The Morning Brew

Slow news day today due to holidays in the US I suspect – hope everyone over there had an enjoyable Independence Day

Software

• All-In-One Code Framework surpasses 1,000,000 downloads! – Congratulations to the All-In-One Code Framework team on passing through the 1 million downloads barrier this year. If you haven’t already checked this project out then you are really missing out, it provides a huge array of code samples for a variety of non-trivial cases.
• First stable release of the Community TFS 2010 Build Extensions – Jakob Ehn highlights the first stable release of the Community TFS 2010 Build Extensions, a collection of 100 custom build activities for interacting with the likes of IIS7, PowerShell, NUnit, Hyper-V and much more.

Information

• Flowing Bowling Game Kata I – Ralf Westphal takes a look at a simplified Bowling Game Kata exercise using Flow Design and Event Based Components to solve the problem. This first post explores the problem space, and constructs the model to be used in the next post to create the Event based components.
• Getting your NuGet Gallery Orchard Growing… – Greg Duncan highlights a post from ‘espenao’ which shares some tips on creating your own NuGet Gallery installation to host your own package repository.
• Passing Objects between ASP.NET and Silverlight Controls – Brij Mohan continues this series looking at passing data between ASP.NET and Silverlight, exploring the passing of objects of data using object serialisation, working through the process step by step.
• Bin Deploy ASP.NET MVC 3 Application With SQL CE 4.0 & Entity Framework – Prashant Khandelwal discusses the ‘bin’ deployment of ASP.NET MVC with Entity Framework and SQL CE 4.0, showing the steps required to get this working on a hosting provider who do not permit you to install the libraries globally.
• WebSockets, WCF & Silverlight 5 – Bert ONeill explores the creation of a WebSockets application, using a Silverlight client, calling back to the HTML Page to execute JavaScript to communicate back to the server, showing the use of this technology in a simple example.
• 15 Episode SQL Azure Learning Series – Eric Nelson highlights a series of short episodic videos which give you the essential bits of information about working with SQL Azure, exploring Getting Started, Administration, Migration and Synchronisation Programming and Business Intelligence.
• Create the Next Big App: Webcast Series – Microsoft Press also highlight a web cast series looking at a range of different scenarios where the cloud can be helpful, as well as a series of Windows Azure virtual labs to take your learning deeper.

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Software

• VsVim 1.0 Released – Jared Parsons announces the V1.0 release of VsVim, his visual studio extension which brings Vim keybindings to the Visual Studio IDE. This release brings a number of bug fixes and improvements to the synchronisation of settings between Visual Studio and the VsVim Extension. Download is available through the extension galley, and full source is available on GitHub.
• Microsoft Media Platform Content Manager 1.0 Released – Chris Knowlton highlights the release of the Microsoft Media Platform Content Manager v1.0. This tooling provides end to end workflow for working with video delivery through IIS. The tooling provides encoding features, insertion of advertisements for live event broadcast using IIS Smooth Streaming.
• Mercurial 1.9 Release Notes – The Mercurial Team announce their latest release, Mercurial 1.9 contains improves remote changeset discovery, fileset matching support, command mode, experimental generaldelta storage and an experimental http client library.
• RegEx’ing in Visual Studio with the Regular Expression Tester Extension – Greg Duncan highlights a nice Visual Studio Extension for anyone who works with Regular Expressions. The Regular Expression Testing Extension brings a number of useful testing and construction features for working with and testing Regular Expressions from within the IDE.

