The Morning Brew

Post levels seem to have returned to pre-PDC levels (although the small matter of organising a new President of the United States may have had something to do with this).

Information

• Grouping Controllers with ASP.NET MVC – Phil Haack shares a prototype showing how the MonoRail feature ‘Areas’ can be implemented in ASP.NET MVC using the extensibility model included in ASP.NET MVC
• C# 4.0 Feature Focus – Part 3 – Intermezzo: LINQ’s new Zip operator – Bart De Smet continues his series with a slight detour looking at the new Linq Zip operator, and moves on to look at how it could be implemented in previous versions too. Along the way Bart also talks about Iterators and exceptions. Interesting stuff
• Compressing Viewstate – John Finlay looks at shrinking down the view state by compressing it, sharing code to do this and some real world examples of how its use vastly reduced the page size.
• Another way to get all the PDC Videos… This time as a RSS feed, with WMV videos as an enclosure (i.e. Catch them all for your Zune/IPod) – Greg Duncan highlights another way of getting the (37GB!) of video content from PDC, and also plans to upgrade his PDC List Maker to utilise this information.
• WPF Developers: PDC Wrap-Up and Visual Studio Tooling Update – Tim Sneath talks about WPF content at the PDC, and highlights a Hot Fix for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 which fixes a number of annoying issues in the WPF Designer
• What’s New in the BCL in .NET 4.0 [Justin Van Patten] – Justin Van Patten of the BCL team talks about some of the new features of the BCL that are included in the Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 CTP
• Dreamspark 2.0 Released! – Dreamspark seems to be a great way for students to get hold of the latest and greatest Microsoft developer tools. This post announcing the release of the new site is from New Zealand / Australia, but I couldn’t see any restriction to those locations on the actual site
• Building blocks for an Azure application – Neil Kidd provides some good definitions of the key parts and terminology associated with Azure

Community

• Vista Squad meeting with Visual Studio General Manager Jason Zander – Mike Taulty highlights the months Vista Squad Community event, where Jason Zander will be talking about Visual Studio 2010 – sounds like a great opportunity to get some information about what is yet to come.

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Back to the usual format today as I think the PDC deluge is coming to an end, still quite a large post but over the course of the week I’m hoping things will reduce back to the usual 1-12 links a day.

Software

• Where to Download "The Goods" for PDC 2008 – Habib Heydarian shares download links for most of the software given away at the PDC, so that those who weren’t fortunate enough to attend can still play with the toys (assuming you have enough bandwidth to download all this stuff – it came on a 160gb HDD at PDC!)
• Visual Round Trip Analyzer released – Ed Glas highlights the release of a utility which uses NetMon to capture traffic from the network and analyse it for the purposes of improving performance of web applications.
• NCover v3.0.5 Beta is now available – NCover release their 5th beta release of NCover 3.0, including a number of fixes and changes reported by beta users.

Information

• Messaging Concepts – The Starbucks example – Ayende starts a series of posts on Messaging, opening with outlining an analogy for messaging many of us will be familiar with. he then moves on to look at Auditability & Tracebility in the next part.
• Common Conceptual Issues with F# – A nice introductory article discussing a number of issues that many people trying F# find conceptually difficult.
• 7 Steps to write your own custom rule using FXCOP – Shivprasad Koirala walks through the creation of custom FXCop rules in this CodeProject article.
• Visual Studio Team System 2010 is huge! – Dennis Doomen shares a comprehensive looking Feature List for Vsual Studio 2010
• Bin Deploying ASP.NET MVC – Phil Haack talks about how you can still bin folder deploy ASP.NET MVC in case your web host hasn’t installed the beta (as the beta installs into the GAC)
• Tiny Victories Inside Microsoft – SmallestDotNet makes headway – Scott Hanselman talks about how Microsoft are making it easier for people to get the .NET Framework.
• NH Prof: A guided tour – Ayende gives a feature tour of his latest project, a profiler for NHibernate
• Introducing "Oslo" – Aaron Skonnard has a nice article on Oslo, talking about the various parts that make up the whole Oslo technology suite.
• I KILL-ed you! Now can I go for a coffee break while you die? – Mladen Prajdi? shares a useful SQL trick which will give you an idea of how much time is left rolling back large transactions.
• C# 4.0, Dynamic Programming and JSON – Nikhil Kothari looks at how the Dynamic functionality of C#4 helps when working with JSON.
• Free e-book: the Best of SQL Server Central Vols 5 and 6 – Jose R. Guay Paz highlights the availability of tow more free SQL Ebooks from RedGate.
• ASP.NET MVC and Rhino Tools sample application – Bart shares a ASP.NET MVC Sample application built using an interesting technology stack (Rhino Tools, NHibernate, NHibernate Search, Migrator.NET, Windsor, Binsor and ExtJS Grid). This is a first version release, and I look forward to seeing how it develops
• LINQ to SQL, EF, and the Thunderdome Solution – Ian Cooper talks about the rationalisation of Microsoft’s ORM technologies, and shares his hopes for the future of this area of MS technology
• Best Decision to Kill LINQ to SQL – Paul Gielens weighs in on the Linq to SQL debate, agreeing with the decision to move on from it to Linq to Entities.
• Crazy Talk: Reducing ORM Friction – Rob Conery looks at Object Oriented databases as a means of reducing development friction when it comes to Object Relational Mapping

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Another large edition of the Brew today, and as there is still a lot of posts about the new PDC announced technologies I’ve kept the PDC heading in today’s edition to group them together.

