The Morning Brew

Next week I’m going to be attending a number of London based events (UK Techdays, Techdays Fringe events and SQL Bits), and as always with these events I’m looking forward to meeting up with my fellow developers, so if you see me out and about, come over and say Hi.

Update: Fixed a problem with the HTML between Krzysztof Kozmic and Jimmy Bogard’s links in todays edition which resulted in them being merged together

Software

• Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 – The The Visual Basic Team talks about the plans for release of Crystal Reports for VS 2010, which will now ship outside of the main release. The beta for this new version will begin next week, and the product will still be free for Visual Studio users.

Information

• jQuery, ASP.NET, and Browser History – Stephen Walther looks at adding support to your AJAX powered web applications for providing back button and browser history support, along with bookmarkable urls, demonstrating with a real application example.
• "Dogfooding" VS 2010 and .NET 4 – Somasegar talks about the internal process of ‘Dogfooding’ the Visual Studio and Team Systems products internally at Microsoft, sharing some impressive numbers from the VS Team’s TFS installation
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – A Separation of Concerns – Matthew Podwysocki continues his exploration of the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript, talking about the plans for the next release to separate out the areas of functionality within the library and also shows an example integrating with the Dojo framework.
• Build your conventions – Krzysztof Kozmic continues exploring the ideas of Convention over Configuration, taking a look at the things in strongly typed languages which support building frameworks around conventions.
• Strengthening your domain: Domain Events – Jimmy Bogard continues his series on building better domain models with and exploration of the concept of Domain Events to provide the means for developers to know when things happen within the domain model.
• Currying with C# – Garry Shutler shares his notes on Currying in C# inspired by the discussions at the Brighton Alt.Net Beers event earlier in the week.
• Precision and accuracy of DateTime – Eric Lippert talks about the difference between accuracy and precision, looking at the capabilities of the DataTime data type in these areas, and using these means to explain why the StopWatch class is a better choice for measuring time elapsed.
• New iPhone OS License Threatens 3rd Party Languages – Larry O’Brien highlights some new Terms and Conditions included in the Apple iPhone OS4 release which casts question over the use of C# and the MonoTouch library for iPhone application development.
• The Practical Guide to Multithreading – Part 1 & Part 2 – Ajay Vijayvargiya explores the principals and practices of Multi-threaded programming in this two part CodeProject Article, showing solutions for common multi-threaded problems in C# and C++.
• Parallelism coverage in April 2010 MSDN Magazine – The Parallel Programming with .NET Blog highlights the April edition of MSDN Magazine which looks at a number of Parallelism topics.

Community

• YUI Theater – Douglas Crockford: "Crockford on JavaScript – Part 5: The End of All Things" (94 min.) – The Yahoo! User Interface Team share the video footage of the final part of Douglas Crockford’s series of talks on JavaScript, exploring the future of JavaScript, and talking about security in the browser.
• Your testing tendencies: Survey results – Dahlia Bock shares the results from the recent survey on Testing, linked to from this blog a few posts back, with results which look quite encouraging, with positive responses about how much automated testing people are performing.

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Software

• AutoPoco v0.2 Released – Hot on the heels of his previous release, Rob Ashton has updated AutoPoco with improved configuration and support for generating collections of entities.
• Entity Framework Profiler goes out out beta – Ayende announces the date for the Entity Framework Profiler to loose its beta badge, meaning you have a few more days to obtain a copy with the 30% beta discount.
• Introducing ReSharper 5.0: Structural Search and Replace – The JetBrains team show off the new Structural Search functionality of ReSharper 5 which allows you to search for code based on how it is structured.
• MvcContrib – Portable Area – Visual Studio project template – Eric Hexter shares a Visual Studio Project Template to help you get up and running with the ASP.NET MVC Contrib Portable Areas functionality

Information

• New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output in ASP.NET 4 (and ASP.NET MVC 2) – Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts on new ASP.NET Features with a look at the new encoding output syntax available in ASP.NET 4 which provides a short hand for HTML Encoding things you output into the page.
• Using AntiXss As The Default Encoder For ASP.NET – Phil Haack picks up on a comment posted on Scott’s post (linked above) which asked if the output encoding could be hooked up to the Anti-XSS library, and Phil gladly points out how this can be achieved via the webconfig encoderType attribute of the httpRuntime section. Barry Dorrans also picks up this topic in his post Replacing the ASP.NET encoder with AntiXSS
• Is ASP.NET MVC Exposing My Secrets? – Brad Wilson talks about what can be mistaken for a secret data leak when using the Editor For functionality in ASP.NET MVC, however this actually points to some bad design in your underlying entities if this problem bites you.
• LINQ: Enhancing Distinct With The PredicateEqualityComparer – Paulo Morgado looks at implementing a simple Equality Comparer which takes a predicate allowing you to perform custom distinct operations in LINQ, and shows how your can make its use simpler when writing your LINQ statements.
• SQL SERVER 2008 – Introduction to Snapshot Database – Restore From Snapshot – Pinal Dave takes a look at the new SQL Server 2008 functionality of Snapshot databases, showing how you can use them to manipulate data in your database, and restore the database to the state it was in at snapshot time – a possible bonus for doing data related testing of your applications.
• Ten Reasons to use the Managed Extensibility Framework – Jeremy Likness takes a look at 10 reasons that you should take a look at the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) based on his real world use of the library.
• ASP.NET 4.0 Part 15, Data Enhancements – Dan Maharry continues his series of posts on the changes in ASP.NET 4, exploring the data related functionality (Dynamic Data and Entity Framework)
• Introducing .NET 4.0 Parallel Programming – CodeProject – Mohamad Halabi takes a look at the new features of .NET 4 for Parallel Programming, introducing the use of tasks, PLINQ and PLINQ extensions, along with discussing Debugging, deadlocks and race conditions.

