The Morning Brew

This weekend I will be attending the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper SouthWest conference in Bristol where I will be delivering my first ever conference session, an introduction to the Reactive Extensions for .NET and JavaScript.

Software

• ApiChange Is Released! – Alois Kraus announces the release of ApiChange, a command line based utility which allows you to query the use libraries and methods, allowing diff’ing public types, finding uses of methods, interfaces, types, etc, and giving reporting in Excel. At a quick glance, this looks like a powerful and useful tool, and this post also discusses a little about its implementation.
• First Beta of MonoTools 2 for VisualStudio – Miguel de Icaza highlights the release of the first beta of MonoTools 2 for Visual Studio, which now plugs into both Visual Studio 2010 and 2008. Other significant new features are the new Soft Debugger, vastly improved debug deployment times and appliance support with SuseStudio.

Information

• What the Heck is "MEF" for, and what Silverlight designers need to know about it? – Don Burnett takes a look at the basics of the Managed Extensibility Framework, looking at some of the key features of the library.
• Sticky Seesmic Desktop Plugin – John Papa is also raising awareness of MEF with a look at creating a plugin for the Silverlight Based Seesmic Desktip, which uses Silverlight and MEF to provide the plug-ability. This first post presents the acutal plugin, with later posts to look at the actual constuction processes.
• Duck Typing with NHibernate Reloaded – Fabio Maulo looks at duck typing using NHibernate and the .NET Dynamic Language Runtime, allowing you to work with and persist Dynamic Entities.
• Set based operations with RavenDB – Ayende talks about set based operations in RavenDB, discussing why he really wanted to support them in terms of User appeal, code simplicity, and performance and shows the implementation in RavenDB.
• How to work RavenDB Id with ASP.NET MVC Routes – Shiju Varghese’s Blog – Shiju Varghese continues looking at the uses of RavenDB with ASP.NET MVC, looking at how the default RavenDB Identifiers can interfere with ASP.NET MVC routing, showing two solutions to the problems
• That No SQL Thing: Video – Ayende highlights the availability of the video recording of his session at Skills Matter on the various NoSQL database approaches. This is another 4 hour video, so plenty of content, and is available in a streaming only format.
• Your First Fluent Cassandra Application – Nick Berardi gives a step by step overview of working with the library he has created to give a .NET style Fluent interface for integrating with the Cassandra distributed database
• Border Image Generator Tool; Using local file APIs – Ajaxian highlights the Border Image Generator Tool from Kevin Decker, and particularly the use of the latest browser APIs such as Data URIs, File API and the Web Storage API

Community

• Microsoft UK Event: Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) with Glenn Block – Mike Taulty announces an event to be held at Microsoft Reading on the 14th July 2010, where Glen Block will be presenting a half day session on the Managed Extensibility Framework. This UK event will be a cut down version of his ‘Way of MEF’ session.
• MEF day in SF, "The Way of MEF, the Path to Enlightenment" – Glen Block will be presenting his Way of MEF full day session in San Fransisco on Saturday 12th June at the Bay.Net Usergroup. This full day event has a $39 cost.

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Information

• MEF has shipped!!! – Glenn Block reminds everyone that MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) version 1 was one of the technologies which shipped with .NET 4 and Silverlight 4 in their respective releases, and gives a list of a range of other projects supplementing, porting or utilising MEF.
• Silverlight and WCF RIA Services (3 – Client) – Mike Taulty continues his series of posts on using Silverlight with the WCF Rich Internet Applications Services, focusing this time on the client side implementation using Silverlight, exploring the various types required to interact with the service such as the DomainContext, DomainClient, EntityContainer, EntitySet, etc.
• Castle Windsor and child containers & Castle Windsor and Child containers reloaded – Krzysztof Ko?mic discusses the possibility of removing child container from the Castle Windsor implementation, making use of Handler Selectors and sub-resolvers to provide the same type of functionality instead. Krzysztof also posts explaining the problems with container hierarchies
• NHibernate stump the expert video – Ayende shares a streaming only recording of his 4 hour ‘Stump the Expert’ on NHibernate session held at SkillsMatter. The video contains tricks, tips, details of under-utilised features, and importantly, the answers to peoples real world questions.
• RavenDB & CouchDB – Basic Queries – Rob Ashton presses on with his Document Database Comparison series with a look at basic querying in RavenDB vs CouchDB
• Get GIT – The "Getting Started with Git" DZone Refcardz – Greg Duncan highlights a recent DZone’RefCard’ from Matthew McCullough which gives you a crash course and quick reference to the GIT distributed version control system in 6 pages.
• Translating my Git workflow with local branches to Mercurial – Jimmy Bogard gives an overview of his standard workflow using the GIT version control system, and then looks at how he can implement a similar style of working using another distributed version control system in the form of Mercurial
• The aftermath of the blog platform migration – Sean Jenkin openly and honestly shares the experiences and problems encountered by the team who migrated the MSDN blogs to the new platform. This one is interesting reading, especially if you ever have to do a similar migration / replacement project as it highlights areas and planning you may want to give further consideration to in your own projects
• ASP.NET MVC and Me in PragPub Magazine – Phil Haack highlights some ASP.NET MVC content, and an interview with him which are included in the June edition of PragPub Magazine from the Pragmatic Bookshelf team. June’s edition is PragPub Magazine’s 12th issue, and scanning back through previous issues there is some great content there. The magazine is available in a number of formats (HTML, PDF, epub, mobi), and is free.
• 6 important uses of Delegates and Events – Shivprasad koirala takes a detailed look at C# Delegates and Events, looking at their common usages, implementations, and the differences between evenst and delegates, and their implementations in other programming languages in this CodeProject Article.

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Software

• Snippet Designer 1.3 Released! – Matt Manela announces the release of Snippet Designer 1.3, adding support for ASP.NET / HTML, JavaScript and SQL snippets and an improved search along with a few bugfixes. Both Visual Studio 2010 and 2008 are supported.
• Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects RTW – Available Now – Visual Web Developer Team announce the release to web (RTW) of Web Deployment Projects for Visual Studio 2010. This release includes all the functionality you are used to from the 2005 and 2008 days, and since the beta has been supplemented with performance improvements, improvements to multi-targeting support and filetype ignore rules for non-required files.
• Windows Embedded Compact 7 announced and public CTP available – ‘obloch’ highlights the public CTP release of Windows Embedded Compact 7, providing a Windows based operating system with a Silverlight based UI.

Information

• Multiple Project Downloads, Wiki Enhancements and more – The CodePlex team have pushed out their latest release of the CodePlex platform, and now provides support for multiple default releases from a single project, improvements to the Wiki, and also some new user features for showing projects you have forked.
• Parallel Programming in .NET Framework 4: Getting Started – Alexandra Rusina starts a new series of posts looking at the Parallel programming capabilities of the .NET 4 release, beginning with an introductory look at the Task Parallel Library
• Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC: Final Look – Jimmy Bogard rounds off this series of posts looking at the further uses of Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC beyond the common use in the controller, and talks about separation of concerns and its place in good API design.
• Rietveld, or "How to revamp your code review process" – Kyle Baley talks about the traditional code review process of formal meetings and WTFs a minute, and then looks at how a code review tool like Rietveld can help change this process and make it better.
• How we test the compiler backend – Alex Thaman talks about how the Visual C++ team at Microsoft go about testing their compiler implementation, looking at the different types of test they perform and how they hook the tests up.
• Cucumber, A Brief Overview – Joey Beninghove takes a look at Cucumber a Ruby library for testing at a high level, such as integration and acceptance testing, showing a few samples of it in use.
• Outside-In BDD: How?! – Sarah Mei gives an overview of how she does BDD style testing using Ruby, RSpec and Cucumber
• Albacore Feature Preview: Building C# Code With CSC.exe – Derick Bailey talks about the latest task addition to the Albacore Rake Build tasks for .NET library. This new task allows the building of C# code using the CSC compiler, and is in the early stages of production now.
• Tip -When writing custom assertion methods – Keep your assertion stack trace clean – Daniel Wertheim talks about a best practice for constructing your own test assertions so that your stack trace presented in the test runner is as clear as possible as to where the assertion error occurred in the system under test, not within your custom assertion.
• Three cautions with mocking frameworks – Tim Stall talks about 3 of the most common issues arising from the use of Mocking Frameworks as a part of testing, spaghetti code, false test coverage, and broken encapsulation.
• Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever – Josh Holmes highlights the second year of the ‘Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever’ a set of 100 puzzles organised by Jeff Blankenburg. This year sees the puzzle count rise to 100 (it was 30 last year) and there are prizes for the first 100 people to complete all 100 puzzles.

Community

• Edge UG June 2010: IIS 7 and Functional Alchemy – London’s Edge Usergroup will be meeting on the evening of Wednesday 16 June at Microsoft’s London offices for two presentations, Andrew Westgarth on IIS 7 and Mark Rendle on Functional style programming ion C#.

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