The Morning Brew

Software

• A More Beautiful Web Launches on March 14th – Ryan Gavin makes the public announcement of the plans for the release of Internet Explorer 9, which will be available from 9pm PST on Monday 14th March. With this in mind, the Internet Explorer Team blog takes a look back over the past year of beta and release candidates in their post ‘Blogging IE9: A Year in Review‘.
• Release Notes – NHibernate – Version 3.1.0 – The NHibernate team have been hard at work and have release NHibernate 3.1.0 GA, a bugfix and improvement update to 3.0 which fixes numerous reported bugs and implements Read only entities and brings the <properties> functionality across from Java Hibernate. Binary and source downloads for the release are available on the NHibernate SourceForge pages.
• Python Tools for Visual Studio – The Python Tools for Visual Studio CodePlex project has released its first beta of v1.0. This tooling brings an integrated development environment for Python into Visual Studio 2010 making working with Python a more familiar experience for VS based developers.
• Announcing WCF Data Services March 2011 CTP2 for .NET4 & SL4 – The WCF Data Services Team announce their second CTP release (March CTP2) of the WCF Data Services project, with the major addition being support for properties on Derived Types, a topic to which the devote a whole post to ‘Introduction to Derived Properties ‘

Information

• Tips on installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 – Now that Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 is out there, Jon Galloway shares some top tips and advice on getting it installed successfully.
• Installing all the new stuff – In a similar post, Brian Harry discusses the installation of the latest raft of updates on differing configurations of Sharepoint and TFS, along with defining some of the terminology used when referring to some of the updates / releases this week.
• Support dynamic fields with NHibernate and .NET 4.0 – Ayende looks at a nice solution to the user defined / custom fields problem by combining a custom extensions table wit NHibernate’s support for dictionary based properties and .NET 4’s dynamic functionality to create an elegant solution.
• NHibernate – Custom Id-generator – Daniel Wertheim looks at migrating from identity based keys in NHibernate to the HiLo generator, discussing how you can go about this translation, and why you might benefit from doing so.
• Entity Framework Week Part 2: Conventions and Fluent Mappings & Part 3: Runtime Issues – Ian Nelson continues sharing his experiences of working with Entitty Framework Code First, coming from an NHibernate background, exploring the fluent mappings API and conventions based mapping and looking at cascades, lazy loading and dynamic proxies.
• Lazy Loading,Eager Loading,Explicit Loading in Entity Framework 4 – Nikolaos Kantzelis also continues his series on Entity Framework exploring in depth the different entity loading strategies, looking how Eager and Lazy loading actually work with a simple example.
• NuGet Action Plan – Upgrade to 1.1, Setup Automatic Updates, Get NuGet Package Explorer – Scott Hanselman shares three actions you should take to get yourself to .NET Package Management nirvana, getting the latest version of NuGet, ensuring you get notifications of future versions, and make use of the NuGet Package Explorer.
• Take NuGet to the next level with sample packages – David Ebbo urges developers who are releasing libraries as NuGet Packages to also create Samples packages which help the user learn how to consume the library by providing working code which installs itself as easily as the library does via NuGet.
• HTML5-MVC application using VS2010 SP1 – nmarun explores the use of HTML 5 in a web application, looking at the minor changes required to get Visual Studio up and running with HTML5, and shares a simple ecommerce system which illustrates some of the HTML5 features. Full source is available.
• Testing conventions – Krzysztof Kozmic discusses and illustrates how you can write simple tests to ensure you are being consistent in your code, sharing example test from Windsor which ensure that methods on implementation classes and interfaces are consistently marked with Obsolete attributes and comments.

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Recording of Andreas Öhlund on NServiceBus (Part Two) @ E-VAN 08 March 2011 – Jan Van Ryswyck provides access to the recording of Andreas Öhlund’s second session for the European Virtual Alt.Net usergroup on NServiceBus, delivered earlier this week
• Tech.Days Live – The 2011 schedule for the UK Techdays event has been announced, and registrations are now open. The events, spread across 2 tracks (Developer and IT Pro) over 4 days (Monday 23rd May – Thursday 26th May) will be covering a wide range of topics ranging from Cloud to phone, client to server.
• Webinar wrap-up: Julian on JavaScript III – Julian M Bucknall shares notes, slides, the recording and sample script from his 3rd instalment of his Webinar series on JavaScript, exploring the depths of the Function in JavaScript.

