The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing ALM Roadmap in Visual Studio vNext at Teched – The big talking point of TechEd so far seems to be the revealing of some features which will be in Visual Studio vNext and the Application Lifecycle Management Roadmap, and in this post Jason Zander outlines those features. Good coverage also from:
  • Visual Studio vNext mentioned at TechEd 2011 – David Jung
  • Next Version of Visual Studio ALM Announced at TechEd – Bruce Kyle
  • TechEd Keynote: Sneak Peek at Visual Studio vNext – Susan Ibach
• Announcing a Java SDK for TFS – Brian Harry announces the release of the Team Foundation Server SDK for Java providing options for developers working with TFS on ‘the other platform’ to extend their development environment.
• Introducing the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus May 2011 CTP & Announcing the Windows Azure AppFabric CTP May and June Releases – Clemens Vasters and The Windows Azure AppFabric team announce the release of their May 2011 CTP of the Service Bus Service and the forthcoming June CTP which includes AppFabric Developer Tools and Application Manager.
• JUST ANNOUNCED: Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 v1.2 – The Windows Azure team announce the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7 providing easy to use integration between the phone and access control, push notifications, storage, etc provided in the cloud.
• Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) Extension for SAML 2.0 Protocol Community Technology Preview (CTP) – Alik Levin highlights the release of the CTP of Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) Extension for SAML 2.0 Protocol, an extension which allows .NET Developers to create SP-Lite compliant applications that use SAML 2.0. Vittorio Bertocci also shares some details in his post Attention ASP.NET Developers: SAML-P Comes to WIF
• Cumulative Updates for SQL Server 2008 SP1 & SP2 are available – Aaron Bertrand highlights two cumulative update packages for SQL Server 2008 SP1 and SP2 which include all the current patches to those versions making it easy to get your servers patched up to date.
• FubuMVC Beta (0.9) is Released – Jeremy Miller announces the 0.9 release of the FubMVC framework. This release carries the ‘beta’ label and is the final release in the build up to the 1.0 release planned for 31st May

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• Optional argument corner cases, part three – Eric Lippert continues this series of posts looking at the use of optional arguments in methods in .NET 4, discussing in this post how the optional arguments actually work at the call site, and not, as may people think, by generating methods at compile time for all possible signatures,
• Outercurve Foundation: Partnering with the open source community – Somasegar discusses the work of the OuterCurve Foundation (previously known as the CodePlex Foundation) over the past 18 months, and highlights te Orchard and NuGet Projects as two successes where Microsoft have worked with the community to produce great results.
• Announcing Xamarin – Miguel de Icaza talks about the continuation of the Mono project following the closing down of all work on the project by Attachmate. The Project (and team) live on and will be producing an equivalent product line (MonoTouch, MonoDroid, etc) and continuing work on the Open Source aspects of Mono. Good Luck to them – this is important work.
• Speed up Visual Studio Builds – Arik Poznanski discusses some tips to help improve the performance of the build in Visual Studio when you are working with solutions with large numbers of projects.
• Windows Phone Choosers – Paul Sheriff continues exploring some of the key features of the Windows Phone platform, looking this time at the use of Choosers, outlining the background and showing the PhoneNumberChooserTask in use.
• Publish 5 Windows Phone apps, get free advertising – Glen Gordon highlights an offer of free advertising from Microsoft for anyone publishing 5 Windows Phone applications between April and the end of June
• Playing with dapper Micro ORM and ASP.NET MVC 3.0 – DotNetJalps – Jalpesh P. Vadgama takes a look at the use of the Dapper Micro ORM project in an ASP.NET MVC 3 setting walking through a simple use case.

