The Morning Brew

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.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #737

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.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #736

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.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #735