoft.com) additional domain for accessing the CDN.
• Essential JavaScript And jQuery Design Patterns - A Free New Book - Addy Osmani has released a Free e-book on JavaScript and jQuery Design Patterns, available to read online or to download (in a download which includes design pattern quick reference sheets from Jason MacDonald and a copy of the Dzone Reference Card for Design Patterns.
• jQuery Selectors (Basic and Basic Filters) - Bipin Joshi takes a look at the wealth of features provided in jQuery to allow you to select elements in the HTML page, looking at the use of the 8 major groups of selectors.
• Supercomputing 2010 - Somasegar shares some of the news from Microsoft from the SuperComputing 2010 conference, that Azure can now be used to supplement the computing power of your on-site HPC Server instances.
• Top 7 Coding Standards & Guideline Documents For C#/.NET Developers - Anoop Madhusudanan highlights 7 freely available Coding Standards documents and resources from sources outside and inside Microsoft.
• Basic to Basics: What is Dependency Inversion? Is it IoC? Part 2 - John Sonmez continues his Back to Basics look at Dependency Inversion discussing how the principles can be applied to your code, and talks about Inversion of Control as a specific technique for helping to implement Dependency Inversion.
• How to make sharing code between .NET and Silverlight (a little) less painful - Krzysztof Kozmic finds a very good use for the conditional attribue support in the BCL to provide a means for sharing code between .NET and Silverlight when the Serializable attribute needs to be used.
• Using ASP.net Output Caching with WCF Data Services - Peter Qian takes a look at the use of ASP.NET output caching when working with WCF Data Services, showing how cache dependencies and cache variation may be used.
• A one-stop-dev-shop for WP7 Dev, the "Windows Phone 7 Development Best Practices" wiki - Greg Duncan highlights the Windows Phone 7 Development Best Practices Wiki, a nice collection of the general consensus for best practices on the Windows Phone covering all aspects of development for the WP7 device.

1 Comment »

Software

• Feature Pack 2 is Available! - Brian Harry announces the release of the second Feature Pack for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Premium and Test editions. Feature Pack 2 includes all the goodness from Feature Pack 1 along with support for testing Silverlight applications, recording tests in Firefox, and an editor for Coded UI tests.
• Visual Studio 2010 Feature Pack 2 - Videos - Mathew Aniyan highlights videos of the new Feature Pack 2 features
• Castle Windsor/Core 2.5.2 - Krzysztof Kozmic announces the second bugfix release of Castle Windsor and Castle Core, this release addresses reported issues, along with upgrading to NLog 2 and includes a logging facility for Silverlight
• F# in MonoDevelop and cross-platform web sites & screencasts - Tomáš Petříček announces the first beta release of his F# binding for MonoDevelop which brings first class support for the F# language to the MonoDevelop IDE providing Intellisense autocompletion and the F# interactive tool window. Tomáš also shares two screencasts to help you get up and running with F# on Mono under Linux.

Information

• Back to (Parallel) Basics: Don’t Block Your Threads, Make Async I/O Work For You - Scott Hanselman takes a back to basics look at multi-threading with the Async CTP and the Task Parallel Library, building on an example posted by Steve Smith.
• Exploring resources, a resource programming model, and code-based configuration - Glenn Block shares an early prototype of a Resource programming model which he presented at Oredev, along with discussing the background of resource based programming
• Finalization Uncovered - Maoni shares some background on what actually happens as a part of the Finalisation Process within the CLR, including discussing the output of the windbg !finalizequeue.
• Http Processors in the WCF Web Programming Model - Pablo M. Cibraro takes a look at the newly introduced Http Processor pipeline in the WCF Web Programming Model showing where the processors operate in the request response process and discussing their use.
• The Future of F#: Type Providers - Rob Pickering reflects on Don Syme’s talk at PDC on F# Type Providers discussing their use and speculating on the future direction of the language.
• Migrating to FAKE - Mauricio Scheffer discusses his reasons for porting the 250 line MSBuild script for the SolrNet project to the FAKE build tool
• A less abrupt progress bar for Windows Phone developers - Jeff Wilcox shares another replacement Windows Phone 7 Control, this time replacing the built in progress bar with one which provides a nice finish by allowing the animation to complete smoothly before disappearing. Source and sample application are available.

