The Morning Brew

Software

• Enter ditto – Mike Nichols releases Ditto, an object to object mapper which itches his scratch for an implementation which will work as a CQRS denormaliser for updating a view model from multiple different events. In this post Mike discusses his motivation for the project, along with discussing the design and implementation. Full source is available on github.
• Pepper: A Visual Studio Settings Synchronisation & Backup Extension – Willy-Peter Schaub highlights Pepper, a Visual Studio 2010 extension from Robert MacLean which provides a means of backing up and synchronising your IDE settings, allowing you to keep settings in sync between multiple machines or simply keep a backup copy in the cloud.
• dotCover 1.1, dotTrace 4.5 Performance Beta Releases – The JetBrains team announces the beta releases of dotCover 1.1 and dotTrace 4.5. These new versions build on the success of the Early Access Preview releases, and dotCover boasts improved integration over the EAP release, as well as all the other new features. dotTrace gains improved calls stack display, better performance gain prediction, improved performance and much more.
• Team Explorer Everywhere is now available in 3 new languages – Brian Harry announces the release of three new UI languages for Team Explorer Everywhere as a single language pack which adds German, French and Japanese languages.

Information

• MvcScaffolding: Creating custom scaffolders – Steve Sanderson continues his series on MvcScaffolding and hi look at the customisation of the framework with a look at creating your own scaffolders allowing you to have the MvcScaffold framework create things other than the built in controllers, actions, repositories, etc
• NuGet Needs Your Input – Phil Haack, on behalf of the NuGet project, appeals to the community for help in making decisions regarding multiproject solutions. If you have 5 minutes read this post and fill out the short survey to help the team make the right decision.
• Building Better HTML5 – Somasegar discusses the support for HTML5 across the Microsoft Developer tools currently available, including Internet Explorer 9 Developer Tools, Expression Web 4, Expression SuperPreview and Visual Studio 2010, along with highlighting a number of other projects and resources for working with HTML5.
• Add dynamic property in regular objects with new dynamic object supports in .net 4 – Kazi Manzur Rashid takes a look at using dynamic objects with your existing static typed objects to provide dynamic properties on your objects, and looks at providing nice support to allow casting your object as dynamic to give nicer access to these dynamic properties.
• OData Primer wiki content re’org… Now we’re cooking with pages! – Greg Duncan highlights the OData Primer wiki and discusses his involvement with the project which is cataloging the great resources about all aspects of OData.
• Paper: A Co-Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks – Todd Hoff highlights a paper from Erik Meijer and Gavin Bierman which discusses noSql databases as the duality of regualr SQL databases. Duality is a very interesting concept when applied to computer science and gives some very powerful realisations (remember its application in relation to LINQ to objects and the Reactive Extensions?). Interesting stuff.

Community

• Be quick to bag a space at UK Tech.Days 2011! – Rachel Collier gives an update on the uptake of places at the UK TechDays 2011 events, highlighting the events making up this ‘super’ event which still have spaces available .

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Software

• StyleCop and StyleCop for ReSharper have merged – Howard van Rooijen announces the merging of StyleCop for ReSharper with the main StyleCop project, and discusses the process being undertaken for competing the merge of these two projects.
• posh-git Release v0.3 – Keith Dahlby announces the formal release of v0.3 of posh-git, a set of PowerShell scripts which bring better integration of git into PowerShell. This new release has an easier way of getting the scripts, along with some performance and tab expansion improvements.

Information

• MvcScaffolding: Overriding the T4 Templates – Steve Sanderson continues his series digging into the functionality of MvcScaffolding, taking a look at how you can change the T4 Templates used to generate the code for the different Scaffolding operations to allow you to control and customise the code generated.
• The sound of .net – A demonstrations site showing ASP.NET MVC, NHibernate, and a raft of other OpenSource libraries running on AppHarbor which provides some useful community function, aggregating all the .NET Podcasts about.
• Taking Proper Screenshots in Windows for Blogs or Tutorials – Scott Hanselman shares the how and how not of generating good screenshots for inclusion in documents and blog posts, showing illustrations of each of his things to avoid and things to do
• Extending Bddify – Mehdi Khalili takes a look at the extension points included in his Bddify BDD framework for .NET, explaining how the extensibility works, and looking at the implementation of custom Scanners (which fetch scenarios from test objects) and processors (which allows for custom output from your tests)
• Debugging Series: Symbols Server and Your Symbols – Cameron Skinner continues his debugging series continuing his look at Symbol Servers, exploring how you can publish the symbols from your own applications allowing you to get a good debugging experience without having the exact source for the deployed version.
• Automatically Including Current Language In Generated URLs With ASP.NET MVC – Davy Brion looks at controlling the URLs generated using routing to allow the inclusion of language codes in URLs to make localized versions of sites be output cache friendly
• Getting a Windows Azure account for Rock, Paper, Azure – Following on from the announcement of Rock Paper Azure in yesterday’s edition, Brian Hitney looks at the 4 ways in which you can get an Azure account to allow you to take part.
• Mono Android and iPhone Updates – Miguel de Icaza announces the release of Mono for Android 1.0 and MonoTouch 4.0, the latest versions of the Mono Project’s projects which allows development of Android and iOS (iPhone/iPad). This release brings with it the benefits o Mono 2.10 Core and the C# 4 language and .NET 4 APIs
• A Simple Computation API with Progress Tracking – David Sehnal shares an interesting article which look at using the Reactive Extensions for .NET and the Async CTP functionality to provide monitoring of progress of a long running computation.
• F# Code-First Development with Entity Framework 4.1 – Jack Hu takes a look at the use of the Code First functionality of Entity Framework 4.1 with F#, illustrating some of the power of F# for quickly and simply building Object Oriented Structures, and hooking them up to EF.

Community

• Get your MIX Fix Online – Bill Zack highlights the plans for live broadcast of the Keynote addresses from MIX11, taking place next week (Tuesday & Wednesday), along with the promise of having all sessions videos online and available to watch within 24 hours.
• Pluralsight’s Weekly Webcast: ReSharper Tips and Tricks – The ReSharper team highlight this week’s Pluralsight webcast taking place today (7th April) at 11:00 AM EDT (GMT-5) where James Kovacs will be sharing ReShaper tips and tricks, along with answering viewers questions.

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Information

• Of memory and strings – Jon Skeet, fuelled by a StackOverflow question investigates the use of Memory when storing lots of strings, and looks at some alternative structures which can result in lower memory use if you are sure your strings are only basic ASCII.
• How is it even possible for code to be this bad? – Gojko Adzic explores the source code of the Hudson/Jenkins Java based CI server, looking at a number of examples of bad coding practices, explaining why these things are bad.
• Visitor and multiple dispatch via C# ‘dynamic’ – Shawn Hargreaves takes a look at the Visitor Pattern and Multiple Dispatch, showing how the Dynamic keyword can provide help implementing this by making it perform the method resolution at runtime.
• MSDN Magazine: April 2011 Issue – The April 2011 edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online. This month sees Azure as the headline topic, with explorations of CQRS in Azure and Caching being explored. Also in this month’s edition are articles on WebMatrix, Map Reduce in F# (running on Azure), TFS Guidance, and all the usual columns.
• ASP.NET Deployment Needs To Be Fixed – Rob Conery discusses the fragmented landscape of ASP.NET Deployment, discussing why he believes that this should really be a solved problem, discussing the best solutions currently available, and discussing the key features of a Capistrano like deployment tool.
• Silverlight, HTML5, The Web, The Phone and All That – Joey deVilla discusses the ‘Standards-Based Web, Plug-ins and Silverlight’ post from 3 key Microsoft DevDiv Executives, outlining the key points and decisions you need to make for your developments.
• Mocks and Tell Don’t Ask – Ian Cooper continues the discussion of Mocks, explaining how his opinion of distrusting mocks has changed over time, discussing the ‘Tell, don’t ask’ principle, and CQRS along the way.
• Webinar wrap-up: Julian on JavaScript – reading underscore.js – Julian M Bucknall follows up yesterday’s Webinar exploring the underscore.js code with a blog post highlighting some of the salient points from the session.
• Building a NuGet Server with gold plating – Michael Ceranski looks at extending the standard NuGet Server web application, adding a package list and package upload capabilities
• Producing and Consuming OData in a Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 application (Part 3) – Michal Crump continues his series of posts exploring the production and consumption of OData within the Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Platforms. In this post Michael looks at the process of consuming OData on WP7, from the libraries to use to gain the ability to work with OData through a worked example.
• Why override ToString()? Use DebuggerDisplayAttribute instead – ScottBurk67 looks at improving the debugger experience for your objects examining the use of ToString() overrides, and the better solution of using the DebuggerDisplayAttribute to provide a specific solution to debugger visualisation.

Community

• Take the Rock Paper Azure Challenge! – Peter Laudati, Jim O’Neil and Brian Hitney announce the Rock Paper Windows Azure Challence, an online competition where entrants write a bot to play a variant of Rock-Paper-Scissors deployed to the cloud.

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