The Morning Brew

Software

• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 codename “Eaglestone” – Brian Harry announces the first beta release of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer 2010 codename “Eaglestone”, a plug-in for Eclipse which allows access to TFS 2010 backends. This release is based on the product acquired from Teamprise, updated to match the features and functionality in TFS 2010
• Free PDF Book Download: A Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control powered by thinktecture – Christian Weyer highlights the release of the eBook edition of A Guide To Claims-Bsed Identity and Access Control, a title from the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group contributed to by Dominick Baier of Thinktecture, along with other recognisable Microsofties in the Identity and Access control space.

Information

• Creating and Sharing Project & Item Templates – Aaron Marten of the Visual Studio Platform Team talks about new features of Visual Studio 2010 which allow for easier use and sharing of Template for Projects and items
• Events get a little overhaul in C# 4, Part I: Locks – Chris Burrows talks about a C#4 language change to how events are handled by the language / framework, showing how locks used to be used when attaching and removing event handlers, and talks about how it has changed in C#4
• Too much reuse – Eric Lippert gives some background on why rethrowing exceptions using ‘throw ex’ is bad due to the way exceptions are not completely immutable.
• ASP.NET 4.0 Part 10, A Handful Of Little Things – Dan Maharry looks at a number of the smaller changes in ASP.NET 4 as a part of his series, exploring new Redirects, Inline HTML Encode, and the inclusion of the chart controls.
• ASMX and JSON – Common mistakes and misconceptions – Dave Ward talks about the ASMX web service, and how, despite preconceptions, it can be used to serve JSON formatted data for use in JavaScript. Prashant Khandelwal illustrates this quite nicely with a look at consuming an ASP.NET Web Service in his post ‘Calling ASP.NET Web Service Using Jquery – Part I‘
• There’s no such thing as a "JSON Object" – Ben Alman sets the record straight about the meaning of JSON, what it is, and how its defined
• MEF will not get easier, its’ cool as ICE – Maarten Balliauw talks about the three key concepts / keywords in the Managed Extensibility Framework , Import, Export and Compose, which make up the initials ‘ICE’, showing simple examples of each phase.
• NHibernate: Mappings path – Fabio Maulo illustrates the NHibernate Mapping structures showing how they interact with each other and the various functionalities of NHibernate in this useful diagram
• Tamper Proofing – an implementation (Part 3) – Paul Mason gives a recap of the work he undertook to add tamper proofing to NCloak, and talks about some of the problems he ran into when debugging
• Using Mongo With LINQ – Rob Conery talks about the work he has been doing (with some help from others) on creating a Linq supporting C# driver/provider for the MongoDB Document Database, showing off the features of the provider with a simple example
• Using Reactive Extensions in Silverlight – Pencho Popadiyn explores the use of the Reactive Extensions in Silverlight, as possible in the .NET 4 release. This post covers some of the theory behind, along with showing Silverlight related examples to illustrate the concepts.
• Combining Higher Order Functions in C# – Mike Hadlow performs some functional programming gymnastics with C# functions which gets him under way with his Windsor CurryFacility implementation
• Poll: IoC Containers for .NET – Oliver Sturm is canvassing the community on their choice of and opinions of Inversion of Control containers for .NET via a simple poll – spare him 2 minutes to fill it in, and then have a read of the results if you are interested

Community

• Video of C4MVC talk on MvcContrib Portable Areas – Jeffrey Palermo highlights the availability of the video of his C4MVC virtual event presentation from late last month on ASP.NET MVC MvcContrib Portable Areas.
• Community For MVC.Net – March Meeting – The Community For MVC.Net (C4MVC) also have their next virtual event planned for 17th March at 1PM CST where Brad Wilson will be presenting on Templated Helpers and Testing in ASP.NET MVC

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Software

• Second VS2010 RC UI Automation Hotfix/patch released – If you needed/installed the first, you’ll want the second one too. – Greg Duncan highlights a further hotfix for Visual Studio 2010 RC to resolve problems with Intellisense in the RC when you have certain types of hardware attached to your machine.

Information

• Message-Based Systems for Maintainable, Asynchronous Development – Billy McCafferty looks at the concepts and techniques behind message passing and looks at how it is a natural fit for asynchronous problems.
• Behavior Driven Development (BDD) with SpecFlow and ASP.NET MVC – Steve Sanderson talks about the history and background to Behaviour Driven Development, the types of specifications that you can create using these techniques, and looks at using SpecFlow, WatiN, NUnit and ASP.NET MVC to provide a pure .NET BDD solution.
• Challenge: Robust enumeration over external code – Ayende posts an interesting (and simple looking) problem base on enumeration, which seems to be significantly more complex than it appears based on the comments – interesting reading.
• 1 Simple Step for Commanding in Silverlight – Christopher Bennage talks about the Silverlight 4 implementation of Commanding, a technique borrowed from Silverlight’s Big Brother WPF, and shows how this same technique can be implemented using his Caliburn framework.
• What is Projection? – Chris Missal puts a pattern name to a code implementation face with a look at projection from one list of types to another, showing a traditional C# implementation along with a LINQ based example.
• Lambda Expressions: Join – Deborah Kurata takes a look at the Join methods use in Lambda expressions allowing an easy way of combining two lists of items into one, illustrating with an example in both C# and VB.NET
• Is MSpec an Internal DSL?…And is that okay? – Richard Cirerol follows on from a comment on a recent post of his, discussing the types of Domain Specific Language, looking at what type of DSL MSpec is, and looking at other examples of DSLs we probably use without noticing.
• .NET Remoting Events Explained – Silic0re09 takes a look at implementing events over a .NET Remoting interface, showing a code example illustrating both server and client, along with some best practices for eventing over remoting.
• Tips to Optimise asp.net Web Applications – Prasenjit Das gathers together a number of tips for improving the performance of your applications, focusing on Web Applications, but there are plenty of tips there which are relevant for most types of application.

Community

• UK Events Of Interest (March\April 2010) – Dan Maharry highlights a number of interesting .NET related events occurring across the UK this and next month.
• Ok official call for inter … – Rory Becker uses Twitter to identify is there is demand for a .NET Usergroup in the Poole / Bournemouth area – If you are, or know people who might be please help him spread the word.

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Software

• NServiceBus 2.0 RTM – Udi Dahan announces the RTM release of NServiceBus 2.0, containing only a few minor changes since the Release Candidate release, which proved to be good and stable in production. Udi also gives an update on the state of the NServiceBus community.
• Now Serving Gummy Bear 1.2 – Dave Burke announces the release of Gummy Bear 1.2 the packaged installer for Sweetie, which makes it easy to set up a community site based upon well known open source .NET applications covering media gallery, blogs, forums, wiki and marketplace all combined and running together with common logins.
• New Offers for Visual Studio 2010 – Soma Somasegar announces a special deal to make it affordable for Visual Studio 2005/2008 Standard Edition users to upgrade to 2010 at a special price, along with an offer for anyone purchasing professional edition as a retail edition which will give them a 1 year MSDN Essentials subscription giving some of the benefits of the full MSDN Subscription
• Spark bits for MVC 2 RC2 – Louis DeJardin announces an update to the Spark View Engine for ASP.NET MVC 2 RC2 in the form of the Spark 1.1 RC1 release

Information

• MSDN Magazine: March 2010 Issue – The Online edition of the MSDN Magazine’s March edition is available now, with articles on IIS Smooth Streaming, Multitouch in Silverlight 3, Thread performance tuning with the VS2010 Concurrent Visualizer, and testing Silverlight applications using messages, along with the usual regular articles and columns.
• C# 4 expressions: blocks [Part I] – Mitsuru Furuta explores the changes to expression trees in C#4 and looks at utilising the power of them from the C# language, exploring block expressions in this first part and moving on to variables in Part II, and dealing with looping, goto/label, if and not in Part III
• ASP.NET, Part 9: Rendering Cleaner HTML – Dan Maharry continues his exploration of the new ASP.NET 4 features with a look at the cleaner HTML output now available from server controls, which also allows for cleaner CSS support.
• The Weekly Source Code 51 – Asynchronous Database Access and LINQ to SQL Fun – Scott Hanselman takes a look at using the asynchronous capabilities of LINQ to SQL (built on the ADO.NET async functionality) and looks at combining it with the Task Parallel Library to make it nicer to work with.
• NHibernate Validator ASP.NET MVC 2 Model Validation – Scott Kirkland looks at validation in ASP.NET MVC 2 models and using the NHibernate validator to perform the validations in this new series of posts. This post looks at the sever side implementation, illustrated with code samples and a full download of the sample available.
• How IE8 Determines Document Mode – Marc Silbey shares some very useful information on how Internet Explorer 8 decides which document mode to use including a flow chart showing the whole process.

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