The Morning Brew

Software

• SQL Server Code Name "Denal" CTP3 and SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 are HERE! – The SQL Server Team announce the release of their latest CTP of Denali, the vNext release of SQL Server. This release is a chance to get your hands on the new features coming in vNext. Also released today is Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008 R2, which as usual wraps up all the cumulative update and customer feedback issues into one package.
  • SQL Server 2011 (Denali) CTP3 Download Links – Davide Mauri provides some quick access links to the various components of the Denali CTP3 Release
  • SQL Server Denali CTP3, Project Crescen – Robert Bruckner discusses some of the improvements in Reporting Services in the latest CTP release of SQL Server
  • SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 is now available – Aaron Bertrand explores the SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 release, highlighting the download links for the various editions of SQL Server.
  • Announcing SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v.5.1 – The SQL Server Migration Assistant Team announce version 5.1 of the SQL Server Migration Assistant which provides a way of performing automated migration to SQL Server and SQL Azure from Access, Oracle, Sybase and MySQL.
• Small Basic 1.0 is here! – The Small Basic Team announce their v1.0 release, a minor update to the 0.95 release with support for Icelandic added, as sell as some setup and editorial changes.
• Announcing the Microsoft Surface 2.0 SDK Release – Pete Brown highlights the release of the Microsoft Surface 2.0 SDK which replaces the Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch beta. This release contains a suite of controls templates and access to Surface APIs and uses .NET 4 WPF4 and XNA 4 technologies.

Information

• Patterns of Compositional Architecture: DSLs – Registries & Patterns of Compositional Architecture: DSLs – Conventions – Josh Arnold presses on with his series looking at the pattern that support Compositional Architectures with further exploration of Domain Specific Languages with discussion of Registries which provide access into a DSL and the use of Conventions to apply changes to your model using the DSL.
• hOOt – full text search engine – Mehdi Gholam discusses the creation of hOOt a full text search engine (much like Lucene). This CodeProject article discusses the project, looks at some of the implementation details and show how you can use it in your applications. Full source and sample application are available to download.
• Debugging Web Workers in IE10 – Jonathan Carter and Gaurav Seth discuss the Web Worker functionality of Internet Explorer 10 Preview and look at how you can debug the code you are running this way using the Internet Explorer F12 tools.
• What curious property does this string have? – Eric Lippert sets a puzzle involving the "Yi script". Full answer will follow in a future post, and there are some hints in the first couple of comments (along with some correct answers further down)
• Sharing Assemblies between Silverlight and .NET – Christian Nagel discusses assembly sharing between Silverlight and .NET and some of the issues you run into if attempting to reference Silverlight Class Libraries as project references in your WPF projects, showing how the Portable Library Tools make this possible.
• Parallel for loop in C# 4.0 – Jalpesh P. Vadgama takes a back to basics look at how simple the Parallel programming functionality in .NET 4 makes taking a for loop and converting it into a parallel operation.
• .NET Gadgeteer – Lee Stott highlights the .NET Gadgeteer project from Microsoft Research, a rapid prototyping platform and teaching tool for small electronic devices which uses the .NET Micro Framework.

Community

• NEBytes and SUGUK July 2011 – SharePoint Performance on Broadway – The NEBytes .NET usergroup have teamed up with the Silverlight Usergroup for a joint session on Wednesday 20th July in Newcastle Upon Tyne where Simon Tyler will present on Sharepoint best practices and Andrew Westgarth will present on streaming video both live and on demand using IIS Media Services 4

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Update: Corrected some broken HTML which was merging the links to Hugo Bonacci’s Razor article and Micheal Crump’s Silverlight article – Thanks to KevinW for letting me know via the comments

Software

• EF 4.1 Language Packs – The ADO.NET Entity Framework Team announce the release of a number of language packs for Entity Framework 4.1 offering support for culture aware Intellisense for DbContext and CodeFirst APIs, satellite assemblies with localised error messages and templates for Model first and Database first. The language packs support Chinese (Traditional and Simplified) French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish.

