The Morning Brew

Software

• Machine.Specifications for ReSharper 6 now available – Hadi Hariri highlights the release of the ReSharper runner of Machine.Specifications (MSpec) for ReSharper 6 allowing you to run your Machine.Specifications tests right within the IDE using the ReSharper test runner.
• DotNetNuke 6 Released, big thangs – Chris Hammond highlights the release of DotNetNuke 6, the latest incarnation of the widely used Web Portal implementation now written completely in C#, with significant changes across the board including improved UI, SharePoint Integration, full cloud support and much more.
• "Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games" preview released – Toolkit to help you Social your .Net or HTML5 games… – Greg Duncan highlights a new toolkit to aid with the implementation of Socail aspects of modern games, providing support for Windows Azure hosted services which can be consumed in your game applications

Information

• Using MSBuild to deploy your AppFabric Application – Justin Beckwith takes a look at improving and automating the deployment of AppFabric Applications using MsBuild, the June update of the Windows Azure AppFabric SDK CTP and the REST API of the Application Manager.
• The Current State of Parallel Computing – Keyvan Nayyeri shares his thoughts on the current state of Parallel Computing, looking at the background to parallel computing, the differing approach to algorithms, and how programming languages are evolving to enable parallel computing.
• A Spelunking Exercise In The Finer Points Of ASP.Net MVC 3 Model Aware Data Annotations – Doug Rathbone takes a look at implementing custom MVC 3 Validation Attributes, discussing their use, and looking at how some of the built in ones are implemented.
• Continuous Integration and Delivery – Antonio Paes discusses the various software parts of the continuous integration process, highlighting some of the options available and discussing how a CI solution hangs together.
• Delivering Software to a Global Audience – Chad Z. Hower aka ‘Kudzu’ takes a look at the Localisation Process, discussing translations, some of the trickier translations issues such as text in images, some of the issues surrounding Right to Left and Top to Bottom reading directions and much more.
• A CultureInfo switcher with Fluent syntax – Idalgo Cantelli shares a small utility class to make switching culture for localisation testing into a nice Fluent experience allowing you to write more expressive tests of your localisation.
• Site Map Provider using custom business objects – K. G. Sreeju Nair takes a look at implementing a custom site map provider drawing its structure from your own business objects
• Understanding Basics of UI Design Pattern MVC, MVP and MVVM – Avtar Singh Sohi takes a look at the common presentation patterns, exploring the differences between the different patterns

Community

• DevDirective a new kid on the block – Christiaan Baes highlights a new community site aiming to do what Stack Overflow has done for questions for articles. The site is very new at the moment, but could well be one to watch in the future. As soon as the RSS feed are working I will be monitoring the site for interesting articles

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Software

• CLR Stack Explorer – Preview & Manual Stack Walking – Sasha Goldshtein releases a preview of CLR Stack Explorer, inspired by the lack of CLR 4 support in the Managed Stack Explorer Sasha has created this tool to allow you to explore the managed stack of both 32 and 64 bit processes while they are running. Sasha also discusses how you can handle corrupted stacks in your memory dumps allowing you to derive useful information in these scenarios.
• Iterative MapReduce on Windows Azure – ‘Planky’ highlights Project Daytona, an Iterative MapReduce implementation on Windows Azure from the folks over at Microsoft Research, who hit a v1.0 release on 6th July, providing a platform for large scale distributed data processing.
• Small Basic 1.0 is here! – Alfred Thompson highlights the release of Small Basic 1.0 a week ago, along with a selection of great learning resource to help teach programming in Small Basic to children and other non-developers.

