The Morning Brew

Software

• Algorithmia Source Code released on CodePlex – Frans Bouma announces the Open Source release of Algorithmia, a data structures and algorithms implementation library providing implementations of well known algorithms and structures which are not already present in the .NET Framework.
• Downloads – Fluent NHibernate – The Fluent NHibernate team have released ‘stable pre-release’ binaries of Fluent NHibernate which work against NHibernate 3 (which hit its General Availability release this past week)
• SQL Server 2008 R2 System Views Map Poster – Andrew Kelly highlights the availability of a poster describing the key System Views and their relations in SQL Server 2008 R2. If you ever need to interrogate the state or metadata of a SQL Server instance this kind of document is very valuable. Available in PDF and XPS formats in 36inch square format

Information

• Announcing Entity Framework Code-First (CTP5 release) – Scott Guthrie gives one of his great overview posts of the new Entity Framework Code First CTP release, looking at installation giving an overview of all the new features and improvements
• Looking at EF4 CTP5 in Parts: Part 1 – A New T4 Template, Part 2 – Internal Validation, Part 3 – Easy Access to In-Memory Entities & Part 4 – Working with New and Existing Databases in Code First – Julie Lerman takes a look at the new Entity Framework Code First CTP, exploring the new T4 DbContext Generator, the use of Validation attributes to provide validation checks on entities, the use of the Local property to access in memory entities and reduce calls to the database,and explores the features that enable you to work with pre-existing databases.
• EF Feature CTP5 – Walkthrough For The New DbContext T4 Template, Code First Fluent API & Raw SQL Query/Command Support – Gil Fink also has a series of posts exploring the new release, taking a look at the DbContext T4 Template, using the Fluent API for defining your code first mappings, and the ability to execute custom raw SQL queries on the database through the DbContext.
• EF Feature CTP5: Code First Walkthrough &Fluent API Samples – Rowan Miller of the ADO.NET team shares a worked example using the latest CTP version of the Entity Framework Code First features, and shares a number of short samples illustrating the different aspects of the Fluent API.
• Logging all SQL statements done by Entity Framework – Simone Chiaretta digs into Entity Framework looking at using the Provider Wrappers to help intercept the queries being run against the database.
• Aimee.NET – Faster Unit Tests and Refactoring the Documents Folder – Matthew Dennis continues his series of Code Project articles discussing the refactoring work being undertaken to take Lucene and transform it into Aimee.Net giving it a more .NET like API.
• Optional Razor Sections with Default Content – ‘marcind’ takes a look at some of the templating options in Razor exploring required and optional section declarations
• Dynamically Generating Controls in WPF and Silverlight – Pete Brown continues with a series of posts looking at helping ease WinForms developers over to the world of WPF and Silverlight taking a look at the variety of ways of creating controls both in code and in XAML.
• The Fat ViewModel – Richard Dingwall takes a look at the Fat ViewModel anti-pattern, discussing how you can identify if you are suffering from this and looking at some of the causes.
• Experience ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta/RC – The New Dependency Injection Support – Part 2 – Xianzhong Zhu continues exploring the improved support for Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC 3 looking in this part at using dependency injection in your model classes with a worked example.
• Rebuilding the PDC 2010 Silverlight Application (Part 3) – Mike Taulty continues his rebuilding of his PDC Session Downloader Silverlight application looking at the use of WCF Data services to access the session information data.

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Software

• Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta – Jason Zander announces the beta release of Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1, available now for MSDN Subscribers, with general availability coming on Thursday. This release focuses on addressing the most requested features including IntelliTrace for 64bit and Sharepoint, along with including the Silverlight 4 tooling. Somasegar also discusses the release in his post Visual Studio 2010 momentum. Brian Harry also has a nice post highlighting the major changes, along with the details of all the changes for TFS users in his VS/TFS 2010 SP1 Beta has Released announcement post.
• "Going Live" with the Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta – ‘selkins’ of the Visual Studio Product Feedback team discusses the support available for you if you choose to put the Service Pack 1 beta into your production development environment, and also highlights the Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta Survey
• Announcing Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 and Project Server Integration Feature Pack Beta – Christophe Fiessinger highlights beta of the second feature pack for Visual Studio TFS which brings integration between TFS 2010 and Microsoft Project.
• Windows 7 Phone Database Rapid Repository – V2.0 Beta Released – Sean McAlinden announces the beta release of V2 of his Windows Phone 7 Database and Repository implementation. This version addresses reported bugs and also adds new View features
• EF Feature CTP5 Released! – The Entity Framework Team have pushed out their 5th Technology Preview edition containing the latest cut of the Code First features along with its simplified DbContext API

