The Morning Brew

Software

• Standards-based web, plug-ins, and Silverlight – Three of the most senior people in Developer Division, Walid Abu-Hadba, Corporate Vice President, Developer & Platform Evangelism Group, Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform and S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division, discuss the future of Silverlight in the context of Web Standards and Browser Plugins, showing how Silverlight 5 and HTML 5 answer different requirements

Information

• Effective Tests: A Test-First Example – Part 2 – Derek Greer continues his series of posts on Effective Tests continuing with his worked example of Test Driven Development writing a Tic-Tac-Toe implementation, continuing adding functionality showing the red-green-refactor steps.
• So many interfaces! – Eric Lippert turns his attentions to Interfaces, looking at the mechanism of Interface Inheritance in a question/answer, discussing the basics, and exploring how Generics make things more complicated.
• Static analysis of Simple.Data code to generate databases – Rob Ashton digs into the IL generated from code written with dynamic types, looking at how you could generate database schema from code written against the Simple.Data library, making use of Mono.Cecil. Fascinating stuff.
• DOT NET TRICKS: Internals of LINQ – Abhishek Sur explores the generated code which powers our use of LINQ in the latest instalment of his Internals series.
• Write Your Own Debugging Visualizer – Mike Frank shows how you can develop Debugger visualisers to give a better view of your custom types (or any type for that matter) in the debugger
• The Decorator Pattern – Learning with Shapes – AliAmjad explores the Decorator Pattern, discussing its purpose and use, and sharing a simple example to show how you can implement this pattern in your own code in this CodeProject article.
• Dynamically load embedded assemblies – because ILMerge appeared to be out. – Jason Jarrett explores an alternative to IL Merge for combining assemblies into a single assembly, looking at storing assemblies as embedded resources and dynamically loading them out of the resource at runtime.
• Building a photoblog with NancyFX and Simple.Data Part 1: Setting up the project & Part 2: Defining the routes – Kristof Claes kicks off a series of posts looking at building a PhotoBlog application using two of the new and trendy .NET open source projects, NancyFX and Simple.Data. The first part looks at getting the libraries and setting up the project, and part 2 gets into the implementation exporing the route definitions.

Community

• SQL Herts – User Group for SQL Enthusiasts in Hertfordshire – The newly formed SQL Herts ussergroup is a usergroup for both DBAs and Developers in and around the Hertfordshire area. Their next meeting is scheduled to be held on Thursday 5th May at the University of Hertfordshire, with sessions from Christian Bolton and Jen Stirrup.
• FREE Bing Developer event at Tech Days in London on May 26th – Eric Nelson highlights an event hosted by the UK Bing team as a part of the UK Techdays events in May. This event takes place in the early evening of Thursday 26th May at Micosoft’s Cardinal Place offices, and will offer sessions on search, mapping and also provide opportunity for you to network with fellow attendees.

Humour

• Development Methodologies – Dylan Beattie shares an amusing look at some alternative development methodologies

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Congratulations to all the new and renewed Microsoft MVPs who are on the 1st April renewal cycle. I’m pleased and proud to say I was among those renewed, and am looking forward to my second year as an ASP.NET MVP.

Software

• Fluent NHibernate 1.2 released – James Gregory announces the release of Fluent NHibernate 1.2, the Fluent interface for configuring NHibernate. This release brings its NHibernte compatibility up to 3.1, introduces some new features for diagnostics, access strategies and IEnumerables. This release is also available as a NuGet Package
• Introducing developwithpassion.specifications – Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo introduces his developwithpassion.specifications testing library, built on top of Machine.Specifications and Machine.Fakes
• AgFx now on CodePlex – Shawn Burke announces the launch of the AgFx website on CodePlex and their first release. This library helps building data connected Windows Phone 7 applications providing data retrieval functionality, caching, reference data, broadcast messaging features.

Information

• FluentMigrator getting started – Sean Chambers gives an introduction to the FluentMigrator Library, a Database schema maintenance framework which has you place your migrations into a standard C# class and providing Up and Down grade support
• Shake Gestures Library- A Windows Phone Recipe – Arik Poznanski shares a discussion of the use and creation of the Shake Gesture Library for Windows Phone, allowing you to have actions in your code triggered by shaking the device.
• Compound Assignment, Part Two – Eric Lippert confuses everyone with an April Fools continuation of his Compound Assignment series. In this post Eric takes an April Fools look at some changes to make it possible to support additional compound operators.
• Little-known gems: Atomic conditional removals from ConcurrentDictionary – Stephen Toub shares a little know feature of the .NET4 Concurrent Dictionary which allows for the removal of elements in an atomic way
• Debugging Series: Symbol Server – Cameron Skinner continues his debugging series with a look at the use of the Symbols and Source Server to obtain debugging symbols and source code for use while debugging your code which adds considerable information to the debugging experience
• NHibernate Id Generator With Suffix – Ricardo Peres shares a custom implementation of an NHibernate Id Generator which applies a suffix to the identity generated, showing how easily this types of functionality can be implemented using the extension points available.
• Customizing ASP.NET MVC’s Required Property Validation Messages – Davy Brion investigates providing convention based validation messages for ASP.NET Required Field Validations, sharing a new subclass of the RequiredAttributeAdapter class which implements this type of behaviour.

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Robert Greyling on Spark View Engine on 12 April 2011 – Jan Van Ryswyck announces the next European Virtual Alt.Net Usergroup meeting, to be held on Tuesday 12th April at 7pm GMT (8pm UK) featuring Robert Greyling on the Spark View Engine for ASP.NET MVC and Castle MonoRail.
• C#5 and FluentValidation – DevEvening – The DevEvening Usergroup turns 3 years olf this month, and is celebrating with 2 talks on Wednesday 27th April. Talk 1 is going to be provided by Jeremy Skinner, who will be giving the lowdown on the FluentValidation library. Jeremy will be followed by Jon Skeet delivering a session on the Async / Await functionality to be included in C#5
• Advance warning: ‘Julian on JavaScript’ analysing underscore.js on Monday – Julian Bucknall will be delivering another part of his series of Webnairs on JavaScript today (Monday 4th April) at 10:00 AM PDT. In this session, Julian will be focusing on the code of Underscore.js, exploring what we can learn from it to improve our JavaScript.

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Software

• jQuery 1.5.2 Released – The jQuery Team announce the relelease of jQuery 1.5.2. This minor update includes bugfixes for a significant number of issues, and is already available on the Microsoft CDN for use in your applicaions.
• Announcing Jounce 1.0 RTM – It’s here! – Jeremy Likness announces the release of version 1 of Jounce, his MEF based MVVM guidance framework which aims to share and allow you to benefit from the expereinece he has gained building real world application.

Information

• Hosting a Simple "Read-Only" NuGet Package Feed on the Web – Phil Haack walks through the process of setting up your won read only package feed for NuGet using the Nuget.Server Nuget Package, allowing you to have a private (or public) custom package list for use with NuGet
• Announcing the Try F# Website! www.tryfsharp.org – Don Syme highlights the launch of the TryF# website from Microsoft Research Connections. This site aims to be a hub for learning F#, and includes an interactive browser based programming environment for the F# language allowing you to program in F# without installing anything.
• NHibernate Interceptor for Dynamic Proxy Generation – Ricardo Peres looks at the NHibernate Interceptor functionality and Dynamic Proxying, providing an skeleton implementation which will allow you to add your own functionality (such as INotifyPropertyChanged, etc) to every method call against an NHibernate entity.
• C#/.NET Toolbox: Adding a ToHashSet() Extension Method – James Michael Hare continues his series on utility methods and classes, sharing and discussing the implementation of a ToHashSet extension method.
• New Docs for Windows Phone 7 Development – Cameron Skinner highlights the release of a new piece of Windows Phone 7 Developer Documentation from the Developer Guidance Team. ‘Building a Windows Phone 7 Application from Start to Finish’ works through the whole process from concept on a white board to having your application in the MarketPlace, offering advice and guidance all the way.
• The Windows Phone 7 Numbers, in Pictures – Joey deVilla shares an update on the progress of the Windows Phone 7 platform and developer ecosystem, sharing some of the key numbers (with pictures)
• ASP Classic Compiler: the next step – Li Chen shares the roadmap for future development of the ASP Classic Compiler for ASP.NET (whose source was released as open source earlier this week).
• The importance of performance testing in a Windows Phone 7 application – Simone Chiaretta highlights the importance of performance testing your applications on the Windows Phone 7 platform (where devices are not as powerful as desktops and server), illustrating with an example of an issue which caused him performance problems.

Community

• DDD South West – Sesson Voting is currently open for the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West Conference to be held on Saturday 11th June 2011. There is a great range of sessions proposed (including one from me), and this is your chance to shape the content of the event.
• European Virtual ALT.NET – Feedback & Suggestions – The European Virtual Alt.Net Usergroup are looking for feedback and suggestions about their future direction and topics you are interested in hearing about with the launch of a feedback forum.

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