The Morning Brew

Software

• ILSpy 1.0 Has Landed – Christoph Wille announces the release of ILSpy 1.0, a ‘reflector’ replacement tool which allows you to inspect the contents of .NET Assemblies, viewing the IL decompiled back to source C#. The great news is that the ILSpy team are not stopping there with work on a V2 already underway.
• Agatha 1.3 Is Out – Davy Brion announces the release of Agatha 1.3, the latest version of his webRequest Response Service framework. This release includes new work on using interceptors for cross cutting concerns, convention based request response pairs, the availability of (8) NuGet packages of Agatha and various integrations.
• Managed Stack Explorer: A Tool to Complement Process Explorer – Sasha Goldshtein highlights the Managed Stack Explorer tool which allows you to observe CLR2.0 processes and see what the current stack of the managed theads it contains.
• Visual Studio + Sass + Less + CoffeeScript = Web Workbench – The folks over at Mindscape announce a new (free) Visual Studio 2010 Extension which brings support for Sass, Less and CoffeeScript to the Visual Studio IDE, offering syntax highlighting, Intellisense, outlining, go to definition support, and interactive error highlighting.
• Veracity 0.9.1 – Eric Sink highlights the latest release of Veracity, his distributed version control system. This release is considered to be the first that is stable and ‘ready to use’, with the V1.0 release scheduled soon.
• FSharpChart new features and code drop availability – Carl Nolan highlights a new code drop release of FSharpChart, a charting library for F# developers. This new release includes save as and clipboard support, along with new 3D chart types and box plots.

Information

• The curious property revealed – Eric Lippert celebrates his 15 year anniversary at Microsoft, and shares the details on his recent string puzzler – a short string which has the same HashCode as String.Empty, along with the property that concatenations of this string also reveal the same HashCode, discussing the nature of the HashCode.
• Why CRUD might be what they want, but may not be what they need – Ian Cooper discusses the CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) nature of applications that are typically outlined as the requirements for software, discussing the origins and reasons for this, and suggesting that Task Based applications are often a better fit and what we should be investigating.
• Extend NuGet Command Line – Rob Reynolds shares his findings from implementing an extension to the NuGet command line tooling, showing the various stages to implementing your own sub commands.
• Test-Driven Development Is Not Slower – Matt Honeycutt shares his experiences as a Test Driven Development adoptee, discussing how he now uses it as his everyday development approach, and discussing some of the common misconceptions about TDD practices.
• FubuMVC: One Model In, One Model Out – Rex Morgan discusses the One Model In, One Model out pattern which is common in FubuMVC, which makes it easier to test the actions in the system by providing simple setup and assertion contexts.
• Design, Code, Release: Software Developer != Zen Warrior – Nathan Gloyn draws on his Martial Arts knowledge discussing the use of martial arts terms such as katas and d?j?’s in the coding space, discussing better names for these practices in our space, and how we can better improve our development skills.
• F#: An Array.Parallel Quicksort Implementation & F# and Running Parallel Tasks – Carl Nolan has been exploring implementations of sorting in F# making use of the Task Parallel library, sharing some comparisons of the different algorithms, along with some wrappers for F# to make the casting required to work with the TPL easier.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Event: Getting up to speed with MVC3 – Ian Russel joins the NxtGenUG in Birmingham for a session on the new features introduced in ASP.NET MVC 3 on the evening of Tuesday 16th August.

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Software

• Announcing PostSharp 2.1 CTP 3 – Gael Fraiteur announces the 3rd CTP release of his PostSharp 2.1 AOP framework. This release brings with it support for Windows Phone 7.1 beta, full class reference documentation and an improved first time use experience with in IDE learning resources.
• StatLight 1.4 and almost 1.5 – Jason Jarrett gives an update on his Starlight Project, a command line runner for Silverlight Tests, re-highlighting the release of 1.4 and discussing some of what is to come in the 1.5 release.
• Use it or lose it, part deux [New Delay.FxCop code analysis rule helps identify uncalled public or private methods and properties in a .NET assembly] – David Anson provides another update to his Delay.FxCop library of custom rules, this time implementing a rule to detect methods and properties which are included in an assembly but not referenced anywhere. As usual there is a binary and full source release available.

Information

• C#/.NET Little Pitfalls: Nullable Math Doesn’t Always Add Up – James Michael Hare continues his series of posts on .NET Little Pitfalls with a look at the use of Nullable<T> values in mathematics via operator overloads, and how you can arrive at some unexpected results to calculations.
• Model Metadata and Validation Localization using Conventions – Phil Haack shares a proof of concept implementation for dealing with the localisation of Model Metadata and Validation without requiring the attribute bloat that performing this using the buit in functionality results in.
• CQRS – Martin Fowler gives a nice overview of the Command Query Responsibility Segregation pattern, discussing its aims, uses and when it is applicable
• Bart De Smet – Interactive Extensions (Ix) – Channel 9 highlight the recent experimental release of the Interactive Extensions, a library of LINQ to Objects Query operators influenced by those in the Reactive Extensions, hosting an interview with Bart De Smet where he explains the content an use of the library
• Defense in Depth: Locking Down Mash-Ups with HTML5 Sandbox – Jacob Rossi takes a look at the Internet Explorer 10 implementation of the HTML5 Sandbox which allows you to include content in a reduced privilege area of the page, providing a safer way of including external JavaScript on your pages.
• Html5 WebWorkers experiment – Sacha Barber turns some of his attention towards the web with a look at the use of Html5 WebWorkers, combining them with some jQuery to create a sample web application which pulls in images from Flickr
• Explanation of Microsoft POCO and Self-Tracking Templates – The dotConnect Team blog takes an indepth look at the Microsoft POCO and Self-Tracking Templates, sharing explanations some of the things that they found more difficult to understand when investigating and making changes to the templates.
• Leverage T4Scaffolding for WCF Web API – Steve Michelotti shares a library (via NuGet) which combines the T4Scaffolding package and WCF WebAPI to address the issues which made his pure NuGet WebAPI technique less than ideal.

Community

• The Stack – Liverpool .NET User Group – August 2011 – The Stack Usergroup will be meeting on Monday 15th August at Studio 2 in Parr Street Studios, Liverpool for their 3rd event. This event sees Matt Salmon take a look at ASP.NET MVC and some of the related projects, and Jon Rimmer discussing Mobile app development using JavaScript , jQuery, and WCF
• Webinar – Compositional and Convention-based Web Development With FubuMVC – Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo highlights a webinar with Mike Murray on Wednesday 20th July between 12PM-1PM MST, where Mike will take a look at the FubuMVC project, showing how to get started with it before moving on to look at its various conventions, behaviour chains, and packages.

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Software

• Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles – Maarten Balliauw highlights the Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles project from the Microsoft DPE Team which enables quick and easy deployment of multiple virtual web sites on a single Azure instance, and providing further tooling to support multiple instances (AKA failover)
• Expression Web 4 Service Pack 2 – Alex Moskwa announces the release of Expression Web 4 Service Pack 2. This service pack release offers improvement to the workspace configuration and code editing functionality of Expression Web 4, including jQuery intellisense, snippets, and Interactive mode for snapshot previews allowing you to test cross browser interactions
• New code sample release from Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework in July – Jialiang highlights the latest release of the All-In-One Code Framework which brings further samples to the collection, covering ASPNET (Fixed Header Grid, Spinner Image, Script Disabling, File Permission editing), Windows Driver Kit (WDK), Windows Azure Web Role Identity, Silverlight Session Cookies, a Tiff Image Converter, HexStringByteArrayConverter, Full Screen Slide Show
• Project Silk Drop 13 – Karl Shifflett highlights Drop 13 of the Project Silk cross browser web application guidance, uilising HTML 5, CSS3 ASP.NET MVC 3 and other modern Web Technologies. This drop brings some minor code changes, along with early drafts of chapters on Modularity, Communication, Navigation and Design and Layout.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 4 Roadmap – Phil Haack shares the ASP.NET MVC Team’s roadmap for the Version 4 release, outlining what they are currently planning to include in the next major release, focusing on improving development and deployment workflow, improved ASP.NET and .NET platform utilisation, improving Ajax support, and HTML5 and mobile device support
• List of HTML5 Presentation Resources – Chris Bowen shares a nice collection of resources related to HTML5, CSS3, Canvas and SVG, along with HTML5 sample applications and the various Microsoft Web technologies including Internet Explorer, ASP.NET MVC, WebMatrix, etc.
• Overriding Unobtrusive Client Side Validation Settings in ASP.NET MVC 3 – Imran Baloch takes a look at how you can manipulate the validation settings of the jQuery Validation library utilised in ASP.NET MVC to perform the particular validation your application may require.
• Understanding Protocols – Eric Lawrence discusses the support in Internet Explorer for custom protocol definitional allowing you to have a particular protocol URL passed to custom code or applications in Internet Explorer
• Detecting and Changing a File’s Internet Zone in .NET: Alternate Data Streams & MEF DirectoryCatalog Fails to Load Assemblies – Mike Hadlow investigates manipulating alternate data streams on files in NTFS after running into problems getting MEF based plugin assemblies to load after being copied from the network (which was resulting in the ‘Blocked’ status on the files)
• Stacks and queues in JavaScript – Jef Claes continues a series of posts on implementing common data structures and algorithms in JavaScript with a look at an implementation of the Stack and Queue structures.
• Smooth CoffeeScript – E. Hoigaard shares a free E-Book on the CoffeeScript programming language, based upon the book Eloquent JavaScript. This guide takes a look at the various features of CoffeeScript, starting from the basics of this ‘improved JavaScript’ language.
• Exploring CoffeeScript Part 3 – More on Functions – Jan Van Ryswyck continues his series looking at the CoffeeScript language, digging a little deeper into functions, looking at scope, context, function binding, and splats.
• NHibernate.Envers – Querying – part 2 – Giorgetti Alessandro continues his series looking at the NHibernate.Envers library which provides support for entity versioning in NHibernate taking a look at the querying of the different versions of the entity.
• Introduction to Office Open XML – DannyMak gives a short introduction to the Office Open XML format, highlighting the developer tools available to assist in working with these file types, and showing a very simple example to create a Word Document.

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