The Morning Brew

Software

• Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework New Samples Updated on 2010-09-06 – The All-In-One Code Framework Team give the lowdown on their September Release giving an overview of the new samples for Shell Extensions in managed coded, samples for Windows Azure, Samples for change tracking entities without proxies, and programmatic detection of the Bitness of a process

Information

• Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework – Scott Guthrie gives a detailed introduction to the first preview release of the Microsoft Web Farm Framework which provides installation, configuration and synchronisation of ASP.NET applications between multiple servers and load balanced environments running IIS7.
• CQRS Info – Following on from his post on the meaning of CQRS and the difficulty of finding good information, Greg Young has set up a new site called CQRSInfo.com which houses video and documents from his training sessions and links to other good CQRS content.
• Getting Started with Node.js on Windows – Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at JavaScript on the server side exploring getting up and running with Node.js on Windows.
• Fun with Rx – Sacha Barber takes a look at the Reactive Extensions for .NET 4 sharing a number of demos exploring the use of Rx for drawing, handling form events, making async web service calls and looks at exporting IObservables using the Managed Extensibility Framework.
• Using the Visitor Pattern with Domain Entities – Mike Hadlow shares an implementation of the Visitor Pattern which works with domain entities to gather information from all the entities in a hierarchy, answering a real world business requirement.
• Death to Windows Services…Long Live AppFabric! – Brian Ritchie takes a look at the support in AppFabric for hosting long running processes / services witihin IIS, looking at the benefits of doing so and stepping through a simple implementation.
• A better way for service threads – Jeff Krebsbach discusses a common ‘sleep work’ pattern used in Windows services, discussing the problems with such an implementation and showing an alternative implementation which behaves better.
• Data Binding with DbContext – Rowan Miller looks to get community feedback on the Entity Framework Teams designs for increasing the number of usage scenarios supported for developers working with DbContext and DbSet, giving us a preview of some of the proposed functionality and the ability to feed back into their design process.
• Debugging Common Canvas Issues – Elizabeth Ford and Jatinder Mann of the Internet Explorer Team share a number of things you should check to ensure that your Canvas based code will operate optimally in Internet Explorer 9
• Experimenting with enterprise level bus messaging – Sacha Barber takes a detailed look at implementing an Enterprise Service Bus application sample using NServiceBus. Lots of detail in the article, and the full code for the sample application is provided
• Dynamic objects and the Facebook C# SDK – Nathan Totten discusses how the Dynamic features of C#4 have helped make their latest open source ‘C# Facebook SDK’ more resilient to change and easier to consume.

Community

• Visual Studio 2010 ALM Events (UK) – Mike Taulty highlights a number of Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management events being held throughout the UK (29th Sept in Reading, 5th October in London, 19th October in Birmingham and 9th Nov in Edinburgh). These events are free to attend, however places are limited and registration is required

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Software

• Magellan 2.0 is here! – Paul Stovell announces the release of Magellan 2.0, his Navigation focused MVC framework for WPF applications. Paul also shares an article ‘Magellan: an MVC-powered Navigation framework for WPF‘ on The CodeProject which provides a nice introduction to working with Magellan.
• YUI 3.2.0 Released: SimpleYUI, Touch Event Support, Gestures, Transitions, CSS Grids, ScrollView, Uploader, and More – The Yahoo! User Interface team announce the release of YUI 3.2.0, available via the Yahoo! Content Delivery Network and as a standalone download, this new version adds features to support touch UI on mobile devices and also enhances performance of the library further.

Information

• CQRS and MVC – Greg Young talks about what CQRS actually is (And a few things that it is not), discussing that CQRS and Event sourcing are not actually new ideas, and looks at the similarities between CQRS and the MVC pattern
• "Blend Bits" – Mike Taulty starts a new series of posts sharing tips and tracks for working with Expression Blend for building Silverlight applications, getting off to a roaring start with 6 articles covering the Blend Environment, Keyboard shortcuts, Margins, Grids and Paths
• VC++, C#, VB.NET Coding Guideline of All-In-One Code Framework – ‘Jialiang’ highlights the update All in One Code Frameowrk release for September and the updated coding standards document which covers Visual C++, C# and VB.NET
• Back to Basic – ASP.NET Runtime Impersonation – Gil Fink takes a look at Impersonation in ASP.NET and more generally in the .NET runtime, showing how ASP.NET can easily be made to run in the secuirty context of another user, with support for either a specific user in all cases or impersonation of the authenticated user, and also shows how you can use P/Invoke to perform your own authentication and impersonation in general .NET code
• Making asynchronous calls to web services during ASP.NET page processing – Gunnar Peipman looks at some techniques for calling multiple web services as a part of an ASP.NET page request looking at how you can make those calls asynchronous using Asynchronous Pages and the PageAsyncTask.
• Transitioning Existing Code to the ES5 Getter/Setter APIs – Allen Wirfs-Brock shows the ECMAScript5 Getter / Setter API and shows how you can make use of it in your own code, using a helper library to provide backward compatibility by using feature detection and emulating the API for browser which do not support ES5
• Overriding a .svc Request With Routing – Phil Haack uses a recent StackOverflow question to illustrate some of the differences and interplay between ASP.NET routing and the ASP.NET build providers, explaining how they intercept the request at different levels sometimes causing things you might expect to work to not work
• What is the WCF RIA Services team up to – Dinesh Kulkarni gives a little update on what the RIA Services team have been up to since their V1 release, outlining their hopes for the content and schedule for their next release will be.
• How to Unit Test WF4 Workflows – Ron Jacobs talks about the testing of Workflows, highlighting the WF4 Workflow Test Helper library which provides a number of helpers to make the process easier, focusing in this article on the testing of activity inputs and outputs
• The .NET Micro Framework – Hardware for Software People – Scott Hanselman takes a look at the Netduino (and others) .NET Micro Framework board, sharing a simple program showing how simple it is to work with this hardware, even if you are only a software guy.

Community

• FREE 2 Weeks of Windows Azure Platform training delivered online – 11th to 25th October – Eric Nelson highlights a ‘Virtual’ Azure training course which will be being held in October, providing instructor led sessions over Live Meeting along with supported distance learning exercises. The best bit, ths training is free, and registration is now open.
• Two days of classroom based training in London on the Windows Azure Platform for £100 (Sep through April) – Eric also highlights 4 2 days sessions of Azure training in an actual classroom in London, each available for £100 per delegate.
• Tech.Ed Online – Ryan Tarak highlights the availability of over 170 session recordings TechEd New Zealand which was held last week, providing a great opportunity for anyone to get access to the learning provided at the conference

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Information

• TIP support for any ADO.NET app – Cameron Skinner takes another look at the Tier Interaction Profiler, looking at how it works for any ADO Data access, and how it can be enabled for application types other then web applications
• Effective MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) – Geoff Cox shares 10 guidelines to help you get the most out of working with the Managed Extensibility Framework, based on his experiences working with the library and his questions to the development team.
• Coming in Autofac 2.3 – OnRelease() – Nicholas Blumhardt explains the new custom component release functionality which is being included in AutoFac 2.3, allowing the correct disposal for objects which require custom means of release beyond the standard IDisposable
• Using Ruby Classes In C# With IronRuby – Davy Brion looks at integrating Ruby classes with C# code, showing that it is relatively easy with the latest versions of IronRuby and C#4 dynamic keyword.
• My Visual Studio (with ReSharper) color settings – Krzysztof Kozmic shares his rather nice looking Visual Studio 2010 colour scheme which also makes use of the ReSharper 5.1 Color Identifiers option
• What is Functional Programming? – Christopher Bennage shares his initial learnings about Functional Programming, looking at a number of the key concepts of Functional Programming
• Mark Methods and Types as Hidden from IntelliSense and the Object Browser – Zain Naboulsi looks at the use of the EditorBrowsable attribute which allows you to control the visibility of methods and properties in the object browser and Intellisense, allowing you to hide, restrict, of always display the method.
• Why ASMX web services are not an excuse anymore with WCF 4.0 – Pablo M. Cibraro takes a look at the improvements in WCF4 which make it easy to implement an ASMX like web service with minimal effort, allowing you the easy of development of ASMX with the power and extensibility of WCF.
• Parallel Programming in F# (I.): Introducing the samples, (II.): Using PLINQ and Tasks, (III.): Aggregating data & (IV.): Financial dashboard example – Tomáš Pet?í?ek has been involved in the creation of F# ports of the samples for the Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET Patterns and Practices guide, and in these 4 posts how runs through the interesting points in the samples.

Community

• UK TechDays special event: keynote speech from Steve Ballmer – Rachel Collier highlights a special UK Techdays event to be held in London on the 5th October, featuring a keynote from Steve Balmer with sessions on Windows Phone 7, The Windows Azure Platform, Internet Explorer 9, and building Windows 7 Applications. Registration for the event are now open.

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