The Morning Brew

Software

• NHibernate 3.0 released – The NHibernate Team announce the General Availability (GA) release of NHibernate 3.0. This release is the official stable release of the latest generation of the ORM tool, bringing it onto the .NET 3.5 platform. This major new release brings a number of improvements and bugfixes over previous versions, and also includes a few breaking changes outlined in this post.
• Visual Studio Unit Testing Extensions v1.1.0.0 – Jeremiah Clark announces the release of v1.1.0.0 of his Unit Testing Extensions for Visual Studio. This release includes new assertion statements for dates, collections and strings and now targets the .NET Framework 4
• Native Extensions for Microsoft Silverlight – Maor highlights the Native Extension for Microsoft Silverlight, a Code Plex project which brings support for some of the funky Windows 7 features to your Silverlight Applications

Information

• MSDN Magazine: December 2010 Issue – The December 2010 edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online, featuring articles on Windows Phone Development, the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service, BDD with SpecFlow and WatiN, profiling with Event Tracing for Windows, along with the usual selection of columns covering topics from Web UI Testing with jQuery through to AOP using Unity 2.0 and much more
• Visual Studio 2010 Survey Results – Jason Zander talks a little about the results of the Visual Studio 2010 Survey, and highlights some of the fixes and releases which deliver on users concerns
• ASP.NET MVC Diagnostics Using NuGet – Phil Haack highlights a great ASP.NET MVC Diagnostic page created/documented by Brad Wilson which provides a quick and simple way of diagnosing common ASP.NET MVC Problems. The diagnostic page is available as a NuGet package
• Basic JavaScript Part 3 : Prototypes – Jan Van Ryswyck continues his series on the basics of JavaScript with a look at the concept of Prototypes, one of the more confusing aspects of the language for those coming from a staticly typed language background
• PhoneHyperlinkButton updated: now supports web, email, text and phone call tasks – Jeff Wilcox shares an update to his HyperlinkButton Control for Windows Phone 7 which now supports the phone operations for Web, Email, Text and Phone call on the data in the control. As usual, Jeff shows the control in a number of code samples, and provides full source for the control.
• C# IShellLink COM Interop Example #1 – Richard Russell shares code for working with Shell Links from C# Code via COM Interop, and also discusses some of the key concepts in the code, providing full source under the Microsoft Permissive License
• Generating Load Tests for WCF Services with the WCF Load Test Tool – MCS UK Solution Development Team – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Rob Jarratt highlights the release of the beta of the WCF Load Test 3.0 with an article which takes a step by step look at how you can use this tool to perform load tests on your own WCF services.
• Quick ways to boost performance and scalability of ASP.NET, WCF and Desktop Clients – Omar Al Zabir takes a look at a number of Machine.Config settings which can have a dramatic impact on the performance of the applications running on the machine, discussing values for these settings which have worked for him.
• 10 Things Developers Will Love About Silverlight 5 – Gergely Orosz gives a quick rundown of 10 of the top features that will be included in the forthcoming Silverlight 5 releases
• Windows Azure: Debug and redeploy your web applications quickly – Gunnar Peipman looks at how having Remote Desktop Access to Windows Azure Web Worker Roles can make it much easier to debug and diagnose application problems
• How to inspect a type inheritance tree properly – Daniel Cazzulino combines Reflection and LINQ to evaluate the inheritance tree of types and the interfaces the implement, and discusses uses for this type of code.
• Okay, WCF, we can be friends now – Jon Galloway takes a look at some of the key features of the WCF Web APIs which have made him more keen to work with WCF

Community

• New UK Visual Studio 2010 Events – Giles of the UK Developer Tools Team highlights a programme of events covering various aspects of the Visual Studio IDE happening over the next 6 months. The events are a mix of in person seminars and Virtual events meaning there is something for everyone.
• Silverlight Firestarter Keynote and Sessions – John Papa posts a quick access set of links the the videos of the sessions from the Silverlight FireStarter event from last week. The 8 videos are available in a variety of formats and cover all aspects of Silverlight development
• My RavenDB talk to the Melbourne Users Group – Ayende shares the video (captured by David Burela) of his session on Raven DB recorded at the Melbourne .NET User Group back in November

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