The Morning Brew

Software

• Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1 Beta is available for download! – Brian Harry announces the release of a beta of TeamExplorer Everywhere 2010 SP1. This beta realease comes with a golive license allowing you to use it in your general development, and brings more TFS features to your Eclipse based projects, including gated checkin support, localisations and much more.
• Windows Azure Platform Introductory Special Extended to March 31, 2011 – The SQL Azure Team highlights the extension of the introductory special offer which gives you a small number of Windows Azure instance hours, storage, SqlAzure and data transfer for free, allowing you to try Azure for free.
• Enterprise Library roadmap – Grigori Melnik outlines the future plans for the Enterprise Library team through to mid-2011, including smaller more frequent releases than in the V5 time frame, including the Enterprise Library Silverlight Integration Pack, Enterprise Library Extensibility Hands-on Labs, SqlConfigurationSource, and Enterprise Library Web Integration Pack.
• DocMounter 2: A tool to build VS.NET documentation (now with Sandcastle) – 10Tec share the second version of their DocMounter tool for generating documentation from your code. This new version now supports extensibility and allows you to use other compilers like SandCastle, NDoc, etc. This CodeProject article runs through the features of this tool.
• Red Gate Labs on a shoestring – Richard Mitchell discusses RedGate’s new Labs project where they are releasing smaller tools which didn’t end up being turned into comercial products. Many of the tools here integrate with other products in their range, and some are standalone, but all are worth checking out.

Information

• Back To Basics: What is an Interface? – John Somez continues his series of back to basics posts with a discussion of the concepts and use of interfaces in code. Derik Bailey follows on with some further discussion on this subject in his post
• A Response To "What Is An Interface" By John Sonmez –
• You are only as fast as your slowest bottleneck – Ayende discusses an important concept in understanding the performance of your (or anyone elses) applications, looking at an instance of this involving the decision to compress (or not to) data.
• MSDN Magazine: November 2010 Issue – The November 2010 edition of the MSDN Magazine is now available online, with articles ranging from writing API documentation, SQL Azure Development, Multithreaded programming using Tasks, and much more.
• MVC – Where To Put Business Logic? – Ian Nelson provides a nice concise answer to a common question about where to locate your business logic code in an MVC application
• Pragmatic Programmers Magazine, Novemeber 2010 – The Novemeber 2010 edition of the Pragmatic Programmers magazine is now available
• 10K Apart – Nishant Kothary & Joshua Allen of the The Internet Explorer Team highlight the some of the great entries to the 10K Apart contest where full web applications had to be created in 10K or less code

Community

• OpenSpaceBeers #2 – The Second OpenSpacesBeers event is planned for the evening of Wednesday 24th November 2010, to beheld in Bar Soho, London. This Open Spaces style event is aimed at developers in any technology, and aims to discuss common topics and issues regardless of the platform. Registration is required, and space is limited
• CodeFest 2 – The DevEvening Usergroup have organised their second CodeFest event for Wednesday 1st December at the Bird in Hand Pub, Woking. This event sees every participant implement a player for a simple game, and then each participants player plays the other participants players to find an overal winner
• NxtGenUG Event: Not a DRY eye in the house – The Coventry branch of the NxtGenUG welcome Mark Rendle and his session on keeping your C# code DRY, showing tricks and tips to enable you to write more DRY code. The session is scheduled for Monday 13th December 2010 at the Royal British Legion in Coventry
• All NHibernate Day materials and videos are online – Simone Chiaretta announces the completion of the work to get all the sessions from last months NHibernate Day event in Bologna available as video for those who were not able to attend to watch. The Videos can be streamed online, and also downloaded for offline viewing.

