The Morning Brew

Software

• Extension Analyzer V3 – Mynor Ivan Muralles announces the release of Extension Analyzer V3 on the Visual Studio Blog. This extension provides exploration and diagnostic information for other extensions (covering VSIX, PkgDef, VS Packages and MEF components), allowing you to trouble shoot problems with extension loading
• Introducing: Emaroo 1.0 – Roland Weigelt releases the first version of his Recently Used Files browser which gives a quick and easy way of opening recently used documents across a range of applications including Visual Studio, Blend and Office.

Information

• 31 Days of Windows Phone | Day #1: Project Template – Jeff Blankenburg kicks off a month long series of posts on developing for Windows Phone 7 promising a post a day throughout October. This first post dives straight in and starts exploring the key parts of the project templates for Windows Phone 7 development
• The curious case of the publicity-seeking interface and the shy abstract class – Jon Skeet explores some of the complexities of using Interfaces when you have internal types, and looks at alternatives using abstract classes to solve the problem, illustrated with an example from his NodaTime project.
• Technical Debt Is Like Your Friend, The Mafia Bookie – Derick Bailey shares an amusing piece comparing techincal debt incurred during a push to delivery to a mafia bookie. I’m sure anyone who has experienced technical debt firsthand will recognise the link here.
• MSDN Magazine: October 2010 Issue – The October edition of MSDN Magazine is now available in online format. This month’s topics include ThreadPools, Bing Maps, .NET Micro Framework, Interop with the Enterprise Distributed Cache, Windows Phone 7 Development and AppFabric Serivce Bus Discovery, along with a range of topics covered in the regular columns.
• The Null Object pattern and the Maybe monad – Derek Fowler talks about the Maybe monad and shares a comparable implementation using the Null Object pattern, sharing his code examples.
• RavenDB – Image Gallery Project (V) – The Structure &
  (VI) – Entities, Repositories and Commands – Rob Ashton continues his series looking at a real application implementation using the RavenDB Document database, looking at the structure of the application, the views and entities, unit of work and the implementation of the documents for storage, along with the repository and commands for accessing the documents
• NHibernate – Customize the Linq provider to call your user defined SQL functions – Giorgetti Alessandro looks at using a custom dialect in NHibernate, along with custom implementation of the HQL generation to give the Linq implementation the ability to call custom functions in the database.
• Interested in PEX & MOLES? Wish you could go to a five hour workshop on them? Here’s the next best thing… – Greg Duncan highlights the recordings of the PEX and Moels Workshop event held in Madrid back in July. This recording offers 5 hours of content on the features and applications of PEX and Moles in testing.
• Public static fields gone from F# 2.0 – Ian Voyce discusses the decision to remove support for Public Static Fields in F# 2.0, discussing why they were removed, and looking at alternatives for when you need to use something like them.
• Ten caching mistakes that break your app – Omar Al Zabir takes a look at 10 of the common problems / mistakes that can creep into your application when you cache objects, discussing some of the more obvious ones, and some where your application performance may actually degrade once caching is enabled rather than improve.
• The easy way to create an Entity Framework "Defining Query" – David Ebbo shares an example of the Defining Query support in Entity Framework which allows you to define a client side database view which you can use in your code as though it was a database view, showing how to create one manually as the designer does not offer tooling for this feature.

Community

• Brighton ALT.NET – The Brighton Alt.Net Community are meeting for beers tomorrow (Tuesday 5th October) at their usual venue, The Skiff. Th event is informal and follows the usual turn up, suggest topics, vote on them and then discuss the most interesting ones pattern
• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Recording of Andreas Öhlund on NServiceBus @ E-VAN 29 September 2010 – The European Virtual Alt.Net group have now posted the recording of Andreas Öhlund’s session on NServiceBus, in which he covered the message sending aspects of the service bus recorded at last Wednesday’s live meeting event
• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Glenn Block on "Embracing HTTP in the .NET platform" on 18 October 2010 – The European Virtual Alt.Net Group have their next event planned for the 18th October 2010, and will feature Glen Block talking on REST, and the improvements coming in WCF for working with REST and HTTP
• NxtGenUG Event: C# Abuse with Jon Skeet – The Manchester chapter of the NxtGen User Group welcome Jon Skeet delivering a session on abusing the C# compiler creating code which causes the compiler (or your code reviewer) pain. The event is being held on Wednesday 20th October 2010 in Daresbury.
• Event: SQL Server User Goup meeting in Edinburgh – Scottish Developers highlight a SQL Server User group event being held in Edinburgh this Thursday (7th October) at Microsoft’s offices. The event features Tony Rogerson and Allan Michell looking at implementing Hierarchies in relational data and exploring StreamInsight.
• SQLBits videos (distinctly amateur) – Jamie Thomson shares a collection of behind the scenes interviews from this weekend’s SQLBits 7 event held in York giving a taste of what the event is all about. I had a great time at the event, and if you deal with SQL Server and you’ve never attended you really should.
• WIN a FREE Phone with like NO effort and attend the Windows Phone 7 Developer Launch – Scott Hanselman has brokered a deal where (US Only unfortunately) you can win a Windows Phone 7 device in return for a small amount of promotion of the Windows Phone 7 Launch events

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