The Morning Brew

Software

• MvcContrib- an Outer Curve Foundation project – The team behind MvcContrib respond to the ASP.NET MVC 3 release with an update to the ASP.NET MvcContrib library bring it in line with the ASP.NET MVC 3 release.
• Open source .NET and Mono web services framework – The team behind ServiceStack announce version 1.75 of ServiceStack, a high performance Open Source .NET REST framework which supports working with XML, JSON and SOAP based services. Full source code is available on GitHub.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 3 Performance – on par with MVC 2 – Marcin Dobosz explores the performance of ASP.NET MVC 3, comparing it against MVC2, focusing on the Requests Per Second throughput, looking at 4 scenarios including ASP.NET MVC2 sites running on the V3 runtime.
• HTTP Modules versus ASP.NET MVC Action Filters – K. Scott Allen discusses how to decide whether to implement your functionality as an ASP.NET HTTP Module of ASP.NET MVC Action filter, highlighting the differences between the two.
• Silverlight and HTTP and Caching, OH MY! – Ayende discusses the issues he has encountered with caching of HTTP Responses on the Silverlight platform finding that cache control mechanisms don’t seem to be being honoured, and shares a workaround.
• Improving Asynchronous Tests for Silverlight – Christopher Bennage explores asynchronous tests on Silverlight as a part of his testing of RavenDB, and shows how he used the coroutine syntax from Caliburn to help simplify the tests syntax.
• Deploying, but without those pesky test files! – Chris Skardon discusses how you can edit the Project File on your Silverlight projects to avoid shipping your Silverlight Tests with your application.
• Start Building an International Application for Windows Phone 7 (Part I) – ‘Jnnet’ kicks off a series looking at building applications for the Windows Phone 7 which are available with a UI in multiple languages.
• Windows Phone 7 Guides for IT Pros (and Developers) – Mike Ormond highlights a series of guides intended for IT Professionals which look at various aspects of the Windows Phone 7 OS, features, certificates and services. Many of the guides contain useful information for developers too.
• Geocoding and Routing with Bing Maps – Mike Battista look at using the Bing Maps Web Services to obtain geocoding information for places and routing information to plot journeys between places, sharing sample code to make use of this functionality on the Windows Phone 7 devices.
• Not as easy as it looks & Not as easy as it looks, Part Two – Eric Lippert discusses the complexities of creating the eliminate variable refactoring in Visual Studio, highlighting some of the scenarios which cause complications, and follows up in the second part with some further cases where the language makes it hard to implement this refactoring.
• Internals of Extension Methods – Abhishek Sur takes a look behind the scenes at how the .NET Framework supports Extension Methods, looking at the IL that gets created when we use the Extension method syntactic sugar.
• Leveraging .Net 4.0 Framework Tools For Encrypting Web Configuration Sections – Sam Abraham takes a brief look at configuring the ASP.NET feature for encrypting (and decrypting) the Web.Config file.
• A Feature-driven Comparison of Entity Framework and NHibernate – Queries – Dino Esposito continues his series looking at the differences and similarities between HNibernate and Entity Framework, examining their respective implementations of querying
• Working with Pinned Sites – Israel Hilerio talks about the Internet Explorer Pinned Sites feature which allows web application to exist as first class application on the Windows Task Bar, and discusses the APIs available to developers to interact with task bar features from their web applications.

Community

• Book Club – February 2011 – The Pragmatic Programmer – Scottish Developers kick off a new series of book club events which will oscillate between being hosted in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The first event will be discussing ‘The Pragmatic Programmer, from Journeyman to Master’ and will be held in Glasgow on the evening of Wednesday 2nd February. In March the book club will be looking at ‘RESTful Web Services’ with the event held in Edinburgh.

Humour

• If Programming Languages Were Television Shows – Neil takes a humorous look at what Television Show each of the major programming languages would be

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Software

• EasyHttp – Hadi Hariri announces EasyHttp a set of wrappers arround the basic HTTP Client functionality provided by the WebRequest classes in the .NET Framework making it easier to call REST based services with GET,PUT, POST, etc requests. Full source is available on GitHub
• Prism 4.0 Template Pack Now Available – David Hill highlights the availability of an updated Template Pack for Prism V4 which creates a basic shell implementation multi project solution for use in Silverlight and WPF implemented in both VB.NET cna C#

