The Morning Brew

This morning I fired up a random number generator and generated 2 random numbers to pick the winners of my Skills Matter / London .NET Usergroup Progressive .NET Tutorials ticket give away. The lucky people are @dfjones and SarahBailey. Please can you both drop me an email so I can put you in touch with Skills Matter to organise your ticket.

Software

• SQL Server Denali: CTP 3 Product Guide Released – Asim Khan highlights the release of the SQL Server Denali CTP3 Product Guide, 450+MB of SQL Server goodness, discussing, demonstrating and documenting the latest preview of the next version of SQL Server.
• Javascript Unit Test Environment (JUTE) Now Open – Mark Trostler announces the availability of JUTE as an open source project. This project combines YUI 3 Testing Framework, automated dynamic code coverage, web based and command line UI, server and client side testing support and three testing backends in one package. The package runs through Node.js, npm and Java – and looks like it is well worth checking out as it answers a number of the pain points in JavaScript testing.

Information

• Free Printed Copies of "Version Control by Example" – Eric Sink announces a free (including Shipping) offer of printed copies of his book ‘Version Control By Example’, also available in electronic form. Eric is willing to ship to non-US addresses too so this is a truly worldwide offer.
• Lambdas for Junior Developers – Chris Eargle gives a nice introduction to Lambda Expressions, aimed at Junior Developers who have not get to grips with their uses yet, exploring the most common use by way of an example, and also setting 6 exercises to further enhance your understanding.
• Dynamic in C# is Broken – Jan Van Ryswyck discusses an interesting issue surrounding the use of dyanmic types as a parameter of an interface method on an implementation of an interface which derives from the interface containing the method. This one is one to read slowly, and be sure to check out the comments for explanations from the community – especially the link to a Stack Overflow question on the same topic – fascinating stuff.
• FlickR Searching with Silverlight & Rx – Mike Taulty walks through the use of the Reactive Extensions in Silverlight, sharing the creation of a simple Flickr search application which illustrates some of the nice features of Rx in a real-world sample.
• The Backbone.js Todo List Sample, Refactored – Part 1 – Rob Conery continues his exploration of the Backbone.js library, sharing his learning by taking a look at refactoring the backbone.js Todo list sample. In this first part Rob looks at some of the initially confusing code in the sample, the model, collection, FormView, and router.
• Meet Spine.js – My framework of choice for client side MVC (Part 1) – Kazi Manzur Rashid joins the discussion about Client Side MVC frameworks sharing the first part of a discussion about Spine.js, his choice of library for client side MVC, also introducing Jasmine for BDD, some jQuery, along with writing the code in CoffeeScript.
• Use MVC Scaffolding in Database First Scenarios – Paul Litwin shares the steps required to make MVC Scaffold work nicely with Entity Framework models created using Database First rather than Code First.
• Ever Wonder How We Build Software at Microsoft? Now You Can Read All About It! – AngelaB discusses the use of TFS and the software development practices at Microsoft, highlighting some other posts and resources discussing different aspects of how Microsoft use their own technology to develop software.
• ASP.NET MVC Dynamic Universal Map of Resources – Rick Anderson highlights the release of the ASP.NET MVC Content map on MSDN providing a useful directed signpost page to the various different resources on MSDN and further afield organised by content area. Rick is actively keeping this page up to date, so it should be a good starting point to learn more about MVC.
• Real-World F# Articles on MSDN – Tomáš Pet?í?ek highlights his latest work with Microsoft on the MSDN documentation for F#, contributing a number of articles on Real World F# programming, spread over 6 chapters this series looks at all aspects of programming and how F# can be used for them.

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Don’t forget, today is the last day for entries to win a ticket to the Skills Matter / London .NET Usergroup Progressive .NET Tutorials – I will be drawing the winner tomorrow morning.

Software

• Introducing the Knockout.Unobtrusive Plugin – Brandon Satrom shares Knockout.Unobtrusive, a plugin for the KnockoutJS framework which makes it possible to represent your binding in code rather than declarativly using data-bind attributes. The plugin was written using CoffeeScript to generate the actual JavaScript implementation, and has a suite of unit tests written in qUnit.

Information

• NuGet Support for Visual Studio 2008 – Scott takes a look at bringing some of the shiny NuGet functionality to the Visual Studio 2008 world, via use of the existing external tools functionality of the IDE.
• Writing an ASP.NET MVC Controller Inspector – Phil Haack discusses the extensibility of ASP.NET MVC, and how you can swap out the mapping of controllers to types and actions to methods with your own implementation of the ControllerDescriptor and ActionDescriptor, introducing the Controller Inspector, which digs into and provides information about your controllers.
• A Simple Example For Backbone.ModelBinding – Derick Bailey shares a simple example which makes use of this Backbone.ModelBinding plugin, allowing you to see it in use
• Edge cases and impossibilities – Jimmy Bogard discusses the three types of behaviour our systems have, how the system Should, Does and Did behave, discussing how these factors lead to assumptions which allow us to ignore possibilities when debugging issues when in fact we should consider them improbable edge cases.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Ghosts – Development With A Dot – Recardo Peres discusses the importance of getting your data types correct between your NHibernate mapping and your database, discussing some of the fail cases incorrect mappings can cause.
• Inheritance mapping strategies in Fluent Nhibernate – Igor Ignatov discusses the different types of mapping available in NHibernate for Inheritance structures, looking at the class and database structure, along with the mapping in FluentNHibernate.
• The Like keyword in VB.Net and the equivalent in C# – Christiaan Baes highlights a little know keyword in Visual Basic.NET which has no equivalent in C#. The Like keyword allows for SQL Server like matching in your VB.NET Code.
• Writing your own cross-browser polyfills – Addy Osmani discusses the creation of cross browser Pollyfills whcih patch in HTML5 functionality into browsers which don’t support the features, giving detailed background, along with looking at some of the techniques to use to make good pollyfill implementations.

