The Morning Brew

Information

• C# Fundamentals: The Joys and Pitfalls of Enums – James Michael Hare continues his back to basics series of articles with a look at the basic use of Enums as a replacement for Constants and also looks at a number of the common problems and mistakes that can catch you out.
• Performance tuning tricks for ASP.NET and IIS 7 – part 1 – Mads Kristensen begins a series of posts looking at some of the options available in IIS 7 for improving the performance of your ASP.NET web applciations. This first part explores caching and compression.
• Mercurial workflows: local development work – Jimmy Bogard continues his series of posts on workflows for Distributed Version Control Systems with a look at working with your local copy of the repository to allow you to perform a number of common tasks such as working on two things at once.
• Configuring IIS6 for WebMatrix – Scott Forsyth runs through the setup required to get the new WebMatrix projects to run on the IIS6 Web Server, showing the part of the process that is unique to this version.
• Sometimes, even jQuery can’t save you from yourself – Dave Ward tells the tail of a seemingly cross browser issue that jQuery did not protect him from, and how it actually was caused by a mistake in his HTML, highlighting some interesting differences in how different browsers handle incorrect markup.
• Fun with VS2010 Ultimate: Comparing SQL Data – Zubair Ahmed explores some of the interesting features surrounding databases available in the Ultimate Edition of Visual Studio 2010 which allow you to compare data in databases and generate change scripts to make the records the same.
• Editor fundamentals: Push vs. Pull – ‘noahric’ begins a series of posts talking about the design and extensibility of the Visual Studio Editor, in this post looking at the differences between the new editor and its previous version from the VS 2008 era, how the model changed from being a push model to a pull / event model.
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Pt. 2 – Customizing The Bootstrapper – Rob Eisenberg continues his tutorial series on his Caliburn Micro MVVM framework with a look at the configuration of the Bootstrapper of the framework and its Inversion of Control Container integration.

Community

• Signup for MvcConf – Virtual ASP.Net MVC Conference – Eric Hexter announces the MvcConf Virtual Conference to be held on Thursday 22nd July between 8am and 5pm CDT. This event is a free community event focusing on ASP.NET MVC 2, and also looking towards the future of ASP.NET MVC with a number of well known names in the MVC space, along with some Microsoft product team members presenting.
• NxtGenUG Fest10 – Friday July 16th in Bournemouth – Mike Ormond highlights the NxtGenUG’s Annual ‘Fest’ event being held in Brighton on Friday 16th July. This is an all day event which is free to attend for members of NxtGen, or £59 for non-members, and sees a packed agenda covering everything from Windows Phone 7 Development, to MEF, via Windows Azure and F#.
• The jQuery Online Conference: Monday, July 12th – Everywhere! – Joey deVilla highlights the jQuery OnLine Conference, a virtual conference on Monday 12th July, with a $150 attendee fee which allows you to watch and interact with the 4 presentations, and also watch the sessions again later.

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Software

• dotCover 1.0 Beta Released – JetBrains release the beta release of dotCover 1.0 their Code Coverage tool which integrates with Visual Studio and ReSharper allowing you to obtain code coverage information for test and standard code execution.
• Firefox 4 Beta – Mozilla announce their beta program for Firefox 4, which includes a new User Interface, support for HTML 5 Video and WebM format HD video, new Add-on management and SDK, further support for CSS 3, an index database for client side code to use and crash protection, with still more features to be added soon.
• ReSharper 5.1: Bug Fixes, Performance, XAML 2009 – JetBrains also announced the release of ReSharper 5.1 a bugfix and performance tuning update, improving memory management and integration within Visual Studio 2010, better Silverlight 4 support and the introduction of XAML 2009 support providing highlighting and quick fixes within the XAML lanaguage.

Information

• How WebMatrix, Razor, ASP.NET Web Pages and MVC fit together – David Ebbo talks about how the different components announced and released over the past week hook together and how they line up along with the more enterprise/professional products.
• Great Ways to Learn jQuery – Marc Grabanski shares a huge collection of links to tutorials, books, presentations, screencasts, podcasts, training courses, and blogs which all contribute towards gaining an understanding of jQuery
• IntelliTrace and unfamiliar code – Cameron Skinner takes a look at using IntelliTrace features to help you gain an better understanding how how a particular application works, and to enable you to find the code you need to put your breakpoints in for your actual debugging of problems.
• What’s a nice class like TextFieldParser doing in a namespace like Microsoft.VisualBasic? – Brian Schroer takes a look at a useful looking class whic greatly helps in parsing delimited fields (like CSV) but is tucked away in a namespace that many developers will never look in.
• Finding code in the MSDN Library – Margaret Parsons shares a few tips on locating sample code in the MSDN documentation and site
• Thinking of Moving to the Cloud? Get Free Compute Time with Windows Azure – Joey deVilla highlights the current Windows Azure special offer to enable developers to experiment with Windows Azure with out incurring any initial costs. This offer lasts until 31st October 2010, and gives you a limited amount of compute, storage, SQL Azure and data transfer, with usage exceeding this to be charged at usual rates.
• Microsoft MS-PL code in Mono – Miguel de Icaza talks about the number of Microsoft Libraries which are now licensed under the MS-PL or Apache licenses which allow their direct inclusion in the Mono Project, and discusses the Mono 2.8 release which will make MEF, OData, the DLR and ASP.NET MVC2 into first class citizens within Mono.
• The Case of The Failed Demo – StackOverflowException on x64 – Bart De Smet explores recursion and stack overflows taking a look at samples in C# and F#, looking at the compiler optimisations available on x86 and x64, and looking at tail call optimisations. As is usual with Bart’s posts this is in detail, involves some IL, mighty interesting.
• Unit Tests and LINQ Queries – K. Scott Allen looks into unit testing of LINQ Queries using fakes and doubles, and discusses how this kind of testing isn’t particularly good when dealing with remote query providers such as Linq to SQL, NHibernate, etc as they may interpret the operators differently.
• How to use the MultiTouch Behavior for Windows Phone 7 – Laurent Bugnion shares some documentation and a tutorial video for his MultiTouch Windows Phone 7 behaviour, which is available along with source code on the CodePlex site.
• Pragmatic Programmers Magazine – July 2010 – The Pragmatic Programmers share the July edition of their on-line magazine available in a variety of ebook type formats. This months edition focuses heavily on iPhone and iOS 4 Development, along with Ardurino and the usual columns.

