The Morning Brew

Software

• Ms-PL Source Release for System.Web.Mvc 2 – Phil Haack announces the source code release of ASP.NET MVC2, which as usual is released under the Open Source Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL)
• NHibernate symbol & source server support – Ayende highlights the inclusion of Symbols for NHibernate on the SymbolSource Servers to allow you to debug into NHibernate source code more easily.

Information

• A reminder of the usefulness of Git – Mark Needham talks about an interesting local use of Git to allow him to easily switch to a setup which allows him to debug through the source of libraries used in his projects.
• A better way to auto-run T4MVC when you build – David Ebbo talks about a better solution to determining when to run T4 templates during the build process, and polls the community on if the T4MVC project should keep the hacky solution now that there is a better alternative.
• Bidirectional Integrity: IEnumerable and read only Entity properties – Sean Blakemore follows on from Jimmy Bogard’s recent post on Encapsulation of Collections to strengthen the domain model, with a look at the potential for an explosion of internal methods, and looks at adding items to IEnumerable collections without the need of the internal methods in Jimmy solution.
• ASP.NET 4.0 Part 12, Routing Helper Functions – Dan Maharry continues his series on ASP.NET 4 new features with a further look at routing, and the new Routing helper functions, making it easier still to work with routes
• Map / Reduce – A visual explanation – Ayende gives a worked example of the famous Map / Reduce method of working, illustrating with diagrams to explain the technique
• Visual Studio 2010 Concurrency Profiling And Parallel Programming – ‘SQLDenis’ takes a look at some of the concurrency and parallel support in Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 illustrating with some example pieces of code to calculate Pi (as yesterday was Pie Day (3.14).
• Happy Pi Day and Monte Carlo Method – Can Erten also highlights Pi day with a look at using the Monte Carlo Method to calculate Pi in F#
• Moles: Dig It? – Martin Rue talks about the Microsoft Research Project Moles and their use in improving the testing of a system, by way of a story of strange behaviour in an imaginary banking system.
• Asp.Net MVC 2 Areas – Chris Brandsma takes a brief look at the ASP.NET MVC 2 Areas functionality, showing how they are hooked up and discussing their use.
• New, But Not So Obvious, Features in .NET 4.0 – Galilyou highlights a few of the less well known about new features being introduced to the .NET Framework in V4, including new string functions, and lazy loading support.
• ParallelWork: Feature rich multithreaded fluent task execution library for WPF – Omar AL Zabir shares a parallel work library for use in WPF projects which provides a fluent interface for queueing work to be run in parallel, including support for running work immediately, running work after a time period elapses, and allowing you to stop parallel work.
• C# 101: Virtual Function Members Vs Abstract Function Members – ‘silvercrux’ shares a nice simple clear definition of the difference (and similarity) or abstract and virtual methods.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – From Blocking to Async – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript with a look at changing to an asynchronous way of working using the library to make this transition easy, and hinting at when the library may be released.

Community

• UK AzureNET User Group: Phoenix from the Flames – The UK Azure Usergroup revive themselves for an evening of talks attached to the end of the UK TechDays event being held in Thursday 15th April in the Fulham Broadway, London Vue Cinema. The UK TechDays week is shaping up to be a real good one with lots on offer beyond the official content.
• Watch Microsoft MIX10 Live Keynotes March 15 & 16 – ‘Dr. Z’ highlights the live streaming of the Keynote presentations from MIX10 from speakers Bill Buxton, Scott Guthrie, Dean Hachamovitch and Joe Belfore. The keynotes kick off at 9am PDT (GMT-9)
• Measuring real-world application usage in Visual Studio 2010 – Tomorrow sees the next Linked In .NET User Group virtual event which sees Terry Clancy and Sebastian Holst talking on the application analytic capabilities of Visual Studio 2010, and related 3rd party projects. The event starts at 11am PST

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Software

• ASP.NET MVC 2 Released! – Phil Haack announces the RTM release of ASP.NET MVC 2. This release will work for both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 RC (although it a little more tricky to install there). Scott Guthrie also weighs in on the release with his announcement post ‘ASP.NET MVC 2 Released‘ talking about some of the key features of the V2 release, and Scott Hanselman highlights a number of resources to help you learn more in his ASP.NET MVC 2 Released announcement post.
• WikiPlex v1.3 Released – Matt Hawley announces the latest release of WikiPlex, the Wiki engine that runs the Wiki on CodePlex. This release comes with all new and improved documentation, along with support for embedding Channel 9 videos and syntax highlighting for PowerShell code.
• Policies for PostSharp 1.5 Legacy – Gael Fraiteur outlines the support plans for the existing free PostSharp 1.5 release now that the PostSharp library is moving to being a commercial library.

