The Morning Brew

Software

• Debugger Canvas on DevLabs , Debugger Canvas Available for Download! & Debugger canvas – Somasegar, Kael Rowan and Agafonov Viacheslav highlight the release of the Debugger Canvas Power Tool on the Microsoft DevLabs site. This release targets Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate SP1 and gives a new visual way of representing your debugging session.
• ReSharper 6.0 Beta Available – Hadi Hariri and the team over at JetBrains announce the release of the first beta of ReSharper 6.0. Significant changes in this release include new support for JavaScript, CSS and Razor support, the inclusion of the dotPeek decompiler, QUnit JavaScript Unit Testing Support, and much more. As is usual with a beta release the team are keen on hearing your feedback.
• TFS 2010 SP1 Cumulative Update 1 Available – Brian Harry highlights the latest Cumulative Update for TFS 2010 SP1 which bundles up all the minor fixes tat have been released since SP1 providing an easy way of getting your TFS instance up to date.

Information

• Classic Computer Science in JavaScript – Rey Bango highlights a number of code snippets from Nicholas Zakas which explore classic Computer Science topics ranging from encodings to algorithms and data structures in JavaScript.
• Looking ahead to the next version of VS Application Lifecycle Management – Brian Harry shares some more of the vision behind the Visual Studio Application Lifecycle features coming in vNext
• Database Migrations – Picking a strategy and getting the ball rolling w/ RoundhousE – Derik Whittaker discusses the difficult problem space that is keeping multiple databases up to the correct level of changes in an active development environment, discussing some strategies and highlighting some tooling, before discussing why he chose to use RoundhousE to help solve his problems.
• Finding a balance with ASP.NET MVC – Rob Ashton follows up from his DDDSW session with a detailed blog post discussing some of the problems he sees with using ASP.NET MVC, using this opportunity to highlight limitations he sees which affect testability, maintainability, readability and general code beauty.
• Writing non-blocking user-interfaces in F# – Tomas Petricek explores the use of F# asynchronous workflows in User Interface programming to give a nice non-blocking user experience, illustrating the concepts by way of a Silverlight based example. Full source is available.
• Making regex authoring easier to read and maintain – Daniel Cazzulino takes a look at 5 different ways of representing a regular expression in your code, each offering a different level of readability, maintainability, and ease of understanding what the regular expression is actually going to do.
• Tweaking your Visual Studio 2010 Start Page (for example, to show your 30 must recent projects…) – Greg Ducnan highlights a post from Shai Raiten looking at how you can customise your Visual Studio Startup page to include the information you want to see there.

Community

• Recording of my DDD talk – Udi Dahan highlights the availability of the recording of his Domain Driven Development X (DDDx) session from Friday’s event. Udi discusses Domain Models & Composite Applications, looking at the use of Bounded Contexts to divide up large applications.

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I had an absolutely fantastic weekend at Developer Developer Developer South West 3 this weekend – once again the team put on an excellent and well attended conference. My thanks to the organisers, those who attended my NuGet session, and all the other attendees who all contributed to making it a great weekend. I will be putting together a blog post this week covering all the things in my talk (and the bits I had to skip over), and will gather together links to the conference related posts in a later edition of The Brew.

Software

• Reactive Extensions 6/5/2011 release available – The Reactive Extensions Team announce their latest release – a Stable version 1.0.10605, and an experimental release 1.1.10605, both available via NuGet. This new version improves support for use on Windows Phone 7, adds CLSCompliant and AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers attributes to the library, along with a number of API improvements and documentation of the redistributable files.
• mvc-mini-profiler – A simple but effective mini-profiler for ASP.NET MVC – mvc-mini-profiler is a neat looking library from the StackOverflow team, which adds support for obtaining profiling output from your ASP.NET MVC applications. The profiler supports custom message output, can intercept and report on problem database behaviour.
• Throwing a little gas on the fire… "HTML App Host Framework for Phone 7" (or Building apps for WP7 like those mentioned for Win8) – Greg Duncan highlights two projects which bring HTML5 application wrappers to the Windows Phone 7 platform, allowing applications created in HTML5 to be packaged up and run on the existing WP7 platform as first class applications.

Information

• Eduasync part 10: CTP bug – don’t combine multiple awaits in one statement… – Jon Skeet continues his Eduasync series of posts looking at recreating the async functionality from the CTP from first principles. In this post Jon takes a look at a bug in the CTP release which affects the use of multiple nested awaits, and uses it as an opportunity to look at some of the potential difficulties of implementing async.
• A Quick Follow-up on Model Binding in FubuCore, Convention over lots of code & Cool stuff in FubuCore No. 9: Stringification – Chad Myers continues adding to his FubuCore series of posts with a follow up on his model binding post, giving some better descriptions of some of the parts of the model brinding functionality, before moving on to another post discussing the principle of Convention over Code, and sharing part 9 of the FubuCore series looking at the tooling it provides for converting objects and entities into string representations.
• Convention Based Filters – John Teague also joins the discussion on Convention over Code with a look at how he implemented conventions in his current project to simplify the code.
• CLAP: Command-Line Auto Parser- Part 2 – Adrian Aisemberg shares the second part of his look at his CLAP command line parser library exploring some of the more complex features including Global Switches, Name Overrides, Global Argument Handlers, validation and much more.
• www.primordialcode.com – NHibernate.Envers – Querying – part 1 – Giorgetti Alessandro follows up from his introductory post on NHibernate.Envers starting a series of posts with this part looking at the querying of versioned entities, exploring the use of the IAuditReader interface implementation to read back versioned data.
• Effective Tests: Custom Assertions – Derek Greer continues his series on Effective Tests with a look at the use of Custom Assertions in your tests to reduce the complexity of assertation code in tests by extracting them into a custom assertion
• SELECT 101 FAQs FROM SQL Server Community INSERT INTO Free eBook (185 pages, PDF) – Greg Duncan highlights a free e-book from the SQL Server Forum Support Team. The e-book, constructed from 101 of the frequently asked questions from the forums, runs to 185 pages of information covering Database Administration, SQL Server Analysis Services, Integration Services and Reporting Services.
• C# use Zip archives without external libraries – D. Christian Ohle takes a look at the use of the System.IO.Packaging ZipPackage class which is a part of the core framework and allows you to create .ZIP archives in a particular way. This functionality underpins the format used for Office ‘x’ format files (docx, xlsx, etc) and is also the format used for NuGet packages.
• Working With Prism 4.0 (Hello World Sample with MVVM) – Abhishek Sur takes a look at how the Prism 4.0 library, combined with Unity and the MVVM style of working in WPF enables the construction of modular applications in this introductory example based post.
• Scott Guthrie Reports Some Windows Azure Customers Are Storing 25 to 50 Petabytes of Data – Roger Jennings highlights some of the headline figures about real world Azure Customer storage use revealed in Scott Guthrie’s NDC Keynote. Sounds like there are some customers who are really taking to the cloud in a big way.

