The Morning Brew

Update: Corrected the general availability date for Windows 7 / 2008 SP1 – should have been February, not January – Thanks to Steve for letting me kno. Further proof that I don’t properly know what day it is until after my first coffee 😉

Software

• Announcing Availability of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 – Windows 7 and Windows 2008 get their first service pack. The service pack has been released to manufacturing and is currently with OEMs with the public release starting on 16th Feb with MSDN, Technet and Volume licensing , and general availability on 22nd JanuaryFebruary
• Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1 is Available – Brian Harry announces the release of the first service pack for Team Explorer Everywhere, available now for MSDN Subscribers and on Friday for everyone else. The service pack brings improvements to the source code control functionality, fast workspace switching, auto connect on startup, and support for running in a cut down version of Eclipse
• Free Silverlight controls – yes, you heard right – Mindscape announce the availability of three free Silverlight Controls. The controls are a cover flow implementation, a book display control offering smooth animations of page turns and support for 1000s or pages of content, and a nice looking expander implementation.
• AlphaFS v1.5 Released (think "The ‘Long Path’ IO support the BCL doesn’t yet have…" or "Don’t ‘W’ [Wide/Unicode API/etc] P/Invoke your Path API’s when AlphaFS has done it already for you…" or "How I learned to love and use Volume Shadow Service paths from .Net") – Greg Duncan highlights a new release of AlphaFS, Version 1.5 Stable. This library provides new implementations of the ,NET Core file system classes with support for extended paths, functionality for interfacing with the transactional functionality of the NTFS file system.

Information

• New version of Cuke4Ninja book published – Gojko Adzic announces an updated version of the free e-book on BDD style testing using Cucumber based implementations across .NET, Java and Ruby. This updated version includes new content on UI automation with .NET and WatiN, sharing context across steps, along with minor updates across the remaining content.
• Writing a Compiler in C#: C Code Generation, Part 2 – Sasha Goldshtein continues his series of posts looking at creating a compiler for the Jack programming language using C# as the basis. In this part Sasha looks at controls statements, implementing support for gotos with labels, while loops, along with the overall program structure requirements such as a main method.
• Adding Rails like ActionController and RespondWith in ASP.NET MVC with RESTful way – Kazi Manzur Rashid gives an overview of the features of the default scaffolding provided by the Rails framework, and then looks at adding support for Rails like ActionController and respond_with functionality into ASP.NET MVC 3
• Disassemble code in Visual Studio instead of ILDASM disassembler – ‘Karthikanbarasan’ highlights a Visual Studio feature that is not widely known about or used, the ability to see the disassembled code that underpins our C#.
• Autoprojecting LINQ queries – Jimmy Bogard discusses a new feature he has added to AutoMapper which allows for data to be automatically projected to another type in a LINQ query.
• Why do you make unreadable logfiles? & Making an XMLLayout for Log4Net with an xsl file to make it human readable. – Christiaan discusses the importance of having log files that you can actually read, and looks at s couple of techniques to help make log entries more readable.
• 5 Ways That Postsharp Can SOLIDify Your Code: Lazy Loading of Dependencies – Matthew Groves looks at how using the PostSharp AOP framework can help you achieve the Single Responsibility Principle in you code by allowing you to remove some of the boiler plate required to implement lazy loading.

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Software

• New JavaScript library for OData and beyond – WCF Data Services Team announce a new poject hosted on CodePlex which aims to allow you to work more easily with data in formats such as JSON and OData. ‘datajs’ is a cross browser JavaScript library which brings helpers for obtaining data in OData format and enabling you to work with it.
• LLBLGen Pro v3.1 released! – Frans Bouma announces the release of LLBLGen Pro 3.1, the latest update to his Object Relational Mapper Designer and framework. If you already have a license for 3.x this is a free upgrade, and brings numerous new features including support for model only relationships, an extensible import system, field ordering, along with significant performance improvements to the LLBLGen Pro Runtime framework.

Information

• Important .NET Framework 4.0 Command Line Tools You Must Know – Suprotim Agarwal shares a breakdown of the various commandline tools included in the .NET Framework, giving a brief overview of them and linking to more details of the tool on MSDN.
• How to deploy to, and debug, multiple instances of the Windows Phone 7 emulator – Samuel Jack discusses how he has been working with multiple instances of the Windows Phone 7 Emulator while deploying and debugging a multi-player game, walking through the process of achieving this.
• Once More In Defense Of The var Keyword – K. Scott Allen discusses the use of the var keyword for declaring local variables in C#, and suggests that var leads to better variable naming
• Special 48-Hour Offer: Free ASP.NET MVC 3 Video Training – Scott Guthrie highlights an offer from Pluralsight where you can get over 3 hours of video training covering ASP.NET MVC 3 absolutely free for the next 48 hours
• Design Patterns Series: The Observer Pattern – ‘Max’ uses a Super Bowl based example to discuss the Observer Pattern, and shares a Super Bowl implementation of the pattern to handle the score notifier.
• Focusing on Real World Web Performance with Internet Explorer 9 – Jason Weber discusses the performance factors being considered by the Internet Explorer 9 team to ensure that their browser is as quick as possible in real world scenarios
• You Want To Wrap OData Around What?!?! – Jonathan Carter looks at the WCF Data Services Toolkit and shows how it can be used to make arbitary sources of data into OData services, illustrating with an example.
• Expression Builder, DSL, Fluent Interfaces and C#, RPG (as in role playing game) Style – Greg Duncan highlights a tutorial from Primary Objects which looks at Fluent Interfaces,Domain Specific Languages and Expression Builders with an example of all of these in the context of a role playing game
• GMind Solution: Steps to Call WCF Service using jQuery – ‘pranay’ shares a step by step example of calling a WCF based service from jQuery on a webpage, sharing the full code in the step by step process, highlighting some of the key points in the code.

Community

• jQuery Manchester Meetup – The second gathering of the jQuery Manchester (UK) group will be happening on Tuesday 8th March 2011 at Manchester Digital Laboratory. This meet up sees Jon Bines hosting a session on building ‘Sexy Navigation’ in a live coding session, and DJ Adams on JSON.
• LDNUG FEB 16th Raven DB and CQRS – The London .NET User Group feature two DDD9 presentations giving you a great opportunity to see two of the sessions you may have missed. The meeting, on Wednesday 16th February features Rob Ashton delivering his session on RavenDB, and Ian Cooper on Command Query Responsibility Separation.

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Software

• Sharp Architecture 1.9.5 Released – Alec Whittington announces the release of Sharp Architecture 1.9.5, the latest update to this MVC based project architecture. This release brings things back upto date with an upgrade to ASP.NET MVC 3 RTM and .NET 4 for the solution, along with providing an implementation of the IDependencyResolver, available should you wish to use it. This is the last planned 1.X release as the team is already well under way with the V2.
• TestApi v0.6 Released! – Ivo Manolov announces the relase of TestAPI 0.6. Test API is a helper library for testing which provides a variety of APIs for performing testing, including String Generation, Input Simulation, Fault Injection etc. This release includes changes across the project, along with signifying the move to hosting on CodePlex.
• MVVM Light V4 preview (BL0014) release notes – Laurent Bugnion has released a preview of the V4 of his MVVM Light framework. This update contains changes across the project, including an improved PropertyChanged Event, support for partial trust, improved serialisation support (allowing for tombstoning on WP7) and much more.

Information

• Strange, but legal – Eric Lippert looks at an uncommon, but still perfectly legal use of both abstract and override in a property declaration
• C#, Clean up your Linq-queries and lambda expressions – Daniel Wertheim takes a look at a technique for making your LINQ queries more readable, testable and expressive by extracting the rules for queries into classes giving them names and context.
• A Dynamic Data Utility for WebMatrix – Rob Conery talks about his latest forray into the world of Data access / ORM, a dynamic library, similar in theme to Mark Rendle’s Simple.Data. Rob will be talking about this today at MvcConf.
• The Value of Symmetry – K. Scott Allen talks about where he values symmetry in code, showing a couple of simple examples where symmetry (or the lack of) helps show complexity.
• Pragmatic web service design – Garry Shutler shares his thoughts on the best practices for designing web services, discussing choice of protocols, Web Method and granularity, versioning, and breaking changes (Don’t ever).
• ORM anti-patterns – Part 5: Generic update methods – Mehdi Khalili continues his series looking at Anti-Patterns in working with Object Relational Mappers, looking ain this post at the updating of large parts of the object graph with Update(Customer) type methods, discussing eh downsides in terms fo higher complexity of work, more chance of conflicts, etc, and explores some alternatives.
• A Circular ProgressBar Style using an Attached ViewModel – Colin Eberhardt takes a look at how you can re-template the standard Silverlight Progress bar to turn it into a circular progress ‘bar’
• ASP.NET MVC Performance Tips – Marcin Doboz shares 3 ASP.NET MVC performance tips, outlining why you shouldn’t pass null models to views, why you should disable unused view engines, and should make use of the IIS URL Rewrite module.

Community

• MvcConf MVC Q&A call for questions – Jeffrey Palermo reminds us that today is the MvcConf virtual conference, and that he will be hosting the Question and Answer session, so if you have any ASP.NET MVC questions, this full session of Q&A is the ideal opportunity, so submit your questions via his blog post.
• Video: Learn How Good C# Habits Can Encourage Bad JavaScript Habits – Mehul Harry shares the recording of Elijah Manor’s session on ‘Good C# Habits Can Encourage Bad JavaScript’ which was delivered as a webinar

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