The Morning Brew

Well this week has been a busy week, and after a flurry of announcements it is now time for the community to get to work on exploring the new technologies released this week – I look forward to an interesting few weeks of posts going deeper into the specific technologies.

PDC

• PDC2008 Quick Video Link List – Greg Duncan gathers together the video and presentations for all the PDC sessions into one simple list, and even shows how he compiled the list using a bit of VB and the HTML Agility Pack – this is practically 2 posts for the price of one!
• C# 4.0 New Features Part 2.1 – default parameter intrigue – Justin Etheredge continues his series of posts looking a the new features of C# 4.0. In this followup post to part 2, Justin expands on a comment left on a previous post to explain why default parameters are implemented the way they are.
• A Quick Waddle Around Oslo – David Ing talks about his impressions of Oslo based on the sessions attended at PDC
• Windows Azure Back End – Dominic Green looks into what goes on behind the scenes with Windows Azure’s backend
• First Look at Windows 7 – Tejas provides a quick run through of some of the first things you notice about Windows 7
• Azure Services Training Kit – Now available – Neil Hutson highlights the availability of the Azure Services Training Kit PDC Preview release, containing 11 hands on labs for Azure

Software

• Add-in to attach ASP.NET debugger – Achintya Jha shares a simple Visual Studio Add-in which makes it a one click process to connect the VS debugger to the ASP.NET Worker Process
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack October 2008 Available For Download – SQLDenis highlights the availablilty of the SQL server 2008 Feature Pack release for October 2008. This pack conatins a huge array of goodies for anyone working with SQL 2008
• Generator Studio released on CodePlex – Ryan Schreiber announces the pre-beta release of Generator Studio, a code generator based on NVelocity primarly aimed at generating Castle ActiveRecord classes
• XNA Game Studio 3.0 is here! – XNA Game Studio 3.0 has not RTM’d. This game development tool now allows submission of games to Xbox LIVE Community Games, along with a host of other new features.

Information

• Update on LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities Roadmap – The ADO.NET Team explain the future Roadmap for Linq to SQL and Linq to Entities / Entity Framework, raising a number of concerns in the developer community (in follow up posts below and the comments on this post) that Linq to SQL may now be a dead end. Hopefully the situation will be clarified in the near future.
• LINQ To SQL Gets Kicked to the Curb… Needs A Good Home! – David Hayden talks about the ADO.NET Team’s announcement about Linq to SQL and Entity framework / LINQ to Entities, suggesting that ‘care in the community’ might be the best thing for Linq to SQL
• Microsoft kills Linq to SQL – Ayende responds to the ADO.NET teams announcement on the future of Linq To SQL and Entity Framework / LINQ to Entities
• My stored procedure "best practices" checklist – Aaron Bertrand shares his best practices for developing stored procedures covering both coding style (casing, formatting etc) along with some coding best practices (good use of NOCOUNT etc)
• Refactoring Service Dependencies to Separated Interface – Billy McCafferty talks about performing a refactoring to split out service dependencies to a separated Interface, along with a discussion of why you would want to do it and also a worked example of performing the refactoring.
• Bulk Data Operations With NHibernate’s Stateless Sessions – Davy Brion looks at how Stateless Sessions in NHibernate afford memory use benefits when performing bulk data operations.
• Authorization in ASP.Net MVC using XML Configuration – Jigar Desai looks at building a means of securing ASP.NET MVC actions behind authorised roles using XML configuration and an HTTPModule
• Enforcing Your Domain Model With Spec#: Part 1: Introduction And The Non-Null Operator – Lasse Eskildsen starts a series looking at Spec#, and how it can be used as a means of enforcing your domain model
• Ever Wonder Why You Never Get Full Code Coverage? – Jason Bock dives down into the IL to look at why 100% code coverage can be an impossible thing to achieve.
• Gotcha: ASP.NET and exceptions in asynchronous threads – J Kealey talks about how unhanded exceptions in asynchronous threads can cause devastating results in your web application, causing IIS to restart the application
• Visual Studio 2008 Regular Expression Editor – Anthony Grace talks about one fo the more hidden features of Visual Studio, a rudimentary Regular Expression editor
• WPF + M-V-VM + NHibernate + NHibernate Validator = Fantastic Four! – Paulo Quicoli talks about combining Windows Presentation Foundation, NHibernate, NHibernate Valdiator and the Model View ViewModel pattern to make great applications in this Code Project Article.
• Developing Custom Controls in Silverlight 2 – Imran Shaik gives a nice tutorial article on building Custom Controls in Silverlight2 complete with code in both VB.NET and C#
• If you’re going to reformat source code, please don’t do anything else at the same time – Raymond Chen talks about a common problem of developers reformatting code (which on its own is a good thing) along with making functional changes – this leads to a horrible experience for anyone reading the differences via version control, so please don’t do it!
• New Release: patterns & practices Acceptance Test Engineering Guide (BETA1) – J.D. Meier highlights the release of a new Guide from the Patterns and Practices team covering acceptance testing
• Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices (white paper) + Agile Development Showcase – Fernando García Loera talks about the release of another new Patterns and Practices guide covering Agile development in distributed teams.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 – Neil Hutson highlights the announcement of Windows Server 2008 R2 release, adding a number of improvements over the original Windows 2008 in a number of areas. more details in the post and linked reviewers guide.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #213

It looks like PDC is starting to wind down (just as I get my process for summarising/link blogging it sorted), and the big hit in terms of posts seems to be C# 4. Today marks a return of some PDC specific sections, and another large edition of the Brew.

