The Morning Brew

Software

• We have released MonoDevelop 2.4 – Miguel de Icaza announces the release of MonoDevelop 2.4, the Mono based IDE for developing .NET and Mono Applications on Windows, MacOS X, and various flavours of Linux. This new release brings support for developing with Gtk#, ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight, MonoMac, MonoTouch, WCF Endpoints and T4. Miguel also highlights that Infragistics Announces Support for Mono in the form of their NetAdvantage for ASP.NET controls library supporting Mono out of the box.
• Announcing PostSharp 2.0 RC 1 – Gael Fraiteur announces the first Release Candidate Release of PostSharp 2.0. This release includes numerous bugfixes, along with improved licensing code, simpler configuration, support for FxCop and much improved documentation as noted in his blog post PostSharp 2.0 Documentation Finally Available
• dotless Version 1.1 Released! – Daniel Hoelbling announces the release of version 1.1 of dotless the dynamic CSS implementation for ASP.NET. This new release includes their new and improved parser, bringing improved error reporting, along with query string parameter passing and improvements to caching.
• ASP.NET MVC – MvcSiteMapProvider 2.0 is out! – Maarten Balliauw announces the release of the ASP.NET MVCSiteMapProvider 2.0. The version 2 release includes a number of major changes, and as such is not backwards compatible, however the V2 does now provide a solid bas for extensibility in the future. In this post Maarten runs through the major features and shows how to use them.
• Details of 5GB and 50GB SQL Azure databases have now been released, along with new price points – Eric Nelson shares the news of the new pricing details for the new sizes of SQL Azure databases, and also highlights the New SQL Azure Development Accelerator Core promotional offer which will give you 6 months of Business Edition Databases at 25% off standard rates.
• June Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Training Kit Released – Ricardo Peres highlights the latest release of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Training Kit, packed with presentations, hands-on labs and demos to provide information on the whole range of technologies in the release from C# 4 to Windows Phone 7 (and everything in-between)

Information

• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Conditionals – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series looking at the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript and .NET with a look at the conditional operators Observable.If and Observable.Case, illustrating with examples in .NET and JavaScript.
• Null Or Empty Coalescing – Phill Haack takes a look at making the null coalescing operator more useful with the introduction of some extension methods on strings to allow coalescing if the string is empty, or only includes whitespace.
• How I understood monads, part 1/2: sleepless and self-loathing in Seattle – Bertrand Le Roy attempts a simple introduction to the concept of monads, illustrating the various key concepts with code samples and explanations (in language other than code)
• Units of measure auto-conversion – Phillip Trelford dives into the F# Units of Measure functionality taking a look at how all units can be related back to base units, allowing for automatic conversion between units (letting you add metres to Kilometres for example)
• RIA Services and Authorization – Nikhil Kothari continues his series of posts on the Rich Internet Application Services, exploring the concepts of Authorization in RIA, illustrating with the help of the Book Club Sample application.
• Start Learning Ruby with IronRuby – Setting up the Environment – Kazi Manzur Rashid offers a getting started post looking at configuring your development environment to experiment with Ruby using IronRuby and NotePad++ as the IDE.
• Multi-tenant ASP.NET MVC – Views – Zack Owens continues his series on Multi-tenant ASP.NET MVC with part 4 looking at Views, and talking about an implementation using a custom View Engine based on the Spark View Engine to hook up the tenancy aspects using conventions in naming the Views DLL.
• Agile Testing is Different – John Sonmez looks at the difference between the traditional software testing approaches and those of Agile Testing, exploring the need for automation, looking at the testing workflow, and the role of the QA person.

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Software

• Prism 4.0 Plan & Drop Available on Codeplex – Blaine Wastell outlines the future development plans for Prism 4.0 (previously known as the Composite Application Guidance), and also highlights their latest release (drop 2) now available on CodePlex.
• SQL Server Driver for PHP 2.0 CTP2 is now released – The Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP Team announce their second Community Technology Preview release of the SQL Server Driver for PHP 2.0. This release sees some major changes architecturally, along with a few changes to the API and some bugfixes.
• Cavity Unit Testing – Alan Dean announces his new open source project, Cavity, which provides an internal DSL for testing property and type definitions as a part of your unit testing
• RTM Demo VM for SharePoint & Office 2010 – With the General Availability of Office 2010 announced yesterday at the public launch, Steve Fox highlights the availability of a demo Virtual Machine which includes all the Office and Sharepoint 2010 bits to support development in one neat package. The VM will expire in 180 days.
• Think ‘Street Map control’ means Google or Bing? Looking for something more ‘open?’ How about a WPF control for OpenStreetMap.org? – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of a WPF based control backing onto Open Street Maps mapping data, providing a nice alternative to the use of Bing or Google maps.