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Recording of Discussion on Software Craftsmanship @ E-VAN 06 April 2010 – The recording of the European Virtual Alt.Net Virtual meeting from Tuesday which featured Robert ‘Uncle Bob’ Martin, David Starr and Mark Nijhof discussing Software Craftsmanship is now available.
• Community For MVC.Net: April Presentation – MVC 2 from The Source – Another speedy recording turn around is the C4MVC virtual event from last night featuring Phil Haack talking about the new features in ASP.NET MVC 2 whose recording is available now.
• Visual Studio 2010 Launch Events – Ireland & Northern Ireland – There are a number of events taking place across Ireland and Northern Ireland celebrating the .NET 4 / Visual Studio 2010 launch. Events are taking place in Dublin, Belfast, Galway and Cork, and spaces are available for all events.
• DevExpress Declared ComponentSource Bestseller: Let’s Celebrate with an Easter Egg! – Rachel Hawley of DevExpress announces a competition to win one of two copies of DXperience Universal or the VCL Subscription package celebrating DevExpress’s recent Best-seller status on ComponentSource.

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Software

• AutoPoco v0.1 Released – Rob Ashton shares his Easter Weekend’s work in the form of AutoPoco, an object factory which produces Plain Old CLR Objects (POCO) using a fluent interface, the ideal solution to the ‘Object Builder’ problem, providing a nice way of producing populated business objects for test cases.
• SonicFileFinder 2.2 released – Jen Schaller announces an updated version of SonicFileFinder, his Visual Studio Add-in which enables efficient file searching across your projects. This release adds compatibility for Visual Studio 2010.
• Expression Web 3 SP2 Released – Chris Eargle highlights the release of Service Pack 2 for Expression Web 3, talking about a number of the issues which are resolved by this release

Information

• Windows programming: The "works on my machine" syndroma – Patrick Smacchia talks about a number of common and less common problems he has run into as a developer of desktop Windows based software written in .NET, caused by operating system level issues. Well worth reading.
• Infinite Scroll WebSites via AutoPagerize – Hacky, but the beginning of something cool – Scott Hanselman takes a look at an implementation of the ‘infinite page’ where new content keeps loading into the bottom of the page as you scroll. There are implementations in JavaScript, but Scott’s focus here is on the browser extensions which make this a ‘built in’ feature once installed.
• Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers, and Implicit Line Continuation support with VB 2010 – Scott Guthrie takes a look at some of the new features makin their way into Visual Basic in the .NET 4 / VS2010 release time frame, exploring Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers and the implicit line continuations.
• 20% more bugs? Or 20% less features? – ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin follows on from the discussions on last nights European Virtual Alt.Net meeting on Software Craftsmanship, suggesting that rather than deliver buggy software with 100% of the features, reduce the number of features by your bug level and have bugfree / quality code. I expect the comments will result in interesting reading on this one.
• Extreme Programming (XP) at a Glance – J.D. Meier gives an overview of the Extreme Programming Practices, along with a number of related links to resources about XP
• Getting Started with Lean Software Development – DZone have published another of their ‘Refcardz’, a short 6 page reference document, in this case on Lean Software Development. This Refcard is more like an article on the subject, but covers all the essential groundings.
• Branching Strategies: Handling Dependencies Between Branches – Derick Bailey continues his exploration of Version Control Branching best practices with a look at a number of the common dependency types which can occur between branches, looking at things you can do to help resolve them.
• A Custom ASP.NET MVC Model Binder for Repositories – Mike Hadlow shares a simple model binder implementation which creates an populates domain entities in one step, allowing you to cut out the view model when you don’t need any of its features.
• First round playing with Memcached – Shaun Xu takes a look at the setup and getting started with coding against the Memcached distributed cache running on Windows.
• Basic Defensive Database Programming Techniques – Alex Kuznetsov talks at length about some of the strategies and techniques you can employ to program defensively against the database, showing, with code, ways of enforcing assumptions and protecting your database from un-intended side effects from bad user queries.
• A .NET Developer Guide to: MongoDB and NoRM – Howard van Rooijen takes a look at NoSql databases, and shows how to get up and running with the MongoDB database on Windows, and explores the NoRM projects attempts to make its use easy for .NET Developers.
• testing NHibernate mappings – Over Easter, Mike Hadlow has been porting his Suteki Shop ASP.NET MVC application from LINQ-to-Sql to NHibernate, and in this post shares a generic approach to testing NHibernate Mappings for correctness.

Community

• MVC Virtual Group will have Phil Haack the ASP.Net MVC Program Manager, on Wed 4/7 12pm CDT – Eric Hexter highlights today / tonight’s Community 4 MVC.Net virtual event featuring Phil Haack, Program Manager for the ASP.NET MVC product, talking on new ASP.NET MVC2 features. By my calculations, viewers in the UK need to tune in at 6pm (but don’t trust my early morning mental timezone calculations, check for yourself)
• VBUG Reading: Visual Studio 2010 Mini Launch – The VBUG Reading team are hosting a Visual Studio 2010 Launch event on Tuesday 13th April at the local Pizza Express. Join them for discussion of the new features over a pizza, along with a few demos.
• Introducing Selenium 2 – London Selenium Users Meetup Group are meeting somewhere in London (venue TBC) on the Tuesday 20th April to take the covers off the new Selenium 2 release, with Dave Hunt, David Burns and Simon Stewart presenting the new features.
• Edge UG: April Silverlight 4, MEF and Reactive Framework – The Edge User Group present their 2nd event of the month in London, with John Donnelly presenting on the Reactive Framework and Mike Taulty taking a look at Silverlight 4 and MEF.

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