The Morning Brew

Software

• Native NuGet Support in TeamCity – Hadi Hariri discusses the new functionality available via plugin which brings native support for NuGet into the JetBrains Team City Continuous Integration server, as previously highlighted by Scot Hanselman at TechEd US.
• PowerStudio – Ian Davis has been hard at work on PowerStudio, a Visual Studio Extension which brings tight PowerShell integration to Visual Studio 2010, supporting Code Colouring, auto-complete Intellisense, error detection in tokens and expressions, project and file templates, and much more. The Extension is available for free on the Visual Studio Gallery, and full source is available on GitHub.
• Introduction to MVVM Hands-on-lab – App Development – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Patrick Danino announces the release of an ‘Introduction to MVVM’ Hands-on-lab, available in Visual Studio Extension form and available via the Visual Studio Gallery. he lab gives a step by step tutorial on taking a traditional event based application and converting it to an MVVM unit tested application.

Information

• First Look at the New C++ IDE Productivity Features in the Next Version of Visual Studio – Sumit Kumar shares an early look at some of the new IDE productivity features for C++ Developers in the next version of Visual Studio, including a new Solution Explorer, improved intellisense, and code understanding changes.
• Fiddler In Action – Part 1 – Mehdi Khalili kicks off a series of posts looking at the Fiddler Debugging tool, exploring how it works, looking at its architecture and how it bolts into the request flow, highlighting some similar tools, and exploring Fiddler in use.
• Continuous delivery – The folks over at ThoughtWorks have created a new portal site for the ideas, principles and themes behind the practice of Continuous Delivery. The site highlights the best articles, events and resources in this area.
• My article on HTML5 for ASP.NET Developers is now online – Wallace B. McClure – Wallace B. McClure highlights his latest article, featured on DevProConnections which takes a look at some of the key components of HTML5 from the point of view of an ASP.NET Developer, examining HTML5 and how you can strat to introduce it to improve your ASP.NET web applications.
• Play Sound in HTML5 and cross browser support with backward compatibility – Joe Stagner continues his series looking at building a Workout Timer using HTML5 and JavaScript exploring the playing of sound in HTML 5 and ensuring that your sounds will be heard in different browsers
• The "got to have guide" to Iconography for Windows Phone 7 – Greg Duncan highlights an interesting article from Peter Kuhn exploring the key concepts of iconography in Windows Phone 7 applications, discussing Tile, Marketplace, and AppBar icons.
• Fun With New Live Tile API – Shawn Wildermuth is also taking a look at Windows Phone Tiles, exploring some of the changes and improvements made to the Live Tile API in Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango)
• Making the most out of IIS compression – Part 2: Configuring IIS 6 compression – Matt Perdeck shares part 2 of his series on IIS Compression, taking a look at its implementation in IIS 6

Community

• WPUG Manchester – Windows Phone – Tuesday 13th September sees the first meeting of a Manchester (UK) based Windows Phone User Group. The group will be gathering at MadLab in Manchester City centre. The speaker line up for the first event is still awaiting confirmation, but it should prove to be a useful gathering for an North West based WP developers.
• NxtGenUG – Event ‘Reach Warp speed with Velocity’ – Phil Pursglove will be presenting a session on the AppFabric Distributed Caching (previously known as Velocity) on Tuesday 20th September at the Cambridge NxtGenUG. In the session Phil will explore a variety of use cases for the AppFabric cache to improve the performance of you ASP.NET applications.

