The Morning Brew

Software

• TouchDevelop v2.3 for Mango: Pin to start for scripts – Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of TouchDevelop v2.3 for Windows Phone Mango . This release will only work on Mango powered phones and adds the ability to pin your scripts to the start screen
• Peer Code Review Add-in for Visual Studio 2008 – ReviewMyCode – Hilmi Jauffer shares a Visual Studio Add-in for VS2008 which brings code review functionality integrated with Subversion source control into the Visual Studio IDE

Information

• Extended WPF Toolkit – using the BusyIndicator – Brian Lagunas discusses the best practices use of the BusyIndicator control from the Extended WPF Toolkit in WPF applications, looking at its use in Multithreaded environments, exploring some of the common problems people encounter.
• Teams in Visual Studio 11, the basics. – Clemens Reijnen discusses some of the basics of working in Teams using the Visual Studio 11 Developer Previews of Team Systems
• Cool stuff in FubuMVC No. 2: Action Conventions – Chad Myers continues his series looking at some of the neat things that are contained inside FubuMVC, exploring how the action conventions actually work, looking at how the framework searches for implementations in your code.
• New solution explorer feature in visual studio11 developer preview – Jalpesh P. Vadgama discusses some of the improvements in Solution navigation in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview with the new Solution Explorer
• New Line of Business Features in Silverlight – Ancestor RelativeSource Binding – Dan Wahlin continues his discussion of the improvements for Line of Business developers available in Silverlight 5, looking at how Ancestor Relative Source Binding can help make more things bindable in your XAML
• Lazy Entities and Virtual Members – Ricardo Peres continues his exploration of NHibernate with a short discussion of the requirement for properties to be marked as virtual in NHibernate mapped entities to support Lazy loading, along with highlighting a configuration setting which can be used to override this requirement.
• First(OrDefault) Vs. Single(OrDefault) – Colin Mackay discusses the subtle but important difference between the LINQ First (or FirstOrDefault) and the Single (or SingleOrDefault) methods, showing how you should be careful in choosing which to use to avoid unexpected exceptions
• Intel’s Parallel Extensions for JavaScript – Ajaxian highlights an interesting project from Intel looking at tieing JavaScript to some of the OnChip features of their processors to boost performance and provide parallelism and multi core support.

Community

• "Azure Table Service" and "How To Manage Your Manager" – Mark Rendle takes his Scottish speaking roadshow to Dundee on Wednesday 12th October for two sessions on Azure Tale Service and How to Manage your Manager.
• NxtGenUG – Event -This Andriods life – The Hereford NxtGenUG welcome Ross Scott for a session on mobile application development in HTML5 using PhoneGap to target multiple platforms on Monday 14th November

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Software

• IronPython – Download: 2.7.1 Beta 3 – The IronPython Team announce their 3rd and final beta release of IronPython 2.7.1, and requires .NET 4 or Silverlight 4 for installation and use. This release updates the standard library to match CPython 2.7.2, adds some more modules to the installation, along with addressing reported issues.
• XNA Game Studio v4.0 Refresh Released (Think "The Bug fix, Windows Phone 7.1 and VB.Net" Update) – Greg Duncan highlights the XNA Game studio 4 Refresh release which brings support for games targeting Windows Phone Mango along with the ability to write XNA games using Visual Basic .NET.

Information

• C#/.NET Toolbox: Creating a "Safer" Task Dispose() – James Michael Hare continues his .NET Toolbox series looking at generic utility code he has written to help his development, sharing a look at some simple code which helps better handle disposal of Task Parallel Library Tasks, and results in cleaner code.
• Modernizr.js – K. Scott Allen kicks off a series of posts looking at what the Modernizr JavaScript Library actually does to make HTML5 work better in legacy browsers, looking at how ti forces browsers to acknowledge HTML elements it doesn’t understand.
• FOWA London – Get excited and build things (and a browser panel) – Christian Heilmann shares his Keynote address slides and audio from the Future of Web Applications conference in London, and shares notes from Dan Horner on a browser panel discussion with representatives of Chrome, IE, Opera and Mozilla – an interesting read, and shows some of the differences in approach of the different browser vendors.
• Windows Phone 7.5 Cheat Sheet: Beyond Mango SDK – Toolkits and Controls – Kevin Ashley shares a second Windows Phone Mango Cheat Sheet which takes a look at the controls available as standard, and via the Silverlight Toolkit, as well as looking at some of the supporting tools such as NuGet, and other Frameworks and control libraries for the platform.
• Avoid Testing Implementation Details, Test Behaviours – Ian Cooper discusses one of the key concepts in Test Driven Development, drawing on sections of Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development book and discussing the importance of the different states of the Test Driven Development Process.
• Three pillars of Unit Tests – Pawel Olesiejuk discusses three factors which will affect the success of your Unit Tests, discussing Trustworthiness, Maintainability, and Readability.
• New Line of Business Features in Silverlight5 – Implicit Data Templates – Dan Wahlin starts a new series of posts taking a look at a new features in Silverlight 5 aimed at Line of Business application developers – starting off with this post looking at Implicit Data Templates.
• SortedDictionary and SortedList – Simon Cooper takes a look at two specialist collection classes which provide sorted ordering, discussing how they work under the hood and their Memory and performance characteristics.

Community

• WPUG drinks with Nokia – The London Windows Phone Developers User Group extend an invite from Nokia to join them for a Drinks reception after their Symbian to Windows Phone developer transition event on Monday 10th October at the Emirates Stadium.
• XPManchester 13th October 2011: TDD – No Code Required! – The XP Manchester group are meeting at MadLab in Manchester on Thursday 13th October for a session from Kevin Timmins on the basics of Test Driven Development

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Update: Fixed the link to Scott Hanselman’s post -thanks to David for letting me know in the comments

Software

• Silverlight 5 Toolkit – September 2011 Released – Kunal Chowdhury highlights the release of the first version of the Silverlight 5 Toolkit which targets the Silverlight 5 Release Candidate release. The toolkit offers a number of components over 4 bands of ‘quality’ ranging from ‘Experimental’ to ‘Mature / SDK’

Information

• Full-height app layouts: A CSS trick to make it easier – Steve Sanderson discusses the difficulties in creating good application layouts which occupy the full browser window without scrolling, looking at some CSS to make it easier
• Brain, Bytes, Back, Buns – The Programmer’s Priorities – Scott Hanselman discusses why he feels it is important to spend well on your ‘Buns’ (chair), ‘Back’ (Bed), ‘Bytes’ (Hardware) and ‘Brain’ (learning and experience) in order to function at your best as a Software Developer.
• Silverlight 5 brings XNA 3D to the web – Shawn Hargreaves discusses one of the new features of Silverlight 5 which allows game developers to bring their XNA powered games to the web via Silverlight
• Chocolatey – The free and open source windows app store. – Jason Jarrett highlights the Chocolatey package manager for Windows Applications, built on top of NuGet brings apt-get style installations for applications, and gives an overview of how you use it.
• Windows Phone 7.5 Mango Cheat Sheet – Live Tiles – Kevin Ashley shares a cheat sheet for working with the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango SDK Live Tiles feature.
• A Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) MVVM Tombstoning Example – Colin Eberhardt explores the Tombstoning of an MVVM based Windows Phone Mango application, discussing how the application lifecycle has changed in Mango and exploring the Dormant state.
• Memcached for C# – A Walkthrough – Dean Hume shares a short introduction to using MemCached from your C# based applications, showing its setup / installation and how to consume MemCached services from your applications.
• What’s new in WCF 4.5 – generated client config cleaned – ‘Piyush’ takes a look at the improvements made in WCF 4.5 discussing how the team focused on making the configuration of WCF simpler, and how they have reduced the required config down.

Community

• FREE DDD North Geek Dinner Sponsored by Devexpress – Andrew Westgarth reveals the plans for the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper North Geek Dinner to be held at the Sunderland Stadium of Light after the event. The Geek Dinner is kindly being supported by DevExpress resulting in the dinner being free for 120 people.

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