The Morning Brew

PDC 2010

• Making Asynchronous Programming Easy – Somasegar introduces the CTP release of of framework and language enhancements for C# and VB.NET which bring an asynchronous programming model to these languages,
• Announcing the Async CTP for Visual Basic (and also Iterators!) – The Visual Basic Team take a look at Async in VB.NET showing code examples illustrating its use in VB.NET using a waiter in a restaurant as the example.
• Visual Studio Async CTP – Shiju Varghese shares links to the specifications for Async in VB.NET and C#, along with the documentation on MSDN and a white paper on Asynchrony in .NET
• HTML5, Using the whole PC: Sixth IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers – The Internet Explorer team announced the release of their 6th platform preview release of Internet Explorer 9 at PDC yesterday and in this post Dean Hachamovitch talks about the performance of this version and discusses what you need to do to get ready for the release candidate.
• TFS on Windows Azure at the PDC – Brian Harry talks about the work that has been done on TFS to allow it to run on the Azure Cloud Computing platform, and how they got to the point where they could demo it at PDC.
• PDC10: Mysteries of Windows Memory Management Revealed: Part One – Tim Sneath blogs about Windows Memory Management from details gleaned from the PDC session by Mark Russinovich, discussing virtual memory, Mapped Files, and paging

Software

• Microsoft Lync Released to Manufacturing – The Unified Communications Group Team announce the RTM release of Lync 2010, the new branding for Office Communications Server and Communicator. This new version brings a common communications platform with extensibility (check out the work on the SDK), along with major enhancements to voice communications.
• Rx for Windows Phone 7 – The Reactive Extensions Team announce the release of a downloadable version of the Reactive Extensions for Windows Phone 7. This version will be of interest to those who want to use the latest bits of Rx in their WP7 applications at the expense of having to ship the additional assemblies to override the built in Rx on the Phone. The Team also announce that Rx packages (are) available on NuPack
• A quick look at what’s new in Orchard 0.8 – Bertrand Le Roy talks about the latest features added to the latest version of the Orchard Project, released on Monday. v0.8 introduces the Razor view engine as the default view engine, introduces their concept of Widgets and a whole lot more.
• StyleCop Compliant Visual Studio 2010 Code Snippets & Templates – Doug Holland highlights the October 2010 release of the Visual Studio Snippets library which is a library of snippets and template which conform to StyleCop rules, meaning that the use of them will not trigger warnings in StyleCop (unlike the default VS ones)

Information

• Free ebook: Programming Windows Phone 7, by Charles Petzold – Microsoft Press have released the full final edition of Charles Petzold’s Programming Windows Phone 7 book as an e-book. This 1000+ Page, 24 chapter book is available in PDF, with full sample code
• Asynchrony in C# 5, Part One – Eric Lippert kicks off a new series of posts looking at the implementation of Asynchrony in C#5, discussing the concepts ad highlighting the CTP release of the C#5 prototype.
• Visual Studio Async CTP: The C# Perspective &Visual Studio Async CTP: A Few More Things – Sasha Goldshtein also looks at the Async CTP in C#, talking about its implementation and its basis in Continuation Passing Style
• What’s Next in C#? Get Ready for Async! – Alexandra Rusina talks about the Async functionality released in the C#5 CTP, showing its use with an example which retrieves Facebook friends lists
• Asynchronous C# and F# (I.): Simultaneous introduction – Tomáš Pet?í?ek also talks about the C#5 CTP, discussing how the C# Aysnc functionality is heavily influenced by the work that has already been done in F# Async Workflows.
• Tutorial: Pic Viewer Revisited on the Async CTP – Jason Zander shares an example of the Async CTP in operation wit a look at fitting it into his Picture Viewer sample
• Visual Studio Async CTP for the rest of us.. – Michael Crump takes a ‘getting started’ look at the Async CTP release, walking through the installation, highlighting the included samples and looking at the assemblies you need to reference.
• The Present and Future of WPF – Pete Brown talks about the various users of WPF both inside and outside of Microsoft, discussing its use in their products and discussing the future direction for WPF
• Rx Design Guidelines – The Reactive Extensions Team have also released a guidelines document to help you make the best possible use of the Reactive Extensions for creating and consuming Observable streams
• Monotouch: your C# app on a real iPhone – Peter van Ooijen discusses the use of MonoTouch to build applications for the iPhone, and discusses the deployment to a real device, and the performance differences between testing the application on your PC vs the iPhone device
• CQRS – The Cult of Shiny Things – Jak Charlton discusses Command Query Responsibility Segregation, setting about separating some of the myths from the facts about the various aspects and claims made about this type of architecture.
• Just Where Is WebResource.axd? – Scott On Writing.NET – Scott Mitchell talks about the use of WebResource.axd, discussing how it works, and what it is used for along with highlighting further resources on the subject.
• Invalid Cast – Martin Rue looks at an alternative technique to constructors with lots of arguments for passing in dependencies, using Func type as a variables to provide a means of overriding functionality for testing purposes.

