The Morning Brew

Software

• Sandcastle with MSHC support has been released! – The Help Guy – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – The Sand Castle Team announce a new release of the SandCastle Help Documentation Generator which now supports .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 and the MSHC format.

Information

• Bulk processing with NHibernate – Jimmy Bogard looks at performing bulk operations using NHibernate and the domain model to do the calculations, looking at some performance improvements you can apply in NHibernate to batch the data operations for increased performance.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Looping Operators – Matthew Podwysocki continues his exploration of the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript and .NET with a look at the Observable.For and Observable.While operators in use in both JavaScript and .NET
• C# Fundamentals: Beware Of Implicit Hiding – James Michael Hare examines method hiding in C#, illustrating with a simple example that does not do what people might think it does, looks at how it differs from C++, and provides some sugestions to make your code safer from this class of bugs by enabling compiler warnings.
• Parallel Programming in .NET 4.0: Parallel Tasks and Parallel Stacks windows in Visual Studio 2010 – Jennifer Marsman continues her series on .NET 4 Parallel Programming with a look at the Visual Studio 2010 tooling support for viewing tasks and the parallel stack at debug time
• An F# WPF MVVM Project Template – Daniel Mohl shares a new project template for creating MVVM style applications in WPF using the F# programming language
• Simplifying commands in MVVM and WPF – Mebyon Kernow takes a look at reducing the amount of code necessary to expose commands in a MVVM style WPF application by utilising the ICustomTypeDescriptor interface. A full code sample is provided.
• Notes From A Project Applying Domain-Driven Design, Event Sourcing and CQRS : Part 3 – Messaging In Web Applications – Mike Nichols continues his series sharing thoughts from a real world project using DDD practices. In this post Mike discusses Command Query Responsibility Segregation in message passing web applications, and talks about the use of the POST-REDIRECT-GET pattern and conventions to simplify
• TryParse vs Convert – Chris Eargle discusses three solutions to the real world problem of reading query string variables into typed variables in ASP.NET

Community

• The SQL Server Conference – SQLBits – The 7 Wonders of SQL – 30 – 02 Oct 2010 – York – The SQLBits team announce their 7th Conference, to be held in York over three days. Day 1 is a Training Day, Day 2 is a deep dive conference on advanced topics and Day 3 is the Free Community conference. The Call for Speakers has started, so if you are interested in speaking at this event go submit your session proposal.
• "May The Silverlight 4s Be With You" with Richard Costall – Monday 5th July sees Richard Costall present a session on what’s new in Silverlight 4 at the .NET DevNet Usergroup hosted at the University of West England, just outside Bristol
• Summer of Extensions – win fabulous prizes – Kate Gregory highlights a competition being run by Microsoft and ReadWriteWeb for US and Canada developers who are working on Visual Studio extensibility in VS2010. Prizes for the best extensions include MSDN Subscriptions, Xbox Elite

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Software

• HTML5, Native: Third IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers – The Internet Explorer continue delivering on their promise of regular preview releases of Internet Explorer 9 with their 3rd preview release. The major new features for this release are the hardware acceleration of canvas, video and audio, along with further improvements to the JavaScript engine performance, and page rendering. Further steps towards ACID standards compliance are also included. The Internet Explorer Team also offer Updates to the IE Testing Center including the 118 new standards tests they have submitted to the W3C

Information

• FREE 96 page book – Windows Azure Platform: Articles from the Trenches Volume One – Eric Nelson announces the release of ‘Windows Azure Platform: Articles from the Trenches Volume One’ a Free (E-)Book containing articles contributed by the Azure community, on subjects from the beginner ‘getting started’ topics through to the details of Azure and SQL Azure. The book is available as PDF, and also in printed from via Lulu.
• All Will Be Revealed: ~7 Hours Recordings from the WIF Workshops – Vittorio Bertocci highlights the availability of the recordings of the main sessions from the Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) Workshop on Channel 9 (and soon to be included in the WIF Developer Training Kit). The 10 workshops start from a high level introduction and dig down deeper into specific areas of WIF.
• A Lap Around TestApi v0.5 – Ivo Manolov gives a tour of the new features included in the latest TestApi release, released last week, showing code samples for each of the new and updated APIs, along with discussions of the new documentation and the updating of the tests to xUnit.Net 1.5
• Modeling hierarchical structures in RavenDB – Ayende answers a common question about structuring hierarchical data in RavenDB (and also other Document databases), along with discussing some concurrency issues (And a clever RavenDB feature to avoid them) in the comments.
• Investigating .NET Memory Management and Garbage Collection – Edward Elliott takes a look at the causes of Memory Leaks, and some of the problems associated, and then goes on to explore the Son of Strike (SOS) debugger extension and the commands available within it to help diagnose the cause of memory leaks.
• Parallel Programming in .NET 4.0: Using Tasks – Jennifer Marsman continues her series on the Parallel Programming features of ,NET 4 with a look at the use of Tasks in place of manual threading using the Thread class.
• Parallel programming in .NET – Internals – Manabendra Roy also takes a look at the Task support in .NET 4 exploring some of the background to tasks and looking at the implementation within the framework along with showing a simple example.
• Multi-tenant ASP.NET MVC – Inversion of Control – Zack Owens continues his series on Multi-Tenancy applications in ASP.NET MVC, exploring the use of the Inversion of Control (IOC) Container to provide a means of obtaining the correct controllers
• Hands on mocking of ASPNETMVC controller action – Mehfuz takes a look at mocking out dependencies in ASP.NET MVC Controllers for testing purposes using the current beta release of JustMock
• Using ModelMetaData in ASP.Net MVC 2 to wire up sweet jQuery awesomeness – Eric Hexer experiments with combining the ModelMetaData with jQuery to provide an unobtrusive solution to providing extra information for jQuery Plugins to use when atatching behaviours to elements.

