The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools – Somasegar announces the official release of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools allowing the creation of Silverlight and XNA based applications for this new Phone Operating System. Other posts on this subject:
  • Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Released – Scott Guthrie gives you a peek at the RTM tools, highlighting a number of related resources and blog posts
  • Announcing the Windows Phone 7 Release, WP7 Silverlight Toolkit and XNA 4.0! – Pete Brown highlights the release and shares the breaking changes made since the beta release from the release notes
  • Final Windows Phone Tools Released Plus Extra controls – Martin Beeby gives a preview of the various controls that make up the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools
• Pining for Windows Phone 7 controls? We got ya covered! [Announcing the first release of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit!] – David Anson announces the release of a new Silverlight Toolkit CodePlex project, the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit, which adds a number of great looking controls to the arsenal of controls for development on the phone devices.
  • Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 – Tim Heuer also highlights the Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 release
• XNA Game Studio 4.0 Available for Download! – The XNA Game Studio Team highlight the release of XNA Game Studio 4.0, released in tandam with the Windows Phone SDK this new version allows development of PC, XBOX and Windows Phone 7 games
• Final versions of Windows Phone Developer Tools and XNA Game Studio 4.0 now available for download – Aaron Stebner provides download links (including direct download links) to various forms of the Windows Phone 7 tools and XNA Game Studio
• Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework 1.4.6 Released – Michael S. Scherotter announces the release of the latest cut of the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework. Version 1.4.6 adds support for use on Windows Phone 7
• WebShell, new web applications framework – Hisham Elbreky announces the first release of WebShell, a web applications framework which takes a restful approach to MVP, and aims to support multiple web platforms

Information

• Building a Bing Web and Image Search App for Windows Phone 7 Using Blend and Silverlight – John Papa highlights the latest episode of Silverlight.TV where Kirupa Chinnathambi walks through the process of building a Bing Search and Images application for Windows Phone 7
• From start to finish with the final version of Visual Studio Tools for Windows Phone 7 – Michael Crump shares screenshots and his initial experiences of the RTM version of the Visual Studio support for Windows 7, running through the installation and creation of a simple application
• Dependency Injection into Controller Actions in ASP.NET MVC – Marcus Bratton talks about the use of Dependency injection in the Siege framework, looking at how dependencies are injected into MVC controller Actions, and talks about the conditional dependency injection in his post Contextual Awareness – Making your container behave intelligently
• Is is as or is as is? – Eric Lippert discusses the ‘is’ and ‘as’ operators in C#, showing both in use, and explaining how they relate.
• C#/.NET – Two Things That Only Initializers Can Easily Do… – James Michael Hare looks at Initializer support in C# for populating collections and properties of objects , looking at some specific uses of this for initalizing static members.
• Geekly ever after: Code Access Security Cheat Sheet – Bruno Marques offers a cheat sheet for Code Access Security in .NET 3.5 focusing on Declarative and Imperative permission handling.
• What is object oriented programming really all about? – Robert Pickering takes a look at what is meant by Object Oriented programming, sharing the three most important concepts, and looks at how these relate to Functional Programming
• Real World Monitoring and Tuning ASP.NET Caching – Steve Smith takes a look at monitoring the cache usage of your ASP.NET websites, looking at the relevant performance counters and how they relate to each other, and discusses some possible resolutions to caching problems,
• Download Internet Explorer 9 Product Beta Guide – Rob Margel highlights the Internet Explorer 9 Product Beta Guide, an 80+ page document discussing all the new features of the IE9 beta

Community

• NxtGenUG WP7 Launch – The NxtGenUG in Coventry will be holding a Windows Phone 7 themed evening on Monday 25th October 2010 with talks on XNA and Windows 7 Phone development
• VBUG London: Introducing Windows Phone 7 – VBUG London are holding a Windows Phone 7 event on the evening of Tuesday 12th October where Matt Lacey will be giving an introduction to development on the Windows Phone 7

Coffee (and servers)

• How I Make Coffee and Servers – Brent Ozar discusses how he makes his coffee, giving a tour of his tools of choice, and discusses how his choice of tool on any given day is similar to his choice for server hardware between physical and virtual.

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Software

• Putting sites at the center of the browsing experience, using the whole PC: IE9 Beta Available for Download – Dean Hachamovitch of the Internet Explorer 9 team announces the release of the public beta, giving a tour of the features and improvements you can find, The launch of this beta yesterday generated lots of blog posts, here are just a few of the many good ones:
  • Internet Explorer 9 Beta has Arrived! The Features that Matter to Me as a Developer – Rey Bango
  • Finally we have a Download Manager in IE!! – Rahul Johri
  • IE9, Site Specific Browsers, and adding your own Jump List Items to Pinned Tabs – Scott Hanselman
  • IE9 Beta Minor Changes List – Eric Lawrence
  • Internet Explorer 9 Beta – what’s new for developers? – Rachfcollier
  • Internet Explorer 9 Beta Features and Benchmarks – Michael Crump

