The Morning Brew

Software

• BizTalk Server 2010 RTM and General Availability date – Nick MacKechnie highlights the RTM release of BizTalk Server 2010, talking about the new functionality, supported platforms, and the new free developer edition.
• AccelKit, an Augmented Reality Accelerometer Kit for Windows Phone 7 Emulator – Nikos Kastellanos shares a project which provides an emulation for the Windows Phone 7 Accelerometer whic you can use with the emulator to help developing games and augmented reality applications
• S#arp Architecture Road Map – Alec Whittington outlines the S#arp Architecture Team’s plans for the next major release of S#arp Architecture, highlighting key features, changes to the organisation of the development effort and their new way of handling templating.
• F#, Caliburn.Micro, and a New WP7 Template – Daniel Mohl shares a new F# based Windows Phone 7 Visual Studio Template which makes use of the Caliburn.Micro Framework

Information

• Microsoft Developer Guidance Maps – J.D. Meier highlights the Developer Guidance Maps from Microsoft which mapp out the developer technology space, providing access to code samples, tutorials, how-to’s and Product docuementation.
• Separation of Concerns with Domain Events – Mike Hadlow takes a look at applying the Domain Event pattern to his SukekiShop open source ECommerce system, explaining how the pattern helps avoid methods which break the single responsibility principle and avoids the need to inject services into entities.
• A Refactoring: Explicit Modeling And Reducing Duplication – Derick Bailey pulls together advice on a variety of topics, such as Implicit vs Explicit Modeling, Reducing Duplication and Readability and Understandability) into on worked example looking at improving some code
• Update on ASP.NET Vulnerability – Scott Guthrie gives a further update on the ASP.NET Team’s efforts to get an official patch out for the recent ASP.NET Padding Oracle vulnerability, along with providing a revised version of the best practice to defend against the attack.
• UrlScan Broke My Blog (And How I Fixed It) – Phil Haack follows on from Scott’s post with a brief discussion of some problems he ran into using URLScan caused by a dot in a real URL.
• Why sleep is good for your app’s padding oracle health – Troy Hunt continues exploring the ASP.NET Padding Oracle Attack and looks into why the random sleep in the recommended workaround is important when dealing with cryptographic vulnerabilities.
• Reactive Extensions in .NET Hot & Cold Observable – ‘Sankarsan’ continues exploring the Reactive Extensions for .NET with a look in this part at the concept of Hot and Cold Observables and what the difference is.
• Explaining What Action<> And Func<>; Are – John Sonmez highlights the Action<> and Func<> types and explains why they are so useful, particularly for dealing with situations where you have code duplication caused by common code wrapping specific functionality.
• Moving ASP.NET MVC Client Side Validation Scripts to Bottom – Imran Baloch takes a look at moving the JavaScript from the ASP.NET MVC Client Side validation to the end of your page as recommended for the best performance of your pages when rendering in the browser.
• Writing a Semi-Local Object Pool – Liran Chen looks at implementing Object Pools in .NET, explaining why there are certain circumstances where this technique can provide considerable performance improvement.
• How To Unit Test Workflows – Mocking Activities – Ron Jacobs continues his series looking at unit testing Windows Workflow, exploring techniques for mocking activities as a part of this testing .
• ASP.NET MVC: Using asynchronous controller to call web services – Gunnar Peipman takes a look at using the Asynchronous Controller feature of ASP.NET MVC to make calls to web services, showing how the MVC version of Async provides a more compact interface than the WebForms version. Gunnar also announces the availability of all his code samples from this (and previous posts) in his post Announcing public source code repository with my blog samples –
• Visual Studio Setup & Deployment Projects declared dead & retired. VS2010 will be the last… – Greg Duncan highlights the demise of out of the box support for Installer creation in Visual Studio
• MSDN Subscribers receive FREE Pluralsight On-Demand! Subscription – Aaron Skonnard highlights a free month of access to the Pluralsight On-Demand training resources to everyone who has an MSDN subscription.

Community

• Kick Off Meeting: What Is Software Craftsmanship? – London Software Craftsmanship Community (London, England) – The London Software Craftsmanship Community will be holding their first meeting at Skills Matter on the 6th October. This first meeting will be a discussion of what software craftsmanship is, and look at how we can further our craft. Registration is required for this event.
• Free CodeRush Webinar! Learn About Powerful Templates – September 30th, 2010 – Mehul Harry highlights an online webinar hosted by Mark Miller and Rory Becker who wil be looking at the uses of CodeRush’s templating features, providing a nice follow on from Rory’s blog posts from earlier in the month.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #694

Software

• Windows Phone + VB developers = Great Mobile Apps – Somasegar announces the release of the CTP of Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools which brings much requested support for creating phone applications using the VB.NET Language. A lot of people are interested in this release judging from the number of posts echoing this announcement I’ve seen. Here are a few which give some more information:
  • Announcing Microsoft Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools – The Visual Basic Team give an overview of the release, along with a simple walkthrough of creating an app in VB.NET
  • Microsoft Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools Tutorial – Jason Zander also shares a preview of the support, along with a warning that the VB.NET support will be fully added in a future release of the Windows Phone
  • Regarding the Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools – The XNA Game Studio Team highlight the VB support release, and remind us all that this release is for Silverlight only, there are no plans for XNA support in VB.NET
• CR_Documentor 2.5.0.0 Released – Travis Illig announces a new release of CR_Documentor, a DXCore plugin which gives a preview of the documentation that would be generated from your XML documentation comments

