The Morning Brew

Updated: Corrected the Assembly name which is being discussed in Bart De Smet’s post linked below

Software

• Visual Studio 2010 editions and "The Ultimate offer" – If you’re buying Visual Studio in the next three months, information you MUST know – Greg Duncan highlights some valuable information for anyone who is considering a software purchase of Visual Studio in the months leading up to the release of VS 2010
• Announcing FubuMVC – Chad Myers formally announces the FubuMVC project, with the links to the official site, official wiki and the offical source code repository, and calls out for some help from the community to help the project progress with its //TODO: list
• Free Azure for January – Bruce D. Kyle highlights that the remains of this month are your opportunity to try out Azure for free

Information

• Getting Started with WCF WebHttp Services in .NET 4 – Randall Tombaugh a developer on the WCF WebHttp Services team begins a 12 part series looking at the WCF WebHttp features looking at building a real world service using these new features. This part begins with a look at the new project templates, addresses some of the basics of WCF WebHtp, and starts building a simple GET service.
• More LINQ with System.Interactive – Functional fun and taming side-effects – Bart De Smet continues his series on the System.ReactiveSystem.Interactive assembly with a look at some of the functional programming methods provided as the EnumerableEx extensions.
• 13 Things You Should Know About Statistics and the Query Optimizer – Fabiano Amorim gives some insight into hwo the Query Optimizer uses statistics about the data to decide on the best execution plans, along with some good background information on statistics
• CLR V4: Stuff That May Break Your Profiler – David Broman talks at length about some of the changes in CLR4 which may cause problems in profilers designed for earlier versions of the framework.
• Is there such a thing as too much precision? – Eric Lippert talks about some of the complexities of having numbers to high precision and attempting to work with them.
• [Video] Spark View Engine Part 3 – Mike Ormond shares the video content for his third (and final) part of the series on the Spark View Engine. This part looks at more complex view pages using strongly typed view data.
• How SparkFun (and 800.com) and small commerce or startup websites can scale – Scott Hanselman draws on his experiences from the late ’90’s and talks about scaling out websites, using a variety of tricks including static pages, and revised definitions of ‘realtime’.
• Advanced StructureMap: custom registration conventions for partially closed types – Jimmy Bogard talks abotu using the StructureMap IOC Container to create a custom registration convention which supports the partially closed types that you use when dealing with some of the common patterns for message handling.
• Advanced Castle Windsor: custom registration conventions for partially closed types – Krzysztof Kozmic follows up on Jimmy’s post with a look at achieving similar effects using the Castle Windsor Container.
• Honey, I MEF-fed the Silverlight Gallery (for Christmas), Part 1 – Andrej Tozon begins a two part series looking at introducing the Managed Extensibility Framework into a Silverlight Gallery implementation to provide pluggable theming
• Custom Explicit and Implicit Operators in C# – Bryan Sampica looks at the useful technique of using Custom Explicit and Implicit operators which can be used to simplify conversions of types when mapping between DTO and Business objects.
• 64-bit platform testing is every bit as important as 32-bit platform testing – William Stanek reminds us that testing on both 32 and 64 bit platforms is increasingly important, as well as showing why it is dangerous to rely on User Agent detection using the Web Browser’s User Agent String.

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Today’s edition number is another of those nice computery numbers. Today we still have plenty of snow and ice in the ground in Liverpool, but life is slowly returning to normal here.

Information

• Walkthrough: Windows Azure Table Storage (Nov 2009 and later) – Jim Nakashima updates his walk through of the creation of a sample application using Windows Azure and the Table Storage Service, serving as a useful introduction to both technologies, full code is provided and the article includes numerous snippets and screenshots to illustrate.
• Locate File in Solution Explorer – Visual Studio Macro – Brian Schmitt shares a Visual Studio macro which adds one of the Resharper features I use a lot to the standard Visual Studio, the ability to navigate to the working file in the solution explorer when Track Active Item (which eats performance) is not active.
• TDD: 4 questions that will help you create the simplest thing that could possibly work – Roy Osherove talks about the key TDD concept of the ‘Simplest thing that works’ and shares some tips to help you ensure that what you do conforms to this principle.
• Inheritance Patterns in YUI 3 – Stoyan Stefanov looks at two JavaScript code reuse patterns (Classical Inheritance and prototypal inheritance) that are implemented in the Yahoo! YUI 3 library,
• Much Ado About Monads – Reader Edition – Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at the Reader Monad as an alternative to the State Monad using a similar example to in his State Monad post.
• Lazy(T, TMetadata) Class in System.ComponentModel.Composition – David Hayden explores the .NET 4 Lazy<T> feature showing how it can be used to help manage expensive resource creation.
• Event Driven Architecture: Publishing Events using an IOC container – Jarod Ferguson continues his series on Advanced IOC container usage with a look at creating an event driven architecture around the IOC Container and looks at publishing events.
• The source code IS (still) the executable [Updated CSI, a C# interpreter (with source and tests) for .NET 4] – ‘Delay’ releases a new version of CSI, the C# Interpreter, one year after its first release. This release brings in support for C#4 Beta 2 along with a number of other improvements to the entry point support.
• Reactive Extensions API: Domain Events Example – Mike Chaliy looks at the types of problems that the Reactive Extensions can help to solve, looking at a fairly standard Bank Account example and making it observable,
• Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 hang while debugging? – Andrew Hall of the Visual Studio Debugger Team talks about a number of know problems that you may be encountering with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Debugging, and offering some diagnostic assistance
• How developers learn survey results – interesting – Eric Nelson shares more detailed results from the MSDN UK Developer Seurvey, looking at the ways in which developers learn their craft, and the types of resources they use.

Community

• VBUG Bracknell: CANCELLED Test Driven Development to save, time, money – VBUG Bracknell’s event planned for tonight has been cancelled due to the adverse weather conditions that the UK has been suffering (or enjoying depending on your view point). The event may be re-scheduled, and If I see details of this I will include it in The Morning Brew.
• VBUG Bracknell: Windows Server App Fabric – VBUG Bracknell’s Feburary Event, to be held on Monday 15th February, will be featuring Santosh Benjamin talking on the Windows Server AppFabric
• New User Group in the North East of England – 20th Jan Silverlight and Hyper-V – Eric Nelson highlights the first event from a new North-East UK basedUser group. This first event sees Mike Taulty and James O’Neill talking on Silverlight and Hyper-V

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Heavy snow yesterday in Liverpool has resulted in chaos last night and this morning, with some of my colleagues taking up to 5 hours to get home last night. I took the decision to walk into the office today, and quite enjoyed the walk, but as a result today’s edition is a little later (and shorter) than usual. Hopefully normal service will be resumed tomorrow.

Software

• Updated Reflector.PowerCommands – Jason Haley announces an update to his Reflector PowerCommands project which adds in support for import and export of queries from within the query editor
• Commodore 64 JavaScript Emulator – Ajaxian shares an amazing port by Tim de Koning of the Flash Commodore 64 Emulator to JavaScript. The Commodore 64 was the computer I first started programming on, and will always have a special place in my heart

Information

• Test Driven Spikes (TDS) – Mark Nijhof talks about using Test Driven approaches when working with spike code to ensure that the code is of a reasonable quality that it can be re-purposed.
• How to Create and Activate an Introductory MSDN Premium Windows Azure and SQL Azure Account Upgrade – Roger Jennings runs through the setup process of the MSDN complementary license for Azure.
• BDD in .NET with Cucumber part 3: Scenario outlines and tabular templates – Gojko Adzic continues his series of posts on Behaviour Driven Development using the Cucumber framework. This 3rd part in the series looks at further techniques for working with repetitive scenarios
• How to effectively define a sufficient set of BDD scenarios/Acceptance tests? – Gojko also answers a readers question in his post ‘
• MVC 2 in Action book conducting public reviews – Jeffrey Palermo gives an update on the progress of the updated edition of ASP.NET MVC 2 In Action, and explains how you can get a preview glimpse of chapters as they are being written / updated.
• NHibernate vs. Entity Framework 4.0 – Ayende discusses the sensitive topic of NHibernate compared to the Entity Framework. I suspect this post will cause one or two reaction posts out there in the .NET blog’o’sphere
• NHibernate and "The multi-part identifier … could not be bound" Exception – Derik Whittaker shares the solution to an often encountered NHibernate problem when working with Cirteria queries.
• ASP.NET 4 SEO Improvements (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) – Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts looking at the .NET 4 release, and in this part talks about a number of improvements which have been made to ASP.NET for improving Search Engine Optimisation.
• A WaspKiller Game with Silverlight 3, .NET RIA Services, MVP and MVVM Patterns Part 2 – Xianzhong Zhu continues this DotNetSlackers tutorial series with the second part in this build a game series. This part looks at the back end parts of the system and using .NET RIA services to communicate with them from Silverlight.

Community

• VirtualDNUG.com a virtual .net users group – Andrew Siemer announce a new Virtual .NET Usergroup which is being supported by ineta

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