August 2010
Monthly Archive
The Morning Brew #660
Posted by Chris Alcock on 09 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, 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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The Morning Brew #659
Posted by Chris Alcock on 06 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Orchard 0.5 is out – Bertrand Le Roy announces the 0.5 release of Orchard, the Web CMS implemented on top of ASP.NET MVC, with this release rounding out the developer use of the system, providing extensibility features including dynamic compilation of modules to simplify the development process.
Information
- IronRuby and the Reactive Extensions for .NET Together at Last – Matthew Podwysocki looks at the recent IronRuby 1.1 release, and at how you can bridge from IronRuby Enumerables to .NET IEnumerable, and shows how this can be further extended to allow you to work with IObservable in IronRuby, bringing the Reactive Extensions to Ruby
- Creating Copies of Attributes – Phil Haack shares some interesting experimentation with copying .NET Attributes, looking at some of the complexities of Reflecting on attributes, and creating new instances of attributes from existing ones.
- Mastering Expression Trees With .NET Reflector – Paulo Morgado shares a useful trick using the .NET Reflector to de-compile a compiled lambda expression to get the code which actually creates the expression, allowing you to build custom expression trees at runtime,
- Other Languages – Ian Griffiths rounds out his series on creating Cartesian Products in C# with a look at how other programming languages can manage the same. This has been an interesting series, and I urge you to read back through his previous posts in the series.
- MVP In Silverlight/WPF: Implementing The Details UserControl – Davy Brion continues his series on MVP over MVVM for WPF and Silverlight development with a look at the implementation of the second UserControl for his sample application to illustrate the use of MVP
- News Flash: Try Windows Azure for One Month Free! – Some great news for any US based developers who wish to try out Windows Azure, Microsoft are making 500 free 1 month accounts available every month which allow you to work with Windows Azure with no requirement for any payment information.
- Aspect Oriented Programming made easy with Event-Based Components – Part II – Ralf Westphal continues with his look at Event Based Components and Aspect Oriented Programming, illustrating how easily an event based components architecture allows you add Aspects of various types to your code, illustrating with logging, validation and exception handling implementations
Community
- Upcoming online classes – Greg Young is running 2 more Virtual / Online classes on Domain Driven Design and Command Query Responsibility Segregation, one on Monday 9th August (US Time zone), and one on Saturday 4th September (EU Time zone). Registration for both sessions is open now, and payment is in the form of a discretionary donation.
- ALT.NET Israel Autumn 2010 – Ayende announces the 4th Alt.Net Israel ‘Un’ Conference, to be held on Thursday 2nd and Friday 3rd September 2010. Registrations are now open for the event, with the Thursday evening being the planning session and the Friday being the full day un-conference.
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The Morning Brew #658
Posted by Chris Alcock on 05 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Final Release of Visual Studio Lab Management announced! – Amit Chatterjee highlights the planned release of Visual Studio Lab Management, with the release to the general public scheduled for the end of August. MSDN Subscribers will be able to get the release now via their subscription
- HTML5, Modernized: Fourth IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers – Dean Hachamovitch of the Internet Explorer Team announces the release of the 4th Internet Explorer 9 Preview release. This release brings native integration of the JavaScript engine bringing tighter integration of the DOM and JavaScript, further improved performance and standards compliance, along with some guidance on making your sites IE9 compatible as well as some new demos of the browsers functioanlity.
- Pivoting your Code, a Silverlight Pivot of your Visual Studio Solution – VS Solution PivotViewer – Greg Duncan highlights a neat use of the Silverlight Piviot functionality from Max Paulousky, providing a visualisation of the code in your Visual Studio Solutions, allowing you to sort and present based on a number of different criteria.
Information
- MSDN Magazine: August 2010 Issue – The August Edition of the MSDN Magazine is now available online, with articles on Federated Identity for ASP.NET Applications using WIF, the Microsoft Sync Framework, OData and Atom Pub, Azure, Data performance with Tier interaction profiling, and plenty more.
- NHibernate is lazy, just live with it – Ayende discusses the importance of the NHibernate Lazy load support, and how turning such functionality off will cause you huge problems for any object graph more than 1 level deep
- JSON Query Languages: 5 special purpose editors – Leon Bambrick shares a set of demo query editors for various JavaScript JSON Query Languages (SQLike, JsLinq, JSinq, JLinq, JimmyLinq, along with a Positive and Negative analysis of each of the libraries.
- Some nice code editor features provided by the VS 2010 Power Tool Extensions – Scott Guthrie takes a look at some of smaller IDE enhancements provided for the Code Editor by the Visual Studio 2010 Power Tool Extensions.
- MVP In Silverlight/WPF: Implementing The Overview UserControl – Davy Brion continues his series on his preference for MVP in Silverlight and WPF over the more common MVVM. This part looks at the creation of the first user control of the sample application, walking through the creation with plenty of discussion on the design decisions.
- Using MSpec – a few weeks in – Joel Abrahamsson shares his experiences with adopting MSpec (Machine Specifications) as a testing framework for a web based project
- Experimenting with PRISM 4, Silverlight, MEF – Mike Taulty takes a detailed look at the integration of PRISM with the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and how they can be used together in Silverlight applications.
- Aspect Oriented Programming made easy with Event-Based Components – Part I – Ralf Westphal continues his series of posts on Event Based Components with a look at how EBC can be combined with Aspect Oriented Programming
Community
- Call for speakers for UK Windows Azure Platform online conference on 20th of September – Eric Nelson, inspired by the success of mvcConf, is organising a UK Windows Azure Platform Online Conference, planned to run from 10am to 5pm on 20th September, spread across 2 ‘rooms’. At this point, Eric is looking for UK based speakers who wish to do a 55 minute session at the Virtual Conference.
- VBUG London: Behavior Driven Development (BDD) – VBUG London meet on Tuesday 17th August in London for a session on Behaviour Driven Development delivered by Ian Cooper. This session looks at what the adoption ofBDD will do for your software development process.
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