Software

• Isolator Feature Focus: Duck Typing and Isolate.Swap – Roy Osherove announces the release of TypeMock Isolator 5.1.1, ans shows off its new Duck Typing and Isolate.Swap features, along with the collection faking functionality.
• Blacklight – Controls for Designers – v1.0 Released! – Martin Grayson announces the first release of Backlight a set of Silverlight Controls for designers / User Experience specialists, offering a number of text and border related controls.
• .NET MicroFramework 3.0 Ships! – The latest version of the Microsoft .NET Micro Framework has shipped, including a bunch of great features, and a new website too.

Information

• Array Injection Using Unity Application Block v1.2 – David Hayden looks at the new Array Injection capabilities of the recently released Unity Application Block 1.2
• Conditional compilation in C# – A nice article showing the use of the Conditional Attribute to allow conditional compilation, illustrated by an example of it in use.
• Developing Linq to NHibernate – Ayende is seeking sponsorship from companies to allow him to dedicate 2 to 3 months developing Linq to NHibernate properly for the Open Source Community.
• Intro to the Network Monitor API – A great introductory post on the Network Monitor API which allows you to write programs which can monitor the network activity, and view the data from your own code.
• LINQ To SQL is Dead – Read Between the Lines – The Linq to SQL announcement from the ADO.NET team continues to get a lot of coverage this weekend.
• LINQ to SQL vs LINQ to Entities – decisions from ADO.NET team – Marco Russo discusses the future for Linq to SQL, and outlines what he hopes will happen to Linq to SQL
• A journey into Expressions – Sacha Barber looks at the construction and use of Expressions and expression trees in this Code Project article
• Validate Your Regular Expressions With This Free Online Silverlight Tool – Amit shares a useful tool created by Shahar A allowing you to test regular expressions in the browser using a silverlight application.
• F# CheatSheet Updated – Chance Coble announces an update to the F# Cheat sheet from A6 Systems, which now includes Async Computations and Active Patterns.
• LINQ Cheat Sheet – BradVin shares his Linq cheat sheet, including both query syntax and lambda syntax for common Linq operations.
• .Net Provider Pattern – Designing decoupled and extensible Component for .Net Application – Adil Akhter looks at the provider design pattern and it implementation in .NET 2
• F# Elevator Pitch – Chris Smith gives the elevator pitch for using F# at your place of work.

PDC

• C# 4.0 New Features Part 3 – Generic Covariance – Justin Etheredge continues his Series on C#4 with a look at Generic Covariance
• NETMF 3.0, Windows 7 Embedded, Spark Competition, Tools Updates. – The Windows Embedded Blog shares a number of releases made in the last week, along with information of a competition for embedded developers.
• Run ASP.NET MVC on Windows Azure – Aaron Lerch walks through getting ASP.NET MVC applications working on Windows Azure, with plenety of screen shots along the way
• C# 4.0 Feature Focus – Part 1 – Optional parameters – Bart De Smet starts a series on the new language features of C# 4 with a post on Optional Parameters, and follow up with Part 2 looking at named parameters
• Oslo Week One Wrap-Up – Chris Sells has a great roundup of Oslo and M related links from the past week
• .NET Services – Two things you may not have noticed yet…. – Clemens Vasters shares two of the less widly known parts of the .NET Services, support for Ruby and Java developers.
• A First Look at WF 4.0, Dublin, and Oslo – David Chappell announces a Microsoft Sponsored White Paper discussing the PDC released tools from the connected Systems Division.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 CTP now available! – The Parallel Programming with .NET Team blog talks about the inclusion of the Task Parallel Library, PLINQ and the coordination Data Structures in the core of .NET 4.0
• ADO.NET Data Services in Windows Azure: pushing scalability to the next level – Pablo Castro talks about the parts of Azure that use the ADO.NET Data Services runtime, and some of the challenges that the team encountered while working on these components.
• Browser Choice and Voting Online – Phil Haack talks about a browser rendering issue with the PDC Session Evaluation form, and encourages anyone who attended to evaluate the sessions they attended
• My PDC Video Link List Maker project & source is now available on CodePlex – Greg Duncan has released the source for his PDC Quick Video Link List tool on to CodePlex, updated with Link Verification, MP4/ZIP links and Channel 9 Session Page.
• Running Windows Azure Development Fabric with SQL Server instead of SQL Express – Lyle Dodge shares a useful tip for getting the Azure Development Fabric to work with Full SQL Server rather than Express edition by adding an express looking alias to SQL Server.

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