September 2011

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #949

Posted by on 30 Sep 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

Information

  • Cloud Identity Stories for Developers – Application Architecture Scenarios – Alik Levin shares a PDF version of ‘Cloud Identity Scenarios and Solutions for Developers’ which takes a look at a number of different authentication scenarios outlining the architecture to handle them and highlighting how-to and other resources to help implement the solution.
  • Free Programming Book – Practical Foundations for Programming Languages – Tatworth highlights the availability of a draft edition of ‘Practical Foundations for Programming Languages’ from Robert Harper of Carnegie Mellon University. This 550+ page book discusses all aspects of the formal computer science that goes into programming langauges.
  • Just a quick note about Tests – Mark Rendle discusses the importance of having a good range of tests for your projects, discussing how his suite of tests for Simple.Data give him certainty about the software he is delivering.
  • AutoMapper 2.0 – Nested/Child Containers – Jimmy Bogard shares a look at one of the new features of AutoMapper 2.0, support for nested / child containers for service location.
  • Mvc.ValidationTookit Alpha Release: Conditional Validation with MVC 3 – Simon Ince shares an alpha release of his ASP.NET MVC validation toolkit for ASP.NET MVC 3 which provides conditional validation support, dependency validation and validation groups answering some of the common requirements for more advanced validation.
  • NHibernate Built-in Code Based Mapping instead of using Fluent NHibernate – Kazi Manzur Rashid takes a look at the new built in Code Based Mapping which is provided in NHibernate 3. This built in functionality is similar in nature to that offered by Fluent NHibernate, and this post illustrates the conversion between the two with worked examples.
  • CSS3 text-shadow in IE10 – Jennifer Yu discusses the implementation of CSS3 Text-Shadow support in Internet Explorer 10, sharing a number of examples which illustrate the visual possibilities that this feature enables.
  • Avoid Parallel Hierarchies – Chris Eargle discusses a potentially troublesome object oriented situation as highlighted by Kent Beck in his book ‘Implementation Patterns’, discussing the scenario and how Generics can help restructure this relationship into a more manageable form.
  • Massive (The Micro-ORM), winforms and VB.Net – Christiaan Baes takes an introductory look at the use of the Massive Micro ORM from Rob , walking through a getting started from installation to retrieving data.

The Morning Brew #948

Posted by on 29 Sep 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • jQuery 1.7 Beta 1 Released – dmethvin and the jQuery Team announce the release of the first beta release of jQuery 1.7. Beta 1 is intended for early adopters to try using in their existing applications to help test the compatibility of the new version, and features a number of significant changes including new APIs for events, changes to form submission behaviour in older Internet Explorer versions, and much much more.
  • Final version of Windows Phone SDK 7.1 now available for download – Aaron Stebner highlights the release of the final edition of te Windows Phone SDK 7.1, linking to the official announcements along with the download links for both the English and non-English versions, along with highlighting some good resources for the SDK and discussing the installation and what to do if installation fails.
  • Windows Phone Mango release and we want your feedback! – Cheryl Simmons highlights the updated documentation and samples for the release of the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK and also directs feedback on these items to the team’s UserVoice site.
  • ILMerge get’s a rev – Greg Duncan highlights an update to the ILMerge tool released on Microsoft Downloads. As yet there appear to be no details of what has changed, but Greg has a link to the likely place where it will be announced.
  • NMigrate – Nicolas Dorier takes the wraps off the NMigrate Project, a framework for migrating various aspects of your application to future versions. The project is hosted on CodePlex, and this CodeProject article walks through the various aspects of its use.

Information

  • Task Exception Handling in .NET 4.5 – Stephen Toub discusses some of the improvements in exception handling in the latest release of the Task Parallel Library in the .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview, discussing how they have strived for a high degree of backward compatibility along with some significant improvements.
  • Lighting up your C# Metro apps by Using the Settings Contract – Derik Whittaker continues his series of posts looking at the different features of Windows 8 which you can plug into your applications via the provided contracts, exploring the integration into this System Settings panel
  • CQRS is too complicated – Rob Ashton takes a look into one of the common issues people have with CQRS, the notion that it is too complicated, discussing how i doesn’t have to be that complex or difficult to implement with a look at a number of different scenarios.
  • Is SQL the barrier to continuous deployment? – Paul Stack discusses the complexities of working with database changes in a continuous deployment environment, discussing the use of tooling to help, and the practice of skipping automatic deployments of versions with database changes, as well as musing about how NoSql may change these types of problem.
  • Code Katas: Kicking off With a Little JavaScript – Adron shares his experience working on a Roman Numeral based Kata problem in JavaScript, discussing how he worked through the Kata, including the use of QUnit for the tests, sharing the full source of his solution.
  • Nullable Types’ Subtlety – Mehdi Khalili takes a look at an interesting problem involving Nullable types including a discussion of how the is operator works as a part of the solution (explored at the IL level)

Community

  • JetBrains Tour – Essex, Cambridge, Manchester & Coventry – Hadi Hariri is on tour on behalf of JetBrains in the UK taking in a number of NxtGenUG groups between 14th and 17th November where he will be talking on the subject of mouseless driven development in ReSharper and how this tooling can help accelerate your development.
  • October 4th to 6th – FREE Online Conferences on Phone, Azure and IE – Eric Nelson highlights 3 days containing a couple of hours of online conference at the beginning of next month addressing Azure, Windows Phone and Internet Explorer. The events are organised as a part of the TechDays Online and are free to virtually attend.
  • Speed War (Operation"Jungle Cheetah") – WPO @ The Times (November) – The London Web Performance Group welcome Mehdi Ali, who is the Optimisation Manager for the Times websites for a session on the optimisation of heavily dynamic websites as well as opportunity to network and discuss on the evening of Wednesday 16th November,
  • Backbone.js Screencast – Introduction and Views – Joey Beninghove shares a re-recording of his webinar session originally presented for the Develop With Passion Webinar, giving an introduction to the creation of a backbone.js application, with a focus on the views aspect of the framework.

The Morning Brew #947

Posted by on 28 Sep 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • September 2011 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit – Stephen Walther announces the release of the September 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit. This update, available from NuGet or the project’s CodePlex site brings start and end date restrictions to the Calendar, a control for displaying Twitter content, and a Gravitar control to retrieve User images.
  • Updated TPL Dataflow CTP – Stephen Toub announces the standalone release of the latest CTP release of the Task Parallel Dataflow library in addition to the library’s inclusion as a part of the .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview. This version of the library works against .NET 4 and brings a number of improvements over the previous CTP releases.
  • NServiceBus Modelling Tools – Udi Dahan announces the availability of the first version of tooling for Modeling NServiceBus, allowing you to design NServiceBus solutions from within the Visual Studio IDE
  • YUI 3.4.1 is now live – Allen Rabinovich announces the release of version 3.4.1 of the YUI JavaScript user interface library. This minor release includes over 150 bugfixes across a wide range project areas along with improvements to documentation and samples.
  • Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" update begins – Eric Hautala announces the official launch of Windows Phone 7.5 AKA Mango which is now actively being pushed out by networks, with most existing customers receiving it within 4 weeks.

Information

  • Keep it secret, keep it safe – Eric Lippert discusses cryptography, its difference from security, and discusses some of the different types of cryptography using the Bob and Alice (and a few extras) scenarios to explain how the different types work.
  • Hanselminutes.com: Rewriting a 5 year old VB.NET WebForms application as an ASP.NET Web Pages application with Razor – Scott Hanselman discusses the steps he took to upgrade a simple old WebForms application to a more modern ASP.NET Web Pages application using Razor and Rob Conery’s Massive data access library.
  • Massive’s Dynamic Query Syntax – Rob Conery picks up on Scott’s early attempts to use Massive, showing some better ways of creating queries using Massive
  • Is OR/M an anti pattern? – Ayende discusses an article which suggests that Object Relational Mapping is an anti-pattern, discussing the different types of application and how ORM in the right circumstances is the right choice.
  • What’s happening on the NuGet feed (leveraging OData in an RSS reader) – Jason Jarrett discusses consuming the NuGet OData feed in your RSS reader as a way of monitoring the release of packages, building URLs which allow you to keep saved searches in your RSS reader, providing an alternative to NuGetFeed.Org for when your NuGet feed is more private.
  • MSDN Magazine: October Issue Preview – Michael Desmond gives a preview of the next edition of MSDN Magazine, due out early next month, highlighting all the significant articles and technologies which will feature.
  • Blob Download Bug in Windows Azure SDK 1.5 – Windows Azure Storage Team highlight a known issue with Synchronous blob downloads using the Windows Azure SDK 1.5 which can result in partial blob downloads being seen as a download of the full blob. A SDK hotfix will be available to resolve this issue shortly, and the team share a workaround for the meantime.
  • A Look at F# from C#’s corner – Demis Bellot takes a look at the F# language from the point of view of a C# developer, discussing some of the key features of the F# language and how it differs from C#
  • Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview: Quick Launch – Zain Naboulsi takes a look at the new Quick Launch functionality included in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview looking at the different features it provides quick access to.
  • Doing Crazy Things with ASP.NET MVC 4’s Display Modes – Eric B Sowell takes a look at the ASP.NET MVC 4 DisplayMode functionality, discussing how it can be used to present different views to different types of devices, looking at how you can extend this functionality to present different views depending on the UserAgent.

Community

  • NxtGenUG – Event: Visual Studio LightSwitch – The Manchester / Warrington NxtGenUG group is meeting on Wednesday 19th October for a session from Rob Martin looking at the Visual Studio LightSwitch tooling which provides a self service way of building applications for the desktop and cloud.
  • WPUG 25th Oct 2011 – Windows Phone 7 – WP7Dev – The London based Windows Phone User Group are meeting on Tuesday 25th October at Juno Bar. The agenda for the event is yet to be confirmed, but will hopefully consist of a speaker (or two) along with a chance to network with your fellow WP developers and an opportunity to demo and show what you have been creating.

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