Information

• Rx on the server, part 5 of n: Observable ASP.NET – Jeffrey van Gogh continues his series of posts looking at the use of the Reactive Extensions for .NET on the Server side. This part takes a look at using IObservable in your ASP.NET Applications
• MushMud.com – High Level Architecture – David W Martines takes the covers off MushMud.com, a music sharing community, and shares how the website is structured and architected using ASP.NET MVC and Domain Driven Development style of development
• Cool eBook of the Day – ‘Threading in C#’ – Greg Duncan highlights a comprehensive eBook from Joseph Albahari available in PDF and HTML format covering all the key aspects of developing multithreaded code in C#
• PSSCor2: Miscellaneous Commands – Sasha Goldshtein continunes exploring the PSSCor2 debugging extension, looking in this post at the !SaveModule, !SaveAllModules, !DumpAllExceptions, and !DumpRuntimeTypes commands
• ASP.NET MVC 3 CTP1 View Improvements – Ashic Mahtab shares a (his first) screencast looking at the changes and improvements in ASP.NET MVC3 CTP1 for working with your views, focusing on the new Razor ViewEngine
• .NET String Formatting Cheat Sheet – Dylan Beattie shares a Cheat Sheet for the multitude of String Formatting options available in .NET, based on a guide to string formatting from Steve Tibbett.
• Making DSLs in F# at DevTalk.net – Dmitri Nesteruk takes a look at building a Domain Specific Language using the F# language, building a sample based on project management.
• Reversing assignment statements with Find and Replace in VS 2010 – Darren Fieldhouse shares a useful tip which demonstrates the power of the Visual Studio Search and Replace, showing how you can easily reverse assignment statements.

Community

• Windows Phone 7 – Manchester – 7th October 2010 – DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper present a free all-day event on the Windows 7 Phone platform hosted in Manchester on the 7th October. Registrations are now open, and are filling up fast.
• Visual Studio 2010 Events & Live Meetings – Microsoft UK Developer Tools Team – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – ‘RichE’ highlights a number of Visual Studio related events, some in person (and in the UK) on Application Lifecycle management and the Ultimate SKU and a few Virtual Events looking at Testing, Team Explorer, and the Ultimate SKU.
• DevTeach videos online – free – Kate Gregory highlights the availability of the Videos from the DevTeach Conference earlier this year for free, Kate’s two sessions (on the Windows API Code Pack and Lighting up an XP Application) are joined by an impressive collection of sessions includes many well know speakers.

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Software

• IE9 Beta launch: are you excited? – Today (Wednesday) sees the launch of Internet Explorer 9 Beta, a significant improvement over previous versions in terms of performance and web standards. The Launch is being streamed live, and details can be found in the Internet Explorer team’s blog post IE9 Beta Webcast: Tune in
• dotCover 1.0 and dotTrace 4 Performance are Released! – JetBrains announce the official release of dotCover 1.0 and dotTrace 4 their code coverage and profiling tools for .NET which integrate into Visual Studio 2005, 2008 and 2010. Licences for both memory and performance profiling together are £577, with dotCover having introductory rates starting at £38 and there are time limited trial versions available. Anyone who purchased after December 2008 is also entitled
• Download details: Microsoft Lync 2010 SDK Release Candidate (RC) – Microsoft released the Release Candidate of the Microsoft Lync 2010 SDK. Lync is the new name for Office Communications Server and this SDK allows you to write code to interact with this server product

Information

• Making history explicit – Gabriel Schenker looks at introducing creating a history of entities as a domain concept using a Versioned Entity base class to provide the core of the functionality, illustrating with an example based on Cages in a Zoo.
• What is Functional Programming? Part 3, Recursion – Christopher Bennage continues his Functional Programming exploration series with a look at Recursion, looking at how Functional Programming can help make Recursion easier and less scary.
• Color Indicator for Code Changes – Track Changes in Visual Studio 2010 – Abhijit Jana highlights one of the less know IDE features, the subtle colour indicator which shows when code has been changed, and looks at the introduction of a third colour state to indicate undo’d code in Visual Studio 2010.
• Why CodeRush Templates? – Rory Becker talks about the use of templates / code generation to create code to improve developer efficiency, looking at a variety of methods for templating, ranging from the Clipboard to tools such as CodeRush.
• A Few Thoughts On IoC, An Idea For A different Type Of Container, And A Lot Of Questions – Derick Bailey muses on the use of Inversion of Control containers, some of the things that it forces us as developers to do and thinks about some possible improvements to the IOC way of working
• Getting the Property Name From a Property Expression – Mike Hadlow takes a look at getting the name and path to a property from an expression, showing how it can be achieved in a more functional style making use of Linq and yield.
• Using timer based Unit of Work and Command classes to measure repositories performance – Gunnar Peipman’s ASP.NET blog – Gunnar Peipman looks at measuring the time operations composed of multiple objects and steps take to complete, looking at the use of Command and Unit of Work patterns
• Have you seen your new look UK MSDN homepage? – ‘Rachfcollier’ highlights the newly refreshed MSDN UK Homepage, newly updated to bring it in-line with the look, feel and organisation of the main US site.
• pexforfun.com: IntelliSense, High Score List, Publishing, Dynamic Ranking, Live Feed – Nikolai Tillmann highlights an update to the PexForFun.com website which introduces a number of new features to the site. The site now has code completion in the browser, a high score list, publishing of coding duels, ranking and a live feed
• Query expression syntax: continuations – Jon Skeet looks at the Linq Query Expression continuation feature, something which is less well known amongst developers, and provides a nice way of making your code simpler and more concise
• Returning paged results from repositories using PagedResult<T> – Gunnar Peipman looks at using a PagedResult class which allows you to easily return particular pages of results from large data sets returned from repositories looking at applying it to NHibernate and Entity Framework
• Automate your DotNet configuration files – Florian Drevet looks at a technique for making it easy for developers to have custom configuration per developer / machine using NANT to make changes to the configuration as needed

Community

• VBUG Newcastle:Getting Started with jQuery – VBUG Newcastle host George Adamson on the 25th October 2010, where he will be giving an introductory talk on jQuery

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