Information

• Code Bubbles – A very interesting coding UX – John V. Petersen highlights a research project from Andrew Bragdon looking at an alternative ‘way’ for the IDE to operate. Check out the video demo of ‘Code Bubbles’ for a glimpse of a possible future for the programmers best weapon the IDE
• A Visual Look At The LINQ SelectMany Operator – Justin Etheredge takes a look at the very powerful SelectMany LINQ operator illustrating the way it works using a series of simple diagrams, and talking about how it is different from other LINQ operators
• IHttpModule Gotchas – The Init() Method Can Get Called Multiple Times
  – Dominic Pettifer talks abotu the HttpModule implementation in ASP.NET and highlights the fact that multiple instances of a single HttpModule can exist in your applications, meaning that the Init method may be called multiple times, and shows how you can use a double check locking strategy to avoid doing unnecessary Init work multiple times.
• A Thoroughly Modern Developer – Peter Gillard-Moss discusses what he considers to be the key traits for a good developer in this new decade, casting out the stereotypes of old and introducing his ‘Thoroughly Modern Developer’
• Advanced Castle Windsor – generic typed factories, auto-release and more – Krzysztof Kozmic takes a look at a simple example of a Command-Handler messaging application to explore having generic typed factories returned from the Windsor container, and discusses automatic releasing of transitive components.
• WebForms vs MVC (again) – Karl Seguin discusses the points made in the latest ASP.NET Website video on choosing between ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC, discussing each of the benefits put forward for both technologies in the videos
• Do not name a class the same as its namespace, Part Two – Eric Lippert continues his discussion of why it is bad to have a type with the same name as its containing namespace with an example about generated code, and how the code many generators create can easily be broken by bad naming.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Composing Callbacks – Matthew Podwysocki continues his exploration of the JavaScript Reactive Extensions with a real example building on the concepts previously discussed. This worked example looks at combining Ajax calls using callbacks and the Reactive Extensions to perform translations using the Microsoft Translator API.
• Entity Framework 4 – Modified Self-Tracking Entity framework that supports Code-Only and Persistence Ignorance – Adriaan de Beer shares some extended templates based on the Entity Frameworks standard Self Tracking templates, which add a number of extensions to the base offering, and shows them in use in a sample project

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Software

• Visual Studio 2010 Professional – $250 off and get an MSDN Essentials subscription offer – Eric Ligman highlights the online availability of a good offer to get you Visual Studio 2010 and a 12 month MSDN Essentials subscription for $549, which seems like a pretty good deal, although I’m unsure if you can order it from outside the US.
• Start-PowerShellPoint – John Robbins shares a neat looking PowelShell script which provides the core functionality of presentation software (ala PowerPoint) from the comfort of your console window.
• Migrating ASP.NET MVC 1.0 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM – Eilon Lipton announces the release of his ASP.NET MVC Application Project Upgrader tool which will now take your ASP.NET MVC project up to the ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM level (which has yet to be released).
• Deleporter: Cross-Process Code Injection for ASP.NET – Steve Sanderson shares a neat experimental library which provides a means for an external process to feed code into an ASP.NET application, intended for integration testing to allow the tests to set up mock data, etc in the ASP.NET from the test runner process.

Information

• We moved your ASP.NET website cheese, in a good way – Scott Hanselman announces the first in a series of updates to the ASP.NET Website, refocusing the site on the core concepts of getting started, getting the software, hosting your application and participating in the community. Another Microsoft website to get a make over yesterday was theMicrosoft TechNet site
• When "Activator" is just to slow – ‘JoeGeeky’ takes a look at the relative performance of the Activator for creating new instances of objects, a common use case in IoC container, and other reflection based code, and shows how better performance can be obtained using lambda expressions.
• Strengthening your domain: Encapsulated collections – Jimmy Bogard continues his discussions on building better domain models with a look at why in general you don’t want to expose collections as it affords the consumer of your code too much flexibility, and shows how you can better express your domain model’s intent by encapsulation.
• Getting Started With CI Using Hudson For Your .NET Projects – Bob Cravens talks us through the process of getting up and running using the Java powered Husdon Continuous Integration Server to build and manage .NET projects in this nice screenshot rich step by step post.
• POCO Template Code Generation Options – Sheetal Gupta of the Entity Framework Design Team talks about the recent release of templates for working with Entity Framework and Plain Old CLR Objects (POCO), and set out various options for taking these template forward, soliciting community feedback on the team’s ideas.
• FluentPath: a fluent wrapper around System.IO – Bertrand Le Roy sharse a Fluent interface implementation which wraps the common and dated System.IO API functions. Full code is available and licensed under a BSD license.
• Debugging .Net framework source code within Windbg – Naveen shows how you can debug into the .NET Framework source from your own applications using the Windbg debugger, allowing you to set breakpoints in the framework code
• Programming Practices: Part 1 – Watching from a distance – Brian Harry begins a series of posts talking about how he codes, in this first part talking about the way he tends to work and some of his core principles and techniques, and in his second post ‘Programming Practices: Part – Thoughts on TDD‘, he shares his thoughts on Test Driven Development, discussing how he dislikes Test Driven Development mechanisms, however likes the overall aims of TDD. Despite its seemingly inflammatory statement this is a very interesting read to hear one of the other sides to the argument.
• Guest Post: Using IronRuby and .NET to produce the "Hello World of WPF" – Eric Nelson hosts another guest post on his blog, this time from Edd Morgan who talks through creating a simple WPF application using IronRuby

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