The Morning Brew

Software

• Sysinternals Suite 2010 Refreshed – All the latest versions, one 12.4MB zip.. – Greg Duncan highlights the latest update to the SysInternals Suite, the collection of all the SysInternals tools in one convenient package, freshly updated yesterday.
• Windows API Code Pack v1.1 Released! – Arik Poznanski highlights the release of the latest edition of the Windows API Code Pack v1.1. Released at the end of August, this update contains bugfixes, along with implementations of Shell Object Watcher, Preview Handler APIs and Thumbnail Handler APIs

Information

• Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy – Scott Guthrie continues his epic series looking at the new features of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4, putting web deployment under the microscope stepping through the use of the Microsoft Web Deploy, a server based solution to making it easier to deploy and publish your web applications
• Using the Accelerometer on Windows Phone 7 – Dave Edson and Greg Hogdal take a look at using the Accelerometer included in all Windows Phone 7 devices from your own code, discussing the data ranges returned from the device, the event stream data is provided by, and some techniques for working with accelerometer data.
• Interoperable HTML Parsing in IE9 – Jonathan Seitel of the Internet Explorer 9 Team discusses the role of the HTML Parser in making a good DOM, and takes a look at the improvements made in Internet Explorer 9
• Web Standards: from Working Draft to Recommendation – Adrian Bateman (also of the IE9 team) discusses the importance of Web Standards, and the process of these standards becoming actual standards, illustrating the process that the drafts must go through to be ratified.
• Just because summer is over, it doesn’t mean we still can’t play in the sand … Sandcastle that is – Greg Duncan highlights a detailed article from Michael Sorens which looks at the use of SandCastle to produce documentation from your code using the XML documentation comments, working through the process and configuration to help you produce great documentation.
• Is That the Right Version of Mscoreei.dll? – The CLR team discuss a trick they used to help reduce the number of reboots required in installing versions of the .NET Framework which results in you seeing .NET 4 DLLs in use in .NET 2 processes.
• Reducing AutoResetEvent’s Synchronization Overhead – Liran Chen takes a look at the performance of AutoResetEvent, and looks at providing an alternative implementation which performs better.
• EF Caching with Jarek Kowalski’s Provider – The ADO.NET team highlight the caching and tracing tool kit from Jarek Kowalski which plugs into the Entity Framework, and in this post they run through the use of it from obtaining the extension, to implementing it in your code.
• A Quick guideline for Microsoft Windows PowerShell Part-1,Part-2, Part-3. & Part-4 – Md. Marufuzzaman provides a useful introduction to PowerShell, starting out with a look at scripting in PowerShell, combining Powershell with VBScript and .NET functions, interacting with other programs via COM APIs, and working with .NET
• How to Unit Test a WorkflowService – Ron Jacobs continues his series looking at unit testing Windows Workflow, exploring the testing of WorkflowServices in this post.
• Encapsulation in JavaScript – ‘After2050’ shares a useful reference to encapsulation in JavaScript, illustrating namespaces, singletons, public and private methods in a simple example.
• Dependency Injection – BlackWasp shares a nice back to basics / introduction to the concepts behind Dependency Injection

Community

• UK Windows Azure Online Conference date change – now 8th October – Steve Plank announces a date change for the "Microsoft Online Cloud Conference: the TechDays team goes online" conference along with sharing the full outline of the agenda across the three virtual tracks. Registration for this free virtual event is now open.

1 Comment »

Software

• FiddlerCore Update – Fiddler Web Debugger – Eric Lawrence annoucnes an update to the Fiddler Core project, bring the inclusion of FiddlerCore4.dll, the .NET 4 compiled version of the Core of this very useful HTTP debugger.
• Release of Windows Server AppFabric Architecture Guide – Yasser Abdel Kader highlights the release of the Windows Server AppFabric Architecture Guide, a guide to properly architecting applications to run on AppFabric and handle enterprise level loads. This 25 page guide addresses a range of topics offering best practice advice