Community

• LinkedIn Live Webinar Presentation – Sneak Preview – Britt King highlights the upcoming Linked In .NET User Group virtual event to be held on Wednesday 3rd November 2010 at 9AM PST where Gael Fraiteur will talks about Aspect Oriented Programming and the PostSharp library.
• How good are you with Regexes? Try http://rise4fun.com/rex – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux highlights a fun game for RegEx experts to attempt to guess a hidden regular expression using the output of Rex to see how close your guess is

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Software

• RIA Services V1.0 SP1 Beta Released!! – Deepesh Mohnani highlights the release of the RIA Services V1.0 SP1 Beta, a release combined with the WCF RIA Services October release. This SP1 Beta brings the ability to share entities across multiple domain services, support for complex objects, better binding, localisation into 10 languages, and improved templating for client code generation
• MvcSiteMapProvider 2.2.0 released – Maarten Balliauw releases the latest version of his MvcSiteMapProvider onto CodePlex (soon to be available through NuPack too). This new version introduces Templated HtmlHelpers allowing you to customise the HTML rendered, improvements to the stability of the library, updates to HtmlHelpers to support MvcHtmlString, and some further extensibility points.
• Announcing Sync Framework 4.0 October 2010 CTP – The Sync Framework Team announce the latest CTP edition of Version 4 of the Sync Framework. This release brings OData to the protocol formats, a new diagnostics dashboard to monitor Sync operations, Client and Server components to aid in implementing the sync, along with a collection of samples showing how the library supports sync to multiple software platforms
• Windows Azure AppFabric SDK October Release available for download – The Windows Azure AppFabric team release an updated October Release of the Azure AppFabric SDK which resolves problems users experienced with the install rolling back on 64bit Windows.
• Sueetie Version 2.0 Now Available! – Dave Burke announces a new major version of Sueetie. Sueetie Version 2 brings together a number of open source projects into a cohesive whole community solution, including CMS, Mobile sites, Calendars, Media libraries, forums, all building on best of breed .NET Open Source projects.

Information

• Continuation Passing Style Revisited Part Five: CPS and Asynchrony – Eric Lippert continues his look at Continuation Passing Style, discussing how CPS can apply to real world problems, looking at fetching documents over a slow link and writing them to slow storage, and how CPS provides a way of making this process more efficient.
• Why I hate implementing Linq – Ayende discusses some of the complexity of developing the Linq providers which make it possible for developers to write the expressive Linq statements we all love.
• Turn your Razor helpers into reusable libraries – David Ebbo looks at wrapping up helpers using the Razor View Engine into libraries which you can share amongst your projects, using the Razor Single File Generator Visual Studio Extension, and a little T4
• Announcement: FREE Code Sample Request Service from Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework – The All-In-One Code Framework Team are on the look out for new code samples that developers would like to see included as fully formed samples the All-In-One Code Framework. This post outlines the process of making these requests.
• WP7 Development Tips Part 1 – Kevin Marshall shares a collection of performance related tips to help you make your Windows Phone 7 Application fly, sharing recommendations of things to consider when building your application
• ECMAScript 5 Part 1: Reusable Code – Amanda Silver, Program Manager for JavaScript in Internet Explorer kicks of a new series on ECMAScript 5, with this first part looking at the construction and cloning of objects.
• RavenDb, ASP.NET MVC and Windsor working together – Mike Hadlow continues his exploration of RavenDB with a look at using it with ASP.NET MVC and Castle Windsor in his latest project, TardisBank.Com, a pocket money back account application. Full source is available on GitHub
• Useful, free resources for SQL Server – Aaron Bertrand shares a great list of free resources for SQL Server, ranging from advisors, through documentation, Add-ins, Community Resources, Sample databases, scripts, performance tools, and books.
• Deploying ASP.NET MVC 3 web application to server where ASP.NET MVC 3 is not installed – Gunnar Peipman discusses the process of deploying an ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta based web application to hosting which does not have MVC3 installed
• F# Parallel Extras (I.): Image pipeline using agents &F# Parallel Extras (II.): Agent-based blocking queue & F# Parallel Extras (III.): Financial dashboard with cancellation – Tomáš Pet?í?ek has been at writing the samples from the Patterns and Practices Parallel Programming in .NET book in F#, translating them from their C# originals, and in this series of posts looks at further re-writing of them in F# using a more functional style and using more of the power of the language.

