The Morning Brew

Software

• Autofac 2.4.5 Release – Nicholas Blumhardt announces the release of AutoFac 2.4.5, a bugfix release of this Inversion of Control (IoC) Container for .NET. This release addresses know bugs, and improves on the exception reporting, along with making other improvements to the API.
• Coding envy? Pex4fun on your WP7 phone – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces the release of the Pex4Fun Windows Phone 7 application. Now you can write C# with auto-complete and background compilation to solve Pex related problems.
• AppFabric WCF Service Template (C#) – Ron Jacobs announces the release of the AppFabirc WCF Service Template, a template which combines the WCF and AppFabric technologies which provides integration with the AppFabric infrastructure to monitor requests to the WCF Service, an improved logging / tracing with Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) events being logged to AppFabric Monitoring.

Information

• Proposed Workaround for Assembly Signing Issue with VS2010 SP1 – Amit of the Visual C++ Team discusses a breaking change introduced in the Visual Studio 2010 SP1 release which affects the signing of assemblies for Visual C++ Projects, and in this post outlines a proposed workaround for these issues.
• My FubuMVC, StructureMap, and StoryTeller Plans – Jeremy Miller gives an update on his three major Open Source Projects discussing his current focus on getting FubuMVC to a V1.0 project, followed by a maintenance release of StructureMap 2.6, followed by version 3
• Using Query Classes With NHibernate – Liam McLennan discusses the use of Query Classes with NHibernate to encapsulate the various queries you need to run against your data model, and looks at implementing this approach with support from an Extension Method on the NHibernate Session to run the queries.
• Asynchrony in C# 5 (Part I) – Javier Arguello kicks off a series of posts looking at the Async CTP which gives a glimpse at the features intended for C#5. In this first part Javier explores the concept of async functions which return Task<T> and make use of the new await / async keywords. Javier also has a post exploring How to make WCF work with Async CTP by way of a simple extension method to add the async task support to service calls.
• Async Samples 3 – Bill Wagner is also in the midst of a series of posts looking at various samples against th Async CTP. In this 3rd post in the series Bill explores the concepts of cancellation and looks at the implementation using Cancellation tokens
• MEF with ASP.NET – "Hello World!" – CodeProject – ‘mgkr’ gives an introduction to the use of the Managed Extensibility Framework with ASP.NET applications showing how it can be utilised ro implement a ‘hello world’ example in this CodeProject article.
• You need testers because… – Bj Rollison discusses why you really do need dedicated testers to help uncover bugs that developers typically won’t find in their code and using Unit tests.

Community

• A million [visits] in review… – Greg’s Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day – Many congratulations to Greg Duncan on reaching his Two-millionth visit on his blog ‘Greg’s Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day’. Greg is a fellow link blogger (of sorts) who has featured regularly in The Morning Brew for his excelent ability to sniff out great content and add value beyond just a link to another article.
• NxtGenUG – Touch or stretch me – Win 7 WP – Guy Smith-Ferrier takes his session on Multi-Touch programming for Windows 7 on the road, visiting the Hereford NxtGenUG usergroup on Monday 9th May. In this session Guy will explore Multi-touch programming using WPF4.

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Software

• Windows Azure SDK and Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio (March 2011) SDK 1.4 – Patrick Butler Monterde highlights the release of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio March update, taking the SDK Version to 1.4. This package brings tooling to Visual Studio to support creation, configuration, build, run and debugging of cloud based services running on Windows Azure.
• Mindscape – Phone Elements Giveaway – Mindscape are in the process of giving away a huge number of free licenses to their Phone Elements Windows Phone 7 Controls library, a $299 value. At the time of writing there are ~750 licenses remaining, to claim one for yourself all you need is to give your email and you will recieve a promo-code for a free license.
• IE9 to Launch on Monday 14th – Martin Beeby reminds us that Today (Monday) is the release date for Internet Explorer 9 – due to be officially released at the MIX conference. This post also contains a video from Dean Hachamovitch and Ryan Gavin of the IE team thanking those who took part in the Beta and release Candidate cycle providing helpful feedback to help shape the final product.

Information

• Free Video Training: ASP.NET MVC 3 Features – Scott Guthrie highlights the extension of the free access to Pluralsight’s ASP.NET MVC video training series, now extended to 18th March. The series, made up of 6 parts, totalling over 3 hours of detailed content presented by Scott Allen is a great way of getting a handle on the new features of ASP.NET MVC3.
• Simplify your Visual Studio 2010 Toolbar and Free Your Mind – Scott Hanselman suggests that a more zen-like development experience could be yours with the removal of clutter which you don’t use from your IDE environment, sharing a few simple tips to give yourself that focused clean IDE experience.
• The Wisdom and Magic of Strings – Rob Conery sets about rediscovering the original meaning of the term ‘magic strings’ in computer programming, looking at and discussing some of the meanings that this term has taken on over the years.
• Saving your API key with nuget.exe – David Ebbo shares a useful NuGet tip provided by a feature from Matthew Osborn which allows you to save your NuGet API key using the SetAPIKey command, making it much easier to push packages from the command line client up to the public NuGet servers.
• Package Manager Console For More Than Managing Packages – Steve Michelotti takes a look at some of the alternative uses for the Package Manager Console for Visual Studio which is a part of NuGet, looking at how having this PowerShell based command line in the IDE allows you to access the full power of the IDE simply
• Entity Framework Week Part 5: Concluding Thoughts – Ian Nelson wraps up his series of posts looking at Entity Framework Code First coming to it with considerable experience working with NHibernate. In this post Ian looks at the positive and negatives of his experience gained during a week working with EF.
• Fun with HTML5 Canvas, WebSocket, JQuery and Asp.net. End-result : A live white board on a web page! – Al-Farooque Shubho looks at the creation of a shared whiteboard application utilising the HTML5 Canvas and WebSockets APIs using jQuery, with a backend in ASP,NET in this CodeProject article.

Community

• NxtGenUG – S.O.L.I.D as a Rock … – The Essex chapter of the NxtGenUG welcome Nathan Gloyn and his session on the SOLID principles to their usergroup on the evening of Wednesday 27th April. Nathan delivered this session recenlty at DDD 9 where it was well recieved, and this is a great oppotunity to see it in a usergroup setting.

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Software

• .NET Reflector 7 Released – Paulo Morgado highlights the release of version 7 of .NET Reflector from Redgate. This release is the first wholly commercial release of the product, and this update also includes improved support for advanced C# functionality (such as iterator blocks).
• Machine.Specifications (MSpec) 0.4 – Aaron Jensen highlights the work being done by Alexander Groß on the MSpec project, including changes to the test runners, and the removal of strong naming from the default build.
• New release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available for download – March 2011 – Jialiang Ge announces the latest update for the All In One Code Framework. This release adds new Drag and Drop samples for Silverlight, encryption, file upload Code highlighting, multiple window prevention, and a simple search engine for ASP.NET, along with other new samples for Winforms and Workflow.

Information

• References and Pointers, Part Two – Eric Lippert continues his series on Pointers and References witha look at converting some C based code which used pointers to use ‘managed pointers’ allowing the same types of functionality without the unmanaged risks.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Tuples and Tuple Factory Methods – James Michael Hare continues his Little Wonders series with a look at the framework’s support for Tuples, exploring the basics of Tuples along with looking at them in use.
• Beyond the Monad fashion (I.): Writing idioms in LINQ – Tomáš Pet?í?ek goes beyond Monads and looks at what else can be encoded using LINQ, exploring the world of idioms, giving the theoretical background to them, and looking at creating and using idioms in your code.
• Entity Framework Week Part 4: Features and Further Investigations – Ian Nelson continues his series looking at the Entity Framework code first, exploring it from the point of view of a developer who is familiar with NHibernate. This post sees Ian explore some of the functionality requirements (such as caching, querying, concurrency, bulk operations, ec) which may be needed for his application, and looks at how Entity Framework addresses them,
• Using NuGet without committing packages – David Ebbo looks at how you can work with NuGet on your project without needing to commit packages to your source , showing how the support for reading and loading packages from Pacages.config allows you to quickly and easily get the required dependencies.
• T4 vs Razor – what’s the skinny? – Gareth Jones shares a comparison of T4 and Razor concocted by the two teams, outlining which is good for which purpose, and providing the reasoning why there are two similar projects as they are good for different purposes.
• "Bart Simpson’s Guide to Windows Azure"[How can I beat that title?] – Greg Duncan highlights a nice article from Yaron Naveh, sharing a number of good practices for working with Windows Azure to help you keep your spending on the Azure platform to the minimum.
• Manos de Mono – Louis Salin explores the use of the Manos de Mono web framework built using Mono, looking at the implementation of a simple service against the platform.

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