The Morning Brew

Software

• A new release of All-In-One Code Framework in May with 20 new samples and a Sample Browser VS extension - Jialiang Ge highlights a new release of the All In One Code Framework, released last week. This new release includes a new Visual Studio Extension which allows the searching of samples from within the IDE, along with a number of new samples for Internet Explorer, Dynamics CRM, Soft Keyboards, Visual Studio Extensibility and Memory dumps.
• Announcing TouchStudio v1.2 beta: fast game and physics engine, pin actions in TouchStudio, post to Facebook, and much more… - Nikolai Tillmann highlights the latest beta release of the Windows Phone 7 TouchStudio v1.2 . This beta release includes a new game and physics engine, FaceBook integration, improvements to the script editor, output wall and much more.
• Simple.Data 0.6.5 - Mark Rendle announces the release of Simple.Data 0.6.5 and gives a recap of the various new features and improvements introduced in the 0.6.x releases.

Information

• Eduasync part 8: generated code from a complex async method - Jon Skeet: Coding Blog & part 9: generated code for multiple awaits - Jon Skeet continues his Eduasync series of posts looking at the implementation of async functionality in C#, exploring the complexities of generated code when your async methods are not trivial, and looking at simple methods which contain multiple awaits.
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Part 8 - The EventAggregator - Rob Eisenberg resumes his series of posts on his Caliburn Micro MVVM framework taking a look at the EventAggregator service and how it allows publish/subscribe communication
• Cool Stuff in FubuCore and FubuMVC Series & Cool stuff in FubuCore No. 1: Cache - Chad Myers kicks off a series of posts looking at some of the particularly useful features of the FubuCore library created as a home for a number of useful methods, utilities and helpers from the FubuMVC library.
• EF 4.1 Validation - Andriy Svyryd of the ADO.NET team shares a detailed post looking at the changes in validation between the CTP5 release of Entity Framework and the RTM of Entity Framework 4.1, explaining the changes and discussing why the changes were made.
• How To Use a .NET 4 Based DLL From .NET 2 Based Application? - Arik Poznanski takes a look at how you can use the the improvements in the .NET Framework to make using assemblies from multiple framework versions utilising the Side By Side (SxS) features, originally intended for COM based consumers, in your native .NET applications by consuming via COM.
• Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - Signature encodings - Simon Cooper continues his series of posts looking at the anatomy of .NET assemblies with a look at the encoding of metadata signatures of methods, fields, properties, generics, etc in the #Blob heap.
• Referencing Routes in ASP.NET MVC The Rails Way - Rob Conery takes a look at ASP.NET Routing, and draws on his experience with Ruby on Rails similar functionality to create an improved developer experience using dynamic types and a custom view page to implement something similar.
• Automatic Javascript, CSS versioning to refresh browser cache - Omar Al Zabir shares an HttpFilter implementation which scans output for JavaScript and CSS inclusions in your Html adding versioning information onto the end of the URL in the page meaning they will be cached by the client and easily expired with a file content change.
• Using Cudafy for GPGPU Programming in .NET - Nick Kopp introduces us to Cudafy which allows you to run some aspects of your .NET Code on the GPU taking advantage of the power of the GPU processor to gain computational performance in this Code Project article.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Many to Many and Inverse, Bags and Join & Lazy Properties in Non-Lazy Entities - Ricardo Peres continues his series of posts looking at common mistakes, limitations and restrictions in the NHibernate Object Relational Mapper, taking a look at Lazy property configuration requirements, correct specification of inverse relationships, fetching non-lazy bags with join.
• Silverlight 5 Beta Rough Notes - Character Spacing and Line Stacking - Mike Taulty continues his series looking at the new features included in the Silverlight 5 Beta release, taking a look at the control of Character Spacing and Line Spacing allowing you finder control of the display of text in your applications.
• Windows Phone 7 Design/UI Cheat Sheet - One sheet, lots of shared knowledge… - Greg Duncan highlights a nice UI Design cheat sheet for Windows Phone Developers created by the folks at Nordkapp. The sheet shows screen layouts of a variety of types, and is available in PNG, PSD, and PDF formats.
• "Mango" from the trenches part 2: Starting a Bing Maps navigation #wp7dev - Laurent Bugnion continues his series of posts exploring the features of the Windows Phone Mango update, taking a look at the new navigation features using Bing Maps.
• Alarms and Notifications in Mango - Peter Torr takes a look at the Alarms functionality in Windows Phone’s Mango release, showing how to consume this functionality to have your application create notifications and alarm actions using the phone framework.
• Introducing OData: Data Access for the Web, Cloud, Devices, and More - Steve Yi highlights a white paper from David Chappell discussing the uses of OData in mobile, web and cloud development. Steve then goes on to discuss how major commercial application vendors are adopting OData
• Distributed computing fallacies and REST - Jimmy Bogard highlights 10 fallacies of distributed computing, discussing how these apply to REST based APIs and some of the considerations to these fallacies you need to make in your service consuming applications.
• Introduction to Boo - Niko Schuessler gives a short introduction to the Boo language, a Python like language which has first class status on the CLR, discussing some of the Boo syntax and language features
• An opportunity for a viable .NET open source ecosystem - Joshua Flanagan discusses his impressions of the NuGet package manager and how its Open Source nature is a significant reason to use it (and extend it as you need) by getting involved in the project giving a better way of creating mainstream software.