Information

• Ambiguous Optional Parentheses, Part Two – Eric Lippert continues his exploration of some of the complexities that object and collection initializers introduced looking at why some possible uses of the syntactic sugar would cause problems with existing code
• Using MemBus for messaging between application components – Gunnar Peipman takes a look at the MemBus messaging framework whcih provides a means of sending messages between different parts of the the same AppDomain sharing a sample application which shows how it can be usd to message between MDI application windows
• Update on SQL Server Modeling CTP (Repository/Modeling Services, "Quadrant" and "M") – Don Box gives an update on the future plans for the ‘Oslo’ project and the components which have not already shipped as a part of other products.
• Using NHibernate To Persist And Query Ruby Objects – Davy Brion explores working with NHibernate using Ruby classes , looking at both the persistence and querying of such classes, sharing the required code to get it working.
• Your Software Can Learn A Lot From ATMs – Justin Etheredge discusses the humble ATM/Cash Machine and how the process it uses to deliver money to us should be mirrored in your software development practices
• MVC .NET URL Generation Done Right! – Matt Hopkins looks at some techniques for generating typed ASP.NET MVC Urls in client side code, sharing a helper library which provides the best version of this functionality
• Crisis for ASP.Net – how serious is the Padding Oracle attack? – Tim Anderson discusses the severity of the recent Padding Oracle attack against ASP.NET, serving as a useful reminder to anyone who has not yet checked their applications.
• ASP.NET padding oracle: how it relates to getting the web.config, forging authentication cookies and reading other sensitive data. – Freddy Rios takes a look at how the recently announced vulnerability can result in some of the serious side effects such as authentication cookie compromises, access to Web.Config, etc.

Community

• Modern .NET Day – Reading – 23rd October 2010 – A Mini DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper day will be hosted at Microsoft’s Reading offices on Saturday 23rd October with a pre-arraigned agenda featuring Kathleen Dollard, Chris Hardy, Sebastian Lambla and Julia Lerman giving sessions. Registrations open on 1st October
• Steve Ballmer at UK Tech Day – Want to Come Along? – Ben Nunney has a competition for students to win some of the last remaining tickets to the UK TechDays event featuring a keynote from Steve Balmer and plenty of tech in the form of Windows Azure, Windows 7, Windows Phone 7 and IE9
• 5th October UK agile testing meeting – acceptance testing in the land of the startup – Gojko Adzic highlights the next UK Agile Testing User Group event, to be held on the 5th October at Skills Matter in London where Joseph Wilk will be presenting on the use of Agile Testing techniques in a startup environment

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #693

Software

• MbUnit/Gallio 3.2 – Andrew Stopford announces the release of version 3.2 of the MbUnit and Gallio test framework. This update brings updates to the the Icarus test runner, the ability to save test run reports in compressed ZIP format, improved IDE integration support using the VS10 Data Collector, and the new Mirror framework for testing non-public functionality
• Prism v4 – Drop 8 – The latest release of Prism V4, the Composite Application framework for WPF and Silverlight has been made available on CpodePlex. Drop 8 includes a number of new features along with a version of the library designed for Windows Phone 7
• Google Chrome Frame: Stable and Speedy – The Google Chrome team announce the removal of the beta label from Google Chrome Frame, the Internet Explorer add-in which allows developers to replace the IE rendering engine with a Chrome based one based on meta tags in the page.

Information

• What is Functional Programming? Part 4, Linq – Christopher Bennage continues his excellent series of posts on Functional Programming, looking this time at the functional programming that most C# developers will be most familiar with – Linq.
• Domain Models, Dependencies And Fighting Anemia – Derick Bailey discusses the difficulty of creating a good non-anaemic domain model which does not take reference to services and other dependencies, discussing a number of options for avoiding this, illustrated with a real-world example of the problem, and looking for suggestions of a good solution. I expect there to be some good stuff in the comments of this one.
• Real World Monitoring and Tuning ASP.NET Caching Part 2 – Steve Smith continues his look at ASP.NET cache monitoring and tuning, discussing the cause of his caching problems, some seemingly fine ASP.NET cache access code which exhibited problems due to lack of locking and poor SQL Cache Dependency use.
• Windows Phone 7, Reactive Extensions, OData, MVVM – John P Alioto shares his experiences building a Windows Phone 7 application making use of MVVM and the Reactive Extensions for Silverlight to access an OData Data source.
• WP7 Code: Using the GeoLocation API – Dragos Manolescu also looks at using the Reactive Extensions of the Windows Phone 7, this time exploring their use with the Geolocation API features of the Phone, and looks at writing queries against the resulting event stream.
• Windows Phone 7 Tutorials: Maps, GPS and Accelerometer – Nigel Sampson shares three more sample Windows 7 Phone tutorials with sample applications. These three explore the use of the Accelerometer, the GPS and mapping, and appropriate use of the Reactive Extensions to work with the GPS and Accelerometer event streams.
• WCF REST Services Inside MVC Projects – Steve Michelotti looks at getting WCF Rest Services and MVC-style web services to co-exist happily in one web project looking at the routing configuration steps involved
• ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 – Global and Conditional Filters – Malcolm Sheridan takes a look at the Global and Conditional filters functionality in ASP.NET MVC Preview 1 whicha allows filters to be registered once, removing the need to apply attributes to every controller that you want to use the filter.
• Evercookie – using a lot of solutions to force a persistent cookie – Chris Heilmann over at Ajaxian highlights the Evercookie library which tries a vast array of tricks to get cookies stored on the client even if the user has disabled cookie support.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #692