Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Release Candidate

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate now available - Soma Somasegar announces the release of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Release Candidate edition, available now to MSDN Subscribers, and tomorrow (Weds) for the general public.
• Announcing VS2010 / .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) - Jason Zander gives a little more information about the release, including a direct download link for those on MSDN Subscriptions, along with some information about the types of changes made in this release.
• Install Visual Studio 2010 RC Today - Ed Glas urges us to install the VS2010 RC today to benefit from all the enhancements to the testing functionality he outlines here
• Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate Offers "Go Live" Option - The Innovation Showcase Blog highlights the fact that the RC release includes a go-live license allowing you to use the VS2010 / .NET 4 bits in production.
• Visual Studio 2010 / .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate - Joey deVilla highlights the release, and points at a video of Visual Studio General Manager Jason Zander talking about how the feedback from the beta programme was used in the creation of the RC.
• RC is here, and so is the Workflow Designer documentation - Cathy Dumas highlights the RC release, and points out that it now includes the documentation for the Windows WorkFlow Designer.

Software

• Small Basic v0.8 - The Small Basic team announce their 0.8 release of the Small Basic programming language which aims to recapture the pleasure of programming back in the 8bit era. This release now includes a Silverlight based player for your Small Basic programs, making it easier to share your applications.
• Download Enterprise Library 5 and Unity 2 Beta 1 - David Hayden highlights the release of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Team Enterprise Library 5 Beta 1 and Unity 2.0 Beta 1, both new for February.

Information

• Upcoming release and the "F# 2.0" language - Brian McNamara highlights the version number change for F# as of the VS2010 / .NET 4 Release candidate, and soon to be available as a CTP release for VS2008
• jQuery 1.4.1 Intellisense with Visual Studio - Scott Guthrie highlights the official location of the jQuery 1.4.1 intellisense VSDOC file
• Migrating an Existing ASP.NET App to run on Windows Azure - Jim Nakashima follows up on a previous post with further and more up to date details of the process involved in migrating an ASP.NET (MVC) application onto the Azure cloud.
• Q&A: How can I calculate the TCO and ROI when considering the Windows Azure Platform? - Eric Nelson answers the most common Azure related question, ‘will it save money’ with a look at the Azure TOC and ROI Calculator, showing the process involved in assessing your applications needs on the cloud.
• SmallestDotNet Update - Now with .NET 4 support and an includable JavaScript API - Scott Hanselman talks about some update he has made to his website which offers the smallest download to get the .NET version you require, including support for .NET 4 and also a JavaScript API which allows you to easily get HTML links or JSON data which you can use on your site to point to the required download.
• BlockingCollection and IProducerConsumerCollection - Justin Etheredge presses on with his tour of the .NET 4 concurrent collections types with a look at the BlockingCollection and IProducerConsumerCollection, showing a sample situation where you would use these types.
• The Basics: Map Objects and Database Tables using Fluent nHibernate - Matt Long starts a series of posts looking at using Fluent NHibernate to map domain entities back to the database, starting out in this post looking at basic property mapping, and following on with a look at Mapping Relationships using Fluent nHibernate
• Making the code read like the spec - Eric Lippert talks about the C# Compiler’s ability to detect cycles in declared types, and how there are some known issues in this area, and follows on to talk about how he prototyped a new implementation directly from the specification, embedding parts of the specification in the code using comments.
• IL perversions: throwing and catching strings - Gunnar Peipman explores the strange and wonderful world of IL behind the compiler, and looks at how you are able to throw and catch strings rather than exceptions at that level, but how it will upset higher level use.
• Functional C#: Extracting a higher order function with generics - Mark Needham continues his exploration of being more functional in your C# code illustrating with an example of refactoring a set of similar looking function calls which differed only by the service the call and the type they return.
• Exploring MongoDB with F# - Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at the No SQL Database MongoDB and show how it can give you a rapid prototyping environment when combined with F#, allowing you to get going with an idea quickly.
• Combine, Minify, And Compress Your JavaScript - Justin Etheredge talks about 3 things you certainly should be doing with your JavaScript on public facing applications, along with some other techniques to help speed up your applications.
• Multi-tenancy in ASP.NET MVC - Views - Rob Ashton continues his series of posts on Multi-tenancy applications in ASP.NET MVC with a look at how a custom View Engine provides a useful way of being able to replace or add pages and parts of pages depending on config.

Community

• Behaviour Driven Development with Cucumber: Video, Slides and Links - Gojko Adzic shares the video of his session from last week at Skills matter which addressed BDD and acceptance testing using Cucumber, showing how it can work for testing .NET, Ruby and Java applications.

• ASP.NET MVC 2 (Release Candidate 2) Now Available - Scott Guthrie highlights the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 RC2, giving a summary of the new features of this release.
• Where to find the jQuery 1.4.1 vsdoc file - Jeff Putz highlights one of the locations you can find the jQuery 1.4.1 vsdoc file which brings jQuery intellisense to Visual Studio.
• MVC Turbine v2.0 for MVC2 RC2 (.NET3.5) - Javier G. Lozano announces the availability of his MVC Turbine project compiled against the new ASP.NET MVC 2 RC2 build running on VS2008/.NET 3.5 sp1
• Spell check enable your WinForm TextBoxes/RichTextBoxes via a nHunspell based IExtenderProvider - Greg Duncan highlights a neat extension for the .NET Textbox / Rich Text Box which provides spell checking easily within your applications. I might have to add this one to the tool I use for compiling the Morning Brew

Information

• Built-in Charting Controls - Scott Guthrie continues his series on Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 features with a look at the new charting components for ASP.NET and WinForms which are included ‘in the box’ as of .NET 4
• NoSQL - A Practical Approach, Part 1 - Rob Conery begins a series of posts exploring moving to NoSql data stores, talking about the shift in thinking needed to move from an ORM based application to using an object database like DB4O.
• On the importance of checking inputs - Barry Dorrans highlights the importance of verifying and validating in addition to encoding your output, illustrating with a real real-world example where someone got it really wrong.
• Mapping Out the Microsoft Application Platform at a Glance - J.D. Meier gives a nice overview of the various technologies offered by Microsoft, breaking them into top level categories, and providing links to MSDN references about a number of them. A useful resource when you’ve forgotten the name of a particular technology.
• Find it faster amongst the collection - ‘JoeGeeky’ shares a neat trick to more quickly establish if a collection contains a certain set of items using the Intersect method on IEnumerable.
• 10 Advanced Windsor Tricks - 10. Configuration with type converters - Mike Hadlow hits number 10 in his series on Advanced Windsor Container usage patterns, exploring in this post how TypeConvertors help with the configuration of the container.
• MVC 2 Editor Template with DateTime - Steve Michelotti explores the ASP.NET MVC2 Editor For functionality, and shows how you can create a custom editor for date time fields which includes jQuery calendars
• Performance: Using LCG to copy property values of two objects - Gunnar Peipman looks at the performance of using Light Weight Code Generation to construct mappings between two objects in a performant way, and provides neat samples of each technique tried in his post Writing object to object mapper: first implementations
• Using IIS Rewriting with MVC Routes to Keep Your Routes Simple - Jon Galloway looks at how you can utilise the IIS Rewriting module to make your ASP.NET / ASP.NET MVC routes easier to construct, leaving the complicated URL manipulation to the Web Server.
• Using and Abusing the F# Dynamic Lookup Operator - Matthew Podwysocki explores the F# Dynamic Lookup operator, showing how F# leaves you to implement it any way you want
• Recursion Is The New Iteration - Ashley Nathan Feniello explores the origin of iteration and recursion, showing how tail call optimisation in languages such as F# allows recursion to be utilised in applications.

Community

• SQLBits Videos available now available - SQLBits goes West - 19-21 Nov 2009 - Newport - The SQLBits team announce the availability of the session videos from the SQLBits V conference held back in November 2009. This is a great opportunity to get a look at the sessions you missed out on either by being in other sessions or by not attending (Shame on you)

Developer Developer Developer 8

• A developer’s guide to encryption - Barrie Dorrans highlights the availability of the video of his (partially hijacked) DDD8 session on encryption, and shares some of the feedback he received on the talk
• Multi-tenancy in ASP.NET MVC - DDD8 Video - Rob Ashton also points out the video of his session on building multi-tenancy applications using ASP.NET MVC
• Phil Winstanley’s DDD8 - Phil Winstanley has been busy putting up video of a number of the DDD8 sessions hosted on vimeo. These include some already linked to, along with Mark Needham’s Functional Approaches session, Ian Cooper’s Real World MVC, Liam Westley’s Commercial Software Development, along with a few session videos from Web DD 09
• DDD8 - post-event commentary #DDD8 - Craig Murphy has a great wrap up piece on DDD8, including a plethora of links to other round up pieces, along with links to video and photos of the event, a Barry Dorrans tribute, and some pointers to future events.

• ASP.NET MVC 2 RC 2 Released - Phil Haack announces the release of the second ASP.NET MVC2 RC (ASP.NET MVC 2 RC 2). This is an additional RC release than was originally planned, and the major change is to the Validation based on user feedback, along with the usual bugfixes and performance improvements
• StructureMap 2.6 (and 2.5.4) is Released! - Jeremy D. Miller announces the 11th release of StructureMap, taking the version number to 2.6. 2.6 isn’t a major change from the previous (unpublicised) 2.5.4, just a few bug fixes and improvements, but represents a year of work over the 2.5 version.

