The Morning Brew

Information

• All your base do not belong to you – Eric Lippert discusses why it is impossible to access your base class’s base class in C# giving another valuable peek at some of the design decisions that the team made in producing the language implementation.
• "Developing a Silverlight Application for Windows Phone 7" Refcard – Greg Duncan highlights DZone’s latest RefCard Release, covering Windows Phone 7 development in Silverlight in this 5.5 page reference sheet.
• .Net 3.0 and 3.5 out of support April 12th, 2011 – ‘rickcau’ highlights the end of support for .NET 3.0 and 3.5 on April 12th 2011, and reminds us all to ensure our applications are updated to .NET 3.5 SP1 to ensure continued support.
• Windows Phone 7 Developer Guidance Map v2.0 – J.D. Meier highlights the release of an updated Windows Phone 7 Developer Guidance Map which acts as a pointer to the more in-depth resources on developing for the phone device.
• Introduction to jQuery Templates &jQuery Templates- tmpl(), template() and tmplItem() – Hajan takes a look at the templating support in jQuery exploring the background to templates, why you would want to use it, and shares some examples, and looks in depth at the three key functions of the templating library.
• How and When to use Dispose Pattern ? – Anupama Prabhakar takes a look at the Dispose Pattern and its implementation in C#, discussing why and when you should implement dispose in a nice back to basics article.
• FxCop ASP.NET Security Rules release – Sacha Faust highlights the release of the ASP.NET Security rules for FxCop and an article on MSDN Magazine which discusses the rules.
• Foundations of Programming 2 Will Need Your Help – Karl Seguin announces his plans to create an updated ‘V2’ edition of his Foundations of Programming e-Book and is looking for community involvement once again to help make it a success
• OpenId With Forms Authentication – Sacha Barber shares an implementation of ASP.NET Forms Authentication which uses OpenId to perform the actual authentication discussing both OpenId and his implementation code in this CodeProject article.
• Announcing F# snippets web site – Tomáš Pet?í?ek highlights a new website which enables the F# community to share useful snippets of code with each other, and looks like it will become a great resource for those working with and trying to learn F# alike.
• Part 3 of 4 : Tips/Tricks for Silverlight Developers. – Michael Crump continues his series of Silverlight Development Tricks and Tips looking at text box trickery, obtaining information about the web browser hosting your Silverlight application and working with child windows and tree based controls.
• Rebuilding the PDC 2010 Silverlight Application (Part 4) – Mike Taulty continues his series on rebuilding his PDC Session downloader Silverlight application, looking in this part at improving the UI and visual experience using Expression Blend.
• ECMAScript 5 Part 2: Array Extras – Luke Hoban continues a series of posts looking at the ECMAScript 5 features included in Internet Explorer 9, looking in this part at some of the new features for working with arrays.
• Quick Tip – HTML5 Intellisense For Visual Studio 2010 – Gil Fink highlights a Visual Studio extension for VS2010 and 2008 which brings HTML5 intellisense to the IDE

Community

• Still Time to Attend My Webinar Tomorrow: What Should I Do? Choosing SQL, NoSQL or Both for Scalable Web Applications – Todd Hoff is running a free Webinar today (14th December) at 2pm EST which will look at the choices between traditional relational databases and the new trend for NoSql data stores in web applications.

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Software

• ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate 2 – Phil Haack highlights the latest ASP.NET MVC 3 release. Release Candidate 2 fixes the incompatibilities with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta along with an array of other fixes and improvements, along with resolving the naming mismatch between View and ViewModel properties. This Release window also includes an update to NuGet, available via the Extension Manager.
• Announcing ASP.NET MVC 3 (Release Candidate 2) – Scott Guthrie does his usual detailed release overview on ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Candidate 2 looking at what’s new in the release, sharing code samples illustrating these features.
• jQuery UI 1.8.7 – The jQuery UI Team announce the release of jQuery UI 1.8.7 their 7th maintenance release which brings support for jQuery 1.4.4 along with a suite of bug fixes and improvements to a variety of controls.
• .NETTER Code Starter Pack v1.0.beta Released – Mohammad Ashraful Alam announces the beta release of the .NETTER Code Starter Pack 1.0. This code pack contains Visual Studio 2010 projects which illustrate a variety of different technologies in use, including Azure, WCF, MEF, Silverlight, Sharepoint, etc.

