The Morning Brew

Software

• Windows Phone 7 - Released To Manufacturing - Terry Myerson announces the key milestone in the Windows Phone 7 project, the Release to Manufacturing of the OS to the handset manufacturers allowing them to do the final integration work to bring Windows Phone 7 to their devices and networks
• New Silverlight 4 Service Release 4.0.50826.0 - John Papa highlights an updated Silverlight 4 Service Release complete with an updated SDK release. Key features of this release are improvements to applications start up time, out of browser support for the mouse wheel on Mac, DRM Media and memory leak fixes, and a fix for users who are trialling LightSwtich.
• Release Day: ReSharper 5.1.1; dotCover and dotTrace RCs - JetBrains announce the latest maintenance release of ReSharper, along with release candidates of dotCover and dotTrace and pricing information for their actual release. The ReSharper release brings with it improved performance and stability in Visual Studio 2010, and updates the NUnit version used for the Test Runner
• Emacs Emulation Extension Now Available! - Brittany Behrens announces the release of a free Visual Studio Extension which brings the Emacs keyboard bindings to the Visual Studio 2010 environment
• PublicResourceCodeGenerator now works with Visual Studio 2010 - Guy Smith-Ferrier releases an update to his PublicResourceCodeGenerator which creates strongly typed resource classes allowing you to use resx files with Silverlight. This updated release supports Visual Studio 2010, 2008 and 2005, and full source is available.
• NHibernate Mapping Generator 2.0 Beta 2 - The second beta release of the NHibernate Mapping Generator 2.0 project has been released. This project aims to make it easy to construct NHibernate mappings (fluent and HBM) and Domain Classes directly from your database tables.

Information

• The Future of Silverlight - Brad Becker talks about the role of standards in Silverlight’s development and future, along with discussing how Silverlight fits in with many of the concepts of HTML 5, supplementing rather than replacing functionality provided there.
• Now Available: patterns & practices Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET - J.D. Meier highlights the latest Patterns and Practices book which covers a variety of design patterns for working with parallel programming using the Task Parallel Library. As is usual with Patterns and Practices books, the full text is available on MSDN, with Print and E-book versions available from O’Reilly.
• PragPub - September 2010 - The Pragmatic Bookshelf releases Issue 15 of their electronic magazine PragPub. Articles this month include Agile Flash Cards, Trust in Agile teams, discussions of improving quality of software and a look back at the first human look robot. As usual, the magazine is available in a variety of formats (HTML, PDF, EPUB, etc)
• Inside the "Default Browser Switcher" extension - Victor Garcia Aprea discusses the creation of the Default Browser Switcher extension, inspired by the recent post from Scott Hanselman examining the actual switching process. In this post Victor explores the use of the VSPackage Builder to create the extension
• Think Twice Before You Map Entities To DTOs - Davy Brion looks at some of the alternative ways NHibernate allows you to populate Data Transfer Objects from the data that would be in your entities, exploring the performance cost versus amount of code of the options.
• Castle Windsor - resolve dependencies on an existing object instance - Giorgetti Alessandro shares some helper extension methods which bring Unity like BuildUp functionality to Castle Windsor allowing you to populate dependencies on an existing object using the Windsor container.
• Applying Interface Segregation to Configuration Files - Steve Smith looks at how you can improve the configuration of your applications by remembering the Interface segregation principle and breaking your configuration up into sections which relate to specific features / behaviours
• Daddy, tell me that story about the ‘big brown bear, who loved to write software’ again (because I don’t want to be THAT bear, he’s a bad bear!)… - Greg Duncan highlights a light hearted re-telling of ‘The Big Brown Bear’ children’s story applied to software development by Joseph Cooney

Community

• Internationalizing Silverlight 4 - Guy Smith-Ferrier highlights his presentation to the London Silverlight User Group on Wednesday 15th September 2010 where he will be focusing on Internationalization concepts and the internationalization features of Silverlight, and also announces that he will be delivering a session on Internationalizing Silverlight at the Internationalization and Unicode Conference in California in October.
• Ed Lambda (Edinburgh, Scotland) - Meetup - Ed Lambda, a Functional Programming Usergroup based in Edinburgh, will be meeting to discuss all things functional programming (ranging from languages such as F#, Haskell, Clojure, etc, to tools and functional programming theory) on Monday 13th September in Malone’s Irish Bar in Edinburgh

