The Morning Brew

I’m expecting a busy blogging week this week with the // BUILD conference this week….

Software

• Package validation in NuGet Package Explorer – Marcin Miko?ajczak of SymbolSource.org shares a useful extension for the NuGet Package Explorer allowing you to validate your symbols packages for your projects ensuring that your packages contain all the correct symbols for your assemblies.
• "Mouse without Borders" utility from Microsoft Garage (Software KVM + Shared Clipboard + Files) – Greg Duncan highlights ‘Mouse without Borders’ a tool that allows you to share a single mouse and keyboard over multiple machines, as well as providing clipboard synchronisation and drag and drop file copy between machines.
• Chutzpah – Chutzpah 1.2.0 Released – Matthew Manela announces the release of Chutzpah 1.2.0, his JavaScript test runner which can be run from the command line and Visual Studio. This new release is available as NuGet packge, source on Codeplex, and also in the Visual Studio Gallery and provides a way of running JavaScript tests in command line and browser.
• Sync Framework Toolkit now available for download – Sreedhar Pelluru announces the release of the Sync Framework Toolkit which provides easy means for creating disconnected applications with data synchronisation supported over multiple platforms

Information

• New Release of SQL Azure – Shaun Xu discusses the latest update to the Sql Azure Platform, looking at the version increase and the new features of the management tooling.
• A Lap Around the New Amazon Web Services Toolkit for Visual Studio – Richard Seroter takes a look at the newly released Amazon Web Services Toolkit for Visual Studio which brings a number of great features for working with AWS services to the Visual Studio IDE
• Asynchronous Programming in JavaScript with ‘Promises’ – Matt Podwysocki and Amanda Silver take a look at the use of promises (or deferreds) in JavaScript to make asynchronous programming easier, exploring their implementation in jQuery and Dojo.
• Why I Prefer JavaScript Over CoffeeScript – Davy Brion shares his opinions on the use of CoffeeScript to write JavaScript versus writing JavaScript natively
• HTML5 Platformer: the complete port of the XNA game to <canvas> with EaselJS – David Rousset shares and discusses his efforts in porting the XNA 4.0 platformer game sample to HTML 5 using canvas for the rendering, discussing some of the interesting points in the code, and sharing the full code.
• Automating Azure 1.4 Packaging using MSBuild and CSPack- via Iain Hunter – Eric Nelson highlights a series of posts from Iain Hunter discussing his work migrating an ASP.NET MVC 3 application to the Windows Azure platform, discussing the decision to use Azure, working with SQL Azure, and looking at automating package creation for your application to make it easier to deploy to Azure.
• Writing Maintainable Code – Michael Williamson discusses the art and science of creating good maintainable code discussing some principles which can help, illustrating with examples.
• Mapping a Route with Directions using the Bing Maps WPF Control (Beta) – Brian Lagunas continues his exploration of the Bing Maps WPF control with a look at using the routing and directions web services and combining them with the map display, building a working sample.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Lazy Properties and Closed Sessions &Entity Refresh – Ricardo Peres continues his series of posts looking at common pitfalls developers may fall into when using the NHibernate ORM, taking a look at problems using Lazy Loaded properties when the session is closed, and looking at refreshing entities with up to date data from the database.

Community

• First RavenDB webinar is now on YouTube – Ayende announces the availability of the recording of the first RavenDB webinar session on YouTube (in multiple 15 minute chunks)
• Functional Programming eXchange 2012: Call for abstracts – Rob Pickering announces the call for abstracts for the Functional Programming eXchange 2012 to be held at Skills Matter in London on Friday 16th March 2012

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Software

• PhoneGap mobile HTML5 framework adding support for Windows Phone Mango – JC Cimetiere highlights the release of a beta of the Phone Gap platform which includes support for Windows Phone 7.1 Mango, allowing you to create Phone applications in HTML5 / JavaScript with access to some native functionality and deploy to a range of device types such as iPhone / iPad, Android, and now Windows Phone.
• Want Denali CTP3 (aka next version of SQL Server)? Here’s a Hyper-V VHD just for you (in 36 parts, but I’ve also provided direct download URL’s for use in your DM of choice…) – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of a pre-installed and configured Hyper-V Virtual Machine of the SQL Server Denali CTP3 release, available as a substantial 36part download.