Information

• Link Rollup: New Documentation and Tutorials from Web Platform and Tools – Scott Hanselman turns link blogger for a post dedicated to all the great stuff being written about the January Web Platforms release posting a series of links to items on Web Matrix, ASP.NET with Razor, ASP.NET MVC3, Orchard, and NuGet
• ASP.NET MVC 3 – New Features – Imran Baloch discusses some of the key new features of ASP.NET MVC 3 and provides links for further details of each feature spread across a number of different blogs and sites.
• Building a Self Updating Site Using NuGet – Phil Haack shares a screen cast and detailed accompanying blog post about building an updating mechanism for a site based around NuGet, illustrated with an example based around Phil’s blog engine, Subtext.
• ASP.NET MVC 3 Razor Syntax – RenderBody, RenderPage and RenderSection – Malcolm Sheridan takes a look at three key functions in the Razor View Engine Syntax which bring the ability to include page content into master pages, load content from another page into the current page and render custom sections of templates.
• Use Razor for Email Template outside ASP.NET MVC – Kazi Manzur Rashid looks at using the Razor view engine for purposes other than rendering web pages – looking at how you could use it to render email confirmations from a template.
• Are you Mocking Me? – Gregory Long continues the discussion over at Los Techies about the use of mocks, stubs and fakes in unit testing discussing some of the reasons that we test our code and looking at the applicability of mocks, stubs and fakes to the different types of / reasons for tests.
• Working (around) with MSpecs – Krishna Bhargava Vangapandu takes an introductory look at working with the MSpec library, sharing the experiences gained building and implementing the tests for specifications for a simple Dependency Injection container, and also looking at running and debugging the tests.
• Back to Basics: Unit Testing, Automated Blackbox Testing, and Conclusions! – John Sonmez discusses Unit Testing as a part of his Back To Basics series, discussing three levels of Unit Testing, the use /abuse of interfaces for testing purposes, and discusses techniques which can help reduce the requirement for interfaces and mocks in your testing.
• Oh no, it’s Monday, again! – Gojko Adzic publishes his second edition of ‘Oh No it’s Monday, again’ his Agile Testing newsletter, sharing links to articles, software and discussions from the world of Agile Testing.
• Monads in C#-5. Maybe 😉 – Mike Hadlow continues his series of posts in preparation of his DDD9 conference session on Monads in C#. In this part, Mike looks at implementing a real Monad which has a real purpose, constructing the Maybe Monad.
• Is a Square a Rectangle? – BlackWasp discuss inheritance and the ‘Is A’ relationship with reference to observing the Liskov Substitution Principle using an example based in Geometry to illustrate.
• A Look At Fluent APIs – Sacha Barber takes a look at the vogue topic of Fluent Interfaces discussing when to use them, looking at some well know examples of Fluent Interfaces, and sharing and discussing a sample application which utilises a Fluent Interface in this CodeProject article.
• AsyncLazy<T> – ‘toub’ discusses why Lazy<T> does not support asynchronous initialization as well as lazy initialization, and looks at how combining Lazy with Task can give you just that functionality.
• The Basics of EF Validation: IDataErrorInfo
  – Chris Sells looks at the IDataErrorInfo interface and its role in providing validation errors in Entity Framework and ASP.NET MVC, illustrating with a simple application which combines the two.
• ORM anti-patterns – Part 4: Persistence vs Domain Model – Mehdi Khalili continues this series of posts on Object Relation Mapping Anti-Patterns with a look at the two models which you may have in your application, the Persistence Model and the Domain Model, and discusses the potential anti pattern of trying to combine the two.
• WCF: 4 Tenets of Service Oriented Data Validation – Ron Jacobs discusses one of the key tenets of SOA, that ‘Boundaries are Explicit’ and shares a screencast and blog post which looks at how this relates to your WCF Services and validation, offering a further 4 tenets of Service Oriented Data Validation.
• From start to parse, the 4 Guys from Rolla show off the HTML Agility Pack – Greg Duncan highlights an article from the good folks over at 4 Guys From Rolla on using the HTML Agility Pack to scrape and parse HTML from the web.
• Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 34 – SequenceEqual, Part 35 – Zip & Part 36 – AsEnumerable – Jon Skeet continues his exploration and re-implementation of Linq to Objects with a look at methods which procide an equality check on sequences, combining of items in a sequence, and the final end result operator AsEnumerable which returns the results out of the Linq to Objects query.

Community

• Online YUI 3 Introductory Course Fri, Jan 21st – Luke Smith revises the date for the half day online YUI 3 introduction course to Firday 21st January to avoid the Martin Luther King, Jr Day holiday.
• Event: Continuously Dependant – The NxtGenUg in Oxfordshire welcome Rob Ashton and Paul Stack to their February meeting to be held on Tuesday 1st February 2011 in Abingdon where Rob and Paull with be discussing Continuous Integration and Dependency Injection along with eating some pizza and distributing some swag.
• Breaking the TDD mould: free talk, 3rd Feb, London – Gojko Adzic will be delivering a session at Skills Matter on the evening of Thursday 3rd February 2011 where he will be discussing the ideas and next steps to help you move beyond the basics of Test Driven Development

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ASP.NET MVC 3, WebMatrix, Nuget….

• Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix – Scott Guthrie announces no less than 7 major releases today, with ASP.NET MVC 3 hitting RTM along with NuGet, IIS Express 7.5, SQL Server Compact Edition4, Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0, the Orchard Content Management System 1.0 and WebMatrix 1.0.
• Windows Web App Gallery – Install an App – The Web Platform Installer also gets an update with these releases, and is probably the easiest way of getting hold of all the new stuff, along with plenty of other great code, utilities, SDKs and platforms.
• ASP.NET MVC 3 and NuGet 1.0 Released (Including Source Code!) – Phil Haack discusses the ASP.NET MVC 3 and NuGet releases, highlighing release notes, documentation, the NuGet Gallery, and his team’s plans for the future.
• MVC 3 Project Upgrade Tool – Marcin Dobosz announces the release of a tool to help you move your ASP.NET MVC 2 projects to the ASP.NET MVC 3 Release. The tooling works for any VS2010 ASP.NET MVC2 project which targets .NET 4, so you will need to perform this upgrade first using Visual Studio. Marcin has the full step by step process listed in this post.
• WebMatrix shipping January 13, 2011 – ‘lmoroney’ highlights the WebMatrix 1.0 release. This product brings easy to use entry level web development tooling to the Microsoft platform making it ideal for creating simple sites and providing a similar experience to other web platforms allowing ease of transition.
• WebMatrix is Released – a free tool that allows you to create, customize and publish web sites on the Internet – Bruno Terkaly discusses the availability of a number of Open Source projects which can be worked on within WebMatrix,
• Thoughts on WebMatrix – Rob Conery shares his impressions of the WebMatrix product and platform looking at all aspects of the product from data access to the Razor view engine, and then compares WebMatrix to other Web platforms.
• ASP.NET MVC3, WebMatrix, NuGet, IIS Express and Orchard released – The Microsoft January Web Release in Context – Scott Hanselman discusses the whole range of releases yesterday, providing links to all the parts, and discusses where they fit in to the whole Microsoft Web picture

Software

• ReSharper 5.1.2 is Released – The team over at JetBrains announce the release of ReSharper 5.1.2, a bugfix and update release for the V5 product line which introduces fixes to stop intellisense interference with Razor, improvements to intellisense in watch windows, along with various other improvements and speedups.
• VsVim Update Released (Version 0.9.4) – Jared Parsons announces the latest update to his Vim emulation layer for Visual Studio 2010 which brings Vim keybindings to the Visual Studio IDE
• SharpDevelop 4.0 Final – Last week the SharpDevelop team released their latest version of the SharpDevelop IDE, a free OpenSource development environment for .NET development. This new version brings loads of new features to bring parity with .NET 4 with full WPF and Entity Framework Designers, support for IronRuby and IronPython, and much more
• Scaffold your ASP.NET MVC 3 project with the MvcScaffolding package & MvcScaffolding: Standard Usage – Steve Sanderson announces the MVCScaffolding NuGet package which brings a very simple way of creating a skeleton MVC user interface which you can then build upon.

Information

• Monads in C#-4. Linq loves Monads! – Miek Hadlow continunes his exploration of Monads in C# in preparation for his DDD9 session with a look at building on the Identity<T> implementation improving the SelectMany to reduce the complexity of its use
• Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 33 – Cast and OfType – Jon Skeet continues his series on re-implementing LINQ to objects with a look at the Cast and OfType operators.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Constraining Generics with Where Clause – James Michael Hare shares another post in his .NET Little Wonders series, looking in this post at the use of ‘where’ with generics to control what types can be specified fo the type parameter.
• Razor Tip #2 : Inheritance & Configuration – K. Scott Allen shares his second Razor View engine tip looking at how you can control what class the view inherits from
• ASP.NET MVC and jQuery Mobile – Maarten Balliauw explores the use of jQuery Mobile and ASP.NET MVC to create rich mobile web site experiences.
• How Developers Should ‘Read’ Exceptions – Davy Brion shares some advice on how to get the most information out of the exceptions thrown by your applications.

Community

• Online YUI 3 Introductory Course Monday, Jan 17th – Luke Smith is hosting a free online half day course on Developing with the Yahoo! YUI JavaScript library on Monday 17th January running from 9:30am PST to 1pm
• Event: .Net on a chip! – Tuesday 1st March 2011 sees Ryan O’Neill delivering a session to the Oxfordshire NxtGenUG usergroup on the .NET Micro Framework

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