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Information

• Reactive Extensions for .NET - Event-based Async Operations - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts on the Reactive Extensions for .NET, going back to basics with a look at why we need reactive programming, looking at the increasing need to perform asynchronous event based programming and how the Reactive Extensions make this kind of work easier.
• It really happened, legacy programmers tales - Ayende shares some real world coding horrors in the form of the ‘Super If’, a monster of a condition statement, and the ‘Blackhole Method’ that could absorb whole code bases.
• Super Simple CQRS Example - Greg Young shares the code of a simple Command Query Responsibility Segregation sample which weighs in at around 500 lines which provides a nice illustration of some of the key concepts of CQRS. I look forward to Greg’s future posts on this sample.
• Race Conditions Don’t Exist - Udi Dahan discusses the nature of Race Conditions, and how they typically don’t occur in business applications, and where they appear to be is often an indication that there are some further requirements to be discovered
• Crack .Net Applications 101 - Part 2 - Mark Pearl continues his series looking at decompilation of .NET assemblies taking a look at some of the techniques you can use to help prevent users ‘hacking’ your restricted application to enable additional features.
• Developer’s Guide to Enterprise Library released! - Grigori Melnik highlights the release of the latest Patterns and Practices book. The ‘Developers Guide to Enterprise Library’ aims to provide a primer on the Enterprise Library enabling you to easily select and understand the components that make up the library. The book is available in a variety of forms, including HTML available freely on the MSDN site.
• Another way to Get Start ASP.NET MVC 3 (Preview 1) - Imran Baloch looks at an alternative way to get ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 up and running on your machine without the aid of installers, manually constructing an MVC3 project from and MVC 2 project and referencing the framework source
• The Great Silverlight Competency Test [2] - Jesse Liberty posts up the second question in his Silverlight Competency Test, a series of complex and open ended programming questions on a variety of Silverlight topics which should take a good Silverlight Dev about an hour each.
• .NET Micro Framework - Netduino Controlled Servo Robot - Szymon Kobalczyk shares his second Netdurino powered robotic experiment, this time using the SERB robot but re-fitting it with the Netdurino board and programming it in .NET Micro Framework, and hooking up a joystick controller to control its movements.
• How To : Communicate between two user-controls using Event Aggregator - Kranthi takes an introductory look at using the Silverlight Event Aggregator to allow two controls to communicate in a safe manner, sharing the sample code for the article.
• Practical Tools for Analyzing Concurrency - Code Stepping - Phil Pennington looks at some of the improvements made in the Visual Studio 2010 debugger for better working with Concurrent code exploring a number of the features by way of a worked example debugging session

Community

• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Dublin - 9th October 2010 - The Developer Developer Developer series of events moves over the Irish Sea for DDD Ireland to be held in Dublin on the 9th October 2010. Currently the call for speakers is underway, so if you are interested in speaking at this event get your session proposals in (you have until 13th September) Registration for the event opens on the 22nd September and judging by the current proposed session list its going to be a great event.
• Building Windows Phone 7 Apps? Head to Irish Open Spaces Coding Day! - Martha Rotter provides another reason to attend the Irish Open Spaces Coding Day, the ability to get your hands on some Windows Phone 7 Development Devices and to try your application on the real hardware.
• VBUG Portsmouth: Hyper-V for Developers - VBUG Portsmouth have Liam Westley joining them on Thursday 20th September to deliver his Hyper-V for Developers session giving an introduction to what Hyper-V is, and how it can make your development life easier.

