The Morning Brew

Information

• How Good C# Habits can Encourage Bad JavaScript Habits: Part 1 – Elijah Manor discusses some of the finer points of JavaScript and how if you come to JavaScript from a purely C# experience you will be able to achieve things, but you will be under misapprehensions about how some things are actually working.
• NuPack- .Net Package Management… and much, much, more & Introducing NuPack: the smart way to bring bits into your projects – Eric Hexter and David Ebbo discuss the need for package management software in the .NET Developer space, and discuss how NuPack addresses these requirements, and David shares a 15minute video demo of NuPack in operation.
• Using Solution Factory + NuPack to create Opinionated Visual Studio Solutions. – Eric Hexter also explores the use of the Solution Factory and MetaPacakges in NuPack to provide templates for solutions in Visual Studio, illustrating with an example which creates a test project configured to his liking within an MVC solution.
• ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta Support for Code Runs before Views and Strongly Typed Models in Razor Views – Shiju Varghese looks at the use of _viewstart.cshtml in ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta to provide shared view startup code capabilities
• Testing the Untestable with Delegate Injection – Harry Pierson explores using Delegates to inject functionality into an ASP.NET MVC controller, allowing him to replace calls to static dependencies like FormsAuthentication, Request, Response with more testable alternatives for testing purposes.
• One application in both WPF and Silverlight – Khawar Yunus discusses a few techniques which can help you creating a single application which will run in both a Silverlight and WPF environment
• RavenDB – Image Gallery Project (VIII) – Signing In + RavenDB Testing – Rob Ashton continues with his series on RavenDB in a real world application with a look at creating the authentication routines of the Image Gallery, and talks about testing RavenDB queries, and his base test class for spinning up RavenDB in order to test the queries.
• Experimental ASP.NET MVC Add-ins : Updated (or why it pays to blog) – Mike Hadlow (with some feedback from Krzysztof Ko?mic) follows up from his previous post sharing an ASP.NET MVC Addin platform based purely on Castle Windsor 2.5
• No Backtracking, Part Two – Eric Lippert looks at a complex example which illustrates why back tracking in the compiler would be both complex and confusing, and would probably result in outcomes which the compiler user would not expect.

Community

• Building Offline Experiences using Sync Framework with Andy Wigley – developer Fusion – The .NET Developer Network User Group host Andy Wigley presenting a session on using the Sync Framework to provide offline working functionality in your .NET Applications. The session is to be hosted at the University of the West Of England, just outside Bristol on Tuesday 16th November.
• Upcoming talks (mostly on RavenDB) – Rob Ashton is going on tour over the next few months delivering sessions covering RavenDB at a number of UK Usergroups, along with a few sessions on NHibernate and structure map at a couple of conferences. Rob has been working with RavenDB for some time now, and will be delivering code heavy sessions looking at its use.

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Software

• Announcing NuPack, ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta, and WebMatrix Beta 2 – Scott Guthrie announces the release of new betas of ASP.NET MVC 3 and Web Matrix, along with a first public release of NuPack, an Open Source Package Manager for .NET which will provide (another) means of packaging open source libraries and make it easy for developers to add references to these projects.
  • Introducing NuPack Package Management for .NET – Another piece of the Web Stack – Scott Hanselman discusses NuPack in more detail looking at its command line and GUI based use, alogn with discussing a change in role for him at Microsoft where he will be working with the web technologies team to promote things link NuPack.
  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta Released – Phil Haack announces the ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta release, highlighting the detailed release notes, and discussing what is included and what is not included in this beta release, along with outlining the details of the next steps for MVC3.
  • Microsoft announces WebMatrix Beta 2 – The Official Microsoft Web Platform Team Blog announces the release of the 2nd Beta of WebMatrix, the completely free development environment for building simplified web applications on the Microsoft Stack
  • Introducing NuPack Package Manager – Phil Haack also shares some information and thoughts on NuPack, discussing the type of problem it is designed to solve, along with talking about the guiding principles of the project.
• Mono 2.8 is out – Miguel de Icaza announces the release of Mono 2.8. This new release is a major update and contains C#4 support, the new Generational Garbage Collector, the inclusion of a number of new .NET Open Source licensed technologies from Microsoft, and much more.
• WoVS Quick Add Reference VS Extension helps you say goodbye to the Add Reference Dialog – Greg Duncan highlights a new Visual Studio 2010 Extension which provides a solution to the always slow Add References Dialog. WoVS Quick Add Reference brings ReSharper like Add Reference support where you type the type name and the IDE suggests where that type lives and offers the ability to reference the assmebly.
• Razor Syntax Highlighter for MVC 3 Beta – Ben from BuildStarted.com shares an updated ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta supporting extension for Visual Studio which adds syntax highlighting for the Razor View Engine

