The Morning Brew

Software

• Castle Visual Studio Integration 0.4.0 – Jonathon Rossi announces both binary and source release of v0.4.0 of the Castle Visual Studio Integration which brings colourisation and Intellisense for the NVelocity language to Visual Studio 2010. The binary for this release is available from the Visual Studio Extension Manager.
• Prism Template Pack 1.4: Now with MEF Support! – David Hill highlights the release of the latest version of the Prism Template Pack, taking the version to 1.4, and introducing support for MEF and Unity into the templates, adding those possibilities to the choice between C# and VB.NET, and Silverlight and WPF.
• Performance Troubleshooting Article and VS2010 SP1 Change – Jason Zander hints at an imminent release of Visual Studio 2010 Service pack 1, discussing some of the changes that will be being made to help improve reliability of the product on Windows XP to do with Hardware Acceleration.

Information

• IE6 Countdown – Microsoft launch a new website designed to encourage the upgrading of Internet Explorer 6, and also to promote adoption of Internet Explorer 9. The aim of the site is to get use of Internet Explorer to drop below the magic 1%, which judging by some of the stats on the site will be no mean feat in certain parts of the world. This site has created quite a stir in the community, and here are a few reactions to it:
  • Microsoft joins the rest of us…and counts down to the end of IE6 – Brian Ritchie
  • IE6countdown.com – Pushing for IE6 to Die – Rey Bango
  • Missing the point with ie6countdown.com – Christian Heilmann
• Danger, Will Robinson! – Eric Lippert discusses the considerations which go into deciding wether to introduce a new compiler warning, looking at some examples where compiler warnings weren’t introduced.
• Building a simple ASP.Net application using the Entity Data Model – Nikolaos Kantzelis hase been busy posting up a series looking at the Entity Framework and its use in ASP.NET, with part 2 exploring tthe Model First approach , part 3 examining the use of stored procedures , part 4 looking at the Reading data from an Entity Framework data model through a WCF Data Service, part 5 delving into the concurrency support in Entity Framework , and part 6 explores the use of Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs)
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: ConcurrentBag and BlockingCollection – James Michael Hare continues his ‘Little Wonders’ series with a continuation of his exploration of the concurrent collection classes, exploring the use of ConcurrentBag and BlockingCollection in this post.
• NuGet Package of the Week #1 – ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization – Scott Hanselman kicks off a new series exploring some of the best NuGet packages currently available. In this first post Scott looks at the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization, available for both WebForms and MVC / Razor, showing how to obtain the library, and looking at its application in your applications.
• Why We’re Going With HTML(5) Instead Of Silverlight – Davy Brion discusses the outcome of his research into UI technology which has resulted in his client opting for HTML5. In the post Davy discusses the key factors which influenced the decision, and also provides his comparison spreadsheet.
• Auto updating a desktop app – Louis Salin discusses the difficulties of providing a self updating desktop application, and shares his lightweight solution to this problem, discussion its creation and design.

Community

• Webcast on NServiceBus with Andreas Öhlund – Udi Dahan gives a reminder that the much awaited second part of Andreas Öhlund’s NService Bus presentation is being held by the European Virtual Alt.NET Usergroup, tomorrow (Tuesday 8th).

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Software

• Alternatives To .Net Reflector – Adrian Banks looks at some of the offerings, both free and commercial which are alternatives to .NET Reflector, giving a brief overview of each offering, and reminding use that there is plenty of choice in this area for those evaluating the different possibilities
• Mindscape Phone Elements released! – Mindscape announce the release of their latest control collection, a library of controls for the Windows Phone 7 Developer. This collection includes a rich charting suite, along with numerous other controls, and the MindScape team have spent a lot of time tuning and optimising the performance of these controls.
• WhatsNew – Mercurial – The Mercurial team announce the release of version 1.8 of Mercurial, a release which includes improvements to the stability of Mercurial when running on Windows, support for Git sub repositories along with various other enhancements and bugfixes
• TortoiseHg v2.0.0 – To go with the new Mercurial release, the TortoiseHg team announce a major new release, taking their project to V2.0. This new release changes the whole way of working with Tortoise, introducing features to help educate uses in the use of Mercurial at the command line, a new merge resolve tool, and much more.
• WebStresser: A very simple web load testing tool – Mike Hadlow shares a simple implementation of a Web load testing tool which is available in both binary and source formats, providing a simple means to put your we based services under load with a variety of options for configuring the type of load to produce.

Information

• EF 4.1 Is Coming (DbContext API & Code First RTW) – ADO.NET team blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – The ADO.NET Entity Framework Team give an update on the work they have been doing on Entity Framework’s Code First and DbContext API, outlineing their plans for a RTW (release to web) release in mid-march
• Five Bucks says you’ll Bookmark this Site: jsFiddle.net – Steve Wellens highlights a very useful little site for testing out and experimenting with JavaScript, CSS and HTML, allowing you to work with various JavaScript frameworks in a simple yet rich way.
• Using T4 to generate Configuration classes – Justin Hoffman explores the use of T4 Templating to produce strongly typed classes to access configuration and connection strings stored in the web.config, sharing the code and giving a bit of background to how he approached the work.
• 5 Ways That Postsharp Can SOLIDify Your Code: Logging and Auditing – Matthew Groves continues this series looking at how PostSharp and Aspect Oriented Programming techniques can be utilised to implement logging an Auditing functionality in your appplications.
• Three Routes to Spaghetti-Free Javascript – Zef Hemel takes a look at three different approaches to making the code required for async JavaScript more linear and understandable using streamline, mobl and StratifiedJS
• My Software Development Manifesto – Kris Kemper shares his software development manifesto, listing all the key principles he believes strongly in and giving a little background to why he olds each to be important.
• Stop Spinning Your Wheels… Sage Advice for Aspiring Developers – Mark Rackley shares some good advice, aimed at aspiring developers, but probably applicable to everyone to some extent, about how to get up to speed, practices, and techniques for developing your skills.

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Apologies to UK and European readers today for a slightly late edition of The Morning Brew – you folks are going to have to read today’s content with your mid-afternoon beverage of choice due to me forgetting to set the correct posting time for today’s post as I’m still in a considerably different timezone.

Information

• PragPub for March – The Pragmatic programmers announce the March edition of PragPub their online magazine for developers which looks this month at testing web services and cloud based projects, along with a look at the relation between punk rock and programming.
• Oredev Videos on Responsibility Driven Design and Internal DSL’s with C# – Jeremy Miller highlights the availability of videos of two sessions he delivered at Oredev last year, with one session exploring Compositional design practices, and the other exploring implementing domain specific languages in C#3
• A Windows Phone 7 Application Starter Kit – Dr. Z highlights the release of a Windows Phone Application starter kit, intended for use by schools to create an application which consumes RSS feeds. Full source and instructions for its use are provided giving another starting point for getting into WP7 development
• Leaving patterns & practices – J.D. Meier, who has been featured on this blog a number of times, announces that he is leaving is role in the patterns and practices team at Microsoft, and looks back at his time there and links to the vast array of content created during that time.
• Passing a parameter so that it cannot be changed – C# – nmarun takes a look at how you can use ReadOnly collections to prevent the collections you pass into methods being from being modified
• The Cost of Delay – Louis Salin looks in detail at the effects that delay can have on your company, product, and process improvement efforts
• Windows Phone Development Quickstarts – Wes Yanaga highlights the Windows Phone Developer Quickstarts included on the AppHub site, a series of simple recipe based resources which help you get what you need to get done.
• Custom Application Block Tutorial Included in EntLib Extensibility Labs – The Patterns and Practices guidance site highlights the release of an update to the Enterprise Library Hands-on Labs for extending the Enterprise library, which now includes guidance on creating custom application blocks

Community

• F# London Meetup Group, Tomorrow Night! The F#/C# XBox Live Arcade Game "The Path of Go" – Don Syme highlights the F#unctional Londoners Meetup Group gathering tonight (Thursday 3rd March) at 6:30pm at Skills Matter in London, where David Stern will be delivering a talk on The Path of Go, an XBox Live game which he worked on which uses F# for the AI engine

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