The Morning Brew

Yesterday marked what is being hailed as ‘The Dawn of the Third Age’ of computing at Microsoft, with the public announcement and release of Microsoft Windows Azure, taking Microsoft deeply into the world of Cloud computing.

As predicted yesterday, today’s edition of the Morning Brew is an absolute monster, with special sections dedicated to PDC specific content, Visual Studio 2010/.NET 4.0, Oslo, and of course Azure. In addition to this I’ve attempted to keep the core of the Brew, as despite what the Microsoft Community might think there were other things going on yesterday other than PDC, so Information and Sotware sections feature as usual

PDC

• PDC2008 Professional Developers Conference October 27-30, 2008 – The official PDC site is the best source of information about the PDC, with links to the latest videos from channel 9
• Windows Live ID Becomes an OpenID Provider – The official announcement and technical details for the Windows Live ID Open ID Provider, including links to the CTP release
• ANNOUNCEMENT: Live ID OpenID Provider technical preview + see the screencast – Angus Logan talks about the Live ID Open ID provider announcement, and shares a screen cast which shows the experience.
• Session = "The Future of C#" – Joseph Guadagno shares his notes from Anders Hejlsberg session on C# 4

Microsoft Windows Azure

• Azure Services Platform – Microsoft’s official Azure site, containing links to the key parts of the platform and documentation.
• Getting Started: Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio – The Cloud Computing Tools Team has a nice post gathering together the downloads, tools and some information about the tools and SDK
• A Lap Around Windows Azure – Paul Gielens shares some notes of Azure, including the details of the contents Technology preview available to PDC attendees.
• Welcome Windows Azure – PDC Day 1 Keynote Recap – Jim O’Neil gives a nice summary of who said what in the PDC keynote, along with links to the speakers and any related technology that was demoed.
• .Net Services Team Blog : Welcome to .NET Services! – The Azure announcement is accompanied by a number of new sites and blogs, this one is focused on the Microsoft .NET Services (of which Access Control, Service Bus and Workflow Services) are the ones which have been released as a CTP.
• Azure: Microsoft .NET Service Bus – Clemens Vasters writes one of the longer and more detailed looks at Azure, taking about a number of the key components and technologies
• Windows Azure – Getting Set Up – Dominic Green talks about the setup of the Azure SDK, and what components you require as pre-requisites
• Microsoft Unveils Windows Azure at Professional Developers Conference – The official press release announcing Microsoft Windows Azure, their new cloud based services platform.
• On Demand Stream of Ray Ozzie Keynote – So much of the content for PDC is bring streamed, and you can catch the KeyNote from yesterday by Ray Ozzie on demand, and watch as Azure how announced

Oslo

• Oslo Developer Center – Micorosoft Code Name Oslo is the platform for Model Driven Applications, and yesterday its Developer Centre lauched. Here you can learn about the Oslo Framework, and the M language.
• Oslo SKD – The CTP SDK for Oslo is also available now – this is a direct download link.
• The Oslo Developer Center: Letter from the Editors – Chris Sells Kent Sharkey give the lowdown on the different parts of Oslo in this nice introduction
• MODELS remixed. – The Connected System Division released their new website about Oslo yesterday.

Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4.0

• Download details: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP – Microsoft have opened up the latest CTP of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 to the general public, although at a 7GB download and requiring 23gb of diskspace this Virtual Machine takes serious commitment. My download has just finished extracting and I’m hoping to fire it up later today!
• 2010 Feature Preview for TFS : VSTS 2010 – David Starr shares his notes from the PDC session on Visual Studio 2010 features
• Visual Studio 2010 – Ayende shares his first impressions of Visual Studio 2010, exploring (with screenshots) a number of the new features which will ship with 2010

Software

• Announcing the WCF REST Starter Kit! – Kent Brown announces the release of the Windows Communication Foundation REST starter kit on CodePlex. This release is a preview of what is to come in WCF 4.0, allowing you to try out the proposed features now.
• Downloading jQuery – jQuery JavaScript Library – The latest release of JQuery now includes a release which is the Visual Studio documentation release of JQuery, showing the first influence of Microsoft on JQuery.
• Practicing patterns : Prism V2 – Drop 4 – Erwin van der Valk announces the release of Prism Version2 Drop 4 on CodePlex. This update to the Composite Application Guidance package for WPF and Silverlight includes some features ported back from V1 and also a new form of composition called Top Down Composition.
• Windows Embedded Standard 2009 Releases! – The Windows Embedded team announce the RTM release of Windows Embedded Standard 2009, the latest generation of Windows XP embedded
• SubSonic MVC Addin Updated for Beta 1 – Rob Conery announces an update to his SubSonic MVC Addin which creates scaffold like MVC code for Linq to SQL data access, has now been updated to produce ASP.NET Beta 1 code.
• What’s New for Performance Profiling Tools for WPF – I believe this is a new update to the Windows Presentation Foundation Profiling tools, a great looking (visually as you’d expect for a WPF product) and feature rich set of tools for working with and identifying performance issues in WPF
• CodeRush Xpress announced and available – Julian M Bucknall, CTO of Developer Express announces the release of a joint venture with Microsoft. Code Rush Express is a free refactoring tool (drawing on functionality in Code Rush and Refactor! Pro) which works in all non-express edition Visual Studio, and best of all is FREE!
• Announcing CTP2 of Microsoft project code name "Velocity" – Velocity, the Microsoft project to create a distributed cache has reached its CTP2 release, as announced at PDC yesterday. This new release has a bunch of really good sounding features including x64 support and a number of Availability and Performance related changes.
• The GDR RC Is Here! – Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR has gone to release candidate, as announced by Data Dude at PDC

Information

• Not at the PDC? Participate Virtually Here! – Jason N. Gaylord highlights a website which aims to coordinate a Virtual conference using Microsoft Shared View, Live meeting and Twitter, with a number of interesting non-pdc sessions.
• Batching NHibernate’s DML Statements – Davy Brion looks at the batching of statements in NHibernate allowing NHibernate to send multiple statements to the database in a batch thus cutting down the round trip time dramatically when executing large numbers of statements,
• Testing Hibernate mappings: Where to test from? – Mark Needham ponders the testing of (N)Hibernate Mappings and looks at three types of test you can apply
• Programmatically managing Virtual Server using C# – Saurabh Singh taks about programatically controlling Virtual Server 2005 virtual machines, showing how you can power up, down restore, etc all from the comfort of C#.
• Writing a good Debug.Assert – Marcelo talks about the use of Debug.Assert, what its for and how to use this relatively unknown (in my experience) feature of the platform.
• Silverlight 2 and Localisation/Globalisation – Mike Taulty takes a look at Internationalisation in Silverlight applications
• Announcing CodeRush Xpress for C# – Mark Miller – Mark Miller looks at a number of the features of Developer Express’s new Free refactoring tool
• Specifying Injection Constructor using Unity Fluent Interface for Loose Coupling and POCO – David Hayden looks at how the Unity IOC framework determines which constructor to call when creating instances of an object, and shows how you can influence this decision with attributes.
• Composing Statements with Expression Trees in .NET 3.0 – Chad Myers explores Expression Trees in preparation for a talk at the Alt.Net workshop, sharing an illustrative example along the way.
• Software + Services: The Greater Sum – Yesterday saw a number of new Microsoft websites getting launched, and following the Azure site, I think this is another of the key ones.

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Looks like this week is going to be a busy week Brew wise with a huge number of really good posts over the weekend, and I suspect this is only the start of it with it being PDC this week! There will be a few of the weekends posts making it into the brew tomorrow as I simply had too many today! Full on PDC coverage will start tomorrow, and I can feel a special section about to be created for the week.

Software

• Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET Framework 3.5 Released! – Microsoft Chart Controls for .NET Framework 3.5 are released, providing enhanced graphing capabilities to both web and desktop applications developers
• IronPython 2.0 Release Candidate – Harry Pierson announces the release of IronPython 2.0 Release Candidate, so final release can’t be far off.
• StructureMap 2.5 is Released! – Jeremy D. Miller announces the release of StructureMap 2.5, a Dependency Injection / Inversion of Control library with a number of nice features Significant in this release is some new documentation of the public interface, along with a whole host of other features.
• Rapid UI Mockups with Balsamiq – Aaron Jensen highlights a great looking simple tool for quickly mocking up UI prototypes. It exists as a free web app (with nag screens), or in paid for desktop formats.