No Comments »

Software

• jQuery 1.4.4 Released - The jQuery Team announce the release of jQuery 1.4.4. This release addresses a number of community reported issues, along with a new method ‘fadeToggle’. The team are now turning their attention to planning jQuery 1.5
• Prism 4.0 For Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0, WPF & Silverlight 4 - Karl Shifflett announces the release of Prism 4.0 , available for Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0, WPF, Silverlight 4 & Windows Phone 7. The major feature is the support for Windows Phone 7, and this is joined by documentation in the form of sample applications, Quick Start Guides, and Hands on labs.
• Introducing Power Assert .NET - Rob Fonseca-Ensor highlights his latest Open Source Project. Power Assert .NET is a port of the Groovy PowerAssert which gives a complete output of an expression tree when assertation fails.
• MVVM Technical Description - Karl Shifflett shares an excerpt from his In the Box – MVVM Training, available through the Visual Studio Gallery. In the Box is a multi media training delivered through the Visual Studio IDE

Information

• WS-I Completes Interoperability Standards for Web Services - Bruce Kyle highlights the completion of over a decades work by the Web Services Interoperability Organization with the ratification of the final 3 web service profiles. Burce also provides some links to futher information on these standards.
• ASP.NET MVC 3: Server-Side Comments with Razor - Scott Guthrie highlights one of the new ASP.NET MVC 3 features, support for server side comments in the Razor View Engine.
• MVC 3 RC Enhancements - ‘nmarun’ looks at a number of the improvements in the ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate, including improved control of session in controllers, Output caching, request validation and NuGet.
• ASP.NET MVC 3 RC Bug and Quick Solution - Imran Baloch talks about the improved Granualr Request Validation in ASP.NET MVC 3 RC and highlights a bug (and a workaround) with HTML being passed with ValidateInput set to false.
• AOP in C#? Over Anders Hejlsberg’s Dead Body! - Gael Fraiteur responds to Anders Hejlsberg’s answers to whether C# will gain Aspect Oriented Programming capabilities in later versions with a good myth busting set of points and responses - very interesting reading (as are the comments)
• Basic to Basics: What is Dependency Inversion? Is it IoC? Part 1 - John Sonmez continues his Back to Basics series with an introductory look at Dependency Inversion and how it relates to IoC.
• Migrating a Silverlight Application to Windows Phone 7 - Dan Wahlin discusses porting Silverlgiht Applications to the Windows Phone device, porting his Album Viewer sample application to the Phone, discussing the key points of the process.
• Basic JavaScript Part 2 : Objects - Jan Van Ryswyck continues his JavaScript series with a look at objects, methods, constructors, and encapsulation in JavaScript
• Combinatorial Testing: Testing Highly Probable Combinations - Bj Rollison discusses choosing combinations of values for testing in Combinatorial Testing, talking about how its most worth testing the highly probably combinations first
• Getting started with F# using an online book - Don Syme highlights a great F# learning tool in e-book form - The F# Survival Guide, by John Puopolo with Sandy Squires.

Community

• Silverlight Firestarter 2nd December 2010 - Scott Guthrie heads up a fantastic lineup of Silverlight talks as a pars of the Silverlight Firestarter event, an in person and streamed live event on Thursday 2nd December, starting 9am PST

No Comments »

Software

• What happened to Lucene.Net? It got forked - Simone Chiaretta shares an update on the Lucene Project which faced an uncertain future a few weeks ago, highlighting the direction being taken by the main project and also two new projects forked from the original Lucene.Net
• New Mono Log Profiler - Miguel de Icaza announces a new profiler now included in the Mono Project, and also discusses the Mono Project’s plans for F# now that ‘F# Goes Open Source‘
• Visual Studio 2010 vsdoc for jQuery 1.4.3 Now Available - ‘appendTo’ announce the release of their VSDoc documentation file for JQuery 1.4.3 which brings intellisense for the latest jQuery to your Visual Studio IDE.

