The Morning Brew

Software

• EF CTP4 Released! – The ADO.NET team announce the release of the latest Entity Framework Feature CTP, the 4th CTP release of this productivity and feature library which includes the Code First features. This release includes a significant number of new conventions and annotations for the Code first feature along with productivity improvements to make writing the code quicker and simpler
• Albacore v0.2.0 Preview 1 Is Available – Derick Bailey announces the release of Albacore v0.2.0 Preview 1, an early preview of the new 0.2 release of this collection of Rake tasks specifically for building .NET systems using Rake. This release includes .NET 4 support, new configurations systems, and has also removed some of the tasks from earlier releases to provide a better focus for the project.
• "Fake – F# Make" 1.40.5.0 released – Bugfixes for CruiseControl.NET – Steffen Forkmann releases a new version of his F# Make tool. This version includes some improvements and bugfixes for integrations with CruiseControl.NET along with some improvements to the MSBuild task to increase the performance of multi project builds.
• Veracity: The next step in DVCS – Eric Sink gives a pre-announcement of SourceGear’s new Distributed Version Control System, Veracity. This product implements the core DVCS features, along with a few new ones, and the core of the product will be licensed as Open Source via the Apache License, with the code being released next week (along with the formal announcement). SourceGear will also produce commercial add-on products.
• Windows Phone Developer Training Kit – Beta Refresh – Yochay Kiriaty highlights the Updated Windows Phone 7 Developer Training Kit, updated for the new beta release

Information

• Simple Code First with Entity Framework 4 – Magic Unicorn Feature CTP 4 – Scott Hanselman takes a look at the new Entity Framework Feature CTP Release, running through some of the standard CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) operations when using the Code First approach.
• EF CTP4 Walkthrough: Code First – Rowan Miller of the Entity Framework team has a more detailed run through of the Code First functionality, and also gives the low down on the Productivity Improvements – looking at a number of the tasks which are now significantly easier than before.
• New Mono Runtime Features – Miguel de Icaza talks about the changes in Mono 2.8 to make it much easier to use the LLVM Mono engine and the new Garbage collector to give improved application performance with a slight JIT performance penalty
• Solution Folders – Deborah Kurata looks at the often overlooked Visual Studio IDE feature of Solution Folders which allow you to organise your projects (or files) into folders within the solution
• ASP.NET MVC: Do You Know Where Your TempData Is? – Greg Shackles explores the ASP.NET MVC TempData feature looking at its implementation, and also showing how you can, via an extensibility point, implement your own TempData Provider to allow you to store TempData where ever you want.
• jQuery JavaScript Templates Tutorial: Inline Expressions and Code Blocks – Rey Bango continues his series looking at templating in JavaScript and jQuery with a look at the inline expressions and code blocks features provided in the Microsoft jQuery Template plugin.
• DevCheatSheet.com, The Developer focused cheat sheet aggregator (just about all languages, all areas, all the time…) – Greg Duncan highlights DevCheatSheet.com, a one stop shop for developer cheat sheets on a huge array of developer topics
• JavaScript vs Silverlight: An answer – Laurent Bugnion posts a reaction to an article on JupiterJS.com which argued that JavaScript was better than Silverlight, where Laurent believes the two are not direct competitors and in fact complement each other. Good discussion breaking out in the comments on this one.
• UTC gotchas in .NET and SQL Server – Derek Fowler (friend of The Brew, and creator of the Brew Badge concept) looks into some of the confusion that is Time zones in DateTime Calculations, and looks at the use of DateTimeKind to specify exactly what you mean.
• Caching Improvements in Internet Explorer 9 – Eric Lawrence (with his Internet Explorer hat on) looks at the changes and improvements to Caching in Internet Explorer 9, along the way providing a great overview of the concepts of caching generally.
• C# 4 broke my code! The Pitfalls of COM Interop and Extension methods – Samuel Jack discovers that the upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 may cause you some problems if your code relies on extension methods on COM Objects, something which is especially true if you use the Microsoft VSTO Power Tools to program against the Microsoft Office Object Model.

Community

• FubuMVC for ASP.Net MVC Devs at MVCConf – Jeremy D. Miller gives a taste of what will be in his mvcConf virtual conference session on FubuMVC. mvcConf is looking like it will be a great event, which now is ‘sold out’, however recordings of the sessions will be available for those who didn’t get to ‘attend’

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