The Morning Brew

Big weekend round up edition today, although I suspect the rest of the week may be a little quieter due to the MSDN and TechNet blog platform upgrade meaning comments and posting on blogs hsoted there will be offline all week – more information here

Software

• ReSharper PowerToys gone OSS – Hadi Hariri highlights the release of the ReSharper PowerToys under an open source license hosted on CodePlex, and talks a little about the remaining work in the project.
• mvcturbine – Release: Release 2.1 for MVC2 – Javier Lozano releases the RTM of MVC Turbine 2.1 for ASP.NET MVC 2 (with a previous release targetting MVC1). 2.1 adds a few new features to interact with the IServiceLocator, along with upgrades to the templates to add support for VS2010 and MVC2
• RequireJS 0.11 Released; Ready for jQuery – Ajaxian highlights the work by James Burke on RequireJS, a script loader for JavaScript which in this latest release has a number of the features required to be a jQuery script loader.
• You wouldn’t drink 9 year old milk would you? – Jim Duffy highlights the latest Microsoft marketing campaign to encourage users to upgrade their browser to later versions of Internet Explorer from the now 9 year old Internet Explorer 6.
• Rex integrates Pex – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux highlights the announcement by Nikolai Tillmann that he has integrated the Rex regular expression exploration tool into Pex to allow Pex to understand regular expressions which will be included in the next Pex release.

Information

• Three Hidden Extensibility Gems in ASP.NET 4 – Phil Haack looks at three of the new ASP.NET 4 extension points which allow you to have code executed before the application starts up, register build providers at runtime in code and add reference assemblies via code.
• The Aspnet Compiler Build Task in Visual Studio 2010 ASP.Net MVC 2 Projects – Joe Cartano digs into the ASP.NET MVC 2 project file to uncover a post build task that allows you to have your ASP.NET MVC views compiled at build time
• F# and the Standard ASP.NET MVC 2 Web Application Template – Daniel Mohl shares an F# based implementation of the standard ASP.NET MVC web project template which also includes implementations for validation, authentication and Membership along with a number of jQuery plug ins.
• Three New Managed Package Framework features for Visual Studio 2010 – Paul Harrington of the Visual Studio Platform Team talks about the of the new features which have been added to the Managed Package Framework to make it easier for managed code developers to package up extensions to the IDE written in managed code.
• Visual Studio 2010: How to extend the architecture tools – Jennifer Marsman continues her series looking at the architecture tools in Visual Studio 2010, and in this part explores the extensibility which allows you to create your own extensions for the architecture tools, also highlighting the offical Feature Pack and Power tools for the Visual Studio 2010 Visualization and Modelling tools.
• Make the Visual Studio 2010 IDE colors look like Visual Studio 2008 – Scott Hanselman looks at customizing the Visual Studio 2010 IDE colour scheme to make it look like VS2008 highlighting the Visual Studio Color Theme Editor by Matthew Johnson and showing a number of the stock themes.
• OpenWrap – A Package Management System for .NET – Rob Pickering talks about Seb Lambla’s OpenWrap project, which has recently been publicly unveiled at the Progressive.Net event in London.
• That No SQL Thing: Column (Family) Databases – Ayende continues his look at the NoSql databases offerings exploring in his post the ‘column family database’ , well know from Google’s BigTable implementation. Ayende explores the differences between CFDB and the standard relation model, and looks at some of the strengths and limitations of their use.
• RavenDB – The HiLo what how and why – Rob Ashton continues his series of posts exploring RavenDB with a look at the use of the HiLo identity algoithm to provide a solution to the problem of requiring trips to the database to obtain an identity for an object/record.
• NHibernate Tutorial #5 – Working with Many to Many relationships – Bob Palmer releases the 5th instalment of his NHibernate Tutorial. This part looks at the Many-to-Many relationship, IdBag and Lazy loading, along with a look at the HiLo algorithm in use in NHibernate.
• Not So Hidden Gems of NHibernate – Formula Discriminators – Tuna Toksoz highlights a solution to a common Object Relational Mapping problem where two entities share a table in the database and you need to discriminate between those types using NHibernate
• Exception handling in batch operations with the AggregateException – Jef Claes looks at the new AggregateException, introduced in .NET 4 as a part of the Parallel Framework, which allows an exception to be thrown which contains multiple other exceptions from a batch process.
• Evolving Architectures – Part I What’s Software Architecture – Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz shares a short series translated from Hebrew looking at Evolving Software architectures, with part 1 looking at the definition of software architecture, Part II – looking at emergent design andPart III looking at some do’s and don’ts on starting out
• Chasing the shiny – HTML5, CSS3, transitions – oh my! – Chris Heilmann highlights a nice demo of HTML 5 combined with CSS3 and transitions created by Paul Irish and Divya Manian to show the support for various features in the different browsers