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Software

• New Version of My Free GUI for the Microsoft Ajax Minifier - Jorge Ramon shares the latest version of his GUI wrapper for the Microsoft Ajax Minifier which helps you to produce the smallest most optimal version of your JavaScript code without having to use the command line providing a simple UI to configure and perform the minification.
• I find you "Ultra!" - Ultra Find VS2010 Add-in (Think "Find in Files++") - Greg Duncan highlights Ultra Find, a Visual Studio extension, available on the Visual Studio Gallery, which provides powerful search capabilities as a replacement for the standard find in files functionality, offering searches for classes and methods, exclude file patterns, and much more.
• posh-git Release v0.2 - Keith Dahlby announces the release of posh-git v0.2, a set of scripts which provide integration of git into the PowerShell environment
• CSLA 4 version 4.0.1 released - Rockford Lhotka announces version 4.0.1 of his CSLA application framework which is a bugfix release which addresses a number of issues in the 4.0 release
• Visual Studio LightSwitch beta Training Kit Now Available for Download - ‘gduthie’ highlights the release of a Developer Training Kit for the LightSwitch beta release which contains demos and hands on labs sessions which walk through the process of creating a LightSwitch application, and building and packaging extensions for users to use.

Information

• Compiler|Interpreter Warnings Are Important Learning Opportunities - Davy Brion talks about the role of Compiler / Interpreter warnings as a useful educational tool for helping you to write better code, and how you can enable Warnings as Errors which will prevent your build from succeeding if there are errors.
• Managing business object locks on application level - Gunnar Peipman takes a look at building a solution for locking business objects on a single server at the application level, allowing your application to safely work with a particular object while preventing other threads from accessing that object. Full code is provided for download.
• The Joy of Moq - Multiple Interfaces - The ‘Bare Bones Coder’ shows how the Moq mocking framework allows you to construct mock objects which implement multiple interfaces.
• Implementation of an Observer - Abhishek Sur looks at implementing the Observer pattern to provide a way of implementing notifications, exploring the origins of the Observer and some of the theory behind them, along with sample code showing the implementation.
• The Task Parallel Library Series - The Task Class - Steve Strong continues his series of posts on the Task Parallel Library introduced in .NET 4 with a look at how the Task class makes it very easy to implement parallelized work with the ability to know when the parallel work is completed.
• HTTP Optimization the easy way: Part 1, how do I know? - Scott Galloway talks about optimising the performance of your web applications by reducing requests to the server and making the data you do transmit make the most of the available bandwidth.
• Crack .Net Applications 101 - Part 1 - Mark Pearl takes an introductory look at disassembly of .NET executables using Reflector and Reflexil, and how these tools make it quite easy to view and alter the contents of .NET assemblies.
• Overview of Data Validation in LightSwitch Applications - Prem Ramanathan takes a look at the validation support provided in Visual Studio LightSwitch which allow you to add data integrity rules to your application with little effort, exploring a variety of different validations in a sample application.
• More on SVG - Jennifer Yu of the Internet Explorer Team talks about the importance of SVG for the modern web, HTML5 and the hardware accelerated support for it in Internet Explorer 9
• Performance: Profiling how different web sites use browser subsystems - IEBlog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Jason Weber (also of the IE team) discusses the different amounts of use that different website generate on the core components of the Web Browser, and how understanding this breakdown can help to optimise the browser platform for optimal use.
• Rx on the server, part 4 of n: Buffering output to a stream - Jeffrey van Gogh continues his series looking at the use of the Reactive Extensions for .NET on the server-side, looking in this part at the use of Rx in providing buffering for stream output.
• Testing Rx - Jeffrey van Gogh highlights a Channel 9 video in which he discusses the new testing functionality which is now a part of the Reactive Extensions
• Demonstrating CLR Side-by-Side Execution - Sasha Goldshtein shares a sample which illustrates the ability to run .NET 2.0 and .NET 4 side by side in the same process by having two COM libraries written in managed code each targeting different versions of the framework, and loading them both in a C++ application.
• TSQL: Passing array/list/set to stored procedure (MS SQL Server) - Denis Gladkikh looks at the variety of different ways of passing an array of values into a stored procedure in SQL Server, exploring delimited strings, bulk insert and the newly introduced table valued parameters.
• The Bricks Game - Tetris for Silverlight - Marcelo Ricardo de Oliveira walks through the creation of a Tetris clone created in Silverlight 4 using the styles and themes and MVVM style of development
• I am an Exception Extremist - John Sonmez talks about his dislike of throwing exceptions, discussing some defensive programming techniques we can use in preference to throwing exceptions, and sharing some best practices for web we really have to throw exceptions.
• PropertyOf and INotifyPropertyChanged.PropertyChanged without strings - Fabrice Marguerie looks at a technques which allows you to write INotifyPropertyChanged and PropertyOf implementations which do not rely on strings
• Experimenting with enterprise level bus messaging - Sacha Barber takes a detailed introductory look at the NServiceBus project for implementing a message passing architecture exploring the theory behind the architecture and how NServiceBus implements it.
• The Programmer’s Body - Scott Hanselman reminds us not to take our bodies for granted and to look after ourselves as our profession as programmers does tend to keep us trapped (hunched) behind a desk, and how that can have serious knock on effects on our health.

Community

• Andreas Öhlund on NServiceBus on 29 September 2010 - The European Virtual Alt.NET group have a presentation from Andreas Öhlund on the evening of Wednesday 29th September 2010, starting at 7:00 GMT (8pm UK). In the presentation Andreas will be giving a hands on introduction to NServiceBus, showing how to get started developing with the project.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript - Scene 6: Loopage - (52 min.) - The Yahoo! User Interface team share the latest instalment of Douglas Crockford’s talk series on the JavaScript language. This sixth session looks at event loops and server side JavaScript, and the video of the session is available in a variety of formats.

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Monday is a public holiday here in the UK (the last one before Christmas Day - a depressing thought), and as is the Morning Brew tradition I shall be taking the day off so there will be no edition of The Morning Brew on Monday. Normal posting will resume on Tuesday. Have a good (long) weekend everyone.

Software

• SigParse uploaded to MSDN Code Gallery - David Broman highlights the release of SigParse on the MSDN Code Gallery. SigParse is a code sample written by Rico Mariani which takes the method signatures in CLR metadata and parses out information about their components. This code is now licensed as MS-PL.
• VS 2010 - Fix for hang on debugging ASP.Net 3.5 Apps - Joel Varty highlights the availability of a fix for Visual Studio 2010 users who have problems with the IDE hanging when debugging ASP.NET 3.5 applications

Information

• Must I release everything when using Windsor? - Krzysztof Kozmic continues his series of posts looking at the lifecycle of components in the Windsor Container, looking in detail at the process for releasing components once you have finished with them, and looks at how Windsor makes it easier by doing most of the work for you.
• Intro to RX - Scott Weinstein highlights a series of 7 posts from Lee Campbell looking at the Reactive Extensions for .NET, exploring the key concepts of Observables, subscribing, combining, flow control, and types of observables.
• The Downside Of Providing An API Through Extension Methods - Davy Brion looks at one subtle difference between Moq and RhinoMocks in the form of its API, and use of Extension Methods, showing that an API which is heavy with Extension methods can result in very cluttered Intellisense.
• C#/.NET Five Little Wonders That Make Code Better (1 of 3) - James Michael Hare starts a mini-series of three posts each consisting of 5 C# / .NET features which can make you code much better. This first part explores Null Coalescing, Auto Properties, ‘as’ casting, the Stopwatch and TimeSpan Factory methods.
• PSSCor2: GC Heap Analysis Commands - Sasha Goldshtein continues exploring the PSSCor2 debugger extension showing some of the improvements it offers to the commands for exploring the managed heap
• Coding: Mutating parameters - Mark Needham discusses a long held coding practice of not mutating or changing values passed as function parameters in functions, looking at the origins of the practice, and looking at some cases where its not been followed, questioning if it really is that important a principle
• Writing Files from Low-Integrity Processes - Eric Lawrence looks at the ability to write files in processes started in Low Integrity mode, discussing the origins and uses of low and medium integrity processes using Internet Explorer as an example. Eric shares a solution to allow your low integrity processes to write to locations that aren’t normally allowed by creating the file initially as medium integrity and marking it to be allowed to be access from low integrity processes.
• Release Management White Paper and Assessment - Jez Humble shares a white paper “Agile Release Management: Towards Frequent, Low-Risk Releases” and multichoice assessment looking at the release management process based in part on the content of his book ‘Continuous Delivery’
• The Anatomy of a LightSwitch Application Part 3 - the Logic Tier - The LightSwitch team continue their series on the architecture behind LightSwitch applications, looking at the ‘logic’ tier which acts as the gateway to the data storage, including concepts such as Transactions, data providers, Data services, queries, etc.
• TekPub Content is FREE this Friday! - Darcy_Lussier highlights a special 1 day offer of free content on TekPub in celebration of James Avery’s birthday. TekPub is a great resource of detailed screen casts and tutorials created by well known and respected developers covering a wide variety of tech concepts, and this is a great opportunity to check it out.
• We’re Not Paid To Write Code - Phil Haack discusses what our primary goal as software developers is, and that its not writing code, its delivering solutions which provide customers with value

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Update: Looks like I forgot to assign the Tags/Categories to this post, so some of you may have missed out on it. I’ve added them now - thanks to Dan Puzey for spotting it

Software

• Microsoft Project Code-Named ‘Houston’ CTP 1 (August 2010 Update) - The SQL Azure team announce the August 2010 CTP release of ‘Houston’ their light weight database management tool for SQL Azure. This CTP update features improved navigation and search, better visibility of database statistics, table, view and stored procedure designers. This preview version has also been deployed to all datacenters allowing you to experience better performance by using an instance local to your database.

Information

• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - Buffering - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts exploring the Reactive Extension for JavaScript with a look at the various techniques the framework provides for collecting values from observables and buffering them into an array which is then returned to your code.
• A quick primer on .NET web frameworks - Chad Myers gives an overview of some of the more common ASP.NET based web frameworks, looking briefly at what each does well and does badly.
• Chakra: Interoperability Means More Than Just Standards - Allen Wirfs-Brock discusses some of the types of decision the team implementing the Internet Explorer 9 JavaScript engine had to make relating to the standards compliant implementation they are creating
• MSDEV Video Series Highlights Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) - Bruce Kyle highlights a new series of videos from MSDev exploring some of the new key concepts in the Internet Explorer 9
• LightSwitch & Source Control & LightSwitch on the wire - Ayende rounds up this series of posts sharing his initial impressions of Visual Studio LightSwitch with a look at how LightSwitch’s generated code will work in Version Control system environments, and finds that if you include images in your data (and those images are large) then you are in for a wait while the LightSwitch screens download.
• Profilers, in-process side-by-side CLR instances, and a free test harness - David Broman looks at the requirement for profilers in .NET 4 which implement ICorProfilerCallback3 to be aware of side-by-side CLR instances, exploring what this Side-By-Side feature is, and how your profiling code can be made to accommodate it.
• Inspecting Local Root Lifetime - Sasha Goldshtein looks at the SOS debugger command !GCInfo which allows you to workout when local variables become active or inactive
• MVC 3 Preview 1 VS 2010 Template w/ Razor, Html 5 Boilerplate and OpenId Authentication | Adventures in HttpContext - Michael Hamrah shares an ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 Visual Studio 2010 project template which combines the Razor view engine with HTML5 Boilerplate from Paul Irish, and replaces the MembershipProvider with OpenID authentication implemented using DotNetOpenAuth.
• Experiments with WindowChrome - ‘ jwalk’ explores the WindowChrome WPF class included in the WPF Shell Integration Library which shipped as a part of the WPF Microsoft Ribbon Control, looking at some of the additional window styling that this class enables.
• An easier way to unit test INotifyPropertyChanged in Silverlight/WPF - Benjamin Day shares a simple class to help make testing IPropertyNotified implementations in classes much easier

Community

• Behind the scenes at mvcConf: How we ran a free virtual conference - Jon Galloway talks about his experience as one of the organisers of the very successful mvcConf virtual conference, discussing how the team organised the virtual event, the things that worked and the things that they could improve on for next time.
• Open Source? There’s an annual award for that… "Welcome to the 2010 Open Source Awards" - Greg Duncan highlights the Open Source Awards 2010, a virtual award organised by Packt Publishing, with projects nominated and voted on by you. Nominations are open unitl 17th September, so if you know of a worthy project get it nominated.

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Software

• WikiPlex 1.4 Released - Matt Hawley announces the release of WikiPlex 1.4, the wiki engine behind the CodePlex wiki. This release consists of a .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 release, with the sample website implemented in ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight 4 support by default, ability to include Vimeo videos and a number of other bugfixes.

Information

• An effective testing strategy - Jimmy Bogard shares some details of how a recent project he worked on structured their automated testing to minimise the requirement for manual QA team testing of the application, discussing the break down of types of tests they had, the quantities of tests of each type, and some other testing and development practices relating to large projects
• Quality Assurance - Jeffrey Palermo, Blake Caraway and Eric Hexter of HeadSpring discuss how they handle Quality Assurance, discussing the importance of having responsibility for quality in every team member, how you don’t need testers to have quality assurance, and also the importance of Full System Tests.
• Upgrading to Windsor 2.5 (Northwind) - Krzysztof Kozmic shows the process of upgrading an existing code base to use the latest Castle Windsor 2.5 release, illustrating by upgrading the Sharp Architecture project explaining the steps along the way
• New! Unit Testing Asp.NET Applications with Pex and Moles Tutorial - Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux highlights a new tutorial document from the Pex and Moles team which walks through the process of creating isolated tests for ASP.NET code using the Moles and Pex libraries
• Search and Navigation Tips/Tricks with Visual Studio - Scott Guthrie continues his series exploring the featues of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 with his 27 instalment. In this post Scott explores some of the less known Visual Studio search features such as incremental search, Find Usage, Navigate Backwards / Forward and many more.
• iPhone to Windows Phone 7 Tutorial - #0 - Jesse Liberty begins a new series of posts looking at providing you with the basic information to be a Windows Phone 7 Developer, approaching it from the point of view of a developer who has worked with iPhone development. This introductory post sets the scene, and introduces some of the key concepts.
• Learning F# for C# developers - Bill Morrissey starts a series lookin at F# from the point of view of a C# developer, and in this first post looks at a hello world example, and starts to explore types, whitespace and comments
• PSSCor2: Object Inspection Commands, Part 2 - Sasha Goldshtein continues with his look at thePSSCor2 debugging extension looking in this part at some of the commands and output relating to exploring objects which live on the heap.
• "Getting Started with UML" DZone Refcard - Greg Duncan highlights the latest RefCard quick reference card from DZone. This card, created by James Sugrue provides a 6 page overview to the key concepts of UML.
• Degrees of Breaking Changes: Optional Parameters in C# 4.0 - Bill Wagner looks at the level of consideration you should give to Optional Parameters included in your API, looking at the effect a change of default value on code that is compiled against your library.
• LightSwitch: Initial thoughts & Profiling LightSwitch using Entity Framework Profiler & Analyzing LightSwitch data access behavior - Ayende takes a peek under the covers of LightSwitch, looking at the development experience, application performance and the way it does data access using his Entity Framework Profiler.
• What were you doing 15 years ago today? The launch of Windows 95… - Eric Ligman reminds us that yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the release of Windows 95 and looks back at the Microsoft of 1995. Raymond Chen also shares a memory of the Apple perspective in Windows 95 in his post ‘Windows 95: It sucks less‘

Community

• Irish Open Spaces Coding Day III - Saturday 11th September sees the 3rd Irish Open Spaces Coding Day, being held in Enterprise Ireland’s offices in Dublin. The main focus of the event is .NET development, although other technologies are welcome to join in, and the day consists of getting into groups various interest based and writing some code collaboratively - a great opportunity to work with a range of developers and learn lots.

