The Morning Brew

Software

• Stylecop 4.5.22.0 is available – Tatworth highlights the RC10 release of StyleCop 4.5, and the plan for the RTW release on Thursday30th June. Update: Looks like 4.5.23.0 is available now – thanks to cyberzeddk for the head up
• Nancy 0.6.0 saw the light of day – Andreas Håkansson highlights the release of Nancy 0.6.0, a huge community effort, spanning 220 change sets and 12 authors. This release sees the BootStrapper recieve attention, customisable view , view caching, introduction of the dotliquid view engine, improvements to Razor view support.

Information

• How to use a tool installed by Nuget in your build scripts – Joshua Flanagan follows on from his post on tips for creating NuGet Packages with a look at different ways of working with executable tools included in NuGet Packages from build scripts.
• Unit Testing the Windows Phone 7 applications – Amit Chatterjee explores the testing of Windows Phone 7 applications using Jeff Wilcox’s unit testing framework for Windows Phone, walking through the testing of his Chronometer application.
• Effective Tests: Expected Objects – Derek Greer continues his series on effective tests with a look at the expected object pattern as a way of reducing the code duplication which can result from comparing object instances
• Everything You Need to Get Started with SpecFlow and WatiN – Steve Smith takes a look at using SpecFlow and WatiN to test his web application’s UI in an acceptance test style, walking through the process of getting up and running with both SpecFlow and WatiN sharing some tips and gotchas along the way.
• Levels of Testing – Bj Rollison discusses some tesing theory looking at the different levels of testing available to us as developers and discussing the test automation pyramid.
• AppKata – Enter the next level of programming exercises – Ralf Westphal discusses the role of Code Katas as a learning and practice tool, and shares some ‘AppKatas’ which expand on the practice into a full application rather than just a class or method, allowing them to be expanded to a team effort. Ralf outlines 3 sample AppKata exercises, with further iterations to follow.
• Internet Explorer 9 Developer Tools Deep Dive – Part 3: Debugging JavaScript – Chris Bowen continues his series looking at the Internet Explorer 9 Developer Tools, looking in this part at the various debugging features provided by the developer tools for working with JavaScript code
• How to unsubscribe from an Event which is registered to an anonymous method – Derik Whittaker takes a look at event subscription in C#, sharing a trick to enable you to unsubscribe an anonymous method event subscription.
• SharpDevelop gets T4 support – Greg Duncan highlights the new T4 Template support in SharpDevelop, built upon the MonoDevelop T4 functionality, this enables the creation and use of T4 Templates with syntax highlighting, custom tools to process the templates and error reporting.
• SQL Azure Blog is moving to the Official Windows Azure Platform Team Blog – The Sql Azure Blog highlight the consolidation of blogging on all aspects of Windows Azure onto the main Windows Azure Platform Team Blog
• Microsoft splits up its XAML team: What’s the fallout? – Mary Jo Foley highlights the redistribution of the XAML team into the Windows, Windows Phone and DevDiv teams – no doubt this will spark a whole new set of ‘Microsoft Killing XAML / .NET / Silverlight’ speculation.

Community

• NDC 2011 – Norwegian Developers Conference 2011 – The Videos of the sessions at NDC 11 are now all available from the agenda pages on their site – NDC looks to have had a wonderful selection of session this year, and now everyone can benefit from the knowledge shared – I know what I’ll be watching all week.
• Video: Oliver Sturm on Functional Programming and DevExpress Training Courses at NDC 2011 – Oliver Sturm joined Rachel Hawley at NDC for a chat about Functional Programming in C# and F#, and life as a DevExpress Expert Consultant and Trainer.

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Software

• ReSharper 6.0 Release Candidate – The Team at JetBrains follow up on their beta releases over the last week or so with a Release Candidate build of ReSharper 6. This release addresses issues from all the beta releases, and will no doubt be followed with the official release in short order.
• Porting Node to Windows With Microsoft’s Help – Ryan Dahl shares the announcement that Microsoft are joining forces with Joyent to produce a native port of Node.js to the Windows Platform, which will bring the Node Platform to Windows 2003 onwards, along with Windows Azure.
• IronPython – Download: 2.7.1 Beta 1 – The IronPython team announce the first beta release of IronPython 2.7.1. This release brings parity with CPython 2.7.2, disables the built in VS tooling support in favour of the pytools tooling, adds a few modules to the distribution and addresses reported issues.
• Project Silk Drop 12 – Karl Shifflet announces Drop 12 of the Project Silk Guidance project. This drop does not contain any significant code changes, and as usual contains the latest versions of all chapters of the guidance that goes with the sample.

