November 2009

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #484

Posted by on 25 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Announcing PostSharp 2.0 CTP 2 – The PostSharp team announce the release of their second CTP of PostSharp 2.0. This updated release brings support for .NET 4 / Visual Studio 2010 and Mono 2.4, and is set to expire on 1st February 2010
  • NHibernate 2.1.2 – Released on Sunday with very little noise in the community, NHibernate 2.1.2 contains a couple of minor changes, improvements and bugfixes over the previous 2.1.1 release

Information

  • Now Available: Final PDF of the Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, Second Edition – J.D. Meier announces the release of the final PDF of the Patterns and Practices Application Architecture Guide Second Edition. This release is also available in HTML and Printed (via Amazon) formats and is supported by a CodePlex knowledge base
  • Data Services Release Plan Update – Mike Flasko of the ADO.NET Data Services Team talks about their plans for the release of ADO.NET Data Services 1.5 as a Framework Update rather than a side by side release for .NET 3.5 and how it will be included directly in the .NET 4 release.
  • Silverlight Salmagundi – Joey deVilla shares a comprehensive list of the new features of Silverlight 4 with links to Tim Heuer’s resources on each features, alogn with the links to the required and optional tool installs to get you working with Silverlight 4, and some video content to help you learn
  • Application Accessibility Testing – Ivo Manolov talks about testing your WPF and Silverlight applications for accessibility compliance, reviewing what accessibility means, what APIs are provided and a process and details of tools to test the different areas of compliance
  • What’s new for editor extenders in Beta 2? – Noah Richards of the Visual Studio Editor Team highlights the new features of the Visual Studio Editor which can be utilised for extensibility, and how it differs from the previous incarnation
  • An Engineer’s Guide to DNS – Yahoo! Developer Network follow on from their article on Bandwidth a few months ago with this indepth look at what the Domain Name System is all about, and how it relates to software engineers
  • Getting Started with Entity Framework 4 – Complex Types and Entities – Eric Nelson presses ahead with the 4th part of his series looking at the Entity Framework 4 which looks at the use of complex types in the Entity Data Model Designer. Eric also answers a common question in his post QandA: Is the ADO.NET Entity Data Model designer fixed in .NET 4?
  • Tap into the power of the Windows 7 Taskbar – Paul Foster looks into the various Windows 7 taskbar integrations which are made possible and easy using the samples in the Windows 7 API Code Pack
  • Windows 7’s solution to beta software – Jeffrey Palermo shares a useful tip for anyone running Windows 7 who wants an easier way to test beta software with less risk to their main Windows install
  • Populating Hierarchical Data Using Model Binders in ASP.NET MVC Application – Mohammad Azam explores the use of ASP.NET Model Binders to work with nested entities such as a customer with multiple addresses. Sample project for the code discussed is also provided
  • Dynamic objects and ReSharper – Hadi Hariri shows how working with the .NET 4 Dynamic types is made much easier using ReSharper in Visual Stuidio 2010
  • The joy of MSpec – Mike Hadlow takes a first look at using the MSpec framework to write behavioural tests for his code and finds he really likes the syntax
  • Use Dependency Injection To Simplify Application Settings – Patrick Steele looks at how you can use Dependency Injection to decouple your configuration by inserting a class between your configuration consuming code and the means of access to the config and have that class supplied by Dependency Injection.

The Morning Brew #483

Posted by on 24 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Windows Embedded Standard 2011 CTP2 is now available! – The Windows Embedded Team announce thier second CTP release of Windows Embedded Standard 2011. This update includes the usual bugfixes and improvements along with a new Static Dependency Analyser, and packages for Anti-Malware, DVD, PhotoViewer, Fax and Scan, and a few more
  • Announcing: Reflector Addin Toolkit on Codeplex – Jason Haley announces the first additions to his CodePlex Project Reflector Addin Toolkit which includes utilities and examples for building Reflector addins, including VSTemplates, explanatory diagrams, and helper scripts
  • Migrating ASP.NET MVC 1.0 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta (updated!) – Eilon Lipton updates his utility to convert ASP.NET MVC 1 projects to ASP.MC 2 Beta. This update now better handles the JavaScript files in your projects, along with improving the way the reference to ASP.NET MVC Beta 2 is included, and some UI improvements to the application.

Information

  • Building High Performance Web Applications – James Senior looks at some of the new features in the ASP.NET Ajax Library, linking to the official content on each subject, and also highlights a white paper he prepared with Dan Wahlin about using these new features to speed up your ASP.NET Applications
  • Automatic Null Checks – Alois Kraus suggests a new operator (and attempts to get some support for it on Connect) for better dealing with null values, and shows some other alternatives you can use to provide similar functionality using extension methods.
  • A View into the Behavior of Your Parallel Application : Learning to Write in Parallel – ‘jarapp’ of the Concurrency Visualizer team shows how they had a little fun making words in the thread view using a little sample application. This is quite similar to a demo at SQLBits using SQL to make the 96 cores of a UniSys test machine write words in task manager – good fun 🙂
  • ux musings : Windows System Color Theme for Silverlight – Corrina, Tsitsi, Vidya, and Susan talks about the work they have been doing on building a theme mapping for Silverlight to use the underlying Windows colour scheme, further adding to the accessibility support in Silverlight.
  • Connecting Your Tests to an Implementation – Nico Kicillof of the Spec Explorer Team talks about the two way you can connect your generated tests to the implementation in Spec Explorer, and also discusses Static vs. Instance-Based Models, another significant design decision which is influenced by your choice of connection.
  • OMG, Better Rake (for .net)! – Steven Harman highlights the work being done by Derick Bailey on implementing real Rake tasks for .NET builds as a part of the Albacore project.
  • Deploying A Web Application with Git and FTP – Rob Conery looks at deploying web applications using the best solution he has found so far, the Git Version Control System and FTP.
  • Silverlight 4 Beta – Using Silverlight as Drop Target – Brian Lagunas looks at using a Silverlight application as a target for drag and drop operations, allowing you to drag files into the application and have it process it. Brian provides source for this Silverlight 4 Beta sample, and also discusses a neat UI features for Text Trimming
  • Facebook Connect Action Filter for ASP.NET MVC – Jim Christopher (beefarino) shows how you can use ASP.NET MVC Action Filter attributes to utilise the Facebook Connect User Identity and profile data services in your ASP.NET MVC applications
  • Enabling the ASP.NET Ajax script loader for your own scripts – Bertrand Le Roy looks at how you can utilise the features of the ASP.NET Ajax script loader to load your own scripts taking advantage of the lazy load, parallel loading and dependency management
  • IIS SEO Toolkit – Crawler Module Extensibility – Carlos Aguilar Mares looks at the Extensibility of the IIS SEO Tookit in this first post in a series. This Post looks at the extensibility of the Crawler Module, showing how you can add new features to the crawler to report on, in this case, images.
  • Hitting the upper limit of foreign key constraints – Jimmy Bogard talks about an interesting problem his team ran into surrounding strange messages from SQL about running out of stack space, and how it eventually traced back to the number of foreign key constraints in the Database.
  • Always write a spec, Part Two – Eric Lippert follows up from his previous post about specifications with a look at what was wrong with his specification mentioned in the previous post
  • Silverlight: Universal GUI toolkit – Miguel de Icaza talks about the Silverlight 4 Beta announcement at PDC, and discusses what it means for desktop applications and the Moonlight project
  • Getting your OSS binaries with Horn – Hadi Hariri highlights the latest developments of the Horn project, probably the easiest way to get the correct versions and builds of the various open source .NET libraries. Horn how has a server based component which is being hosted by the kind folks at iMeta, making it even easier to get the correct builds of the things you need.
  • Can I talk to that William fellow? He was so helpful – Raymond Chen recounts the story of the time when Bill Gates answered a support call (a little over 20 years ago) in this amusing, yet true, anecdote.

Community

  • Linked .Net Users Group – Presentations – Last Nights Scott Guthrie live chat was a great opportunity to get to hear about all the developments discussed at PDC, along with getting Scott’s view on where things are going to be going in the future. The recording of this session is now up, so if you missed it live you can catch up

The Morning Brew #482

Posted by on 23 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

I had a great time at SQLbits this weekend in South Wales, it was nice to meet up with friends old and new, and to learn a thing or two about SQL along the way. Congratulations to the organisers for another excellent event.

Software

  • MockingBird v1 RTM – Santosh Benjamin announces the release of MockingBird V1, a set of tools for mocking web services, providing a useful tool for testing, and for developing against web services based on WSDL alone with no concrete implementation.
  • Lot’s of new software for IIS, ASP.NET, AJAX and PHP this week – ‘BillS’ highlights a number of releases from PDC week for the Microsoft Web Platform, including a number of IIS add-ins and some PHP on Windows related additions
  • TestApi v0.4 Released! – Ivo Manolov announces the release of TestApi v0.4 a collection of test supporting Apis, and the 0.4 release brings a number of new APIs for detecting memory leaks, object comparison, test text string generation.
  • PDC09 Session Downloader – Frank La Vigne shares a simple tool to download all the PDC videos from the PDC site. The program offers limited support for resuming, as it will download any missing files without overwriting any existing files. Bear in mind that these videos are pretty big, so ensure you are on a fast unmetered connection before downloading. Frank has also released the PDC09 Downloader Source Code for his program
  • IronRuby – Release: 1.0 RC1 – The IronRuby Team release V1.0 RC1 on CodePlex. This release. So far I’ve only seen mention of this release on Twitter, so don’t have any details of what is new / changed in this release
  • T4MVC 2.5.01: added support for Html.RenderAction and Html.Action – David Ebbo releases the latest minor update to his T4 Template Library for ASP.NET MVC which adds in support for the two new ASP.NET MVC 2 beta features Html.RenderAction and Html.Action

Information

Community

  • LIDNUG: Online chat with me Monday Nov 23rd – Scott Guthrie highlights the Linked In .NET User Group’s virtual event to be held today 11:30am PST where Scott will be talking about the new things announced at PDC, and will be taking questions on anything.

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