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Information

• Interface Attributes != Class Attributes – Brad Wilson discusses the use of attributes on interfaces, and how interfaces and base classes differ when implemented / inherited in terms of attributes defined on them
• SlowCheetah – Web.config Transformation Syntax now generalized for any XML configuration file – Scott Hanselman highlights the SlowCheetah XML Transforms Visual Studio Extension from Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi and Chuck England which allows web.config like transformations to be applioed to other XML config files.
• Things you didn’t know the Watch window could do – Kate Gregory highlights a number of previous posts on tips for working with Visual Studio along with a post from "Daan-Nijs" which shares a number of really useful features of the Watch Window.
• Tasks vs ThreadPool – Sacha Barber highlights an interesting discussion on Tasks vs ThreadPool over on Paul Stovell’s blog where Paul takes a look at implementing Task behaviours in ThreadPool terms – check out the comments on Paul’s post. Sacha also takes this opportunity to highlight his series of articles on CodeProject about the Task Paralllel library
• Managed Thread Synchronization – Paulo Zemek takes a look at the varirty of different means for synchronising application behaviour across multiple threads, including lock(), EventWaitHandle, AutoResetEvent, ReaderWriterLock and much more.
• Windows Phone 7 : Choosing Photo from your Phone – Wriju Ghosh shares a number of small code snippets whcih use Windows Phone 7 specific functionality, looking at picking photos from the phone, Sending SMS from your application, Choosing Email Application to send email , Choosing Email address from the list & Calling a Number from Application. Wriju is also hosting a Partner Event Windows Phone 7 Mango – Platform Overview for Application Development on Sunday 28th August.
• Building an HTML App – Workout Timer – Clock Logic – Joe Stagner continues with the build of his Workout Timer sample application, looking at the implementation of the clock / timer functionality in this part of the series.
• A Magnifying Lens using Script and CSS – K. Scott Allen shares an implementation of a magnifing lense for a webpage using JavaScript and CSS to implement it. The example shows off a number of useful techniques from rounding the magnifing glass to debouncing the mouse tracking.
• Introducing Cosby, spontaneous striped background generator – Leon Bambrick shares an example of using the ASP.NET MVC FileResult type, creating a simple application which renders striped background images based on user selections. Full source is available.
• Static Code Analysis (aka FxCop) – Simple Code Analysis – Zain Naboulsi takes a introductory look at the use of Static Code Analysis which is integrated into Visual Studio (higher SKUs), illustrating its use with a simple worked example showing some simple code, enabling the checking and looking at the warning messages.

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Software

• EF 4.2 Beta 1 Available – The ADO.NET Entity Framework Team announces the availability of the first beta release of Entity Framework 4.2. This release marks the start of a new versioning strategy for the EF project with version numbers taking a semantic versioning approach.
• "Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Release Candidate" on Microsoft Downloads – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Release Candidate on Microsoft Downloads. This release includes the latest version of the SDK, emulator, assemblies, XNA, WCF Data Services for Phone, and much more, and ushers Mango ever closer to RTM.
• Official site of AutoMapper launched at AutoMapper.org – Jimmy Bogard announces the launch of a dedicated site for his AutoMapper project, a library which provides a low code solution to mapping data between object instancse. The new site hosts news RSS feeds, wiki, mailing lists, and links to the source code.
• Introducing ORM Profiler. Beta-testers wanted! – Frans Bouma announces the launch of the beta of his new ORM Profiler tool, a profiler which allows you to inspect what is going on behind the scenes in your ORM. Frans is looking for beta testers of this new project, needing 25 testers who use LLBLGen Pro and 25 users using other supported data access frameworks.

Information

• An Object Lesson in Binary Compatibility – Sharon Cichelli takes a look at the complex area of Binary Compatibility and making breaking changes to library methods by changing the return value of a method from void to returning some value / object.
• Optimization and generics, part 1: the new() constraint & Part 2: lambda expressions and reference types – Jon Skeet kicks off a new series of posts looking at some of the micro optimistaions which may give generics based code a boost in performance
• The horror of having to enforce SLAs – Ayende shares a devious use of an NHibernate Interceptor to provide some entertainment for developers when ASP.NET pages use too many queries through NHibernate, neatly illustrating an important performance consideration and also the use of Interceptors ion NHibernate.
• Embedded scripting using F# – Vladimir Ivanovskiy takes a look at embedding scripting capabilities into your application using F# as the scripting language.
• Creating an HTML 5 Game – Part – Simple Parallax Stars – The South Africa Developer and Platform Group blog continues its series looking at the creation of a game in HTML5 and related technologies, with this 3rd part exploring the creation of a parallax scrolling background.
• Should You Upgrade Your WP7 App to Mango? &Maintaining a Project with Two Windows Phone Versions – Shawn Wildermuth discusses how Fast Task Switching is the compelling reaon to upgrade your Windows Phone 7 applications to the Mango (7.1) release when it becomes available, and also looks at how you can manage versions of your application on both versions of the phone platform.

Community

• Aberdeen Developers .Net User Group – August Meeting – The Aberdeen Developers .NET User Group are meeting this Thursday (25th August) for a session from Jessica Meats of Microsoft on SharePoint Online. The group are also meeting next month on Thursday 29th September for theirr September Meeting where Phil Leggetter will be discussing real time web applications
• Skills Matter : In The Brain of Matthew Baxter-Reynolds: XML Documents over REST Interfaces – Skills matter continue their ‘In the Brain of’ series of talks into September with a session from Matthew Baxter-Reynolds on XML oer REST interfaces on Monday 5th Septemeber, and Mary Poppendieck on the The Impact of the Pace Delivery on Monday 19th September
• Be a Part of Something Awesome… – Ben Nunney discusses the Microsoft Student Partner programme which gives students a way to get the inside track on Microsoft, gain training opportunities, and useful experiences for later working life

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