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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Software

• bddify V0.5 and some updates – Mehdi Khalili announces the release of bddify 0.5, the latest version of his BDD Framework, available from the project website and via NuGet. This version adds a fluent API, and increases the frameworks use of convention over configuration. Mehdi also has an introductory article ‘Introduction to bddify: A Simple to Use and Extend BDD Framework for .NET‘ over on The CodeProject which gives an overview and getting started guide to the framework.
• YUI 3.4.0 Preview Release 1 – The Yahoo YUI team are embracing new development practices, and one of the artefacts of this is a more regular release cycle of preview releases allowing you to get your hands on their latest bits more often.
• Windows 8 – Mike Taulty gives a roundup of the various videos and source of official information about the Windows 8 demonstration earlier this week. The details revealed have sparked active discussion in the community, and here are a few of the posts that caught my eye:
  • Some Thoughts on Windows 8 – Mike Hadlow
  • Windows 8 – Paul Stovell
  • You Might Want To Start Taking JavaScript Seriously – Davy Brion
  • 4 Questions about Windows 8 (and a lot more) – Kip Kniskern
  • Windows 8: Old Dog, New Tricks, Important Questions – Andrew Brust

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Empty(), DefaultIfEmpty(), and Count() – James Michael Hare continues his Little Wonders series, wraping up his look at the LINQ extension methods in the Enumerable class, taking a look at the Empty(), DefaultIfEmpty() and Count() methods, giving their background and example of them in use.
• Cool stuff in FubuCore No. 4: Dependency Analysis with Directed Graph – Chad Myers continues his series of posts on the interesting bits of FubuCore with a look at the features provided for dependency resolutions and identifying dependency trees, discussing the theory, implementation and use of this functionality.
• C# and VB.NET – Differing namespace conventions – Jon Galloway discusses the difference in defaults for the use of Namespaces between VB.NET and C# resulting in the decision that the MVC Music Store tutorial port to VB.NET would not have namepaces.
• Entity Framework 4.1 – One To One Mapping – & Component mapping – Benny Michielsen continues exploring the various aspects of the Entity Framework 4.1 Code First looking in these two posts at the intricacies of mapping One To One elements, and component mappings.
• Faking DbContext – K. Scott Allen highlights a post from Daniel Cazzulino on unit testing Entity Framework 4.1 Code First Domain Models, and shares his experiences of implementing a Fake IDbCoOntext.
• Getting Mono compiler output in a web application using StreamReportPrinter – Jon Galloway highlights how you can caputre the output of the Mono C# Compiler as a service allowing you to identify bugs in your code that is being dynamically compiled.
• Intercept calls to objects in C# – Neeraj Kaushik takes a look at using the Unity Framework to intercept method calls on objects in C#, illustrating with an example.
• Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web – The Official Google Blog announces the launch of Scheme.Org, an initiative from Google, Microsoft (Bing) and Yahoo! which is creating a standard structured format for data markup on web pages. With the ‘big three’ behind this it is clearly well worth getting to know.

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Software

• Previewing ‘Windows 8’ – Julie Larson-Green, corporate vice president, Windows Experience takes the wraps off ‘Windows 8’ at the D9 Conference yesterday, and this article, and video discusses the various aspects of the new heavily touch driven UI – Looks very interesting
• Microsoft’s Windows 8 Demo From D9 (Video) – AllThingsD share the full 19 minutes of video from the D9 conference showing off ‘Windows 8’ in a demo by Steven Sinofsky and Julie Larson-Green.
• BUILDing a bright future – S.Somasegar announces the BUILD Windows event, essentially this year’s PDC event, which will be a deep dive event focusing on developing for Windows 8. The event will be held between 13 and 16th September 2011 at the Anaheim Convention Center in California
• Caliburn.Micro v1.1 RTW – Rob Eisenberg announces the release of Caliburn.Micro v1.1 RTW his lighweight MVVM framework for Silverlight, WP7 and WPF. This release includes numerous bug fixes along with some new features including a new Tombstoning API, an new Chooser API, strongly typed navigation, a new Regex bases View Locator and View Model locator, and much more
• jQuery ASP.Net MVC Controls – The jQuery ASP.Net MVC Controls Team announce the release of version 1.4 which includes support for their use in Razor Syntax views, improved controller configuration for the grid, along with a variety of bug fixes and general code improvements.
• Analyze Your Move to the Cloud and Windows Azure With MAP 6.0 Beta – The Windows Azure Team highlight the availability of na new beta release of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit version 6.0 which includes the Windows Azure Migration Portfolio Analysis, a tool to help with planning migration of existing applications to the Azure Cloud platform.

Information

• Cool stuff in FubuCore No. 3: Static Reflection – Chad Myers continues his series looking at the interesting bits of the FubuCore library, discussing the use of Static Reflection to replace the use of strings when referring to types, properties and methods in your code. This post gives a nice introduction to the concepts, along with pointing to plenty of examples of Static Reflection in use.
• Internals of Array – Abhishek Sur continues his ‘Internals of…’ series with a look at the humble Array, and how it underpins many of the other collection like data structures
• Record Visual Studio Web Test Using Fiddler – Steve Smith highlights the use of Fiddler to record sessions of HTTP traffic which can then be exported and used as a Visual Studio Web Test or Web Performance test.
• The super-slidy Windows Azure Pricing Calculator – Eric Nelson highlights the ‘The super-slidy Windows Azure Pricing Calculator’ which has to be the easiest way to work out how much your Windows Azure capacity requirements will cost.
• Windows Phone 7.1: WCF Data Services and tomb stoning – Alex van Beek takes a look at the improved support in Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) for consuming WCF Data Services, and the WCF client’s support for storing the enitire WCF Data services state (All the entities, pending changes, etc) for use when your application is Tombstoned, allowing your application to pick up exactly where it left off.
• June Issue of Pragmatic Programmer magazine, PragPub – The Pragmatic Bookshelf announce their June edition of PargPub, their multi-platform online development journal. This month’s edition looks at pair programming, the use of mocks in RSpec, agile planning using velocity and lots more.
• Applied Design Patterns Series – Ron Garlit kicks off a series of posts to accompany a usergroup presentation series he is creating. This series will look at real world uses of Design Patterns in creating an application running on top of the ubiquitous AdventureWorks database.

Community

• Interested in Silverlight and in Reading? – Martin Beeby highlights a VBUG event on Silverlight being held in Reading on Tuesday 7th June where there will be two talks, Kiril Matev looking at the building of line of business applications in Silverlight and Peter Lindsey will discuss the key concepts of User Experience.
• Video: Visual Studio 2010 Tips and Tricks Presentation on LinkedIn (LIDNUG) – Lisa Feigenbaum highlights the availability of a recording of her most recent presentation to the Linked In .NET User Group which focused on using new language features and Visual Studio 2010 features to accelerate your development process.

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