The Morning Brew

Software

• Paint.NET v3.5 (Final) is now available! – Paint.Net the Paint / photo editing package written completely in .NET recieves its latest update with a while host of new features, and A new license for Paint.NET v3.5
• The RC of Windows Identity Foundation is here! – Vibro announces the release candidate build of Windows Identity Foundation the new name for Geneva, the SDK and programming model for federated identity and claims based authentication for .NET
• Windows Identity Framework (WIF) Announcements – Sam Gentile has a number of related news and announcements over at his blog
• Microsoft .NET Services SDK (Nov 2009 CTP) – The latest .NET Services CTP release has been made available on MSDN.

Information

• Neat VS10 Feature: Pinning A Debugger Watch – Phil Haack highlights another nice new feature of Visual Studio 2010’s debugging capabilities, the ability to pin a watch window to the editor, meaning it will be anchored to a point in the code, allowing you to see the value of a variable alongside the code.
• ASP.Net MVC Portable Area – Part 4 IoC framework support – Eric Hexter continues his series on the development of Portable Areas in ASP.NET MVC with a brief look at adding support to the portable areas for Inversion of Control
• HDI Video: Generate from Usage in Visual Studio 2010 with Karen Liu – Charlie Calvert highlights a video by Karen Liu looking at the new Generate from Usage feature of VS2010, giving a non-video summary of the content of the video
• Equality and Comparison Constraints in F# – Don Syme talks about the two new constraint added to F# in the 1.9.7 release for dealing with equality and comparisons, giving a nice summary of the background to the problem, and an introduction to the new features.
• Sproc Executing Slow? It Might be This – Rob Reynolds talks about a configuration setting which can make massive differences to the speed of execution of your stored procedures in SQL Server, and vast differences between the different ways of running procs. This one is well worth knowing about, I’ve been bitten by this one on more than one occasion
• IronRuby and Cucumber – Cucumber Tutorial (Part 3 of 3) – Greg Malcolm wraps up his series on IronRuby and Cucumber for BDD testing with a look at Cucumber, illustrated with a healthy number of examples.
• The Number of Classes Is Not A Good Measure Of Complexity – Eric Lee talks about the danger of using the number of classes as a metric for complexity, arguing that having more classes makes things less complex if done correctly
• Request/Response Service Layer Series – Davy Brion beigns a new series of posts on the Request /Response service layer, with his first post Requests And Responses looking at the basics of the Request Response service layer
• Integrating Google Javascript Compiler in Visual Studio – Kim talks about some work on integrating the Google Closure Javascript compiler into the Visual Studio IDE via the REST API. This looks very promising work, and I look forward to seeing a release of the code / Add-in
• Jumping the trampoline in C# – Stack-friendly recursion – Bart De Smet digs into recursion looking at how it can be made easier on your stack trace in another of his epic posts – this one is another I’m going to have to take a while to read over.
• DWORD – Duct Tape Programmers – Roy Osherove starts a new video cast blog series called DWORD, and in this edition takes an amusing look at the Duct Tape Programmer debate

Community

• Architect Cafe November 2009 Series | Online Webcasts – Architect Cafe highlights 2 webcasts for architects coming up in the next few weeks, the first looking at Silverlight 3, and the second looking at cloud computing and Azure. These are US events around noon PST, so should be watchable from western Europe at not too later hour
• Expect the Unexpected – Microsoft are running a competition to win a trip to the Galapagos Islands, or a Smart Car, along with a number of other smaller prizes, all for sharing your story about something you achieved with the .NET Framework

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Software

• Google releases Closure, the tools behind the JS geniuses – Ajaxian highlights the release of Closure the JavaScript library that powers the Google Application offerings, including an optimizer (‘Closure Compiler’), a JavaScript library, along with templating in both Java and JavaScript,

Information

• Hanselminutes on 9 – Debugging Crash Dumps with Tess Ferrandez and VS2010 – Scott Hanselman talks with Tess Ferrandez about ASP.NET Debugging, and Tess shows Scott how to debug a dump of an ASP.NET application using some of the new features in Visual Studio 2010.
• Retrieving Nested Properties from Lambda Expressions – Elton Stoneman looks at getting ProperyInfos for properties using Lambda expressions, and how it gets a little more tricky when you want to access properties off objects referred to by a property
• IronRuby and Cucumber – Installation (Part 1 of 3) – Greg Malcolm shares a 3 part series based on his recent Usergroup demo. This first part looks at getting IronRuby and Cucumber installed correctly, and the second part ‘A quick look at IronRuby‘ takes a tour around IronRuby, with Part 3 yet to be published looking at BDD with Cucumber and IronRuby
• November’s Toolbox Column Now Online – Scott Mitchell highlights the contents of his Toolbox column for MSDN Magazine’s November edition, which means that the rest of the magazine is online too – follow the link at the end of his post to get into the full column and the rest of the magazine
• Now Available: patterns & practices Application Architecture Book – J.D. Meier highlights the release of the Patterns and Practices groups Application Architecture book as a physical printed book. The whole content of this (and may other useful guides from P&P) is available online as PDF, links at the end of this article.
• Creating something from nothing, asynchronously [Developer-friendly virtual file implementation for .NET improved!] – ‘Delay’ adds some enhancements to the virtual file creation using drag and drop from a previously linked article, improving the UI by keeping it responsive while creating the files which were downloaded through the application
• WPF RichTextBox Subscript and Superscript Without Font Restrictions – Steven Robbins shares a work around for WPF applications using the RichTextBox wanting to include Superscript and subscript text regardless of the font being OpenType and having a suitable variant for super/subscript
• Writing WPF/Silverlight compatible code. Part 2: Dependecy Properties – Alan Mendelevich is on part 2 of a series looking at writing WPF and Silverlight compatible code in the currently stable version (WPF3.5 and Silverlight3). This part looks at working with dependency properties in ways that will work in both Silverlight and WPF
• It’s Okay To Write Unit Tests – Justin Etheredge responds to post about unit testing with a 7 step plan which should help you to unit test better and more effectively
• Enabling X-Domain access to your Data Services – The ADO.NET Data Services Team talk about how you can grant access to your ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) services to other domains using the ClientAccessPolicy file