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Software

• Opening OpenXML, the Open XML Package Editor Power Tool for Visual Studio 2010 – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the updated release of the Open XML Package Editor PowerTool, now updated for Visual Studio 2010. This tool allows you to open OpenXML document packages in the Visual Studio IDE and view, edit, supplement and export the component parts of the package.
• Introduction to StickyBeak – Mark Kemper introduces StickyBeak, an ASP.NET HttpModule which allows you to log and view all HTTP requests to your ASP.NET powered web application, including form posts, query strings, cookies, etc. This looks like a very useful tool for debugging problems with sites and systems, although don’t forget to turn it off when you are done.

Information

• How I use Inversion of Control containers – pulling from the container – Krzysztof Kozmic follows up on his previous post answering reader questions on how you can obtain components from the container based on some external input, discussing the use of the Abstract Factory/ Factory Method pattern, and how the Windsor container does a lot of the hard work for you in providing the implementation of such a factory.
• Extension Methods and "yield return" – Jason Bock explores the use of yield return, and the changes that it makes to the structure of your code once compiled, in order to delay the execution of the iteration loops until needed, and shows a situation where this can result in dramatic changes to the way something works when called.
• AndAlso and OrElse – Christiaan takes a look at two less known VB.NET operators which provide the lazy evaluation of conditionals which makes working with reference types easier as you can test for null on one side of the statement and use the reference on the other side when combining with these operators.
• Now Available: Layered Architecture Sample for .NET 4.0 – J.D. Meier highlights the release of an update to the Layered Architecture Sample, now updated to .NET 4. This sample aims to show how you can structure your applications into layers utilising different .NET technologies in each layer.
• Great Uses of Using Statement in C# – Steve Smith looks at how you can use the using statement along with IDisposable to have actions taken at the start and end of a code block with minimal effort and code around the code block.
• Using Custom Performance Counters with Windows Azure Services – Mike Kelly explores the support for custom Performance Counters when running your applications on the Windows Azure cloud, and looks at how you can monitor the counters having the data from them written into the Azure Table Storage.
• MSTest vs. NUnit with Visual Studio 2010 & TDD – Jeff Vera explores the differences between NUnit and MSTest for unit testing in .NET, breaking the comparison down into a few stages, examining setup and a number of test cases and announcing the winner of the round at each stage. Check out the comments for some other good points from Sergio Pereira
• The Task Parallel Library Series – Introduction – Steve Strong begins a new series of posts looking at the Task Parallel Library. This introductory posts sets the scene for the TPL discussing the need for parallelism and the state of parallel programming in the pre-.NET 4 era.
• Sequential Async using CoRoutines – Torkel Ödegaard takes a look at implementing Async Workflows based on the work by Rob Eisenberg in his Build your own MVVM framework talk at Mix10. Torkel shares an implementation and explains the background nicely, showing how you can have your workflow in one place readable consecutively but maintaining the async nature and providing feedback for the UI
• Web Application Extensibility with FubuMVC (Part 1) – Jeremy D. Miller talks about the importance of extensibility and customisation for small product based companies selling their software to large organisations, and discusses some of the extensibility features his team put into FubuMVC to enable easy customisation by obeying the SOLID principle.

Community

• Being functional AND productive – a quick introduction to F# – The Canary Wharf .NET User Group (London) are meeting on the 7th July at 6:30pm when Diego Colombo will give a talk on the F# Language, some of its key concepts, and the art of functional programming. Only 30 spaces are available, so if you are interested be quick to sign up.
• Inaugural Financial Services Microsoft Architects/Senior Developer Community meeting, London July 1st – Eric Nelson highlights a new community for the more experienced developers / architects amongst you who work in the financial services industry, organised by James Burns. The first event is on the 1st July, and sees three 20 minute presentations, along with discussions and a chance to network.

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