The Morning Brew

Software

• Team Foundation Server – Scrum v1.0 – The Innovation Showcase Blog highlights the release by the Team Foundation Server team of the TFS Scrum v1.0 Beta, a set of templates for implementing Scrum when working with TFS
• Transactional File Manager Is Now On CodePlex – Chinh Do announce the first release of Transactional File Manager on CodePlex. This library wraps up the .NET File interaction API methods such as copy, move, etc, and allows them to be utilised within a transaction with full transaction support.
• Basic XAML Framework on CodePlex – Rockford Lhotka shares the code for his bxf (Basic XAML Framework) a library which makes it easy to teach/learn and write MVVM style applications, with the code for the library now hosted on CodePlex.

Information

• MSDN Magazine: June 2010 Issue – The June Edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online, with the topics discussed this month including Input Validation in WPF, Video encoding using Expression Encoder 3, Occasionally connected Silverlight, AppFabric Caching, and Thread reource Contention and Profiling.
• Patterns & Practices Performance Guidance Roundup – J.D. Meier gathers together all the Performance related guidance from the Patterns and Practices team, collecting the published books and various how-to guides across the spectrum of performance testing and design.
• UNISA Chatter – Operating System Concepts: Part 10 – File System Interface – Willy-Peter Schaub continues sharing his notes from the courses he is taking at UNISA with a look at the File System interface of an operating system looking at some of the data structures and types of file access, along with other features operating systems provide.
• Building Mac Applications in MonoDevelop with MonoMac – Michael Hutchinson shares a walk through of creating an Apple Mac based application using MonoDevelop and the MonoMac bindings which allow Mono developers to create applications with a native Mac UI.
• Using Mono Cecil Decompiler within Windbg to decompile – Naveen shows how you can wrap up Mono Cecil in a simple console application, and use that from WinDbg to get C# language versions of the IL you can obtain using WinDbg.
• Sqlite-Csharp and NHibernate – Rob Ashton takes a look at resolving some of the problems of using Un-Managed Sqlite in your NHibernate based unit tests, and looks at replacing it using the Sqlite-Csharp library which is a port of the C Sqlite project and provides a managed interface the Sqllite data stores.
• MongoDB – Initial Thoughts – John V. Petersen shares some of his initial feelings on MongoDB and and Document databases coming, as he does, from a long history of working with relational data stores. If you find this interesting, be sure to check out the EVAN recording of the MongoDB session listed in the Community section below.
• Git: D’oh! I Meant To Create A New Branch First! – Derick Bailey walks through the process of correcting the type of mistake that often gets made with version control systems, committing files to the wrong branch showing how to undo this mistake using Git.

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: European VAN on MEF on 28 June 2010 – The next European VAN Event has been announced. Monday 28th June sees Hamilton Verissimo, aka hammett, talking on the Managed Extensibility Framework. This virtual event kicks off at 7pm GMT (Don’t forget to apply daylight / british summer time corrections).
• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Recording of Michael Dirolf on MongoDB @ E-VAN 07 June 2010 – The European Virtual ALT.Net team also share the recording of this weeks session with Michael Dirolf on MongoDB.
• Commercial Software Development – presentation slide decks for DDD SouthWest 2.0 – Liam Westley shares the slides and notes (and a previous recording) for his session on Commercial Software Development he delivered at DDD SouthWest this past weekend. If you’ve never seen this session there is lots useful information both for Contractors and Permanent employees, be sure to check it out.

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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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I had a truly excellent time at Developer Developer Developer South West 2 this weekend – my talks on the Reactive Extensions seems to have been well received and I got to put plenty of names to faces (both new and old). Many thanks to the all the organisers for a great event.

Software

• Silverlight 4 minor update – June 2010 – Tim Heuer announces the release of a minor update for Silverlight 4. This update to the Silverlight environment addresses a number of bugs reported in the RTM release, most notably surrounding media functionality.
• Silverlight 4 Theme refresh including RIA Services templates – Tim also highlights the release of updated Application Themes for Silverlight and RIA Services, making it easier for those of us who are design challenged to produce visually appealing applications in Silverlight
• Subtext 2.5 Released! – Phil Haack announces the release of Subtext 2.5, the latest release of his blogging platform written on the .NET framework, with a completely new search (powered by Lucene) a new dashboard andSubtext 2.5 Skin Improvements , this is quite a significant update.
• Windows Server AppFabric v1 RTW (and samples too) – Greg Duncan highlights the RTW release of Windows Server App Fabric 1.0, providing core infrastructure to host web and composite applications on IIS using WCF, WWF, Dublin and Velocity
• FsCheck 0.7: Pleasure and Pain – Kurt Schelfthout announces the 0.7 release of FsCheck, the F# port of QuickCheck, and introduces a new .NET specific API moving away from the API of the Haskell original, making this release not backwards compatible, but bringing improvements to the way of working with it.

Information

• Design by Contract with Microsoft .Net Code Contract – Fredrik Normén looks at implementing Design By Contract style development using the Code Contracts functionality provided in .NET 4, reviewing both the technology implementation and the key principles in developing with Code Contracts
• Simple Branching Strategy Part 1: Back to Basics – John Sonmez looks at the key issues surrounding branching strategies when working with Source control management / version control systems in this back to basics article series.
• DebuggerDisplay Name and Type Parameters – The folks at BlackWasp take a look at two very useful and under known attributes for controlling waht you see about a type when debugging, showing them in use illustrated by a simple example.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – MooTools Integration – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript with a look at the integration provided for the MooTools JavaScript library
• A Hidden Feature in Visual Studio 2010 – The Visual Studio team share a way to enable a feature which was disabled as a part of the RTM release which gives a preview of the code window when you Crtl+Tab between editor windows.
• Possible problem installing Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh on a system with Silverlight 4 installed – Aaron Stebner talks about, and shares a work around for problems in installing the Windows Phone Developer tools CTP Refresh if you already have Silverlight 4 installed
• Castle Windsor and child containers: Revolutions – Krzysztof Kozmic continues looking at the problems in the implementation of Child Containers in Castle Windsor (but including the news that it won’t be removed), and looks at alternative ways of resolving the dependencies in these problem cases.
• NHibernate 2 Beginner’s Guide Book – Ricardo Peres highlights a new beginners NHibernate book from Packt Publishing, and point to the free preview chapter ‘Data Cartography’ looking at the NHibernate Mapping process
• RavenDB & CouchDB – Map and Reduce – Rob Ashton continues his series of post comparing the Document Databases RavenDB and CouchDB, looking in this post at the differences in the implementation of the Map and Reduce operations.
• This Week In Test – Episode 1 – Rietveld! – Roy Osherove and Ariel Raunstien re-launch their weekly testing related video cast with their first edition on a new website. Topics discussed this week include Pex, TDD and JavaScript, QuickUnit and the Rietveld Review Process.

Community

• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Sydney! – The spread of the Developer Developer Developer Community events continues to widen with the opening of registrations for Developer Developer Developer Sydney, a free DDD style event to be held in Sydney Australia on the 17th July 2010
• Developer Developer Developer South West #DDDSW – @JonAlb reviews his experience of Developer Developer Developer South West 2, held this weekend in and around Bristol. The posting of slides from the event has also started with those from An intro to CQRS by Neil Robbins, John McLoughlin on Prism, along with my own slides and demos from Reactive Extensions for .NET and JavaScript

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