Information

• ViewBag dynamic in ASP.NET MVC 3 – RC 2 – Hajan takes a look at the newly named ViewBag feature of the ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2 release which allows dynamic data to be passed through to the view using the .NET 4 dynamic functionality.
• Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta IIS Express Integration – Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi discusses the integration of IIS Express and Visual Studio which is now supported in the Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta release, showing it in operation and discussing its use.
• VS2010 SP1: T4 no longer locks assemblies in memory – GarethJ looks at another of the VS2010 SP1 improvements, looking at how shadow copying has been brought into T4 to avoid locking assemblies.
• An Explosion of Alternative Web Frameworks – Mike Hadlow gives a nice round up of the various alternative web frameworks available on the .NET Platform, giving a brief overview of Manos, Nancy, Kayak, OWIN, and Nina.
• C# Domain-Driven Design Sample Released – Artur Trosin shares a .NET equivalent of the Java Domain Driven Design Sample application built on top of the .NET Framework 3.5, using ASP.NET MVC2, WCF, NHibernate, Rhino Commons, SqlLite, Windsor, MvcContrib, WPF, Moq, NUnit, and Log4Net, providing a good sample to explore to see these technologies in use.
• Fluent-Style Programming in JavaScript
  – Chris Sells takes a look at Linq like operations in JavaScript using features provided by the language and frameworks link jQuery.
• Writing a Compiler in C#: Parsing, Part 4 – Sasha Goldshtein continues his series on building a compiler for a custom language in C#, continuing the exploration of parsing with a code heavy post looking at a parser implementation.
• WP7 Code: Mocking Event Streams with IEnumerable – Dragos Manolescu shows how you can mock the IObservable event stream from things like the WP7 accelerometer by using the IObservable / IEnumerable duality.
• WCF Web APIs Roundup – Volume 1 – The WCF Team share a great collection of links regarding the WCF Web APIs, some of which have been featured here, but also highlighting some others I’ve missed.
• Deployable dependencies in Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta – Gunnar Peipman takes a look at another Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta feature which allows you to add deployable dependencies providing a way for component vendors to package up their runtime requirements for deployment.
• Adventures in Mono – Rob Ashton shares his initial experiences of .NET on Linux via the Mono Project, talking about getting setup, compiling some large projects he cares about (like RavenDB), debugging problems with the Mono build, and fixing his first Mono bug.
• Back to Basics: Why Unit Testing is Hard – John Sonmez continues his back to basics series with a look at unit testing, discussing why Unit Testing is so difficult, the costs of unit testing, and looking at the different levels of unit testing that are possible

Community

• Calling All Belgian Developers – Davy Brion looks to kick start the .NET / Alt.Net and wider developer movement in Belgium, looking to arrange events for the sharing of best practices, discussions of the work people are doing.

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Software

• VS2010/TFS2010 VM Refresh Downloads now available – Greg Duncan highlights the replacements Virtual Machine image for the previous VS2010 / TFS 2010 virtual machine images which expire on the 15th December 2010. This updated version is patched up to date, includes a vast array of samples and hands on labs, and won’t expire until 1st June 2011.
• Released: GhostDoc and GhostDoc Pro v3.0.10340 – SubMain announces an updated release of GhostDoc the free documentation generator for the Visual Studio IDE, and introduce a commercial offering GhostDoc Pro which adds additional features and is licensed for commercial use.
• Mono: What we are Cooking – Miguel de Icaza shares some details of all the fun and exciting things that the Novell Team are working on for the Mono Project which will be released over the next few months, including packaging IronPython, Iron Ruby, F# and UnityScript, improved WCF support, Mono support on Android, and much much more.
• Visual Studio Explosion! – VS2010 SP1 *BETA* Released and Context – Scott Hanselman talks at length about the Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta release, now generally available, discussing the risks of Beta Software, what works well together (including a link to the yet to be released ASP.NET MVC 3 RC2) and discusses the features the Service Pack introduces.

Information

• Now Available: Windows 7 Phone Guide – J.D. Meier announces the release of the Patterns and Practices Windows Phone 7 Guidance, now available on MSDN. This 7 Chapter guide looks at design patterns for developing on the Phone device, discusses the hardware capabilities and provides advice on the key design decisions you will face when developing on this platform.
• Now Available: Windows 7 Phone Guide – J.D. Meier announces the release of the Patterns and Practices Windows Phone 7 Guidance, now available on MSDN. This 7 Chapter guide looks at design patterns for developing on the Phone device, discusses the hardware capabilities and provides advice on the key design decisions you will face when developing on this platform.
• Checking for Network connectivity in Windows Phone 7 SDK – ‘A Ninja’ takes a look at how you easily check for the presence of a network connection when executing code on the Windows Phone 7 platform, allowing you to handle missing connections nicely in your application rather than waiting for connections to fail.
• Class-Level Model Validation with EF Code First and ASP.NET MVC 3 – Scott Guthrie takes a look at the Entity Framework validation support via Data Annotations, and shares a worked example of using this functionality in an ASP.NET MVC3 application.
• Efficient Paging with WebGrid Web Helper – ASP.NET MVC 3 RC – Malcolm Sheridan takes a look at working with the ASP.NET MVC WebGrid helper, exploring how to implement paging in the grid.
• How to use T4 templates in WP7, Silverlight, Desktop or even MonoDroid apps – Daniel Cazzulino takes a look at how T4 templates can utilised applications on any framework without requiring an additional runtime dependencies.
• Dependency Injection with Windows Workflow Foundation 4 an answer – Daniel Marbach follows up from a previous post about injecting dependencies in Windows Workflow Foundation activities taking a look at using his Ninject extension which provides this functionality. In this post he looks at its use sharing plenty of code samples.
• Fluent Builders, Part 1 – Peter Ritchie starts a series of posts on the builder pattern and creating a Fluent API for it, exploring the background to the patterns, the principles and exploring implementations.
• Writing Cross-Platform XAML Applications – Mike Ormond shares a guest article from Colin Eberhardt who discusses some of the key considerations, pitfalls, and tips to help you build cross platform applications using XAML to target web, desktop and phone.
• WCF and AppFabric AutoStart – Ron Jacobs discusses the difference in first call duration on a WCF Service that the AppFabric Auto Start functionality provides, talks about what Auto Start does, and highlights the IIS Warmup Module for IIS7.5 which provides similar benefits.

Community

• Register now for the FREE Tech Days Online Conference January 20th – Eric Nelson highlights a free online Tech Days event being run on the 20th January 2011 which looks at building applications with Windows Phone 7, Windows 7 or for the web browser. With an agenda spread over 3 tracks and running from 3pm GMT to 8:30pm GMT there will be plenty of good and interesting content there.

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