May 2011

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #856

Posted by on 20 May 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Saw a rumour floating about twitter quite a lot last night about the Open Sourcing of Visual Basic 6 – based on a complete lack of supporting evidence in blog posts and more official channels this morning I suspect it is just an (amusing) rumour.

Software

Information

  • Optional argument corner cases, part four – Eric Lippert rounds off this series of post on Optional Arguments discussing how the default values are actually ‘stored’ at the caller sites, and how if you change defaults on a method in a library you need to recompile all the assemblies which call this method to get them to update to the new default
  • Using Task<T> in ASP.NET MVC Today – DevHawk has been exploring the Async CTP and getting used to all that nice Asynchrony and wanted to apply it to controllers in ASP.NET MVC, This post takes a look at creating enough TPL plumbing to allow controllers to use async / await.
  • Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1 KB2478063 Service Pack 5 Feature Set 3.1 R2 November Edition RTW – Maarten Balliauw discusses the importance of good naming, and the recent .NET 4 Platform Update release, talking about how inconsistent and complex naming can cause confusion and lack of understanding.
  • Quick Look at Reverse Engineer DB into Code First Classes – Julie Lerman takes a look at the use of the reverse engineering of a database into Entity Framework Code First classes introduced in the release of the EF Power Tools CTP1, examining a simple database model and looking at some of the classes created.
  • Insert with Dapper Micro ORM and ASP.NET MVC 3 – Jalpesh P. Vadgama continues his series of posts exploring the use of the Dapper Micro ORM with ASP.NET, looking in this post at the inserting of data from a MVC form into your database.
  • Using DebugView to catch debug output of .NET program – Gunnar Peipman highlights an under used, but very useful tool which allows you to see what is going on inside your applications via the Trace and Debug writes. This is a really easy way of seeing diagnostic information in environments where you can’t attach a real debugger to a process.
  • Using Fiddler HTTP Debugger for CRM Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning – JMorlock takes a look at using Fiddler to explore some performance problems in a Dynamics CRM application, although the principles apply equally to any web application, and the article provides a good starting point to learn about the use of Fiddler.
  • Socially-Engineered XSS Attacks – Eric Lawrence discusses the 3 different types of Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks that the IE9 team traditionally consider, offering a 4th type, based around social engineering and discussing the efforts that have gone into IE9 to help prevent these attacks from succeeding.
  • Visual Studio vNext – Simon Cooper discusses the news from TechEd about Visual Studio vNext, and the focus on performance, highlighting build improvements, UI Improvements, further speeding up of the Add References dialog, and the use of the PerfWatson tool.
  • Seven Rules for Beginning Programmers – Alfred Thompson highlights 7 rules for developers who are just starting out, originally posed by Paul Vick. As with any list of this nature there are a good number of them that are equally (if not more) applicable to the more seasoned developers amongst us too.
  • Switching to MVVM – Zeeshan Amjad explores implementing MVVM in an existing Brown Fields development, giving the background to the MVVM pattern, and looking at migrating real existing code to work in the MVVM way in this CodeProject article

The Morning Brew #855

Posted by on 19 May 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

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

The Morning Brew #854

Posted by on 18 May 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Information

  • Eduasync part 5: making Task<T> awaitable – Jon Skeet continues his EduAsync series exploring how the Async functionality which will be included in C#5 can be implemented. In this post Jon attains a full demonstration of Asynchrony by implementing awaitability on the Task<T>
  • C#/.NET Fundamentals: Of Lambdas and LINQ – James Michael Hare shares a nice back to basics presentation looking at Lambda expressions and LINQ extension methods giving developers who are not familiar with them the basic understanding needed to build upon.
  • Diffing Files to Avoid Easy Goofs – Sharon Cichelli discusses a good developer practice – self reviewing your change set before committing to your Version Control System allowing you to identify mistakes, missing comments, etc.
  • Automated builds and versioning, with Mercurial – Nathan Evans discusses and shares his implementation to allow for automated builds run on a build server to be correctly versioned using AssemblyFileVersionAttribute. This post explores the different version number strategies, the creation of MSBuild Tasks to perform the update, and the configuration to get it to all hang together.
  • Display branch name in Visual Studio 2010 title bar – Sebastian Negomireanu highlights a neat method to make multiple instances of Visual Studio working on different branches of the same solution identifiable using a feature of the VS Commands 2010 Extension.
  • Maximizing the lifetime of your SSD – Tom Wijsman shares some excellent advice to help (if you are lucky enough) owners of SSD disks to ensure that they get the best lifetime out of the drive, highlighting a variety of configuration settings and features to enable and disable to keep unnecessary and damaging writes to a minimum.
  • My "Windows 7 Power Users Guide" eBook is Now FREE – Mike Halsey announces the availability of his 170 page Power Users Guide to Windows 7 as a free eBook. The book covers all aspects of Windows 7 in 16 chapters with content applicable to beginners and ITPros alike.
  • Silverlight 5 Beta – Combining Implicit Data Templates & Multiple Windows – Mike Taulty continues his exploration of Silverlight 5 beta, looking this time at how you can effectively work with multiple details windows, sharing a Window Manager class to help when working with a number of windows.
  • An Introduction to Service Bus Queues – David Ingham takes an introductory look at the use of AppFabric Service Bus Queues, discussing scenarios where you should use queues, some of the theory behind their use, and looking at basic uses in code.
  • ASP.NET Suggester – Auto-complete Control – Lisetsky Val shares a nice looking implementation of a multiple select auto complete control for use in your ASP.NET Web applications. The control supports all browsers (including IE6) and has hooks for matched and unmatched items, along with data support for WCF/ Web Service data sources.
  • Using the Windows Phone 7 Advertising SDK – Doug Holland digs into the use of the Windows Phone 7 Advertising SDK which allows you an easy route to generating income from your phone applications, looking at the code implementation and the required account configuration to include Ads in your applications.

Community

  • 21st May 2011 – XPManchester XL2 – XP Manchester are running their second all day event this Saturday (21st May) at MadLab in Manchester. The event is language agnostic and will be exploring a variety of eXtreme Programming topics. The event is free to attend, but registration is required, and if you want an idea of what the last event covered take a look at XPManchester XL – Follow up
  • The Cloud Hack – Saturday 11th June sees ‘The Cloud Hack’ event running in London. This event is an all day Code’a’thon working with the Cloud and a number of public and private APIs, along with support from Microsoft Experts, free trial of Azure and competitions and prizes. Registration is required and places are limited, with free tickets available until 4th June.
  • NxtGenUG – Event: Get down low with SpecFlow – Paul Stack joins the NxtGenUG in Cambridge for a session on Tuesday 21st June, exploring the use of SpecFlow for automating your testing using WatiN and a BDD style of testing.
  • Microsoft Tech-Ed North America 2011 – How to view and access information, videos and resources – Eric Ligman highlights how, even if you are not attending TechEd North America this week, you ca still get access to lots of the great content .

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