The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing the first Visual Studio Pro Power Tools! – Brian Harry announces the release of the Visual Studio Pro Power Tools, a set of new features for the professional and above editions of Visual Studio, including an improved add references dialog, improved text selection features, Ctrl+Click for Goto Definition and much more.
• Announcing: VS2010 Productivity Power Tools and Modeling Feature Packs – Jason Zander also has the details of the Power Tools, along with another feature pack release, the Visualization and Modeling Feature pack which extends the architectural features of the higher Visual Studio editions.
• New Pex release 0.92: Rex and Silverlight – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces an updated release of Pex and Moles, which brings an early stage of Silverlight support, Rex integration for better understanding of Regular Expressions and the usual bugfixes and improvements.
• Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.2 (June 2010) released – Think TechEd US 2010 Release (Azure support for VS2010 RTM, .Net 4, Cloud Storage Explorer, integrated deployment, service monitoring and IntelliTrace) – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the version 1.2 of the Visual Studio support for Windows Azure. The Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio bring all the tools and utilities you need to develop Windows Azure based applications, including the Windows Azure SDK
• Windows Azure Platform Training Kit – June Update – Guy Barrette highlights an updated Windows Azure Platform Traning Kit which contains all the crucial information about developing for Windows Azure including information on Windwos Azure, SQL Azure, AppFabric Service Bus, Dallas, Access control and mich more.
• Expression Studio 4 Launch of Blend, SketchFlow, Encoder and More! – John Papa highlights the release of the version 4 of Expression Studio. For those with a V3 license, this is a free upgrade (but hold off upgrading if you are developing for Windows Phone 7), and for anyone else there is a 60 day trial

Information

• Peering into the cloud with IntelliTrace – Somasegar highlights one of the key features of the latest Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio release, the ability to use intellitrace with applications hosted on the cloud
• ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2010 – Service Pack 1 – Ken Cox highlights a survey from the ASP.NET Team which will help them shape the Service Pack 1 release for Visual Studio.
• What on Earth is a Feature Pack? – Brian Harry discusses what is meant by the new Microsoft term ‘Feature Pack’, explaining it in the context of other types of release item
• SQL Azure at TechEd 2010 – The SQL Azure Team share their key announcements and releases for TechEd
• Debugging .NET 2.0 Assembly from unmanaged Code in VS2010? – Rick Strahl appeals for some help in solving a debugging related problem with a .NET 2 assembly exposed as COM to a hosting application hosting the .NET 2 runtime, and attempting to debug with Visual Studio 2010.
• Code Contracts Part 5 – Abstract Types and Interfaces – Kevin Hazzard hits part 5 of his series on the Code Contracts functionality of .NET 4, exploring the use of contracts on Abstract Types and Interfaces using the ContractClass and ContractClassFor attributes to hook up the implementation of the contract with the interface definitions.
• Simple Branching Strategy Part 2: Implementation – John Sonmez continues his series of posts on Branching Strategies with a walk through of what he believes to be the simplest and most effective strategy, and addresses some of the common concerns about this approach.
• A ToDynamic() Extension Method For Fluent Reflection – Dixin’s Blog – Dixin looks at the use of a derived class of DynamicObject to create a simpler approach to reflection which allows reflection based programming to be performed in an easier more readanble way
• Reminder: IMMINENT END OF SUPPORT: Windows 2000 and Windows XP SP2 End of Support on July 13, 2010 (US Pacific Time) – Nick MacKechnie highlights the official end of support for Windows 2000 and Windwos XP SP2 next month. Time to make sure everything you care about has been upgraded

Community

• Introduction to Ruby – ThoughtWorks Manchester GeekNights – ThoughtWorks Manchester continue their series of evening GeekNight Events with David Santoro talking on Ruby, to be held at Manchester University on the Wednesday 23rd June.

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