November 2010

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #740

Posted by on 30 Nov 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Announcing: Visual Basic Windows Phone 7 Support RTW – Jason Zander highlights the RTW release of Visual Basic support for building Windows Phone 7 Silverlight application, and in this post Jason links to the downloads and walks through the creation of a simple Tip Calculator application.
  • VB Goes Mobile: Announcing "Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools – RTW" – Lisa Feigenbaum and the VB.Net team announce the release of the Windows Phone 7 tooling for VB, linking to the various announcements from across Microsoft and to the downloads for English, Spanish, French, German and Italian localisations.
  • Azure SDK 1.3 and Visual Studio Tool Released! – ‘tonyguid’ highlights the release of the Windows Azure SDK 1.3 and updated tooling for Visual Studio which adds support for hosting of custom VHD images, full IIS support in WebRoles, Remote desktop access, role configuration and deployment support, along with a lot more.
  • MefContrib 1.0.0.0 sees the light of day! – Andreas Håkansson highlights the 1.0 release of MefContrib, a community project to add functionality to the Managed Extensibility Framework. The library adds a number of new catalog types, along with integration with Unity and a custom export provider which allows you to take control of instance creation.
  • BCL Extensions Source Code released on CodePlex – Frans Bouma highlights the release of the BCL Extensions and Algorithmia libraries from Solutions Design (the creators of LLBLGen) as open source on Codeplex. The BCL extensions are a suite of .NET 3.5 extension methods which add a variety of functionality to core BCL types. Algorithmia will be released later in the week and is a collection of algorithm and data structure implementations.

Information

The Morning Brew #739

Posted by on 29 Nov 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Introducing Nancy, a lightweight web framework inspired by Sinatra – Andreas Håkansson announces his new Open Source project, a web framework inspired by the Sinatra framework from the Ruby world. This project brings that style of web programming to the .NET world, which aims to operate well on both IIS/.NET and Mono/FastCGI

Information

  • Quick introduction to Pex – Gunnar Peipman gives a brief overview of the functionality available to MSDN and academic users in the Pex Library/tooling, showing how it can analyse code to discover problematic value combinations and uncover errors.
  • Time-travel with .NET or DateTime, DateTimeOffset and the lost DST hour – Greg of the BCL Team discusses the complications of the Daylight Savings Time clock change, discussing some of the complications and bugs that this time change can introduce into our applications, along with sharing some recommendations for handling the clock change well.
  • Revisiting Normalization and De-normalization – Kenneth Downs discusses the concepts and reasons for using Normalisation and De-normalisation of your database schema arguing from a database perspective of the importance of good normalisation.
  • RavenDB – Image Gallery Project (XVIII) – Adding Edit Functionality (II) – Rob Ashton continues his series looking at building a real world Image Library application using ASP.NET MVC and the RavenDB Document Database
  • Compile your asp.net MVC Razor views into a separate dll – Chris van de Steeg walks through the process of building C# code for Razor view files allowing them to be compiled into a DLL making it possible to ship views as you would compiled code.
  • Getting The Route Name For A Route – Phil Haack discusses the use of the name of a route and how its not exposed as standard, along with showing how you can obtain (and modify) the name of a route using a set of Extension Methods.
  • All-In-One Code Framework Code Sample Index – The All-In-One Code Framework Team have been publishing indexes of the many samples which make up the All-in-one Code Framework, covering a huge range of technologies including Windows Shell, COM, Visual Studio Extensibility, WPF, IIS, Azure, and much much more.
  • Developing applications for Windows Phone 7 – Intro – Rafal Kwiek kicks off a new series of posts on building applications on the Windows Phone 7 platform, looking at both Silverlight and XNA applications. The discussion of the Download and installof the tools and the first screencast looking at writing a Hello World application are already online
  • A Brief Introduction to F# – Mike Ormond shares a guest article from Mark Bloodworth giving an introduction to the F# programming language giving a simple introduction to doing things in this functional language.
  • Finding Controls in a Master Page with jQuery – Steve Wellens discusses a variety of techniques for locating and working with controls in master page templates from client side code using jQuery.

Community

  • VIDEO: Mark Rendle’s Talk at the inaugural Cloud Evening – ‘Planky’ highlights the availability of the video recording from the first Cloud Evening User group event, featuring Mark Rendle discussing the new features of Windows Azure announced at PDC.
  • BDD with “TickSpec“ talk – Phillip Trelford highlights the availability of the video recording of his session on TickSpec, and Tomas Petricek’s on Concurrency with Agents from the F#unctional Londoners event last week.
  • PostSharp Training Day, London – Gael Fraiteur highlights the availability of free places on a training day focusing on Aspect Oriented Programming with PostSharp – an all day event to be held on Thursday 2nd December in London.

The Morning Brew #738

Posted by on 26 Nov 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Demo of Image Optimizer – Mads Kristensen has released his image optimizer Visual Studio 2010 Extension available now on the Visual Studio Gallery (and source available on CodePlex), and has recorded a video screencast showing the extension in operation.

Information

  • NHibernate and Mapping Aggregates – Ian Nelson discusses the use of Formulas in NHibernate Mappings to retrieve counts of child entities in collections without loading the full collection, and looking at alternatives to this approach.
  • Adding a design mode to your MVC app – Derek Fowler shares a technique for having a design mode in your ASP.NET MVC Application using ‘design mode’ controllers which return fake data, making it possible to style and view Views that make up parts of complex processes (like checkouts) without having to got through the application processes.
  • Difference between int.Parse and Convert.ToInt32: – Jalpesh Vadgama looks at two different ways of converting a value to an int, highlighting the subtle difference between the two techniques
  • Gold Nugets – Tyler Brinks has created a site which allows you to rate and comment on the publicly available NuGet packages. the site consumes the NuGet OData feed so should always be up to date, and provides a useful resource for checking out what others think of a particular package.
  • How do you prefer getting bundles of technologies? – ‘Tatworth’ highlights a poll from Scott Hanselman enquiring about how developers prefer to get technologies bundled together. Take a moment to give you opinion.
  • How to consume a web service from within SQL Server using SQL CLR – ‘maspeng’ looks at how the CLR support in SQL Server enables consuming external web services from within SQL Server. I’m not sure how much of a good practice this is, but its certainly interesting.
  • All-In-One COM Code Samples – The All-In-One Code Framework Team highlight the samples from within the All-In-One Code Framework which relate to COM

Community

  • Developer Day Scotland 2011 – Date Announced – Scottish Developers announce the plans for Developer Developer Developer Scotland 2011 which will follow the familiar Developer Developer Developer Comminuty Conference format and will be a free Saturday event held at Glasgow Caledonian University on 7th May 2011. I’ve really enjoyed this event in the past am looking forward to visiting Glasgow for the event next year.
  • Oredev Talk – Greg Young highlights the availabiliy of video from his Øredev session on ‘Things to Make You a Better Object Oriented Programmer’, joining the ~25 other videos from this year’s conference currently on the Øredev channel on Vimeo
  • Tech-Ed 2010 – Download the presentation videos free – Ray Fleming highlights the availability of the videos from the TechEd Europe 2010 conference. A quick look at the site suggests that there are ~300 videos from this year’s conference now available.

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