The Morning Brew

Software

• NOW AVAILABLE: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 – The Windows Azure Team announce the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7, providing a head start for anyone wanting to use the Windows Azure Services from the Windows Phone Device. The kit includes binaries, project templates and sample applications, along with some additional tooling to make sure things will work when deployed to the device.

Information

• Getting specific with the Specification Pattern – Sumit Thomas takes a look at the implementation and testing of the specification pattern, a pattern designed for testing candidate objects for matches against a set of requirements.
• Let’s synchronize our watches: Determining Clock Skew with Christian’s Algorithm and the Reactive Framework – Samuel Jack shares the experience he gained in writing a Windows Phone 7 game where time played a key in the communication for multi-user games, looking at how he combined the Reactive Framework with Christians Algorithm to detect the amount of time ‘slippage’ between two systems.
• 5 Ways That Postsharp Can SOLIDify Your Code: Transaction Management – Matthew Groves continues looking at ways in which Aspect Oriented Programming techniques using PostSharp can make it easier to keep your code following the SOLID principles. In this post Matthew takes a look at how AOP can provide Transaction functionality to your code auto-magically.
• Good Exception Management Rules of Thumb – Back to Basics Edition – Scott Hanselman kicks off the debate about exception handling with a post of some real world bad ‘exception handling’ code from a reader. Good discussion in the comments ensues.
• Working with more then one web.config files in asp.net application. – Jalpesh P. Vadgama takes a look at web.config inheritance when there are multiple web.config files in different directories of a website, explaining the functionality and looking at a concrete example.
• Deployment Guide: How to Configure a Web Server to Host LightSwitch Applications – Beth Massi shares the end to end process required to set up and configure a web server to run Visual Studio Lightswitch applications, working step by step through the process
• AppFabric WCF HTTP Service Template – Ron Jacobs takes a look at the AppFabric WCF HTTP Service Template, available on the Visual Studio Gallery, which combines these two technologies offering out of the box support for monitoring services across multiple servers, removing the need for the .svc extension using routing and providing custom Event Tracing for Windows events. In this post Ron shows how each of these features can be enabled and used.
• Stop Using Mocks – Karl Seguin shares his throughTs on the use of Mocks in tests to provide implementations of dependencies of the code under test. Be sure to check out the comments on this one for further discussion and debate on the subject.
• Using BCrypt in a .NET Application – Why it’s better than SHA or MD5. – Sergio Tapia takes a look at the BCryprt encryption library comparing it to SHA and MD5 for hashing passwords, discussing why its a better choice than SHA and MD5 due to its increased complexity meaning its harder to crack passwords using brute force.

Community

• Don’t forget to join us tomorrow for the WP7 Online Conference – Mike Ormond reminds us of the free virtual Windows Phone Online Conference being held today (Thursday 24th March) beginning at 3PM. If you want to attend (virtually) then registration is still open to this two track 5.5 hour event
• Streams of Streams – Your Rx Prescription with Ray Booysen – Canary Wharf .NET User Group – Wednesday 6th April sees Ray Booysen join the Canary Wharf .NET User Group for a session on the use of the Reactive Extensions for .NET looking at how they work and how you can apply them in your code.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #819