The Morning Brew

Software

• Castle Windsor (incl. Core with DynamicProxy and Dictionary Adapter) v2.5 final is out – Krzysztof Kozmic announces the official final release of Castle Windsor v2.5. This release targets .NET 3.5 (SP1), .NET 4, .NET 4 Client Profile, and Silverlight 3 & 4. This release sees some minor improvements over the beta 2 release of a month ago and there is one sample application (a Silverlight 4 app) which illustrates some of the new versions features
• Getting Started with PowerConsole – Bil Simser takes a look at PowerConsole, a Visual Studio 2010 add-on available from the Extension Manager which brings PowerShell right into the Visual Studio Environment, allowing you to explore, manipulate, and query the IDE environment from a command line.
• Visual Studio ALM Rangers – Visual Studio Database Guide "ships"… Cowabunga! – Willy-Peter-Schaub highlights the release of the latest Visual Studio ALM Rangers Guide, the Database Guide which looks at Database Projects in detail, giving guidance for Solution and Project Management, Source Code and Configuration Management, External Changes, Build and Deploy, along with database testing and deployments.

Information

• .NET Micro Framework – More blinking LEDs – Szymon Kobalczyk takes a look at the new .NET Micro Framework development board called ‘Netduino’, a board which is pin compatible with the very popular Arduino boards. Szymon discusses the hardware, and then shares a couple of simple projects for working with LED segment displays, complete with the code to run it.
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Pt. 5 – IResult and Coroutines – Rob Eisenberg continues his series exploring the features of his Caliburn Micro Framework taking a look at its support for Coroutines allowing you to execute part of a routine, pause, go do something else and return to where you left off.
• Rx on the server, part 3 of n: Writing an observable to a stream – Jeffrey van Gogh continues his series exploring the uses of the Reactive Extensions in Server Side Code with a look at writing the values of an observable to disk asynchronously
• Bending Time with the Reactive Extensions – Scott Weinstein looks at the support for custom schedulers in the Reactive Extensions allowing you to test time dependent reactive code without having to wait for the time to elapse.
• How to change the default browser in Visual Studio programmaticly with PowerShell and possibly poke yourself in the eye – Scott Hanselman looks at finding a way of switching the default browser used by Visual Studio mid-session using some PowerShell and registry monitoring, reminding us that programs and computers are not black boxes, we can poke around inside and make some powerful discoveries
• Animation with the HTML Canvas Tag and the IE9 Preview in Expression Web 4 – Little-endian – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – ‘gsmith’ walks through the creation of a simple animation using the HTML Canvas element in Internet Explorer 9, stepping through he JavaScript required to work with the element.
• Want to pack JS and CSS really well? Convert it to a PNG and unpack it via Canvas – Chris Heilmann highlights a slightly crazy idea from Jacob Seidelin, packaged up into a script by Alex Le. The idea is to use PNG’s lossless compression to compress CSS and JavaScript, send it to the browser via the canvas element, and then decompress it on the client.
• Website diagnostics page to diagnose your ASP.NET website – Omar Al Zabir looks at the creation of a self diagnostics page for your web applications, testing the various requirements for the application, and reporting their state in the hosted environment back to you.
• Using Different Resources for Windows Phone 7 Themes – Ivan Suhinin looks at serving different resource content to your Windows Phone 7 application dependent on the theme the user of the phone has the device set to, building on some earlier work from Derik Whittaker.
• Storing and playing media on Windows Phone 7 – Tim Heuer looks at implementing a download of a audio file, storing it for later playback on the Windows Phone 7. This post walks through the simple sample application, and full code is available to download.
• MSR Rex – Christian Bitter takes a brief look at the Microsoft Research project Rex, a tool to explore regular expressions. Christain looks at a sample of its use where it can generate sample data for a given regular expressions
• Anatomy of the T4 Text Template – Doug Holland gives a simple guide to the way that T4 templates are constructed, showing how easily you can create templated code using the T4 system.
• Maintenance-Free Mocking for Unit Testing with EntityFramework 4.0 – Rab Hallett looks at the creation of a low maintenance set of Mocks for working with Entity Framework data models, generating the code for the mocks using T4
• Roll your own mocks with RealProxy – Derek Fowler takes a look at using the RealProxy class from the .Net Remoting part of the framework to construct his own simple mocking framework. Full source is available on GitHub
• Technical Debt- Don’t Let it Kill Your Projects – Gary Short gives an overview of his talk on Technical Debt, giving some key information on managing debt, identifying debt and removing debt.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #670