The Morning Brew

Software

• What happened to Lucene.Net? It got forked – Simone Chiaretta shares an update on the Lucene Project which faced an uncertain future a few weeks ago, highlighting the direction being taken by the main project and also two new projects forked from the original Lucene.Net
• New Mono Log Profiler – Miguel de Icaza announces a new profiler now included in the Mono Project, and also discusses the Mono Project’s plans for F# now that ‘F# Goes Open Source‘
• Visual Studio 2010 vsdoc for jQuery 1.4.3 Now Available – ‘appendTo’ announce the release of their VSDoc documentation file for JQuery 1.4.3 which brings intellisense for the latest jQuery to your Visual Studio IDE.

Information

• A few quick ASP.NET MVC 3 Installation Notes – Scott Guthrie shares some installation related notes about the ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate, outlining some if the issues you may encounter if you install ASP.NET MVC 3 RC along side the C# / VB Async CTP, Razor Intellisense and tooling like ReSharper, and avoiding problems with NuGet by removing old packages.
• Asynchrony in C# 5 Part Six: Whither async? – Eric Lippert continues his series on the C# / VB.NET Async CTP with a look at some of the design decisions that the team made when designing these language extensions sharing a interesting insight to the decisions and the process.
• Writing a Compiler in C#: Parsing, Part 3 – Sasha Goldshtein continues his series building a compiler for a custom language in C#, looking in this part at the parsing of subroutine calls.
• The Only Console Application Template You Will Ever Need – Alois Kraus shares a nice template for command line applications and handling parsing of command line parameters, available for both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 via the code gallery.
• Creating Zip files with System.IO.Packaging namespace – Mikael Svenson takes a look at using the not widely known System.IO.Packaging namespace functionality to create Zip Files
• StyleCop Compliant Visual Studio 2010 Code Snippets November Release – Doug Holland announces the release of an updated collection of Code Snippets for Visual Studio 2010 which conform to the StyleCop guidelines. This latest update adds a number of new snippets fo the collection, and Doug is always looking for feedback on the project.
• Using the Library Package Manager with Add-on Libraries in Visual Studio – ‘Timlee’ walks through the various options for working with packages using NuGet in Visual Studio, exploring the package manager and the package manager console.
• 5 minute Observable.FromAsyncPattern sample for Windows Phone 7 – Den Delimarsky explores the use of the Reactive Extension on the Windows Phone 7 Platform to create observable collections from Async method calls, and discusses some of the limitations.
• ReSharper C# Live Template for Dependency Property and Property Change Routed Event Boilerplate Code – Bart Read shares a ReSharper Live template to make implementing the large standard chunk of code to handle dependency properties and the property change routed event implementation.
• Multithreaded Apps Made Easy Using Aspects – Part 2 – Gael Fraiteur posts the second (and final) part of his article on using Aspect Oriented Programming techniques to make building Multi-Threaded applications easier

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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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Software

• Announcing the ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate – Scott Guthrie and Phil Haack announce the release of the ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate, available as a direct download or via the Web Platform Installer. This release brigns the much awaited Intellisense for the Razor View Engine, partial page output caching improved JavaScript and Validation support, along with tooling improvements. This release also comes with the latest CTP of NuGet.
• NuGet CTP 2 Released! – Phil Haack gives the lowdown on the CTP2 release of NuGet. This new version introduces some changes to the package format specification, and the introduction of OData as the format for the package feed.
• WebMatrix Beta 3: Now available! – The Microsoft Web Platform Team announce the release of the 3rd Beta release of WebMatrix. This release builds on the key principles that underpin the product to improve the production of simple web applications.
• November 2010 F# 2.0 Free Tools Update – The F# Team have updated the F#2.0 Free Tools. These tools bring tooling support for F# to Visual Studio 208 and Visual Studio 2010 Shell. This update brings some improvements for users working with Mono or the Windows Phone 7
• SQL Server v.Next (Denali) : Setup walk-through – Aaron Bertrand discusses the setup of the first public CTP of SQL Server Denali the next major version of SQL Server which was released yesterday at the PASS conference.
• First look at SQL Server Management Studio Denali – SQLDenis takes a look at the Management Studio interface of the CTP release of SQL Server Denali.
• SSMS Tools Pack 1.9.3 is out! – Mladen Prajdi? announces an updated version of his SQL Server Management Studio Tools. This extension brings a number of useful features to the Management Studio environment, and this release brings improved history features to the query editor, along with fixing reported bugs.

Information

• Granular Request Validation in ASP.NET MVC 3 – Marcin talks about the changes to the request validation API in ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate which provides granular validation support via attributes
• Windows Phone 7 Development Tip: Use Concurrent Programming Techniques – Bart Czernicki discusses concurrency in Windows Phone 7 applications and how using threads to perform work will keep your UI responsive, illustrating with a sample from his book.
• Windows 7 Phone Database Rapid Repository – Queries and Views Proposal – Sean McAlinden dicsusses the querying and views implementation for his Windows Phone 7 Rapid Repository project, looking for feedback on the proposed implementation
• Test Driven Design and levels of testing – Alexander Beletsky discusses Test Driven Development and the various types of testing that you may need to perform, giving samples of each type of test and implementation classes
• Back to Basics: Cohesion and Coupling Part 2 – John Sonmez continues his back to basics series with a second part on Cohesion and Coupling looking at the relationship between the two, breaking problems down into smaller pieces and using Dependency Injection to bring them together.
• How To Write Testable Code in .Net – Chris Farrell gives a run through of the common techniques used to make your code more testable, including dependency injection, discussions of coupling and the use of stubs.
• F# – An Introduction To Currying – Sergio Tapia provides a simple and effective introduction to currying support in the F# language, illustrating with a few short samples.
• Client Templating with jQuery – Brij takes a look at the templating support in jQuery , currently provided by a plugin for jQuery, and shows it in use in a variety of situations.

Community

• Alt.Net.UK – Next Event – 19th/20th November 2010 – Next round of tickets available 10th November – 12.30pm – Ben Hall announces the release of the next round of tickets for the Alt.NET UK Conference. Tickets will be made available today (10th November) at 12:30pm (GMT I assume)
• Announcing the Internet Explorer 9 Webcast Series with Imaginet – John Bristowe highlights a series of webcast events covering the various aspects of the Internet Explorer 9 release. The events are being held around noon in Canada and are being streamed live on the 30th November, 2nd, 14th, 16th December,

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