Community

• MVPs Bring Together Hundreds of Developers to Hack Kinect and Build Games in Sydney – Nick Ellery, an MVP Lead in Australia gives an overview of last month’s Developer Deverloper Developer Sidney event which saw 280 attendees enjoy a 1 day conference across 4 tracks, and a subsequent hack day event looking at Windows Phone Mango and Kinect. DDD community events are a great way to gain knowledge and meet your peers, and it’s great to see the format being taken on in other parts of the world.
• FubuMVC Webinar: F102 – FubuMVC In Action – Josh Arnold reminds us that tomorrow (Friday) sees the second part of his webinar series on FubuMVC, with the session looking at View engines and HTML conventions, Validation, custom behaviours, bootstrapping an partials.

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Software

• Extended WPF Toolkit Release 1.5.0 – Brian Lagunas announces the release of the latest version of the Extended WPF Toolkit. Version 1.5 is available from the project site and also as a NuGet Package, and includes a number of new controls, a ChecListBox, CollectionEditor & CollectionEditorDialog, DropDownButtons, MultiLineTextEditor, PrimitiveTypeCollectionEditor, and Wizard. This version also introduces a new sample browser application to aid your use of these controls.
• Rx Contrib – new release – Bnaya Eshet announces the release of an updated edition of Rx Contrib, updating to support the latest version of the Reactive Extensions as well as the previous one, and introducing some significant refactoring and new features.
• Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework August Code Sample Updates – Jialiang Ge highlights the release of the August All-In-One Code Framework code sample updates, bringing a further 15 code samples across the range of Microsoft Technologies
• Run QUnit tests under Continuous Integration with NQUnit – Joshua Flanagan highlights some work by Robert Moore and Miguel Madero in taking Joshua’s original work on running jQuery QUnit tests under continuous integration, upgrading and fixing the code to make it work with the latest versions of WatIN and NUnit, and making it available as a NuGet package.
• Security updates for August – Benjamin Moebius highlights the range of security patches released this patch Tuesday, including patches for Internet Explorer, Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.

Information

• The DRY obsession – Joel Abrahamsson discusses the over reliance on the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle without enough reference to other programming principles can he harmful to your code
• Exploring CoffeeScript Part 6 – Show Me the Goodies ! – Jan Van Ryswyck continues his series exploring the use of CoffeeScript, taking a look at String Interpolation, Destructuring Assignments, Strict Equality, Conditionals, and the Existential Operator.
• Rx and Schedulers – Mike Taulty discusses some unexpected Reactive Extensions behaviour, looking at how the scheduler being used affects significantly the end results of your Rx Code.
• The BackboneJS and Knockout Danceoff – Rob Conery discusses his decision to use BackboneJS in his TekPub MVC3 series rather than Knockout, exploring the similarities and differences between the two JavaScript frameworks
• HTML5: Edition for Web Authors – The W3C released the working draft of ‘HTML5: Edition for Web Authors’ a version of the HTML5 Specification tailored to Web Developers, omitting all the documentation intended for User Agent (browser) manufacturers.
• An Introduction to Razor Syntax – Brian Mains gives a nice short and to the point introductory post on the Razor View Engine Syntax

Community

• Weekly technical webcasts – 10-12 August 2011 – Ray Fleming highlights a series of Webcast events running weekly through to December this year, covering a wide range of technical topics, both Developer and ITPro. The events are scheduled for 2-4PM Australian Eastern Time, so will be in the early hours of the morning here in the UK, but should be more achievable for US readers.
• Agile Week 2011: 40% off – The folks over at Pragmatic Bookshelf are celebrating Agile Week by giving 40% of all titles ordered through their ProgPub.com site.
• Announcement from Linked.NET Users Group (LIDNUG) – The Linked In .NET User Group have 4 events planned over the next 2 months, with Jeffrey Ricther delivering a session on Thread Synchronisation on 15th August, Robin Shahan on Azure for Developers on 26th August, Jeff Prosise looking at What’s new in Windows Phone 7.1 "Mango" on 30th August and Scott Guthrie’s 9th Unplugged session on 22nd September. All sessions are delivered via LiveMeeting and are well worth checking out.

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