The Morning Brew

Software

• Help Make Visual Studio Faster – David Berg highlights Visual Studio Perf Watson an extension which will gather information whenever your Visual Studio 2010 SP1 IDE becomes un-responsive. This data will then be fed back to Microsoft enabling them to fix those annoying freezes.
• Project Version Updater – Greg Osborne shares a useful little command line utility ideal for CI build environments which will increment build numbers of your projects when run.

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The LINQ Set Operations — they’re not just for math! – James Michael Hare continues his series of .NET / C# ‘Little Wonders’ with some more discussion of LINQ extensions looking at the set operations Intersect Union and Except, along with a discussion of the related topic of object equality.
• EF Code First and Data Scaffolding with the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update – Scott Guthrie blogs in detail in his usual style looking at the new scaffolding features and Entity Framework Code First along with the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tooling update, working step by step through a sample use of these techniques.
• MSDN Patterns & Practices introduces Project Silk, a web guidance project – Rachel Appel highlights the Patterns and Practices Project Silk, a sample web application built using modern techniques on ASP.NET MVC 3, jQuery, Entity Framework, SQL Compact, Unity, xUnit, qUnit and DotnetOpenAuth.
• We have IQueryable, so why bother with a repository – Pablo M. Cibraro discusses the Repository pattern, and how the existence of LINQ and IQueryable impacts on the use of Repositories, discussing some strategies for combining the two.
• Connecting LinqPad to Entity Framework Code First – Kevin LaBranche highlights the latest bLINQPad beta’s support for working with Entity Framework Code First libraries allowing you to load an assembly which uses EF Code First and then issue LINQ queries against the entities defined in that assembly.
• The Nearly True Story of Geoff and the Cloud – a great 15 minute read at bed time – Eric Nelson highlights ‘The Nearly True Story of Geoff and the Cloud’ a short tale which deals with a number of common business level questions about the cloud written by Liam Kelly, illustrated by Andrew Fryer and edited by Eric.
• Silverlight 5 Beta Rough Notes – The Third Dimension – & "Expression Blend for Silverlight Developers" (DevDays, Holland) – Mike Taulty continues his Rough Notes series with a look at the new 3D functionality of Silverlight 5, combining it with the XNA Math Helper Library, illustrating its use in a simple sample. Mike also shares the recording of his DevDays Holland talk on Expression Blend working from scratch to an example including data binding, layouts, resources, behaviours, actions, triggers, visual states and much more.

Community

• Agile Development and Testing Breakfast Briefings – Giles Davies highlights 4 technical breakfast briefings addressing Agile Development and Testing using the Microsoft ALM stack being held in Manchester, London, Dublin and Birmingham over the next two months.
• HTML5 and friends on the 18 May 2011 – The ThoughtWorks Manchester GeekNight series of events continues on Wednesday 18th May with a session from Patrick Lauke on HTML5 and associated topics, looking at what there is, what is supported by browsers, and where these web standards are going.

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