The Morning Brew

Slightly less PDC content than I was expecting today, no real announcements, just more detail about what has been release.

I’m really looking forward to the SQLBits goes west community event this weekend – if you happen to spot me there please come over and say Hi.

PDC

• Videos :: Microsoft PDC09 – Videos from a number of the sessions at PDC are available on the PDC website for on demand viewing mostly in WMV and WMV High quality formats with the odd one in MP4. Slide decks are also available for most.
• ASP.NET MVC 2 Custom Validation – Phil Haack continues his series of posts looking at the new features of the ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta released at PDC. In this post Phil explores custom validation using a worked example to show how you can build attributes to implement your validation rules and how the framework utilises them. Phil Haack is also the featured guest on show 188 of Hanselminutes where Scott Hanselman talks with him about the beta release
• News on the ASP.NET Ajax Library Beta – James Senior highlights the release of the ASP.NET Ajax Library Beta and discusses how this is the first Microsoft project contributed to the CodePlex Foundation, how the Ajax Control Toolkit was merged into the ASP.NET Ajax Library, and the future of the library. James also points at a number of other posts about the various features the library offers
• Silverlight 4 beta released at #PDC09 – Laurent Bugnion talks about the Silverlight 4 Beta and the new features and asks a question that is on most peoples lips – ‘what happens with WPF?’
• Rundown of Silverlight 4 Beta Features and 6 Hands on Labs – Adam Kinney highlights 6 newly posted hands on labs for Silverlight 4 features such as the WebCam support, image browser, out of browser, and rich text editor.
• Using WIF on a WCF Client – The “Geneva” Team Blog discusses the use of Windows Identity Framework (WIF) with Windows Communicator Foundation (WCF), looking at the extensions that have been made for working with Security Token Services
• The PDC Is Over; Here Comes the SDP – Sasha Goldshtein provides an index post to all his PDC session postings and highlights the Sela Developer Practice, an Israel based event in December which aims to bring the content of PDC to Israeli developers
• Silverlight 4 Security Overview White Paper – Nick Kramer shares a white paper on the security implementation in Silverlight 4 which discusses the way security is implemented along with a glimpse into the reasoning for the way certain features work.

Software

• Introducing: The Agatha Project – Davy Brion gets permission from his employer, Item Solutions, to release their implementation of the Request Response Layer as a project called Agatha.
• .NET Reflection Made Fast & Simple – Fasterflect 1.1 Release – Buu Nguyen announces the release of Fasterflect 1.1 a library which provides reflection capabilities with simpler code usage and enhanced performance over the standard .NET reflection.

Information

• Exploring Spark View Engine for ASP.NET MVC – Part 3 – Al Nyveldt has been taking a look at the Spark view engine this week with three posts on the subject. This 3rd post gives a glance into Conditionals, Viewdata and Iteration, the previous posts exploring the role of the view engine and getting started with basic markup and master layouts
• Take 2: Why we use SOLID in static languages and how we get the same functionality for cheap in dynamic languages – Ryan Svihla continues his discussion of how development practices change when working with dynamic languages by looking at how the SOLID principles are provided for in dynamic languages
• Always write a spec, part one – Eric Lippert talks about the art of writing technical specifications of how code should work, illustrating how the process can go with a recent compiler related example which contained bugs in the specification
• 30 “Quick Hit” Videos for folks that couldn’t join us at PDC – Joe Stagner shares 30 short videos offering previews of various ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 features which give a taste of the features being demoed at PDC
• Design Patterns Are Not Outdated – Steve Rowe picks up a theme which has been cropping up suggesting that some of the design patterns are solving out dated problems, and Steve sets about explaining why this isn’t really the case
• ASP.NET MVC and Windows Azure (November 2009 edition) – Jim Nakashima looks at how the latest release of the Microsoft Azure Tools for Visual Studio make it much easier to run ASP.NET MVC applications on the cloud
• Getting Started with Entity Framework 4 – Templated Code Generation – Eric Nelson continues his series of posts on the Entity Framework 4 with a look at its use of T4 templates to generate the necessary code from the Entity Data Model.
• More debugging videos and a Resource List from my TechED and Oredev sessions on debugging asp.net applications – Tess Ferrandez shares a number of resources from her recent presentations on debugging ASP.NET applications, along with highlighting some other sessions she enjoyed at those events
• ASP.NET 4.0: Writing custom output cache providers – Gunnar Peipman takes a look at a new ASP.NET 4 feature – the ability to implement your own output caching via a provider interface, showing a complete working example (source provided)

Community

• Developer Day Scotland 2010 – Scottish Developers announce the free Developer Day Scotland event for 2010 to be held on the 8th May 2010 at Glasgow Caledonian University. Along with announcing the event the are also issuing a call for speakers for the event so iof you want to present get your sessions abstracts in. I attended last year’s event and enjoyed it immensly
• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Recording of Mark Nijhof on CQRS @ E-VAN 18 November 2009 – Jan Van Ryswyck makes available the recording of the Virtual European Alt.Net Meeting from earlier this week where Mark Nijhof spoke about Command Query Responsibility Segregation

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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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PDC

• ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta Released – Phil Haack shares the news of the ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta release, announced as part of the PDC keynote. This beta release includes support for Visual Studio 2008 SP1, but not for VS2010 beta 2 due to that being on a different schedule
• Windows Identity Foundation RTM! – ‘vibro’ highlights the PDC announcement of the GA / RTM release of Windows Identity Framework, Microsoft’s latest incarnation of identity products formerly know as Geneva.
• Announcing the Identity Developer Training Course on Channel9 – Vibro also highlights the Identity Developer Training Course, a self learning set of content available on the Channel 9 site covering the use of identity in a number of scenarios such as Web, Web services, Azure
• Microsoft Codename Dallas : Introducing "Dallas" – Moe Khosravy shares the announcement of the new Microsoft project codenamed ‘Dalas’ which brings hih quality information conent services to the Azure offering via a clean API. Moe also shares A Quick Overview of Dallas for Developers.
• Developing and Managing Services with Windows Server AppFabric – Cliff Simpkins talks about the Windows Server AppFabric Beta 1 release which is designed to make it easier to build and scale out applications built on IIS. Key components of this technology are the Velocity Cache, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, ADO.NET Data Services all of which enable SOA style applications to be built on the framework
• Announcing Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack For SQL Azure CTP – Maheshwar Jayaraman highlights the release of the Microsoft Sync Framework Power Pack For SQL Azure CTP which contains the Azure Data Sync tool which lets you synchronise data between your own SQL instances and Azure, the SqlAzureSyncProvider which eables synchronisation of existing data providers and adds in a number of SQL Azure metadata APIs, and a SQL Azure Offline Visual Studio plugin which enables you to build offline synchronisation routines with Azure
• Azure – from July CTP to November 2009 PDC Release – Mike Kelly takes a look at the changes from the July CTP release of the Azure SDK through to the release for PDC 2009, highlighting the large key changes
• Windows Azure case studies launched at PDC 2009 – Hanu Kommalapati highlights a number of Azure case studies showing the use of various Azure features in real world situations. Hanu also shares some of the details of the pricing of Windows Azure supported OS image types
• Breaking Down ‘Data Silos’ – The Open Data Protocol (OData) – Mike Flasko of the ADO.NET Data Services Team talks about the new OData protocol for data sharing which aims to make interoperability between data sources much eaier
• Introducing the Microsoft Open Data Protocol Visualizer – Noam Ben-Ami & Fabian Winternitz of teh ADO.NET Data Services Team share the release and show the Microsoft Open Data Protocol Visualizer a tool to help work with Open Data Protocol data from inside Visual Studio
• PDC09 Demo App: Tailspin Travel (Visual Studio 2010) – Dr. "Z" highlights the availability of the full source of the TailSpin sample application being shown at PDC on CodePlex. This app, build in VS2010 Ultimate and requiring the new Azure AppFabric installed shows off a number of the new features being discussed this PDC
• PDC 2009 Day 1: Future Directions for C# and Visual Basic – Sasha Goldshtein talks about some of the interesting stuff revealed at PDC about the two main .NET languages and also some interesting news about the respective compilers for each language

Software

• Vim Emulator Editor For Beta2 Released – Jared Parsons updates his VIM emulator for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, bringing some traditional VIM Editor goodness to the Visual Studio IDE
• SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 is finally here! – Eric Kraus highlights the release of SharePoint 2010 Beta 2 which will expire on 31 October 2010 and is available now to MSDN subscribers. Eric also links to a number of resources with help for getting installed and running
• Announcing: IIS SEO Toolkit v1.0 release – CarlosAg highlights the release of the IIS Search Engine Optimisation Toolkit 1.0 RTM release. This release builds on the sucess of the Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases adding a number of bug fixes and new features while retaining backward compatibility with the betas
• Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer – John Resig highlights a useful tool for anyone battling performance issues in JavaScript in Internet Explorer versions 6-8. dynaTrace Ajax looks like a really useful tool at a good price (free)
• Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) released on DevLabs – Matthew Podwysocki highlights the release of the Reactive Extensions for .Net which was release on DevLabs today. This release covers .NET 4 beta 2, .NET 3.5 SP1 and Silverlight 3 giving lots of opportunities to play with this stuff.

Information

• Getting Started with Entity Framework 4 – Simple Model First Example – Eric Nelson follows up from his TechEd presentation with a series of blog posts looking at the content he delivered there. This first part looks at implementing the Entity Framework from the model, using a empty model, building entities and pushing them back to the database
• Security Tools : How to Configure WPL v1.0 SRE – RV takes a look at the Web Protection Library released last week showing how you go about setting it up and configuring it to protect your sites from a variety of attacks
• TempData Improvements – Jacques Eloff talks about the improvements made to TempData in the ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta release
• Pass Number 1: ActiveRecordEngine for ASP.NET – Rob Conery continues the discussion about a standard interface implementation for Active record allowing active record implementations from your ORM of choice to be plugged in.
• ASP.NET MVC from Basics to Tips and Tricks – Michael Johnson shares his notes from his presentation to the Fort Smith .NET User Group on ASP.NET MVC basics and tricks and tips, bringing together a lot of the standard advice with simple small code samples to illustrate
• How We Do Things – The Team Room – Scott C Reynolds continues his series looking at how his team do development with this post looking at how they organise their team room discussing layout, white boards, hardware, etc

Community

• NotAtPDC – For those of us not at PDC this year, the .NET community has created the NotAtPDC events, a string of virtual events from well known speakers who are not at PDC either. There is a health list of sessions scheduled over the next few days, so check it out

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