The Morning Brew

In case you missed it due to its different tagging, yesterday I published a rather later than planned ‘Afternoon Tea’ edition with lots of community news, a competition to win a place at the Skills Matter / London .NET Usergroup Progressive .NET Tutorials.

Software

• Aug ’11 TFS Power Tools coming soon – Brian Harry gives a sneek peek at the features of the August 2011 TFS Power Tools extension which will be coming out of testing soon. This update contains a number of long standing feature requests, including login support in the shell extension, work item search, UI based rollback, build automation utilities, and much more
• NHibernate 3.2 Released – Ricardo Peres highlights the recent NHibernate 3.2 release, giving pointers to the downloads, source, release notes and issue tracking, along with highlighting the key new features of the release.

Information

• Overmocking – Brendan Enrick discusses the act of overmocking, where developers, wearing their mocking goggles, refactor out dependencies in legacy code without considering if the dependency should even be in the method or class in the first place, over looking a number of other development principles in the process.
• Realtime Webcam Sudoku Solver – Bojan Banko takes a fascinating look at using image recognition to capture a sudoko puzzle via web camera before solving the puzzle in code. Full source and binaries are available for this project and will make for interesting reading.
• Turning stories from good to great – Jenny Wong discusses the art (and science) of writing good user stories to give a good basis for the application you are going to write based on these user stories.
• How to Break Down a Backlog – John Sonmez discusses the decomposition of an agile backlog, discussing breaking down the tasks on the backlog, getting good information to support the items and inform estimates before creating a real detailed backlog.
• Load-balancing partitioner with work stealing, part one – Dzmitry Huba discusses the role of partitioners in Parallel LINQ and how different types of partitioner can be used in different scenarios, before sharing an implementation which makes use of work stealing techniques to keep idle workers busy.
• Silverlight and Synchronous Network Calls – Mike Taulty goes against his principles by taking a look at blocking the UI thread while making network calls in Silverlight applications, using it a s good illustration of why th API for such service calls is usually manifested as Aysnc.
• C# Async Examples in F# – Part 1 – Chris Marinos kicks off a series of posts looking at reformulating Bill Wagner’s 101 Async Samples from C# to F#, starting off with a simple example, and discussing some of the key implementation details of the F# version.
• Working with HTML Fragments in jQuery – ‘More Tech Tips’ shares some useful information for anyone working with HTML fragments in jQuery, discussing creating elements and tricks for avoiding unnecessary requests for images, iframes, etc when trimming HTML snippets down.
• .Net DI container speed test – Philip Mat explores the relative performance of the most popular Dependency Injection frameworks for .NET, taking a look at AutoFac, Castle.Windsor, StructureMap, Spring.NET, Ninject, and Unity.

Community

• UK Connected Systems User Group – August 2011 – The UK Connected Systems Usergroup are meeting on Tuesday 23rd August at Hitachi Consulting in London for two sessions from Sam Vanhoutte exploring Windows Azure AppFabric – with the first session exploring the capabilities of the Azure AppFabric Service Bus and the second session on building and deploying composite applications with Azure.
• NxtGenUG – Event: Performance: An American Dream – The NxtGenUG in Cambridge welcome Kendall Miller for a session on some of the laws which govern software performance on Tuesday 18th October at Microsoft Research.
• 10 Secret Unit Testing Tips to Become Agile – Senthil Kumar highlights a vendor neutral webinar from TypeMock looking at 10 unit testing tips which whill help you become more agile on Thursday 25th August 14:00 UTC / GMT.

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Those who follow me on Twitter may recall a few weeks back I mused over doing a daily follow up to the main Morning Brew posting in the afternoon with some of the links that didn’t quite make it into the main Morning Brew. This is where the concept of ‘Afternoon Tea’ came about – and for now I will be occasionally producing these posts to complement The Morning Brew, probably with a more relaxed and varied format than the daily Morning Brew posts. With that introduction out of the way, here is what I have in store today:

• Competition – Win a place at the SkillsMatter / London .NET Usergroup Progressive .NET Tutorials
• Community Events and News
• Link Overflow

Competition – Win a place at the SkillsMatter / London .NET Usergroup Progressive .NET Tutorials

The kind folks at Skills Matter have allowed me 2 tickets to give away for the Progressive .NET Tutorials event being held in London next month. The event is a commercial training opportunity, running over three days (Monday 5th to Wednesday 7th September) and is organised in conjunction with the London .NET UserGroup. Each day features two tracks, with two in-depth sessions / Workshops on each of the tracks from great speakers (many of them with articles which have been featured in The Morning Brew) talking on their areas of authority.

Full details of the event can be found on Skills Matter’s site and you can get £50 off the regular registration fee of £425 using PromoCode PROGNET50 when registering.

As mentioned earlier, I have 2 tickets to give away to lucky readers, so to be in with a chance of winning, let me know what your drink of choice is when you read The Morning Brew by tweeting:

‘Reading @calcock’s #TheMorningBrew with a (cup|mug) of <InsertDrinkHere>‘

at some point before I publish Friday’s Morning Brew when I will pick (at random, or as close as I can manage) the two lucky winners.

Community Events and News

There are plenty of great Community conferences and community events coming up over the next few months:

• SQL Bits 9 – Liverpool – 29th September -1st October

  The SQL Bits team are bringing the SQL Bits conference to my doorstep (almost) with the venue for the 9th conference being Liverpool. The conference runs over 3 days, Day 1 being a pay for Training Day with 8 topics being covered by all day training sessions, the Friday features a paid for Conference day with 25-30 sessions over 5 tracks, and the Saturday is the Free Community Conference.

  The agenda is now set, and Registrations for SQLBits 9 are currently open, with early bird pricing for the pay for component of the conference being available until 26th August. If you are free that week/weekend be sure to check out one of my favourite conferences.

• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper North – Saturday 8th October 2011 – University of Sunderland

  New for 2011, DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper North takes the familiar DDD event format to the North of England for a Free all day event at the University of Sunderland. Session submissions have been open for this event for a little while already, and from the look of the sessions the conference will have a fantastic range of topics. If you are interested in speaking at the event, you will need to get your session submissions in on or before 26th August, after which the community will vote on the sessions people want to see before the agenda is finalised.

  The DDD North team are also very interested in hearing from potential Sponsors with a range of sponsorship opportunities available – full details can be found on their dedicated ‘Sponsors Flyer’

• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Belfast – Saturday 1st October –
  University of Ulster

  DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper makes a return to Belfast this year with a free to attend all day event on Saturday 1st October. As with DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper North, the Belfast event will feature a community voted agenda drawn from sessions submitted by potential speakers. As usual the event welcomes submissions from speakers both new and old (in age and experience), and the submission process is currently running – so if you are interested get your session abstract in soon.

• GiveCamp UK – 21st to 23rd October 2011 – London

  Following the success of GiveCamp in the US, 2011 sees the first GiveCamp event here in the UK. Over the weekend of 21st-23rd October teams of volunteers will combine with representatives from charities to work on producing technology solutions for the charity organisations. The event proved to e very popular when registration opened, and now the team are accepting registrations on a waiting list should places become available.

  The GiveCamp team are still very interested in hearing from organisations interested in sponsoring the event – pledges of either financial assistance or swag (or even both!) are very welcome. Further details (including news about the venue) can be found in this post on the Team’s official blog.

• NRW Conf – 8th & 9th September – Wuppertal, Germany

  Daniel Fisher dropped me an email to let me know about NRW Conf, a Community conference organised by JustCommunity e.V, bringing together speakers from across Germany (and the rest of Europe). The conference opens with a day of workshops covering PowerShell, Scrum and ASP.NET MVC, and the second day consisting of a traditional conference format over 4 tracks. Daniel has some more information over on his blog.

If you are involved in running a conference or similar community event either here in the UK, or further afield that you think Morning Brew readers may be interested in then please drop me a note.

Link Overflow

Quite a few people have been emailing me links to articles they have written or found intersting recently – some have made their way into the normal Morning Brew posts, but I’ve also been overrun with good content recently so not as many as I would like have made the transition. If you email me a link that is of Brew interest I generally subscribe to the RSS feed of the blog so I will see future posts when preparing the Morning Brew – and I always welcome link suggestions – if you’ve found something interested, or written something you think the rest of the world needs to see please drop me a note.

So, without further ado, here are a few links which slipped through the cracks:

• Create optimization programs dynamically with C# and the Microsoft Solver Foundation – Mathias Brandewinder has been exploring the use of Microsoft Solver Foundation from C# to solve a variety of Mathematical problems, taking an introductory look at its use before looking at more complex dynamic cases such as this post, and has started a series of posts looking at different approaches to solving a fabricated brewery problem
• Expression Tree Basics – Abul Kayes takes gives a nice introduction to Expression Trees in this CodeProject article, introducing them and taking a look at using them to create a strongly typed way or ordering objects based on the value of an arbitrary property.
• ThoughtWorks Technology Radar – Every quarter the team over at ThroughtWorks produce their Technology Radar whcih looks at the acceptance level, maturity and stability of various new and emerging technologies, classifying them and sharing their findings in the form of this report. This Quarter PowerShell made its entrance into the ‘Trial’ classification, as noted by Doug Finke
• A Better Team: Arrogance And Accepting Your Own Strengths – Derick Bailey posted an interesting discussion about taming some of the traits good developers are prone to, such as Arrogance, and accepting and becoming aware of our own strengths and weaknesses in order to be a better part of a team.
• Package that resizes and compresses images used with an ASP.NET web site and combines them into CSS sprites – Matt Perdeck shares a library which takes the hard work out of optimising and combining images into CSS Sprites. This CodeProject article discusses in detail the various features and parameters of the library , and the full source is available to download and try out.

