The Morning Brew

Software

• Windows Phone Developer Tools January 2011 Update is now available for download – Aaron Stebner highlights the release of the January 2011 Update to the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools SDK. This new release includes an updated version of the Windows Phone 7 Emulator which includes the Copy/Paste functionality which will be coming to the physical devices in the near future.
• Notes on Silverlight and Phone Toolkits, Testing and Other Phone Stuff – Jeff Wilcox also discusses the Windows Phone 7 SDK update, looking in detail at the copy / paste functionality, discussing the other changes in the SDK, and looking towards the February 2011 update release.
• AsmSpy: A little tool to help fix assembly version conflicts – Mike Hadlow shares a simple little command line tool which will output the assembly references and version numbers for each of your dependent libaries which will help when diagnosing problems with assembly references and versioning.
• Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework "Sample Browser" v2 available for Technical Preview – Jialiang Ge highlights the new and improved sample browser for the All-In-One Code Framework, allowing you to view the various samples and search for code from within the samples.

Information

• If Writing An Object That Is IDisposable, Don’t Fail During Construction – Steve Smith explores the IDisposable pattern for working with unmanaged resources safely in .NET, exploring some of the issues that can occur if you allocate your unmanaged resources in the constructor of your object
• Using DbContext in EF Feature CTP5 Part 10: Raw SQL Queries , Part 11: Load and AsNoTracking & Part 12: Automatically Detecting Changes – Arthur Vickers completes his series of posts looking at the DbContext in the CTP5 release of the Entity Framework Features, exploring the running of native SQL Queries through Entity Framework, Loading entities without tracking changes, and a look at the automatic change tracking functionality.
• New Validation Attributes in ASP.NET MVC 3 Future – Imran Baloch explores the additional validation attributes available in the ASP.NET MVC 3 Futures assembly which provide Email, URL, CreditCard and FileExtension validations.
• Functions inside page using Razor View Engine – ASP.NET MVC – Hajan takes a look at how you can create functions inside your Razor view engine pages using the @functions syntax and the underlying programming language of the template.
• Internals of Anonymous Types – Abhishek Sur continues his series of posts looking at the internal implementation of various language features. In this post he explores how Anonymous types are represented by the compiler into C# and the intermediate language.
• MSDN Magazine: February 2011 Issue – The February 2011 edition of the MSDN Magazine is now available online. This month the focus is on dynamic programming, along with looks at F# pattern matching, Workflow, TFS, the use of SynchronizationContext, and all the usual columns.
• F# + Razor View Engine = FSRazor – Keith Dahlby shares his experiments with using the Razor View Engine with the F# language, showing a simple example of the combination in use, and looking at the next steps for his experiments.
• TDD breaking the mould – Gojko Adzic shares the recording of his recent session on different models of Test Driven Development which he delivered at Skills Matter

Community

• The 2010 Niney Award nominees have been announced – Raymond Chen highlights the Niney Awards, Channel 9’s awards for contributions to the developer community with the winners being awarded based on community votes
• Some videos from DDD9 Sessions – John Price highlights the availability of videos from the sessions at DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 9 which were hosted in Chicargo, including Mike Hadlow on Monads, Liam Westley on Async, Paul Stack on Continuous Integration, Helen Emerson on CSS and Andy Gibson on MVC.
• Boilerplate talk slides for DDD9 – Dan Maharry shares the slides from his session at DDD9 on the HTML5 Boilerplate Project.
• DDD9, teaching Jon Skeet C#, and fun with exceptions – Mark Rendle shares his impressions of DDD9, on having Jon Skeet in the audience for his talk, and discussions of some of the techniques from his session on Functional C#
• jQuery Conference: Boston 2010 – Videos from the jQuery Conference held last year are now available online, with over 25 sessions already available and more still to come. The videos, including the keynotes from John Resig and Richard D Worth cover all aspects of jQuery, from JavaScript testing to HTML6.

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Repeated browser crashes this morning have resulted in some of today’s potential links being locked away from me for the time being, meaning today is a little shorter than usual (although hopefully the DDD9 roundup will help offset that). Depending on the quantity of link worthy content I’ll either put out a ‘Morning Brew #785b’ later today or save them for Monday’s edition.

Software

• Get advance notice for February security updates: 12 bulletins, 3 critical – Marcelle Amelia highlights a barrage of security updates coming next Tuesday, some of which address some major security issues in applications such as Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, IIS, Office.
• Windows Azure Software Development Kit (SDK) Refresh Released – The Windows Azure team announce the release of a refresh of their SDK, updating the November 2010 release, addressing issues reported with the Full IIS feature.
• Simple.Data is out there – Mark Rendle announces the first release of Simple.Data, a data access library which makes heavy use of .NET 4’s support for dynamic types, providing a simple way to do data access in platforms like WebMatrix and Nancy.

