December 2010

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #759

Posted by on 29 Dec 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • SSMS Tools Pack 1.9.4 is out! Now with SQL Server 2011 (Denali) CTP1 support. – Mladen Prajdi? announces the release of the latest edition of his SQL Server Management Studio Tools pack, a suite of utility tools that bolt into the Management Studio IDE / Management Console. This new version fixes a number fo bugs and brings support for the SQL Server 2011 CTP release.
  • New Release Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting 1.71 – Ron Jacobs announces the latest release of his Workflow testing framework for testing activities. This new release makes use of the Task Parallel Library to make testing easier using tasks to push episodes of work through the workflow.
  • ReSharper 5.1.2 Release Candidate – Jura Gorohovsky highlights the release candidate release of ReSharper 5.1.2 which will likely be released as an official release in mid-January. This release brings support for MSTest projects being re-targeted to .NET 3.5
  • "Azure Blob Studio 2011" A standalone utility and/or Visual Studio 2010 extension for Azure blob management (with VB source too) – Greg Duncan highlights the release of ‘Azure Blob Studio 2011’ a utility from Alessandro Del Sole which provides a standalone WPF client and Visual Studio 2010 Extension which allows you to work with files stored in Azure Blob Storage. Full source (in VB.NET) is available for these tools too.
  • CoffeeScript – CoffeeScript has reached its 1.0.0 release. This simple language allows you to write clear code and have it compiled down into real JavaScript which passes Lint, runs quickly and integrates well with any JavaScript Libraries.

Information

Community

  • An Introduction Into XNA – The Manchester / Warrington NxtGenUG are holding an event on the evening of Wednesday 19th January 2011 where Simon Jackson will be looking at building games for the Windows and Windows Phone 7 platform using the XNA game development framework.

The Morning Brew #758

Posted by on 24 Dec 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Today is the last Edition before Christmas, so I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all readers (who celebrate it) a very Happy Christmas.

As per normal Morning Brew rules, there will be no posts on the Christmas and New Year UK public holidays – this means the schedule for the next week or so will be complicated:

Saturday 25 & Sunday 26th December
Weekend, no Morning Brew
Monday 27th and Tuesday 28th December
UK Public Holidays (Christmas day and Boxing Day) – No Morning Brew
Wednesday 29th to Thursday 30th December
Morning Brew will be published – although likely to be later than usual publishing time.
Friday 31st December
Normal Morning Brew and End of Year Retrospective post
Saturday 1st – Monday 3rd January 2010
Weekend and UK Public Holiday (New Years day offset public holiday) – No Morning Brew
Tuesday 4th January 2010 and onwards
Back to normal publishing schedule

Without further ado, here are today’s links….

Software

  • ReSharper 6 EAP is Open; Details on JavaScript Support – The JetBrains team give us an early Christmas present with the launch of their Early Access program for ReSharper 6. This release brings JavaScript support to the tooling allowing navigation, inspection, refactoring, etc, CSS improvements, and brings code inspections to the VB.NET features.
  • SQL Scripts Manager: An Appreciation – William Brewer highlights the release of SQL Scripts Manager, a free tool from RedGate and SimpleTalk which provides a nice interface for managing and executing SQL Scripts. The program comes with a number of useful scripts to perform a variety of maintenance and performance related tasks.

Information

  • Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 3 – "Select" (and a rename…) – Jon Skeet continues with a series from earlier in the year looking at implementing Linq-To-Objects again from first principles. In this post Jon highlights the availability of the source for the project on Google Code, and explores the implementation of Select.
  • Client-side model binding using ASP.NET MVC, jQuery and Knockout.js – Pete Sutcliffe takes a look at implementing model binding in Client Side Code using the jQuery and KnockOut JavaScript libraries, showing how combining these two can create powerful functionality quickly and easily.
  • JavaScript for C# developers: writing a library (part 4) – Julian M Bucknall continues with a series on writing libraries in JavaScript with this part looking at testing the created library using the QUnit JavaScript testing framework, popularised by its use in the tests for the jQuery Project.
  • Kill That Util Class! – Dhaval Dalal discusses the Utility Class anti-pattern, and looks at using Extension Methods in preference to create a better API and remove the need for calling methods on a Util Class.
  • What every developer should know about character encoding – David Thielen gives a brief discussion of character encoding and text files, sharing some best practice ideas for making sure you don’t get caught out by encoding problems.

Community

  • SQLBits – Beside the seaside – 7 – 9 April 2011 – Brighton – The SQLBits team have announced the plans for SQLBits 8 ‘Beside the Seaside’ to be held in Brighton, and will be in the familiar 3 day format, with day 1 and 2 being pay for pre-conference and deep dive events, and culminating with the Saturday Free Community day. SQLBits is one of my favourite community events and well worth checking out

The Morning Brew #757

Posted by on 23 Dec 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Selenium 2.0-beta-1 (WebDriver) released. – Paul Hammant highlights the release of Selenium Web Driver 2.0 Beta 1 on the ThoughtWorkers on Open Source Blog, the latest update in this product for controlling selenium browser based testing which is more mature than the beta label would suggest.
  • MonoDevelop plugin for F# now available – Don Syme highlights the efforts made by the Mono Project since the release of F# under an open source license to get support for the language into the Mono Platform.

Information

  • Free Training on HTML 5, JavaScript, and CSS – The Patterns and Practices Guidance Blog highlights a free series of university style training being offered by Mozilla and Peer to Peer University bringing 6-10 weeks of quality JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 training to you. Registrations open on 8th January 2011 and places are limited.
  • Service Oriented Design Pattern – Service Ping – Don Demsak starts out on a new series of posts looking at documenting service oriented design patterns in a format similar to the Gang of Four design patterns book. This first post looks at the Service Ping pattern to test a service end point.
  • How to Write a Repository – Phillip Calçado also posts on a patterns related theme, looking at the correct implementation of the Repository pattern.
  • Giving feedback on Visual Studio – some best practices – ‘Dougturn’ discusses the scale of feedback the Visual Studio 2010 team have received, discussing their processes for working with and responding to the feedback, and gives some pointers on giving good feedback and identifying the correct channel to send it.
  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Extensionless URLs on IIS 6 – Phil Haack discusses how running ASP.NET MVC 3 on ASP.NET 4 makes it much easier to get extensionless URLs working on IIS6
  • ASP.NET MVC3 Razor Script Loading Tips – Kazi Manzur Rashid takes a look at improving the loading of client side JavaScript in the Razor View Engine using the @Url.Scripts helper and some custom JavaScript to load further scripts. A Sample project is available.
  • C# Closure Constructors – Mike Hadlow looks at applying the Closure based class constructors popularised by Douglas Crockford in the JavaScript language to code in C#, showing how its implemented and asking for people thoughts on using this style of constructor method.
  • 10 tricks that will make your jQuery enabled site go faster – Anders Nygaard shares 10 recommendations for making your jQuery based JavaScript perform better

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