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• Effective Tests: Test Doubles – Derek Greer continues his series of posts on creating effective tests with a look at the theory and use of the various forms of test double, mocks, fakes, stubs to test colaborations between objects in isolation.
• Effective Tests: Test Doubles – Derek Greer continues his series of posts on creating effective tests with a look at the theory and use of the various forms of test double, mocks, fakes, stubs to test collaborations between objects in isolation.
• Eduasync part 2: the shape of the caller / async method boundary, Part 3: the shape of the async method / awaitable boundary & Part 4: Filling in AsyncTaskMethodBuilder<T> – Jon Skeet shares the next three parts of his EduAsync series looking at how the Async APIs work, exploring the method boundary between caller and async method, looking at the API implementation, and in part 4 starts to add actual async like behaviour.
• Using Lazy<T> to Solve Deadlocks in Resource Caches – Rick Brewster.discusses how he was having problems with locking when accessing resources in Paint.NET and how using Lazy<T> helped resolve them by allowing him to remove his own locking for read operations.
• Parallel Containers – CodeProject – ‘logicchild’ takes a look at the concurrent collection classes available in the .NET Framework, discussing the features and behaviour of each and sharing an example of each in use.
• Great Free Video Training on ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC – Scott Guthrie highlights the availability of two online video training resources on the ASP.NET website – one for ASP.NET MVC and the other for ASP.NET WebForms. These training resources have been created by Pluralsight, and feature K. Scott Allen and Dan Wahlin in 10 sessions on each technology.
• Automated Unit Testing – BlackWasp have a nice series of posts on the subject of Unit Testing with NUnit and related techniques, exploring the framework, different types of assertion, and the use of Mocks an Stubs.
• Aligning Numbers on the Decimal Separator – Ron Petrusha discusses the BCL’s support for formatting numbers, and explores how you can implement number alignment centred on the decimal separator.
• Code First EF 4.1 : Building Many to Many Relationship – Wriju is in the midst of a nice series of posts exploring a variety of scenarios with the Entity Framework 4.1 Code First Functionality. Along with this post topics explored include the use of Stored Procedures, changing table and column names, Visual Studio templates, and Many to Many relationships.
• Introducing Real World Windows Azure Guidance & Microsoft UK white papers to help evaluate Cloud Services – The Windows Azure Team highlight a new series of guidance documentation which provides some real world Windows Azure experiences from the community. Eric Nelson highlights three white papers from the UK Enterprise Strategy Team looking at the cloud, and Keyvan Nayyeri discusses his experiences getting up and [Now] Running on Windows Azure
• Prepare Your Site For IE9 With Pinify – Prashant Khandelwal highlights the newly renamed Pinify library (formerly IE9ify) which provides scripts based on jQuery which easily implement the IE9 Windows 7 Task Bar integration, illustrating its use with a worked example.
• Windows Phone Launchers – Paul Sheriff discusses the use of the various launchers from within your Windows Phone 7 applications which allow you to jump out of your application to other pieces of functionality within the phone such as the MarketPlace, media player, Phone calls, etc.
• MSDN Instant Answers – Cameron Skinner highlights a new feature in the MSDN Search giving ‘Instant Answers’ in the form of new search results interface
• Bulk upsert to SQL Server from .NET – Derek Fowler discusses the SQL Server and NET Framework support for Bulk Insert / Bulk Upsert and how they would make an ideal performant solution for inserting entities in ORMs
• Nhibernate BatchSize and massive insert – alkampfer discusses the large insert scenario in NHibernate, highlighting how batching of queries makes a dramatic difference to performance by reducing the round trips to the database.
• PetaPoco and Spatial Data Types – John Katsiotis takes a look at the PetaPoco micro-ORM and explores extending it to provide a way of working with the Spatial Data Types available in recent SQL server releases.
• Dapper.Net – A Micro ORM that puts you back in control – Michael Ceransk shares a short introduction to Dapper.NET, another micro ORM, exploring some simple use cases and its use in solving them.
• Stylesheet Limits in Internet Explorer – Eric Lawrence highlights the limits on style sheets in Internet Explorer 6 – 9, discussing why these limits exist due to the way the stylesheets rules are stored in memory.
• Best Practices to Improve ASP.NET Web Application Performance – Maulik Dusara shares a collection of tips for improving ASP.NET Web Application performance, discussing ASP.NET Specific items along with CLR and Data Access recommendations.

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• Optional argument corner cases, part two – Eric Lippert continues his series of posts looking at the optional argument support in C#4, examining some of the edge cases of its use. In this post Eric continues looking at interfaces and inheritance when there are methods with optional parameters.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: 5 Easy Ways to Combine Sequences – James Michael Hare continues his look at LINQ extension methods as a part of his ‘Little Wonders’ series, exploring a number of extension methods which perform combining of sequences, showing examples of each in use.
• Effective Tests: A Test-First Example – Part 6 – Derek Greer continues his series of posts looking at what makes good tests and the process of working in a Test Driven Development way. This post wraps up his comprehensive Test-First Development example.
• ASP.NET MVC 3 and the @helper syntax within Razor – Scott Guthrie digs into the Razor View Engine’s support for creating helper methods using the @helper syntax to give you re-use of output in your views, working through their use in a simple worked example.
• MVC Music Store Updates – MVC 3 Tools Update Features, Scaffolding, Save Points, VB.NET Code – Jon Galloway – Jon Galloway announces the latest drop release of the MVC Music Store sample application, now update to the the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools Update level, utilising the new features introduced as a part of that release. Also included is a translation of the project into VB.NET.
• Tinyweb Series: 4 Views & Model Binding – Martin Rue continues his series of posts exploring his TinyWeb framework, looking at the rendering of views within the framework using the Spark View Engine, and looking at the model binding support
• Proper Exception Handling in .NET – A nice post from JASE Digital Media discussing some of the key considerations when writing exception handling code, shared in the form of 6 tips.
• IE Pinned Sites Part 10: Pinned Site Resources – Jennifer Marsman wraps up her series of posts on Internet Explorer Pinned Sites with a collection of related resources, including demos, presentations, blog posts and sample code.
• Free E-book – Windows Phone 7 – Maureen Mansour highlights an 89 page e-Book, titled "Designing for Windows Phone 7" published by Avlade which discusses the key issues with designing for Windows Phone 7, illustrating with a sample application ‘Flickr4Fun’
• Celebrating All-In-One Code Framework being selected as one of the 30 elites of Global Microsoft Next – Many congratulations to the All-In-One Code Framework Team, who have been selected as one of 30 projects and individuals by the Global Microsoft Next award.

Community

• New Online Event Series,"Cloud Power: Create the Next BIG App" Teaches How to Harness The Cloud with Windows Azure – The Windows Azure Team announce a series of virtual training events looking at moving to and working with the Azure cloud on a variety of technology stacks including SharePoint, Mobile and ASP.NET. The first of these events is today (Firday 13th May 10-11:30am PDT), with further events taking place over the next few weeks. Free Registration is required to gain access to these sessions

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