The Morning Brew

Software

• Introducing Microsof Visual Studio LightSwitch – Jason Zander announces LightSwitch, a standalone Visual Studio Product to enable the easy creation of Line Of Business Applications to run on the desktop or in the cloud using C# or VB.NET providing easy creation of data capture and display screens. Jason runs through a ‘File > New’ use showing the tool in operation to make a simple application
• MonoTools 2 for Visual Studio has been released – Miguel de Icaza announces the release of MonoTools 2 for Visual Studio which now supports Visual Studio 2010 along with 2008, improves the deployment transfer, adds soft debugger support, along with general improvements to the tools.
• Prism 4.0 CTP Available on Codeplex – Blaine Wastell highlights the Patterns and Practices release of a CTP release of Prism 4.0 focusing on MVVM implementation guidance and help using MEF for modularity, with new and updated quick starts and reference implementation, along with documentation.
• MvcSiteMapProvider 2.1.0 released! – Maarten Balliauw announces an updated version of the MvcSiteMapProvider which provides an MVC implementation of the standard ASP.NET Site Map Provider. This release targets the ASP.NET MVC 2, and this release includes interoperability with other site map controls and extensibility features.
• Netduino – .NET Micro Framework, open source, electronics platform, free (software), code walk though, cool… – Greg Duncan highlights a new Open Source electronics platform based on the .NET Micro Framework. Netduino is influenced by the Arduino hardware platform, but allows development using Visual Studio on the Micro Framework platform

Information

• Introducing LightSwitch – rapid development of LOB applications – Eric Nelson discusses the LightSwitch announcements, talking briefly about its origins in 4GL and looking at how it fits in with the WebMatrix release as a part of the .NET based development offerings.
• Visual Studio LightSwitch 2010 – Chris Eargle shares his thoughts on LightSwitch, discussing the appropriateness of this new tool for certain tasks, and how integrates well with existing technologies and leaves the more complex applications to the full development tools.
• A short take on Microsoft.Data – David Ebbo talks about the community reaction to the Microsoft.Data functionality discussed over the past few days, attempting to refocus the discussion away from ‘using Raw SQL is wrong’ and back onto making development easier and safer for those who do choose to use Raw SQL.
• Microsoft.Data and Positioning – Ayende discusses what the new ‘simpler’ tools releases from Microsoft may mean for the wider professional .NET developer community
• Using EF "Code First" with an Existing Database – Scott Guthrie takes a look at the use of the new Entity Framework Code First support for working with existing databases, taking a step by step approach to building mappings for the NorthWind sample database using the Code First features.
• The short example about EF4 CTP4 using DataAnnotation configuration – Context is King – Thang Chung takes a look at using the DataAnnotation attributes for mapping entities to the database using Entity Framework 4 CTP4, illustrating with an example mapping a 8 entity class model.
• Quick Access Extension – Weston Hutchins talks about the new Quick Access Extension which was included in the latest update to the Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools, and canvases for opinion on tools which should be added or improved.
• Windows Phone 7: Free eBook – Sekna Khanafer highlights the latest update to Charles Petzold’s book on Programming Windows Phone 7, with the first 11 chapters now available as a free e-book, with the completion of the book (and availability for free) due in time for PDC in October
• How do You Stress Test Your Web Application? – Mike Hadlow crowd sources Stress Testing application suggestions from his Twitter followers aggregating their suggestions and opinions on tools into this useful post.
• MVP In Silverlight/WPF: The Sample – Davy Brion continues his series on MVP in Silverlight and WPF with an introduction to the sample application he will show the implementation of to illustrate his preference for MVP over MVVM
• DynamicDuck: Duck Typing in a Dynamic World – Brian Ritchie discusses Duck Typing with the new .NET Dynamic support, and shares an updated DuckTaper library for making duck typing work in .NET which he has added support for dynamic to.
• Container-friendly domain events – Jimmy Bogard looks into Domain Events, discussing the standard implementation pattern for Domain Eventing, and explaining how it prevents some of the more advanced uses of IOC Containers, and shares his thoughts on an implementation which allows better control.
• Optimizing Regular Expression Performance, Part II: Taking Charge of Backtracking – Ron Petrusha continues his three part series on Regular Expression Performance Optimisation with a detailed look at the control of Backtracking in your regular expressions, sharing tips for keeping backtracking to a minimum to improve your RegEx performance.
• A high performance ProgressBar for Windows Phone – Jeff Wilcox shares a solution to the performance issues in the Progress Bar template for Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 when operating in indeterminate mode, providing a simple drop in solution and answering questions about its implementation.

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Software

• Announcing: Microsoft Ribbon for WPF RTW – Pete Brown highlights the release of the RTW release of the Microsoft Ribbin for WPF. This release is a 100% managed code and WPF implementation of the Ribbon which works in WPF 3.5SP1 and WPF4
• Windows Ribbon for WinForms v2.3 Released – Bug fixes – Arik Poznanski announces another Ribbon related release in the form of the Windows Ribbon for Winforms V2.3. This control is a managed wrapper round the Windows Ribbon framework which is included in Windows 7 and Vista.
• Download out-of-band security update for Windows – Marcelle Amelia highlights yesterday’s important security update release in the form of an Out-of-band update to fix a vulnerability in Windows XP, Vista, 7, Server 2003, Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2.

Information

• Introduction to Microsoft.Data.dll – David Fowler talks about the new Microsoft.Data assembly which aims to make data access much simpler to aid adoption of the Microsoft Platform as a part of the WebMatrix level of products. Unsurprisingly this initative has had a mixed reception as can be seen in the comments and echoed in a post from Ayende entitled ‘Microsoft.Data, because the 90s were so good, we want to do them again
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Error Handling Part II – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series exploring the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript. This post explores handling / continuing after errors, looks at retrying operations which fail and tidying up after failures using the using function.
• MVP In Silverlight/WPF: Some Infrastructure Bits – Davy Brion continues his series looking at MVP as an alternative to the more common MVVM pattern in Silverlight and WPF Development. This part of the series looks at the base class implementations for the View and Presenter parts of the pattern implementation, along with a base implementation for the BindingModel, and looks at the communication between the parts and the model.
• Dynamic Methods in View Data – Phil Haack looks at the new support for Dynamic View Data in ASP.NET MVC3 Preview 1 provided via the ViewModel and View Properties of the Controller and View respectively, showing a sample of it in use, along with sharing some of the naming problems the team encountered.
• You Don’t Need an Application Server – Mike Hadlow discusses (and debunks some of the myths) surrounding the architectural requirements for having an Application Server to perform your business logic in Web Based applications.
• Abstracting the persistence medium isn’t going to let you switch persistence abstractions – Ayende follows on from a previous post discussing the encapsulation of Data Access Layers with a look at the pain that can be caused by trying to fit a different data store (i.e. Document DB in place of Relational) behind an abstract DAL API.
• July 2010 Doc Updates for VS ALM – Brian Harry highlights the July update to the Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management documentation which includes loads of new content on TFS, Modeling, Planning, Testing, Databases Development and ALM extensibility.
• OpenWrap’s view on versioning – Seb Lambla discusses the approach taken to versioning in his OpenWrap package management system, talking about the GAC and Strong Naming of assemblies.
• Dumping Objects Using Expression Trees – Paulo Morgado takes a look at using Expression Trees and compiled expression trees to get a dump of an object graph for debugging / logging purposes with a better performance than looping through properties using reflection.
• Updated Visual Studio Performance Testing Quick Reference Guide (Version 3.5) Released – Shawn Cicoria highlights the availability of a Quick Reference Guide to Visual Studio Performance Testing, compiled from blog posts, internal discussions and Test Consultants experiences.

