February 2011

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #795

Posted by on 18 Feb 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • ILSpy – Development of a free replacement for Reflector now that it is becoming paid software are underway, and the ILSpy project are well underway with releasing their latest binary, and already its looking like a good replacement in your free toolbox.
  • ReSharper 6 Bundles Decompiler, Free Standalone Tool to Follow – JetBrains also enter the market with a replacement for Reflector, initially as a feature which will be included in ReSharper 6, with a standalone (and free) edition coming in the near future
  • Introducing the February 2011 Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit – Jeff Wilcox highlights the February 2011 release of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit, available on CodePlex now. This library contains a collection of controls for use in your applications including a new Tilt Effect and PerformanceProgressBar, along with performance improvements and more general improvements across the library.

Information

The Morning Brew #794

Posted by on 17 Feb 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Moonlight 4 Preview 1 is out – Miguel de Icaza announces the release of the first preview of Moonlight 4, the Mono Project’s implementation of Silverlight for Linux. This preview release brings some of the features of Silverlight 4 to the Moonlight platform, with more still to come.
  • Three Months and Ten Days – Miguel also highlights the release of Mono 2.10, the latest evolution of the Mono platform which now includes a new profiler, VB.NET support for V2.0 and v4 profiles, performance improvements in SGen, Cecil, support for ASP.NET MVC 3, a new C# compiler backend, and lots more.
  • Windows 7 SP1 RTM available for MSDN and TechNet customers – SQLDenis highlights the release of Windows 7 (and Windows 2008 Server R2) Service Pack 1, available now to TechNet and MSDN Subscribers. General availability will be on 22nd February 2011.
  • Free WPF controls from Mindscape! – The folks over at MindScape have released three controls available for free which target WPF Developers. The Controls, (Coverflow, AutoCompleteBox and PromptDecorator) have been released to celebrate the release of their commercial controls library WPF Elements 4.0.

Information

  • Massive: 400 Lines of Data Access Happiness – Rob Conery talks about his simple Dynamic based data access library, implemented in 400 lines of open sourced code (also available as a NuGet package). Rob discusses the key design choices made in the development of this library in this very interesting post.
  • Unit of Work in Rich Clients – Paul Stovell takes a look at the Unit of Work pattern, and how you should implement it in Rich Client applications, briefly discussing the implementations in Linq to SQL, Entity Framework, and NHibernate, along with discussing how this can fit in with MVVM frameworks.
  • Get/Load Polymorphism in NHibernate 3 – James Kovacs takes a look at the polymporphic behaviour of NHibernate 3 in loading objects which are part of an inheritance graph, discussing some of the limitations of its support.
  • Notes on Building Razor Views – K. Scott Allen explores the building of views implemented in Razor to help you identify syntax errors in the view at build time rather than runtime, walking through the process of enabling this feature.
  • Caching items in Orchard – Bertrand Le Roy shares a look at the Orchard Open Source CMS project’s cache API, which is built on top of the standard ASP.NET cache, but gives a nicer developer experience.
  • Using Windows Azure AppFabric Cache (CTP) – Panagiotis Kefalidis explores the Windows Azure AppFabric Cache, looking at the CTP release, and stepping through configuration and utilisation of the cache from your code in this CodeProject article.
  • SQL Azure Reporting Limited CTP Arrived – Shaun Xu takes a look at the CTP release of SQL Azure Reporting walking through using it for the generation of a simple report.
  • AppHarbor – Azure Done Right AKA Heroku for .NET – Rob Reynolds highlights AppHarbor, a cloud based hosting, akin to Azure, but actually running on Amazon’s cloud offering. Where AppHarbor excels is in its deployment support, allowing you to deploy your application by pushing directly from your version control system much like Heroku.
  • 5 Ways That Postsharp Can SOLIDify Your Code: Caching – Matthew Groves continues this 5 part series looking at how PostSharp’s AOP functionality can help you achieve SOLID code. In this part, Matthew takes a look at implementing caching
  • IE9 No-Reboot Setup and the Windows Restart Manager – Eric Lawrence takes a look at how the Window Restart Manager makes it possible for IE9’s setup to not require a Reboot, and looks at how you can make your applications work with the Restart Manager.