Community

• GiveCamp UK - GiveCamp arrives in the UK this October with a weekend long event in London bringing the tech community together to donate their time and skills to a range of non-profit organisations. The event is open for registration for both technical and non-technical participants now, and spaces are filling up quickly so be sure to register if you want to get involved.
• LIDNUG: Visual Studio Tips and Tricks, Greatest Hits by… - The Linked In .NET User Group welcome Zain Naboulsi for the best of his Visual Studio Tricks and Tips in a virtual event taking place today (Tuesday 31st May) at 10:30am Pacific
• LIDNUG: Visual Studio Tips and Tricks, Greatest Hits by… (Take 2) - Zain Naboulsi is also giving a re-run onf the session at 7:30pm Pacific, giving a second chance to see the session.
• Live Webinar: Building Composite Applications with… - Gael Fraiteur and Kendall Miller welcome Seb Lambla for a Webinar session on creating composite applications on the OpenRasta 3 platform starting at 9am Pacific on Wednesday 1st June

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Monday is a Public Holiday here in the UK (and in the US too I believe) so as is Morning Brew Tradition I will be having a lie in on Monday and there will be no edition of The Morning Brew. Normal Service will be resumed on Tuesday 31st May, with what is usually a bigger than usual edition. Have a great (long) weekend.

Software

• Announcing PostSharp 2.1 CTP 2 - Gael Fraiteur announces the second CTP release of the PostSharp 2.1 AOP Framework, available both as a standard download and as a NuGet Package. This release includes build time performance improvements, Reflection extensions, Obfuscation and Silverlight 5 support.
• There’s a new T4 editor in town… The (free) Devart T4 Editor for Visual Studio 2010 and/or 2008 - Greg Duncan highlights the release of a free T4 Template editor from Devart which runs in both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010
• NetOffice - A version independent Microsoft Office API proxy (Think "No More PIA" or "One Library, many Office versions") - Greg also highlights the NetOffice project, hosted on CodePlex which is an Microsoft Office Interop library which helps work around the differences between Office versions, simplifying the process of providing interaction with Office applications in your projects.

