The Morning Brew

Software

• XAML Power Toys and XAML Power Toys for Cider – New Versions Released – Karl Shifflett announces an updated release of the XAML Power Toys which now run against the Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 RC editions. Also updated are the XAML Power Toys for Cider (The WPF and Silverlight Designer)

Information

• Composition versus Inheritance – Chad Myers discusses the fundamentals of Object System Design, the core concepts upon which all the modern OO concepts such as patterns at built
• A First Look at Unity 2.0 – Dino Esposito takes a look at the latest beat edition of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Unity project, taking a look at it in use, and exploring some of the improvements in the V2 release scheduled to ship in the same time frame as VS2010 / .NET 4
• Back to Basics: C# 4 method overloading and dynamic types – Scott Hanselman takes a look at an important question when working with the new Dynamic Type support in C#4, how do you know which overload will be used?
• ASP.NET MVC 2 Optional URL Parameters – Phil Haack talks about an interesting issue with model state caused by the way routing will pass through a empty string as an Id value due to the way the default route is configured, and shows how a new feature of ASP.NET MVC 2 helps work round this.
• Silverlight Tools – Steve Smith shares a list of tools that he (or other he knows) have found useful for Silverlight Development, along with some links to good Silverlight news sources.
• CQRS and Event Sourcing – Greg Young talks about a specific case where Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) and Event sourcing techniques fit well together
• In praise of ELMAH – Mike Hadlow shares his experiences with the ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) library looking at how he set it up in his ECommerce application, and is now able to monitor errors in a variety of ways.
• Reduce Chain and Extract Projection Refactorings – Chris Eargle takes a look at simplifying a bit of sample code using two less well known refactoring techniques to simplify the code and improve readability.
• Javascript: Passing functions around with call and apply – Mark Needham looks at the difficulties in using ‘this’ in JavaScript, and shows how the Call and Apply methods help in this regard. Mark also shares a bit of information about a number of other JavaScript related thing he learnt this week in his post Javascript: Some stuff I learnt this week
• Multi-tenancy in ASP.NET MVC – Controller Actions (Part I) – Rob Ashton continues his series on Multi-tenancy ASP.NET MVC Applications with a look at a means of replacing and supplementing the controllers of an application on a per client basis by re-wiring some of the ASP.NET MVC framework to provide a means,

Community

• SQLBits VI has been announced! – Luke Hayler highlights the announcement of a date and venue for the next SQLBits Conference. SQLBits VI is the 6 SQL Server community Event, and will be held on Friday 16th April 2010 at the Church House Conference Centre in London. I’ve attended a number of these free events in the past and can highly recommend them to anyone who has a need to interact with SQL Server (or other database products)
• Functional Programming eXchange: The Videos – Robert Pickering highlights the availability of session videos from the Functional Programming eXchange event held at SkillsMatter. The videos cover a range of topics and languages, ranging from Erlang to F#, resource management to pure functions.
• London Geek Night – Ian Robinson shares the video from his ThoughtWorks London Geeknight talk last week, and follows on the discussion from a number of points raised during the session.
• Linked .Net Users Group – Presentations – The LIDNUG team shares the recording of Scott Guthrie ‘Talking Shop’ with developers held last week. A great opportunity to catch up with what is going on at Microsoft, and hear Scott answer questions from the audience.

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Update: As pointed out by Gordon in the comments, this post was missing its Tags – I’ve now added them, so hopefully no-one will have missed this post.

Software

• Autofac 2.1 goes RC (the "me too!" release) – Nicholas Blumhardt announces the release of AutoFac 2.1 RC. AutoFac is an Inversion of Control library that uses on modern C# techniques to implement IoC in a slightly different way to the traditional libraries.
• Announcing touch.codeplex.com – Marc Schweigert highlights a new CodePlex project which looks to bring an easy to use API for th Windows 7 Multitouch to the .NET Framework 3.5 WPF and Silverlight technologies.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit – February Release (aka the VS2010 RC Compatible release) – We’re talking 602MB of VS/.Net training stuff here – Greg Duncan highlights the release of February cut of the Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 Training Kit from Microsoft, which consists of a whole CD’s worth of resources, and links out to lots of training videos hosted out on the web.
• SQL Heartbeat – my favorite free tool – John Paul Cook highlights a nice looking (and free) tool for monitoring SQL Server instances from SqlSolutions

Information

• The F# PowerPack Released on CodePlex – Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at the newly released F# PowerPack, a CodePlex project contributed to by the F# Development team, and containing a number of libraries and tools that they have found useful, such as FsLex a Lexical Analyzer, FsYacc a parser generator, FsHtmlDoc a documentation generation tool, along with libraries for Linq and Parallel Linq Integration, OCaml compatibility and much more.
• Installing ASP.NET MVC 2 RC 2 on Visual Studio 2010 RC – Phil Haack talks us through the process of ensuring we have the most up to date ASP.NET MVC2 release up and running inside Visual Studio 2010 RC installations, explaining how the install order can mean you need to do a liitle extra work to get up and running.
• Manually Upgrading an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 application to ASP.NET MVC 2 (RC2) – Martin Aatmaa talks through the official process for updating ASP.NET MVC 1 projects to ASP.NET MVC 2 RC2, and offers some additional notes based on his experiences doing the process across a number of projects
• Intellisense Crashing fix for VS 2010 – Scott Guthrie shares a work around for one known problem with Intellisense in the Visual Studio 2010 RC release which can occur if your computer uses UI Automation and certain devices. A patch is on the way, but for the time being Scott offers a workaround.
• ASP.NET 4.0, Part 1: New Visual Studio ‘Code Optimized’ Profiles – Dan Maharry continues his tour round ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 RC with a look at the IDE profiles that are now available, and talks about finding a happy medium for Web developers.
• Getting Started with WPF : Hello World in multiple flavors – Pete Brown takes an introductory look at Windows Presentation Foundation by way of the traditional Hello World application, getting that up and running and then modifying it to introduce further WPF techniques.
• Chaining simple assignments is not so simple – Eric Lippert takes a look at some of the confusion that can occur when using chained assignment statements in C#
• Tamper Proofing – an implementation (Part 1) – Paul Mason begins looking at adding Tamper Proofing to NCloak to provide further levels of protection to assemblies, and in this part looks at creating a bootstrapper to wrap the actual assemblies and perform the checking.
• Still On Windows 7 Release Candidate? – Jim O’Neil reminds anyone on still running the Windows 7 Release Candidate that from the beginning of March they will be seeing their machines shutting down ever 2 hours, and that the RC release will finally expire completely on 1st June. Make sure you are not caught out, and use the next couple of weeks to get on to a final release build.

Community

• Dr. Don Syme – Introduction to F#, 2 of 3 – Channel 9 release the second part of Don Syme’s series on F# for the C9 Lectures series. Part 2 reviews Functional Data, Pattern Matching, the basics of Imperative programming, and Sequences.

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Software

• VS 2010 RC now available for download to the general public (no MSDN Subscription required) – Greg Duncan provides a comprehensive list of download URLs for the various parts of the Visual Studio 2010 RC release to the general public..
• IronRuby 1.0 Release Candidate 2 – Charlie Calvert shares the IronRuby Teams announcement of their 1.0 RC2 release, including download links for both .NET 3.5 and the .NET 4 RC.
• Announcing the F# February 2010 Release – Don Syme talks about the February 2010 release of F#, where you can get it, and the significance of this release in that it moves them onto version 2.0 of F#. DOn also announces a parallel release of the F# Power Pack which is available from CodePlex, and provides a set of further tools which the F# team have created.
• Iron Python 2.6.1 RC Now Available – Charlie Calvert also highlights the release of Iron Python 2.6.1 RC, which again has releases for both the .NET 2 CLR and the .NET 4 CLR.

Information

• Bundler Part 2 – ASP.NET Integration – Justin Etheredge follows on from his post on combining, compressing and minifying JavaScript with a look at integrating the process more tightly with ASP.NET
• Impact The Planning For EF/Astoria vNext – Jonathan Carter talks about the importance of your feedback to help the Entity Framework and WCF Data Services teams plan their future features roadmap
• Visual Studio 2010 clean application level web.config – Deepak Verma highlights one of the nice features in ASP.NET 4, the clean empty web.config file, which in .NET 4 is practically empty as compared to .NET 3.5 where there were a large number of sections that ‘had’ to be there.
• UNISA Chatter – Operating System Concepts: Part 6 – Synchronization – Willy-Peter Schaub talks about about synchronisation functionality provided by the underlying operating system, and follows on with a look at Deadlocks in the next part of his notes from his studies at UNISA
• F# and the Dynamic Lookup Operator ala C# – Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at implemeing dynamic operators for using the C# dynamic binders and looks at their use in dealing with MondoDB and COM Interop.
• ASP.NET 4.0, Part 0: Installing VS2010 – Dan Maharry beings a series which will be taking a look at the ASP.NET 4 Release Candidate. This first part takes a blow by blow overview of the install process for VS2010
• Optimisations in LINQ to Objects – Jon Skeet talks about optimisations to some of the standard LINQ to Objects functions , which can allow for vast improvements in execution time if applied correctly.

Community

• LIDNUG Online Chat with Me on Thursday Feb 11th – Scott Guthrie issues a reminder for his virtual Q&A session to be held later today (10AM PST/6PM GMT) where Scott will be taking questions on anything and everything.
• VBUG Manchester – re-launch event with Martin Bell & Chris Testa-O’Neill – VBUG Manchester (UK) resumes its events on the 3rd March, with Chris Testa-O’Neil talking on Reporting Services, and Martin Bell on Table Valued Parameters in SQL Server 2008. The event kicks off at 18:30, and is free.
• F# London Meetup Group – Don Syme highlights a new F# Usergroup in London started by Carolyn Miller, and the groups first event is scheduled for 21st April 2010
• Next European VAN on 01 March 2010 – Jan Van Ryswyck announces the next Europe Virtual ALT.NET Usergroup event when Mike Amundsen will be talking on HTTP Web Caching Techniques, looking at how you can improve the performance of your sites, and reduce your bandwidth costs.
• The "Ignite Your Coding" Podcast Series – Joey deVilla announces his new PodCast/WebCast series which will be recorded weekly in March and April, which will feature a number of very well known names in the Software Development and .NET spaces.

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