The Morning Brew

Software

• Releasing StreamInsight V1.1 – The Microsoft StreamInsight Team announce the release of StreamInsight 1.1 which brings a number of new features including support for .NET sequences as event sources, support for side by side installation with previous versions making upgrading easier and a number of enhancements to performance and stability
• Azure Storage Explorer 4 Beta 1 Released – David Barrett highlights the release of Azure Storage Explorer, Version 4 Beta 1, a useful tool which allows you to view the contents of Azure Containers and Blobs, view queues and messages and view table storage tables
• Announcing YUI 2.8.2 – Important Security Update for All Users of YUI 2.4.0-2.8.1 – The Yahoo User Interface team announce an important security fix release which addresses security issues in the YUI 2 Flash component infrastructure in all versions since 2.4.0. If you are utilising YUI, check your version and upgrade if necessary

Information

• ASP.NET Developer Guidance Map – J.D. Meier discusses the ASP.NET Developer Guidance Map from the Patterns and Practices team which provides a useful means of locating good information about the range of features and technologies which make up the ASP.NET Space.
• Continuation Passing Style Revisited Part Three: Musings about coroutines – Eric Lippert presses on with his latest series on Continuation Passing Style of programming, looking in this part at coroutines, talking about their style of cooperative multitasking, and looking at yield return as a similar concept in C#
• Equality vs Identity – Part I & Part II – Luis Abreu looks at the concept of identity and equality in C#, looking at the implementation of the Equals method for objects and value types, and exploring GetHashCode and its use in dictionaries.
• Inheritance Mapping: A Walkthrough Guide for Beginners – Pedro Ardila of the Entity Framework Team gives a beginners guide to the mapping of Inheritance hierarchies in EF, looking briefly at each of the strategies for performing the mapping.
• Returning Dynamic Types from an Ajax Web Service Using C# 4.0 – Scott Mitchell highlights his series of posts on returning server side data to client side code, and discusses the possible use of Dynamic return types in Ajax methods to avoid the need for a data transfer object.
• Execution Plans – Indexing to achieve optimal query plans – Ted Krueger shares a detailed article which looks at the use of SQL Server execution plans as a means of directing your indexing strategy to improve performance, looking at a number of scenarios where the need for specific indexes can be identified from the execution plan of a query.
• The Case of NUnit Hanging During Startup – Liran Chen shares another example of a real world application hang and how attaching WinDBG can quickly and easily establish what the problem is, giving you enough information to resolve the problem.
• Unit Testing – MsBuild Series – Mark Kemper continues his series on automating your build processes with MSBuild with a look at hooking up NUnit Unit Tests into you build process
• Introducing the New Authorize.NET SDK – Rob Conery discusses his guiding principle for a recent project to design an API for a payment provider, showing the API he ended up with and discussing the key decisions made to match these principles.

Community

• Get Your Special Edition WP7 User Group Kit! – A useful link for anyone running a Windows Phone 7 inspired User Group Event (for an official user group registered with www.usergroupsupportservices.com) here you can get USB drives loaded with software, t-shirts, phone protectors, etc to make your event go with a bang.

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Software

• Visual Studio Tools for IronRuby – Christopher Bennage highlights the Visual Studio tooling included in the latest IronRuby release which includes template projects for common Ruby applications such as Ruby on Rails 3, Sinatra, Gems, and Silverlight.
• WPF Ribbon October Release – Pete Brown highlights an update to the WPF Ribbon wihich fixes a number of issues in the first release (including ClearType Support), along with adding support for its use in the Visual Studio Express editions.
• Windows Phone Developer Tools October 2010 Update – The latest update to the Windows Phone 7 Developer tools is out, bringing an updated Bing Maps control which boasts improved performance, Phone Capability Detection tool to establish the phone features your application uses, and the Windows Phone Connect Tool allowing you to connect to a Windows Phone 7 device without Zune software.
• Goodbye to an old friend… – ‘walbourn’ highlights the beginning of the end for Windows XP, discussing the end of your ability to purchase this version of Windows which passed on the 22nd October, discussing the significance of this version, and highlighting that support will continue to 2014.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 3: Layouts with Razor – Scott Guthrie discusses the ASP.NET MVC 3 Layouts features of the Razor View Engine, providing Master Pages type support to your MVC Views created in Razor, showing the functionality in operation via a simple example.
• ASP.NET MVC3 JsonValueProviderFactory – ‘Yo Briefcase!’ posts on the ASP.NET MVC3 JsonValueProviderFactory, showing the problem in ASP.NET MVC2 which it solves, bringing easier access to values posted in JSON format.
• Windows 7 Phone Database – RapidRepository – Sean McAlinden introduces a new project which offers a simple Document Database implementation which runs on Windows Phone 7 and utilises Isolated Storage on the device to provide the data store.
• Part 1: Getting started with TouchToolkit – Shahedul Huq Khandkar begins a series looking at the TouchToolkit project, a toolkit for developing touch enabled applications on Windows 7 using Silverlight and WPF 4.0. In this part he looks at getting up and running with the library, subscribing to gestures, and obtaining raw touch data.
• How to capture audio from your microphone in WP7 – Derik Whittaker takes a look at capturing audio on the Windows Phone 7 devices, sharing a code sample to capture and replay audio.
• RavenDB – The Image Gallery Project (XV) – Improving Tag Search with AutoComplete – Rob Ashton continues his series on developing a real application using RavenDB with a look at adding AutoComplete functionality to the tag search in his Image Gallery showing both the RavenDB interaction via Linq and the MVC frontend.
• You saved 5 cents, and your code is not readable, congrats! &What is the cost of storage, again? – Ayende discusses the real cost of storage, and looks at the trade off of storing additional data in the database to make the code easier to read, looking at the costs of both storage and developer resource.
• Naming is Hard, Let’s Go Shopping &Community Naming – Phil Haack discusses the importance of a good name, answers a number of the common community questions about the NuPack projects renaming exercise, and gives an update on the voting.
• Continuation Passing Style Revisited Part Two: Handwaving about control flow – Eric Lippert continues his series on Continuation Passing Style with a look at a more complicated control flow than the If Conditional exploring Throwing Exceptions.
• Presenting the OpenWrap logo & Building packages with OpenWrap – Sebastien Lambla unveils the new Logo for the OpenWrap package management project, and also blogs about the production of packages using OpenWrap and MSBuild, Nant, Rake and other build tools.
• 15 Things I’ve discovered about Silverlight. – Michael Crump shares a collection of 15 pieces of advice, suggestions and experiences about Silverlight Development.
• SQL Myths – 60 pages from Paul Randall – John Paul Cook highlights a great 60 page document from Paul Randall outlining and setting the record straight on 30 of the most commonly perpetuated SQL Server Myths.
• Crypto Primer: Understanding encryption, public/private key, signatures and certificates – ‘Planky’ gives a nice introduction to the key concepts behind common cryptography topics including discussion of Certificates, Public/Private Key encryption and signatures.
• Basic JavaScript Part 1 : Functions – Jan Van Ryswyck explores some of the crucial facts about Functions in JavaScript, looking at Inner Functions, Self-writing functions and Closures
• .NET MEAP Books at Half Price! – Joey deVilla highlights a one day half price offer from Manning Publications on their Manning Early Access Program titles.

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Software

• We’re Renaming NuPack – Phil Haack highlights the decision to rename the NuPack project due to a naming clash with another software project. The project team have a number of suggestions, and you can vote on the name you think is best.
• Dolphin Deploy: Deploying ASP.net applications using IronRuby – Ben Hall discusses and shares Dolphin Deploy, a Prototype IronRuby based Domain Specific Language for handling the deployment of ASP.NET Applications. Full source is available, and Ben is looking for people to get involved in the project.
• New Components and Contributors for IronPython and IronRuby – Jason Zander announces some changes to the leadership and model for the IronPyton and Iron Ruby projects, with the aim of increasing the ability of the community to contribute to the projects.

Information

• Continuation Passing Style Revisited, Part One – Eric Lippert kicks off a new series looking at Continuation Passing Style programming, starting in this post with a recap and the background on CPS, looking at creating a CPS conditional operator in C#
• Creating a new project with OpenWrap – Sebastien Lambla continnues his series exploring his OpenWrap project, looking in this post at its use in a new development project, showing how easily you can use the package management to satisfy your library dependencies, and illustrating the integration with the IDE/ReSharper, and showing how you can then package up this project into an OpenWrap package.
• Creating a NuPack package using a Build File – MsBuild Series – Mark Kemper continues his series on MsBuild, looking at how you can create a NuPack package from your project as a part of your MsBuild process
• Hosting Your Own Local and Remote NuPack Feeds – Phil Haack gives blow by blow instructions for setting up your own NuPack package feeds, looking at local file system based feeds and published Url remote feeds.
• RavenDB – The Image Gallery Project (XIV) – Implementing a real-time tag search – Rob Ashton presses on with his realworld Image Gallery project using RavenDB, showing the implementation of the tag based search in this post
• NoSql No Problem – NoRM and MongoDB Tutorial – Querying – Tadeusz Wójcik takes a look at Querying in the MongoDB NoSql database and the NoRM .NET Driver, showing queries in the MongoDB Shell and how they are represented in .NET using NoRM.
• The F# Asynchronous Programming Model, PADL 2010 (pre-publication draft) – Don Syme shares a draft of his paper on asynchronous Programming in F#, looking feedback on the paper which discusses how F# supports reactive, concurrent and parallel programming.
• There’s only one ThreadExceptionHandler – Simon Cooper discusses a bug that has been present in the .NET Framework (caused by a typo) which means that there can be only one ThreadExceptionHandler, and talks about the effects of this.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: ToDictionary() and ToList() – James Michael Hare makes his ‘C#/.NET Little Wonders’ series a more regular feature of his blog, exploring the LINQ extension methods ToDictionary() and ToList()
• Extending MVC Views with DynamicObject – Javier G. Lozano looks at the use of DynamicObject in the MVC Razor View Engine looking at how @View and @Service can be extended using Dynamic objects to resolve methods and properties at runtime.
• Showing Open Source maps on Windows Phone 7 with the Bing Maps Control – Joost van Schaik looks at how the Windows Phone 7 Bing Maps control can be used to display alternate mapping imagery, illustrating with a look at using OpenStreetMap imagary.

Community

• Agenda (With Videos) – NHibernate Day – The NHibernate Day Conference organisers have got the video footage and slides from most of the sessions at the the recent NHibernate Day Conference on-line now, so you can view all the sessions across both tracks on demand
• Sessions (With Videos) – SQL Bits 6 – The SQL Bits team have released the video footage from the SQL Bits 6 conference from May this year, providing a valuable resource of detailed SQL Server knowledge, and the opportunity to see the sessions you missed
• FREE workshop on using Bing Maps with SQL Server and SharePoint on November 2nd in Reading – Eric Nelson highlights a Free event to be held at Microsoft’s Reading campus which will be looking at the use of Bing Maps with SQL Server and Sharepoint, exploring the integration of these three technologies in a workshop format. The event is free, and registration is required.
• "Modern Windows 7 Applications" (UK Steve Ballmer Event Recording) – Mike Taulty highlights the video of his session on Modern Windows 7 Applications, exploring the WPF Ribbon, Application Restart/Recovery
  , Taskbar integration, Chromless Windows and a bunch of other great features, from the recent Steve Balmer UK event.

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