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The String Split() and Join() methods – James Michael Hare continues his series of posts on less well known areas of the C# language and .NET Framework with a look at some of the more unusual options of the String Split and Join functions.
• Know your place in life [Free PlaceImage control makes it easy to add placeholder images to any WPF, Silverlight, or Windows Phone application!] – David Anson shares an implementation of an image control which handles content that takes a while to load into your application by providing a placeholder while the image loads, swapping it with the image when loaded. David’s control supports WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7
• There is no need to provide an custom error message when using Code Contracts – Derik Whittaker takes a look at the exception messages produced by the Code Contracts functionality when validating parameters, discussing how you should use the built in condition statement message rather than duplicating the condition in your own message
• Client side paging of Server Paged OData Entity Sets using dataJS – Lohith shares a look at OData Paging, how you can support and enforce paging in your OData feeds, sharing a sample application demonstrating the concepts.
• Periodic Agents on Windows Phone 7.1 – Shawn Wildermuth discusses the use of the different types of agents in Windows Phone 7.1, taking a look in detail at the use of Periodic Agents to perform background tasks on the phone.
• Tweaking NHibernate Mappings at Runtime With a Remapper – Alex Ullrich discusses the ability to manipulate NHibernate Configuration and Mapping at runtime, allowing you to manipulate settings in the config depending on the database system being used without having to have separate mappings, sharing a code sample which illustrates this technique.
• Data Contracts and Behaviors over the Wire – Jeremy Likness discusses the ability to share your model classes between client and server in Silverlight applications via WCF Services, exploring some of the unintended side affects you may encounter when using this approach

Community

• Progressive .Net Tutorials – A Review @skillsmatter #prognet11 – Gary Ewan Park shares a look at the sessions he attended at this week’s Progressive .NET Tutorials held at Skills Matter. Gary has prepared his nots on all the sessions he attended into blog posts sharing the salient information from each session
• Progressive .NET Tutorials 2011 05-09-11 – Skills Matter have been busy since the end of the Progressive .NET Tutorials getting videos of all the sessions up on their site providing a great opportunity for those who weren’t able to attend to get some of the benefit of the event. I shall certainly be watching a good number of these.
• London Ajax User Group Meetup: MooTools, Dojo, jQuery, and PhoneGap – The London Ajax User Group are meeting at Skills Matter on Tuesday 13th September for two sessions, one exploring jQuery and PhoneGap for developing mobile applications using JavaScript with Mark Drew presenting, and David Walsh will be exploring JavaScript Development with MooTools and Dojo.
• Functional meets parallel – Functional Brighton – The Functional Brighton group will be meeting on Tuesday 20th Septemnber at The Skiff in Brighton where they will be exploring the parallelizable nature of functional code looking at its implementation in a number of languages.
• RavenDB Webinar #2 – Q & A Free For All – Ayende celebrates the success of the first RavenDB Webinar and announces plans for another webinar today (Friday) which will also include a Question and Answer session.

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Software

• MonoDevelop 2.6 is out – Miguel de Icaza announces the release of MonoDevelop 2.6, a significant release with a good number of new features included, including Mac application development support, integrated support for Git, and the combining and standardising of the editor used across a number of platforms.
• Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5 – Mike Taulty highlights the corresponding Expression Blend Preview release to go along with the Silverlight 5 RC release.
• Used to be addicted to Command and Conquer and C&C:Red Alert? What if I was to tell you about a free, open source clone? And that it was written in C#? – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of a Command and Conquer clone, developed entirely in C# and made available as open source, with the source code available over on the projects GitHub account.

Information

• What is this thing you call a "type"? Part Two – Eric Lippert continues his mini-series taking a look at the meaning of ‘type’, discussing what he means by ‘type’ from his point of view as a compiler developer.
• Building forms for deep View Model graphs in ASP.NET MVC – Jimmy Bogard takes a look at the use of lambdas in strongly typed ASP.NET MVC 2 helpers and templated helpers allowing us to build forms in our applications for complex nested models.
• JavaScript OMG #21 to #25 – Mike Taulty continues his series of posts sharing the interesting and suprising things he has learnt in the process of gettin up to speed on JavaScript, sharing 5 more ‘features’ many with illustrating code samples.
• The Pragmatic Bookshelf – The Pragmatic Bookshelf announce the availability of the September edition of their magazine ‘PragPub’ which this month focuses on the Scala Programming Language.
• JavaScript Development and Resources – Tatworth highlights a good resource from the folks at O’Reilly, sharing book references, sample chapters and a great collection of articles videos and tutorials on JavaScript.
• Become a Good Programmer in Six Really Hard Steps – ApochPiQ discusses 6 steps which will take significant effort and time but will lead you towards being a better developer. Good discussion of these steps in the comments on this one too.

Community

• See My Stack Overflow Dev Days Talk – Rob Pickering highlights a chance for you to see his session originally intended for the now cancelled Stack Overflow DevDays event in London, which you can now see at Skills Matter as an ‘In the brain of’ session on Tuesday 1 November.
• RavenDB Webinar – Ayende is trialling a regularly scheduled RavenDB webinar event, with a first test event scheduled for today (Thursday) between 5 and 6pm (UK).
• 2 Days of Free SQL Server Training! – Natasha Zaza highlights 24 free hour long webcasts from the SQL PASS team giving a taste of that is to come in the conference, starting today (Thursday) at 12pm GMT until midnight, with the second 13 webcasts coming tomorrow.
• "Building Applications for Windows Phone ‘Mango’ Jump Start" sessions are now available on-demand on Channel 9 – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of the recording of the sessions from the Windows Phone Mango Jumpstart event from Rob Miles and Andy Wigley last month.

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