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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Software

• Announcing Silverlight 5 – Scott Guthrie blogs the announcement of Silverlight 5, made today at the The Future of Microsoft Silverlight – keynote yesterday. The full recording of the keynote is available online, so you can watch the announcement for yourself, or get the highlights from Scott’s post. The beta release of Silverlight 5 will be in Spring 2011 with the final release being second half 2011.
• Why a 64-bit runtime for Silverlight 5 Matters – Bart Czernicki discusses why he feels that the 64-bit runtime for Silverlight, announced in the plans for Silverlight 5 is a significant one.
• Silverlight 5 Beta announced – Mike James highlights some of the key features of Silverlight 5, and also links to a number of other blog posts on the Silverlight / HTML5 debate.
• WCF RIA Services Toolkit December 2010 – Jeff Handley highlights the December 2010 edition of the WCF RIA Services Toolkit which builds on top of the WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP1 Beta. This new release includes significant improvements to the T4 Code Generation, a new MVVM-Friendly DomainDataSource and an update to the Windows Azure Table Storage DomainService.

Information

• Handling Events with Reactive Extensions – Mike Battista takes a look at event handling using the Reactive Extensions on the Windows Phone 7, sharing the benefits of Rx brings to the table when handling events
• Grouping Routes Part 1 – Phil Haack takes a simple look at grouping routes together by common parts of them and then looks at a more complex and feature rich way, digging down inside the way Routing works.
• If you’re building web apps, this will just take 2 minutes – Don Smith highlights a survey from the Patterns and Practices team which they are using to help focus some new guidance on building web applications. If this is your field, go give them some answers to help shape their direction.
• Static type langagues – Louis Salin follows up on a Twitter conversation which suggested “If you need a static typed language, then you don’t pay enough attention to your tests.” with a look at the benefits of a static typed language
• Type systems and their advantages – Matt Hinze shares his thoughts on the dynamic vs static typed languages debate which has recently resumed, looking at the issues from both standpoints.
• The case against Interfaces in TDD – Jimmy Bogard highlights an interesting post from Mark Ploeh discussing how interface use in TDD style development is not always about providing an abstraction. Jimmy builds on this topic with some discussion of how the situation changes (or doesn’t) if you drop these interfaces.
• C#/.NET Toolbox: Generic Reversing Comparers – James Michael Hare starts a new series of posts sharing Generic Utility Class implementations. In this first part, he shares some helpers for comparisons in.NET.
• Rebuilding the PDC 2010 Silverlight Application (Part 1) – Mike Taulty kicks of a series of posts looking at the construction (or re-construction) of his Silverlight based PDC2010 session video downloading application. These post will be a walk through of the steps involved in re-creating the application.
• Slash your ASP.NET compile/load time without any hard work – JKealey shares a number of tips which can help you to improve the performance of your ASP.NET Compile / Load time, looking at compilation time, application first load time, and other general performance tips.

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Software

• JetBrains TeamCity 6 is Released, Bundles dotCover – JetBrains announces the release of TeamCity version 6, the latest edition of their continuous integration and build management server. New in this release is the inclusion of DotCover ‘in the box’ providing code coverage reporting as a part of the build.
• WiX v3.5 escrow build is now available to download – Aaron Stebner highlights the status of the latest WiX build which has put Wix in ‘escrow mode’ meaning that there are zero active bugs. Obviously this means that this version is a great candidate to update to, and in doing so (and testing it) you will help the team verify that this build is ready to become the final 3.5 build.

Information

• 24 ways – web design and development articles and tutorials for advent – Drew McLellan kicks off the 5th year of 24 ways, a web development advent calendar bringing a quality web development related article from well know authors every day in the lead up to Christmas.
• Windows Advent Calendar – Rob Margel highlights the Windows 7 Advent Calendar, a Silverlight application which highlights a different Windows 7 feature for every day of advent.
• Enterprise Integration Anti-Patterns #2 – Shared Assemblies – Ian Nelson continues his Enterprise Integration Anti-Patterns series of posts looking at why he considers Shared assemblies to represent an anti-pattern, and how functionality can be shared in enterprise applications without sharing assemblies.
• WebFormContrib – Sample Part 1 – Deran Schilling shares some of his experiences using the WebFormsContrib framework in real projects to make his WebForms applications more MVC like.
• The joys of date/time arithmetic – Jon Skeet discusses the complexities of time and date arithmetic and working with time periods and the challenges that this brings to the Noda Time library.
• Web Server and ASP.NET Application life Cycle in Depth – Massimiliano Peluso takes a nice detailed look at the lifecycle of an ASP.NET Application, looking at both the Web Server and ASP.NET parts of the process in this CodeProject article.
• Pooled Lifetime Manager for Unity – Ricardo Peres shares an implementation of a object pool lifecycle for Unity which creates a pool of objects of a particular type and then reuses the items from the pool

Community

• DDD9 – 29th Jan 2011 – Vote for Sessions – Session submission for the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 9 conference to be held in Reading on Saturday 29th January 2011 has now closed, which can mean only one thing, now is the time for you to pick which sessions you want to see at the event in the session voting.

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