The Morning Brew

Software

• WikiPlex v1.2 Released – Matt Hawley announces the release of WikiPlex 1.2, the wiki engine that powers the CodePlex Wiki. The updated release includes support for embedding Silverlight, video, improved indentation, and support for syntax highlighting of C++ and Java.

Information

• The catalogue metaphor and command-query seperation architectures – Ian Cooper discusses the concept of Command Query Separation, looking at how you can comprehend this concept at the detail and architectural level
• NHibernate Caching and Assigned Ids – A Potential Pitfall – Anne Epstein talks about an interesting problem she encountered causing entities to become read-only whilst implementing NHibernate Caching on entities that had assigned Ids
• ASP.NET MVC learning resource: Request-Handling Pipeline Poster – Steve Sanderson highlights a poster he has produced in conjunction with RedGate which details the process that ASP.NET MVC Requests go through
• Hybrid App Debugging – Threading – Harry Pierson continues his series looking at debugging polyglot C# / IronPython applications with a look at the implications of threading on the traceback debugging.
• .Net Developers Hear Me Out! IronRuby is IN DA HOUSE! – Shay Friedman has a public conversation with his imaginary .NET Developer friend hoping to convey why such a developer should be interested and excited in IronRyuby 2
• Create your own IDE in 10 minutes – Rudi Grobler shows off two controls from the SharpDevelop / ICSharpCode team which make creating an nice simple IDE very easy, dealing with arrangement of panes (AvalonDock) and editing the source with highlighting (AvalonEdit)
• My History of Visual Studio (Part 4) – Rico Mariani continues his series of posts sharing his personal history of the Visual Studio IDE
• Setting log4net FileAppender.File at runtime – Wil Peck shares a useful tip about customising log4net configuration in code at runtime to override the configuration from elsewhere.
• Leveraging ASP.NET MVC 2 futures"ViewState" – Don’t be discouraged by the title, this post is infact Maarten Balliauw taking a look at Serialized Model State which allows you to embed the current version of your model data into your page allowing you to create optimistic locking situations like Martin outlines in this post
• What’s the difference between "as" and "cast" operators? – Eric Lippert continues his ‘What’s the Difference’ series with a look at the difference between a cast "(Foo)" and the "as" operator.
• .NET Voice Recorder – Mark Heath shares a project on the Coding4Fun site which deals with sound recording and visualisation in C#.Net and WPF
• Functional Programming Fundamentals Lectures – Matthew Podwysocki highlights a series of Video Casts he did with Erik Meijer and Charles Torre exploring functional programming basics. At the time of writing the first 2 videos of the 13 part series have been posted
• Application that won’t Pin to Taskbar in Windows 7 – Rick Strahl runs into some interesting behaviour in Windows 7 which prevents one of his applications from being able to be pinned to the taskbar due to the executable name containing some reserved words defined within Windows

Community

• AltNetBeers StackOverflow DevDays edition – Seb Lambla opens registration for the AltNetBeers special event which coincides with the DevDays conference. This is a great opportunity to taste Open Spaces discussions and meet a lot of your fellow developers in a social environment around the conference schedule

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Post 450 feels like it should be a significant milestone, but really is isn’t – looks like the big 500 is going to occur on 17th December if my maths is correct – I’d better start preparing something special 🙂

Software

• New Sysinternals utility released today, Disk2vhd v1.0 – Yes, creating a VHD from a physical hard drive, even an online one, is now a couple clicks away… – Greg Duncan highlights the release of a new SysInternals tool aimed at making it easier to create virtual machines from physical machines by allowing you to easily convert a physical drive to a VHD image
• Pex v0.17.41006.7 : More Moles and Bug Fixes – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces an updated release of the Pex testing tool. This release includes further features to enhance the Mole behaviour allowing you to detour method implementations, along with the usual bug fixes
• 1000 Free "Farm-Fresh Web Icons" – FatCow Web Hosting are offering 100 16×16 and 32×32 icons under a Creative Commons Attribution license. This is a nice looking collection, adnis free to use in any situation as long as you give them credit for the icons.
• Enhanced Firefox Memory Profiler Add-on – Ajaxian highlights an updated version of a ireFox memory profiler which allows you to see what is going on in your pages in terms of memory use, object allocations, etc

