April 2011

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #833

Posted by on 13 Apr 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software & MIX11

  • Introducing ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update – Phil Haack announces the release of the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools update, This release does not bring new features for the MVC Framework, but brings some really cool updates to the Visual Studio tooling, including HTML5 templates, Scaffolding of Controllers with plug-in capability, the inclusion of Modernizr and Entity Framework 4.1, along with JavaScript dependencies as NuGet packages allowing for easier updates to these. And if this wasn’t enough, you also get NuGet 1.2 as the cherry on top
  • EF 4.1 Released – The Entity Framework Team announce the RTW release of Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1 which brings the official release of the DbContext API, giving a easier to use interface to the Object Context along with the introduction of Entity Framework Code First, allowing you create model classes and define their mappings in code.
  • MVC 3 and EF 4.1 Code First: Here are my classes, now you do the rest, kthxbai – Julie Lerman takes a walkthrough of the MVC3 Tools Update and Entity Framework 4.1 Code First, illustrating a use case that is now possible using the features introduced in these latest releases.
  • Native HTML5: First IE10 Platform Preview Available for Download – Hot on the heels of Internet Explorer 9 and after only 3 weeks development the Internet Explorer announced their first preview release of Internet Explorer 10 in the MIX11 Keynote. IE 10 continues to build on the HTML5 functionality of IE9, expanding on the standards compliance and performance work, with support for things like CSS3 Gradients, Grid and Column layouts, Transitions and 3D Transforms.
  • The World’s Biggest Pac-Man & SVG Girl – Another feature of the Internet Explorer part of the keynote was a number of new TestDrive examples showing the power of Internet Explorer 9’s Graphics and Hardware acceleration, and in these two posts Joey deVilla highlights two very impressive examples.
  • Windows Azure News from MIX11 (April 2011) & Access Control Service V2 – Free Until 2012! & Windows Azure Traffic Manager (WATM) CTP announced at MIX 11 – Lots of new stuff was also announced in the Windows Azure Space, including a new SDK release offering improved deployment tooling, the production release of then Access Control Service (which is free to use through to January 2012), and a CTP release of the Azure Traffic Manager, providing functionality for Geographically distributed data centre deployments.
  • Windows Azure Benefits for MSDN: New and improved – Jim O’Neil highlights and explains some changes (improvements on the whole) to the Windows Azure Benefits included as a part of an MSDN Subscription, bringing increased quotas across the board, and also the introduction of benefits for Visual Studio Professional MSDN Subscribers.
  • Free security updates for April – Marcelle Amelia highlights yesterday’s Patch Tuesday update patches, including a number of important security ones, so make sure you apply these patches to all environments you are responsible for.

Information

Community

  • Monospace has a home! – Louis Salin confirms some good news about the Monospace conference, with a date and location for the event now secured in Boston. The conference Call for Speakers is currently open, so if you have an interest in presenting on Mono, of the OpenSource .NET space then get your submissions in.
  • DDD South West Registration is Open – Rachel Hawley highlights the opening of registrations for the third DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West Conference to be held near Bristol on Saturday 11th June 2011. Spaces are filling up quickly so register soon to avoid missing out. Also Rachel gives a shout out to next month’s DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Scotland conference, which is currently accepting Waiting List registrations as the event has ‘sold’ out.

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The Morning Brew #832

Posted by on 12 Apr 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Caliburn.Micro RTW, NuGet Support, Mix Open Source Festival! – Rob Eisenberg announces the release of Caliburn,Micro 1.0 RTW for Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone. This release brings a number if new features for providing modal dialogs and support for obtaining the library using the NuGet package manager.
  • Phoney Tools 1.0 Released! – Shawn Wildermuth announces the release of Phoney Tools 1.0, his library of tools for Windows Phone Development which contains controls, helper classes and converter implementations. The library is available as source and Binary and also via NuGet.
  • Version 4.5.10.0 of StyleCop released & StyleCop for VB.NET – do you want it? – Tatworth announces the latest beta release of StyleCop which includes a number of bug fixes, 5 new rules, and now also contains the StyleCop for ReSharper plugin. Also, support for VB.NET is under discussion on the CodePlex site, so if you are a VB’er who is interested in having StyleCop like functionality for VB.NET, go share your opinion.

