The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing: TinyMessenger – Steven Robbins updates the TinyIoC project adding a new event aggregation implementation to allow a message passing loosely coupled communication method between components, providing message passing, filtering and subscription support along with proxy support for marshalling to the UI thread
• Work item visualization – Brian Harry highlights a Visual Studio 2010 add in which provides a means of visualising the dependencies between TFS task work items using the new architecture visualisation tools functionality..
• Windows Workflow Foundation in .NET4 – Soma Somasegar gives an overview of the changes to Windows Workflow between the WF3 and WF4 (.NET 4) releases. The Windows Workflow team also have a WorkFlow Migration Kit available, as highlighted here by the Innovation Showcase showcase blog. The tool aims to take the pain of migration away, performing automatic upgrades where possible.

Information

• Validate your conventions. – Krzysztof Kozmic talks about the benefits of having conventions in your code to make it easier to understand and work with, and discusses the need to test that the conventions are being adhered to to avoid encountering bugs due to lack of adherence to conventions.
• Socks, birthdays and hash collisions – Eric Lippert talks about the generation of hash codes, and illustrates the probability theory (by way of his sock draw) behind the possibilities of collisions in hashcode, and why you should not use 32bit hash codes as unique identifiers
• Whats new in Code Analysis for Visual Studio 2010 – The Code Analysis Team talks about what is new and changed in the Visual Studio 2010 Code Analysis functionality, including a summary of the analysis rules which have been added and changed, along with a discussion of the new rule sets.
• A simple WCF service with username password authentication: the things they don’t tell you – Peter van Ooijen looks at username and password authentication on a WCF Service, showing the minimal steps required to set up such an authentication setup for both client and server.
• Exploring ASP.NET Validators – Brij takes a deep look at the ASP.NET validators provided by the framework, examining the server and client side validation functionality, the AjaxControlToolKit Validation Extender, along with two more complex scenarios involving validation of multiple controls.

Humour

• Now there’s a License plate (Take that, License plate cameras!) – Greg Duncan shares a picture that has been doing the rounds across Twitter in the past few days, showing an enterprising driver who is hoping to exploit SQL Injection in Vehicle Speed Camera database systems. A useful reminder to always sanitise input regardless of source.

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Software

• SubSonic 3.0.0.4 Released – Rob Conery announces the latest release of the SubSonic ORM which has been brought into being by the contributions of Adam Copper, Christoph Walcher, and Bruce Onder. This release mostly fixes reported issues with previous versions along with some minor improvements and performance enhancements.
• Fasterflect 2.0 Release – Buu Nguyen announces the second major release of Fasterflect, a reflection library which aims to take away some of the performance penalty of performing reflection operations. This new release includes a new Query API allowing you to explore objects as well as creating and calling methods and properties via the Access API. Both binary and source are available on CodePlex.
• VS2010 RC, TFS2010 RC Virtual Machines are here… – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of Visual Studio 2010 RC and Team Foundation Server 2010 RC Virtual Machine images for Virtual PC 2007, providing you with a guaranteed conflict free way of trying out the latest and greatest Development Environment and Framework version.
• ASP.NET Performance Framework – Karl Seguin shares a framework for ASP.NET Web Application performance which combines the techniques he discussed in an earlier post providing a means of performing merging and shrinking of files, enabling cache bursting , and manipulating content headers, all via a simple command file which is used by the framework which is implemented as a HttpModule.
• Bundler Now Supports Named Bundles – Justin Etheredge has updated his Bunder utility to add support for named bundles of files and also to support the Media attribute in CSS files.

Information

• Parallel Programming Patterns Book – Ade Miller highlights the CodePlex site for the Patterns and Practices Team Parallel Programming Patterns content, which will in time be formed into a P&P book. At the moment there is an outline of the book along with an early version of a sample. This will be one to watch over the coming months as the book solidifies.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Drag and Drop – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript taking a look at porting examples from the Flapjax Language into jQuery using the Reactive extensions, exploring a Drag Drop example, and in his next post ‘Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – jQuery Live Event Integration‘ where he explores jQuery Live Event integration with the Reactive Extensions and also talks a little about some new features coming soon to the Rx library.
• ASP.NET 4.0 Part 14, More Control Over Session State – Dan Maharry presses on with his series of posts looking at the new features of ASP.NET 4 with this post looking at Session State changes touching on Session state compression allowing you to trade reduction in network traffic for increased CPU when working with out of process session state, as well as looking at the SetSessionStateBehavior allowing you fine control of what session features you require for a page.
• Visual Studio Color Theme Editor – Extension #01 – Sara Ford begins a new series of posts focusing on Visual Studio Extensions, with this opening post looking at a theme editor for Visual Studio appearance.
• Don’t Give Up on the State Pattern Just Yet – Jan Van Ryswyck follows on from Greg Young’s post on the state pattern last week with a look at using interfaces to control what state transition are possible for an object
• Building extensions for Expression Blend 4 using MEF – Timmy Kokke takes a step by step look at extending Expression Blend 4 using the Microsoft Extensibility Framework illustrating with code and screenshots
• Teaching AutoMapper about our conventions – Joshua Flanagan takes a look at implementing your own rules for the AutoMapper to follow when performing its automapping to help the automapper work more seamlessly encapsulating all the repetitive coding of the mappings into the config.
• A quick look at Windows Phone 7 development – SQLDenis takes a look at Windows 7 Phone Development using the newly released Windows Phone Developer Tools, showing the install, and highlighting developer resources.

Community

• DotNetDevNet Meetings – March to June 2010 – Guy Smith-Ferrier highlights a number of great events being run by the DotNetDevNet Usergroup in the South West of England. All these events are free to attend, and feature great speakers on great subjects.
• MIX10 Wrap Up – Mike Swanson talks about the popularity of the MIX 10 Session videos and highlights a number of ways of obtaining the video content, along with sharing the list top rated sessions and a number of amusing numerical facts about the conference (food, drink and bandwidth consumed amongst others)

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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.

Community

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