The Morning Brew

Happy New Year everyone, and congratulations to the new and renewed MVPs.

Software

• NServiceBus 2.5 Released – Udi Dahan announces the release of NServiceBus 2.5, the latest incarnation of this Enterprise Service Bus. This release brings updates, improvements and bugfixes based on real use of V2.0, along with introducing new commercial licensing options and a new product website.
• "Simple MVVM Toolkit for Silverlight" v1 Release – Greg Duncan highlights a new MVVM framework for Silverlight development from Tony Sneed which has evolved out of real world use cases drawing on and helping to define some pragmatic best practices for work in the MVVM style.
• Introducing SeleniuMspec – Ashic Mahtab announces his first CodePlex project, SeleniuMSpec, a tool for converting the output of the Selenium IDE into MSpec BDD tests. The project is a work in progress and Ashic is looking for feedback and help with it.
• Zombie.js: insanely fast, full-stack, headless testing – Assaf Arkin announces Zombie.js, a testing framework for performing headless full stack testing of web applications and their client side code using an expressive JavaScript API

Information

• VS 2010 SP1 (Beta) and IIS Express – Scott Guthrie discusses the support for IIS Express which is added to Visual Studio 2010 in the Service Pack 1 update, bringing the ease of the built in ‘Cassini’ web server with the beef of IIS7.5. This post outlines the features and looks at how you can enable IIS Express in your projects.
• Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 18 – ToLookup, Part 19 – Join, Part 20 – ToList, Part 21 – GroupBy, Part 22 – GroupJoin, Part 23 – Take/Skip/TakeWhile/SkipWhile &Part 24 – ToArray – Jon Skeet continues his series of posts looking at reimplementing LINQ to Objects with a look at another 7 operators/groups of operators, continuing in the same style of defining the operator, looking at test cases and implementing the operator, providing an interesting look at how these things work behind the scenes.
• Dotfuscator Deep Dive with WP7 – Bil Simser shares his experiences working with Dotfuscator to perform code obfuscation for Windows Phone 7 applications, working through the obfuscation process and discussing the key options which control the obfuscation performed.
• That dreaded M in ASP.NET MVC – Hadi Hariri discusses the use of ViewModels in ASP.NET MVC and shares results from a Twitter Poll on the subject.
• VS2010 SP1: T4 Template Inheritance Part I – Sample Metadata &Part II – The Core Template – GarethJ discusses the introduction of Inheritance to T4 Templates as a part of the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 update sharing a sample using the functionality providing full code.
• Native Extensions for Silverlight (NESL)? – Mike Taulty talks about the Native Extensions for Silverlight which brings more Windows OS features to Silverlight Out Of Browser applications.
• Automate your UI using Microsoft automation framework – Ashish Kaila discusses the use of the Microsoft Automation Framework to provide a means for performing UI automation of WPF and other Windows applications, illustrating with an example which automates the Calculator UI.
• Parsing Concerns – Jesse Taber discusses some of the important considerations you should make when thinking about the parsing of user provided data, especially focusing on some of the difficulties of working with dates.
• Parsing with applicative functors in F# – Mauricio Scheffer looks at using F# based monads, applicative functions and FParsec for performing parsing of strings.

Community

• European VAN on RavenDB on 11 January 2011 – Jan Van Ryswyck announces the first European Virtual ALT.NET event of the year, featuring Ayende talking about his RavenDB NoSQL database. The event kicks off at8pm GMT on Tuesday 11th January.
• NxtGenUG – The Black Cats are in Town … – Tuesday 15th February sees Andrew Westgarth take the drip to the Birmingham NxtGenUG Usergroup to deliver a talk on using the IIS SEO Toolkit to help improve your websites search engine ranking.

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