The Morning Brew

Software

• Feature Builder power with drag and drop simplicity – Instant Feature Builder v1 (Think "Drag and Drop Map/Code files/Docs/Guidance in and vsix out") – Greg Duncan highlights the Instant Feature Builder V1 release which brings a simple and easy to use way to build guided developer experiences using a drag drop interface within Visual Studio. This tool provides about 80% of the features if the official Feature Builder product.

Information

• ASP.NET Web Application: Publish/Package Tokenizing Parameters – Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi of the Visual Web Developer Team talks about the way that Web.Config transformations are tokenised on publish / package, and looks at how you can control the tokenising of connection strings.
• WF 4 Performance Whitepaper Published – Wenlong Dong highlights the publication of a whitepaper which discusses the performance of Windows Workflow 4, comparing to the performance of WF3, showing some quite dramatic improvements in performance.
• New White Paper Details the Windows Azure Programming Model – The Windows Azure Team highlight a new introductory whitepaper on the Windows Azure Programming Model which looks at how the cloud platform can help you build more available and scalable applications than you could with traditional application programming models.
• The taming of the phone [New SetterValueBindingHelper sample demonstrates its usefulness on Windows Phone 7 (and Silverlight 4)] – David Anson updates his SetterValueBindingHelper and sample application to work on Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight 4, providing a means of using binding within setter properties like Style as you can in WPF, helping work round a limitation in Silverlight / WP7
• Windows 7 Phone Database Rapid Repository – Examining Pending Changes – Sean McAlinden documents another feature of his Windows Phone 7 Database Rapid Repository project, which allows you to inspect the entities which are pending save prior to performing the save on them through the repository.
• Introduction to InterceptingCatalog – Part I – Piotr W?odek looks at the MEFContrib project’s InterceptingCatalog which allows you to intercept values exported via MEF using a chain of responsibility deisgn pattern to combine intercepter together in a processing pipeline.
• Razor Intellisense and ReSharper – Hadi Hariri highlights the Razor View Engine Intellisense introduced in the ASP.NET MVC3 Release Candidation, and explains how you can access this autocompete if you have ReSharper (which does not yet support Razor in its own Intellisense).
• If You Use BackgroundWorker in .Net, Make Sure You Wrap Your Worker Method In Try (or risk missing the exception thrown) – Peter Kellner highlights the importance of handling exceptions in your background worker methods to help you avoid loosing exceptions and having background tasks terminate unexpectedly with no idea why.
• C# 5.0: async/await vs PostSharp – Gael Fraiteur discusses the new C#5 CTP async/wait functionality and how it compares to similar implementations which can be achieved using an AOP framework like PostSharp. Gael is also republishing an article on using PostSharp to make creating Multithreaded Apps Made Easy Using Aspects
• Discovering race conditions using PostSharp – Dror Helper also shares a PostSharp Aspect which can help you to discover race conditions in your code recording and alerting when two threads call the same method at the same time.

Community

• A word from NxtGen User Group – Micro Framework, jQuery, dynamic .Net and Christmas swag – Rachel Collier and Ryan O’Neill highlights the NxtGenUG events across the country in the build up to the Christmas period
• Win two tickets for the .Net magazine awards party – Rachel also highlights a chance for you to win two tickets to the .NET Magazine Awards party on November 18th as a guest of Microsoft.

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