Information

• A few quick ASP.NET MVC 3 Installation Notes - Scott Guthrie shares some installation related notes about the ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate, outlining some if the issues you may encounter if you install ASP.NET MVC 3 RC along side the C# / VB Async CTP, Razor Intellisense and tooling like ReSharper, and avoiding problems with NuGet by removing old packages.
• Asynchrony in C# 5 Part Six: Whither async? - Eric Lippert continues his series on the C# / VB.NET Async CTP with a look at some of the design decisions that the team made when designing these language extensions sharing a interesting insight to the decisions and the process.
• Writing a Compiler in C#: Parsing, Part 3 - Sasha Goldshtein continues his series building a compiler for a custom language in C#, looking in this part at the parsing of subroutine calls.
• The Only Console Application Template You Will Ever Need - Alois Kraus shares a nice template for command line applications and handling parsing of command line parameters, available for both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 via the code gallery.
• Creating Zip files with System.IO.Packaging namespace - Mikael Svenson takes a look at using the not widely known System.IO.Packaging namespace functionality to create Zip Files
• StyleCop Compliant Visual Studio 2010 Code Snippets November Release - Doug Holland announces the release of an updated collection of Code Snippets for Visual Studio 2010 which conform to the StyleCop guidelines. This latest update adds a number of new snippets fo the collection, and Doug is always looking for feedback on the project.
• Using the Library Package Manager with Add-on Libraries in Visual Studio - ‘Timlee’ walks through the various options for working with packages using NuGet in Visual Studio, exploring the package manager and the package manager console.
• 5 minute Observable.FromAsyncPattern sample for Windows Phone 7 - Den Delimarsky explores the use of the Reactive Extension on the Windows Phone 7 Platform to create observable collections from Async method calls, and discusses some of the limitations.
• ReSharper C# Live Template for Dependency Property and Property Change Routed Event Boilerplate Code - Bart Read shares a ReSharper Live template to make implementing the large standard chunk of code to handle dependency properties and the property change routed event implementation.
• Multithreaded Apps Made Easy Using Aspects - Part 2 - Gael Fraiteur posts the second (and final) part of his article on using Aspect Oriented Programming techniques to make building Multi-Threaded applications easier

No Comments »

Software

• Feature Builder power with drag and drop simplicity - Instant Feature Builder v1 (Think "Drag and Drop Map/Code files/Docs/Guidance in and vsix out") - Greg Duncan highlights the Instant Feature Builder V1 release which brings a simple and easy to use way to build guided developer experiences using a drag drop interface within Visual Studio. This tool provides about 80% of the features if the official Feature Builder product.

Information

• ASP.NET Web Application: Publish/Package Tokenizing Parameters - Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi of the Visual Web Developer Team talks about the way that Web.Config transformations are tokenised on publish / package, and looks at how you can control the tokenising of connection strings.
• WF 4 Performance Whitepaper Published - Wenlong Dong highlights the publication of a whitepaper which discusses the performance of Windows Workflow 4, comparing to the performance of WF3, showing some quite dramatic improvements in performance.
• New White Paper Details the Windows Azure Programming Model - The Windows Azure Team highlight a new introductory whitepaper on the Windows Azure Programming Model which looks at how the cloud platform can help you build more available and scalable applications than you could with traditional application programming models.
• The taming of the phone [New SetterValueBindingHelper sample demonstrates its usefulness on Windows Phone 7 (and Silverlight 4)] - David Anson updates his SetterValueBindingHelper and sample application to work on Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight 4, providing a means of using binding within setter properties like Style as you can in WPF, helping work round a limitation in Silverlight / WP7
• Windows 7 Phone Database Rapid Repository - Examining Pending Changes - Sean McAlinden documents another feature of his Windows Phone 7 Database Rapid Repository project, which allows you to inspect the entities which are pending save prior to performing the save on them through the repository.
• Introduction to InterceptingCatalog - Part I - Piotr Włodek looks at the MEFContrib project’s InterceptingCatalog which allows you to intercept values exported via MEF using a chain of responsibility deisgn pattern to combine intercepter together in a processing pipeline.
• Razor Intellisense and ReSharper - Hadi Hariri highlights the Razor View Engine Intellisense introduced in the ASP.NET MVC3 Release Candidation, and explains how you can access this autocompete if you have ReSharper (which does not yet support Razor in its own Intellisense).
• If You Use BackgroundWorker in .Net, Make Sure You Wrap Your Worker Method In Try (or risk missing the exception thrown) - Peter Kellner highlights the importance of handling exceptions in your background worker methods to help you avoid loosing exceptions and having background tasks terminate unexpectedly with no idea why.
• C# 5.0: async/await vs PostSharp - Gael Fraiteur discusses the new C#5 CTP async/wait functionality and how it compares to similar implementations which can be achieved using an AOP framework like PostSharp. Gael is also republishing an article on using PostSharp to make creating Multithreaded Apps Made Easy Using Aspects
• Discovering race conditions using PostSharp - Dror Helper also shares a PostSharp Aspect which can help you to discover race conditions in your code recording and alerting when two threads call the same method at the same time.

