The Morning Brew

A browser crash at too later stage in my Morning Brew Prep has curtailed today’s Information section – anything from yesterday that didn’t go in today will be in tomorrow’s edition

MIX, Silverlight and Windows Phone

• Silverlight 5 Beta – A guide to the new features – Following on from the Keynote announcement of Silverlight 5 Beta, Tim Heuer gives the lowdown on the tools and features that make up the beta SDK release. With new features in the areas of text, media, data binding, 3D graphics, as well as improvements to out of browser support, and much much more.
• Announcing the Silverlight 5 Beta Release and the Silverlight.net Redesign – Pete Brown highlights the release of Silverlight 5 beta, the launch of the redesigned Silverlight Site, and shares a series of blogposts and videos about some of the new functionality:
  • Working with Implicit Templates
  • Supporting Double and Even Triple Click for the Mouse
  • Using the SoundEffect Class for Low-Latency Sound (and play WAV files in Silverlight)
  • Advancements in Text
  • Working with Operating System Windows
  • Debugging Bindings with Xaml Breakpoints
• Silverlight 5 3D + SLARToolkit Augmented Reality = Win! – René Schulte shares a demo using Silverlight 5 and his Silverlight Augmented Reality Toolkit library, showing some of the power of the new Silverlight 5 hardware accelerated 3D API.
• A Quick Wrap-Up of Today’s Windows Phone Announcements at MIX – Joey deVilla shares a summary of the announcements regarding the Windows Phone platform from yesterday’s MIX keynote, highlighting improvements in the emulator for working with tilt, GeoLocation, improvements for profiling applications, the arival of Angry Bird on Windows Phone and browser improvements.
• Mix 11 – Web Platform and Tools Keynote Demo Script – Scott Hanselman shares blog based walk through of the MIX Keynote Demos for ASP,NET, looking at the construction of the ThisDevelopersLife backend and frontend site. In other MIX related news, Scott also took a ride in "Jellybean" the Kinect-Controlled Lounge Chair which uses the much discussed Kinect SDK, and Joey deVilla captured it on video for posterity.

Software

• Refreshing the Async CTP – Eric Lippert announces the release of the next Community Preview of the Async Language Features. This release brings Async features to the Windows Phone Platform, works in non-english versions of Visual Studio, and includes a Go Live License allowing you to use these features in production (at your own risk). This release also contains features and fixes to address the top issues raised with the previous CTP and is well worth checking out. Lucian Wischik has details of the install process, and getting up and running with Async on the Phone in his post Async CTP Refresh – Installation
• RouteDebugger 2.0 – Phil Haack highlights a really useful looking tool for helping diagnose Routing issues available as a part of the Glimpse Web Debugger project.
• xUnit.net 1.8 – The xUnit.NET team have released the RTM version of xUnit.NET 1.8 – from what I gather this release is actually the same as the release Candidate, just with a label change on the download – great news as the RC process must have had no significant issues – well done guys
• Announcing datajs version 0.0.3 – Asad Khan of the WCF Data Services Team announces the release of data.js 0.0.3, a library for JavaScript which aims to make data heavy application development easier. This new release makes use of some of the HTML5 local data storage features to improve the caching of data, and adds pre-fetch capabilities

Information

• The seven deadly sins for the developer (* some restrictions apply) – Ayende kicks off a discussion of Development Anti-patterns, sharing three of the worst practices, and calls for his readers to add their own ‘favourite’ crimes against code in the comments.
• Me on NHibernate 3.2 – James Gregory discusses the new Fluent ‘loquacious’ API for configuring NHibernate in NHibernate 3.2, and how this relates to the FluentNHibernate project

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Recording of Robert Greyling on Spark View Engine @ E-VAN 12 April 2011 – Jan Van Ryswyck shares the recording of this week’s European Virtual Alt.Net Usergoup meeting, allowing you a chance to see Robert Greyling presenting his session on The Spark View engine, touching on JavaScript Spark Views, SparkSense, and using Spark with other web frameworks

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