The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing Microsoft Ajax Library (Preview 6) and the Microsoft Ajax Minifier – Scott Guthrie announces the release of the 6th preview release of the Microsoft AJAX library, and the availability of the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. Preview 6 contains improved jQuery integration, a new Client-side script loader, and improved syntax for creating client controls. The Minifiier works by re-formatting and re-writing your JavaScript so it is smaller to transfer.
• Now Available: The IIS 7.5 Application Warm-Up Module – ‘thomad’ shares the news of the release of IIS 7.5 Application Warm Up Module which helps improve the performance of those first hits of an application by starting up worker processes before a request arrives
• One step toward becoming a Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcut Ninja – ShortcutVisualizer Visual Studio Addin – Greg Duncan highlights the ShortcutVisualizer Visual Studio Add-in which allows you to press keyboard shortcuts and find out what they do

Information

• Entirely unobtrusive and imperative templates with Microsoft Ajax Library Preview 6 – Bertrand Le Roy explores the newly improved Microsoft Ajax Library Templating support from preview 6, showing how the new imperative style makes life easier
• Using the New Microsoft Ajax Minifier – Stephen Walther digs deeper on the newly release Microsoft Ajax Minifier, showing how you can include the minifier in your build process via command line tool or Visual Studio build task
• T4 template consuming a WCF service – Abhijeet Patel shows an interesting technique for working with an un-friendly web service interface by combining WCF with T4 Templating to create a means to converting a web service dictionary response to a structured class.
• Test Review: MEF – Roy Osherove takes a look behind the tests of another well known project offering his critique of test of the Managed Extensibility Framework (20 min video)
• NHibernate Shards: Progress Report – Ayende gives an update on the progress being made on the NHibernate implementation of Sharding which allows your entities to seamlessly be stored in multiple databases / servers and be brought together by the library for use in your code without you even knowing.
• Inversion Of Control, Single Responsibility Principle and Nikola’s laws of dependency injection – Nikola Malovic offers up and discusses a set of rules for Inversion of control use and how to spot when you may be violating the Single Responsibility Principle
• MSDN.COM Refresh! – Lisa Feigenbaum highlights the newly released design refresh of the MSDN content pages. This redesign has been featured before on the Morning Brew, but has now gone world-wide and been applied to all the MSDN dev centres
• Introducing the Documentation tab for CodePlex projects – Sara Ford talks about the latest release of the CodePlex Software which powers the CodePlex site. This release brings about a new tab in the User Interface allowing documentation to be specifically located for each project.
• My Logic Is Undeniable : Why Not ICloneable<T>? – ‘chrimart’ talks about the possibility for a generic IClonable interface exploring some of the limitations of generic interfaces along the way
• My History of Visual Studio (Part 9) – Rico Mariani wraps up his series of posts on Visual Studio for the time being with a look at the post Whidbey to Visual Studio 2010 time frame
• SlimList – ‘aspdotnetdev’ shares an implementation of List which consumes less memory, and explores the related algorithms to show how it is achieved in this Code Project Article
• Coding: Role based interfaces – Mark Needham discusses how you can support different user interfaces for users in different roles using the MVC pattern
• Is Functional Abstraction Too Clever? – Keith Dahlby questions if a more functional style of code is sometimes too clever following on from a Stack Overflow question which he proposed a functional style answer. K. Scott Allen continues the discussion with his post What’s Wrong With This Code (#23).

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Software

• Microsoft SharedView 1.0 RTM/RTW – Greg Duncan highlights the RTW release of Microsoft SharedView, an easy to use screen sharing utility that allows up to 15 other people to view what is going on in your screen
• Pex 0.18 Released: New Tutorials, Moles work with Visual Studio 2010 – Nikolai Tillmann talks about the release of Pex 0.18, a maintenance release fixign bugs and refining features. Significant in this release is support for Moles in Visual Studio 2010, and a number of new tutorials to help you get under-way with Pex
• T4MVC 2.4.04 update: MVC 2 support, new settings, cleanup, fixes – David Ebbo makes a blog announcement about some of the recent improvements in his ASP.NET MVC Templates project T4MVC. This latest release includes support for ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 and improved output code quality

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Scripts Available on Microsoft CDN – Phil Haack announces the inclusion of the ASP.NET MVC 1 common JavaScript files on the Microsoft Javascript CDN, meaning you can get the benefit more caching, additional hostnames (to allow more stuff to load concurrently) and the geographic distribution of the CDN to help your page loads
• A generic way to find ASP.NET ClientIDs with jQuery – Rick Strahl shares a technique which can allow you to get the correct Id in your client side code using JQuery and ASP.NET Web forms
• Thoughts on Choosing an ASP.NET MVC Book – David Hayden gives a quick summary of the 6 most common ASP.NET MVC books available today, along with links to other reviews of each book
• More missing LINQ operators – Jimmy Bogard shares a few more ideas on methods that could be included in Linq but aren’t, along with shareing a simple test for each, and an extension method implementation.
• F# First Class Events – Composing Events Until Others – Matthew Podwysocki returns to F# First Class Events one more time to look at an implementation of the until event combinator which fires events until another event fires.
• There’s Only One Thing You Can Learn From Code Coverage – Davy Brion talks about the concept of code coverage as a metric, and argues that the only meaningful thing that can be derived is that when code coverage is low you have a problem
• Required Validator For NHibernate Validators – Scott Kirkland talks about the NHibernate Validators project, and shares the details of implementing a new validator to provide required field validation.
• CLR Team Blog : Automatically Capturing a Dump When a Process Crashes – Anton Tykhyy of the CLR Team show how you can configure the Just In Time Debugger to grab dumps as the process you care about crashes allowing you to be guaranteed good crash debug information with the minimal hassle
• Gtk# for .Net Developers, part II – Louis Salin continues his series on GTK development from a .NET background with a look at the form layout capabilities of GTK
• As Timeless As Infinity – Eric Lippert move onto a large concept, that of infinity, looking at how infinity is represented in the hardware and how you can end up with infinity as a result of your calculations

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Software

• Updated CTP for SQL Azure Database includes complete feature set for PDC 2009! – The SQL Azure Team announce the release of their latest CTP edition of SQL Azure. This is the feature set they will be taking to PDC, now including support for bulk inserts, firewalling, further TSQL support. This release has also been deployed on bigger hardware, and all existing users should have access to this new release.
• PowerCommands for Reflector 1.3 and Introducing Query Editor – Jason Haley has issued another update to his Reflector PowerCommands, taking the total commands to 26, and introducing two new commands, the simple sounding Open, and the more complex Query Editor which lets you write queries in C# Linq to locate types, members etc.
• Releasing psake v1.00 & psake v2.00 – James Kovacs announces the latest revision of his Powershell based build tool, 1.00 is the same as the 0.23 release, which targets Powershell 1, and 2.01 is PowerShell 2 targeting. This tool allows you to utilise the power of the PowerShell scripting language for automating your builds

Information

• SQL Azure Now Feature Complete for PDC 2009 Release – Roger Jennings has a whole host of additional information about the latest SQL Azure CTP release. If Azure is something you care lots about, be sure to subscribe to Roger’s blog as his primary focus is Azure / Cloud technology.
• TechnicalDebtQuadrant – Martin Fowler discusses the concept of Technical debt, and looks at classifying it into four regions on a grid of deliberate to inadvertent combined with reckless to prudent, and explores the further analogies based on this financial metaphor
• The Application Architecture Guide 2.0 Is Here! – David Hill highlights the completion of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Application Architecture 2.0 Guide. This is a significant update to the previous edition, and is available now on MSDN. Printed copies will also be available in the near future.
• View Source Tutorial: Sticky Notes With HTML5 and CSS3 – Ajaxian starts what could be a very interesting series titled ‘View Source’ which will b looking under the covers of sample applications, websites and applications looking at how they work. This post looks under the hood of the Webkit sticky notes demo and uncovers some CSS3 and HTML5 in use.
• My History of Visual Studio (Part 8) – Rico Mariani presses on with his personal history of Visual Studio, with this post which talks about some of the CLR changes which were introduced for the Whidbey(2005) release
• There Can Be Only One. Or Two. Or Three, but Never Four. – Dylan Beattie shares a useful snippet of code which allows you to easily restrict the number of instances of an application you allow per machine.
• The Gradual Development Paradigm – Ivo Manolov discusses practice of delivering little features more often rather than huge chunks of a system in one go, highlighting how this makes it much easier to tell if things will be delivered on time or not, complete with some probability maths to support.
• LOGPARSER #0: Get started with logparser – Anders Lundström shares a 15 part series on using the LogParser library to write queries against log files to extract useful information. Anders’ posts look at IIS HTTP logs, with queries to help trouble shoot 500 errors, identify slow pages, etc.
• WeakReferences, GCHandles, and WeakArrays. – Paulo Zemek explores the .NET Framework’s Weak References, and GCHandles support looking at what they are and what they are useful for, along with looking at the construction of a WeakArray type.
• Performance Counters Added to MassTransit – Chris Patterson talks about the adding of performance counters to the Mass Transit Service Bus project to provide statistics about how the bus is performing to make problem identification easier
• StructureMap with Named Instance and With Method – Steve Michelotti looks at using named instances with StructureMap to work around a dependency which conditionally needs a boolean constructor passing in different situations

Community

• UK Imagine Cup – Calling all problem solvers! – The UK Academic Team at Microsoft announce the 2010 Imagine Cup, a competition for Students which sets a number of real world problems for them to solve with technology. This is a world wide competition with the Final this year being held in Warsaw Poland.

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