Community

• A word from NxtGen User Group - Micro Framework, jQuery, dynamic .Net and Christmas swag - Rachel Collier and Ryan O’Neill highlights the NxtGenUG events across the country in the build up to the Christmas period
• Win two tickets for the .Net magazine awards party - Rachel also highlights a chance for you to win two tickets to the .NET Magazine Awards party on November 18th as a guest of Microsoft.

No Comments »

Software

• Announcing the ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate - Scott Guthrie and Phil Haack announce the release of the ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate, available as a direct download or via the Web Platform Installer. This release brigns the much awaited Intellisense for the Razor View Engine, partial page output caching improved JavaScript and Validation support, along with tooling improvements. This release also comes with the latest CTP of NuGet.
• NuGet CTP 2 Released! - Phil Haack gives the lowdown on the CTP2 release of NuGet. This new version introduces some changes to the package format specification, and the introduction of OData as the format for the package feed.
• WebMatrix Beta 3: Now available! - The Microsoft Web Platform Team announce the release of the 3rd Beta release of WebMatrix. This release builds on the key principles that underpin the product to improve the production of simple web applications.
• November 2010 F# 2.0 Free Tools Update - The F# Team have updated the F#2.0 Free Tools. These tools bring tooling support for F# to Visual Studio 208 and Visual Studio 2010 Shell. This update brings some improvements for users working with Mono or the Windows Phone 7
• SQL Server v.Next (Denali) : Setup walk-through - Aaron Bertrand discusses the setup of the first public CTP of SQL Server Denali the next major version of SQL Server which was released yesterday at the PASS conference.
• First look at SQL Server Management Studio Denali - SQLDenis takes a look at the Management Studio interface of the CTP release of SQL Server Denali.
• SSMS Tools Pack 1.9.3 is out! - Mladen Prajdić announces an updated version of his SQL Server Management Studio Tools. This extension brings a number of useful features to the Management Studio environment, and this release brings improved history features to the query editor, along with fixing reported bugs.

Information

• Granular Request Validation in ASP.NET MVC 3 - Marcin talks about the changes to the request validation API in ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate which provides granular validation support via attributes
• Windows Phone 7 Development Tip: Use Concurrent Programming Techniques - Bart Czernicki discusses concurrency in Windows Phone 7 applications and how using threads to perform work will keep your UI responsive, illustrating with a sample from his book.
• Windows 7 Phone Database Rapid Repository - Queries and Views Proposal - Sean McAlinden dicsusses the querying and views implementation for his Windows Phone 7 Rapid Repository project, looking for feedback on the proposed implementation
• Test Driven Design and levels of testing - Alexander Beletsky discusses Test Driven Development and the various types of testing that you may need to perform, giving samples of each type of test and implementation classes
• Back to Basics: Cohesion and Coupling Part 2 - John Sonmez continues his back to basics series with a second part on Cohesion and Coupling looking at the relationship between the two, breaking problems down into smaller pieces and using Dependency Injection to bring them together.
• How To Write Testable Code in .Net - Chris Farrell gives a run through of the common techniques used to make your code more testable, including dependency injection, discussions of coupling and the use of stubs.
• F# - An Introduction To Currying - Sergio Tapia provides a simple and effective introduction to currying support in the F# language, illustrating with a few short samples.
• Client Templating with jQuery - Brij takes a look at the templating support in jQuery , currently provided by a plugin for jQuery, and shows it in use in a variety of situations.

Community

• Alt.Net.UK - Next Event - 19th/20th November 2010 - Next round of tickets available 10th November - 12.30pm - Ben Hall announces the release of the next round of tickets for the Alt.NET UK Conference. Tickets will be made available today (10th November) at 12:30pm (GMT I assume)
• Announcing the Internet Explorer 9 Webcast Series with Imaginet - John Bristowe highlights a series of webcast events covering the various aspects of the Internet Explorer 9 release. The events are being held around noon in Canada and are being streamed live on the 30th November, 2nd, 14th, 16th December,

No Comments »

Software

• PDC 2010 Session Downloader in Silverlight - Mike Taulty shares a Silverlight application which consumes the PDC2010 OData feed providing a easy way of getting the Session content (videos and Slides), along with illustrating the use of Silverlight by presenting the sourcecode for the application for you to examine.
• Silverlight Elements 2.0 is here! - Mindscape announce the release of their Silverlight Elements 2.0 control library, a commercially licensed collection of Silverlight controls, and three of these controls (Coverflow, Book and Expander) are completely free as a part of their Free edition

Information

• Asynchrony in C# 5 Part Five: Too many tasks - Eric Lippert continues his exploration of the C# 5 Async CTP release with a look at the dangers of task based asynchrony looking at examples of where you can simply end up with too many tasks
• Streaming Live or On-Demand Video from IIS7 to iOS Devices (iPhone/iPad) and Silverlight Clients - Scott Hanselman discusses some of the excellent features of IIS 7 available as extensions to the product and explores streaming video for Silverlight Clients and iOS devices (iPhone / iPad)
• Rubik’s Cube for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 using Balder - Coding4Fun shares and article from Einar Ingerigtsen on the construction of a Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight implementation of the Rubik Cube
• Customize the Silverlight Installation Experience in about 15 Minutes - Michael Crump looks at how you can make your use of Silverlight look more professional for users who have yet to install the Silverlight plugin, showing how you can customise the display of the ‘You need to Install Silverlight’ screen to fit in with your application.
• Back to Basics: Cohesion and Coupling Part 1 - John Sonmez continues his Back to Basics series with a discussion of the key concepts of coupling and cohesion in software, illustrating with an example from the world of Computer Hardware.
• An ASP.NET HttpModule to set the current culture to the user’s locale - Mike Hadlow builds an idea from Dylan Beattie and some sample code from Rick Strahl to build an ASP.NET HTTP Module which detects and sets the locale for the .NET Globalisation features.
• Primer: federated identity in a nutshell - Planky shares a nice introduction to the key concepts behind Federated Identity, showing the type of problem it solves, comparing the Federated solution to the more traditional identity techniques.
• A Complete Impersonation Demo in C#.NET - Wayne Ye gives an introduction to using the .NET Framework’s Identity Impersonation facilities to change the user that your code is running as
• Decoding standard output and standard error when redirecting to a GUI application - Dennis Dietrich discusses retrieving the standard input, output and error streams from console applications, and dealing with the encoding that these streams use.
• Logical and Physical Architecture - Udi Dahan discusses the difference between Logical and Physical Architecture, and looks at a common misunderstanding that leads people to hosting different parts of the architecture separately when they actual belong together.

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Discussion on the State of (ALT).NET on 23 November 2010 - Jan Van Ryswyck announces the next Virtual Alt.Net Usergroup virtual event to be held on the evening of 23rd November starting at 8pm , discussing the state of the Alt.Net community, looking for feedback on the events organised by the group and looking at the future of the group and the Alt.Net movement.
• How to decrease risk when designing integrated systems - Sarah Taraporewalla highlights her talk at the London .NET Usergroup to be held on the evening of Thursday 18th November 2010 where she will be discussing how you can intelligently design systems which have to integrate with other systems to avoid some of the common pitfalls of such development.
• Video: Julie Lerman on Entity Framework 4 - Seth Juarez catches up with Julie Lerman at DevConnections discussing her session at this conference, POCO support in Entity Framework, EF4 features and improvements, and much more
• LIDNUG: Scott Guthrie Talks Shop VII - The Linked In .NET Usergroup welcome Scott Guthrie back for another ‘Talks Shop’ session where Scott answers your questions on development and the .NET stack. This virtual event is running on Friday 19th November 2010 at 10AM PST

No Comments »