The Morning Brew

Software

• SSMS Tools Pack 1.9.4 is out! Now with SQL Server 2011 (Denali) CTP1 support. – Mladen Prajdi? announces the release of the latest edition of his SQL Server Management Studio Tools pack, a suite of utility tools that bolt into the Management Studio IDE / Management Console. This new version fixes a number fo bugs and brings support for the SQL Server 2011 CTP release.
• New Release Microsoft.Activities.UnitTesting 1.71 – Ron Jacobs announces the latest release of his Workflow testing framework for testing activities. This new release makes use of the Task Parallel Library to make testing easier using tasks to push episodes of work through the workflow.
• ReSharper 5.1.2 Release Candidate – Jura Gorohovsky highlights the release candidate release of ReSharper 5.1.2 which will likely be released as an official release in mid-January. This release brings support for MSTest projects being re-targeted to .NET 3.5
• "Azure Blob Studio 2011" A standalone utility and/or Visual Studio 2010 extension for Azure blob management (with VB source too) – Greg Duncan highlights the release of ‘Azure Blob Studio 2011’ a utility from Alessandro Del Sole which provides a standalone WPF client and Visual Studio 2010 Extension which allows you to work with files stored in Azure Blob Storage. Full source (in VB.NET) is available for these tools too.
• CoffeeScript – CoffeeScript has reached its 1.0.0 release. This simple language allows you to write clear code and have it compiled down into real JavaScript which passes Lint, runs quickly and integrates well with any JavaScript Libraries.

Information

• Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 4 – Range, Part 5 – Empty, Part 6 – Repeat, Part 7 – Count and LongCount, Part 8 – Concat , Part 9 – SelectMany & Part 10 – Any and All – Jon Skeet continues his look at re-implementing Linq-to-objects from first principles with a look at the implementation of a number of the standard LINQ operators, in each case looking at what the method is, defining tests for the method and sharing an implementation.
• Testing IndexedDB with the SqlCeJsE40.dll COM Server and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 or 9 Beta & Testing IndexedDB with the Trial Tool Web App and Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta 8 – Roger Jennings takes a look at the implementations of the IndexDB draft specification from the W3C in the latest editions of Internet Explorer and FireFox
• Format JavaScript with the IE9 developer tools – Jef Claes shares a useful tip for anyone who has to work with pages which include minified JavaScript code, the Internet Explorer Developers Tools in IE9 include a feature which will reformat JavaScript making it much more readable. This feature is in the latest preview releases.
• Basic JavaScript Part 5: Hoisting – Jan Van Ryswyck continues his series looking at the basics of JavaScript, taking a look at the scoping of variables in JavaScript functions, and discussing how to prevent some of the interesting bugs that can be introduced due to not understanding this.
• An Introduction to Mocking (Now that we are SOLID) – Philip Japikse takes a look at the various aspects of mocking, exploring the meaning and use of Mocks, Stubs and Fakes in your testing.
• Internals of a Delegate – Abhishek Sur takes a look at the wonderful world of Delegates, showing how they are declared and used, and exploring how they operate at the Intermediate Language level, using the examples to illustrate some facts about delegates behaviour.
• Aspect Examples (INotifyPropertyChanged via aspects) – Sacha Barber takes a look at implementing INotifyPropertyChanged using Aspect Oriented Programming techniques across 4 of the popular AOP framework implementations (Castle, Unity, PostSharp, and LinFu.AOP).
• Detecting UI Thread Misuse – Nathan Nesbit discusses the importance of not blocking on the UI thread in your applications to ensure that you are providing a responsive UI experience to your users, and shares a little tool that can help to detect blocking of the UI thread.
• Hosting the Razor Engine for Templating in Non-Web Applications – Rick Strahl posts in detail looking at the use of the Razor View Engine as a provder of generic template functionality in your non-web based applications, looking at the various options for hosting the template runtime. Full source code is available to support the article.
• Project templates for F# games, libraries and applications on Windows Phone 7 using XNA – Don Syme highlights the availability of templates for creating Windows Phone 7 games using the F# language created by Johann Deneux and Giuseppe Maggiore
• Basic Collision (TriangleShooter) – Kenny Spade takes an introductory look at collision detection using XNA on the Windows Phone emulator.
• Taking a screenshot from within a Silverlight #WP7 application – Laurent Bugnion shares the code necessary to take screenshots of your Silverlight based Windows Phone 7 applications which makes use of the XNA libraries to provide means to save the captured picture
• Part 4 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers. – Michael Crump wraps up his series sharing tricks and tips for the Silverlight looking in this part at clean XAML Code, debugging Browser support issues, making use of Lambda expressions, disabling the close button, and working with your own web services.
• Dependency Property Value Resolution – Arik Poznanski takes a look at the 11 different ways of influencing the value of a dependency property, illustrating each technique with a simple example.
• An update on the NuGet package submission process – David Ebbo gives an update on the NuGet package submission process, discussing its weak points, and talking about how the process will be improved with the introduction of the new Gallery.

Community

• An Introduction Into XNA – The Manchester / Warrington NxtGenUG are holding an event on the evening of Wednesday 19th January 2011 where Simon Jackson will be looking at building games for the Windows and Windows Phone 7 platform using the XNA game development framework.

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