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Software

• Ajax Control Toolkit July 2011 Release and the New HTML Editor Extender – Stephen Walther announces the release of the July 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit, giving the lowdown on the new HTML Editor Extender Control which provides an easy way to get rich HTML editing on nay ASP.NET Textbox control. There are two editions of this release, one targeting NET 3.5 and the other VS2010 / .NET 4
• MVC Controls Toolkit – Download: Mvc Controls Toolkit 1.3.0 SP1 – The MVC Controls Toolkit team announce their latest service pack release 1.3.0 SP1, available via the CodePlex site or NuGet. This release adds further controls to the library including Dynamic DropDown, along with updates to the TypedTextBox and TypedEditDisplay controls, improvements to client side validation, and a number of bug fixes.
• Transactional File Manager Version 1.2 .1 Released – Chinh Do announces the release of version 1.2.1 of his Transactional File Manager library. This library provides file system operations enlisted in System.Transaction Transactions. The release is a minor bug fix release, and includes an upgrade to VS 2010 for the solution, migration of the test to NUnit along with a number of bug fixes.
• CoffeeScript 1.1.2 – The CoffeeScript team announce the release of CoffeeScript 1.1.2, a minor update with a lot of changes taking place under the hood, with improvements to the REPL environment, the use of Function.prototype.bind, along with a range of other fixes.
• Visual Studio Testing Tools – Two new hotfixes released – Terje Sandstrom highlights two hotfixes which address 7 serious issues encountered by uses of the Visual Studio Testing Tools, released earlier this summer.

Information

• Entity Framework 4.1 Update 1, Backward Compatibility and Microsoft – Ayende discusses the importance usually placed on Backward compatibility at Microsoft, and how that principle has been broken with the release of Entity Framework 4.1 Update 1 and its changes to support for Generic Provider implementations, the technique that profiler vendors use to hook into the data access process.
• HTML5 Feature Support Detection – The Composite Code blog shares a nice post on feature detection for detecting browser support for HTML5 features, looking at common techniques to detect HTML5 input types, Canvas, and geolocation.
• HTML5 Part 5: Resources, Websites, and Tools – Jennifer Marsman wraps up last week’s series on HTML 5 with a collection of great resources for learning more about HTML5 and associated technologies. This collection of links includes books, videos, tools, and samples.
• Code First Migrations: Your Feedback – Rowan Miller, Program Manager on the ADO.NET Entity Framework Team responds further on community feedback from the first CTP release of the Code Frist Migrations framework, discussing the feature directions they are taking for the next CTP based on your feedback.
• 18 Months of Developer Division Releases – Brian Harry gathers togther a list of the 75 releases that the Developer Division have made over the past 18 months – a quite incredible range of tools, and features.
• Passing Objects between Silverlight Applications – Mike James discusses the use of Local Messaging between Silverlight Out of Browser applications running on the same machine, discussing serialisation of objects between the two applications using the DataContractJsonSerializer.

Community

• The Client Side – Dan Maharry announces The Client Side, a Morning Brew like blog for all things web Client-Side Programming. If my coverage of Client Side Dev topics leaves you wanting more then this is certainly going to be a blog that is worth a read – Good Luck with it Dan.
• NxtGenUG – Event: Seriously Scalable Websites – Chris Hay will be delivering his session ‘Developing big scaly websites for Windows Azure’ at the Cambridge NxtGenUG Tomorrow evening (Tuesday 9 August). This session will take a look at build web applications that scale well in Windows Azure, how server behave under load, scaling up and out, the use of load balancers, sessions caching and Content Delivery Networks.
• NEBytes August 2011 – Cross Device XAML and Office 365 – The NEBytes Usergroup in Newcastle Upon Tyne will be meeting on Wednesday 17th August for two sessions, one from Colin Eberhardt on cross platform development with WPF and Silverlight, and a second session from Jonathan Noble and Andrew Westgarth on Office 365
• F101 – Behaviors, Configuration, and Runtime – Josh Arnold share the recording and slides of the first run of his FubuMVC Webinar on Behaviors, configuration and runtime, delivered on Friday.

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