The Morning Brew

Software

• jQuery UI 1.9 Milestone 1 -Tooltip – The jQuery UI Team announce the first Milestone release of jQuery 1.9. This milestone release is an early opportunity to try out the new version of the library including new widgets. This release adds a new Tooltip widget. The team are looking for feedback on the changes and additions to the library, so if you have a view, let them know
• Announcing PostSharp 2.0 CTP 5 – Gael Fraiteur announces the 5th and final CTP release of PostSharp 2.0. This release is deemed to be feature complete, and at a good level of reliability, and includes support for .NET 4 and VS2010 RTM along with Silverlight, Compact Framework and Windows Phone 7
• Announcing the RTM of MvcExtensions (aka System.Web.Mvc.Extensibility) – Kazi Manzur Rashid announces the RTM release of the project formerly known as System.Web.Mvc.Extensibility. The project (and root namespace) has been renamed to avoid any confusion about it being part of the official MVC release, and this release also targets only ASP.NET MVC2. Full source code is available on GitHub
• Ignition, 3, 2, 1 … Microsoft Project 2010 Launch countdown has started – Christophe Fiessinge highlights the virtual launch events for Project, Sharepoint, Office and Visio 2010, and provides links to some of the downloads associated with the releases

Information

• ADO.NET Survey Results – Luiz Fernando Santos of the ADO.NET team shares the results of a recent community survey of impressions and opinions about new features and ideas for the ADO.NET products.
• Updated C# all-in-one file – Kirill Osenkov shares an updated edition of his C# all-in-one file which aims to include all possible C# syntax in one file (and there sure is a lot if it)
• Visual Studio 2010: How to understand your code using Dependency Graphs, Sequence Diagrams, and the Architecture Explorer – Jennifer Marsman looks at using the Visual Studio 2010 Architecture tools to explore a new code base showing how you can easily generate dependency graphs and sequence diagrams for your code.
• Windows Azure Guidance – The "Get","Delete" pattern for reading messages from queues – Eugenio Pace talks about how Windows Azure Queues operate, and why there is no dequeue, peek and enqueue operations available.
• Connections and SQL Azure – David Robinson looks at the additional issues involved in connecting to SQL Azure instances over the internet, and shares a sample of code which takes into account all these issues in obtaining a results set.
• Extra .Net 4 Parallel Extension goodness in the Parallel Extension Samples, with RTM updates and a few new Projects – Greg Duncan highlights an article from Dr Dobbs and Intel which look at the .NET4 Parallel Extensions, and raises awareness of the Parallel Extensions Extras included in the Parallel Extensions Samples library
• Customizing Your WPF/Silverlight UI using Value Converter and/or Partial Class Properties – Shichao Hu looks at the ability to customize the presentation in your User Interface using custom Value Converter implementations, and also looks at achieving the same using partial class properties.
• Understanding Tasks in .NET Framework 4.0 Task Parallel Library – Jeff Juday takes a look at the basics behind the Task Parallel Library in .NET 4 in this CodeGuru article
• Visual Studio debugger fails to catch unhandled exception for a Windows Form or WPF Application? – Andrew Hall of the Visual Studio Debugger Team talks about an interesting problem on x64 Windows which can result in you not seeing exceptions in Windows forms applications as the form loads, and sharing a work around to help if you are in this situation.
• Screencast – Getting Started With Machine.Specifications – Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo gives a walk through his ‘Develop with Passion’ fork of the Machine.Specifications testing framework, including the specific extensions of the framework included in his fork
• Strict Transport Security ASP.NET Module – Sacha Faust talks about the proposal for Strict Transport Security which involves forcing all HTTP traffic over HTTPS at the browser level, and shares details of an ASP.NET implementation of the standard provided as a HTTP Module

Community

• Austin Code Camp 2010 – Joshua Flanagan highlights this free Austin, TX User Group all day event occurring this weekend, offering 7 tracks of sessions covering a wide range of topics. Registration is still open, and is free, so if you are in the area be sure to check it out.
• Visual Studio Virtual Tour – 4 Days, 4 Hours, 4 Topics, for Free – Greg Duncan highlights 4 hours of free Visual Studio 2010 Readiness training delivered virtually over 4 days, looking at the new IDE, Architecture tools, development processes and testing.

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Software

• SharpDevelop 3.2 RTW – ‘ChristophWille’ announces the release of SharpDevelop 3.2, the Open Source .NET IDE for Windows. This release adds support for IronRuby 1.0 and improves the IronPython support, and integrates SharpDevelop Reports. This release targets the .NET 2 CLR, Version 4 which will be in Beta soon will be their .NET 4 product.
• The New Release of the Identity Training Kit works on VS2010! – Vittorio Bertocci highlights the updated release of the Identity Developer Training Kit which updates it to Visual Studio 2010 RTM and .NET 4. The previous version is still available if you are still working in .NET 3.5, however the training kits cannot be installed side by side.

Information

• Pinning Projects and Solutions with Visual Studio 2010 – Scott Guthrie continues with his series of posts on what’s new in Visual Studio 2010 with a look at some project loading enhancements when you run on Windows 7, and some corresponding features within the Visual Studio 2010 IDE.
• New IDE Features in Visual Studio 2010 for C# Developers – The C# Team take you on a quick tour of the new Visual Studio 2010 IDE features which assist you in coding your C#, looking at some of the code generation, navigation, and editor enhancements
• Parallel Performance Analysis in Visual Studio 2010 : Concurrency Visualizer Feature Grab Bag – James Rapp of the Parallel Computing Platform Team shows off some of the great features of the Concurrency Visualizer which allows you to see when and what your threads are doing within your application
• C# 4.0/BCL 4 Series: BigInteger – Sam Gentile is in the midst of a blog series on the new features of the C# 4 release and the BCL 4. This post looks at the new BigInteger Class, and others in the series include a look at System.Tuple, Complex, and there are lots of other good posts planned.
• Globalizing ASP.NET MVC Client Validation – Phil Haack explores a way of Globalizing the client side validation used in ASP.NET MVC, and shows an example in Spanish which illustrates the differences in numerical entry in different cultures, and how it causes problems with validation.
• Integrating HTML into Silverlight Applications – Dan Wahlin looks at a couple of techniques for including HTML Content into your Silverlight applications, illustrating with example and sample code.
• Every Program There Is, Part Five – Eric Lippert continues his series of posts on mathematically generating every program there is with a look at the possibilities for using recursion to prove the statements, and look at techniques for reducing the problem space. Truly mind bending stuff.
• Build Tools Roundup For .NET Systems – Derick Bailey takes a look at the various Build tools available for building .NET Applications, looking at the technology behind them, the style of the build language, and example build config, and sharing some general thoughts.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Async Method Chaining – Matthew Podwysocki presses on with his series on the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript with a look at how you can create functions which allow method chaining, but maintain an async aspect to allow, for example, fetching of data from an external web service.
• Do you care about the performance of your .NET application? – Red Gate Software are offering the free download of their eBook ‘Performance Testing and Optimization – The Complete Guide’, written by Paul Glavich and Chris Farrell. This eBook was originally highlighted in The Morning Brew back in February as a preview of the first part, and now the full book is available.
• Understanding T4: <#@ parameter #> directive – Oleg Sych takes a look at the new Parameter directive introduced to the T4 template language in VS2010 which makes it much easier to pass parameter into your templates for use within the template
• JavaScript Coding Standards – Simon Ince shares some work he has been carrying out with Stuart Leeks on creating a Coding Standards document for JavaScript code working with the Ajax Control Toolkit, and covers the usual areas of Naming standards, style, programming and design guidelines.
• Using C# Compiler as a Service in F#, PoshConsole (Powershell) – Naveen takes a look at the Mono Compiler as a Service running against the .NET Framework to allow interactive compilation of code at runtime, bringing about new possibilities for extension of applications.

Community

• Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight Gotchas – The Edge UG resume their normal meeting schedule with an event on Wednesday 19th May at Microsoft’s London Offices. This event sees two talks, with Ray Booysen talking on real world Silverlight, and Paul Foster talking on the Windows Phone 7 platform.

Humour

• A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages – James Iry takes an amusing look at the history of computer programming from 1801 to the present day. This one made me chuckle.
• Scott Hanselman Opens Up On His Relationship with Scott Guthrie – What a way to open a presentation at a conference. Scott Hanselman proves he is part stand-up comedian in this amusing snippet from the AzGroups Day of .NET 2010.

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I had a great weekend away in Glasgow at Developer Developer Developer Scotland 2010, it was very nice to catch up with various acquaintances both old and new during the conference and evening socials. Many thanks to the organisers for another great event.

Software

• ADO.NET Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 – Refresh – Shayne Burgess highlights the release of a refresh update for ADO.NET in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 which fixes a number of issues users have experienced with the SP1 update.
• Agatha 1.1 Is Out – Davy Brion announces the 1.1 release of his Agatha community project which implements at Request Response Service Layer on the NET stack. This release includes a number of changes, including support for NInject, a server side caching layer, updates to its library dependencies, along with improvements to Silverlight support and much more.
• S#arp Architecture 1.5.2 released – Alec Whittington announces the release of S#arp Architecture 1.5.2, a bugfix release which addresses issues discovered in the 1.5 RTM release. This has a number of fixes for the templates used by S#arp architecture along with a few other fixes.
• Html Agility Pack 1.4.0 Released – Jeff Klawiter announces the release of version 1.4.0 of the HTML Agility Pack. This release freshens the API with the introduction of generic lists to replace array lists, fixes a number of bugs, and adds a number of other subtle features.
• News about NAnt – Daniel Marbach shares some news about the future of the NAnt build tool, and highlights the release of the NAnt 0.90 RC1 release.
• SolutionConverter – Arthur Liberman shares an implementation of a tool to convert solution and project files between different versions and editions of Visual Studio, supporting versions from 2002 rights through to 2010. This Code project article includes the project, code and discussion about the creation of the application.

Information

• That No SQL Thing: Scaling Graph Databases – Ayende continues his series of posts looking at NoSQL database systems, continuing by looking at the scaling aspects of Graph databases, answering the common reader question of Why do I need that again?, and also looks at Graph DB Sharding Strategies: Gravity
• Playing with RavenDB – A Precursor – Rob Ashton has been exploring the Raven DB project created by Ayende, outlining his initial thoughts on the project in this post, and goes deeper into the getting started topics in his next post ‘RavenDB – An Introduction‘
• Careful with those enumerables – Sergio Pereira looks at the increasing use of IEnumerable<T> as a return value from and API, and shows how, unless you are careful, you may cause some interesting bad performance characteristics in your application.
• Using NetModules for Reducing Compilation Costs – Sasha Goldshtein looks at a little remembered feature of the .NET C# compiler, the ability to compile code into NetModules and then combine these into a final executable / Class library
• ASP.NET and F# (I.) – Creating MVC web applications in F# – Tomas Petricek takes a look at creating Web Applications using F# and ASP.NET MVC, talkign through the application structure, the ways of implementing the component parts of an MVC application (Model, Controller, etc) in F# and shares a sample solution and Visual Studio 2010 Project template to allow you to have a go too.
• The Power of Enum – John Sonmez talks about the use of Enums in your code to make APIs more intention revealing and control the possible inputs to functions.
• Make your XML strongly-typed: Because you can, and its easy – Doug Rathbone suggests that rather than doing complicated XML parsing you might want to consider making use of the XML Serializer in .NET to allow you to convert from the XML document to a structured strongly typed object structure, allowing you to write easier to understand code.
• If you’re still using Xml configuration with StructureMap, I need your help – Jeremy D. Miller is performing some significant work on the internals of Structure Map, and is looking at the possibility of clearing out some of the legacy aspects of the XML Configuration and would like some user feedback to help in making the decisions.
• Easy creation of code generators in Visual Studio 2008 – Sebastian begins a series of posts looking at making code generators for use in Visual Studio 2008, beginning with this first part looking at creating Visual Studio Packages
• Use Extension method to write cleaner code – Fredrik Normén takes a look at how extension methods can be used to make code cleaner and more readable, showing a worked example taking a piece of code and introducing extension methods to simplify it.

Community

• LIDNUG: Scott Guthrie Talks Shop V – The Linked In .NET User Group welcome Scott Guthrie back for the 5th time to talk about anything and everything Microsoft Developer related. This free, virtual event will take place on Thursday 13th May at 10am PST (early evening in the UK)
• LIDNUG: Effective Silverlight with SharePoint 2010 – Sahil Malik – A second Linked In .NET User Group this month sees Sahil Malik talking on the uses of Silverlight within Sharepoint applications, with this free virtual talk targeting Sharepoint developers which takes place on Tuesday 25th May at 11am PST

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