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Software

• LightSwitch Public Beta 1 Now Available! - The Visual Studio LightSwitch team announces the release of the first public beta of LightSwitch, the Rapid Line of Business application development tool.
• SQLCop update Version 1.1 - George Mastros highlights an update to the SQLCop project, an FxCop like tool for your SQL Server database, which will inspect and report on possible problems. This version includes a number of bugfixes to improve the experience (especially in use in partially connected environments)

Information

• LightSwitch Beta1 Now Available, Building Your First App - Jason Zander follows on from the LightSwitch public beta release with a walkthrough the process of building your first application using the new tooling in a step by step guide. Matt Thalman also explores LightSwitch in his post Authentication Features in Visual Studio LightSwitch taking a look at the different authentication possibilities in LightSwitch applications.
• A Developer’s Roadmap to Windows Phone 7 Launch Timing - The Windows Phone 7 team announce the plan for the run up to the Windows Phone 7 Launch, outlining some of the key dates and sharing links to some resources.
• PSSCor2: Object Inspection Commands, Part 1 - Sasha Goldshtein begins a series of posts looking at the PSSCor2 debugging extensions released by Microsoft a while back, and providing a number of useful additions to the core SOS debugger
• Database assisted denormalization - Ayende explores some possibiliies for denormalisation of data in a relational database using features of the SQL Server engine, looking at a variety of ways of solving the blog post and Number of posts problem examining the performance of the queries used. Interesting discussion breaking out in the comments.
• ASP.NET MVC with JQuery Validation and ValidationSummary - Imran Baloch looks at combining the Validation summary control with the jQuery Validation library to provide feedback clientside for the validations being performed on a page
• What is the difference in <:%: variable%> and <%= variable%> in ASP.NET MVC? - Jeffrey Palermo reminds of the introduction of the <%: blah %> syntax, explaining its difference from the traditional <%=blah%> syntax, and highlights a subtle difference between VS2008 and VS2010 ASP.NET MVC templates
• The ThreadPool is dead - Josh Twist looks at the improvements offered by the Task Parallel Library over the Threadpool in .NET 4, suggesting that TPL is the way to go for parallel code in .NET 4
• IObserver and IObservable - A New addition to BCL - Abhishek Sur looks at the IObserver and IObservable interfaces that are now a part of the .NET Base Class Library, looking at how they can be derived from the duality with IEnumerable / IEnumerator and illustrating their use with a simple example
• Lessons Learnt - Each Application Should Be Shipped With a Set of Diagnostics Tools - Marek Blotny discusses the importance of providing good logging and diagnostics tools for applications that you develop highlighting a number of key areas to consider
• Log Reporting Dashboard for ASP.NET MVC - ‘daffrey’ looks at combinging the output from ELMAH, Health Monitoring, Log4Net and NLog into a useful ASP.NET MVC based diagnostics / log reporting tool in this CodeProject article
• Heisenbug of the Day: IIS 7.0 Discarding POST Data From Firefox 3 when using Custom 404 Handlers - Dylan Beattie looks at an annoying issue with IIS7 handling 404 errors with FireFox 3 as the web browser posting small amounts of data, explaining how he investigated the problem and the tools used, along with sharing the workaround they ended up implementing
• Capturing Page Load Times - FiddlerScript to the Rescue - Robert Bogue looks at a use of the scripting capabilities included in the Fiddler HTTP diagnostic Proxy, showing how you can use it to capture the load time of all your pages in your application and log them to a file.

Community

• JAOO Aarhus 2010 Free Event - Oren "Ayende" Eini: "NoSQL Databases" and Nikhil Kothari - The Jaoo conference and .NET Usergroup will be hosting a free event in the early evening of October 5th in Aarhus, Denmark where Ayende will be presenting a session on NoSQL Databases, and Nikhil Kothari will be discussing Silverlight. If you are attending the JAOO conference this is a great free event for your evening.

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Software

• Castle Windsor (incl. Core with DynamicProxy and Dictionary Adapter) v2.5 final is out - Krzysztof Kozmic announces the official final release of Castle Windsor v2.5. This release targets .NET 3.5 (SP1), .NET 4, .NET 4 Client Profile, and Silverlight 3 & 4. This release sees some minor improvements over the beta 2 release of a month ago and there is one sample application (a Silverlight 4 app) which illustrates some of the new versions features
• Getting Started with PowerConsole - Bil Simser takes a look at PowerConsole, a Visual Studio 2010 add-on available from the Extension Manager which brings PowerShell right into the Visual Studio Environment, allowing you to explore, manipulate, and query the IDE environment from a command line.
• Visual Studio ALM Rangers - Visual Studio Database Guide "ships"… Cowabunga! - Willy-Peter-Schaub highlights the release of the latest Visual Studio ALM Rangers Guide, the Database Guide which looks at Database Projects in detail, giving guidance for Solution and Project Management, Source Code and Configuration Management, External Changes, Build and Deploy, along with database testing and deployments.

Information

• .NET Micro Framework - More blinking LEDs - Szymon Kobalczyk takes a look at the new .NET Micro Framework development board called ‘Netduino’, a board which is pin compatible with the very popular Arduino boards. Szymon discusses the hardware, and then shares a couple of simple projects for working with LED segment displays, complete with the code to run it.
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Pt. 5 - IResult and Coroutines - Rob Eisenberg continues his series exploring the features of his Caliburn Micro Framework taking a look at its support for Coroutines allowing you to execute part of a routine, pause, go do something else and return to where you left off.
• Rx on the server, part 3 of n: Writing an observable to a stream - Jeffrey van Gogh continues his series exploring the uses of the Reactive Extensions in Server Side Code with a look at writing the values of an observable to disk asynchronously
• Bending Time with the Reactive Extensions - Scott Weinstein looks at the support for custom schedulers in the Reactive Extensions allowing you to test time dependent reactive code without having to wait for the time to elapse.
• How to change the default browser in Visual Studio programmaticly with PowerShell and possibly poke yourself in the eye - Scott Hanselman looks at finding a way of switching the default browser used by Visual Studio mid-session using some PowerShell and registry monitoring, reminding us that programs and computers are not black boxes, we can poke around inside and make some powerful discoveries
• Animation with the HTML Canvas Tag and the IE9 Preview in Expression Web 4 - Little-endian - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - ‘gsmith’ walks through the creation of a simple animation using the HTML Canvas element in Internet Explorer 9, stepping through he JavaScript required to work with the element.
• Want to pack JS and CSS really well? Convert it to a PNG and unpack it via Canvas - Chris Heilmann highlights a slightly crazy idea from Jacob Seidelin, packaged up into a script by Alex Le. The idea is to use PNG’s lossless compression to compress CSS and JavaScript, send it to the browser via the canvas element, and then decompress it on the client.
• Website diagnostics page to diagnose your ASP.NET website - Omar Al Zabir looks at the creation of a self diagnostics page for your web applications, testing the various requirements for the application, and reporting their state in the hosted environment back to you.
• Using Different Resources for Windows Phone 7 Themes - Ivan Suhinin looks at serving different resource content to your Windows Phone 7 application dependent on the theme the user of the phone has the device set to, building on some earlier work from Derik Whittaker.
• Storing and playing media on Windows Phone 7 - Tim Heuer looks at implementing a download of a audio file, storing it for later playback on the Windows Phone 7. This post walks through the simple sample application, and full code is available to download.
• MSR Rex - Christian Bitter takes a brief look at the Microsoft Research project Rex, a tool to explore regular expressions. Christain looks at a sample of its use where it can generate sample data for a given regular expressions
• Anatomy of the T4 Text Template - Doug Holland gives a simple guide to the way that T4 templates are constructed, showing how easily you can create templated code using the T4 system.
• Maintenance-Free Mocking for Unit Testing with EntityFramework 4.0 - Rab Hallett looks at the creation of a low maintenance set of Mocks for working with Entity Framework data models, generating the code for the mocks using T4
• Roll your own mocks with RealProxy - Derek Fowler takes a look at using the RealProxy class from the .Net Remoting part of the framework to construct his own simple mocking framework. Full source is available on GitHub
• Technical Debt- Don’t Let it Kill Your Projects - Gary Short gives an overview of his talk on Technical Debt, giving some key information on managing debt, identifying debt and removing debt.

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