The Morning Brew

Software

• ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 – Source Code for ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 is now available via the CodePlex site, along with the source for the ASP.NET MVC 3 Futures project.
• Albacore v0.2.0 Preview 2 Is Available – Derick Bailey announces the second preview of the 0.2 release of Albacore, the .NET build task library for Rake. This release includes a lot of the changes discussed in the Preview 1 release notes, along with significant under the hood changes, and improvements for its use as a basis to create new tasks.
• ASP.NET Sprite & Image Optimization Framework Intro in WebForms – Craig Shoemaker – Craig Shoemaker highlights the release of preview of the Sprite and Image Optimisation Framework from the ASP.NET Team, bringing a number of improvements to the techniques available for image delivery on your ASP.NET pages
• Hot Fix Released for the Issue of Visual Studio 2010 Crashing When Switching to the Design View – Anh Phan of the Visual Web Developer Tools Team highlights a hot fix release which addresses the problems some users have encountered when switching to the design view on complex page layouts.
• Help Viewer 1.0 SDK now available! – Paul O’Rear announces the release of the Help Viewer 1.0 SDK which allows you to interface with the new Help system included in Visual Studio 2010.
• TFS Integration Platform – after much dog fooding, the first fully supported product has been released – Willy-Peter Schaub announces the 1.0 release of the TFS Integration Platform, available now from the Visual Studio Gallery. This release is the team’s first supported release, and contains a variety of tools and adapters to connect TFS to other tools, and to help with migration and import.
• Version 3.5 of the Performance Testing Quick Reference Guide Available – Ed Glass highlights the Version 3.5 release of the Performance Testing Quick Reference Guide from Geoff Gray, with a range of new performance testing content ranging from Performance Counters to Network Emulation.

Information

• Start spreading the news…: the future of Jimmy and IronRuby – Jimmy Schementi talks about his decision to leave Microsoft, and what this means from his point of view for the IronRuby Project which he was working on. The community has been quick to react to this post with a variety of responses regarding the future of the IronRuby project:
  • Is IronRuby being un-funded just the tip of an iceberg? – Simone Chiaretta
  • A Snowball’s Chance In Hell : IronRuby – Karl Seguin
  • IronRuby, A Match Made In… – Justin Etheredge
  • "Bring out yer dead!" *clang – Derick Bailey
  • IronRuby and IronPython are NOT dead – John V. Petersen
• NHibernate Tooling Review: LLBLGen Pro 3.0 – Ayende takes a look at the LLBLGen Pro 3 Obect Relational Mapping tool’s support for NHibernate, bringing a friendly GUI tool to managing the mappings of entities, taking a look at the process and generated code.
• NHibernate Linq Eager Fetching – Mike Hadlow takes a look a the new NHibernate Linq Provider’s support for Eager fetching of entities, showing it in operation and highlighting a few gotchas along the way.
• "Creating High Performance Silverlight Applications for Windows Phone" – 1 zip, 6 samples and 26 pages – Greg Duncan highlights the release of documentation and samples which provide tips for producing better performing Silverlight code for the Windows Phone 7 Devices. Also, congratulations to Greg on his Seventh Blog-aversary!
• Understanding the Role of Commanding in Silverlight 4 Applications – Dan Wahlin explores commanding in Silverlight 4 implementations of MVVM based applications, aiming to answer many of the frequently asked questions he hears on the subject when presenting MVVM.
• MVP In Silverlight/WPF: Automated Tests & Conclusions – Davy Brion rounds out his series on MVP over MVVM as his pattern of choice for Silverlight and WPF development with a look at testing the samples created, and wraps up with a short conclusion.
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Pt. 4 – Working with Windows Phone 7 – Rob Eisenberg continues his tour round his Caliburn Micro framework with a look at the specifics of using the framework with the Window Phone 7 and takes a look at some of the specific workarounds required to get up and running here.
• Data access is contextual, a generic approach will fail – Ayende discusses the use of Entities, DTO and View Models as a part of a real world system showing why each may be needed, and illustrating with a sample.
• Going asynchronous – AOP made easy with Event-Based Components – Part III – Ralf Westphal continue exploring Aspect Oriented Programming with his concept of Event Based Components taking a look at how this approach can enable asynchronous programming
• WatinN to automate browser and test sophisticated ASP.NET AJAX sites – Omar Al Zabir explores using the WatiN automated UI Test library to test ASP.NET sites which make heavy use of Ajax and jQuery in this Code Project Article.
• Templates Galore: Live Templates – Hadi Hariri takes a look at one of the less well know ReSharper features, the Live Template and Macro features which take the basic concept of Snippets (ala Visual Studio) to the next level providing sophisticated templating support in the IDE.
• Don’t Parse That XML! – John Sonmez argues that you shouldn’t need to manually write XML parsing code these days, and should lean on the framework support available to allow you to access XML as strongly typed objects, exploring doing this in .NET , Java and Android platforms
• Getting rid of null checks in property chains with – but not limited to – AutoMapper and S#arpArchitecture – Sandor Drieënhuizen takes a look at how expressions can help improve the readability of your code when it comes to null checking, sharing a helper method which uses this technique to give a clear and simple solution to the problem.
• Flexible Method Arguments in C# 4.0 Using Dynamic Trickery – Rob Conery takes a look at using the C#4 dynamic features to provide a VB (of old) and Ruby like way of passing arrays of arguments into methods.
• Mock framework challenges in F# – Vagif Abilov takes a look at a variety of mocking projects / products exploring how well they work when it comes to mocking in F#.

Community

• What Can You Build in 1k of JS? – Ajaxian highlights a contest from Peter van der Zee for you to build the most impressive demo possible in 1k of JavaScript. Closing date is 10th September.

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