Community

• London "Guathon" Event with Me on August 13th – Scott Guthrie announces an all day UK community event to be held in London on 13th August featuring Scott presenting on Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET MVC2, Web Development Futures (ASP.NET MVC3, SQL CE, IIS Express), along with the UK’s own Mike Ormond presenting on Windows Phone 7 Development. The registration for the event opens today (Tuesday 3rd August) at 2pm UK, and is bound to fill up very quickly

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Software

• Cleaning a VS2010 solution with a sledgehammer – Rory Primrose shares a simple utility to forceably clean a build tree of any remnants of previous builds which can be installed into Visual Studio as an external tool. This tool was designed to scratch an itch of Rory’s where he was finding that old assemblies were sometimes getting loaded by MSTest projects causing problems.

Information

• MVP In Silverlight/WPF Series – Davy Brion begins a series looking at MVP as an alternative to the more commonly supported MVVM pattern when working with Silverlight and WPF. The first real part of this series ‘Architectural Overview‘ takes a look at the key architectural parts of the MVP pattern
• The false myth of encapsulating data access in the DAL – Ayende discusses the encapsulation of data access in a DAL, arguing that in the modern world where we are using ORM products which abstract and provide support for multiple data stores this is less important, and that by restricting ourselves we miss out on some of the best features of our ORM of choice.
• Code First Entity Framework Unit Test Examples – Jag Reehal takes a look at Entity Framework 4 CTP 4 and shows some ways of testing that your code first implementations work correctly using automated tests.
• The initial OpenWrap installation – Seb Lambla shows the install processes for his OpenWrap package management tool, a simple process of downloading a tiny bootstrapper which deals with the process of installing the tooling, and Seb then starts the journey of showing how to Add OpenWrap to an existing project (Part 1) looking at the process of installing OpenWrap into your project.
• Package management for .NET: Nu – Ayende discusses the other new package management solution, Nu from Dru Sellers & Rob Reynolds, discussing the simple process of using Nu to get dependencies
• Creating a "New" Gem for "Nu" – From 0 to 100 in 24 Hours – Bil Simser shares his experience of building a Nu Gem package for the AutoFac Inversion of Control Container, stepping through the process following Rob Reynolds step by step guide.
• Cancellation with .NET 4 (Part 2) – Christian Nagel continues his series of posts looking at the support for Cancelling asynchronous processes using the new .NET 4 cancellation framework
• MVC 3 – Supporting Custom View Engines – Jacques Eloff explores the support for multiple view engines in the new ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 release, looking at the process of utilising different view engines in your project, and looking at the process for installing 3rd party view engines. Arun Mahendrakar also digs a little deeper at how view engines are chosen in his post MVC3 WebFormViewEngine or CshtmlViewEngine
• Static Variable Gotchas – Are Static Variables in Base Classes Shared In Derived Sub Classes? – Dominic Pettifer takes a look at the humble static member and how instances of these members are shared between the base and derived classes, and shows how this can differ for classes which are generic and used as a base class.
• Cautiously Merging IL – Udi Dahan follows on from Dru Sellers’ post about the use of IL Merge sharing his experiences from working with IL Merge in the NServiceBus project
• CreateDelegate<T> – An Exercise in Using Expressions – Jan Van Ryswyck follows on from previous posts looking at using CreateDelegate as a performance improved alternative to using MethodInfo.Invoke with a look at improving the technique by making it strongly typed using Generics.
• Principles 3: Principles of Software Development (aka Principles of Shipping) – Ivo Manolov continues his ‘Principles’ series of posts, in this postsharing a series of rules and suggestions for ensuring that you ship good high quality software
• Using an NHibernate Formula to aid searching – Kyle Baley explores using calculated members in NHibernate to make searching for values easier. Be sure to check out the comments for some discussion of alternative methods for achieving this too.

Community

• The SQL Server Conference – SQLBits – The 7 Wonders of SQL – 30 – 02 Oct 2010 – York – The registration for the 7th SQL Bits conference is now open. This event is occurring in York, UK between the 30th September 2010 and 2nd October, with the first two days being pay-for conference days and the 3rd day being the free community conference day. Registrations are sure to fill up quickly so make sure you register if you wish to attend.

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