Information

• The Evolution of Package Management for .NET – Rob Reynolds talks about his involvement in the Nu / NuPack package management system, talking about his experiences of how the projects were created and managed, and why package management is important.
• Unicorns, Triple Rainbows, Package Management and Lasers – Bil Simser shares an overview of NuPack, along with links to related posts from other well know bloggers, download links, and his story of its creation.
• NuPack .NET package management open-source software released – developer Fusion – Chris Alexander reports of the release of NuPack, and includes details of discussions between Seb Lambla (of OpenRasta, and more recently OpenWrap fame) and Steve Balmer at a recent London event debating the Microsoft way of creating Open Source software.
• Unobtrusive Client Validation in ASP.NET MVC 3 &Unobtrusive Ajax in ASP.NET MVC 3 – Brad Wilson discusses two of the new features of the ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta release. Unobtrusive Client Validation brings a clean unobtrusive way of adding validation via data attributes with consumer code in jQuery, and Unobtrusive Ajax also revolves round data attributes to add ajax functioanlity to standard forms
• ASP.NET MVC 3 Service Location, Part 1: Introduction – Brad has also updated his 10 part ASP.NET MVC 3 series to contain the correct information relating to the Beta release
• POCO Results for MVC Actions – Javier G. Lozano looks at extending ASP.NET MVC to allow your actions to return POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects) and ahve them automatically serialized to JSON using the NewtonSoft JSON.NET Serializer.
• Experimental ASP.NET MVC Add-ins – Miike Hadlow explores the creation of a Plugin architecture for his ASP.NET MVC powered e-commerce shop, looking at using the Managed Extensibility Framework to provide this functionality.
• October PragPub Magazine is here! – The Pragmatic Bookshelf announces the October edition of PragPub Magazine, available in PDF, epub, Mobi and HTML formats this edition contains articles on HTML5, agile programming, and good code.
• Writing a Compiler in C#: Lexical Analysis – Sasha Goldshtein posts on the creation of a compiler implemented in C# for a simple programming language. In this post, setting the context of the language and exploring the lexical analysis involved in parsing code written in a programming language.
• NHibernate 3 and Autofac, can go together? (part 2) – Thang Chung continues this series of posts with a look at the AutoFac Inversion of Control Container, and looks at wiring it up to support NHibernate use,
• Announcing Bootstrap – a simple JS library for loading scripts – Scott Koon provides a simple bootstrapping function for the lazy inclusion of JavaScript libraries, only including them in the page when your custom JavaScript requires them.

Community

• First UK Online Tech Days is this Friday – three free tracks of Windows Azure Platform goodness – Eric Nelson highlights the UK TechDays Online events, beginning this Friday (8th October) and providing 3 tracks of Azure related content provided over LiveMeeting

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Many thanks for all the 700th edition support and feedback, your kind comments and retweets are the things that keep me producing The Morning Brew every day.

Software

• Windows Azure Application Monitoring Management Pack Released – Wes Yanaga highlights the release of the Azure Application Monitoring Management Pack, This tooling works along side Windows Server 2008 and 2008R2 and System Center Operations Manager and allows you to monitor Azure applications for availability and performance
• Windows Azure Platform Training Kit – September Update – Patrick highlights the latest update to the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit. The September update brings all the content up to date with Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio version 1.2, adds a number of new hands on tutorials, and updates and extends a few existing tutorials.
• SisoDb – An early prototype – Daniel Wertheim shares an early edition of his new project, a Microsoft SQL Server backed NoSQL schema-less data store which uses JSON to provide the format for stored data. Full source is available for this Open Source Project.
• Kaliro App Explorer is a quick, simple and easy way to explore the resources, modules, etc in a .Net Assembly (Yes, like Reflector, but simpler…) – Greg’s Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day – Greg Duncan highlights Kaliro App Explorer, a reflector like tool which provides a simplier experience for exploring the resources files and modules contained inside your assemblies.
• Prism v4 – Drop 9 Coming Wednesday Morning – Pete Brown gives a heads-up of a new updated release of the Prism Composite Application Framework V4. This new release brings a new license with the project moving to a Microsoft Patterns and Practices License, completes the code samples and quickstarts.
• A Real WPF 4.0 WebBrowser – Chris Cavanagh announces the latest release of his WPF Chromium WebBrowser whcih brings a native WPF based browser control to the table. This latest release has been updated for .NET 4 and Awesomium 1.6 RC1

Information

• What is Functional Programming? Part 5, Bindings – Christopher Bennage continues his series of posts on Functional Programming with a quick look at bindings using the let keyword, exploring the true meaning of the keyword and the power it provides.
• Introduction to Functional Languages – DotNet-TV.com shares a video from ON Microsoft which is a 15 minute discussion of functional languages with Luke Hoban, the Program Manager for F#.
• Rethinking user interface test automation – Gojko Adzic shares some thoughts based on Geoff Bache’s "Making GUI testing productive and Agile" presentation at Agile Testing Days 2010, discussing the brittleness of recorded tests, the use and abuse of assertions and some alternative approaches to UI testing.
• Five rules for writing effective UI tests – Jimmy Bogard shares his top 5 rules for writing good UI tests, derived from his years of experience of creating UI tests and for working with some other talented developers. These rules can be applied regardless of the technologies used, and provide good food for thought, well worth reading before you attempt your latest UI testing
• Extending ASP.NET MVC’s Validation – Mike Ormond shares this week’s MSDN Flash featured article from David Bending addressing the extensibility of ASP.NET MVC validation, showing how you can extend the platform to provide hooks for implementing custom complex validations.
• RavenDB – Image Gallery Project (VII) – User Registration – Rob Ashton presses on with his RavenDB Image Gallery sample project, this time focusing on User Registration features, sharing the implementation of the business entities, services and integration tests.
• Creating WIX Installer for ASP.NET Web Application – Petr Pechovic walks through the theory and process of building an installer for ASP.NET Web applications using the WIX installer in this Code Project article.
• Integrating Prism v4 Region Navigation with Silverlight Frame Navigation – Karl Shifflett shares a sample application demonstrating the use of Prism V4 Region Navigation, and combining it with the the Silverlight 4 Frame Navigation showing how the two APIs can be combined.
• Windows Phone 7 – Top 10 Tips for a Successful Marketplace Certification – ‘jodonnell’ shares a list of 10 key points to ensure you consider before submitting your applications to the marketplace for testing to help ensure that your application will pass the tests.
• NHibernate 3 and Autofac, can go together? (part 1) – Context is King – Thang Chung explores using NHibernate 3 and the AutoFac IOC implementation together, and will be giving some background on each technology and showing some implementation. This first part looks at NHibernate 3.

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