The Morning Brew

Software

• XNA Game Studio 3.1 – Coding4Fun announces the release of XNA GameStudio 3.1, the latest version of the SDK for building XBox games in C#. Lots of new features in this much anticipated release
• Pex 0.14.040610.2: Fix Suggestions for Invariant Methods and Natural properties for Stubs. – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces the latest release of Pex and runs through the significant new feature, Suggestions for Invariant Methods and Natural properties for stubs

Information

• Brad’s Sure Guide to Indexes – Brad McGehee gives a very interesting and detailed exploration of indexing in SQL Server, looking at the more tradiional features, right through to some of the new bits in 2008
• Integration Testing Your ASP.NET MVC Application – Steve Sanderson explores ways of performing integration testing on your ASP.NET MVC applications using the MvcIntegrationTestFramework
• Getting Started With Selenium For ASP.NET Developers – Robert Johnson gives a brief introduction to the Selenium testing platform working in C#
• ASP.NET MVC TDD using Visual Studio 2010 – Maarten Balliauw shows how you can apply Test Driven Design principles in ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio 2010 to create a new Controller. Plenty of screen shots in this quick run through
• What does the optimize switch do? – Eric Lippert explores some of the optimisations that the C# compiler can perform when the optimize switch is specified
• Entity Framework Design : Code Only – Alex James talks about the Entity Framework Team’s ideas for Code First model production in the Entiry Framework. None of this is set in stone and they are looking for your feedback on the ideas, so this a fantastic opportunity to help shape the final product
• LINQ to NHibernate, part IV – Steve Strong gives another update on the progress being made with the full NHibernate Linq To NHibernate implementation
• Playing With SQL Server CLR Integration Part I – Paulo Morgado starts a series on working with the .NET CLR within SQL Server, and quickly follows up with Part II and Part III
• You’re Not Your Data Access – Rob Conery talks about simplicity and the importance of keeping things simple and not following every complex technique in every project

Community

• Internet Explorer 8 – Better Browser – Microsoft are running a campaign to increase adoption of Internet Explorer 8, with the added incentive that if you download it from this site they will donate 8 meals to the charity ‘Feeding America’ – if you are planning to upgrade your browser this is a great opportunity to do some good in the world in the process
• London AltNetBeers #9 – At the glass house – Seb Lambla announces the 9th London Alt.Net Beers event, to be held on 17th June

1 Comment »

Software

• JetBrains TeamCity 4.5.2 Available – Jose Rolando Guay Paz shares the announcement of the release of JetBrains TeamCity 4.5.2, a second bugfix release which focuses in compatibility of integrations and stability.
• Free, for MSDN Subscribers/reg-ware, WPF Controls from Telerik (Limited time only!) – Greg Duncan highlights a special offer for MSDN Subscribers to get a free developer license for Telerik’s WPF controls

Information

• Visual Studio: Why is there no 64 bit version? (yet) – Rico Mariani talks about some of the reasons we don’t yet have a 64bit version of Visual Studio, and some of the things that have to be considered before making a program 64bit.
• Breaking All The Rules with WCF – Scott Hanselman talks about some interesting real-world problems he encountered working with a web service produced in a non .NET language which supposedly confirmed to WS-Security, and shows how the extensibility of WCF lets you work with dubious service implementations
• Subversion 1.6, Tree Conflicts, and the Incompatibility of Subversion 1.5: What You Need to Know – Rob Reynolds highlights some of the issues surrounding mixing Subversion 1.5 and 1.6 – worth being aware of
• More on Structs – Chris Eargle digs down into some of the details of Structs following on from his post from earlier in the week
• SubSonic 3.0: The SimpleRepository – Rob Conery talks about the simple repository implementation in SubSonic
• SubSonic 3.0: ActiveRecord – Rob also explores the use of SubSonic as an ActiveRecord implementation achieved using T4 Templates
• Coding: Keep method/variable names positive – Mark Needham talks about a few techniques for keeping names of methods and variables easily understandable
• Update on Velocity upcoming release – CTP4 – The Velocity distributed cache is nearing CTP4 release and the team give a heads up on some of the new features
• Managed Extensibility Framework 101 (b) – Malisa Ncube continues on from his previous post (back at the end of May) with a look at the Aggregate and Directory Catalogues, and accessing the host application from a plugin.
• NHibernate – query only properties – Ayende looks at a nice technique that allows you to have items in your mappings which do not present in the model classes but are available to query through NHibernate
• NHibernate : Some Naked Thoughts – Karl Seguin shares some thoughts on NHibernate, talking about the need for OR Mappers, the perceived ‘lack of control’, and some of the good and bad bits of NHibernate

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #366

Software

• ASP.NET MVC Installer For Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 And Roadmap – Phil Haack announces the release of an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 installer for VS2010 users (it was omitted in the VS release as it hadn’t yet hit 1.0 RTM when the code freeze occurred)

Information

• Introduction to StructureMap – Chad Myers provides a nice introduction to the StructureMap IOC / DI implementation in this article for DotNetSlackers
• Release Roadmap for .NET RIA Services – Brad Abrams highlights a Silverlight Forum post which outlines the forthcoming release strategy from the Microsoft Rich Internet Applications Services team.
• Let your Inversion of Control tool work for you – Joshua Flanagan looks at one of the common mistakes people make when using Inversion of Control frameworks – they take dependency on the container internally, rather than using the Dependency Injection features
• Working with memory mapped files in .NET 4 – Salva Patuel takes a look at Memory Mapped Files, a new feature of .NET 4.0 which provides a simple high performance way of sharing Data
• Opinionated Input Builders for ASP.Net MVC using partials – Part I – Eric Hexter builds on work from a number of other folk in the creation of this new series of posts on constructing input screens using opinionated conventions.
• Opinionated Input Builders for ASP.Net MVC – Part 2 Html Layout for the Label – In Part 2, Eric talks about his conventions surrounding the label positioning
• Interfaces with static methods, reducing the cost of extensibility – Sebastien Lambla talks about the possibility that already exists which allows you to have static methods which are part of an interface, by way of extension methods
• SilverBullet #1 – System.Environment – Timmy Kokke starts a new series of tips posts for Silverlight Developers with a look at the static properties of System.Environment which are available in Silverlight, and in the SilverBullet #2second SilverBullet, Timmy looks at the JSON serialisation support
• AnyCPU Exes are usually more trouble than they’re worth – Rick Byers talks about some of the problems you can encounter when using AnyCPU architecture executables
• 11 keystrokes that made my jQuery selector run 10x faster – Dave Ward looks at a few techniques which can help make working with Id’s from .NET easier in JQuery
• Code Contracts Primer – Part 1: Introduction – Derik Whittaker embarks on a series of posts looking at the use of Code Contracts, a technology cooked up at MS research which will meet the general public in VS2010/.NET 4. Part 1 is an introduction to the concepts, and Code Contracts Primer – Part 2: Handling Legacy Code looks at the uses of code contracts when working with legacy code

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #365