The Morning Brew

Update: Thanks to Dan Atkinson for the comment that pointed to an updated MVC Contrib release- looks like the original link’s release was removed, so I’ve updated the post with the updated release.

Software

• MVCContrib – Release: MVC2 2.0.34.0 Updated: MVCContrib 2.0.36.0 for MVC2 (RTW) – Eric Hexer has pushed out a new release of the ASP.NET MVCContrib library which brings additional features to the ASP.NET MVC engine. This release includes some changes to Portable Areas support, along with the usual bug fixes.
• "FAKE – F# Make" and NaturalSpec released – Steffen Forkmann highlights the release of updated versions of FAKE 1.0, the F# Make implementation and NaturalSpec 1.0, both of which target the F#2 release and the Release Candidate and RTM editions of Visual Studio 2010.
• Back to the future! – New version of the VB6 InteropForms toolkit is released!! – The Visual Basic Team share a new release of the VB6 InteropForms toolkit which has been updated to support both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 whcih provides a means of developig controls and forms in .NET and consuming from VB6 applications
• Download details: Microsoft Sync Framework – An update to the Microsoft Sync Framework is now available, and this service pack release contains bug fixes for a number of know issues, along with changes to expose the public change tracking API in SQL Compact (with an associated performance impact)

Information

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Released – Scott Guthrie gives his usual overview of the latest release from Microsoft, sharing the key features of the .NET 4 / Visual Studio 2010 RTM products, and providing links to further information on the new bits.
• 602 Pages of pure and complete VB’ness, the Visual Basic Language Specification 10.0 – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the Visual Basic 10.0 language specification, 600+ pages of detailed implementation information about the VB language in its latest form
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Aggregation Part 1 – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts on the Reactive Extensions for Javascript with a new sub-series on Aggregation, exploring the functionality which allows us to apply custom functions to the items in an observable, and obtain the combined results, exploring the use of the Aggregate, Any and All operators
• Wha’s happening? Loosely coupled events – Phillip Trelford takes a look at nice ways of handling loosely coupled events from an event broker in a way similar to the Reactive Extensions provide for CLR events, illustrating with some F# examples.
• Metroline: A VS2010 Color Scheme – Thomas Restrepo shares a dark colour scheme for Visual Studio 2010, his first created specifically for use in Visual Studio 2010
• SOSEX v4.0 Now Available – Steve Johnson announces the release of an update SOSEX Windbg extension taking its version to 4.0 and adding in support for .NET 4 compiled code. Both 64 and 32 bit editions are available.
• Connect – The .NET CLR team talk about how they go about handling Connect issue reports, so, if you have cause to file an issue report, you will know the likely process they go through
• MSDN Partner Benefits for Visual Studio 2010 – Mikael Svenson investigates the Visual Studio 2010 offerings available to partners of different levels, which depending on your organisations partner status could net you up to 35 licenses of Visual Studio 2010 Premium with associated MSDN Subscriptions
• Visual Studio 2010 MSDN Subscriptions installs the trial version? (directions on Activating Visual Studio 2010 Trial) – Charles Sterling talks about some confusion about the Web Install of Visual Studio 2010 fro MSDN Subscribers installing a trial version, and shows how you can activate the trial using the product keys in the ISO release.
• WordPress says the Network Solutions hack is not their fault. – Barry Dorrans talks about a recent hosting security incident at Network Solutions which illustrates (and mis-reports) the need for encrypting connection details in text config files, and talks about how you can do this on the .NET platform.
• How to implement UI testing without shooting yourself in the foot – Gojko Adzic discusses a three level approach to building good automated UI tests, along with talking about how you can achieve this, and the types of tools needed.
• Beginning Silverlight – Layout Part 1 & Part 2 & Styles – Neil Knobbe explores the layout and styles functionality in Silverlight, providing a introductory series of posts which will get you up to speed on the Silverlight way of working.
• MVC Portable Areas Enhancement – Embedded Resource Controller – Steve Michelotti takes a look at using the ASP.NET MVC Contrib portable areas functionality with embedded resources exposed through the Embedded Resource Controller allowing you to package your area and its associated assets in the one DLL.

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Yesterday saw the release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 RTM, and today sees the inclusion of a special section in the Brew dedicated to this and related release news.

Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4 Release

• Visual Studio 2010 Released – Scott Hanselman rounds up the Visual Studio 2010 Launch news, featuring download links, articles about the new functionality, along with MSDN related content.
• Some VS2010/.Net4 and related Training Kits (to give you something to download until VS2010 is available) – Greg Duncan highlights some .NET 4 / Visual Studio 2010 Training Kits which can be downloaded for free, and will give you a taste of the functionality while the VS ISO is downloading
• F# 2.0 Released as Part of Visual Studio 2010 – Don Syme highlights the launch and inclusion of F# 2.0 in the Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 release, along with the release of a standalone installer for Visual Studio 2008 users
• ASP.NET 4 – Breaking Changes and Stuff to be Aware of – Scott Hanselman highlights 3 common breaking changes that people are running into with ASP.NET 4 and provides a link to the full breaking changes document.
• Visual Basic 2010 Samples Updated for RTM – Greg Duncan highlights updated samples for Visual Basic 2010 which cover a number of application areas including Data, LINQ, Security, TabletPC, WCF, Winforms and much more.
• Announcing the release of Entity Framework 4 – The Entity Framework Team talks about the new features of Entity Framework 4, which shipped yesterday along with .NET 4, highlighting the major improvements in the product across the areas of Development, Architecture and Data Access.
• What’s New for Performance in WPF in .NET 4 – The WPF Performance and .NET Framework Client Profile team talk about the improvements made to performance in WPF in the .NET 4 release with a look at UI Automation improvements, Graphics and text improvements.
• Upgrading Visual Studio 2010 & Upgrading from TFS 2010 RC to TFS 2010 RTM done – Martin Hinshelwood runs through the steps involved in upgrading from the Release Candidate to the full RTM versions of Visual Studio 2010, and TFS 2010 in these two screenshot rich step by step posts.

Software

• Launch: Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta – Eric Havir of the Microsoft Surface Team announces the release of the Microsoft Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch Beta which brings a number of the Microsoft Surface controls to PCs which support Touch.
• ReSharper 5.0 Is Out! – JetBrains are one of over 50 partners who launched new releases of their Visual Studio related tools yesterday. This new release integrates with Visual Studio 2010 (along with 2005 and 2008), and provides a bunch of great new features over the 4.5 release). Free Upgrades for recent purchasers of V4,5 are available, along with 30 day trials versions.
• CodeRush Xpress for C# and VB – DevExpress have updated the free CodeRush Xpress release to add support for Visual Studio 2010, bringing quality tools to help refactor and improve your code to the latest IDE version, along with keeping support for VS2008 and 2005.
• IronRuby- Release: 1.0 – The IronRuby team ship version 1.0 of IronRuby, representing a major milestone in the development of Ruby on the .NET Platform
• Profiler subscriptions are now available – Ayende announces the subscription based licensing costs for the NHibernate Profiler, 12EURO / $16 per month gives you a rolling license, with free upgrades for as long as you continue paying.
• psake v4.00 – James Kovacs announces the release of psake 4.0, a build automation tool built on PowerShell. This release adds .NET 4 and x64 support, along with nested build support and much more.
• QueryUnit 0.0.0.8 – Trust No One – Davide Mauri announces an update to his QueryUnit project which allows you to unit test the queries in your Business Intelligence projects adding better string handling, and new asserts in the form of NotEqualTo, Greater and Less.
• JustMock is here !! – ‘Mehfuz’ highlights the first pre-releases of Telerik JustMock an new mocking and proxy library which follows the Arrange – Act – Assert format. The final product is planned for a Q2 release.

Information

• Easy And Safe Model Binding In ASP.NET MVC – Justin Etheredge takes a look at making model binding in ASP.NET MVC a little safer by controlling what you expose using a view model, and looks at solutions to re-binding the data to the actual model
• Ignoring parentheses – Eric Lippert explores another interesting area of the C# specification, looking at the theoretical differences which could be caused by additional parentheses in return statements.
• Simple-MongoDB – Part 1, Getting started – Daniel Wertheim begins an introductory series of posts looking a the MongoDB NoSQL database solution, also exploring his simple MongoDB driver
• Visual Studio Performance Testing Quick Reference Guide (Version 2.0) Published – Ed Glas highlights an update to the Visual Studio Performance Testing Quick Reference Guide taking its version to 2.0. This 150 page document contains lots of background on the performance testing capabilities of Visual Studio along with a number of HowTo articles.
• C# 4.0: Covariance And Contravariance In Generics – Paulo Morgado takes a look at some of the theory behind Co and Contra-Variance in supporting Generics, sharing a set of rules for their implementation in C# and .NET
• Coupling Is Your Friend – Derick Bailey talks about the role of Coupling in development, and how it isn’t always something evil which you need to get rid of.

Community

• Webinar on Obfuscation and Encryption this Thursday (4/15/2010) – Jason Haley will be co-presenting with Eran Dror at a virtual meeting organised by LIDNUG (the Linked-In .NET User Group) on the 15th April at 11:00am PDT (early evening in Europe) on .NET Code Protection using Secure Team.
• Next European VAN on 26 April 2010 – The European Virtual Alt.NET Usergroup have a presentation from Neil Robbins on introductory concepts behind the NoSQL debate. The talk is the first of a series on NoSQL, and is being held on Tuesday 26th April, beginning at 7:00GMT (Don’t forget to adjust for British Summer time / Daylight savings)

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So today is launch day for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 – is everyone suitably excited? I’m going to be at the UK Launch Event in London, so if you are too, and spot me, come and say hello.

Updated: Another HTML Glitch swallowed Mark Needham’s link below, and mangled the DDD Down under one, now fixed, thanks for the comment ‘RSS Subscriber’ highlighting it.

Software

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Available: Silverlight 4 will release to Web this week – The official word from Microsoft on the availability of this weeks launch technologies, VS2010 and .NET 4 available now, Silverlight 4 later this week.
• Announcing availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 – Somasegar shares the news of the official release of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework version 4, highlighting the launch events, and the streaming version of the keynote.
• Download details: F# April 2010 CTP – F# gets its April Community Technology Preview update, along with a version number of 2.0.0. The release includes both the F# compiler and the Visual Studio 2008 integration
• Introducing jLight – Talking to the DOM using Silverlight and jQuery. – Timmy Kokke announces his latest project, to provide easy means of interacting with the browser from Silverlight using jQuery on the browser side. This project provides helper methods for interactions in JavaScript using the jQuery library, with very jQuery like syntax.

Information

• JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010 – Scott Guthrie hits post number 20 on his series of posts looking at the improvements for Web Developers in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. This article focuses on the improvements made to VS for the JavaScript Developer, focusing on Intellisense functionality.
• What is a Domain Event? – Greg Young look to clear any confusion aboutthe term ‘Domain Event’, defining what he considers the term to mean in a form suitable for his book and training course material. Some interesting suff in the comments of this one too.
• Why diversity and choice are good things – Rob Ashton discusses his motivations for creating AutoPoco, discussing other projects in the area, and outlining where he sees AutoPoco as being different / adding new value.
• What key [binding] does what again? The "Visual Studio 2010 Keybinding Cards" for C++, C#, F# and VB – Greg Duncan highlights some great looking keyboard quick reference cards from Microsoft for the functionality exposed for C#, C++, F# and VB developers in Visual Studio 2010.
• Moving to Visual Studio 2010 free e-book – Guy Barrette highlights the availability of a free Draft Preview of a Microsoft Press book on migrating to the new Visual Studio 2010 release from Visual Studio 2003, 2005 and 2008
• TDD in the Real World, Part 1 & Part 2 – Jeremy Jameson shares his thoughts on Test Driven Development (TDD), looking at high level concepts in Part 1, and moving on to show an example walking through the process in Part 2.
• ECMA 2010 Common Language Infrastructure Public Draft – Miguel de Icaza highlights the release of the Working Drafts of the ECMA 335 specification for the Common Language Infrastructure Standard
• Where we are with acceptance testing and our BDD journey today – Ian Cooper talks about the writing, structuring, and organisation of tests, sharing thoughts which span across the technologies used for such tests, looking at the difference between unit tests and stories, and discussing what should be tested.
• Do you have an Action Plan to Tackle your Technical Debt? – Derik Whittaker talks about the concept of Technical Debt, and looks at how you should keep track of you technical debt , and plan to pay back some of this debt.
• Documentation with Sandcastle – a notebook – Jon Skeet:looks at generating API documentation from assembly metadata and XML comments using the Sandcastle documentation generator project
• That No SQL Thing – Document Databases – Ayende talks about the key concepts of document databases, and looks at building queries against these datastores.
• Coding: Maybe vs Null Object patterns – Mark Needham discusses the Maybe pattern, comparing it to the Null Object pattern, showing an implementation of Maybe in use

Community

• DDD Down Under – Barry Dorrans highlights the début of the Developer Developer Developer conference in Austrailia. The event, to be held in Melbourne, follows the same conventions as teh UK events, and currently speaker submissions are open, with registrations opening later today.
• Making the Most of the Reactive Extensions for .NET – The Virtual Alt.NET group have Scott Weinstein presenting on the Reactive Extensions for .NET on 21st April. This event is geared up for US based developers, as the event starts at 8pm GMT-5, which makes it early hours of the morning for UK based devs.

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