The Morning Brew

Software

• Spec Explorer: A Model-Based Testing tool – Soma Somasegar announces the latest DevLabs project to see the light of day, Spec Explorer a model based testing tool which allows you to view your models as UML and generate tests which can later be run in a number of test frameworks. This one sounds quite interesting, and the
• Spec Explorer Team Blog – is one that I will be keeping an eye on over the coming months.
• SSMS Tools Pack 1.7 is out! New feature: SQL Snippets – Mladen Prajdi? announces the latest release of SSMS Tools Pack, an add in for SQL Server Management Studio which brings a number of greate additional features to the environment. New in the 1.7 release is support for SQL Snippets which, like in Visual Studio, allow you to type a short cut and have it expand out into a full statement with replacement slots you can tab through
• Caliburn v1 RTW for WPF, Silverlight 2.0 and 3.0! – Rob Eisenberg announces the RTW release of his UI pattern implementation library for Silverlight and WPF giving a head-start in implementing applications using this well defined design patterns

Information

• WPF 4 (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) – ScottGu continues looking at the new features of Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 with a look today at the improvements and new features for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), covering new controls, graphics improvements, text rendering, Windows 7 integrations, along with some improvements to the core of WPF
• Channel 9 Learning Center – Just Launched! – Channel 9 announce the launch of their learning centre, currently populated with courses on Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 and Windows 7, all broken down into units and lessons allowing you to break your learning into bite sized chunks. Future courses will include Sharepoint 210, Azure, Win2008R2 Server and Office 2010
• ClientIDMode in ASP.NET 4.0 – Rick Strahl examines another of the great ASP.Net Webforms features in .NET 4, the ability to control the way that identifiers are being created, allowing you to guess and tightly control the IDs along with the default auto assignment, making it much easier to create nice JavaScript using those IDs
• Creating something from nothing [Developer-friendly virtual file implementation for .NET!] – Delay takes a look at creating files on the file system from your applications by allowing the user to drag and drop from your application into the filesystem using the .NET drag and drop functionality to do this
• Roadmap for Outlook Personal Folders (.pst) Documentation – Paul Lorimer, Group Manager of the Microsoft Office Interoperability Team talks about the opening up of the file format of the Outlook PST file
• Extending Visual Studio 2010 UML Designers – Part 1: Getting Started – Peter Provost begins a new series of posts looking at the extensibility points of the Visual Studio 2010 UML functionality . This first post covers the ground work for creating such extensions, showing the Hello World of this type of extensibility work
• WF4 Performance – David Paquette talks about the possibility of using Windows Workflow Foundation Flowcharts to model the business rules of his system, causing him to explore the Workflow performance in .NET 4 and to look at the performance tools available in Visual Studio 2010
• Playing with JQuery Validation Library, Part 2 – Chris Brandsma resumes his series looking at JavaScript validation using the JQuery Validation Library, and in this part tackles validation using AJAX validators to check back with the server to see if a value is valid
• NHibernate and Execution Plans – ‘Naz’ talks about some factors that can affect the efficiency of NHibernate generated queries due to the way parameter lengths are created causing more execution plans to be generated than would be ideal, and shares details of resolutions of this problem
• Unit Testing: An Introduction – Deborah Kurata starts a nice series of posts on the unit testing facilities in Visual Studio (2008 pro, and later), exploring test generation, execution and code coverage in the first 3 parts

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Software

• Small Basic : Happy Birthday Small Basic – The Small Basic Team celebrate its first anniversary with a new release. 0.7 brings more international versions, along with a new feature called ‘Graduate’ which upscales a small basic project to a Visual Basic Project

