August 2010
Monthly Archive
The Morning Brew #663
Posted by Chris Alcock on 12 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Announcing the release of Codename "Dallas" CTP3! – ‘elisaj’ of the Dallas Team announces the 3rd CTP preview release. This updated CTP includes support for Basic Authentication, enhanced querying of OData Content, Add Reference support in Visual Studio, along with a variety of other enhancements to make development easier.
Information
- Migrating your application from CTP2 to CTP3 – ‘elisaj’ shares some advice for developers who wish to update their Dallas based applications from the CTP2 release to the new CTP3 release
- Looking ahead: Panorama and Pivot controls for Windows Phone developers – Jeff Wilcox takes a detailed look at the new Panorama and Pivot navigation controls which will be included in the next release of the Developer Tools, showing samples of how the controls work, along with the XAML code to utilise them
- How do I get the reference count of a CLR object? – Raymond Chen continues CLR week with a discussion of Reference counting, how the garbage collector uses a simple version of this to decide if things can be collected, along with looking at cases where there may be garbage but no references to examine.
- My new home page, rejuvenated [Updated collection of great Silverlight/WPF/Windows Phone Data Visualization resources!] – David Anson shares a comprehensive collection of links to overviews, tutorials, articles and discussions relating to various Silverlight and WPF Data Visualisation / Charting methods.
- Playing with Entity Framework Code Only – Ayende takes an initial look at the Code Only functionality of the Entity Framework, setting about creating a simple example of its use as a regular developer would, discussing his findings as he goes.
- Blocking Collection and the Producer-Consumer Problem – Alexandra Rusina continues her series on parallel programming with a look at the concurrent collections available as a means of thread-safe data storage in .NET 4, taking a look at the use of the BlockingCollection and the producer consumer pattern
- Is That Closure or Inheritance? – Chris Eargle continues his exploration of accessing private members of one class from a nested class, looking at some variations which illustrate the true nature of this relationship.
- Garbage Collection Notifications in .NET 4.0 – Abhishek Sur looks at garbage collection in .NET 4, and shows how you can register with the Garbage collector to get notification when objects are garbage collected.
- Nearly 22 years ago – Brett Schuchert shares a PDF version of his 1988 book on Data Processing, an interesting blast from the past – we’ve certainly come a long way since then. Brett also discusses the story behind the book.
Community
- Real-world Dynamic .NET & OpenWrap – DevEvening have an event in Woking on Thursday 26th August (6:45pm start) where Mark Rendle will be talking on the subject of Dynamic Support in .NET 4, and Seb Lambla will be discussing his OpenWrap Package Management / Export Management system.
- VBUG Bracknell: SQL Server CLR and Data Tier Applications – VBUG Bracknell are meeting on Tuesday 7th September for an event where Colin Leversuch-Roberts will be presenting a session on CLR functions vs TSQL functions in the database, and Neil Hambly will be talking about Data Tier Applications (DAC).
- Free talk at Yahoo on the 27th about the software revolution that is JavaScript – Chris Heilmann highlights a free event to be held on the 27th August at Yahoo!’s Sunnyvale Campus where Douglas Crockford will be talking on the subject of ‘Loopage’ and JavaScript. Sign up is required for this event.
- Interested in becoming a Windows Azure MVP? – The MVP program is looking for good developers with experiences of the Windows Azure Platform to become the first batch Azure MVPs. If you are such a person, or know someone who is, get in touch – contact details in the post.
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The Morning Brew #662
Posted by Chris Alcock on 11 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Announcing the Mindscape NHibernate Designer – Mindscape release a visual designer for NHibernate based models, based on a similar design to their LightSpeed ORM tooling, providing access to common object mapping features, along with Model to Database and Database to model synchronisations. 14 day trial version is available, with the full version costing $249, but until Friday 4pm you can save 50% with a discount code.
Information
- One Good Reason to Upgrade to .NET 4.0 – Elton Stoneman looks at the Parallel Extensions included in .NET 4, sharing a sample which makes use of these extensions to show the kind of dramatic performance increases it can easily bring to your applications.
- .NET Debugging and C++ Debugging Resources – Sasha Goldshtein shares a good list of software tools and documentation regarding debugging both .NET and C++ based code categorised and drawn from a variety of sources
- Versioning Issues With Optional Arguments – Phil Haack looks at the use of the .NET 4 Optional Parameters and Named Parameters as a means of helping the versioning of your API’s discovering that this technique doesn’t work well due to the way that the compiler works with optional parameters, and thus you should be very careful when using this feature.
- Are Private Members Inherited? – Chris Eargle discusses a particular interview questions about inheritance of private members, showing that the specification does allow this to happen in particular circumstances (nested classes).
- Everybody thinks about CLR objects the wrong way (well not everybody) & When does an object become available for garbage collection? – Raymond Chen continues CLR week with a follow up on the comments from his previous day’s post looking at Auto-disposal based on scope, and how the CLR works differently to unmanaged code. Raymond then continues the story with a look at when objects become eligible for garbage collection on the CLR.
- IoC patterns – partitioning registration – Krzysztof Kozmic looks at the organisation of your component registrations within an IoC Container, suggesting that if you keep registration code granular it will make it easier for new developers to identify the types being used in a certain context
- Coding4Fun – Part 1 of the Windows Phone Picture Effects App and Roadmap – René Schulte highlights the release of his article on Windows Phone 7 on the Coding4Fun site. The article explores the process of writing a Windows Phone 7 picture effects application, with full source available licensed as MS-PL
- A F# Silverlight Template – Daniel Mohl releases another F# project template, this time for Silverlight, which is now available from the online templates section in Visual Studio 2010.
- Exploring FubuCore: Convert a string value to any type of .Net class with the ObjectConverter – Jeremy D. Miller begins a new series of posts looking at the FubuCore library of utility functions which is a part of the FubuMVC project, but has applications outside this project. This first part explores the ObjectConverter implementation.
- Xaml Toolkit: Manipulation of Xaml – Lester looks at the use of the Xaml Toolkit for sanitizing Xaml Code copied from an application, and how it makes it easy to remove elements which refer to methods, events, etc which are not available in a particular context.
- Using DynamicObject to implement general proxy classes – ‘OlliFromTor’ explores using the Dynamic Object in .NET 4 to wrap any type with implementations of common interfaces such as INotifyPropertyChanged, IEditableObject, etc in this CodeProject Article.
- Bankers Rounding in Math.Round Method – Vikram Lakhotia reminds us all that it is dangerous to assume anything about methods, highlighting that the standard numerical rounding in .NET may not do what you assume it would, and shows the way of instructing it to do the rounding you require.
Community
- SQL Social – Kent – Jamie Thompson announces the first SQL Social event to be held in Maidstone, Kent, UK on the eventing of 18th August. This inaugural event features Dave Ballantyne giving an overview of PASS, Neil Hambly talking on the subject of Replication, and Allan Mitchell looking at Complex Event Processing.
- FubuMVC at C4MVC Tomorrow (Now Today) – Jeremy D Miller will be presenting an online brown bag session today (Wednesday) beginning at 12pm CDT (6PM BST by my calculations) looking at FubuMVC, its differences from MS MVC, its integration if IoC and Composition and their configuration features.
The Morning Brew #661
Posted by Chris Alcock on 10 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Introducing Observal – Paul Stovell shares a new library called Observal, extracted from a recent project this library provides easy means for tracking and responding to changes in entities and collections which are part of complex or deep hierarchies.
- FastSharp 2.0 – Matt Manela shares the latest version of FastSharp, a lightweight IDE for trying out simple pieces of code in C#, F# or VB.NET
- TiltContentControl for Windows Phone – Jeff Wilcox shares another un-official piece of code for Windows Phone 7, this time mirroring the tilt behaviour of the standard UI controls in the Operating System and brings that capability to your applications in Silverlight.