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Software

• Announcing Gallio and MbUnit v3.2.3 – Yann Trévin announces the 3.2.3 release of Gallio / MbUnit, introducing a raft of new features for MbUnit, such as the NHamcrest port of Hamcrest the assert library, support for testing for attributes, case insensitive string marching, Identity Impersonation for tests, and much more

Information

• You Really Should Be Using NuGet – Justin Etheredge shares a really nice article discussing the purpose of NuGet, and running through a getting started guide to get you up and running, and familiar with its use.
• Using a custom build of MVC 3 – David Ebbo looks at how you can re-write existing ASP.NET MVC3 projects to use a custom built version of ASP.NET MVC built yourself from the source available on CodePlex, sharing simple project file replacements you can use to make it work.
• Effective Tests: Introduction – Derek Greer kicks off a new series of posts looking at the creation of good automated tests, and in this first part he discusses the key types of automated test
• Internet Explorer 9 Security Part 1: Enhanced Memory Protections – Eric Lawrence discusses some of the key features of Internet Explorer 9 which look to protect against three different types of attack, looking at the use of DEP/NX (Data Execution Prevention / No eXecute), ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) and SafeSEH (Safe Structured Exception Handling), and how they help protect you.
• MVVM For Silverlight/WP7- the Refcard… – Greg Duncan highlights the latest RefCard from DZone which details the MVVM Design Pattern and its use in Silverlight applications for both Desktop, browser and mobile based applications.
• GDC 2011 – Miguel de Icaza looks at the use of C# in game development, looking back at its position in times past, and exploring how the XNA and the Mono Project’s projects have led to it becoming a serious contender in the space.
• BDD Simply with Bddify – Mehdi Khalili shares Bddify, a simple lightweight Behaviour Driven Development library which focuses on simplicity of use and the production of good reporting. Full source is available.

Community

• JetBrains night at Bristol .NET User Group – Hadi Hariri highlights the Bristol .NET Usergroup’s JetBrains evening, a free community event were Hadi will be delivering some sessions on the JetBrains tooling available for .NET Developers. The event takes place on the evening of Monday 14th March at the University of West England, and the event is open to all, with no registration required.

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Update: Some broken HTML merged Ian Nelson’s link and hid Jose Romaniello’s NHibernate link – both are corrected below now. Thanks to Drew for letting me know

Software

• Visual Studio 2010 enhancements – Somasegar shares the announcements he is announcing as a part of his Keynote address at TechEd Middle East, including the availability of Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 for MSDN Subscribers later today (8th March), with general availability on 10th March. Also announced and released today are the TFS Project Server Integration Feature Pack which improves the integration of TFS an MS Project Server, and the Visual Studio Load Test Feature pack, both available for Visual Studio Ultimate MSDN Subscribers.
• Native Extensions 2.0 For Microsoft Silverlight Released – Davide Zordan highlights the release of the Native Extensions 2.0 for Silverlight, which adds support for Touch APIs, System Tray Integration, and implementation of the Single Instance Pattern, interception of Windows API messages through the browser plugin, along with a number of bugfixes.

Information

• References and Pointers, Part One – Eric Lippert kicks off another series of posts exploring the manipulation of references to values, and the use of Pointers in C#
• Defining Default Content For A Razor Layout Section – Phil Haack explores the use of Layouts in your Razor based Views, and shows how they can be used in conjunction with the Templated Razor Delegates from a previous post to create a very powerful layout based templating solution.
• Basic JavaScript Part 11: Functional Initialization – Jan Van Ryswyck continues his series looking at the JavaScript language, sharing an index of the previous posts, and also sharing and discussing a piece of beautiful JavaScript he saw in the 11 More Things I Learned from the jQuery Source screencast by Paul Irish.
• Effective NHibernate Session management for web apps – Jose Romaniello explores the session per request pattern in NHibernate, looking at two implementations of this pattern, one in the main NHibernate, and the other in the uNhAddIns.Web library.
• Entity Framework Week Part 1: Introduction, Configuration and Initialization – Ian Nelson documents his experiences in getting to grips with Entity Framework 4 in the first post of a 5 part series, looking in this part at the configuration and Initialization of Entity Framework Code First.
• Identity Map Pattern and the Entity Framework – Nikolaos Kantzelis continues his series looking at the use of Entity Framework with ASP.NET applications, exploring the Identity Map Pattern and its implementation in Entity Framework in this 7th part of the series.

Community

• Register for ASP.NET Security Webinar – OWASP Top 10 Web Vulnerabilities – Mehul Harry highlights a DevExpress Webinar featuring Barry Dorans delivering a session on the OWASP top 10 Web Vulnerabilities, explaining them in the context of an ASP.NET website, and showing how you can defend against such attacks. The virtual event is on Monday 14th March at 10am PDT, register now to book your space.
• Don’t forget to attend the IE9 developer Live Meeting this Thursday – Eric Nelson highlights the Internet Explorer 9 ISV Developer LiveMeeting, your opportunity to get answers to your pressing questions on upgrading your products to work with IE9. The live meeting is happening on Thursday 10th March at 11am.

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