Community

• Upcoming NEBytes event: Asymptotics and Algorithms with Gary Short – Rachel Collier highlights the NEBytes Online event to be held on Wednesday 15th June between 7:00 and 8:30pm where Gary Short will be delivering a his session on Asymptotics and Algorithms. The event is running over live meeting, and registration is required to get the access link.
• Secrets of a .NET Ninja – The DevEvening Usergroup running out of Woking welcome ‘Friend of the Brew’ Chris Eargle for two sessions on the evening of Wednesday 29th June, kicking off at 6:30pm. Chris will be discussing Declarative Refactoring, and sharing some of the ‘Secrets of a .NET Ninja’
• DDD South West 3 Sticker Photo Competition – Win a Kinect – Guy Smith-Ferrier reminds the attendees of DDD South West 3, held this weekend passed, that the DDD related fun can continue with their DDDSW sticker Competition where you stand the chance to win a Kinect.

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Software

• dotTrace 4.5 Performance, dotCover 1.1 Released – The JetBrains team announce the RTM release of dotTrace 4.5 and dotCover 1.1. Both products hav significant improvements over previous versions, with dotTrace now sporting performance improvement estimation, better presentation of results, and changes to the floating licensing model. dotCover 1.1 brings new formats for the reporting, NDepend integration and improved filtering coverage.
• Updated Silverlight Unit Test Framework binaries – compatible with the Mango phone tools beta – Jeff Wilcox has rebuilt the Silverlight Unit Testing Framework against Windows Phone 7.1 Mango and made them available for download,

Information

• Cool stuff in FubuCore No. 8: UrlContext – Chad Myers dedicates a post of his FubuCore series to the UrlContext class, a class within FubuCore which provides a number of realyl useful static helper methods for working with URLs, and discusses how this level of abstraction is really useful when unit testing code using the library.
• Domain-Specific Languages – Phil Trelford discusses the use for external DSLs, discussing their common use in the games industry and taking a look at implementing both internal and external DSLs in F#, illustrating with examples
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Part 9 – New WP7 Features – Rob Eisenberg continues his series of posts discussing his Caliburn.Micro UI patterns framework for Silverlight, WP7 and WPF. This post explores some of the new features for Windows Phone 7 introduced in the 1.1 release of Caliburn.Micro, exploring the HelloWP7Sample application.
• Code snippets on blogs, are you allowed to use them in your own work? No you can not!! – Keith Nicholas highlights some important information about the copyright of content in blog posts across the world, and reminds us that the best thing to do is to explicitly specify a license with any samples you post.
• Free WebMatrix e-book – The folks over at Ubelly have constructed a free e-book on the Web Matrix tool from Microsoft. The e- book is constructed from the best content available on the web and supplemented with content written by the Ubelly team.
• Optional update to the May 2011 Visual Studio/TFS VMs. If you’re giving the VM more than 2 GB of RAM or need to put more stuff on the image, check this out… – Greg Duncan highlights some useful information from Brian Keller for anyone attempting to work with the latest Visual Studio 2010 ALM virtual machine image who wants to increase the memory available in the VM.
• WCF Service Trace Viewer Part 1 & Part 2 – ‘nmarun’ highlights the WCF Service Trace Viewer utility which is a part of the Windows SDK already installed on many developers machines. These two posts take you through the use of this tool to help diagnose and debug problems in your WCF services and learn a little more about WCF along the way.
• HTML5 Snippets – Ralph Whitbeck highlights the HTML5Snippets.com website from Roberto Brevé.. The site is a gallery site for the sharing of snippets of HTML5 and CSS3 code, and provides a nice way of learning more about HTML5 and CSS with some concrete examples.
• DynamicObject: AOP for the poor – Oleg Smirnov discusses how dynamic objects can be utilised to provide AOP like functionality in your applications illustrating with an example.
• Test Impact Analysis – Syed Aslam Basha highlights the Test Impact Analysis features of Visual Studio 2010 Premium and Ultimate which allows you to see the tests which should be run to test changes to particular areas of your code.

Community

• YUI Theater – Jenny Donnelly: Introduction to Git – The YUI Blog highlights a number of recordings of sessions, many from their internal developer conference, including this one on the Git Distrbuted Version Control System given by Jenny Donnelly. Other topics addressed include Node.js, the YUI library, Mobile web development, etc.

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