The Morning Brew

Software

• Extended WPF Toolkit – Release 1.3.0 – Brian Lagunas highlights the release of the Extended WPF Toolkit 1.3.0 which brings three new controls (DateTimeUpDown, Magnifier and Magnifier) along with updates to two others (RichTextFormatBar and ColorPicker)
• 500 Metro Style WP7 Icons – Bil Simser shares ‘The Noun Project”s 500+ icons ported to PNG and XAML format (in addition to the original SVG format) making them easier to consume in your Windows Phone 7 Applications, discussing the conversion process along the way.

Information

• How to find and fix performance problems in ORM powered applications – Frans Bouma explores the investigation and resolution of common classes of Object Relational Mapper performance problems in applications, looking at the various techniques to help identify the problems and talking about the common causes of the issues.
• HTML5: Installing the Microsoft WebSockets prototype – Jef Claes takes a look at the WebSockets prototype recently released on the HTML 5 Labs site, walking through the installation and getting one of the samples up and running.
• Grouping Routes Part 2 – Phil Haack builds on a previous post and looks at the generation of URLs from group routes using ASP.NET routes
• There is something about "Paths" for Asp.net beginners – Al-Farooque Shubho takes a back to basics look at the use of Paths win ASP.NET Applications discussing relative and absolute paths for images, css and user controls.
• Monads in C# – 1. Introduction &2. What’s the point? – Mike Hadlow kicks off a new series of posts where he will be gathering his throughs on Monads and their use in LINQ code in preparation for his DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 9 session.
• FubuMVC’s Internal Runtime, the Russian Doll Model, and how it compares to ASP.Net MVC and OpenRasta – Jeremy Miller talks about the internals and how FubuMVC implements functionality, comparing to the ASP.NET MVC and OpenRasta implementations of similar
• Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 26d – Fixing the key selectors, and yielding early, Part 27 – Reverse, Part 28 – Sum & Part 29 – Min/Max – Jon Skeet continues his series on re-implementing LINQ to Objects, completing his look at ordering, and moving on to look at Reversing IEnumerables, and starts looking at the aggregates Sum and Min/Max.
• Tools for the lazy: Templify and NuGet – Maarten Balliauw looks at reducing the friction of setting up a new ASP.NET MVC project with all the common libraries that you want included, showing how the Templify and NuGet projects can really assist you in simplifying this process.
• Debugging Windows Phone 7 device traffic with Fiddler – Eric Lawrence discusses the use of Fiddler to monitor and debug HTTP traffic to the Windows Phone Device
• A first look at ConfORM – Part 1 – Context is King – Thang Chung takes a look at the ConfORM project exploring its use in configuring object relational mappings in a model driven development style
• Windows Phone 7 Design Guidelines – Cheat Sheet – ‘cherylws’ shares a Windows Phone 7 development cheat sheet which focuses on the design and certification requirements drawn from the various official documents.

Community

• A Couple of Upcoming Events – Mike Ormond highlights the UK Bing Maps Usergroup’s event on the evening of Wednesday 19th January, in London which will include a briefing on what is new in the Bing maps platform and a series of presentations of real world uses of the API. Mike also highlights the VBUG Spring Conference being held on 28/29th March in Reading

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Software

• Spec Explorer 2010 Release 3.4 now available! – Xiang Li announces the latest release of Spec Explorer 2010. Release 3.4 brings a number of new features along with enhancements and bug fixes, including improvements to Validation, Dynamic traversal for test case generation and much more.

Information

• Foundations of Programming 2 – Chapter 3 – IoC 180 – Karl Seguin shares the first draft of Chapter 3 of the updated Foundations of Programming eBook. This chapter takes a look at Inversion of Control in dynamic languages, and explores metaprogramming in Ruby to gain a better understanding of IoC.
• Razor Syntax Quick Reference – Phil Haack shares a Razor view engine Quick Reference sheet which focuses on the syntax, also providing a link to a guide to Razor which looks at the basics of web programming using Razor.
• Razor Tip #1 – K. Scott Allen shares a tip showing how you can force the Razor View Engine to run pieces of C# where they may look like an email address which would typically be ignored by the parser.
• The design of RavenDB’s attachments – Ayende discusses the implementation of attachments in RavenDB, allowing files to be included along with documents rather than within documents, and shares some of the reasons the implementation is as it is.
• Developing web apps using ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor and EF Code First – Part 1 – Shiju Varghese kicks off a series of posts looking at constructing a Web Application using ASP.NET MVC3, the Razor View Engine, and th Entity Framework Code First Functionality, along with Dependency Injection provided byUnity 2.0. In this code heavy first part the domain model, unit of work implementation, EF plumbing, Unity implementation, and Simple ASP.NET MVC pages are all discussed, and full source is available for download.
• Entity Framework Code-First, OData & Windows Phone Client – Jon Galloway continues the full stack project with a look at exposing data to a Windows Phone application usung Entity Framework and OData hosted in an ASP,NET MVC application
• Use WinDbg and SOS.DLL with multiple CLR instances SxS in the same process – Yi Zhang shares some help with debugging processes which contain multiple versions of the .NET CLR loaded through the Side By Side (SxS) feature of .NET 4, showing how you can get meaningful debugging with WinDbg and SOS
• Putting mocks in their place – Jimmy Bogard shares some recommendations for working with mock objects discussing how and where best to use them, and discussing some of the coupling issues with tests using mocks which can cause problems when refactoring.
• Windows Phone Blue Book Pdf – Rob Miles highlights the availability of his ‘Blue Book’ on Programming Windows Phone 7 in C# as a standalone PDF
• Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 26c – Optimizing OrderedEnumerable – Jon Skeet presses on with his series on re-implementing LINQ to Objects with a look at implementing a better sorting algorithm for his OrderedEnumerable implementation.
• Parameter Substitution within Expression Trees – Nick Polyak takes a fascinating look at swapping parameters of Linq expressions with alternative expressions, allowing new functions to be generated from each other, and shares a library for performing this swapping.
• SayIt, don’t spray it! [Free program (and source code) makes it easy to use text-to-speech from your own programs and scripts] – David Anson shares his experiments with using the the Windows Text to Speech engine from .NET showing how easily you can make use of this functionality, and releasing a simple program you can use with full source to illustrate.

