The Morning Brew

Software

• SharePoint 2010 reaches RTM! – The Microsoft SharePoint Team announce the RTM (Release to Manufacturing) release of SharePoint , along with Office,2010 Visio 2010 and Project 2010. There will be a virtual launch event held on 12th May
• Office 2010 Reaches RTM! – Takeshi Numoto talks about the Office 2010 RTM release milestone, giving the details of the availability of office in volume licensing and retail stores
• MonoTouch 3.0 – Miguel de Icaza announces the release of MonoTouch 3.0, which brings support for the new features of iPhoneOS 4.0, along with a few other new features. This release is technically a preview, and requires that you have the Apple iPhone 4.0 SDK installed
• Moonlight 3 Preview 6 – Miguel de Icaza also highlights the latest preview release of Moonlight, the Mono Project’s Silverlight Implementation
• Silverlight 4 Released – Scott Guthrie gives his usual overview of a new release, looking at the various bits of the Silverlight 4 release, linking to further details from other members of the team
• CSLA 4 Preview 4 available – Rockford Lhotka releases a preview release of his CSLA 4 Application Framework. This preview release almost contains the full range of functionality that will be in the final release, and requires Visual Studio 2010 with optional dependencies on Silverlight 4

Information

• Eliminating Comments: the Road to Clarity – John Sonmez talks about the role of comments in our code, and examines the assertion that comments should be unnecessary, and that good clear code should be completely readable without comments, illustrating with some examples
• Sending JSON to an ASP.NET MVC Action Method Argument – Phil Haack follows on from Javier Lozano’s post from last week with a look at using the support ASP.NET MVC Futures library to perform the sending of JSON to controller actions.
• A Simple JSON Model Binder – Javier follows up with a simple custom implementation of the JSON Model Binder, and shows this in this post.
• Moving Suteki Shop from Linq-to-SQL to NHibernate – Mike Hadlow has been porting his Suteki Shop Open Source ASP.NET MVC E-commerce application from Linq-to-Sql to the NHibernate ORM, and has now completed this work, and along the way learning some interesting things about NHibernate and Get<T> vs Load<T> and sub types
• Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) Explained – Jeremy Likness posts a long but valuable article on the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern, looking at the structure, reasons why you should use it, and showing an example implementation
• Visual Studio 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts Poster – Suprotim Agarwal highlights some Visual Studio keyboard shortcut posters, available as PDFs for Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++ and Visual F#
• C# 4.0: Alternative To Optional Arguments – Paulo Morgado continues his exploration of the new C#4 release, looking in this post at the alternatives to optional parameters when implementing interfaces which are to be consumed from other versions of the framework. Paulo also turns his attentions to Dynamic Programming and COM Interop Improvements
• Strings and F# Immutable Lists – Robert Pickering talks about Immutability in programming, looking at its place and use in strings and lists, and discusses the performance aspects of using immutability in your F#
• SilverLight 4, RIA Services, MEF and MVVM, oh my… A four part series from the mind of Shawn Wildermuth (updated for VS2010/SL4 RTM) – Greg Duncan highlights an updated version of a series of posts from Shawn Wildermuth which addresses an number of the key concepts in Silverlight 4 development, now updated for the RTM release
• Double Dispatch is a Code Smell – Derek Greer talks about the Double Dispatch form of the Strategy pattern, discussing why it exists, and how it can be used, and showing alternatives which may be better.

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Had another enjoyable evening at the UK Techdays Fringe event last night, hosted by the UK AzureNET Usergroup (details of their next meeting in today’s community section).

Software

• Silverlight 4 released. Availability of tools announcement – Tim Heuer announces the release of Silverlight 4, providing links to where you can get everything, along with answering some common questions about the release.
• Alive and kickin’ [New Silverlight 4 Toolkit released with today’s Silverlight 4 RTW!] – David Anson (Delay) announces the release of the April 2010 Silverlight Toolkit, which adds support for the Silverlight 4 RTM, and outlines the new features in this release. If you are new to this library be sure to checkout the previous releases release notes for details of other features.
• AutoPoco 0.4 released – features features features – Rob Ashton announces version 0.4 of AutoPoco, improving the conventions used in the library, and adding inheritance support, the ability to call methods, and a number of new data sources for your properties.
• AutoMapper source moved to GitHub – Jimmy Bogard gives an update on the source hosting for the AutoMapper project, moving the active repository to GitHub

