The Morning Brew

Software

• New release: 1.1.2 – KnockoutJS – Steve Sanderson announces the latest release of Knockout, his MVVM implementation for JavaScript UIs. This new release introduces a number of enhancements to observables and bindings, along with addressing some reported issues in the previous release.
• StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1.14977.000 – Howard van Rooijen announces an updated release of the StyleCop for ReSharper 5.1 plugin which brings real time highlighting and fixing of StyleCop rules into the Visual Studio IDE. This release addresses some bugs and performance issues from previous releases.
• Mono for Android – Miguel de Icaza announces the opening Mono for Android preview program, giving you an opportunity to get you hand on the pre-release Mono for Android release and have a spin at creating .NET based applications for the Android platform.
• Mini Memory Dump Diagnosis using Asp.Net – Sundara Prabu .T highlights a CodePlex project which provides a means of taking Mini Memory Dumps when you web application encounters an unhandled exception, providing you with more information about what caused the error and assisting with debugging.

Information

• NuGet versioning Part 1: taking on DLL Hell & Part 2: the core algorithm – David Ebbo discusses the problem space of versioning that the NuGet team have tackled, exploring the core issues that needed to be solved, and talks about how NuGet handles versioning.
• Preprocessed T4 Templates – K. Scott Allen looks at the runtime text generation capabilities of T4 Processed Templates showing how simply they can be used to generate text dynamically in just a handful of lines of code.
• VS2010 SP1: T4 Template Inheritance Part IV – Regular template inheritance – GarethJ continues exploring T4 Templates looking in this post at using regular templates to provide extensibility and customisation using inheritance sharing a demo solution to illustrate the functionality discussed.
• The BCL bug of the day – Ayende discusses an interesting issue using the .NET 4 dynamic support with anonymous types as a return value when calling across multiple assemblies.
• WP7: When does GC Consider a Local Variable as Garbage – ‘abhinaba’ explores the Windows Phone 7 Garbage Collector, showing how it differs from the desktop GC implementation, and shares some tips for ensuring your WP7 apps release memory the way you would want them to.
• Getting TransactionScope to play nice with NHibernate – Matt Wrock looks at the interactions between NHibernate and the .NET TransactionScope implementation, examines some of the problems you can encounter when combining these technologies, and shares some code which enforces the correct operation order of the two.
• End of support for Visual SourceSafe – Rachel Collier highlights the end of mainstream support for Visual SourceSafe in April 2011, and uses this opportunity to highlight resources to help transition to TFS, including a Live Meeting event on 8th February.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Packaging up Seb – The Southampton NxtGenUG welcome Seb Lambla on the evening of Thursday 17th February 2011 who will deliver a session on his OpenWrap .NET packaging framework.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #763

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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