Community

• Virtual ALT.NET Recordings – A reminder that all of the Virtual Alt.Net presentations are archived on the VirtualAlt.Net site, with recent additions of Billy McCafferty S#arp architecture talk and Ayende Rahien on Building NHProfiler. A great resource and a useful means of seeing talks from other timezones

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Software

• Visual Studio 2010 Power +25 with PowerCommands 10.0 – Greg Duncan highlights the release of PowerCommands 10.0 which bring the PowerCommands Extensions to Visual Studio up to date with VS2010 support offering extensions within numerous parts of the IDE
• ADO.Net Entity Framework Community Technology Preview Released! – The ADO.NET Entity Framework Team announce the release out their latest Features CTP, which brings a number of new enhancements to Code Only support, code generation support for self tracking entities for WCF / multi tier applications. This release supports Visual Studio 2010 beta 2
• Introducing Debugging for MonoTouch – Miguel de Icaza announces the release of MonoTouch 1.2, the library that brings multi touch support to Mono for developing iPhone/iPod applications. The significant new feature for this release is the ability to debug on the simulator and iPhone
• Code Review Plug-in for Visual Studio 2008, ReviewPal – Chathuranga K.W. releases a Visual Studio Plug-In which adds support for performing Code Reviews to Visual Studio 2008. This is very similar to an Add-in I started writing a while back, and looks like it might be very useful, one to check out for sure
• OpenRasta 2.0 RC – Seb Lambla announces the Release Candidate release of OpenRasta 2.0, his resource oriented framework for building MVC web applications.

Information

• Getting Started with Clojure in .net – on code – ‘On Code’ blog highlights the existence of a CLR port of the Java Clojure language with the start of this series looking at the installation and some of the getting started concepts of the language
• Selective Unit Testing – Costs and Benefits – Steve Sanderson discusses the merits of testing different types of code, looking at the how the costs of testing vary, along with the difficulty of testing cost benefit analysis of testing certain types, suggesting that it may be worth investigating other types of testing where TDD offers less value return
• F# 1.9.7 Language Specification Now Available – Don Syme highlights the availability of the F# 1..9.7 language specification which matches with the team’s latest releases. They plan some minor updates the the document over the coming weeks
• Introduction to WPF 4 Multitouch – Jaime Rodriguez gives a nice introduction to the MultiTouch support for raw-touch and manipulation in Windows Presentation Foundation 4, sharing sample applications to illustrate the various points in the tutorial
• A RouteHandler for IHttpHandlers – Phil Haack explores how you could implement RouteHandlers for your IHttpHandlers to allow you to register routes to particular HttpHandlers, along with a sample project illustrating the technique
• Automapper Auto Profile Registration – Eric Hexter talks about his experiments with smaller Automapper profiles, and shows a method of registering them more easily which is a massive help when you have lots of small ones
• Letters from the editor : What’s new for extenders in Beta 2? – Noah Richards highlights some of the differences in Visual Studio Editor extensibility between Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases, a useful translation when, if like me, you are investigating extensibility in Beta 2 and finding lots of resources talking about beta 1
• Visual Studio 2010: UML modeling projects – Gunnar Peipman shows some of the support for UML Modelling available in Visual Studio 2010 Modelling Projects, illustrated with a series of screenshots
• Revisiting randomness – Jon Skeet looks at providing a better version of his static Random Number generator which aims to improve the randomness of numbers by not constantly recreating the random generator with similar seeds, and to offer better multithreading support than his previous version
• Writing Presentable Code Pt.1 – Properties and Variables – David Whitney discusses his coding style in detail, providing his justifications to certain decisions. This one is probably most useful if you don’t agree with the standards David uses as it provides the reasoning you might need to see why people do do things that way.
• Using Windsor to inject dependencies into ASP.NET MVC ActionFilters – Patrick Steele pieces together a means of allowing a Windsor Container to be used to inject dependencies into ASP.NET MVC ActionFilters, drawing on a number of posts from elsewhere to utilise some of their techniques

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