Community

• Worldwide Web Camps – Scott Guthrie highlights the Microsoft sponsored Web Camp events taking place across the globe over the next month. The events are free to attend, and there are still spaces available at some of the events where you will be able to learn about the latest ASP.NET 4, MVC2 and Visual Studio 2010 features for Web Development
• My Talks in London: The F# User Group & At Progressive.NET – Rob Pickering gave two talks last week at Skills Matter for the London F# Usergroup and Progressive.NET events both on F#, with the Progressive.NET talk being 4 hours. Videos of both talks are available .
• Skillsmatter Progressive .NET Tutorials May 12-14th 2010 – Mike Hadlow also spoke at the Progressive.NET event in London on his specialist subject of Castle Windsor, and once again, his talk is available as video.
• Linked .Net Users Group – Presentations – Scott Guthrie Talks Shop V – The recording from last week’s Linked In .Net Usergroup event which was the 5th ‘Scott Guthrie talks shop’ event where Scott Guthrie takes questions from the audience on all things Microsoft .NET

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Another nice round number of posts milestone today – 600 posts old!

Software

• Updated versions of .NET Framework cleanup and verification tools that work with the .NET Framework 4 – Aaron Stebner has updated two of his .NET tools to support .NET 4. The tools, The .NET Framework Cleanup Tool – which cleans and removes the .NET Framework including removing files and registry keys , and the .NET Framework Setup Verification tool – which checks installations of all versions of the .NET Framework.
• Feature Builder Power Tool for VS2010 RTM-Preview Now Available – Michael G. Lehman highlights the release of the RTM-Preview release of the Feature Builder Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010. This release is comparable with the RTM release of VS2010, and contains Side by side support for running with the VS 2010 Feature Pack, improvements to the Feature Extensions API, along with the usual bugfixes.

Information

• [Draft/Preview/Excerpt II] "Moving to Visual Studio 2010" Part 2, with three new chapters – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of the next three chapters of the ‘Moving To Visual Studio 2010’ ebook, available in PDF and XPS formats
• Class Definitions: Binding Contracts And Agreements To Get Things Done – Derick Bailey looks at the difference in nature of the class definition between C# and Ruby programming languages, suggesting that C# is like a strict legal contract, and Ruby is like a handshake and cooperative agreement.
• Every Program There Is, Part Six – Eric Lippert continues his series on exploring the space of all programs that are possible with a further look at the arithmetic grammar and the definition of it as an unambiguous grammar.
• Why Raven DB? – Ayende talks about his motivations for creating the RavenDB project / product, looking at what it give him, you as a developer, and discusses the core feature list.
• First 3 Videos – Building Tailspin Spyworks – Joe Stagner directs us to the first three videos which make up the start of the follow along series looking at building the Tailspin Spyworks Silverlight demo application
• T4MVC Extension for MVC Partials – Evan Nagle talks through extending the T4MVC projects templates to include support for MVC Partials
• C# 4.0/BCL 4 Series:Dynamic Primitive Type Part 1 – Sam Gentile continues his what’s new in C#4/.NET4 series with a look at the new dynamic functionality looking at the basic use, and giving some discussion of how it works under the hood
• Passthrough Objects – Duck Typing++ – Elton Stoneman looks at using dynamic features (in this case using Castle Dynamic Proxy) to provide a means of mapping objects with similar behaviours but difference method implementation to conform to an interface.
• Lazy<T> and IEnumerable<Lazy<T> support comes to Unity – Piotr W?odek looks at combining the Unity application block with the .NET 4 Lazy<T> functionality to allow the Unity container to provide implementations of Lazy<T> to your code.
• Augmented Reality Domino Knock-Down Game – Ohan Oda walks through the creation of an Augmented Reality game using the open source Goblin XNA framework and XNA in this latest Coding4Fun article.
• The CSS Corner: CSS3 Selectors – Sharon Newman talks about the CSS 3 Selectors which are now supported in the latest Internet Explorer 9 preview builds, looking at how they are used and what they can help you achieve.
• Fun Visual Studio 2010 Wallpapers – Scott Guthrie highlights a community site which allows you to obtain community generated desktop wall papers featuring Visual Studio Branding, along with the ability to have them automatically delivered to your desktop in Windows 7

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Software

• Quick Charts for WPF & Silverlight v.1.0 Beta Released – amCharts announce the beta release of Quick Charts for WPF and Silverlight 1.0. This library brings easy to use fast charting to WPF and Silverlight, and is released under the MS-PL open source license, completely free with no additional branding applied.
• New db4o 8.0 release candidate announced – db4o announce the release candidate of their forthcoming 8.0 release. This release will be the first major release in 2 years of their Object database. The version 8.0 release is all about performance, and also adds some significant new features, and open source licensing improvements
• "FAKE – F# Make" 1.20.0 released – Steffen Forkmann announces a bugfix release of FAKE, an F# powered build tool. This release fixes issues users encountered with paths and adds a new path combining operator.
• Docx 2 UnitTest – Daniel Fisher shares a Visual Studio 2010 code generation tool he has created with Philip Proplesch which builds templates for unit tests from specifications declared in a Word Document included in your project, allowing you to take a human readable testing document and generate the actual test method signatures from the document.

Information

• Starting and using Git successfully – Jimmy Bogard shares a number of best practices for working with the Git distributed version control he has learnt over the past few months working with it. With ever increasing numbers of open source projects moving to GitHub a good understanding of Git is becoming crucial.
• Introducing the MVC Music Store – MVC 2 Sample Application and Tutorial – Jon Galloway gives the public announcement of a new beginners ASP.NET MVC 2 sample application and accompanying tutorial based around a Music Store, with full source and tutorial documentation available on CodePlex
• Comments on the MVC Music Store – Ayende responds quickly to the new Sample Application offering some criticisms of the code base. Be sure to check out the comments for more discussion along with Jon Galloway’s responses to some of the points raised.
• Pages in IE render differently when served through the ASP.NET Development server and Production Server – Raj Kaimal highlights an Internet Explorer 8 default setting which causes all sites being viewed from the VS development web server to be viewed in compatibility mode, and shares the HTML meta tags which allow you to control the IE version mode rendering.
• Visual Studio 2010: How to maintain control of your code using Layer Diagrams, custom MSBuild tasks, and work item integration – Jennifer Marsman continues looking at Visual Studio 2010 architecture features with a look at how you can use Layer diagrams to have the code validated against the diagram to check for violations of the layering of the application.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Custom Schedulers – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the JavaScript Reactive Extensions looking at creating a custom scheduler implementation which allows you to control when items from your observable are released further extending the means of composing asynchronous and event-based operations.
• WIF and the ASP.NET Sign In Processing Pipeline – Vittorio Bertocci shares some of the information from the WIF Workshop looking at how Windows Identity Foundation fits in with the ASP.NET authentication pipeline
• SQL Azure Team Blog : Why Do I Need a Clustered Index? – David Robinson discusses why Sql Azure requires you to have a clustered index on your data tables, and why heaps cannot be used.
• RavenDB – Basic usage considerations – Rob Ashton continues his exploration of the Raven DB Document Database looking at a number of best practices for working with this document database, including looking at how you manage ‘connections’, indexes, paging, persisting objects, and handling stale data.
• IQueryable Can Kill Your Dog, Steal Your Wife, Kill Your Will To Live, etc. – Evan Nagle discusses a number of things you should and should not do with IQueryable, including discussion of method naming, using IQueryable as a return type, using IQueryable in your ASP.NET MVC Controllers.
• New advance SharePoint 2010 training material released – Vesa "vesku" Juvonen shares the announcement of new SharePoint 2010 training material released, targeting both developers and IT Pros and with 40+ modules ranging from 40 to 100 minutes from well know instructors there is plenty to look at.
• All About Assemblies – Vinayak kadu takes a back to basics look at .NET assemblies in this Code Project article discussing versioning of assemblies, private assemblies, the Global Assembly Cache, and manifests.

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