Information

• Atomicity, volatility and immutability are different, part one - Eric Lippert starts a new series of posts exploring the concepts of Atomicity, volatility and immutability. This first part discusses atomicity and race conditions with assignments
• Effective Tests: Double Strategies - Derek Greer continues his effective tests series of posts with a set of best practice recommendations for working with test doubles in your tests
• Feedback Opportunity: Command Complexity in Visual Studio - The Visual Studio Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Sam Zaiss, a UX Researcher on the Visual Studio Team, is looking for feedback from users who work within Visual Studio 2010 (for 20+hours a week) who would be willing to try out a new toolbar setup and report back on how you get on.
• Dynamic ASP.NET MVC 3 models using Mono’s Compiler as a Service - Jon Galloway experiments with the Compiler as a Service provided by the Mono project, looking at dynamically compiling model classes and hooking them into an ASP.NET MVC application which shows how the Scaffolded editor and display screens would look for that type.
• HTML5 Spec Hits Last Call Status - Paul Cotton gives an update on the progress with the HTML 5 Specification as it moves into ‘Last Call Status’. This is a significant stage in the process as it means that the working group consider the spec to have reached a reasonable level of stability.
• Code Metrics - Maintainability Index - Zain Naboulsi continues looking at the code metrics available in Visual Studio 2010 Premium and Ultimate exploring, in this post, the code maintainability metric
• .NET and nullable value types- part I - Luis Abreu starts a new series looking at nullable value types, discussing the background to value types, the need for nullable value types, a looking at simple uses of them
• Multi tasking in Windows Phone 7.1 - Alex van Beek takes a look at the Multi-Tasking support in Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) discussing scheduling tasks and using the SchedulerAgent
• Target Different versions of Windows Phone with the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK - Senthil Kumar highlights the multi-targeting support in the Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) SDK allowing you to develop applications for both Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7.1 using the same SDK install.

Community

• The Stack - Liverpool .NET User Group - July 2011 - The July meeting of The Stack .NET Usergroup in Liverpool will be held on Wednesday 6th July at Studio 2, in Parr Street Studios where Chris Eargle will be giving a session on Declarative Refactorings in C#, and Andrew Stopford will be taking us through a look at MbUnit.

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Information

• Globalization, Internationalization and Localization in ASP.NET MVC 3, JavaScript and jQuery - Part 1 - Scott Hanselman kicks off a series of posts looking at internationalisation (or Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn as he calls it) of a ASP.NET MVC based web applications which makes use of jQuery and JavaScript, exploring the use of resource files, Globalising the JavaScript validation and jQuery Data picker using a variety of techniques.
• Bin Deploying ASP.NET MVC 3 - Phil Haack discusses the Bin Deployment of ASP.NET MVC 3 applications for situations where your host does not have ASP.NET MVC installed in the GAC, discussing what you need to bring with you, and the tooling support.
• Parallel programming coding guidelines - Neeraj Kaushik highlights a nice coding guidelines document from Igor Ostrovsky of the Parallel Computing Platform Group at Microsoft. The guide discusses techniques and patterns for writing good code for multi-core systems in .NET 4.
• Project Silk Documentation Drop: New Chapters Ready for Review - Karl Shifflett highlights the next batch of chapters from the Project Silk Patterns and Practices Project, offering advice on building modern cross browser web applications
• Internet Explorer 9 Developer Tools Deep Dive - Part 1: Introduction - Chris Bowen starts a new series of posts looking at the Internet Explorer 9 Developer Tools which serves as a blog companion to his Code Project Virtual Summit talk on HTML5/CSS3. In this first post, Chris looks at the basics of the IE developer tools, getting you familiar with the various parts of the tooling.
• Code Metrics - Class Coupling - Zain Naboulsi takes a look at the Class Coupling Code Metrics available in Visual Studio 2010 Premium and Ultimate, exploring their use and looking at an example piece of code which illustrates the metric
• An Introduction to Service Bus Topics - David Ingham of the AppFabric Team gives a nice introduction to the use of the AppFabric Service Bus explaining the background to the service bus pattern and looking at the code for basic use cases.
• Getting started with Script# - John Katsiotis gives an introduction to the Script# library which allows you to write web client side interactions in C# and have them compiled down to JavaScript for use in the browser, walking through the process of using it.
• ReSharper 6 Enhances the JavaScript Experience - Hadi Hariri shares a detailed look at the JavaScript support that is new in ReSharper 6, exploring both native JavaScript and their enhanced jQuery functionality bringing autocomplete, refactoring, code inspection and much more.
• Why is a Y in the Windows Phone Mango Camera API - René Schulte takes a look at the camera support in Windows Phone Mango, which brings it on par with the support in Silverlight 4, discussing the PhoneCamera class API, highlighting good resources for further information, and filling a few gaps with information on the YCrCb Caputre method.
• Automatic properties and their backing fields big difference between C# and VB.Net - Christiaan Baes highlights a subtle, but significant different to the implementation of automatic properties between VB.NET and C#, where VB allows access to the generated backing field and C# does not.