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Software

• Mo controls, mo controls, mo controls… [Announcing the second release of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit!] – David Anson announces the release of the November 2010 release of the Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 Toolkit. This release drastically increases the available controls with new list controls, transitions, autocomplete, improved documentation and a bunch of bug fixes
• Simple.Data 0.2.0 available – Mark Rendle announces his first stable release of Simple.Data. Simple.Data is intended as an alternative to the Microsoft.Data.dll assembly which caused significant discussion when it was released. Mark’s Simple.Data aims to provide a more testable API, but with the simplicity of the Microsoft offering.

Information

• PDC 10 Session Video List – Greg Duncan provides his usual list of PDC sessions along with easy access links to download the recordings of the sessions in a variety of formats – this has to be the simplest way of getting at this content.
• Subterranean IL: Introduction – Simon Cooper kicks off a new series of posts looking at some of the low level Intermediate Language commands, starting out with a look at the Execution Stack and the datatypes that can be used there, following on with a look at calling methods for Reference and value types in Calling methods
• Using Ready-made Virtual PCs to try out the Visual Studio Async CTP – Samuel Jack share a very good suggestion for a safe way to try out the C#5 Async CTP, download one of the pre-prepared Visual Studio 2010 Virtual machines, and install the CTP on there. Samuel also highlights one of the samples for Async which shows some of the power of this new functionality in his post C# 5.0 and the sample that made me go "wow!"
• Using the Visual Studio Async CTP with RIA Services – Kyle McClellan talks about the application of the Async Functionality to RIA Services scenarios, both on the server and in the Silverlight Client.
• A Common Scenario of Multi-instances in Windows Azure – The Windows Azure Technical Forum Support Team look at a common architectural pattern for working with multiple instances, illustrating it with a Lucene.NET based example of collecting documents for indexing, indexing with multiple indexers and storing the results.
• Tracking Sales Statistics with the Silverlight Analytics Framework for Windows Phone – René Schulte looks at how you can use the SIlverlight Analytics Framework to hook into Google Analytics to allow events in your Silverlight applications to be recorded in Google Analytics allowing you to track things like sales through your application.
• PDC10: Kung Fu Silverlight – Architectural Patterns and Practices with MVVM and RIA Services – Tim Sneath continues his series of posts of his notes from various PDC sessions with his notes from John Papa’s session and Patrick Dengler’s session on Introducing HTML5 Vector Graphics
• Getting Started with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate – Load and Performance Testing – ‘nkamkolkar’ shares a step by step getting started guide to working with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate’s Load and Performance Testing functionality
• Using Tuples – BlackWasp Software Development give a nice overview of the Tuple classes introduced in .NET 4, discussing the types of tuple and their use.

Community

• Skills Matter : London .NET User Group : C# 5 – Skills Matter hosts Mads Torgersen tomorrow evening (Thursday 4th November) talking about the new functionality for C#5 announced at PDC last week.
• Caliburn.Micro Contest – Rob Eisenberg launches a competition with prizes (MSDN Subscriptions and Re-Sharper licences) looking for nice sample applications for his Caliburn.Micro library. Entries must be licensed under the MIT license, and entries will close on 1st December 2010.
• The Full Stack – videocast series with Jesse Liberty and Jon Galloway – Jon Galloway highlights his new video podcast series which features Jessie Liberty and Jon building a full, real application using the whole technology stack from server side technologies to the Windows Phone (and every thing between)

