The Morning Brew

Software

• Introducing Knockout, a UI library for JavaScript – Steve Sanderson releases Knockout, a UI library for Javascript which utilises observers to keep the display and data in sync, bringing dependency tracking, declarative binding and nested templates for data display. Wirtten in pure JavaScript, this library plays nicely with jQuery, and is licensed under the Microsoft Permissive(MS-Pl) open source license.
• StoryTeller One Point Oh! – Jeremy D. Miller announces the 1.0 release of StoryTeller after some 18 months of developement. Story Teller is a tool for creating External DSLs for use in creating executable human readable specifications based on .NET langauges.
• Castle Windsor 2.5 – the final countdown – beta 1 released (and Core, DynamicProxy, Dictionary Adapter) – Krzysztof Kozmic announces the first beta of Castle 2.5, specifically Castle Windsor and a number of other Castle Components, giving the details of the significant changes to both the organisation of the project and the individual components

Information

• Dynamic Behaviour on Objects at Runtime With Custom ExpandoObject – Abhishek Sur explores the Dynamic functionality of .NET 4, and looks at how you can create objects which can be extended and customised at runtime by using the ExpandoObject
• Elegant infoof operators in C# (read Info Of) – Patrick Smacchia picks up from an Eric Lippert piece, and shares an implementation from Stack Overflow of the infoof methods for obtaining information about fields, methods, constructors and properties of objects as we can with typeof for Types, using expressions to get access to the parts of the object.
• Enumerator Structs: Optimizing for the Common Case – Sasha Goldshtein takes a look at the confusing world of enumerators on mutable value objects, illustrating and explaining some of the strange behaviour using a number of examples.
• How To Break The CLR For A Cool Feature – Alois Kraus digs down into the CLR to find a way of tracking the last thrown exception, using the tracer from APIChange to help capture the required information.
• The duplex story: looking at duplex communication in Silverlight 4 (Part 1) – Gill Cleeren begins a series taking a look at performing two way communication between a server and Silverlight client, exploring why you might want to use it, and looking at a simple initial example.
• Are Code Generated POCOs Really POCO? – K. Scott Allen discusses the origins of the Plain Old CLR Object (POCO) term, looking back at the original POJO from Java, and discusses if POCO generated by a tool should be considered differently from standard POCO objects.
• About layers, separation, and Entity Framework – Dino Esposito discusses the layered architecture style, and looks at its implementation when using Entity Framework, highlighting that in it standard way of working EF still merges a number of concepts together
• Asp.Net MVC: My Personal View Rules – Chris Brandsma shares 10 rules he uses when building Views in ASP.NET MVC to help keep them to a single responsibility.
• Repository and Unit of Work T4 Template for Entity Framework – Gil Fink follows on from previous posts with a T4 template for generating the Unit of Work and Repository pattern implementations outlined in his previous posts

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Software

• Introducing "Razor" a new view engine for ASP.NET – Scott Guthrie announces Razor, a new code focused view engine for ASP.NET which is due for its first public beta release shortly. The Razor engine aims to be efficient to use, minimising key presses required to achieve output, easy to learn, and builds on existing languages. In this post Scott takes an in depth look at Razor in use.
• Prism 4.0 Drop 3 released – Diego Poza highlights the release of the 3rd Drop of Prism 4. This release of Prism, formerly known as the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight, is another early preview of the platform, and the team are keen to get your feedback to help improve the product,
• new Test Lint Beta – with command line runner – Roy Osherove announces the release of the latest beta of Test Lint. Test Lint is a test review tool for Visual Studio which gives feedback on common test problems based on your test code, helping you write more maintainable, readable and trustworthy tests. The VS add-in is free, and this beta also includes the command line runner which will be commercially licensed.
• MVVM Study – Segue – Introducing Caliburn.Micro – Rob Eisenberg announces a lean and mean version of his Caliburn MVVM framework aimed at Windows Phone and Silverlight development, distilling the core down to a mere 2000 lines of code, and 50 of assembly (which can be further compressed).
• Firebug Lite 1.3.1b1 – The FireBug team announces their latest beta release of FireBug Lite 1.3.1. FireBug Lite is an edition of Firebug for ‘the other browsers’ supporting Internet Explorer, Safari, Chorme and Opera, bringing some of the features of the full Firebug to these platforms.