Information

• Ref returns and ref locals – Eric Lippert highlights a question from StackOverflow on "ref returns", looking at the background to the basic use of ref to pass variable references, and discusses some of the CLR support for references which is not implemented in C#.
• Tips for building Nuget packages – Joshua Flanagan shares some great tips for creating good NuGet packages, ranging from managing package version numbers, to the package structure, and automating package builds.
• FlagArgument – Martin Fowler discusses the use of flag arguments to toggle between different implementations of a functions logic, discussing how he prefers to avoid this by having two specific methods which better explain intent, and looks at some more complex cases of this scenario.
• Model binding XML in ASP.NET MVC 3 – Jimmy Bogard explores the support within ASP.NET MVC 3 for custom Model Binder implementations to be pulled in using Service Location, allowing you to support additional formats of data, and Jimmy explores this by showing the creation of an XMKL based model binder.
• 404 errors fixed! Goodbye /Glimpse/Config, hello /Glimpse.axd – Anthony van der Hoorn discusses a change to the URL for accessing the Glimpse Client side functionality which is in the latest release. The change was brought about due to users running into 404 errors with the way Glimpse used to work. Anthony discusses what the problems were, and how they ended up fixing by moving to a .axd implementation.
• Cool stuff in FubuMVC No. 1: Behaviors – Chad Myers moces his series on from FubuCore to look at features of FubuMVC, with this first part exploring the background and approach used in the creation of the Behavior model in FubuMVC.
• Silverlight WebBrowser Control for Offline Apps (Part 2) – Mike Taulty continues his exploration of HTML content in Silverlight applications, looking at embedding HTML content into the Silverlight application as a resource, and dumping it to disk on the the clients machine to read offline.

Community

• London .NET User Group:Restoring sanity to JavaScript – The London .NET UserGroup are joined by Andrew Davey on Thursday 30th June 2011 at SkillsMatter in London for a session looking at tools and techniques for structuring your client side JavaScript Code
• Video: Barry Dorrans on security, AKA"developers doing naughty things" at NDC 2011 – Rachel Hawley shares a video interview with Barry Dorrans recorded at NDC discussing the importance of security at a developer level, and providing a nice introduction to the issues.

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Information

• Eduasync part 11: More sophisticated (but lossy) exception handling, Eduasync part 12: Observing all exceptions & Eduasync part 13: first look at coroutines with async – Jon Skeet continues his EduAsync series of posts looking at implementing the async functionality from the Async CTP in C#, with parts 11 and 12 taking a look at improving the exception handling, and looking at the differences between async and the TPL, before moving on to look at coroutines in part 13, exploring the background theory and looking at basic uses.
• Lazy Exceptions for Fake LINQ Queries – K. Scott Allen takes a look at mocking / faking exceptions in LINQ Queries, discussing how the standard technique of throwing on access to the property / method doesn’t truly mirror reality where the exception would occur at enumeration time.
• Cleaning up POSTs in ASP.NET MVC – Jimmy Bogard takes a look at simplifying the logic of dealing with POST actions in ASP.NET MVC, identifying the common patterns that occur in handling these requests and looks at defining a mechanism for cleaning up the process.
• Announcing Free Ingress for all Windows Azure Customers starting July 1st, 2011 – The Windows Azure Team announce a significant change to the pricing model for the Windows Azure service. From 1st July all inbound traffic will be free during both on-peak and off-peak times.
• The ASP.NET Daily Community Spotlight – How posts get there, and how to make it your Visual Studio Start Page &My ASP.NET news sources – Jon Galloway discusses how he goes about selecting the daily link which goes into the ASP.NET Community Spotlight on the ASP.NET site, shows how you can get these links on your Visual Studio start page, and also discusses where he finds his .NET News. I’m very proud that The Morning Brew is featured highly in Jon’s news gathering, and I also follow similar processes to Jon for finding the links for TMB. I’d also like to echo Jon’s frustration about blogs which don’t have the author’s name in an easy to find location – I really like to give decent attribution in TMB and it’s a real annoyance to not have a name to use.
• Silverlight, HTML and the WebBrowser Control for Offline Apps – Mike Taulty discusses the interoperability between Silverlight and the HTML DOM, looking at the cases when Silverlight is hosted in an HTML page, and the new Silverlight 5 features which allow the Silverlight application to also host the WebBrowser Control to display HTML inside the application
• Passing parameters between Silverlight and ASP.NET – Part 1 – Brij Mohan is also looking at Silverlight Interoperability with the containing HTML page, exploring how your Silverlight application can pass values back to the ASP.NET Application hosting the Silverlight application in the first part of this new series
• Why You Should Never Use DATETIME Again! – Susan Ibach discusses the new datetime data type in SQL Server 2008 which allows better control and accuracy of the values you store for date time fields and allows you finer control of the data storage requirements.

Community

• Join the Rock Paper Azure Grand Tournament July 13, 2011 For a Chance to Win $5,000 – The Windows Azure Team highlight the Rock Paper Azure Grand Tournament to be held on Wednesday 13th July between 7 and 8pm Eastern Time where teams from the US, Canada, China, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden and the UK will compete for a range of prizes up to $5000
• In The Brain of Robert Pickering, The Combinator Approach to Programming Domain Specific Languages with F# – F# event – Skills Matter welcome Rob Pickering on Tuesday 23rd August for a session on Domain Specific Languages using F#, looking at the applicability of this approach to a number of problem spaces
• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Sydney with WP7 and Kinect SDK Hackathon – Rachel Hawley highlights the second DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Sydney event to be held over the weekend of 2nd & 3rd July at the University of Technology in Sydney. This event follows the community format and will also include a WP7 and Kinect SDK hackathon on the second day. There is a (very) small charge for the event to cover costs of running the event, and spaces are still available.

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