The Morning Brew

Software

• Silverlight service release today – 4.0.51204 – Tim Heuer highlights the release of an update to Silverlight 4 which addresses two customer reported issues where there was no workaround possible, addressing issues with diacritical marks in textbox on the Mac Silverlight player, an an issue with updates for Silverlight OOB applications when certificates expire.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 3: Razor’s @: and <;ext> syntax &
• ASP.NET MVC 3: Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor – Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts looking at some of the new features in ASP.NET MVC3, taking a look at two new pieces of syntax for rendering out text content, and discusses the support for code nuggets in Razor allowing you to perform a variety of expressions in your templates.
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Part 7 – All About Conventions – Rob Eisenberg continues his series on his Caliburn.Micro application framework for Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and WPF, exploring the use of conventions in Caliburn Micro to reduce the boiler plate code required, and discusses how the conventions can be customised
• RavenDB – StackOverflow style voting with Live Projections – Rob Ashton takes a look at a Stack Overview like question / answer system, looking at how RavenDB and its live projections can provide nice ways of generating the data required for views via a web application in an efficient and computationally cheap way.
• jQuery Templates – XHTML Validation – Hajan continues this series of posts on jQuery Templates, discussing how the use of templates as illustrated so far can cause XHTML validation errors due to HTML tags in script blocks, and in this post looks at some of the solutions to this problem.
• Critical Analysis of an Algorithm: Sproc, Embedded SQL, and ORM – Ken Downs follows on from yesterdays article with a look at how a particular problem can be solved using the three different data access methods, showing some of the key differences and requirements between the implementations.
• Monitoring Memory Usage on Windows Phone 7 – Mike Ormond discusses some of the memory monitoring features of the Windows Phone runtime when you are debugging explaining the meanings of the debugging numbers displayed in the emulator, and looking at how you can access memory use information programatically.
• Strategies for Improving INotifyPropertyChanged in WPF and Silverlight – Pete Brown takes a look at some alternatives for implementing INotifyPropertyChanged one of the key parts in databinding in WPF and Silverlight, looking at a basic example, showing an alternative using Lambda expressions and reflection, and highlighting another way using IL weaving
• Rebuilding the PDC 2010 Silverlight Application (Part 5) – Mike Taulty continues with his series on rebuilding his PDC 2010 Session Downloader Silverlight application, discussing the implementation of some quick select buttons to provide a quick way of getting all items of a particular type.
• Displaying HTML Content in Windows Phone 7 – Mike Ormond discusses some of the complications encountered by early adopter developers on the Windows Phone Platform with the Web Browser control, discussing the solutions his colleagues came up with.

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Software

• December release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available now. – ‘Jialiang’ highlights the latest All-In-One Code Framework release. This ever growing collection of samples which demonstrate various technologies has been updated with a number of new samples in both C# and VB.NET covering ASP.NET Features, Office Development, Windows Shell, Web Browser controls and networking.
• Windows Azure AppFabric CTP December release now available – The Windows Azure AppFabric Team announces the release of the December Windows Azure AppFabric CTP which brings further enhancements to the Acess Control Service.
• The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit December Update Available for Download – Wes Yanaga highlights the latest update to the Windows Azure Platform Traning Kit which consists of a range of hands on labs, demos and presentations, and this release specifically includes a number of new presentations on the service buss, Azure Connect, SQL Azure, low latency web apps, and also has all the demos updated to the Azure SDK 1.3.
• Enter Hawkeye – Dru Sellers announces Hawkeye, a service monitoring tool which hosts its own web server allowing you to monitor the health of services. Full code is available on GitHub

Information

• New Windows Phone 7 Curriculum available! – Required Verbage – my garbage collector – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Andrew Sithers highlights the release of the Windows Phone 7 curriculum for Computer Science written by Rob Miles and edited by Andrew. The material is code first, and gives introduction to the Phone, Silverlight, VS2010, and look at UI Design in SIlverlight, consuming data, writing CNA applications and is available as a handbook and series of labs and presentation decks.
• Exploring Reactive Extensions – Testing – Alex Ullrich continues his series of posts on the Reactive Extensions for .NET, looking at testing and mocking of code that works with observable event streams.
• jQuery Templates with ASP.NET MVC – Hajan continues his series of posts on jQuery Templates with a worked example in ASP.NET MVC which illistrates their use ina real world case.
• Razor, Nested Layouts and Redefined Sections – Marcin Dobosz follows up on his earlier post on option sections and default content in the Razor view engine with a look at using sections across nested and complex layouts
• Force VS to garbage collect – Cameron Skinner shares a key press combination which causes the Visual Studio IDE to perform a forced garbage collection of the CLR in the VS environment which can be very useful when testing code which integrates with the IDE
• Slightly lighter than HashSet<WeakReference> – HashSet<GCHandle> (an experiment) – ’tilovell’ looks at the use of GCHandle structs over WeakReferences for implementing large collections, discussing the memory behaviour, and some of the features of GCHandle.
• EF Feature CTP5: Validation – Pawel Kadluczka, a developer on the Entity Framework Team discusses the validation features introduced in the Entity Framework Feature CTP 5 release, discussing the background and implementation of the validation, and looking at the validations use in a variety of different scenarios.
• A Feature-driven Comparison of Entity Framework and NHibernate – Self-tracking entities – Dino Esposito continues his series of posts comparing and contrasting Entity Framework with NHibernate, discussing the Entity Framework Self Tracking Entity feature and looking at the closest equivalent in NHibenate
• Historical Perspective of ORM and Alternatives – Ken Downs takes a look back at the history and origins of the Object Relational Mapper paradigm and how it sits alongside the altermatives to ORM.
• Sharding with SQL Azure – Michael Thomassy shares a whitepaper on creating a sharded data architecture with SQL Azure, discussing the theory, benefits and challenges and introduces the key concepts
• What to Read to Get Up to Speed in JavaScript – Rey Bango collates the wisdom from the JSMentors list’s discussion on books for learning JavaScript, collecting together the collectives recommendations for the best books to look at.

Community

• In The Brain Session: Intro to RavenDB – Ayende will be visiting SkillsMatter in London on the evening of Tuesday 18th January 2011 where he will be giving an ‘In the Brain’ session on RavenDB.

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Software

• Running xunit tests in Silverlight-xunitcontrib-silverlight – Matt Ellis highlights the latest release of xunitcontrib, containing a port of the xunit testing framework to the Silverlight platform allowing you to create tests in the xunit way and have them run in any environments which Silverlight runs.
• StatLight release (V1.2 &amp; V1.3) – Jason Jarrett highlights (somewhat belatedly) the last two releases of StatLight, a Silverlgiht tool for automating test execution in Silverlight unit tetst making it easier to run your tests regularly and help reduce your feedback cycle.
• MVC Extensions – Announcing DXperience v2010 vol 2 – DevExpress have just released their DXpereince v2010 Vol 2 release which is their major release for the second half of 2010. This release includes a vast array of new stuff across all the areas they provide solutions, including this library of extensions for ASP.NET MVC.

Information

• Update on ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 (and a workaround for a bug in it) – Scott Guthrie discusses a metadata caching issue which has been reported in the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 release, sharing a workaround for the problem to enable you to continue using the RC if you are encountering this issue.
• A Bluescreen By Any Other Color – Mark Russinovich takes a Christmas themed dive into some kernel hackery looking at changing the colour of the traditional ‘Blue Screen of Death’. As this post involves meddling with the kernel it comes with the highest of ‘at your own risk’ warnings.
• Best Practices for Maximizing Scalability and Cost Effectiveness of Queue-Based Messaging Solutions on Windows Azure – Valery Mizonov shares a whitepaper on best practices for working with queue messaging systems in Windows Azure, looking at common customer scenarios the theory, and an actual technical implenentation.
• jQuery Templates – {Supported Tags} – Hajan continues this series looking at the templating functionality in jQuery, looking at the template tags and their syntax in more detail, sharing examples of each in use.
• Learn WPF for Free – Daniel Auger outlines a learning plan with links to resources for anyone who is looking to learn the basics of WPF development at no cost, drawing on some of the great resources available for free.
• RavenDB on Mono – Rob Ashton continues his Mono adventure with a look at running RavenDB on the Mono Plaftorm, discussing what works (most of it) and what doesn’t (unit tests).
• Working with the Silverlight Rich Text Box control – Kevin Dockx takes a nice look at the Silverlight Rich Text Box control which was introduced in Silverlight 4, looking at its various features and sharing a code sample to illustrate.
• Strict Mode Is Coming To Town – Douglas Crockford discusses the ECMAScript 5 ‘Strict Mode’, one of the key new features which removes some of the problematic features of the ECMAScript language. Douglas discusses how adoption has been made easy by making it backward compatible with earlier versions, and discussing the various features it affects.

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