The Morning Brew #793

Posted by on 16 Feb 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Silverlight 4 February 2011 Update Released Today – Tim Heuer announces the release of the ‘GDR3’ update to the Silverlight 4 Runtime which provides a number of updates addressing issues with media playback, IDE Debuging bugfixes, fixes for out of browser updates when applications name changes, and better memory management and network optimisations.
  • CSS Support in ReSharper 6 – The JetBrains ReSharper team share an in depth look at the new features for working with CSS which will be included in ReSharper 6 (and are currently available in the Early Access Preview)

Information

  • Basic JavaScript Part 10: The Module Pattern – Jan Van Ryswyck continues his back to basics series on JavaScript with a look at the Module Pattern and its use in JavaScript, and how it supports the CommonJS Initiative, and sharing an implementation using this pattern and looking at how it can be refined.
  • User Experiences – Listen, Learn, Refine – Jane Kim discusses some of the User Experience changes in the Internet Explorer 9 RC, talking about how they came from user suggestions and comparing the user experience of IE9 RC with the latest editions of other browsers.
  • IE9’s tracking protection and content distribution networks – Barry Dorrans highlights the Tracking Protection security feature of Internet Explorer 9, some of the problems it causes for CDN based content such as JavaScript libraries, and a change in the Release Candidate which allows publication of Tracking Protection Lists, with Barry sharing a list which will allow you to make use of the protection this feature offers, yet still have the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft CDN content operate correctly.
  • Creating a NuGet Package in 7 easy steps – Plus using NuGet to integrate ASP.NET MVC 3 into existing Web Forms applications – Scott Hanselman, inspired by a readers comment, takes the process he has previously blogged about for getting ASP.NET MVC 3 into existing WebForms projects and turns it into a NuGet package removing all the pain from doing this. Scott also takes us on the journey of building the package showing how he achieved it.
  • BDD Simply – Mehdi Khalili takes a look at Behaviour Driven Development style testing, focusing on the naming conventions and structure of BDD tests, along with taking a look at the StoryQ and SpecFor libraries
  • How to get more out of text templates – Niko Schuessler takes a look at some of the more advanced code generation features of T4 Templates, including the use of variables and Linq within the tempate generation
  • Logging Your Application for Fun and Profit Part 1 – Casey Kriutzfield kicks off a series of posts looking at the various logging features available to you as a ,NET Developer. In this first post Casey looks at the basics of logging and highlights the DebugView tool.
  • Prototyping with anonymous classes – Jimmy Bogard discusses some trickery which you can use to support execution of expressions against anonymous types, and illustrates how he uses this technique to avoid having to create lots of classes for testing purposes.
  • Delegates make great container components – Mike Hadlow discusses how storing delegates in your Inversion of Control container can help avoid the need for lots of classes which essentially wrap a single function, illustrating this with an example surrounding dates.
  • Adding Client Validation To DataAnnotations DataType Attribute – Scott Kirkland looks at using the Data Annotation attributes to provide validation on his entities all the way down to the client side in an ASP.NET MVC application.
  • Windows Phone 7 Silverlight Programming – MultiTouch and Manipulation – Xianzhong Zhu shares a detailed look at the Multi-Touch capabilities of the Windows Phone 7 devices and how you can consume this functionality in your Silverlight based phone applications.
  • Idle Detection and Running under Lock on your WP7 – Derik Whittaker discusses how to make your Windows Phone 7 applications handle the detection of being idle, and how to make you applications behave nicely when the device is locked.
  • RTL (Arabic and Hebrew) Support for Windows Phone 7 – Daniel Moth discusses the lack of Right to Left rendering on the Windows Phone 7 Silverlight applications, and how the Windows based solution of PInovke won’t work here, sharing a simple piece of code which achieves RTL rendering.
  • Pivot MSDN Magazine (as in quickly and easily browser, filter and view 10 years of MSDN Magazine Articles) – Greg Duncan highlights the MSDN Magazine Pivot viewer which provides access to the last 10 years of MSDN magazine content, and also highlights the series of posts from Howard Dierking on the building of the application.

Community

  • DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper … Squared! – Rachel Hawley highlights the currently scheduled DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper events still to come this year in the UK (and also sneaks a shoe reference in there too….bonus points to Rachel for broadening developers world view)

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