Community

• Windows Phone User – First Meeting July 28th – The UK Windows Phone Usergroup announce their first meeting, to be held in London hosted by EMC Consulting at their London Offices and sees Paul Foster (UK Windows Phone 7 Evangelist) and Rob Fonseca-Ensor (who is currently writing ‘Windows Phone Development’ for Wrox) presenting.

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Software

• Introducing WebMatrix – Scott Guthrie announces the first beta of WebMatrix, a new entry level development tool for creating web applications on the ASP.NET stack, utilising all the new technologies announced over the past weeks (Razor, SQL Serve Compact Edition, IIS Developer Express). This tool aims to lower the barrier to entry for developers on the .NET Stack, making it easy to build your first applications / sites with a route to upgrading skills to the professional tools at a later stage. This post outlines the key concepts and features of the tool in Scott’s typical screenshot rich tour.
• SharpCrafters Blog | Announcing PostSharp 2.0 RTW – Gael Fraiteur announces the Release to Web of the official PostSharp 2.0 release. 2.0 is a major re-work of the concepts of PostSharp, and this release builds on the previous beta and CTP releases, providing better Visual Studio integration, improved performance and numerous new features over the version 1.5
• The PowerGUI Visual Studio PowerShell extension is now officially a v1 (RTW/RTM, Released, Stable, etc, etc) – Greg Duncan highlights the release of v1.0 of the PowerGUI Visual Studio PowerShell extension which integrates PowerShell script editing support into Visual Studio .

Information

• Microsoft WebMatrix in Context and Deploying Your First Site – Scott Hanselman gives an overview of the Web Matrix Beta product, and takes a look at the deployment process for a simple site.
• Introducing WebMatrix – An Easier Way To Do ASP.NET & WebMatrix – A First Application – Mike Brind explores the Web Matrix product, discussing its role in making ASP.NET Development easier, and runs through the creation of a simple book listing application
• The Forrest Gump guide to the new WebMatrix. – Michael Crump also explores the Web Matrix product, discussing its aims, and looks at the install of the product from the Web Platform Installer, and explores the easy publishing to compatible hosting packages.
• Using WIF with Workflow Services – Zulfiqar explores the integration of Windows Identity Foundation with Windows Work Flow Service Applications hosted in WCF and looks at the role of the WF Security Pack to add security related activities to workflows.
• Introduction to Data Sync Service for SQL Azure – Wayne Walter Berry discusses Data Sync Services for SQL Azure which brings a means of performing two-way synchronisation of data between different SQL Azure databases hosted in the same (or different) data centres. The Data Sync Services are built upon the Microsoft Sync Framework, and is provided as a service centrally by Microsoft.
• Layout Designer prototype is now open-source on CodePlex – Kirill Osenkov announces the releases the source code of his Silverlight / WPF Layout Designer prototype application on CodePlex allowing people to investigate how it was implemented and re-purpose it for their own uses.
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Pt. 1 – Configuration, Actions and Conventions – Rob Eisenberg begins his tour / tutorial of Caliburn Micro his Silverlight / Windows Phone 7 targeted MVVM framework, beginning by exploring a simple getting started example to illustrate configuration, and conventions used by the framework.
• Being threadsafe – an introduction to the pitfalls of parallelism – Mike James explores the concepts of Thread Saftey, looking at where it becomes necessary to make something thread safe, and explores some ways of achieving this, along with some of the bad sideffects of getting thread saftey wrong such as deadlocks.
• A GPU-Powered Shopping Experience with Amazon.com – The Internet Explorer 9 team discuss another of their sample applications (the Amazon shelf) looking at how the utilisation of the GPU changes the performance characteristics of the application, and compare the CPU / GPU use with other browsers.
• Model-View-* – The UK Application Development Consulting Blog shares a nice article from Mehran Nikoo from last month which gives nice brief overviews and pictorial representations of various common Model-View style patterns.
• Hosting Windows PowerShell 2.0 under CLR 4.0 – B# .NET Blog – Bart De Smet returns to blogging with a look at hosting the Powershell console and runtime under .NET 4.0, involving some ILDASM and WinDbg usage to investigate the options.

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