The Morning Brew

Special section today for the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Release Candidate Release, available today for MSDN Subscribers, and tomorrow for the general public.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Release Candidate

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate now available – Soma Somasegar announces the release of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Release Candidate edition, available now to MSDN Subscribers, and tomorrow (Weds) for the general public.
• Announcing VS2010 / .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) – Jason Zander gives a little more information about the release, including a direct download link for those on MSDN Subscriptions, along with some information about the types of changes made in this release.
• Install Visual Studio 2010 RC Today – Ed Glas urges us to install the VS2010 RC today to benefit from all the enhancements to the testing functionality he outlines here
• Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Offers "Go Live" Option – The Innovation Showcase Blog highlights the fact that the RC release includes a go-live license allowing you to use the VS2010 / .NET 4 bits in production.
• Visual Studio 2010 / .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate – Joey deVilla highlights the release, and points at a video of Visual Studio General Manager Jason Zander talking about how the feedback from the beta programme was used in the creation of the RC.
• RC is here, and so is the Workflow Designer documentation – Cathy Dumas highlights the RC release, and points out that it now includes the documentation for the Windows WorkFlow Designer.

Software

• Small Basic v0.8 – The Small Basic team announce their 0.8 release of the Small Basic programming language which aims to recapture the pleasure of programming back in the 8bit era. This release now includes a Silverlight based player for your Small Basic programs, making it easier to share your applications.
• Download Enterprise Library 5 and Unity 2 Beta 1 – David Hayden highlights the release of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Team Enterprise Library 5 Beta 1 and Unity 2.0 Beta 1, both new for February.

Information

• Upcoming release and the "F# 2.0" language – Brian McNamara highlights the version number change for F# as of the VS2010 / .NET 4 Release candidate, and soon to be available as a CTP release for VS2008
• jQuery 1.4.1 Intellisense with Visual Studio – Scott Guthrie highlights the official location of the jQuery 1.4.1 intellisense VSDOC file
• Migrating an Existing ASP.NET App to run on Windows Azure – Jim Nakashima follows up on a previous post with further and more up to date details of the process involved in migrating an ASP.NET (MVC) application onto the Azure cloud.
• Q&A: How can I calculate the TCO and ROI when considering the Windows Azure Platform? – Eric Nelson answers the most common Azure related question, ‘will it save money’ with a look at the Azure TOC and ROI Calculator, showing the process involved in assessing your applications needs on the cloud.
• SmallestDotNet Update – Now with .NET 4 support and an includable JavaScript API – Scott Hanselman talks about some update he has made to his website which offers the smallest download to get the .NET version you require, including support for .NET 4 and also a JavaScript API which allows you to easily get HTML links or JSON data which you can use on your site to point to the required download.
• BlockingCollection and IProducerConsumerCollection – Justin Etheredge presses on with his tour of the .NET 4 concurrent collections types with a look at the BlockingCollection and IProducerConsumerCollection, showing a sample situation where you would use these types.
• The Basics: Map Objects and Database Tables using Fluent nHibernate – Matt Long starts a series of posts looking at using Fluent NHibernate to map domain entities back to the database, starting out in this post looking at basic property mapping, and following on with a look at Mapping Relationships using Fluent nHibernate
• Making the code read like the spec – Eric Lippert talks about the C# Compiler’s ability to detect cycles in declared types, and how there are some known issues in this area, and follows on to talk about how he prototyped a new implementation directly from the specification, embedding parts of the specification in the code using comments.
• IL perversions: throwing and catching strings – Gunnar Peipman explores the strange and wonderful world of IL behind the compiler, and looks at how you are able to throw and catch strings rather than exceptions at that level, but how it will upset higher level use.
• Functional C#: Extracting a higher order function with generics – Mark Needham continues his exploration of being more functional in your C# code illustrating with an example of refactoring a set of similar looking function calls which differed only by the service the call and the type they return.
• Exploring MongoDB with F# – Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at the No SQL Database MongoDB and show how it can give you a rapid prototyping environment when combined with F#, allowing you to get going with an idea quickly.
• Combine, Minify, And Compress Your JavaScript – Justin Etheredge talks about 3 things you certainly should be doing with your JavaScript on public facing applications, along with some other techniques to help speed up your applications.
• Multi-tenancy in ASP.NET MVC – Views – Rob Ashton continues his series of posts on Multi-tenancy applications in ASP.NET MVC with a look at how a custom View Engine provides a useful way of being able to replace or add pages and parts of pages depending on config.

Community

• Behaviour Driven Development with Cucumber: Video, Slides and Links – Gojko Adzic shares the video of his session from last week at Skills matter which addressed BDD and acceptance testing using Cucumber, showing how it can work for testing .NET, Ruby and Java applications.

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