Information

• Entity Framework Tutorials for ASP.NET Developers – Tom Dykstra of the ASP.NET User Education Team highlights a new series of tutorials for ASP.NET developers which covers the Entity Framework, hosted on the main ASP.NET site.
• NuGet Roundup December 2010 Edition – Phil Haack turns link blogger providing a short link list of soem great content about the NuGet Project, ranging from podcasts to step by step walkthroughs there is some great content there.
• Back To Basics: Sorting – John Sonmez continues his Back To Basics series with a look at the general background to sorting, discussing the various different ways of performing sorts
• Exploring Reactive Extensions – Subscription Management – Alex Ullrich continues his exploration of the Reactive Extensions, discussing in this post how you look after the IDisposable Subscription object you get when subscribing to an event stream.
• Dependency Injection with Windows Workflow Foundation 4 Introduction – Daniel Marbach kicks off a new series of posts looking a Dependency Injection in Windows Workflow Foundation 4, and in this post sets the scene by outlining the various problems.
• Generating Random Dates – Bj Rollison shares some simple ways of generating random dates within a date window for testing purposes.
• An easy approach to adding user notifications to ASP web applications – John V. Petersen shares an implementation of user notifications for Web Applications in an ASP.NET MVC2 sample. John bases his work on an article from the Java world, and aims to make common notification tasks easy to implement in your applications.

Community

• DDD9 – voting now open for the UK’s premier community event – Liam Westley reminds us all that the community session voting is currently under way for the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 9 event to be held in Reading at the end of January 2011. This is your chance to shape the agenda for the event, so if there is something you are interested in seeing, get voting for it.
• Last chance to see … Virtualisation for Developers at NxtGenUG Cambridge, Tuesday 14th December – Liam is also taking his Virtualisation for Developers and Hyper-V for Developers presentations on the road for the last time, visiting the Cambridge NxtGenUG on Tuesday 14th December. Liam is an excellent and entertaining speaker, and this event promises to have some extra Christmas sparkle – well worth checking out if you are in the area.

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Update: Fixed the attribution for ‘Dynamic Language Integration in a C# World’ – an incorrect copy paste operation incorrectly attributed the article to Marcus Olsson when the correct author was ‘Zenon Ochal’. Thanks to Marcus for pointing it out.

Information

• Making ASP.NET deployment easy with the Package/Publish Web tool – Rachel Appel discusses the provisions in Visual Studio to assist teams who are responsible for deploying the ASP.NET code they develop, walking through the configuration, build and deploy process.
• RenderAction with ASP.NET MVC 3 Sessionless Controllers – Keith Dahlby looks at the support fo Sessionless Controllers in ASP.NET MVC 3, looking at how this setting affects the rendering of other controller actions using RenderAction().
• Javascript: Defining Classes with Closures – Mike Hadlow takes a look at creating classes in JavaScript using Closure syntax based on thing he learnt from Douglas Crockford’s 5 part video presentation series
• Strategies for becoming a better programmer – Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo shares thoughts on things you can do to become a better developer, ranging from soft skills, through to practising your art.
• Some NHibernate Best-Practices – Nick Harrison shares a number of best practices for getting the most out of (and avoiding some of the pitfalls of) working with NHibernate for creating business applications.
• When WinForms met Game Loop – Shawn Hargreaves discusses some of the differences between XNA and WinForms, looking at how the two worlds can be brought together when hosting XNA inside a WindowForms applications, whilst maintaining the good behaviours of each.
• Announcing the Caliburn.Micro Contest Winners! – Rob Eisenberg shares the results of his Caliburn Micro competition highlighting the winners (and more importantly the location of the code for each), providing a great way to learn more about the framework by looking at others work with it.
• Subterranean IL: Pseudo custom attributes – Simon Cooper continues his series on the .NET Intermediate Language with a look at how Custom Attributes are applied to your code and compiled into the IL representation.
• Silverlight 5 features, firestarter keynote and sessions resources – Katrien De Graeve provides a nice summary of the Silverlight 5 announcement, along with links to the various resources from the Silverlight Firestarter event
• Rebuilding the PDC 2010 Silverlight Application (Part 2) – Mike Taulty continues his step by step rebuild of his Silverlight PDC 2010 Session downloader applications, focusing in this part on the Out of Browser experience.
• Exception data evolved – Markus Olsson takes a look at the little know Exception.Data collection which provides a way of passing additional Key/Value information along with your exception to help debug exceptions more easily.
• Dynamic Language Integration in a C# World – Markus OlssonZenon Ochal takes a look at interop between the dynamic language world of IronPython and the staticly typed world of C# using the .NET 4 dynamic keyword

Community

• What’s new in ASP.NET MVC 2.0 & 3.0 – Scottish Developers welcome Andy Gibson and a session on the new features in ASP.NET MVC v2 and 3 bringing your knowledge up to date with the latest features including Razor, NuGet, improved Dependency Injection support. Th event is on the evening of Thursday 20th January, and is being held at Glasgow Caledonian University
• From Express to Ultimate: Improving Productivity with Visual Studio 2010, 14th Dec – Giles highlights an event being organised by Microsoft and Black Marble to be held on Tuesday 14th December at Microsoft London, where they will be looking at the features of the different Visual Studio editions.
• Plankytronixx Academy: Windows Azure Connect – Live Meeting on 15th December 16:00-17:15 UK time (08:00-09:15 PST) – Planky is running a live meeting event on the early evening of Wednesday 15th December which will look at the uses and misuses of Windows Azure Connect networking and domain joins, in what may become the first of a series of events.

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