Information

• Have you met arguments.callee? – Sergio Pereira takes a look at a little know JavaScript feature which allows you to get a reference to an anonymous functions from within that function, making recursive anonymous functions possible.
• Windows Azure Application Patterns – J.D. Meier shares 11 common patterns for web based applications running on Windows Azure in the form of component level diagrams illustrating the relationships between components.
• The Architecture of Full Hardware Acceleration of All Web Page Content – Ted Johnson of the Internet Explorer 9 team discusses the architecture which has enabled full hardware accelleration of web pages in Internet Explorer 9.
• Adventures in Repetitive Code & More Boilerplate Code Removal – Mike Hadlow shares a couple of nice tips for removing some of the more repeatitive bits of code taht we as developers write, making more sucinct clearer code using Lambdas and extension methods to achieve this
• Chained null checks and the Maybe monad – Dmitri Nesteruk looks at addressing the ‘repeated null check’ problem in code using extension methods and generics to implement maybe monadic functionality in this CodeProject article
• Find out how long your method runs – Gunnar Peipman continues looking at the techniques for measuring the time your code takes to run, looking in this post at a helper class for measuring method calls.
• MVVM so easy a n00b can do it (Silverlight4) – Michael Crump shares a worked sample for introducing the MVVM style of development in Silverlight.
• The Magical Input Queue Of T (aka InputQueue<T>) – Clemens Vasters explores a useful class which is a part of the WCF Samples, the InputQueue<T> which is a code version of an internal framework class which is actually very useful when working with WCF.
• Maximizing Productivity with the Visual Studio 2010 Silverlight Designer – Dan Wahlin looks at a number of features of the Silverlight visual designer included in Visual Studio 2010 which help improve developer productivity, exploring improvements to grids, data binding and styles,
• MVC Turbine and MVC3 – Javier G. Lozano talks about the future of ASP.NET MVC in the form of Version 3, and how the features included in this impacts his ASP.NET MVC Turbine project

Community

• 2010 Poll: Which Isolation Framework do you use in .NET? – Roy Osherove issues his yearly poll about the Mocking / Isolation frameworks people are activly useing in their projects. If you have a spare 30 seconds go fill out the poll.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #684

Software

• Seeing Code Contracts in Intellisense NOW! – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux highlights a great little Visual Studio Extension which brings the Code Contracts details of the code you are consuming into the Intellisense at consume time.
• TFS Power Tools September 2010 – It is fresh off the press and solves one of our Rangers HOL headaches – Willy-Peter Schaub highlights the release of the September 2010 release of the TFS Power Tools. The main changes for this release are the ability to take backups of your TFS setup on a scheduled basis, improvements to working with version controlled files and folder in Team Explorer, and a command line tool for working with version control, team projects and work items.

Information

• Great News for MonoTouch Users – Miguel de Icaza discusses Apple’s change of heart about the technologies thy officially allow you to build iPhone and iPad applications in, and how that is a great result for MonoTouch, the Mono way of writing applications in C# / .NET and having it run on the Apple hardware.
• What is Functional Programming? Part 2, Currying – Christopher Bennage continues his series of posts on Functional Programming with a look at the concept of currying, addressing the theory and looking at some implementation in F#
• Common mistakes made when measuring the speed of code – Gunnar Peipman discusses some of the common things that developers get wrong when measuring the performance of code, from imprecise timing measurements, measuring too much code, to testing in debug mode. Gunnar then takes a look at an Experiment: List<T> internals and performance when adding new elements – providing an application of these theories and revealing some interesting numbers about the performance of List<T> under a variety of use cases.
• Old school tree display – Eric Lippert outlines a coding challenge to create an old fashioned ASCII Art style tree view, giving the structure of a tree, and a method signature and leaving you to have a go before reading his own answer.
• Optimizing Silverlight Applications for Windows Phone 7 – Rohan Thakkar takes a detailed look at making your Silverlight applications run as optimally as possible on the Windows Phone 7, looking at graphics, images, XAML and threading
• C#/.NET Five Final Little Wonders That Make Code Better (3 of 3) – James Michael Hare rounds off his series of posts on 5 different things that can make your code better with a look at implicit typing, LINQ Extension Methods, general Extension Methods, the System.IO Path methods and Delegates.
• Unit Testing Workflows – Testing Activities with Bookmarks – Ron Jacobs continues looking at the WorkflowTestHelper exploring how it allows you to test activities which use bookmarks to obtain data for the activity.
• Simple REST API Versioning Using MEF and MVC – Nick Berardi takes a look at using MEF to allow his ASP.NET MVC REST API to support two versions of the API concurrently
• Design-Time Friendly ViewModels with MEF – Jeremy Likness looks at how MEF can provide a way of having a simple design time View Model with the full featured ViewModel used at runtime, illustrating this by taking an existing application, refactoring to MVVM and adding design time viewmodels through MEF.
• Silverlight Globalization Namespace Comparison Updated For Silverlight 4 – Guy Smith-Ferrier shares an updated comparison of the Silverlight (now version 4) System.Globalization classes to those in the full .NET Framework
• The "Windows Sysinternals Primer: Process Explorer, Process Monitor, and More" from TechEd 2010 North America – Greg Duncan highlights a presentation from TechEd 2010 about the SysInternals tools, looking in detail at how they can be used to investigate a number of different scenarios, giving you a view of the range and use of the tools.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #683