October 2010

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #706

Posted by on 13 Oct 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Database, Development, Links, Morning Brew, SysAdmin

Software

Information

  • Running Open Source In A Distributed World – Phil Haack discusses distributed Open Source projects, drawing on the wisdom of Karl Fogel’s book ‘Producing Open Source Software – How to Run a Successful Free Software Project’ and discussing the processes to become a core committer on a project, illustrating with the NuPack Project
  • Adopt an Open Source Project – Rob Conery attempts to convince Microsoft (and other large .NET Dependent organisations) to allow their Developer Platform Evangelists to work part time on Open Source Projects
  • All-In-One Code Framework Coding Standards – Sasha Goldshtein highlights the All-In-One Code Framework project’s Coding Standards document – an 80+ page guide to writing code to their standards in C#, C++ and VB.NET written in ‘Framework Design Guidelines’ format (Do / Do not)
  • Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Part 6b – Simple Navigation with Conductors – Rob Eisenberg continues his series of posts on using Caliburn.Micro looking at the use of Conductors for navigation between screens, illustrating with a simple sample of them in use
  • .NET Formatting Reference Sheet – Richard Carr of BlackWasp Software shares a Reference Sheet for the multitude of string format specifiers, showing each with a description and a sample of its output.
  • Dependency Injection for Filters in MVC3 – Javier G. Lozano looks at using the improvements in ASP.NET MVC 3 for Dependency Injection, and how this helps make using Dependency Injection with Filter Attributes much easier.
  • A Simple Wrapper To Make Things More Fluent – John Sonmez continues looking at using wrapping methods with logging (or other cross cutting concerns) and explores creating a fluent-like interface for adding this functionality.
  • When Intel’s Hyper Threading goes bad – Paulo Reichert discusses an instance where having a Hyper-threaded CPU may not make as much difference to your performance as you might thing, looking at what hyper-threading actually means, and how it trick the operating system into running more threads than might be optimal.
  • 7 Freely available E-Books/Guides I found essential for .NET Programmers and Architects – ‘nikosangr’ shares links to 7 really good resources for .NET Developers. I think all of these have been mentioned here before, however all are so good they deserve at least another mention.
    UPDATE: Turns out this link was to a complete copy of another bloggers article. The original (which was included in The Morning Brew previously) can be found here

Community

  • PDC UK – do you fancy a night in with the Microsoft evangelists? – Rachel Collier highlights an event with a difference to be held at Microsoft’s Reading Offices during PDC. On the evening of the 28th and 29th of October you can gather at Microsoft’s Reading HQ to join UK Evangelists to watch live streams of the PDC sessions. Registration is required
  • PDC10 at a university near you. – Phil Cross highlights a similar opportunity for UK Students at a number of Universities around the UK where you can see the Keynotes live, and participate in local Q&A

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The Morning Brew #705

Posted by on 12 Oct 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Windows Phone 7

Software

  • Windows Ribbon for WinForms v2.5 Released – New Events Mechanism – Arik Poznanski releases version 2.5 of this managed wrapper around the Windows Ribbon Framework providing a managed interface for creating a free Ribbon based UI. This update includes improvements to the events making them more .NET like.
  • Should Assertion Library – Eric Hexer releases beta 1.1.12 of the Should Assertation Library which provides a collection of extension methods allowing AAA and BDD style test assertions to be made off the object being tested.
  • Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework 1.4.7 Released – Michael S. Scherotter announces the release of the Silverlight Analytics Framework 1.4.7. This release fixes a number of bugs and also includes support for tracking Silverlight Media Framework 2.2 in both Silverlight and Windows Phone7.

Information

  • Debunking another myth about value types – Eric Lippert continues his series looking at myths surrounding value types, discussing in this part the allocation of memory for value types versus reference types
  • Multiple variables in a using statement – Kirill Osenkov highlights a little know feature of the using statement, that you can instantiate multiple items in a single using statement as long as the type is the same.
  • The Caveats of Time Zone Names – Greg of the BCL Team discusses some of the complexities of dealing with time zones in .NET and some of the confusion that the naming of certain time zones causes, including ambiguities of Daylight savings time.
  • A Quick Play With NuPack – Mike Hadlow takes a look at NuPack, exploring package creation by looking into building a package for Castle Windsor 2.5.1, running through the steps of creating the package in the post.
  • Light up your NuPacks with startup code and WebActivator – David Ebbo digs down into some of the more complex NuPack usage, looking at how you can package (or NuPack) assemblies with configuration code included and also looks at the use of the WebActivator, illustrating with its use in the Spark View Engine Package.
  • A close look at the Razor Parse Tree – Pranav Rastogi takes a look at the Parse Tree created by the Razor View Engine discussing the various parts which make up the parse tree, showing examples of how the content gets parsed.
  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta: Built-in support for charts – Gunnar Peipman discusses the inclusion of charting support in ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta, showing some samples of the functioanlity in use.
  • White Paper: Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 cross platform development – Colin Eberhardt shares a whitepaper based around his recent talk at a ScottLogic / Microsoft event which looks at how WPF and Silverlight are unifying Desktop, browser and smartphone development
  • Pushing the Boundaries of HTML5 Gaming: Jitterbugs – Tim Sneath discusses the use of HTML5 for creating games in browser, discussing the use of HTML 5 features in Jitterbugs
  • Fluent Search Interface with some Func – Deran Schilling talks about creating Fluent Interfaces, and works through the process of creating a real world Fluent Interface for searching.

