The Morning Brew

Software

• Caliburn 1.1 on Windows Phone 7 – Nigel Sampson looks at getting Caliburn the MVVM framework for WPF and Silverlight to compile and run on the Windows Phone 7 Platform, combining it with the Ninject DI / IOC library and providing a.zip of the built package.
• An F# Silverlight MVVM Multi-Project Template – Daniel Mohl shares another F# based project template, this time creating a MVVM implementation in Silverlight and F# with both the source and packaged template available to download.

Information

• ILMerge to the Rescue? – Dru Sellers discusses the use of ILMerge to combine .NET assemblies into one single assembly making adding references and distribution easier, discussing the benefits for encapsulating dependencies of your code.
• ASP.NET MVC Filters and Statefulness – Brad Wilson discusses how you can handle state in your MVC Filters where there may only be one instance of your filter for all requests, looking at the use of Context.Items and Session for storing the associated state for each request and user.
• More on Zip in .NET – Richard Lee, who is a developer intern on the BCL Team discusses some of the feedback received about working with Zip files in .NET, and looking at some of the scenarios people raised in the discussion and how the new features will support them.
• UtilityVsStrategicDichotomy – Martin Fowler discusses two different types of IT system, utility systems which just have to work well, and strategic systems where the system needs to make a difference to the business and where being better than the competition is important.
• Using Event-Based Components for Library Development – Ralph Westphal continues looking at event based architectural design and explores how it can apply to developing libraries, illustrating with and example.
• Graph Colouring, Part Five – Eric Lippert continues his graph colouring adventure with a look at colouring heavily connected graphs where there are lots of connected sub graphs
• ASP.NET MVC 3: Using multiple view engines in same project – Gunnar Peipman continues looking at ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 examining the support for multiple view engines in a single project with a simple example showing two view engines running side by side
• Troubleshoot ASP.NET Errors Remotely – while Appearing Local – Scott Forsyth shares a neat trick using the URL Rewrite 2.0 library to fake the REMOTE_ADDR HTTP Header value so your requests look like they are coming from the local machine to enable you (And only you) to see detailed error reports remotely while still serving friendly errors to other users of the site
• Cancellation with .NET 4 (Part 1) – Christian Nagel takes a look at the framework capabilities for cancelling async work in the pre-.NET 4 , showing there was no standard way of achieving this and setting the scene for his next part in the series to explore the .NET 4 solution to this.
• VS 2010 Web Deployment – Scott Guthrie continues his epic series of posts about the .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 release with part 25 looking at the Web Deployment improvements in 2010, including improvements to publishing, packaging of web apps and databases and web.config transforms
• Introduction to TestApi – Part 8: Object Comparison API – Ivo Manolov continues his series of posts looking at the TestApi library of helper APIs for developing tests for software. In this part Ivo explores the Object Comparison features of TestApi showing how the make complex object comparisons easier to create and report on differences
• Windows Phone 7 – First Impressions – Scott Hanselman takes a first look at the Windows Phone 7 Developer phone, sharing his initial impressions as he got up and running with the device, sharing a video showing the phone in operation.

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Software

• Migrating ASP.NET MVC 2 applications to ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 – Eilon Lipton releases an updated version of his ASP.NET MVC Project Converter which now enables upgrades from ASP.NET MVC 2 to ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1. The new version of the tool requires that you have .NET 4 on the machine and takes backups of the project as it upgrades it.
• Microsoft XAML Toolkit CTP – July 2010 – Brian Chapman highlights the imminent release second CTP release of the Microsoft X
  AML Toolkit (imminent as it has not yet been posted up on the projects
  code.MSDN site). This release includes improved Silverlight support, increasing the support to Silverlight 3 and 4, along with Windows Phone 7.
• Microsoft XAML Toolkit CTP – July 2010 – Brian Chapman highlights the immenent release second CTP release of the Microsoft X
  AML Toolkit (iminant as it has not yet been posted up on the projects
  Code.MSDN site). This release includes improved Silverlight support, increasing the support to Silverlight 3 and 4, along with Windows Phone 7.
• TFS 2010 updates coming to a download site near you – Brian Harry gives a heads up on a number of service releases for TFS which fix bugs, improve the quality of components and improve the general experience of using the product.

Information

• New C# Yellow Book Now Available – Rob Miles releases an updated version of his free C# Programming ‘Yellow Book’. This updated edition has an improved structure, new content on threading and collections. This 197 page book is used as a part of the University of Hull’s First Year programming course, and is an excellent introduction to the language.
• Microsoft XAML Toolkit CTP – July 2010: Silverlight Features, FxCop Rule Authoring, XAML DOM – & FxCop Integration – Brian Chapman explores some of the features of the XAML Toolkit CTP, looking at the improved Silverlight support, the manipulating XAML using the XAML DOM, and integrating and creating FxCop rules for XAML
• MVC 3 – first look – Arun Mahendrakar shares his first impressions of the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview release, running through some experiments with the framework and sharing the sample code.
• Integrated StructureMap container for the MvcServiceLocator in ASP.NET MVC 3 – Thang Chung takes a look at using the new ASP.NET MVC Service Locator support to integrate the Structure Map Inversion of Control / Dependency Injection container into an ASP.NET MVC application.
• ASP.NET MVC 3: Using HttpStatusCodeResult & Creating HttpStatusCodeResult with view based body – Gunnar Peipman continues exploring the new Action Results in the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 release with a look at HttpStatusCodeResult which allows you to return a specific HTTP status code, and explores how you can do this with also returning some page content from a view.
• Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development Screencasts – Mark Needham discusses the Test Driven Development Screen casts from Kent Beck, published by the Pragmatic Programmers, discussing some of the things he noticed watching Kent doing TDD, and looks at the ‘Call your shots‘ technique where your announce what the test will do before you run it, and also looks at a common TDD mistake when Testing collections
• WCF by Example – Introduction, Chapter I – Baseline, Chapter II – Repositories, Chapter III – Response ,Chapter IV – Transaction Manager & Chapter V – Contexts – Enrique Albert presents a series of articles on building a WPF client application calling WCF services backed by NHibernate data access. Currently at 5 chapters + introduction (with more parts to follow) this CodeProject article series walks through the creation of a 3 tier (Rich Client, Application Serice, Data Storage) application.
• LINQ and N-ary Cartesian Products – Ian Griffiths starts a series of posts looking at producing n-ary Cartesian Products using LINQ. This problem space has been discussed before by Eric Lippert, however Ian indicates that he came to a slightly different solution.

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Special Section included today for the chatter about the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 release.

ASP.NET MVC3 Preview 1

• ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 Released – Phil Haack announces the the release of the first Preview of ASP.NET MVC 3. This preview release requires ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 in order to operate, and includes a the Razor View Engine (in CSHTML), makes use of the Service Locator for hooking up to Dependency Injection Frameworks, supports the .NET 4 Data Annotations and Validations and improves the tooling for multiple view engine support.
• Introducing ASP.NET MVC 3 (Preview 1) – Scott Guthrie does his usual in depth preview of the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 release, showing an overview of the new features in his screenshot rich way.
• ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 Released – Channel 9 Video and Hanselminutes Podcast 224, Oh My! – Scott Hanselman paid a visit to Phil Haack (and Morgan his an intern on the ASP.NET team) to discuss the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 Release, and some of the other stuff they are working on and here provides the video on Channel 9, and also his latest podcast goes into more detailed discussions of the MVC release
• Brad Wilson: ASP.NET MVC 3 Service Location, Part 1: Introduction, Part 2: Controllers, Part 3: View Engines/View Pages & Part 4: Filters – Brad Wilson does a 4 part blog series looking at the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 Service Locator functionality, exploring the background to its use and looking in detail at how it works for Controllers, Views and View Engines and Filters
• ASP.NET MVC 3: Using HttpNotFoundResult action result – Gunnar Peipman takes a look at one of the new ActionResults types in ASP.NET MVC 3, showing how you can use the HttpNotFoundResult type
• ASP.NET MVC 3: New ViewModel is dynamic ViewData – Gunnar also looks at how the ASP.NET MVC3 Preview 1 takes advantage of the .NET 4 Dynamic support with the addition of the ViewModel property of a controller allowing you to use dynamic objects in your views.
• ASP.NET MVC 3 and MEF sitting in a tree… – Maarten Balliauw takes a look at using the new ServiceLocator support in ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 to make use of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) to provide Dependency Injection capabilities.

Software

• HQL Language Service for Visual Studio – HQLAddin is a new open source project from ‘jfromaniello’ which aims to bring IDE support for writing NHibernate HQL queries inside the Visual Studio IDE. Currently at an alpha 1 release it supports HQL syntax checking and highlighting, with intellisense the next big feature planned.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC: Adding client-side validation to ValidatePasswordLengthAttribute – Stuart Leeks looks at the ValidatePasswordLength validator provided in the Account support in the ASP.NET MVC 2 project template, and looks at how you can go about adding support for client side checking of this validation rule.
• Mercurial workflows: mainline workflow – Jimmy Bogard continues his series of posts on workflows in the new batch of Distributed Version Control Systems with a look at setting up a mainline workflow in Mercurial
• Structured Systems Analysis & Design UNISA studies – Chap 1 – Mark Pearl starts a new series of lecture notes from his studies at UNISA, with this series on Structured Systems Analysis & Design. This first part introduces the key definitions, looks at the skills and role of the systems analyst and related careers.
• Ultimate Developer PC 2.0 – Part 3 – UPDATE on Building a WEI 7.9 and RFC for building a GOM (God’s Own Machine) – Scott Hanselman gives an update on the build of his ultimate developer machine comparing some performance figures and real world performance figures from compiling NHibernate 3, along with discussing the different Windows experience scores as the machine was configured and drivers installed.
• The Segment and Sequence Project Iterators – Paul White explores some fo the query optimisation that SQL server can do to your queries which utilise the top operator to retrieve the first X records from a result set, working from a very simple case looking at the execution plan, through to more complex versions of the query, and a discussion of two of the less well known execution plan operations related to top.
• Silverlight and WCF RIA Services (6 – “Validation) – Mike Taulty continues his series on Silverlight and the WCF Rich Internet Application (RIA) Services with a worked example of introducing validation to your application, starting out with a blank project and showing the full process with plenty of sample code and screenshots.
• Iterate, damn you! – Jon Skeet takes a look at a simple piece of code that does not do what you might think, and shows why mutable value types can cause rather a lot of confusion, along with showing how you can work around this particular problem.

Community

• MVCConf Videos Posted! – Darcy Lussier highlights the release of the session videos from last weeks mvcConf virtual conference, so if you missed out on any of the sessions this is your opportunity to see the great content from the event.
• CodeBetter/Devlicio.us/LosTechies MSDN Ultimate Giveaways – Tuna Toksoz – Devlicio.us – Just the Tasty Bits – Tuna Toksoz announces a scheme for distribution of some of the MVP MSDN licenses provided to Microsoft MVPs to be distributed amongst the community. A number of the bloggers from devlicio.us CodeBetter and LosTechies have combined their licenses and are looking for open source projects which are in need of the software that the MSDN license provides.

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