Information

• PDC 2008: New .NET Logo – Scott Hanselman shares the new look .NET logo
• Exploring NHibernate Statistics, Part 1: Simple Data Fetching – Davy Brion takes a look at the Statistics feature of NHibernate 2.0, allowing you to obtain all kinds of useful information about the work your NHibernate Sessions and SessionFactory are doing.
• Can’t get to PDC? You can still catch the keynotes… live… – Greg Duncan points out that we (the unfortunate ones who are not at PDC) can still keep up to date with what is going on by watching the keynotes live over the web.
• Intellisense Luv for a Friday – Dave Burke shows one of the nice features of the Intellisense in Visual Studio 2008 – this is so clever and shows that they really do try to make Intelisense as useful as posisble
• Further Examination of .NET Framework Features Survey – Keyvan Nayyeri talks about the conclusions that can be drawn from the results of Scot Hanselmann’s recent survey on .NET technologies used.
• Simple AOP Example Using Castle DynamicProxy 2.0 – David Hayden looks at the Aspect Oriented Programming capabilities of Castle Dynamic Proxy showing how you can have your code run before a methods code.
• Application Domains – Ricardo Peres looks at using Application Domains to run your code with additional restrictions, covering creation, and unloading of application domains as well as creating instances in the application domain and calling methods.
• Simple Cryptography Block – Steve Sheldon shares a short chunk of code to encrypt and decrypt values – a useful resource as I always find the crypto APIs confusing to work with so having a simple reference piece is very useful
• ASP.NET MVC Tip: Dependency Injection with Unity Application Block – Shiju Varghese look at using the Unity Application Block to do Dependency Injection in an ASP.NET MVC Application.
• ReSharper Jedi – FizzBuzz in under 4 minutes – Chad Myers shows how good Resharper really can be by doing a Test Driven Development version of Fizz Buzz in 4 minutes without a mouse, using a number of ReSharper’s useful features.
• Using IronRuby To Implement Dynamic Business Rules – Justin Etheredge continues his series on Domain Validation with a look at using IronRuby to implement scripted rules which can interact with the C# code.
• Pex now a DevLabs project – Nikolai Tillmann announces that Pex is one of the first projects to be hosted on DevLabs, the new Microsoft site for software developer innovations, and along with this also makes Pex available as a Visual Studio 2010 (with the non-2010 version still available on the Microsoft Research site).
• ASP.NET MVC Storefront Part 23: WebForms and Dynamic Data – Rob Conery continues his screencast series with episode 23. In this part Rob talks with J Sawyer who has taken the ASP.NET MVC Store Front and created a web forms based front end along with a Dynamic Data powered admin site.
• Solving complex parsing tasks with RegexTreeer – Sergey Stoyan looks at implementing complex parsing solutions using the RegexTreeer library to build a tree of regular expressions to parse complex input.
• .NET Projects: Code Coverage with NCover – Grant Palin looks at the setup and working with NCover (and associated tools) to generate code coverage information for your projects. Plenty of screenshots and description of the process are included to get you going

Community

• Barcamp Liverpool 6th – 7th December 2008 – Barcamp has arrived in Liverpool, with a 2 day event happening in December. Having attended and enjoyed the Manchester Barcamp I highly recommend this event to anyone who can make it.

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Software

• Small Basic – A new Labs project from Microsoft labs, Small Basic has been in development on and off for a year. The idea behind Small Basic is to bring the fun and simplicity of writing code back, recapturing the fun and easy we used to program on the early 8bit home computers.
• NCover 3.0.2 Beta is now available – 1 day on, and the NCover team are on their 3rd beta release of NCover 3

Information

• Encapsulation: Entities, Collections And Business Rules – Derick Bailey talks about encapsulation of business rules in your business entities, rather than letting the functionality out into controllers or forms, and shows a solution to the problem.
• New MassTransit Screencast and Sample – Chris Patterson shares a screencast on the WebServiceBridge sample in MassTransit, showing how it works, and how it makes low coupling possible in web services for the publish / subscribe functionality.
• Application Idle – DaveyM69 looks at techniques to detect when a WinForms application is idle (for the purposes of logging a user out) in this Code Project Article.
• ASP.NET: Alternatives to Dynamic Controls – Part 2 – Adam Pooler continues his series looking at alternatives to creating controls dynamically in code, looking in this part at persisting values between postbacks.
• Troubleshooting ASP.NET issues with HTTPERR logs – Tess Ferrandez reminds us all of a very useful (and often forgotten) log file to help diagnose ASP.NET (and other Web server) errors.
• TODO.txt 2008 Ultimate Team Edition – Tobin Harris talks about his favourite way of achieving Collaborative Issue Management – use a text file as it ticks a lot of the boxes for such a requirement.
• Big Day for Amazon EC2: Production, SLA, Windows, and 4 New Capabilities – Significant things are happening for Amazon EC2 – its finally out of beta, and (more interestingly for us .NET folks) Windows and SQL Server are being made available (in a beta form) on the platform.
• Architecting .NET Web Applications for Scale & Performance (A Practical Guide) – A nice article which remains quite practical, covering working on large projects, managing development teams along with scaling and performance.
• What I want from an ORM – Colin Jack talks about some features he’d like to see in Object Relational Mapping software in the future.
• ASP.NET Patterns every developer should know – Alex Homer looks at some common patterns for ASP.NET, offering some implementation and usage notes for them.
• Custom Exceptions: When should you create them? – Jared Parsons shares some rules you should consider before creating your own exceptions

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