Information

• Curiouser and curiouser – Eric Lippert takes a look at seemingly circular class declarations, including the use of generics, exploring how they are actually legal, although the can be confusing to people reading your code.
• The MVC 3.0 IDependencyResolver interface is broken. Don’t use it with Windsor. – Mike Hadlow takes a look at the IDependencyResolver implementation in ASP.NET MVC3, discovering that its lack of support for a release method makes it more dangerous to use with Windsor. Check out the comments for a discussion of the issues, and some possible work arrounds.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Useful But Overlooked Sets – James Michael Hare takes a look at another of his C# little wonders, exploring in this post the Set collection classes, looking at a little set theory, and exploring their use.
• Hitting the Ground Running with Parallel Extensions in .NET 4.0 – Jeremy Jarrell takes an introductory look at the Parallel extensions for .NET, looking at both PLINQ and the Task Parallel library, sharing examples of each.

Community

• Video Series: How To Give Great Presentations – Guy Smith-Ferrier highlights (the long awaited) release of a series of videos he recorded for Microsoft’s User Group Support Services on presentation tips for usergroup presenters. If you are planning on making the step up to present at a UG or conference, or even if you are a seasoned presenter, these tips will be most useful to you.

Developer Developer Developer 9

I had a fabulous time at DDD9 last weekend, and as promised earlier in the week, here is a round up of all the DDD9 related content I’ve come across this week.

• My DDD9 Experience (and slides from my talks) – Rob Ashton
• DDD9 Community Developer Day at Microsoft Reading – Jon Alb
• DDD 9 Slides and Samples – Oliver Sturm
• Functional Alchemy – Mark Rendle (Slides)
• DDD9 Thoughts – Phil Jones
• DDD9! – Nathan Gloyn
• DDD9 Introduction to PowerShell session slides – James Boother
• DDD9 – Ian Johnson
• DDD9 slides – Helen Emerson
• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 9 – Phil Winstanley (Photos)
• DDD9 – 29/01/2011 – Craig Murphy (Photos)
• What’s A DDD9? – Phil Pursglove
• Microsoft Async CTP for DDD9 UK Developer Conference – slides and source code now available – Liam Westley
• DDD 9 and StyleCop – Guy Smith-Ferrier

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Software

• An open letter to the .NET community – Neil Davidson, Co-CEO at RedGate announces their change in plans regarding the Reflector tool. From version 7 the product will be a commercial only offering, with licenses costing £35
  • Reflector No Longer Free – Chris Eargle discusses this change in license and what it means for developers and RedGate
• StreamInsight Now Available Through Microsoft Update – The StreamInsight Team announces the distribution of Stream Insight 1.1 over the Microsoft Update Service, which will install V1.1 along side any pre-existing 1.0 installation

Information

• Redirecting Routes To Maintain Persistent URLs – Phil Haack looks at a technique for maintaining URIs for your pages when using ASP.NET Routing, allowing you to provide real permanent URIs by redirecting one route to another, sharing the solution via a NuGet package
• The Pragmatic Bookshelf – The Pragmatic Bookshelf team release the February edition of PragPub, their online magazine for developers. This edition celebrates the 10th anniversary of the Agile Manefesto and Agile Alliance, looking back at all of their Agile related articles, along with a look at Abstraction, refactoring and De Morgan’s Law.
• Service location is (not) always evil – Rob Ashton takes a look at dependency injection and the service locator pattern discussing why calling to the container need not be an absolute crime.
• Fun with Noun Pluralization libraries and the .NET Framework – Scott Hanselman highlights a little known library tucked away as a part of the Entity Framework Designer support in the full .NET 4 Framework which provides a means of pluralisation and singularisation of english nouns.
• Downloading a local NuGet repository with PowerShell – Jon Galloway shares an update to an original script from Steve Michelotti which allows you to download a full NuGet repository allowing you to work off line and providing a useful solution to freezing your dependencies whilst still using NuGet.
• Using DbContext in EF Feature CTP5 Part 8: Working with Proxies – Arthur Vickers continues his series of posts on the new CTP of Entity Framework Features, with this post looking at working with the Entity Framework’s dynamic proxying features.
• Task Parallel Library : 1 of n – Sacha Barber starts a new series on CodeProject looking at the Task Parallel Library looking initially at the basics of creating and running tasks, handling exceptions in tasks and working with the UI.
• Windows Phone 7 Content On Demand, Pt 2 & Pt 3 – Mike Ormond highlights the availability of the video of sessions from the DDD Windows Phone 7 event held in Manchester last year. All 8 sessions from the event are available now on Channel 9, and Mike has all of them embedded into these posts for easy access.
• Make It Yours – K. Scott Allen talks about how you should take a general purpose framework (like ASP.NET) and put your own abstractions and constraints over the top to make a more specific purpose framework fit for your needs, illustrating with an example.
• Modified version of Rob Conery’s TextMate VS2010 Theme that works with Razor – John V. Petersen shares an updated version of Rob Conery’s TextMate Visual Studio Theme which provides good colouration for the Razor view syntax.

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