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Information

• Lucene.Net needs your help (or it will die) – Simone Chiaretta highlights the problems being faced by the Lucene.NET project, how it might be discontinued if the community behind it does not grow and urges people to get involved in this significant and widely used project.
• How to use Lucene.Net in Windows Azure – The Windows Azure Technical Forum Support Team share detailed instructions on how you can get Lucene.NET in Windows Azure applications, showing code and processes for working with Lucene.Net and the Azure Library for Lucene.Net
• WCF Web APIs, HTTP your way – Glenn Block talks about the WCF Web APIs and first class support for HTTP being introduced on the wcf.codeplex.com site, talking in detail about why and what they are focusing on in terms of support for media types and formats, Json, Querying support, HTTP messages and testability.
• Asynchrony in C# 5, Part Three: Composition – Eric Lippert looks at hos the async features in C#5 make it much easier to compose async code together than trying to do the same with code written in the continuation passing style.
• C# 5 Async Exception Handling – Ian Griffiths looks at how the traditional error handling in C# (try/catch/finally, using, etc) fits in with the Async features planned for C#5, finding that despite all the additional work being done it they still behave much as expected.
• Asynchronous C# and F# (II.): How do they differ? – Tomáš Pet?í?ek continues exploring the Aysnc support in F# and C#5, with this post looking at some of the differences between the two, looking at the built in support for cancellation of F# async workflows (looking at implementing the same in C#) and exploring the differences in control flow between the two.
• PDC and Silverlight – The Post PDC Silverlight debate continues, with this offical post from Bob Muglia on the Silverlight Team Blog, and Somasegar’s Silverlight: Lighting up the client, both looking to set the record straight. Once more there are many many other posts on the subject both from MS insiders and others – here is a selection of them:
  • Committed to Silverlight – John Papa
  • Silverlight *versus* HTML5? Really? – Mike Taulty
  • Silverlight is Dead, the Moon is Made of Cheese, and HTML 5 is Ready for Prime Time – Dan Wahlin
  • Silverlight is dead. Long live Silverlight! – Tim Heuer
  • Silverlight and the PDC – Rockford Lhotka
  • Is Silverlight Over? (The Good The Ok and The Bad) – Shai Raiten
• The new Microsoft Partner Network is here! – Eric Ligman highlights the launch of the new Microsoft Partner Network which launced yesterday (1st Nov), discussing the new competencies, ways to interact with the network and how the program can benefit you.
• OWASP Top 10 for .NET developers part 5: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) – Troy Hunt looks at the various types of Cross Site Request Forgery attack which your sites may be vulnerable to, showing how the attacks work, and what you can do to protect against them.
• XHTML in IE9 – Tony Ross of the Internet Explorer Team discusses Internet Explorer 9’s native support for XHTML
• PDC10: Inside Internet Explorer Performance – Tim Sneath continues sharing nice summaries of PDC sessions with notes from Jason Webber’s session and PDC10: Unlocking the JavaScript Opportunity with IE9, a session from Gaurav Seth.
• How To Control Who Can Write Extensions For Your MEF Application – Daniel Plaisted shares a technique which allows you to restrict the assemblies which will be loaded by MEF to look for extensions for your application allowing you to control who can write extensions, limiting them by the signing of their assemblies.
• Issues with ‘Programming Windows Phone 7’ ebook – Microsoft Press acknowledge that some people have been having problems with the display of the full free Windows Phone 7 book, and that they will be releasing an updated edition shortly.
• Only for this week the #NHibernate3 e-book… – Fabio Maulo highlights a special offer from Packt Publishing where you can get the e-book of the NHibernate 3 CookBook for $9.99/£6.99

Community

• Forecasting a cloudy evening in London on 11th November – ‘Planky’ highlights the first ‘Cloud Evening’ a new quarterly event from a new Cloud focused UserGroup. The event, to be held on Thursday 11 November 2010 at SkillsMatter in Clerkenwall, London, will features Ross Scott on his experiences working for a startup using Windows Azure, and Mark Rendle who will cover the various cloud related announcements from PDC, with a break for beer and pizza between the two.
• Video: Internationalizing Silverlight at SLUGUK – Guy Smith-Ferrier shares the video from his session on Internationalizing Silverlight, delivered at SLUGUK and recorded by Ian Smith
• FREE Technical Update Event for UK Independent Software Vendors, 25th Nov in Reading – Eric Nelson, and his colleagues in the ISV Team at Microsoft UK are hosting a full day event for ISVs to get up to speed on the latest technology from Microsoft, with content for business decision makers and techies alike, covering Azure, Sharepoint, SqlServer, Windows Phone 7, etc.

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