Software

• The Web Deployment Tool Beta 2 is now available! – The IIS Team announce the release of the Web Deployment Tool Beta 2 with a number of new features for packaging your application.
• "Geneva" Beta available now – The Geneva team announce the availability of Geneva, a platform for simple user access based on claims based authentication. The release includes bits for developers, infrastructure guys and also cardspace integration.

Information

• .NET Framework 4 Poster – No major framework release would be complete without a good poster, and Brad Abrams shares a poster produced in conjunction with Addison Wesley for .NET 4, available in PDF and Silverlight deepzoom.
• NH Prof: Teaser – Ayende teases us all with a screen shot of the NHibernate Profiler he has been workin on. I’m really looking forward to seeing this tool for my self as it looks like it will be a lot easier to work with then the debug log and SQL profiler
• Zip Compressing ASP.NET Session without changing your code using a Session provider. – Albert Pascual follows on form Scott Hanselman’s post last week about zipping session information putting together an implementation using Session Provider to avoid having to change any implementation code
• ASP.NET MVC and NHaml – Sergio Pereira takes a look at NHaml for the views in ASP.NET MVC looking at some of the advantages and disadvantages of using it.
• Is Code Coverage Really All That Useful? – Kevin Pang talks about code coverage, and if it really is a useful metric. Good discussion seems to be going on in the comments too.
• MSDN Magazine November 2008 – The November edition of MSDN Magazine is now online which this month focuses on Security
• Comparing Hash Table Implementations Performances – Patrick Smacchia looks atht the performance of different hashtable implementations including a number of screenshots from his profiling tool showing the different performance aspects of each implementation.
• NHibernate: Identity columns that are not the primary key – Bil Simser looks at having identity columns in the database which are not the primary key of the table, and how you can work with this situation in NHIbernate.
• Advances in .NET Type system: Type Equivalence Demo – Misha Shneerson looks at some of the new interop functionality in CLR V4
• jBlogMvc : part 3 Themable View Engine, Archive and Filtering by year, month and day – Amr Elsehemy continues his series on building a blogging engine in ASP.NET MVC, in this part themeing is added, along with an update to beta 1 of ASP.NET MVC

PDC Session Bloggers

There are a number of bloggers who are live blogging sessions from PDC 2008, here are a few of the best I’ve come across

• Paul Gielens – Paul has been producing nice posts for the sessions he attends, complete with hand drawn diagrams and slides. I wonder if they are paper drawn or tablet PC drawn?
• Bill Evjen – Bill has notes for a number of sessions from PDC
• JohnPapa.net – John Papa has some notes form the keynotes from day 1 and 2.
• Joseph Guadagno – Joseph has been doing a nice job of live blogging the talks, even managing to get source code written in his posts.
• Ryan Rinaldi – Ryan has been blogging sessions from PDC as he attends them

Azure

• How to create and Publish your first Windows Azure application – Olav Tollefsen walks through the process of getting yourself up and running with Azure, from setting up the development environment to publishing your first application.
• Windows Azure Walkthrough: Simple Blob Storage Sample – Jim Nakashima steps through the process of storing information in Azure with plenty of screenshots and code samples included in the post

C# 4

• Dynamic in C# – Sam Ng looks at the new dynamic type functionality, including a look at what happens at compile time and runtime
• C# 4.0 – Named and Optional Parameters – Behind the Scenes – Matthew Podwysocki continues his look at C#4 new features with a look under the hood on Named and optional Parameters
• Generic Variance in C# 4.0 – Nate Kohari looks at the variance of generic types in C#4
• C# Future – Home – This MSDN Code site looks to be a great resource for anyone wanting to get up to speed with C#4 as it contains a vast array of code samples and documentation available to download.
• C# 4.0 Duck Typing and mocking extension methods – Melvyn Harbour looks at the dynamic type functionality in C#4 with a view to helping with testing and mocking of extension methods.
• LINQ Farm: Covariance and Contravariance in C# 4.0 – Charlie Calvert looks at the new Covariance and Contravariance Functionality of C# 4 using lambda expression delegates
• CodeThinked | C# 4.0 New Features Part 1 – dynamic keyword – Justin Etheredge starts a series of posts looking at the new features of the C#4 language, based on the recently released CTP. In this first part Justin looks at the new Dynamic Types functionality.
• C# 4.0 New Features Part 1.1 – dynamic keyword second look – Justin continues by looking at the performance of working with objects stored with the the dynamic keyword, showing that while performance isn’t as good as static typing its still better than other ways of achieving the same thing.
• C# 4.0 New Features Part 2 – default and named parameters – Justin Etheredge continues his look at the new C#4 features with a look at default and named parameters

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #212

Another bumper edition today, and I completely ran out of time preparing the Brew this morning so with all that is left over from today I’m sure that tomorrow will be even larger !

Software

• Silverlight Tools – The Visual Studio integration for Silverlight has hit a final release, including support for both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express
• Enterprise Library 4.1–October 2008 – There is a new release of the Enterprise library – Version 4.1 (or October 2008). This release supports both VS2008 and VS2008 SP1, and also includes the Unity 1.2features.
• Silverlight Toolkit – The Silverlight Toolkit was announced in yesterday’s PDC keynote, and provides a number of controls, components and utilities which aren’t included in the main Silverlight release. This is the CodePlex site for the library where there are samples of the 12 new controls, along with access to the binary download and source.
• Announcing IronPython 2.0 VS10 CTP – Mohamed Meligy highlights a release of IronPython specifically for use in Visual Studio 2010 CTP, allowing you to try out some of the new dynamic language interoperability features.
• WPF Toolkit is live – DataGrid, Ribbon, and Calendar preview versions – As announced in the Keynote yesterday, there is a new WPF Control Toolkit, including a DataGrid, Ribbon and calendar controls. The Toolkit requires .NET 3.5 SP1
• Announcing Sync Framework v2 CTP1 – Rob Tiffany announces the release of the first CTP of the Wync Framework V2 – a framework providing easy means to synchronise data using providers, with providers for file system, ADO.NET and Feeds provided. This release contains a number of new feaures, as outlined in this post.
• SonicFileFinder 2.0 released – Jens Schaller announces the release of SonicFileFinder 2.0, a free add-in for Visual Studio which provides quick searching for files with some useful actions on the found file.
• SQL Server 2005 SP3 Beta Release – Nosheen M Syed announces the beta release of SQL server 2005 SP3, for those who like to live on the cutting edge, as this release is intended for testing use only.

Information

• PDC 2008 – Looking at Future – Keyvan Nayyeri provides a nice summary of yesterdays Day 2 Keynote talking about Windowws 7, Developer tools, the Live Framework and Office 14
• Live Mesh : Welcome to Beta – Live Mesh, a tool from Microsoft which allows you to easily access your data and services in a variety of ways, along with synchronisation of data to the cloud is going into beta this week. The significant new feature in the beta is the inclusion of Windows Mobile and Mac Clients.
• Welcome to Live Services and the Live Framework – One of the significant announcements yesterday at PDC was the new Live Services and Live Framework which sit on top of Windows Azure
• Windows 7 Developer Guide Is Now Available – The Windows 7 Blog for Developers announces the release of the Windows 7 Developer guide which highlights significant new features (including the SEcnic Ribbon, Multi Touch, etc). More details in the post and document – I think this blog might be one to keep an eye on over the coming months.
• A first look at Windows 7’s pre-beta PDC release – Ed Bott of ZDNet provides some details on what is coming in Windows 7, along with a nice collection of screenshots
• Named and Optional Arguments in C# 4.0 – Matthew Podwysocki looks at the new C# 4 features, and how they interact with F#
• My View of C# 4.0 – Omer van Kloeten gives his impressions of the new C# Features, and isn’t entirely convinced about a number of them.
• Oslo – Martin Fowler talks about his impressions of Oslo, Microsoft’s Model Driven Software implementation. Interesting reading
• MVC Storefront Preview 1 Available – Rob Conery has taken some time to package up a preview release of his MVC StoreFront project which is the source for his great screencast series. The preview requires VS2008 and ASP.NET MVC Beta 1
• Letter from Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft – This email (sent to the Industry Executive subscribers) from Steve Ballmer about the new Azure platform (mainly marketing spiel) is being blogged about all over the place,
• New Silverlight controls suite delivered by Microsoft #PDC08 – Laurent Bugnion shows the new Silverlight Controls released yesterday at PDC, and talks about getting up and running with them in your SIlverlight 2 projects.
• Closure Tip – Peter Ritchie looks at at some of the dangers of mutable variables when combined with closures in both C#2 and 3
• New Release: patterns & practices App Arch Guide 2.0 Beta 1 – J.D. Meier announces the release of the Patterns and Practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0 Beta 1, a 5 part, 24 chapter guide to help you to make good architectural and technical choices, along with choosing the correct patterns and practices.
• Using Intellipad to create your first M model – The Intellipad Team Blog show how Intellipad can be used to create "M" models. This is also the first set of screenshots I’ve seen with any quantity of "M" code. The Intellipad IDE was previously described as emacs.net, and glancing at the other posts in the team blog looks like it could become a very useful tool.
• "Oslo" Modeling Language Team Blog – The Oslo Modelling Language, Codenamed "M" now has its own blog, yet another one to keep an eye on post PDC
• LukeH’s WebLog : F# on Windows Azure – LukeH shares Visual Studio templates for F# cloud services using Windows Azure allowing you to use F# to create Azure services easily

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