Information

• Patterns of Compositional Architecture: DSLs – Semantic Models – Josh Arnold continues his series of posts looking at the various patterns associated with Compositional Architecture, further exploring Domain Specific Language topics with a look at Semantic Models.
• Getting started cooking with Entity Framework 4.1 Code First – Getting the tools and your first dish – Greg Duncan highlights a new series of posts from ‘DiveDeeper’ taking a recipe based approach to learning about Entity Framework 4.1 Code First in a guided way.
• MVC and the HTML5 Application Cache – Dean Hume takes a look at using the HTML5 Application Cache with your ASP.NET MVC Applications (Although the principles will work for any web framework) to provide offline functionality for your web application.
• DotNetOpenAuth: Debugging and Tracing OpenID and OAuth on ASP.NET (or MVC) using Glimpse – David Christiansen takes a look at how DotNetOpenAuth and the Glimpse Server side debug viewer are integrated making it easier to see what is going on during the OpenID and OpenAuth process.
• Templates With Razor – Hugo Bonacci discusses the use of @helper in your Razor Views to create reusable display methods and templates for use across your web applications.
• Communicating between two local Silverlight Applications – Michael Crump takes a look at communications between two Silverlight applications running on the same machine by way of the LocalMessageReceiver and LocalMessageSender, both available since Silverlight 3.
• Generics and Attributes – Jason Bock discusses the use of generics in .NET attributes, and how you can’t use them without a little bit of trickery involving IL, showing how this can be achieved.
• How to Detect if a Method is Overridden Redux – Jeroen Frijters discusses a technique for determining if a method is overridden by a subclass using reflection on the method
• Using DynamicObject and ExpandoObject – Bipin Joshi takes a look at the dynamic support in C#4, exploring the use of dynamic, how it differs from the var keyword, and exploring the DynamicObject and Expando Object classes.
• Using the Portable Library Tools, a tutorial – Greg Duncan highlights a nice article from Mosallem exploring the use of the Portable Language Library Tools to create a library that can be used from both Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight

Community

• NxtGenUG – Event: Node.js Server side JS Really? – The Hereford NxtGenUG welcome Gary Short for a session on Server Side JavaScript using Node.js on the evening of Monday 8th August at Shire Hall in Hereford.
• DDD South West 3 On The Day – Guy Smith-Ferrier reflects back on DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West 3 event held at the beginning of June, sharing some of the feedback and statistics as well as linking to roundups of the day by other attendees.

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Software

• Autofac 2.5 Released – Nicholas Blumhardt announces the release of AutoFac 2.5. This release brings support for Windows Phone 7 to the main project, fixes a number of reported issues, whilst maintaining compatibility with code written against version 2.4
• Exploring a Multicore OS: BarrelFish, a FREE OS From Microsoft! – Sam Stokes highlights a joint project between ETH Zurich in Switzerland, and Microsoft Research which is producing an operating system based around multicore and many core processors. The OS is MIT licensed and available for download, along with research papers on the project.

Information

• Patterns of Compositional Architecture – Josh Arnold kicks off a series of posts looking at Compositional Architecture, exploring how this principle underpins projects like the Fubu family, outlining the core patterns of these practices.
  • Patterns of Compositional Architecture: Policies
  • Patterns of Compositional Architecture: Domain Specific Languages
• Project Templates and preinstalled NuGet packages – Marcin Doboz discusses some of the plans for improving the support for Project templates with pre-installed NuGet packages in the next NuGet release (1.5), walking through the process of creating project templates which include NuGet Packages pre-installed
• Creating a NuGet Package for LINQ to Twitter – Joe Mayo gives a nice step by step walk through of building a NuGet package for his LINQ to Twitter project, discussing some of the decisions made and running through the process of laying out and building the package.
• Single Action per Controller in ASP.NET MVC – Jak Charlton discusses the practice of having a single action per controller, and shows how you can implement your own controller factory to make this convention work with a Windsor container providing the controllers.
• FubuMVC: Authorization – Rex Morgan takes a look at implementing your own rules for authorisation in FubuMVC, discussing defining the convention, creating the policy to implement this convention and consume this using Fubu.
• Tail calls in F# – Keith Battocchi explores how tail calls work in the F# language, explaining the background to tail calls, using them in your code, and looks at the underlying implementation of them at the IL level, and discusses some of the limitations of tail calls.
• What is a Closure? – Mike Hadlow gives a short and straightforward description and definition of Closure in C#, illustrating with an example.
• Bringing AOP to MEF – Sacha Barber takes a look at combining Aspect Oriented Programming techniques with the composition offered by the Managed Extensibillity Framework, giving an overview of the concepts of AOP and MEF and sharing the glue that you can use to tie them together.
• Internet Explorer 9 Developer Tools Deep Dive – Part 5: Network Performance and Debugging – Chris Bowen wraps up his series on the F12 Developer tools in Internet Explorer 9, exploring their use when debugging network level performance

Community

• SQLSoton User Group – August 2011 – The SQLSoton group welcome Neil Hambly and John Martin for a session on SQL Server, the DBA and Compliance on the evening of Wednesday 10th August 2011 at St Andrews Halls in Southampton.

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