Information

  • Intro to WinDBG for .NET Developers – Kirk Evans gives an introductory look at WinDBG Debugger and and PssCor2 Debugging Extensions, walking through the use of these tools in diagnosing problems with a simple sample program.
  • Effective Tests: A Test-First Example – Part 3 – Derek Greer continues his series looking at Test Driven Development and good Tests, continuing with his worked TDD example Tic-Tac-Toe game implementing the last few requirements tests and implementation, discussing and looking at the refactoring in detail.
  • ASP Classic Compiler: the unit testing framework is released & How to contribute – Li Chen releases and discusses the testing framework for this Classic ASP to .NET compiler project, and also puts out an appeal for other interested developers to get involved with the project.
  • On Development: An alternative to NotImplementedException – Patrik Hägne shares a simple tip using the Conditional Compilation features of C# to provide a means for breaking the build if you forget to implement some functionality when not building in release mode.
  • Visual Studio 2010 Version Selector fails to Open SLN files – Ron Jacobs shares a useful tip regarding problems with the Visual Studio Version Selector not opening seemingly valid Solution files due to them being the incorrect character encoding.
  • A Developers’ Guide to Refactoring Databases – Nick Harrison discusses the why and how of implementing Evolutionary Database Design looking at the best practices for refactoring databases and sharing some guidelines for performing these refactorings.
  • Rounded Corners and Shadows – Dialogs with CSS – Rick Stral takes a look at the complicated landscape of CSS Rounded Corner support in browsers, looking at how you can use these features to generate nice looking dialog boxes using the browsers own functionality.

Community

  • DDD South West – Registration for DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West 3.0 opens today (Tuesday 12th April) for the event near Bristol on Saturday 11th June. DDD SW, like all the DDD events is for the community by the community, and boasts a great agenda of sessions from top UK based speakers (and me).
  • Mix11 – Watch the keynotes live, read the liveblog – Guy Barrette reminds us all of the Mix Keynote broadcast and live blog, both good ways of keeping up to date with what is going on over in Vegas over the next few days.

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The Morning Brew #831

Posted by on 11 Apr 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development

Software

  • Announcing TouchStudio – Nikolai Tillmann announces TouchStudio, a new project from the Microsoft Research ‘Research in Software Engineering’ group. TouchStudio allows you to write scripts on your phone device and have them executed there too, and the first version is available now on the MarketPlace.
  • Extended WPF Toolkit Release 1.4.0 – Brian Lagunas announces the latest release of the Extended WPF Toolkit which introduces 11 new controls to the library along with the usual improvements and bugfixes to existing ones. Brian’s post gives an overview of each of the new controls (Calculator, ColorCanvas, DateTimePicker, DecimalUpDown, DoubleUpDown, IntegerUpDown, PropertyGrid, SplitButton, TimePicker, and WatermarkTextBox)
  • NuGet package for Sharp Architecture – Alec Whittington – Alec Whittington announces the availability of a NuGet Package for the Sharp Architecture, making it really easy to get SharpArchitecture up and running in your project and ensuring that the key dependencies are installed correctly.

Information

  • MvcScaffolding: Scaffolding custom collections of files – Steve Sanderson completes his series exploring the MvcScaffold NuGet Package with a look at generating multiple files which work together, and illustrates the power of MvcScaffold with an examples of an Ajax powered controller.
  • Getting Constructive On ASP.NET Deployment – Rob Conery continunes his discussions of Web Deployment taking a look at how current Microsoft Tools could be extended to make deployment easier, proposing a number of interesting solutions.
  • Building Caliburn.Micro’s NuGet Package – Rob Eisenberg discusses the creation of the NuGet package for Caliburn.Micro, highlighing some of the key lessons learned, and sharing the scripts which help construct the package and make the install work.
  • Introducing LLBLGen Pro QuerySpec: a new fluent query API – Frans Bouma introduces the new Query API for LLBLGen, bringing a new fluent expressive API , discussing some of the key points of the API and some of the design decisions made during its creation.
  • NHibernate Examples – Davy Brion has begun the process of updating his NHibernate Samples from NHibernate 1.2 to the current revision, constructed as a suite of Automated tests running against a SQLite database. Full source code of the examples can be downloaded, and Davy will be adding to them over the coming weeks.
  • On deprecation – Grigori Melnik discusses the processes behind the depreciation/retirement of features from the Enterprise Library, looking at the thinking behind these decisions and sharing some real world examples of features which have be considered for depreciation.
  • ditto : with regard to AutoMapper – Mike Nichols continues discussion of his ditto project, discussing in this post how ditto is different from AutoMapper
  • The Visual Studio Patch Place – Greg Duncan highlights the Visual Studio 2010 Patch list, a list of all patches for Visual Studio available on Connect, many of which are already parts of the service pack releases, but some others which have not been included.
  • Refactoring toward frictionless & odorless code: Limiting session scope &The case for the view model – Ayende is mid-stream of an interesting series looking at refactorings and patterns which can make your code better and easier to work with, and in these two posts discusses an anti-pattern of keeping sessions open too late and allowing views to request data, and looks at how the View Model pattern can be introduced to avoid these problems.

Community

  • Software Craftsmanship Round-table (New Venue) – The London Software Craftsmanship Community host their next Software Craftsmanship Round–Table event on the evening of Monday 18th April at a new venue. Places are limited to 25 for this event which offers an informal environment to discuss code, patterns and technology.
  • Slides and Notes from "So You Think You Know JavaScript" – Dylan Beattie shares the slides and video along with sample code used in his recent London .NET User Group presentation on JavaScript at Skills Matter.

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