Information

• Links to .NET Framework 4 deployment guides – Aaron Stebner highlights the MSDN Deployment Guides for .NET 4, giving you all the details of the various means of supplying the .NET Framework to your customers
• The .NET Framework 4 Installer Improvements – Peter Marcu takes a look at the improvements to the installer of the .NET Framework, comparing back over the 3.5 release, and .NET 4 beta and RTM versions, talking about the ways the improvements were made.
• What’s new in T4 in Visual Studio 2010 – Gareth Jones takes a look at the vast number of improvements in the T4 Templating provided in Visual Studio 2010, looking at them from the point of view of Template Authors and CustomTool builders.
• What happens to C# 4 optional parameters when compiling against 3.5? – Tales from the Evil Empire – Bertrand Le Roy talks about how the C#4 optional parameters feature degrades when you compile against .NET 3.5, and how you may need to offer additional constructors/methods with other overloads.
• How to Migrate Your .NET 3.5 App to .NET 4 – Bruce D. Kyle highlights the MSDN Migration documentation which details known differences from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4 in various technology areas to help you in the migration process of moving your applications from 3.5 to 4.0
• POSTing JSON Data to MVC Controllers – Javier G. Lozano takes a look at using jQuery to create JSON data and post it to an ASP.NET MVC Controller to perform actions on your web pages without a page refresh.
• Cyclomatic Complexity – What Is It and Why Should You Care? – Julias Shaw takes a look at the Cyclomatic Complexity software metric, which provides an indicator of how complicated a particular piece of code is. Examples here are in Java, however the concept and discussion applies to all languages
• Unit Testable WCF Web Services in MVVM and Silverlight 4 – lobodan Pavkov takes a look at building Webservices using WCF and consuming them for MVVM development in Silverlight 4 with particular consideration to making the implementation clean and testable. This one is a pretty long article, exploring some key technologies with plenty of code to look at (All of which is available for download)
• C# TDD Videos – You asked for them – Brett Schuchert shares some rough cuts of a C# version of his TDD video series (originally in Java)
• Using VS2010 to edit F#; source code (and a little LOGO EDSL) – Brian McNamara talks about the Editor support in Visual Studio 2010, and provides a link to the screencast showing this, along with the sample Embedded Domain Specific Language (EDSL) shown in the video.

Community

• UK AzureNET User Group: The Power of Three – The UK AzureNET User Group announce their next event, to be held on the evening of Thursday 27th May, in the Microsoft London offices. This event sees 3 talks, looking at Azure apps in Java, Patterns for Windows Azure, and a look at Risk Metrics, a real Azure based application. Round that off with plenty of swag and pizza and you have a fine event.

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Had a really good evening at the UK Techdays Fringe Open Source on .NET event last night, 5 great mini presentations, followed by some good conversations in the bar afterwards.

Software

• Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects Beta – Available Now – The Visual Web Developer Team announce the release of a beta of Web Deployment Projects for VS2010. This beta release preserves the functionality of Web Deployment projects from VS2005/2008, supplementing the new VS2010 MSDeploy functionality, and allowing developers to continue working the way they are used to in VS2010.

Information

• My History of Visual Studio (Epilog) – Rico Mariani updates his personal history of Visual Studio, talking about the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010, where his involvement with the product ends
• WF4 – Guess the number game! – Mark Pearl takes a look at the improvements in Windows Workflow 4, and shows how you can use WF4 to create applications in a flowchart, a way which might enable less technical users to do a lot of the programming via the WF designer.
• Injecting services into entities – Jimmy Bogard follows on from his series on Strengthening your Domain with a discussion of the options for injecting services to domain entities, and why this is usually a bad idea.
• Guarding against CSRF Attacks in ASP.NET MVC2 – Scott Kirkland looks at a way of forcing the inclusion of Anti-Forgery tokens from the Cross-site Request Forgery protection library, enforcing the requirement that all forms supply this token to avoid any CSRF security holes.
• Introduction to TestApi – Part 6: Text String Generation API & Part 7: Memory Leak Detection API – Ivo Manolov continues exploring the functionality offered in TestApi, looking first at the support TestApi offers for generating string data to test particular cases in your application, and follows up with a look at how TestApi can help detect memory leaks in your applications, illustrating with an example.
• ThreadPool performance you can see – ‘toub’ illustrates some of the improvements in the .NET threading performance in .NET 4 showing a simple example which performs drastically better with added CPU Cores than it did it .NET 3.5
• Got Training? How about 15’ish hours of free (reg-ware) VS2010, C#, VB and ALM training from AppDev? – Greg Duncan highlights a great training offering from the AppDev team which will educate you for free in the new features of .NET 4 and VS2010, along with the new Application Lifecycle Management tools. Registration is required.
• Quick Thoughts on Eventual Consistency – Greg Young takes a look at eventual consistency, looking at how it can be explained to the business, and how you can evaluate the costs of implementing such a solution to your users and availability/scaling.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Aggregation Part 2 – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript with a look at the other Aggregate operations supported by the Aggregates library (Max, Min, Final, Count, etc)
• Anonymous Types In C# Are A Crippled Hack – Derick Bailey takes a peek over the fence at how the Java folks do their Anonymous functions and encounters what he considers to be a better way than the C# equivalent. Interesting discussions breaking out in the comments on this post.
• nRoute: Now, More Wholesome – Rishi Oberoi talks about the latest release of nRoute, the message passing framework for Silverlight and WPF. This new release adds a huge range of new features as outlined in this detailed post which can now be used in WPF, Silverlight and also on the Windows7 Phone.
• Same Markup: Writing Cross-Browser Code – Tony Ross talks about the best practices for detecting the browser functionality on offer in the different browsers, and how feature detection is the best way, rather than detecting the actual browser and particular version and assuming the functionality available.
• Free, as in free, eBook – Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (direct download, no reg required) – Greg Duncan highlights a free eBook edition of Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 by Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner a ten chapter 200+page ebook looking at the Data Administration and Business Intelligence functionality.

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