The Morning Brew #563

Software

• S#arp Architecture 1.5 Beta 1 released – Alec Whittington announces the latest beta release of S#arp Architecture which upgrades the foundation to ASP.NET MVC2 RTM, along with updating to jQuery 1.4.2, NHibernate 2.1.2.4 and later builds of Fluent NHibernate, and the Castle Project items, along with a number of bugfixes
• Windows XP Mode now accessible to more PCs – The Windows 7 Team announce a significant change to the Windows XP Mode functionality which removes the requirement for Hardware Virtualization Support, opening it up to users of less powerful computers
• Employee Info Starter Kit (v4.0.0) – Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Version Available – Mohammad Ashraful Alam shares the news of an updated edition of a previously well received ASP.NET Starter Kit application, which has now been updated to utilise a number of the new .NET 4 features such as Named Parameters, Tuples, Entity Framework 4, along with some of the new VS2010 features.
• Telerik announces native controls for Silverlight 4 Release Candidate. – Telerik have updated their Silverlight Control library for the Silverlight 4 RC build, along with the update they have also taken advantage of the newly announced Microsoft Siverlight Analytics Framework to allow their controls to interact with your analytics.

Information

• How to deal with nulls – Greg Gigon talks about the pain of null checks and looks at the Maybe Pattern, Empty Object Pattern and the Null Object Pattern, all of which provide ways of working which avoid the use of null.
• Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight – Scott Guthrie gives his usual expose of a new technology treat, taking a (slightly MIX 10 delayed) look at the new tools and technology for building applications for the Windows 7 Phone using Silverlight.
• An even better way to run T4MVC: a VS AddIn – David Ebbo gives an update on the running of T4MVC templates as a part of the build process highlighting an update from Wayne Brantley who has created a Visual Studio Addin which improves on the previous Macro being used. David also updates on the possible removal of the previous hack which achieved a cruder version of this.
• SVG in IE9 Roadmap – The Internet Explorer Team talk about their commitment to standards and interoperability, exploring their integration of the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics ) standard, and also talking about The New JavaScript Engine in Internet Explorer 9
• Events get a little overhaul in C# 4, Part III: Breaking Changes – Chris Burrows continues a series exploring the changes to the event system in C#4 discussing a new compiler warning and a new compiler error, along with a couple of other minor changes which may catch you out when building existing code.
• Visualizing large code bases with VS2010 – Cameron Skinner highlights a video from Chris Lovett which demonstrates a number of the new VS2010 features to help you explore and visualise large code bases. This stuff looks really useful, and is something I think I need to have a play with.
• Do not name a class the same as its namespace, Part Four – Eric Lippert continues his discussion on reasons why you should not name a class the same as its containing namespace, looking today at the case where the reason for the namespace is to separate two classes with the same name.
• Creating a dynamic proxy generator – Part 1 – Creating the Assembly builder, Module builder and caching mechanism – Sean McAlinden begins a new series looking at the building of a dynamic proxy generator which will be able to create create dynamic proxies for know types. This first part is quite code heavy and sets up some of the foundations to build the dynamic proxy support on top of.
• Interested in Silverlight 4? Here’s a free Silverlight 4 Training Course and downloadable materials – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of a Silverlight 4 RC based training course offered on Channel 9 which addresses both the new features and the core of Silverlight.

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