Community

• mvcConf – the Virtual ASP.Net MVC Conference – mvcConf, an online conference for all things ASP.NET MVC will be happening on Friday 1st February 2011 from 8am to 5pm CST. The organisers are now looking for session proposals from the developer community, so if you have something ASP.NET MVC related you’d like to present, get in touch with the organisers.
• Party with Palermo: MVP Summit 2011 – save the date – Jeffrey Palermo announces the date for his MVP Summit 2011 ‘Party With Palermo’ pre-conference party which will be on the evening of the Sunday 27th February.

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Software

• Json.NET 4.0 Release 1 – .NET 4 and Windows Phone support – James Newton-King announces the first release of Json.NET 4, now targeting the .NET 4 runtime, and also supported on the Windows Phone 7 this version adds support for the latest version of the JSON and BSON Schema, along with being able to utilise .NET 4 features like Dynamic and a whole host of other new features, changes and fixes.

Information

• MSDN Magazine: January 2011 Issue – The January 2011 edition of MSDN Magazone is available on-line, featuring articles exploring Windows Workflow, Dynamic Data, cloud project templates, MEF use in Silverlight to support MVVM, Unity Interceptors, XNA, and much more.
• PragPub—January 2011 – The Pragmatic Bookshelf have released the January edition of PragPub Magazine on-line, and this month look at Code Coupling, Quality Assurance, Agile adoption, and pattern matching.
• The Weekly Source Code 58 – Generating (Database) Test Data with AutoPoco and Entity Framework Code First – Scott Hanselman continues with his Weekly Source Code series with a look at using Rob Ashton’s AutoPoco project to generate test data for Code First Entity Framework Entities, showing how AutoPoco’s fluent interface makes it easy to construct data with a good range of variety in setup.
• Investigating an OutOfMemoryException & Solving an OutOfMemoryException – Ayende shares a real world Out Of Memory exception in his profiler application caused by a particularly large SQL Query with lots of parameters, and looks at how assumptions about the data we are going to handle in our code can effect how efficient our code is, and how data that differs from expectations can cause problems.
• Strong-naming assemblies and OpenWrap – Seb Lambla discusses some of the complexities for Package Management in providing dependencies when the assemblies involved are strongly signed, seeks feedback from the community as to which option to address these issues is best.
• NuGet versioning Part 3: unification via binding redirects – David Ebbo looks at similar issues and discusses how NuGet works in these cases.
• Integrating ASP.NET MVC 3 into existing upgraded ASP.NET 4 Web Forms applications – Scott Hanselman runs through the process required to upgrade a ASP.NET 2 web application to ASP.NET 4 in VS2010 and looks at how you can then configure the project to support a mix of ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC3 in the same upgraded project.
• Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 26a – IOrderedEnumerable & Part 26b – OrderBy{,Descending}/ThenBy{,Descending} – Jon Skeet continues his series looking at re-implementing LINQ to Objects with a look at the more complicated area of ordering of results, looking at the functioanlity required to perform ordering and then exploring the implementation of the actual operators which apply ordering.
• LINQ Macros – ‘cmeek’ looks at how you can wrap up common ‘boilerplate’ LINQ constructs to avoid having to repeatedly write these sections of queries in full, illustrating with an implementation for a Left Anti Semi Join.
• Adventures in performance tuning – Mark Simms looks at the performance optimisation of storage and reading data in a StreamInsight event processing system, looking at the format of the data and the parsing of the data back into structure for processing.
• Preprocessed Razor Templates – K. Scott Allen follows on from his previous post on PreProcessed T4 Templates with a look at achieving the same using the Razor template system and a Visual Studio Custom Tool for performing the PreProcessing.
• RIA Services Output Caching – Mathew Charles discusses the use of ASP.NET Output Caching with WCF RIA Services to help improve the performance of your services.

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