Information
- IronRuby and the Reactive Extensions Together Again – Taming User Input – Matthew Podwysocki continues exploring the integration for IronRuby with the Reactive Extensions for .NET, addressing some of the concerns about IronRuby’s future, and exploring the use of Throttle to slow down user input to manageable levels.
- Optional named parameters work pretty well – Bertrand Le Roy follows on from Rob Conery’s post linked to yesterday with a look at using optional and named parameters to handle a similar situation in a more strongly typed way.
- Redlining C#’s Dynamic Features – Rob Conery continues looking at making C# more dynamic using a variety of techniques to make more areas completely dynamic, in a way similar to that of Ruby and Python.
- Running RavenDB on Azure – Mark Rendle takes a look at getting the RavenDB Document Database up and running in a Windows Azure worker role, sharing his fork of the RavenDB source which adds the ability to run on Azure, and explains how he did it.
- Windows Azure-Compatible NoSQL Databases: GraphDB, RavenDB and MongoDB – Roger Jennings takes a look at various efforts to get other NoSQL / Document Database up and running on Azure, rounding up posts from various sources discussing the process.
- Sprite and Image Optimization Framework & DotNetNuke – Rob Chartier explores implementing the new Sprite and Image Optimization Framework from the ASP.NET Team inside a DotNetNuke site, showing a useful example of how this works and can easily be integrated.
- HTML5 Support In Visual Studio 2010 – Raihan Iqbal looks at the support for HTML5 in Visual Studio, showing how you can get IDE support and validation by moving an XSD for HTML5 into the correct location in your VS install.
- An example of packaging web application containing database upgrade SQL file – Xinyang Qiu walks through the process of packaging a Web Application along with a database upgrade script using the datanbase project features of Visual Studio 2010
- Programmatically Invoke the C# Compiler – Doug Holland shares a simple example showing how you can dynamically compile C# code at runtime, checking for errors and warnings and ending up with an assembly you can use as usual.
- Getting the Silverlight Toolkit Controls to work on WP7 – Derik Whittaker shares a method of getting the Silverlight Toolkit Controls compiled in a form you can then use on the Windows Phone 7 version of Silverlight
- Code Coverage: Did we run the right tests? – Bj Rollison continues an exploration of Code Coverage from a testing point of view, highlighting how it is easy to achieve high code coverage in real tests without actually testing sufficient cases to find problems in that code.
- Searching and skimming code – ‘stevencl’ highlights an interesting paper about how developers orient themselves in unfamiliar code and go about trying to fix bugs
- Everybody thinks about garbage collection the wrong way – Raymond Chen kicks off his CLR week of posts with a look at some of the misconceptions about Garbage Collection, and what that can mean for you as a programmer. Check out the comments for further discussion.
- How to Post Code To Your Blog and other Religious Arguments – Scott Hanselman takes a look at the various different methods of embedding code samples in your blog posts (a common problem for Developer-Bloggers) examining the pros and cons of each method.
- Common Programmer Health Problems – Garry Shutler highlights a good article from Zed Shaw on the many health problems associated with being a Software Developer, and suggesting things you should do to help avoid them.
Community
- Calendar: Upcoming Meetup list – Canary Wharf .NET User Group (London, England) – The Canary Wharf .NET Usergroup will be meeting on the 18th August at 6:30pm where Neil Foster will be sharing the Microsoft roadmap for High Performance Computing, with Steve Harris showing how HPC techniques can be applied to Excel. The Group will also be meeting on the 1st September for a look at Expression Blend for WPF Developers where Sam Bourton will be guiding you round the tools.
- MSDN Firestarter Events Coming Soon – Chris Bowen highlights a series of events across the US for developers interested in learning about the latest Microsoft offerings in Cloud, Web and Client technologies
- Register for DevCon London, the European conference on .NET technologies – The UK MSDN blog shares a 30% off discount code for the DevCon London conference. Standard conference rates range from the £349 1 day early bird, through to £699 for all three days, so this discount is substantial.