Community

• In The Brain of Andreas Ohlund, Reliable integrations with NServiceBus - Skills Matter continue their ‘In the Brain of’ free talk series with Andreas Ohlund giving a session on using NServiceBus as a core part of your systems architecture on Thursday 2nd June. The event is free, however registration is required.
• F#LUG June Meetup - F#unctional Londoners - F#unctional Londoners welcome Andrew Kennedy for a session on F# Units of Measure on the evening of Tuesday 7th June at Skills Matter.
• GeekUp Liverpool May 2011, 31st May 2011 - GeekUp Liverpool’s May meeting, being held on Tuesday 31st May also has a Functional Programming theme, with three talks on Haskell, Implementing a Lisp Interpreter in .NET, and Clojure

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Windows Phone Mango

• Microsoft Previews Next Release of Windows Phone - Microsoft official Press Release announcing the preview release of the next release of Windows Phone (7.1 / Mango)
• Microsoft officially unveils Mango; Hundreds of improvements on the way - The Windows Phone Team Blog also make the announcement, highlighting the recordings of the announcement which include demos and a live chat and discussing some of the new features.
• Developer News: Beta Mango Tools Available Today - Along with the Platform preview release, the Windows Phone Team also announces the availability of the Beta Mango Developer Tools
• Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 - Beta & Resources for Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta - Nikita Polyakov highlights the various download and documentation links for the Developer Tools for the beta release of the Mango tool set
• See Microsoft Windows Phone"Mango" Video Collection - Eric Ligman highlights a series of videos demonstrating some of the new features of the Windows Phone Mango release, exploring the various phone features new in this release.
• OData Updates in Windows Phone "Mango" - Glenn Gailey highlights some of the new features for working with OData data feeds in the Mango release.
• MVVM Light Toolkit patch for WP7 Mango Beta - Laurent Bugnion releases an update to his MVVM Light framework to make it compatible with the Windows Phone 7.1 platform and tooling.
• Augmented Mango - SLARToolkit for Windows Phone - Rene Schulte announces the release of the SLARToolkit for Windows Phone (Silverlight Augmented Reality Toolkit) which takes advantage of the new Mango APIs for accessing the devices camera, showing it in use, and discussing how you write code against the library.

Information

• Windows Phone Mango - Whatâ’s New? ("Overview"- Part 0 of - Alex Golesh shares a comprehensive 8 part series of posts looking at the various aspects and features of the Mango Windows Phone Release. Further parts of the series explore:
  • Local Database - Part 1 of 8
  • Local Data - Part 2 of 8
  • New Sensors & Tooling Enhancements- Part 3 of 8 -
  • Camera - Part 4 of 8
  • Background Agents -Part 5 of 8
  • Fast Application Switch (FAS) - Part 6 of 8
  • Silverlight/XNA Interoperability - Part 7 of 8
  • Push Notifications & Tiles - Part 8 of 8
• Mango from the trenches part 1: Adding a new live tile to the start page #wp7dev - Laurent Bugnion also takes a look at the new release, kicking off a series looking at the new features, and in this first part explores the new Live Tile support.
• NuGet for the Enterprise: NuGet in a Continuous Integration Automated Build System - Scott Hanselman follows on from his TechEd talk on using NuGet in the Enterprise, discussing how NuGet can be integrated into your software development lifecycle, highlighting the videos of the session, and walking through the process of automating NuGet package creation using Continuous Integration.
• Don’t Do Role-Based Authorization Checks; Do Activity-Based Checks - Derick Bailey discusses developing Authorisation systems, discussing how he finds Role Based authorisation doesn’t always fit well, and discussing authorising using an Activity based approach.
• MVVM Backlash - Ward Bell discusses his like of the MVVM pattern, and then proceeds to take an objective view of the pattern discussing its major advantages, and how if you don’t care about those aspects then MVVM may not be the best fit for you.
• Creating a Line Chart using the HTML 5 Canvas - Dan Wahlin takes a look at programming against the HTML 5 Canvas using JavaScript, illustrating with the creation of a simple charting control which draws line graphs.
• The Darkness Behind DateTime.Now - Keyvan Nayyeri discusses the use of DateTime.Now, DateTime.UtcNow and the Stopwatch class, talking about where each should be used, and looking internal implementations and the relative performance of each.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Specifying Event Listeners in XML Configuration , Collection Restrictions & The SaveOrUpdate Event - Ricardo Peres highlights a few NHibenate Pitfalls and Gotchas, some caused by bugs, others by misunderstandings, along with showing workarounds where appropriate
• What’s New in Silverlight 5? - Mohammad Elsheimy gives a run through of the features of Silverlight 5, illustrating with some shared demo code in this CodeProject article

Community

• NxtGenUG - Event - MVC 3 - The Coventry NxtGenUG welcome Ian Russell for a session on ASP.NET MVC3 on the evening of Monday 20th June at the The Royal British Legion in Coventry
• TechDays 2011: dev session recordings, slides and content online - The MSDN ‘Belux’ team highlight the recordings of the sessions from their recent TechDays events featuring an excellent range of speakers and topics allowing those not able to attend to gain considerable benefit from the event.

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Software

• elmah - Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET - The ELMAH team released version 1.2 of ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET). This release addresses a number of issues with support for various backend databases for error recording, along with other bugs
• DiffPlex 1.2 Released - Matthew Manela announces the release of version 1.2 of DiffPlex, the diff engine used by the Code Plex website to compare versions of code. This release adds a new InlineDiffBuilder, case insensitivity, and moves to targeting .NET 4 and Silverlight 4.
• Announcing HtmlTags 1.0 - Joshua Flanagan announces the release of HtmlTags 1.0, a suite of .NET objects for constructing HTML offering a better way than concatenation of strings. The library offers a fluent interface to construct the HTML, and is available via NuGet.

Information

• Read-only and threadsafe are different - Eric Lippert discusses the compiler process of building a look up table for all the symbols used in your program, discussing data structures which are immutable, or become immutable upon some ‘Freeze’ action, following on to discuss thread safety of immutable data structures.
• NuGet Package of the Week #7 - ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) with SQL Server Compact - Scott Hanselman takes a look at the combining of ELMAH 1.2 with the SQL Compact database, available as a convenient NuGet Package allowing your web application to capture error information into its own SQL Compact database.
• Domain Drive Design N-Layered .NET 4.0 Architecture Guide - Miguel Angel Ramos highlights the availability of the English edition of the ‘DDD N-Layered .NET 4.0 Architecture Guide’ along with a supporting Sample Application. The book is available in a variety of e-book formats. The sample application addresses a full range of technologies (.NET4 Core, Windows Server AppFabric and Windows Azure, Silverlight, WPF, ASP.NET MVC clients) showing them in use in a real world like scenario
• The Basics of MVVM - Paul Sheriff gives a nice introduction to the MVVM pattern and its use in Silverlight / WPF applications, illustrating with a number of samples of code, and discussing why you would want to use the MVVM pattern.
• New TDD Kata - Interactions - Roy Osherove shares his second Code Kata exercise, based on his previous string calculator kata this one includes interaction with users and interaction testing.
• A Simple Windows Phone 7 MVVM Tombstoning Example - Colin Eberhardt discusses Windows Phone 7 applciation Tombstoning for applications based on the MVVM pattern, illustrating the implementation of Tombstoning the application with the help of a simple sample application.
• Webinar wrap-up: Julian on JavaScript - reading jQuery (part 2) - Julian M Bucknall blogs about the second part of his Reading jQuery webinar. The recording of the session is available, and this post discusses some of the key points from the session.
• A few tips for working with XAML inside of Visual Studio 2010. - Michael Crump shares four tips for making your experience of working with XAML code in Visual Studio 2010 easier and better.
• Tinyweb Series: 5 To-do Demo - Martin Rue continues his series of posts on his TinyWeb application framework with a look at a sample application which builds on the information in the previous posts to give a better view of the frameworks Model Binding support
• Cookies Law: Ah the Irony! - Andrew Westgarth discusses changes to the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations which come into effect this week in the UK, having an effect on any web applications using cookies

Community

• Free "Guathon"� all day event in London on June 6th - Scott Guthrie will be joined by Steve Sanderson for a whole day event on Monday 6th June in central London which will look at the current crop of ASP.NET MVC and related tools and libraries, KnockOut.js, vNext of ASP.NET and C# and development in the cloud. Registration is required for this free event, and spaces are likely to go quickly.
• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Me, Myself and I on Taking Baby Steps with Node.js on 14 June 2011 - Jan Van Ryswyck will be presenting to the European Virtual Alt.NET User Group on the evening of Tuesday 14th June, giving a taste of JavaScript and Node.js
• Windows Phone UG - June 2011 - Living in a Mango world! - The Windows Phone User Group will be meeting on Wednesday 22nd June, with a feature presentation, along with opportunities to show off your Windows Phone applications, along with a Question and Answer session on the Mango Update.

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Software

• Happy 20th Birthday Visual Basic! - The Visual Basic Team celebrates the 20th birthday of Visual Basic, first publically announced on 20th May 1991. I, and I suspect may of you, did my first commercial development on Visual Basic back in the pre-.NET era and thoroughly enjoyed it, so join me in wishing VB a very happy birthday.
• The Big Event is just a week away - Whilst we are doing celebrations in the Software section, many congratulations to Ayende on his Wedding this week. Someone needs to tell him that people usually give the couple presents, and not the other way round has he has decided to offer a 29% discount on the Hibernating Rhinos profiler range until the end of the month.
• Introducing Debugger Canvas - Kael Rowan shares a video of the Debugger Canvas Power Tool, due to be released next month which brings something of the Code Bubbles development experience to Visual Studio 2010 Debugging

Information

• Eduasync part 6: using the infrastructure manually &amp Part 7: generated code from a simple async method - John Skeet continues his series of post looking at the implementation of the Async / Await functionality currently available in a CTP release. In these two posts Jon explores the compilers role in the Async functionality, looking at what you would have to do if the compiler didn’t help out, and then looks at the work it actually does do for you
• An Obsessive Compulsive Guide To Source Code Formatting - Phil Haack discusses Code Formatting OCD, and looks at a use of the PowerShell console and a Powershell function (wrapped as an NuGet package of course) which can help satisfy your need for enforcing code formatting across a whole solution.
• Anatomy of a Domain Hijacking, part 1 - Leon Bambrick tells the terrifying story of how his email was hacked and his main websites domain name was transferred out to another registrar, giving a number of security tips, and a few pointers of what to watch out for if your mail is compromised.
• Data! I need more data! - Alfred Thompson highlights some useful sources of data that you can use for testing purposes, including popular surnames, first names, along with all sorts of other data available from the US Census bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics , and National Center for Education Statistics.
• Web Browser Control - Specifying the IE Version - Rick Strahl takes a look at how you can control the version of Internet Explorer that the Web Browser UI Control will give you by setting registry values for your application, allowing you to get the desired rendering for your applications.
• Using IIS Express to Secure Silverlight and WCF Applications - Dan Wahlin takes a look at securing the communications between your Silverlight and WCF applications in your development environment using IIS Express, allowing you to get an experience which is more similar to your production environment at development time.
• Entity Framework 4.1 Material - Benny Michielsen shares a series of posts on the features of Entity Framework 4.1, sharing sample code and slides, along with posts on the following:
  • Inheritance - Table per Type
  • Inheritance - Table per Hierarchy
  • Inheritance - Table per Concrete Type
  • Change mappings at runtime
  • Supporting Enums