Information

• How to Get Started with .NET Micro Framework Hardware – Pete Brown highlights the range of micro-controller boards which can be used with the .NET Micro Framework, and explores some of the options for sensor and chassis available to provide you a basis for building a robot.
• Web Workers in IE10: Background JavaScript Makes Web Apps – Travis Leithead shares a look at the Web Workers in Internet Explorer 10 which provide a way of running JavaScript on a background thread to give a more responsive UI, and looks at the capabilities of the workers
• Published first ALPHA version of Domain Oriented N-Layered Architecture V2.0 – Cesar de la Torre highlights the early draft release of the next edition of the Domain Oriented N-Layered Architecture Guide (v2). There has been lots of discussion in the community surrounding the first release of this guide, and its great to see the team responding to the feedback and making further improvements to the project.
• Ayende’s DDD Application: Macto – Ayende has been looking at the Microsoft N Layer sample, and, in response, will be posting a series of articles looking at building enterprise systems the way he approaches the problem.
• Convention Based View Model Location using Ninject in a MVVM/Silverlight Application – Derik Whittaker discusses the use of the MVVM pattern in Silverlight applications and explores the options for the implementation of the ViewModelLocator pattern, highlighting some examples and sharing his own implementation.
• OSS on Github – Tips and Tricks – Josh Arnold shares some tips for working with Open Source Projects which have version control hosted on GitHub based on his experiences with working on the Fubu project.
• From Silverlight To HTML5 – CodeProject – Colin Eberhardt takes a look at re-implementing a Windows Phone Jump List in HTML5 and JavaScript, thereby making it cross platform, working from the reference footage of the actual control, and looking at how the various aspects of the control can be re-created in JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS.
• Microsoft makes the source available for the app that’s going to be used for Bing’s Streetside Wi-Fi/Cell Tower/GPS data gathering (i.e. see some of the code the Bing Streetside cars will be using as they [war]drive around your neighborhood) – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the code for the Bing Maps Streetside WiFi / Cell Tower / GPS gathering as an open source application. The application is being released this way in order for Microsoft to be open about the information they are capturing and how they are going about it.
• Developing Android Apps? Interested in Building your Apps for Windows Phone 7? You Need this Guide! – The Microsoft Public Sector Developer and Platform Evangelism Team highlight the availability of a guide for Android developers who are looking to transition to the Windows Phone Platform, addressing the WP7 platform from an android point of view, and providing an API mapping tool to help ease the transition.

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Software

• Announcing WCF Data Services June 2011 CTP for .NET4 & SL4 – – Ahmed Moustafa of the WCF Data Services Team announces the team’s latest CTP release, the WCF Data Services June 2011 CTP for .NET4 and SIlverlight 4. This release includes improvements to support for inheritance structures and properties on derived types, support for LINQ any / all functions, and a new low level OData serializer/deserializer library supporting ATOM (serialise) and JSON (serialise and deserialise) formats
• ReSharper 6 is Released! – Hadi Hariri announces the official release of JetBrain’s ReSharper 6. This release has been a long time in the making (with plenty of Early access and Beta releases along the way) and adds some impressive JavaScript, Razor, CSS and HTML support along with numerous improvements and new features across the tool
• June 2011 release of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit (aka v2.0… or double the download size from the Feb 2010 release, or now 1.8GB of offline training, labs, information, goodness) – Greg Duncan highlights the June 2011 release of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Training Kit. This training kit explores all aspects of the .NET Framework and IDE, randing from the Parallel Extensions to Windows Azure.
• SLJS.org – a Silverlight -> Html/JS converter – Rob Ashton discusses his latest side project, a converter which will take Silverlight code and, through the use of the JSIL library, convert the Silverlight code into JavaScript and HTML. Full Source is available on Rob’s GitHub account, and the projects official site has just been set up (domain doesn’t yet resolve for me) – looks like an interesting project.

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Nullable static class – James Michael Hare continues his Little Wonders series with a look at the use of Nullable types in comparisons, how they don’t do what you might expect, and how the Nullable static class provides a comparison helper which behaves as you would expect.
• Wha’s the Difference Between a Value Provider and Model Binder? – Phil Haack digs down into how the ASP.NET MVC framework converts input from the request into the strongly typed parameters of an action method, looking at how the new ASP.NET MVC 3 JSON binding functionality works, discussing the architectural decisions in the implementation.
• Following the pattern – Eric Lippert takes a looka t the real requirements for a type to be able to be used in a ForEach statement, rather surprisingly not that it implements IEnumerable (although that does work) but in fact that the type has the required methods and properties. Eric discusses why this design decision to use a ‘pattern based approach’ was taken, illustrating with examples.
• Understanding ASP.NET MVC Model Binding – Bipin Joshi shares a nice example driven look at the Model Binding functionality of ASP.NET MVC, exploring 10 different binding scenarios, each illustrated with an example.
• A New MSDN Forum For All Topics Related to F# Programming – Daniel Quirk & Don Syme highlight the creation of a new MSDN Forum for the discussion of all things F#, and also highlight some of the great F# community resources available.
• A Simple Example That’s Incredibly Complex – Rob Conery discusses the new ‘Microsoft – Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample’ from Microsoft Spain, discussing the difficulty in creating good samples and illustrations of Domain Driven Design principles, and exploring the use and implementation of abstractions, repository pattern, IOC and much more in the sample.
• JavaScript: this – Brian Dukes discusses the sometimes confusing (to people coming from strongly typed OO languages) this keyword in JavaScript giving a short explanation of what it is and how it behaves and illustrating with some examples.
• A Generic, IDisposable WCF Service Client – Steve Wilkes shares an implementation of a wrapper class which helps manage the lifecycle of a WCF client using the IDisposable interface.

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