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The Morning Brew #704

Posted by on 11 Oct 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Profile your Windows Phone 7 Application for Free – Michael Crump highlights the latest version of Equatec’s Profiler which supports profiling of Windows Phone 7 Applications, with the free version being able to profile single DLL Windows Phone 7 Applications.
  • Stash – GitHub – Andy Hitchman kicks off his own .NET NoSQL Persistence Store Project. Stash is backed on to Berkeley DB, and provides Key/Value storage with indexing capabilities.
  • Sharp Architecture 2.0: How are we going to get there? – Alec Whittington discusses the route the S#arp Architecture team are going to take to developer S#arp Architecture 2.0

Information

  • Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Part 6a – Screens, Conductors and Composition – Rob Eisenberg continues with his series looking at his Caliburn Micro Framework for building applications for WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 using well known patterns such as MVC, MVVM, MVP, etc. In this part Rob talks about engineering your UI using the Screens, Conductors and composition features.
  • Using RabbitMQ with C# and .NET – Justin Etheredge explores RabbitMQ, looking at its installation on Windows, and investigates the client library which allows your .NET code to connect to the Queue implementation.
  • Writing Windows Shell Extension with .NET Framework 4 (C#, VB.NET) – Part 2 – The All-In-One Code Framework team share the second part of their series on building Windows Shell Extensions using .NET 4, highlighting the sample contained in the All-In-One Code Framework and explaining the key parts of the implementation.
  • Yet Another Debugging Tale – Visual Studio Disappearing – Tatham Oddie shares the debugging steps he took to diagnose a problem with Visual Studio disappearing when using the NuPack package management implementation in the IDE. Its always interesting to see how someone goes about debugging something like this.
  • Get Started with Ninject 2.0 in C# Programming – Xianzhong Zhu shares an introductory article looking at the use of Ninject in C# applications, covering the common Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control functioanlity and theory.
  • Order in Chaos: .NET Collections – Arik Poznanski shares a useful summary of the various collection types available in the .NET 4 Framework, providing a description and a summary of when you might use each of them.
  • Attributes Every .NET Developer Should Know About – Suprotim Agarwal gives a summary of the most common .NET Attributes, many of which you will already be familiar with, but there are a few less common ones in there too. The format is suitable for printing into a useful reference card.
  • The White Windows UI automation getting started tutorial for testers – Klaus Graefensteiner gives a step by step tutorial for working with the White UI Automation Library, combining it with Visual Studio 2010 and UISpy showing how you can write tests to exercise your Win32, WPF and Silverlight applications
  • Integrating sandcastle into build process to generate MSDN style documentation – Ram looks into integrating the SandCastle API Documentation Generation tool into your build process allowing you to generate MSDN style documentation for your Code.
  • Aspect Oriented Programming with Action<> – John Sommez talks about AOP and how it can help deal with cross cutting concerns, and looks at how Action<> can provide a similar means of managing cross cutting concerns.
  • Yet another simplification of Prism’s EventAggregator syntax & Part II – mocking extension methods – Glen Block highlights some code from Ward Bell which provides a nicer way to work with Prism’s Event Aggregator Protocol using Extension Methods to help marshal types for you. Glen also discusses the testability of these extension methods in his second post.
  • Small Basic Curriculum – Alfred Thompson highlights the beta edition of a Small Basic Curriculum for learning the language and key APIs, a great way of introducing people to programming.
  • Visual Studio 2010 Survey – Jason Zander and the Visual Studio 2010 Team are looking for feedback on Visual Studio 2010, and to do so have a short survey which will get your opinions on performance, reliability, and quality. If you’ve been using VS2010, go give them some well deserved feedback
  • Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Silverlight – what do you want to see in it? – Grigori Melnik and the Enterprise Library team are looking for suggestions of what should be in the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Silverlight, and have a round of public consultation running to November 1st, so if you have any ideas or suggestions get in touch with them

Community

  • DevEvening – Ruby and RavenDB – The DevEvening UserGroup will be meeting at the Bird in Hand Pub in Woking on Wednesday 3rd November for an evening of two talks, one from Andy Pike on Rails Development using Ruby, and Rob Ashton on RavenDB

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