The Morning Brew #855

Software

• EF Power Tools CTP1 Released – The ADO.NET team announce the release of a preview release of the Entity Framework Power Tools which line up against the EF4.1 release providing design time tooling for Code First
• NHibernate 3.2.0 Beta1 – The NHibernate Team release the first beta of NHibernate 3.2. This release includes a few breaking changes from NHibernate 3.1 GA along with a number of bug fixes new features and improvements.

Information

• Did you notice there is a new .Net framework version? & Did you just take a dump on standard versioning practices? – Christiaan Baes & Hadi Hariri highlight a new framework target introduced in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1, resulting in a new target appearing in dialogs, and some inconsistency in the version numbering scheme.
• The craft of cutting code – Phil Winstanley discusses code quality, one of his favorite topics, highlighting tools and practices which can help you to hone your craft and produce beautiful code.
• "Sort" of a follow-up post [IListExtensions class enables easy sorting of .NET list types; today’s updates make some scenarios faster or more convenient] – David Anson shares an updated version of his IListExtensions Class for helping with sorting Lists, and responds to some reader questions.
• "Design for Software: a playbook for developers" – Greg Duncan highlights a slide deck from Erik Klimczak’s presentation at Devsum11 looking at the role of design in software, and exploring the key areas of the design process.
• Transitioning from MSUnit to NUnit – Sebastian Negomireanu shares a 4 part series looking at the process of switching from MSTest to NUnit, outlining the reasons he undertook this, and looking at the tooling, Migrating the test code, Integrating the NUnit tests with TFS Builds, and discussing how to obtain code coverage metrics.
• More Great TechEd News: Enum Support in Next Version of Entity Framework!!! – Susan Ibach highlights one of the announcements from TechEd, that the next release of Entity Framework will provide full Enum support, along with support for Table Valued Functions.
• Entity Framework 4.1 Code First – Mapping Enums to Lookup Tables – Josh Reuben has been looking at a different aspect of Enums with Entity Framework, and shares a process for mapping enums onto values in lookup tables in Entity Framework Code First.
• ALM for C++ in Visual Studio vNext at TechEd NA 2011 – Rong Lu shares an overview of her TechEd session on Application Lifecycle Management features for C++ Devs in the next Visual Studio release, running through some of the key features which bring parity to what is available for C#.
• Update on TFS on Azure – Brian Harry gives an update on the Cloud hosted TFS running on Azure, discussing how they have been focusing on getting it running well at ‘internet scale’ in recent months
• Elmah for Glimpse – Best of both worlds – Steven Lauwers takes a look at the ELMAH error handler and Glimpse tooling in ASP.NET MVC applications and looks at combining ELMAH into Glimpse using its MEF based plugin architecture.