Information

• Strings, immutability and persistence – Eric Lippert draws on another good StackOverflow question, discusses the nature of strings, how they are stored in memory, the benefits that their immutability gives, and how operations on strings scale due to a lack of "persistent" optimizations and how this isn’t actually a bad thing.
• LINQ Pad vs. Visual Studio for Learning LINQ – Jesse Liberty highlights the importance of a good understanding of LINQ for developers. Drawing on a number of previous blog posts, Jesse shares a tutorial on LINQ and discusses the use of LinqPad to learning and experimenting with LINQ.
• Infernal dinner synchronization problem – Dzmitry Huba explores the synchronisation of distributed resources, looking at a scenario in a lost chapter of Dante’s Inferno which involves some quite complex ‘business’ rules about feeding people, looking at some code that answers these requirements.
• References, Routing, And The Event Aggregator: Coordinating Views In Backbone.js – Derick Bailey continues his exploration of the Backbone.js library which brings a Winforms like development experience to client side web programming. In this post Derick explores communication between multiple Backbone views, looking at a a view / edit scenario.
• Razor Helpers Syntax – Gil Fink talks about the use and power of the Razor View Engine’s Helper syntax which allows for code reuses of view logic between views, exploring the similarity to the HtmlHelper implementations,
• @Helpers and @Functions In WebMatrix, What is the Difference? – Michael Bridge discusses the similarities and differences between the Razor @Helper and @Function syntax in ASP.NET Web Pages, illustrating with some examples.
• The Guide to Creating Quality Technical Screencasts & JavaScript is Assembly Language for the Web: Part 2 – Madness or just Insanity? – Scott Hanselman shares a really nice guide to creating good high quality screen casts, discussing video and audio capture and encoding, along with some other tips for producing good content / presentations. Scott is alo continuing the discussion surrounding his recent podcast on ‘Is JavaScript Assembly Language for the Web?’
• Development Key Skills (or lack of them!) – Paul Stack outlines some of the skills and traits he believes are essential for developers to create a good environment for team development.

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Software

• DebugDiag 1.2 Added Full Support for x64 Systems – Ajay highlights the release of DebugDiag 1.2 which now includes support for the x64 platform along with further diagnostic scripts for working with IIS applications, COM+, SharePoint and .NET applications.
• Lucene.net is back on track – Simone Chiaretta gives an update on the progress / revival of the Lucene.net project, following the seeming death of the project 6 months ago. The community seems to have rallied round the project and given it new life, along with some forks of the project there are new releases and an updated website.
• Sysinternals Process Explorer v15… Celebrating the 15th anniversary of Sysinternals (and the release of The Windows Sysinternals Administrator’s Reference) – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the latest versions of the SysInternals tools, Process Explorer v15, Listdlls 3.1, along with a new tool FindLinks, and the celebrations of 15 years of SysInternals tools
• Free SDK from Microsoft: Facebook C# SDK – The Systems, architecture and engineering solution blog highlights the latest update to the FaceBook C# SDK from Microsoft. This project, hosted on CodePlex helps .NET devs build applications for web, Silverlight, desktop and phone which interact with FaceBook.

Information

• Effective Tests: Avoiding Context Obscurity – Derek Greer continues his series on Effective Tests with a look at how to avoid your test context becoming obscured, and sharing and best practices to help avoid this.
• Mapping the Memory Usage of .NET Applications: Part 2, VMMap and MemoryDisplay – Sasha Goldshtein continues exploring memory use in .NET applications with a look at VMMap, a SysInternals tool which helps you peek inside and see the memory allocation and use of your processes
• Best Practice: Get your HEAD in order – Eric Lawrence discusses the correct ordering of elements within a web page’s head element, explaining how this ordering can have an effect on how your page renders, and the performance of the rendering of the page
• Why .NET LinkedList does not support Concat and Split operations? – George Mamaladze takes a look at the .NET Linked List implementation and discusses how the way it works effects the implementation of Concat and Split operations, sharing test driven implementations of these
• Tutorial: Create Custom External Services in Azure AppFabric June CTP – Alan Smith takes a look at the creation of a custom external service hosted in Azure AppFabric to proxy the Bing GeoCoding service, walking through the steps required to create your own AppFabric services
• Configuring, Deploying, and Monitoring Applications using AppFabric Application Manager – ‘adamab’ shares a look at the deployment and monitoring story for your AppFabric Applications, walking through the deployment of a sample application using the AppFabric Application Manager.
• RoutingService on Azure – Roman Kiss explores the use of the WCF4 Routing Service in a Windows Azure hosted application, looking at the differences between hosting on premise and in the cloud.
• Scala comes to .Net – The Scala Programming Language site has an interview with Miguel Garcia, who has been working on bringing Scala to the .NET platform as a part of a project funded by Microsoft. In this article he discusses the progress already made, the reasons why Scala on .NET makes sense and what the future plans are.
• Use ViewModels to manage data & organize code in ASP.NET MVC applications – Rachel Appel takes a look at the use of the ViewModel in ASP.NET MVC applications, illustrating their use in a simple example and discussing some tips and best practices.

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