Information

• VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) – ScottGu’s Blog – In his tenth post in the series, Scott Guthrie takes a look at the improved Intellisense support in Visual Studio 2010, comparing it with that in VS2008
• Language Integrated Query Support in the F# Power Pack – Don Syme shows off the new LINQ support that is being introduced into F# via the F# PowerPack beta 1/2 release
• Overview of type inference in F# – Brian, inspired by recent discussions on Hanselminutes, looks at how type inference works using F# as an example, bringing in examples from elsewhere when needed
• Getting Started with IronPython – Charlie Calvert runs through the process of getting up and running with IronPython, right from obtaining and installing through to running your first simple Python program
• Using C# dynamic to call static members – David Ebbo explores the use of Dynamic to call static methods on types declared dynamically, giving a static method duck typing, and finds that this doesn’t immediately work in .NET 4
• Value objects: Immutability and Equality – Mark Needham explores the concept of the value object and immutability of such objects with a real world example along with some techniques to work around some of the difficult parts of the implementation
• .Net Framework 4.0: System.IO.File supports now IEnumerable<string> – Gunnar Peipman is exploring a number of the new features of .NET 4 with a series of posts on the new bits, including this look at the ability to enumerate files, and the support for Complex numbers
• Collection covariance with C# 4.0 – Mike HAdlow explores a real world case where the new Collection Covariance introduced in C#4 really helps
• How to Get Started with Multi-Core: Parallel Processing You Can Use – Bruce D. Kyle (with some help from Jeffrey Richter and Rob Bagby) explores some of the options available for parallel processing in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010
• Naming Anonymous Types with Generate from Usage – Dustin Campbell shows how the refactoring tools in Visual Studio can help you to convert from an anonymous type to a named type in just a few easy steps
• I don’t do math, or how to get a 50Euro discount to NH Prof – Ayende highlights the launch of Rob Connery’s new venture TekPub a new high quality subscription screencast tutorial site, where this is a series on NHibernate which includes money off NHProf
• Iterating atomically – Jon Skeet looks at how to create a threadsafe atomic iterator which allows you to safely iterate over a collection from multiple threads avoiding any duplication of entries returned
• Thread-safe data structures .NET 4.0 (part 1) – Vitaly Dilmukhametov looks at some of the threadsafe collections which have implementations in .NET 4 and shows them in use
• Extension methods ain’t Trojan horses – A tale on a covariant city built in and protected by C# 4.0 – Bart De Smet tells the tail of the trojan war by way of Extension methods and Covariance, in yet another post which I’m going to have to read at least twice to understand, looks like good stuff
• DTOs, Business Entities and Persistency – Uri Lavi looks at Data Transfer Objects and how they can relate to Entities and the persistence of information

Community

• ScottGu Manchester ASP.NET MVC Video – Mike Taulty posts up the high qulaity video taken at the Manchester UK Guathon event where Scott Guthrie presented a number of topics including this monster session on ASP,NET MVC

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Software

• Windows 7 Virtual Presskit – Windows 7 Launch day seems to have gone pretty well, with lots of press coverage, and plenty of blog posts over the past 2 days. This link will take you to the video of Steve Balmer presenting the keynote from the New York Launch event.

Information

• Repositories don’t have save methods – Richard Dingwall argues that a correct DDD style repository does not have a save method, and should instead have a collection like interface, meaning Add is more appropriate
• Linq to NHibernate Progress Report – Steve Strong gives another update on his work on a full Linq provider for NHibernate, showing the improvements he has been making to the translation from Linq to NHibernate queries, including correct parametrisation of queries
• Where is C# in the Programming Language Lifecycle? – K. Scott Allen asks an interesting question about where in its lifecycle the C# Language actually is, based upon a lifecycle defined by Robin Sharp. I’m looking forward to some interesting discussion on this one.
• No JavaScript IntelliSense in VS 2010 Beta 2? Reset your Settings – Rick Strahl highlights a problem he encountered wtih the JavaScript Intellisense (or rather a lack thereof), along with the fix to get it working. If you are in a similar situation, resetting your settings will unleash one of the more incredible features of VS2010 – I was very impressed with the JS Intellisense when I saw it demoed
• Migrating to Postgresql with my friend NHibernate – Karl Seguin talks about the process of changing database engine when you have utilised NHibernate as a persistence framework, highlighting some of the problems they encountered along the way. Ayende follows up showing a work around for handling DB errors better between dialects in his post ‘Database independence with NHibernate‘
• The Microsoft Ajax Library and Visual Studio Beta 2 – Stephen Walther talks about the Microsoft Ajax Library in Visual Studio 2010 beta 2, about the name change from ASP.NET Ajax and why the team have moved to out of band releases rather than packaging with a particular version
• Castle Windsor forwarded types and proxies – Krzysztof Kozmic digs into some more advanced Castle Windsor functionality, allowing for the same component to be used for multiple services, and proxying such a component
• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Available Now! – Chris Schmich shares some screenshots showing the Performance Analysis features of Visual Studio 2010 in operation, yet another feature to add to the ‘must check out’ list
• New features in Entity Framework impacting providers – Noam Ben-Ami & Kati Iceva highlight some of the changes in Provider support within Entity Framework which will affect people developing their own providers
• C# Static interfaces – Jérémie Chassaing muses about the possible uses of static interfaces if they were provided, and clarifies in a follow up post illustrating with a clearer example in the post ‘C# Static interfaces – Take 2‘

Community

• C4MVC UI Testing screencast posted – Jimmy Bogard shares the link to the video of his session for the virtual Community for MVC.Net event on testing the UI in ASP.NET MVC earlier this week. I enjoyed watching the parts I saw live (I had some internet connection issues) and will be catching up on the bits I missed with this video
• Announcing the first Cambridge AltNetBeers &#8211; StackOverflow edition – Seb Lambla announces a new AltNet Beers event to be held in Cambridge after the StackOverflow Dev Day to allow you to get your fix of open spaces discussion after the Dev-Day event

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