The Morning Brew

Software

• Babylon.Toolkit 1.0.4 – The Babylon Toolkit, a 3D toolkit for Silverlight 5, gets an update, taking its version number to 1.0.4. This new release includes an number of new visual effects, a basic particle rendering system which is handled on the GPU, a number of bug fixes, and a number of other great features.
• TombstoneHelper V2.0 released #wp7dev – Matt Lacey announces the release of TombstoneHelper v2.0. This library adds a number of extension methods to the base PhoneApplicationPage which provide an easy way of maintaining the state of your Windows Phone 7 application when the application is closed. The version 2 release includes a number of enhancements which mean that more of the state of your application is maintained.
• Stylecop 4.5.17.0. a.k.a. StyleCop 4.5 RC5. – Tatworth highlights the latest StyleCop release which adds some neat ReSharper integration optionally having StyleCop set ReSharper’s default setting to being the same as StyleCop meaning that it is easier to make the code your write compatible with the StyleCop ruleset

Information

• Cool stuff in FubuCore No. 5: Easy Configuration – Chad Myers continues his series of posts looking at the cool features of the FubuCore library. This post explores the ISettingsProvider, an abstraction of Configuration
• Getting property and method names using static reflection in C# – Joel Abrahamsson takes a look at Static Reflection exploring how you can easily convert .NET Expressions into string representations meaning your code for configuring mapping libraries, etc can become strongly typed
• Dependency Injection With ASP.NET HttpModules – Phil Haack revisits dependency injection for HttpModules building on the PreApplicationStartMethodAttribute and the ASP.NET MVC 3 Dependency resolver
• An IoC Container in 15 min – Erich Ledesma explores the basic concepts of Inversion Of Control Containers by way of a simple ‘coded in 15 minutes’ IoC Container Implementation in this CodeProject Article.
• MSDN magazine – June edition out now – MSDN UK Team blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Rachel Collier highlights the availability of the June Edition of MSDN Magazine online now. This month the magazine focuses on Agile Development with articles on agile in TFS, along with articles on Windows Phone 7 Development and Extending Debugging tools, and all the usual columns.
• System Tray Progress Indicator – Jaime Rodriguez is exploring the various new features in Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) and in this post discusses the new System Tray Progress Indicator, sharing sample code on SkyDrive.
• Anatomy of a .NET Assembly – Custom attribute encoding – Simon Cooper continues his series of posts looking at how the various aspects of types are encoded in .NET Assemblies, exploring the complexities of encoding Custom Attributes in this post
• How to Configure a Self Referencing Entity in Code First – Gil Fink explores the use of self referencing entities and persisting them using the Entity Framework 4.1 Code First, sharing a working example.
• Getting Started Using HTML5 Boilerplate – Dan Wahlin highlights the HTML5 BoilerPlate site, and discusses the code that it generates for you and how it gives a rapid start to any HTML 5 project you may e undertaking.

Community

• Kent .Net/SQL User Group 14/06/2011 – Tuesday 14th June sees the Kent .NET / SQL Server usergroup welcome Nathan Gloyn and Seb Lambla for an evening containing two talks. Nathan will be delivering his well recieved ‘Is your Code SOLID?’ session exploring the Solid Principles, and Seb will be talking on ‘Building Composite Applications with OpenRasta 3’
• SQL South West – June meeting – The SQL South West Usergroup will be meeting on Thursday 16th June, where the group will be having a live meeting session with SQL Server MVP Aaron Nelson who will be looking at using PowerShell with SQL Server. For more details, contact the group organiser

Windows 8 Developer Reactions

The Windows 8 Announcement and Demos last week have sparked quite a reaction in the Developer Community – here are some of the posts on this subject which crossed my feed reader this morning:

• UNEDITED: My thoughts on Windows 8 announcements – Scott Barnes
• Thoughts on Windows 8 – Robert W. Anderson
• Yet Another Nail In Silverlight’s Coffin? – Davy Brion
• Windows 8: HTML5 and AJAX/JavaScript == Modern UIs: HTML5, AJAX/JavaScript/jQuery – Sam Gentile
• The Hard Thing – Rob Conery
• Windows 8 – HTML 5, JavaScript Windows Azure – Christian Nagel
• How would you write a video editing app for the web? – Rob Pickering

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