The Morning Brew

PDC is really getting into its swing, and so are the bloggers – lots of really good content for Today’s edition.

PDC

• Silverlight 4 Beta – The big developer news out of PDC yesterday has to be the Silverlight 4 Beta. This beta release includes a number of much wished for features including improved out of browser experience (with the ability to interact with the file system, clipboard, etc), webcam and microphone support, video recording, mousewheel support, support in Google Chrome. Developer interest will also focus on the CLR improvements allowing the same compiled output to run on Desktop and Silverlight , WCF support and better UI controls.
• Silverlight 4 Beta is out – and the Toolkit has it covered! [Silverlight Toolkit November 2009 release now available for Silverlight 3 and 4!] – ‘Delay’ talks about the Silverlight 4 Beta announcement and the Silverlight Toolkit release the goes with it adding in the support for all the new Silverlight 4 features
• Silverlight 4 Beta – A guide to the new features – Tim Heuer has a large post which goes into more detail on the new Silverlight 4 features, and Mike Taulty has series of posts on Silverlight 4 starting with Silverlight 4: Beta Announced at PDC detailing the announcement, with the rest of the series of 25+posts available on his blog’s Silverlight tag
• An Early Look At IE9 for Developers – Internet Explorer 9 was another forthcoming technology previewed yesterday at PDC, which brings improved standards compliance (ACID Test and CSS3), improvements to performance of JavaScript and page rendering, along with offloading graphics intensive work to the hardware GPU
• Welcome to WCF RIA Services Beta! – Brad Abrams highlights the WCF Rich Internet Application Services beta which goes hand in hand with Silverlight 4. This release brings the RIA Services under the wing of the WCF Family and provides better means for Silverlight applications to consume data exposed as WCF, Data Serices, and OData.
• Office 2010 Beta is Now Available! – Microsoft Office 2010’s public beta release was announced at PDC and is available in 7 different languages currently.
• SharePoint 2010 Public Beta is now available for download – Another public beta release is SharePoint 2010 which is also available for download now, and for developers has the great feature that it will now install on non-server class opperating systems. VHD versions of the beta will be available soon
• Surface SDK Workstation Edition now available for download! – UK Academic Team Blog highlights another PDC public release, the Microsoft Surface SDK Workstation Edition (Free) which allows surface applications to be developed using a normal PC and a simulator using multiple mice allow you to test surface apps on the PC before deploying to a real surface device
• PDC 2009 Day 2: Keynote, Steven Sinofsky – Sasha Goldshtein has been doing some very good coverage of the sessions at PDC he has been attending, well worth checking out for detail on the sessions on parallel, Windows 7 and the keynotes
• Port Bridge – Clemens Vasters talks about the Azure AppFabric Port Bridge, which uses the Azure Service Bus to enable the construction of distributed applications providing seamless communication between applications located in different locations and those in the cloud

Software

• MSpec v0.3 – Aaron Jensen announces the release of MSpec 0.3, introducing a new assertion library, removing the dependence on NUnit / XUnit, runners for Resharper 4+ along with a number of other features. Aaron also put out a Call for help with MSpec looking for some help with the documentation for the project, so if you fancy helping out drop him a line.
• HTML 5 intellisense and validation schema for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer – Visual Web Developer Team share a new HTML 5 validation schema which can be installed into Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web developer to give validation and auto complete for HTML 5 elements in markup
• Simply Buttons – Ajaxian highlights the Simply Buttons JavaScript library from Kevin Miller which provides a simple way of having beautiful buttons in your web applications across all the main web browsers
• A new update to Windows API Code Pack (v 1.0.1) – Mahmoud highlights an updated release of the Windows API Code Pack, the library which provides easy access to enhancements offered by later versions of Windows from .NET Code. Kevin Griffin provides a nice introduction to the library in his post Enhancing your applications for Windows 7

Information

• Html.RenderAction and Html.Action – Phil Haack talks about two new additions to the Core ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta release. Both of these have been in the futures assembly for a while and allow you to call an action from within a view and have the resulting rendered output returned to the response stream or as a string.
• Tip 44 – How to navigate an OData compliant service – Alex James shares some details on how you go about moving round an OData data service in the form of a cheat sheet looking at locating records, moving through records, ordering, etc
• How to create a custom workflow activity for TFS Build 2010 – Jim Lamb explores in detail how you can create workflow based activities for use inside the TFS Build process in 2010, starting with File New, right through to the deployment process
• NHibernate Event Listener Registration With Fluent NHibernate – Rob Reynolds looks at Event listeners in NHibernate and delves into how you go about registering them when you are using Fluent NHibernate rather than the more traditional XML config
• Applications As Composition Of Services – William Bartholomew talks about how thinking of applications as s composition of a number of services can give great rewards in testability, better OO programming, and revealing and controlling dependencies
• I’ve written a book on Testing ASP.net Web Applications – Friend of the Brew, Ben Hall, highlights the release of his book, co-authored with Jeff McWherter which looks at the complex world of testing web applications in all styles of testing (Integration, automated, acceptance, performance, etc). Congratulations Ben
• Validating business objects with AOP (2: persistence with NHibernate) – Thomas Weller continues his series looking at validation using the Aspect Oriented ValidationAspects library for PostSharp. In this part Thomas looks at wiring the validation into the persistence when persisting with NHibernate
• Why does SubSonic’s SimpleRepository ‘Add<T>’ return a decimal instead of an int? (Part 2) – Jesse Taber digs into the SubSonic projects source code to see why it add method returns decimal rather than the more expected Int, and learns some useful facts about the SQL SCOPE_IDENTITY function and ADO type conversion
• Introduction to the Reactive Framework Part V – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the Reactive Framework with a look at how the framework makes writing asynchronous processes easier
• Reducing friction as a standard operating method – Ayende talks about the notion or reducing the friction in the development process to make work easier and much more efficient
• A Brief Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for .NET, Rx – ‘wesdyer’ shares s simple getting started guide for the Reactive Framework, starting with File New Project, and working through a number of simple samples.

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