Community

• NNUG Online - Mai 2011 - Bonus - Scott Hanselman on the MS Web Stack of Love - The Norwegian .NET User Goup welcome Scott Hanselman for a virtual event on the evening of Wednesday 25th May starting at 18:30 Norwegian. Scott will be discussing MVC3, Entity Framework 4.1 MvcScaffolding, SQL Compact, jQuery and much more.
• Microsoft Professional Developers Conference Keynote Archives Now Online - The Channel 9 team announce the availability of archive footage of the Keynote addresses from the PDC Conferences from the past 20 years. Its fascinating to watch these (especially some of the earlier ones) and see how little things change, how much of the ‘future vision’ came true, and some of the things that slipped by the wayside

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Saw a rumour floating about twitter quite a lot last night about the Open Sourcing of Visual Basic 6 - based on a complete lack of supporting evidence in blog posts and more official channels this morning I suspect it is just an (amusing) rumour.

Software

• Update to Monday’s (5/16/2011) Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 Release, v1.2.1. Think "the Visual Basic and Bug Fix update" - Greg Duncan highlights an announcement from Wade Wegner of an update to the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 taking its version number to 1.2.1. This release updates the 1.2.0 release made on Monday to include Visual Basic.NET project templates, and also fixes a number of bugs, so its also worth getting if you’re not a VB Dev.
• Ola Hallengren’s Database Maintenance Scripts - Greg Low highlights an updated release of Ola Hallengren’s Database Maintenance Script, a comprehensive script which deals with backup, optimisation, and Integrity checking on SQL Server 2005 - 2008R2

Information

• Optional argument corner cases, part four - Eric Lippert rounds off this series of post on Optional Arguments discussing how the default values are actually ’stored’ at the caller sites, and how if you change defaults on a method in a library you need to recompile all the assemblies which call this method to get them to update to the new default
• Using Task<T> in ASP.NET MVC Today - DevHawk has been exploring the Async CTP and getting used to all that nice Asynchrony and wanted to apply it to controllers in ASP.NET MVC, This post takes a look at creating enough TPL plumbing to allow controllers to use async / await.
• Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1 KB2478063 Service Pack 5 Feature Set 3.1 R2 November Edition RTW - Maarten Balliauw discusses the importance of good naming, and the recent .NET 4 Platform Update release, talking about how inconsistent and complex naming can cause confusion and lack of understanding.
• Quick Look at Reverse Engineer DB into Code First Classes - Julie Lerman takes a look at the use of the reverse engineering of a database into Entity Framework Code First classes introduced in the release of the EF Power Tools CTP1, examining a simple database model and looking at some of the classes created.
• Insert with Dapper Micro ORM and ASP.NET MVC 3 - Jalpesh P. Vadgama continues his series of posts exploring the use of the Dapper Micro ORM with ASP.NET, looking in this post at the inserting of data from a MVC form into your database.
• Using DebugView to catch debug output of .NET program - Gunnar Peipman highlights an under used, but very useful tool which allows you to see what is going on inside your applications via the Trace and Debug writes. This is a really easy way of seeing diagnostic information in environments where you can’t attach a real debugger to a process.
• Using Fiddler HTTP Debugger for CRM Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning - JMorlock takes a look at using Fiddler to explore some performance problems in a Dynamics CRM application, although the principles apply equally to any web application, and the article provides a good starting point to learn about the use of Fiddler.
• Socially-Engineered XSS Attacks - Eric Lawrence discusses the 3 different types of Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks that the IE9 team traditionally consider, offering a 4th type, based around social engineering and discussing the efforts that have gone into IE9 to help prevent these attacks from succeeding.
• Visual Studio vNext - Simon Cooper discusses the news from TechEd about Visual Studio vNext, and the focus on performance, highlighting build improvements, UI Improvements, further speeding up of the Add References dialog, and the use of the PerfWatson tool.
• Seven Rules for Beginning Programmers - Alfred Thompson highlights 7 rules for developers who are just starting out, originally posed by Paul Vick. As with any list of this nature there are a good number of them that are equally (if not more) applicable to the more seasoned developers amongst us too.
• Switching to MVVM - Zeeshan Amjad explores implementing MVVM in an existing Brown Fields development, giving the background to the MVVM pattern, and looking at migrating real existing code to work in the MVVM way in this CodeProject article

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Software

• EF Power Tools CTP1 Released - The ADO.NET team announce the release of a preview release of the Entity Framework Power Tools which line up against the EF4.1 release providing design time tooling for Code First
• NHibernate 3.2.0 Beta1 - The NHibernate Team release the first beta of NHibernate 3.2. This release includes a few breaking changes from NHibernate 3.1 GA along with a number of bug fixes new features and improvements.

Information

• Did you notice there is a new .Net framework version? & Did you just take a dump on standard versioning practices? - Christiaan Baes & Hadi Hariri highlight a new framework target introduced in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1, resulting in a new target appearing in dialogs, and some inconsistency in the version numbering scheme.
• The craft of cutting code - Phil Winstanley discusses code quality, one of his favorite topics, highlighting tools and practices which can help you to hone your craft and produce beautiful code.
• "Sort" of a follow-up post [IListExtensions class enables easy sorting of .NET list types; today's updates make some scenarios faster or more convenient] - David Anson shares an updated version of his IListExtensions Class for helping with sorting Lists, and responds to some reader questions.
• "Design for Software: a playbook for developers" - Greg Duncan highlights a slide deck from Erik Klimczak’s presentation at Devsum11 looking at the role of design in software, and exploring the key areas of the design process.
• Transitioning from MSUnit to NUnit - Sebastian Negomireanu shares a 4 part series looking at the process of switching from MSTest to NUnit, outlining the reasons he undertook this, and looking at the tooling, Migrating the test code, Integrating the NUnit tests with TFS Builds, and discussing how to obtain code coverage metrics.
• More Great TechEd News: Enum Support in Next Version of Entity Framework!!! - Susan Ibach highlights one of the announcements from TechEd, that the next release of Entity Framework will provide full Enum support, along with support for Table Valued Functions.
• Entity Framework 4.1 Code First - Mapping Enums to Lookup Tables - Josh Reuben has been looking at a different aspect of Enums with Entity Framework, and shares a process for mapping enums onto values in lookup tables in Entity Framework Code First.
• ALM for C++ in Visual Studio vNext at TechEd NA 2011 - Rong Lu shares an overview of her TechEd session on Application Lifecycle Management features for C++ Devs in the next Visual Studio release, running through some of the key features which bring parity to what is available for C#.
• Update on TFS on Azure - Brian Harry gives an update on the Cloud hosted TFS running on Azure, discussing how they have been focusing on getting it running well at ‘internet scale’ in recent months
• Elmah for Glimpse - Best of both worlds - Steven Lauwers takes a look at the ELMAH error handler and Glimpse tooling in ASP.NET MVC applications and looks at combining ELMAH into Glimpse using its MEF based plugin architecture.

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