February 2011
Monthly Archive
The Morning Brew #798
Posted by Chris Alcock on 23 Feb 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 RTM – Now available for all! – Ben Armstrong highlights the general availability of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, along with providing notes for upgrading to SP1 RTM from the beta or Release Candidates.
- Productivity Power Tools introduces Find, Organize Imports for VB, Enhanced Scrollbar, Middle-Click Scrolling and more! – Sean Laberee shares the details of the latest update to the Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools VS2010 extension. This new update adds a number of new scrolling features, along with improved Find, multi targeting support and a fix for Cut / Copy
- Visual Studio 2010 International Survey Launched! – The Microsoft Global Developer eXperience team want your feedback on Visual Studio 2010 and have released a small (10 minute) survey available in 10 languages to gather your valuable impressions of the product and it use.
Information
- Versioning strategies for the sane – Jimmy Bogard suggests a very good use of the assembly version attributes to store the date and time of the build in the version number and how it meets all the version number requirements.
- NHibernate 3.0 Tutorial with Fluent NHibernate and Linq 2 NHibernate – ‘dan’ shares a getting started tutorial which walks through the process of setting up and getting started with the NHibernate 3.0 stack including looking at the use of Fluent NHibernate and Linq2NHibernate, building a sample console application which illustrates the key aspects of this process.
- C# ATDD on a shoestring (or the complete guide to SpecFlow & NUnit in Visual Studio 2010 Express) – Alister Scott shares a tutorial which explores the use of SpecFlow with NUnit to create Behaviour Driven Development style tests, and looking at how to integrate these tools into your build process.
- There’s Only One Valid Metric For Developer Productivity And Quality – Davy Brion discusses the complicated area of developer productivity and quality of code and how its hard to define a good metric for these factors.
- IE9 RC fixed the Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage error when running an ASP.NET application in Visual Studio – Jon Galloway highlights an issue with running ASP.NET application in Visual Studio when your browser is the Internet Explorer 9 Beta, sharing a workaround for the beta, and urging you to upgrade to the IE9 RC which no longer exhibits the problem.
- Executable Requirements – Mehdi Khalili explores the use of BDD to create executable requirements, sharing some examples based on the ATM machine problem space and discussing the benefits and costs of working in this way.
- Unicode 6.0.0 is [actually] released! – Michael S. Kaplan highlights the release of version 6 of the Unicode specification last week
Community
- ASP.NET mvcConf Videos Available – Scott Guthrie highlights the availability of all the session video content from the recent mvcConf virtual community event which covered all things ASP.NET related. This lists of sessions contains a vast number from very recognisable names in the community and will be a great resource if you missed the actual event.
- Pair programming – The Good, The Bad and the Ugly – Canary Wharf .NET User Group – The Canary Wharf .NET User Group welcome Rachel Laycock and Sara Stephens with their session on Pair Programming on the evening of Wednesday 2nd March. This talk was well received at a recent new speakers event at the London .NET UG so should be well worth seeing.
- NxtGenUG Oxford – .Net on a chip! – The Oxford chapter of the NxtGenUG welcome Ryan O’Neill to their group on the evening of Tuesday 1st March for a session looking at the .NET Micro Framework and the hardware available to run it.
- From Zero To Deployed Contest – Prizes Announced – Rob Reynolds, following on from his look at AppHarbor, is running a video/screencast based contest going from no code to a working database backed application deployed and running with some great prizes for best video and best time
The Morning Brew #797
Posted by Chris Alcock on 22 Feb 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Two Caliburn Releases in One Day! – Rob Eisenberg announces the release candidates of Caliburn 2.0 and Caliburn.Micro 1.0, his client frameworks for WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7.
- Kinect for Windows SDK to Arrive Spring 2011 – Yesterday Microsoft announced that there will be a release of the Kinect for Windows SDK this spring, available to academic and enthusiasts to interact with the Kinect sensor and audio subsystems.
Information
- Never Say Never, Part One – Eric Lippert explores the ability to assign lambda expressions to delegates, looking at the rules that govern this ability, as well as looking at an example lambda which can be assigned to all Func<T> and Action<T>
- Changing Base Type Of A Razor View – Phil Haack explains how you can create your own base object for a Razor view page, allowing you to implement custom functionality and have it available in your views
- Archaeopteryx – Vittorio Bertocci shares his thoughts on the non-release of CardSpace 2.0, and how Claims Based Identity is still a powerful technique even in light of this announcement.
- Task Parallel Library : 2 of n – Sacha Barber continues his series on the Task Parallel Library with a continuation of the discussions of the background to the TPL and exploring Continuations and Cancelling Chained Tasks
- NuGet – Functional Tests – David Fowler gives a tour of the Functional tests for NuGet, powered by PowerShell, discussing how the tests are structures, and the capabilities of their PowerShell testing framework
- jQuery 1.5 Visual Cheat Sheet – Antonio Lupetti shares a nice looking 4 page Cheat Sheet for jQuery 1.5 touching on all the key areas of the jQuery API with simple explanations of the methods available.
- Code Review Guidelines: Avoid inheritance for properties – Ayende shares some sample code and discusses why its use of inheritance for providing common properties is an antipattern, showing the same code how he would prefer it to be structured.
Community
- Webinar: Building Document Based Systems – Ayende will be presenting a DevExpress Channel Webinar on using RavenDB to build document based systems in .NET, exploring the different styles of modelling and their benefits and disadvantages. The Virtual Event takes place on Thursday 24th Feb 24 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM GMT
- NxtGenUG Essex Launch Event! – The NxtGenUG welcome Guy Smith-Ferrier and Dave McMahon tomorrow night (Wedsnesday 23rd February) for the inaugrial Essex NxtGenUG meet. Guy will be delivering his session on Windows 7 Multi Touch support, and Dave will be delivering a NxtGenUG welcome session.
- Book Group: ‘Coders at Work’ by Peter Seibel (part 1) – The Cambridge Developers’ User Group book group will be meeting this Thursday (24h Feb) for a session exploring the first 5 Chapters of ‘Coders at Work’ by Peter Seibel, discussing the work of Jamie Zawinski, Brad Fitzpatrick, Douglas Crockford, Brenden Eich and Joshua Bloch.
- Coding under pressure with TDD/BDD #NUnit and #Specflow Workshop/Seminar – The Cambridge Developers User Group are also meeting this Saturday for a morning of exploring Test Driven Development and Behaviour Driven Development using NUnit and SpecFlow. The event starts at 9:30 and offers two tracks of content – sounds like a really good event.
- Your Chance to Win 1 of 50 Licenses for Red Gate’s .NET Reflector Professional – Fellow link blogger Alvin Ashcraft offers his readers the chance to win one of 50 licenses of RedGate Reflector. All you have to do to enter is tweet or comment on a blog post.
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The Morning Brew #796
Posted by Chris Alcock on 21 Feb 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Validation Application Block ported to Silverlight – Grigori Melnik highlights the availability of a code drop of the Enterprise Library 5.0 Silverlight Integration Pack which includes a new port of the Validation Application Block to Silverlight
- jQuery 1.5.1 RC 1 Released – The jQuery team announce the release of their first Release Candidate of jQuery 1.5.1 the first update to jQuery 1.5. This release includes a vast array of bugfixes and minor improvements.
- WebMatrix refresh released – The Microsoft Web Platform Team announce a minor update to WebMatrix which is available through the Web Platform Installer, and includes a number of fixes to user reported bugs since the release in January.
- Needle Dependency Injection Container – Alpha 0.1 version released – Damian Schenkelman announces the first alpha release of Needle Dependency Injection Container, available as a NuGet package, this light weight dependency injection container started off as a weekend project and over time has grown into a usable DI container including Property and Constructor Injection, a Fluent API, Func<> injection and lifecycle support.
Information
- Routing Regression With Two Consecutive Optional Url Parameters – Phil Haack highlights a regression introduced in ASP.NET MVC 3’s routing support where a route has two consecutive optional parameters. In this post Phil examines the problem, shares a work around and looks at the root cause of the problem.
- Html.Awkward – K. Scott Allen looks at some of the confusing aspects of the many overloads of the HML Helpers in ASP.NET MVC, illustrating how some of them can result in output that is not how you would expect.
- Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 43 – Out-of-process queries with IQueryable – Jon Skeet continues his excellent series on the reimplementation of Linq to Objects with a look at the more complex topic of IQueryable implementations, giving some of the background, and exploring the use of Expression Trees.
- Massive Update Number 1 & Update Number 2 – Rob Conery gives two updates on his ironically named and ever shrinking data access library ‘Massive’, discussing the implementation of a variety of new features such as transactions, paging, stored procedure support and inheritance, as well as keeping a close eye on the number of lines of code.
- Malware on ThoughtWorks Websites – Martin Fowler discusses the recent problems that Thought Works have had with a Malware infection on their webservers, talking about the steps they have taken to investigate and remove the infection, and recommending that anyone on a Windows PC who has visited their sites recently be sure to check their machine for Malware.
- Code Metrics, Reporting, and XSLT Debugging – Cameron Skinner shares an XSLT and CSS file which will transform the output of the CodeMetrics Power Tool into a nice HTML report
Community
- Call For Speakers – DDD South West 3.0 – The session submissions process has now kicked off for Developer Developer Developer South West to be held on
Saturday 11th June 2011 at The University of West England, near Bristol. The session submission is open until Tuesday 222nd March, so if you are interested in delivering a session at a very friendly conference this is a great opportunity - NxtGenUG – Event: It’s a DRY old Do … – The Cambridge chapter of the NxtGenUG welcome Mark Rendle to Microsoft Research in Cambridge for a talk on the DRY principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself) in C# and Functional Programming in C#. This event is tomorrow evening (22nd Feb).
- Free Talk on Asynchronous programming in JavaScript – higher-level abstractions – If you are London based an have an interest in JavaScript, then Skills Matter have you covered with an event tomorrow evening where Damjan Vujnovic will be delivering a session on Asynchronous programming in JavaScript.
- Want a free seat for my TDD class in march? Propose a challenge – Roy Osherove will be running his 2 day Test Driven Development in .NET class at Skills Matter next month, and is giving one place on the course away for free on his blog
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