Community

• Mobile Web Best Practices Webinar Follow-up – Woody Pewitt shares the recording and slides of his virtual presentation held yesterday looking at developing websites which target mobile devices

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Software

• NBehave VS2010 Plugin: New Builds – Naeem Khedarun announces a new version of the NBehave Visual Studio 2010 IDE Plug-in, which brings syntax highlighting and Single Scenario running / debugging for your NBehave BDD Tests
• Windows Phone 7 ConfApp – Microsoft conferences with schedules and past PowerPoint decks/session videos, now with for PDC10 – Greg Duncan highlights the Conf Windows Phone 7 application which now contains session information for PDC2010, along with session information, slides and videos for PDV09, MIX10, and session information for REMIX10 Austrialia.
• Dynamically Create Test Data with NBuilder, JSON and .Net – ‘ActiveEngine Sensei’ walks through the use of their DataBuilder tool which allows you to easily construct good real-looking test data using NBuilder

Information

• Continuation Passing Style Revisited Part Four: Turning yourself inside out – Eric Lippert continues his series on Continuation Passing Style discussing why this style of programming is not used more often, discussing the difficulties people have in understanding these concepts.
• Silverlight Developer Guidance Map – J.D. Meier highlights the Silverlight Developer Guidance Map from the Microsoft Patterns an Practices Team, providing a good pointer to the vast wealth of Silverlight HowTos, Code Samples, Videos and Training Resources.
• RavenDb: Playing with Inheritance and Polymorphism – Mike Hadlow has been exploring RavenDB, and in this post gives a simple example of working with an inheritance based model for the documents to be stored, and how RavenDB supports this.
• Synchronization primitives, MulticastAutoResetEvent – Ayende discusses some of the complexities of signalling background threads to do work in a system like RavenDB, discussing the use of AutoResetEvents and Monitor.PulseAll.
• 10 Tips you should know about "Watch Window" While debugging in Visual Studio – Abhijit Jana shares 10 tips for the use of the Watch Window in Visual Studio, ranging from copy/paste feature to getting Garbage Collection Generation information, and watching new objects created in the immediate window.
• Create your own Format Bar for the WPF RichTextBox – Brian Lagunas looks at creating a WPF Ribbon based user interface for the WPF Rich Text Box, showing the operation of both controls and how to wire them together.
• Building mobile web site with ASP.NET MVC and jQuery Mobile – Gunnar Peipman investigates building an ASP.NET MVC web site using the jQuery Mobile library to construct a good Mobile User Experience and shows how Windows Mobile handles the UI.
• A Step-by-Step Guide to Building and Deploying your Windows Phone 7 Applications – Colin Melia runs through the complete process of building a simple Windows Phone 7 application, from installing the required tooling, right through to the submission to the Marketplace.
• WP7 Code: Managing Application State – Dragos Manolescu looks at adding save and restore of application state to the GeoFencing Windows Phone 7 Application, exploring a few features of the Reactive Extensions along the way.
• Dumping ASP.NET Session (x86 /x64) within Windbg – Naveen looks at investigating the ASP.NET Session data from WinDBG, sharing a script which dumps out the session objects.

Community

• Aberdeen Developers’ .NET User Group, 11th November – Mike Taulty and Mike Ormond will be speaking at the Aberdeen Developers’ .NET User Group on the evening of 11th November, with Mike Taulty covering Silverlight 4 features, and Mike Ormond looking at Developing for Windows Phone 7
• Mobile Web Best Practices Webinar – Woody Pewitt will be delivering a DevExpress Online presentation today (27th October) at 10am PDT looking at best practices for developing websites intended specifically for use on a mobile device.
• PDC10 Coming to you Live! Don’t miss it! – PDC 2010 kicks off tomorrow, and loads of the content and talks will be available live online allowing those unable to attend in person to share in the experience with HD 720p streams, live translations (into Chinese, Japanese, French and Spanish)

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