Information

• A simple implementation of a WeakReference-powered event handler – Paul Stovell discusses Garbage collection, the holding of references to short lived objects by long lived objects, and using Weak References for event handlers
• New Castle Windsor feature – debugger diagnostics – Krzysztof Kozmic discusses a new feature for Castle Windsor, still under development which brings diagnostics features to the container emulating some of the features found in StuctureMap, allowing Assertation of the correctness of configuration. Krzysztof also welcomes feedback about this functionality to help improve it further.
• Stepping into ASP.NET MVC source code with Visual Studio debugger – Gunnar Peipman walks through the process of getting up and running with the Debug into framework code for ASP.NET MVC, showing the setup of this in the IDE
• ASP.NET MVC LabelFor Helper With HtmlAttributes – Imran Baloch takes a look at adding an extension method to build on the LabelFor helper bringing friendly code support for HTML attributes.
• MEF 101 – Part1 – Abhijeet Patel begins a series of posts which takes a detailed look at the Managed Extensibility Framework, starting with a look at Imports and Exports, and how they can be used and consumed.
• What’s a Value Object? – Aaron Weiker takes a look at the features and an implementation of the Value Object based upon his reading of Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans
• Dynamic Views in ASP.NET MVC 2 – Greg Shackles takes a look at using the new C# dynamic keyword as the type for an ASP.NET MVC Model, allowing your view code to be completely dynamic.
• Using TransactionScope with SQLite – Jan Van Ryswyck highlights some strange behaviour with transactions when working with SQLite, explaining it due to a little known feature of SQLite.
• The Weekly Source Code 54 – Can’t have Multiple Attributes of the Same Type when using a TypeDescriptor – Scott Hanselman continues his series of posts taking a weekly look at some interesting code. This week Scott explores the use of the TypeDescriptor, and looks at gaining access to multiple attribute declarations of the same type.
• Silverlight and WCF RIA Services (5 – Authentication) – Mike Taulty continues his series of posts on Silverlight and the Rich Internet Application Services with a detailed look at their role in implementing authentication for your services.
• Introducing Sterling, the Object-Oriented Database for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 – Jeremy Likness discusses Sterling, his soon to be released object database designed for use in Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight applications, talking about some of the key features, and looking at its use in a sample application.

Community

• Brighton ALT.NET Beers. 7pm Tuesday 6th July at The Skiff – Tomorrow evening sees the July Brighton Alt.Net Beers event take place at the usual venue and time. If you are in the area, check it out for some good discussions of .NET Development tools and techniques.

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Congratulations to all the New and Renewed MVPs

Software

• dotTrace 4 Performance Beta 3 – JetBrains announces their 3rd beta release of dotTrace 4. There are no new features in this beta over the previous beta, however the performance and stability has been improved. If you try the beta, and find a problem, be sure to report the issue to help them build a better product.

Information

• Installing, Configuring and Using Windows Server AppFabric and the "Velocity" Memory Cache in 10 minutes – Scott Hanselman runs through in a step by step manner the process of installing the ‘Velocity’ memory cache and Windows Server AppFabric, along with getting it up and running in your ASP.NET Site.
• Two Years With NHibernate – Lessons Learned – Alex Ullrich shares a few best practices for working with NHibernate he has picked up during his two years working with it, discussing the importance of the Domain, Integration Tests, and appropriate use
• Installing ASP.NET 4 in IIS 6 – Al Pascual talks about one possible issue you will encounter if attempting to run ASP.NET 4 on IIS6 due to IIS6 not supporting multiple versions of the Framework
• The Task Parallel Library Series – Parallel.For & Parallel.ForEach – Steve Strong continues his series on Parallelism in .NET 4 with a look at the Parallel.For and Parallel.ForEach methods showing how they provide a very simple way of obtaining some degree of parallelism.
• C# Fundamentals – What is the Difference Between Const and Readonly? – James Michael Hare digs into the differences in meaning between Const and Readonly C# keywords in this back to basics article
• IE9 Includes Hardware Accelerated Canvas – Paul Cutsinger and Jatinder Mann share links to a number of great demos which are vastly improved by the hardware acceleration support in the new Internet Explorer 9 Canvas support, giving a glimpse at what the web may turn into.
• Walkthrough: Extending VS 2010 to Support Additional Programming Languages – Weston Hutchins highlights a series of walkthrough videos being produced for www.devx.com, sponsored by the Visual Studio team, the first of which looked at extensibility via extensions, and the latest takes a look at adding support for your own languages to the editor.
• Config-free IHttpModule Registration – Nikhil Kothari shares a great ASP.NET 4 technique which allows you to remove the need for your custom HttpModules to be registered in configuration (web.config) by using the newPreApplicationStartMethodAttribute to have the registration handled in the code of the HttpModule
• How’d they build that? Using Snoop and WPF Inspector to peek inside WPF Apps – Pete Brown looks at using the tools Snoop and WPF Inspector to dig into the construction of existing WPF applications, walking through the use of the tools in a step by step, screen shot rich guide.
• Using ViewModel information in an ASP.NET MVC 2 Editor or Display template – Jon Galloway looks at the ASP.NET MVC 2 Editor and Display templating, exploring a number of scenarios where you need to pass additional information to the template, exploring the solution using Templated Helpers.
• Should we use boundary values in our combinatorial tests? – Bj Rollison discusses the use of Boundary Value test cases in testing functionality, testing ranges of values, illustrating with an example of a print dialog from Paint.

Community

• May The Silverlight 4s Be With You with Richard Costall &How To Manage Your Manager with Mark Rendle – The DotNetDevNet Usergroup are hosting Richard Costall speaking about Silverlight 4 this coming Monday (5th July) at 6:30pm at their usual University of the West Of England venue near Bristol. On September 14th DotNetDevNet have Mark Rendle talking on the subject of making the most of your manager
• Would you like to write for the UK MSDN Flash? – Mike Ormond, Editor of the UK MSDN Flash news letter (amongst other things) is on the look out for feature articles for inclusion in the news letter. Articles will need to be loosely Microsoft Development related, and should be around 500 words. If you are interested in contribution get in touch with Mike.

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