Information

• A new MSDN for a new Operating System and a new Development Environment – Scott Hanselman talks about the work his team ahve been involved in in creating the new look MSDN site, giving some information on how the new designs / functionality came about, as well as a preview of how things will be looking
• Bootstrapping NHibernate with StructureMap – Weston Binford begins the process of creating a sample project which demonstrates how you can combine NHibernate with the StructureMap IOC/DI project. This post outlines the basis of the sample, requesting comments and feedback from the community
• Introducing SmartyRoute: A smarty-ier way to do routing in ASP.NET applications – Eilon Lipton releases a sample solution which provides simple routing like functionality allowing you to easily create more friendly URLs for your pages
• AutoMapper – the easy way to uncouple your classes – Maciej Gre? give some introductory information on the AutoMapper project, showing how you get up and running with it, along with a brief discussion of what it is and what its benefits are
• AutoMapper Introduction and Samples from NETDUG – Richard Cirerol gives a little more detail on some of the facets of AutoMapper, along with highlighting some samples of it in use, including those from his recent NETDUG presentation.
• The User-Agent String: Use and Abuse – Eric Law talks about the User Agent string, a feature of Internet Explorer he owned, the details about its specification, along with how the it is implemented in Internet Explorer
• Echoes from the Stone Age – ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin responds to a number of the responses to the Duct Tape Programmer article by Joel Spolsky, talking about his use of TDD, Design Patterns, minimising concurrency, and the power of tests to discover the way to do something
• My History of Visual Studio (Part 2) – Rico Mariani continues his personal history of Visual Studio with part 2 and Part 3 –
• Hybrid App Debugging – TracebackDelegate and SetTrace – Harry Pierson continues his new series on debugging polyglot applications written in IronPython and C# with a look at debugging the Iron Python part using the new lightweight debugging functionality introduced in IronPython 2.6
• Hybrid App Debugging Aside – The DLR Hosting API – Harry Pierson also shares an aside about the code required to host an IronPython script inside the CLR calling from C#
• This isn’t an error? – Patrick Steele highlights an interesting feature of object initialisers which initially looks like something that would cause a compile error, but in fact is allowed by the specification.
• Everything You Need to Know About Azure as a Developer – MSDev.Com have 18 presentations on Windows Azure, ranging from 15 minutes of content up to 1 hour covering the range of topics which make up the Azure whole, from the .NETServices, Queues, SQL Azure to the hosting environment

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Software

• FAKE – F# Make – Version 0.10 released – FAKE is a ‘make’ like tool which allows you to automate your build process using code written in F#, allowing you the fuill benefit of the .NET Framework and the F# language. This release now uses interpreted F# rather than compiled, and improved Target Templates.
• Windows Phones, and Windows Mobile 6.5 – Jon Box shares some information about the newly released Windows Mobile 6.5, and the enw Windows Phones branding.

Information

• Getting Started with Silverlight development – Tim Heuer has updated his 7 part series of posts looking at introducing developers to Silverlight Development. The series now contains details of some of the newer features of Silverlight. This is an introductory level series with plenty of code and screenshots to help along the way.
• MvcContrib working on Portable Areas – Jeffrey Palermo gives an update on the MvcContrib project roadmap, talking about the concept of portable areas which will allow related pages to be grouped up into an assembly, and puts out a call for assistance on the project.
• Brad Abrams : Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 26: Authentication and Personalization – Brad Abrams continues his series of posts on Silverlight 3 and the RIA Services. This part looks at authentication in more detail, and shows how you can personalise applications for the logged in user
• Replacing ASP.NET Session with Velocity Session Provider – Gil Fink explores the use of the Velocity distributed Cache to provide distributed sessions support by way of a supplied custom provider, looking at how you go about configuring this.
• Exploring the ASP.NET MVC 2 futures assemby – Maarten Balliauw takes a look at what is inside the ASP.NET MMC 2 Futures assembly. This library gives a glimpse at the some of the things that the ASP.NET MVC team are considering including in future releases, and Martin in this post takes a look at what is inside currently
• Introduction to the Visual Studio Extensions series – Kate Gregory shares a number of presentations about Visual Studio Extensibility. These are slide decks, detailed speaker and demo notes and soem video content to help you prepare. The full list of the posts from this series can be found here
• Extending the Entity Framework Provider Model to support DDL – The Entity Framework Design team share another view into the design process with a discussion of how they are considering implementing Database Definition Language support for entity framework code only processes. As always they are interested in your feedback
• What Sort Of Thing is Programming? Really? – Alfred Thompson asks an interesting question about what people consider programming to be. This post sumaries some of the responses he got and and discusses the various comparisons
• Lightweight Debugging for Hybrid C#/IronPython Apps – Harry Pierson starts a series of posts looking at providing a means for lightweight debugging for the increasing numbers of people who are working on polyglot projects involving both Iron Python and C#. This part outlines the sample application that uses both technologies which will be the basis of the rest of the discussion

Community

• SOA Patterns presentation on E-VAN (recording) – Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz highlights the availability of the recording of his recent presentation to the European Virtual Alt.Net Group on Service Oriented Architecture

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