Information

• Preview of MSDN Library Changes – Scott Guthrie gives an overview of the planned usability changes to the MSDN documentation, and appeals to readers to give feedback on the changs by exploring them on the MSDN Preview site and feeding back via the questionnaire.
• Fluent NHibernate and the 2nd level cache – Mark Needham explores the options for caching data in the NHibernate Second Level cache when using Fluent NHibernate to provide your NHibernate Mappings
• Migrating to Git – Gabriel Schenker shares the experiences of his team in moving from Subversion to Git for version control, talking about the configuration of the server, the conversion, the client side software along with the new workflow they are using.
• Anatomy of a good acceptance test – Gojko Adzic looks at what makes a good acceptance test, and how achieving a good level of acceptance testing can realise long term benefits of live documentation. Gojko takes a bad example of an acceptance test and shows how it can be improved using a variety of techniques.
• BDD, Feature Injection (and the Whirlpool) – Ian Cooper shares his initial impressions of the use of Feature Injection in BDD practices, giving some background into what it is and how it connects with other parts of the BDD development style.
• Behavior Driven Development (BDD) with Cucumber and ASP.NET MVC – Damien White takes a look at testing ASP.NET MVC applications using Cucumber with WebRat and SpecFlow with WatiN, comparing the two combinations in use
• How Orchard works – Bertrand Le Roy shares some documentation of the overall architecture of the Orchard Project a free open source Content Management System developed on the ASP.NET platform.
• Using Tech-Ed OData to download videos – Naveen shows how you can quickly use LinqPad and the TechEd OData feed to obtain the videos of the sessions from TechEd North America, including filtering to only those advanced sessions.
• F# Scaling from Explorative to .NET Component – F# Talk @ TechEd 2010 – LukeH shares the video, slides and demos from his session on F# as a first class citizen in Visual Studio at TechEd North America, along with some additional blog content. This session looked at the F# language, the Integration with the IDE and the new development styles available with F#

Community

• Registration to NHibernate Day opens at 3:15pm CET – Registration for the First NHibernate Day Conference, a free, all day conference to be held in Bologna, Italy on 9th October opened yesterday. At the time of writing there are still 99 tickets available.

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Software

• .NET FX 4 is now available in 10 additional languages – Daniel Walzenbach highlights the release of 10 further language versions of the .NET Framework 4, providing download links to the various editions of the framework localised to those languages (which include Norwegian, Hungarian, Dutch, Hebrew, amongst others)
• Memory Leak Hotfixes for WPF 3.5 SP1 – Jossef Goldberg highlights three hotfixes for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) 3.5 SP1 which address memory leak conditions under a number of difference circumstances.
• The Managed Menu Extension (MME) makes adding right click menus to VS2010 simple and easy (via MEF) – Greg Duncan highlights an updated version of the Managed Menu Extension for Visual Studio 2010, which provides simple means of adding custom menu entries to the Solution Explorer context menu. This release is updated to use MEF and integrate with VS2010, and full source is provided.

Information

• Hide and seek – Eric Lippert picks up a question from Stack Overflow on method hiding, looking at the rules and reasoning behind how the compiler decides which implementation to use.
• Symbolic Calculation in F# – Vagif Abilov explores the interesting world of symbolic calculations using functional programming approaches in F#, looking at the symbolic calculation of derivatives, simplifying, parsing and formatting algebraic expressions in this CodeProject article.
• Internet Explorer 9 Preview 2 link + webcasts for developers – Eric Nelson shares a collection of resources, demos and presentations on Internet Explorer 9 Preview 2
• The New ASP.NET Default Web Template in Visual Studio 2010 – Tim Lee takes a look at the new Visual Studio 2010 Web Application Templates, showing the functionality you get for free with the Web Site Template including Membership support, jQuery integration and standard CSS and site structure features
• TeamRoom – Martin Fowler takes a look at the concept of a TeamRoom in Agile Software development, sharing photos of ThoughWorks Team room setups along with some tips for the creation of a good team room environment.
• Release Management, Features or Time – John Sonmez discusses the two ways of deciding when to release, at a specific time, or after specific functionality is completed, and argues that you should go the functionality route to avoid becoming lazy.
• Is Your ASP.NET Development Server Not Working? – Paulo Morgado shares his experiences with problems with the ASP.NET Development Server bot functioning on certain OS setups, and traces the problems back to a difference in configuration of the hosts file.
• Throttling Silverlight Mouse Events to Keep the UI Responsive – Colin Eberhardt takes a ,ook at improving the responsiveness of his Silverlight applications which make use of the mouse events by throttling the mouse events, illustrating with some browser based examples (NB some of these examples show the unthrottled case which may cause your browser to become unresponsive)
• How to Enable Using the Binding Builder in WPF and Silverlight Applications – Karl Shifflett looks at a number of different scenarios where you can use the new Binding Builder for WPF and Silverlight which is included in Visual Studio 2010, walking through the usage, and sharing code samples to accompany.
• How to do API Key Verification for REST Services in .NET 4 – Ron Jacobs steps through the creation of API Key verification in the .NET 4 REST Services, showing how such a mechanism can be implemented to verify users have permission to use your services. Sample code is provided.

Community

• Microsoft TECH-ED Europe Discount – Jim Glass highlights the final three weeks of special offer rate registration for Tech-Ed Europe to be held in Berlin (8th November), a deal which gets you 500 Euro off the standard registration rate.
• Reactive Programming with F# in London – Tomas Petricek will be speaking at the F#unctional Londoners F# usergroup on the evening of Wednesday 23rd June (6:30pm) at an event to be held at The SkillsMatter eXchange. Tomas wil be speaking on the subject of Reactive Programming using F#
• Visual Studio Language & IDE Resources from TechEd North America 2010 (C#, VB, F#, IronPython, IronRuby) – Lisa Feigenbaum shares the recordings and related resources from the language related sessions at TechEd North America held last week

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