Information

• Editor’s Note - Not Your Father’s MSDN - The February edition of MSDN Magazine is now available, and with the start of a number of changes to the format and column lineup taking place this month, Keith Ward talks about some of those changes. Other content in this months edition include:
  • Managed Extensibility Framework - Building Composable Apps in .NET 4 with the Managed Extensibility Framework
  • Dynamic .NET - Creating Interactive Bing Maps with Silverlight and IronRuby
  • Integrating Windows Azure - Windows Azure Platform for Enterprises
  • and much more
• 10 Advanced Windsor Tricks - 9. Configuring fluently registered components with XML - Mike Hadlow presses on with his ten (or more) part series looking at some of the more advanced Castle Windsor functionality, taking a look at providing configuration via XML to components registered through the fluent interface for registration
• MSpec is Fantastic! - Eric Lee shows the benefit that a BDD framework like MSpec brings to writing BDD style tests in terms of brevity and clarity
• ASP.NET MVC Quick Tips - let’s get this rolling - Nuno Silva has a number of posts on tips for developing with ASP.NET MVC including taking a look at Pass(ing) data to your master page - and exploring changing the standard templates in Can I change the templates?. For the full list of posts check out his February 2010 - Posts index.
• .NET 4.0 and System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentQueue - Justin Etheredge continues his exploration of the Concurrent colections with a look at the ConcurrentQueue, showing it in simple operation, along with talking about how its actually implemented under the hood.
• Implement custom Claim based Authorization in ASP.NET MVC Web Application - Shahed Khan takes a practical look at implemeting claims based authentication in a sample ASP.NET MVC application, walking through the code and concepts
• Reporting In NoSQL - Rob Conery talks about his increasing preference for NoSQL databases, looking at where they sit in the evolution of technology, and addressing a common question on reporting in systems using NoSQL databases.
• Unit Testing Simple ASP.NET MVC Controllers - Chris Missal shows the setup and a couple of example tests for testing simple ASP.NET controllers using either the Rhino Mocks mocking framework or Moq.
• Multi-tenancy in ASP.NET MVC - Breaking it down - Rob Ashton presses on with his Blog Post series on ASP.NET MVC Multi-tenancy applications, in this post exploring some of the areas that need to be considered in an ASP.NET MVC application

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET - The European Virtual ALT.NET community resumes its talks this coming Monday (8th Feb) with James Gregory talking about using Git for version control of source code. The talk kicks off at 7:00PM GMT
• Free UK Azure Training Workshops in Reading and Edinburgh in February - Eric Nelson highlights some Mocrosoft Partner events on developing on the Windows Azure Platform to be held in Reading and Edinburgh at the end of the month.
• Dr. Don Syme - Introduction to F#;, 1 of 3 - Don Syme, a researcher at Microsoft Research who created the F# programming language begins a series of Channel 9 Lectures on F# available as video.

• Moonlight 3.0 Preview 1 - Miguel de Icaza announces the first preview release of Moonlight 3.0 the Mono implementation of Silverlight, which is aiming to be equivalent to Silverlight 3 in terms of features.
• CAT.NET V2.0 released to Beta - Syed Aslam Basha highlights the 1 month beta release of CAT.NET 2.0, the latest update to this Code Analysis Tool. This release brings integration with Visual Stuidio 2010 by way of FxCop rules, along with 55 new rules added to the analysis performed. Syed also has a number of posts looking at getting started with CAT2.0 and checking out some of the new features in use, so be sure to havea read of them too.

Information

• Service Locator is an Anti-Pattern - Mark Seemann talks about how using the Service Locator pattern inside your classes can be considered an anti-pattern due to it hiding a dependency as there is nothing from the consumer of the classes point of view that indicates the dependency on the service locator.
• 10 Advanced Windsor Tricks - 8. Dependency graph visualisation - Mike Hadlow continues his advanced Castle Windsor tricks series with a look at generating a textual dependency graph which shows the dependencies of the types registered in your container, and how they will be satisfied.
• Branch-Per-Feature: How I Manage Subversion With Git Branches - Derick Bailey show how he uses SVN combined with Git to give git versioning on his branches while working with Subversion for the main repository, shareign some best practices for easy working this way, along with looking at some of the benefits of working this way.
• Debugging ASP.NET generated code - David Ebbo takes a look at how you can debug the code that gets automatically generated by ASP.NET when it runs ASPX pages, showing how you can get to see the code, can improve the readability of the code using by eliminating the #line pragma output, and generate psuedo break points and debug against them.
• CLR V4: Profiler Detach - David Broman continues his series looking at the profiling API in the .NET CLR 4, in this post exploring what goes on when you detach a profiler from an application
• Real World S#arp Architecture - Billy McCafferty highlights a new sample application built against his S#arp Architecture framework by Howard van Rooijen, Jonathan George & James Broome. Not only does the project use S#arp, it also makes use of a number of other great Open source .NET tools, so is well worth a look for most people.
• Strengthening your domain: a primer - Jimmy Bogard gives an introduction to moving from a persistence model where your objects are simply containers of data to a more rounded domain model where objects include more of the behaviour associated with them.

Community

• Lessons learned from building NHibernate Profiler - 24th Feb, London - Ayende will be giving a talk on the lessons he learned while building the NHibernate Profiler, looking at the architecture, real world application infrastructure and the way they worked as a distributed team. The session is being held on 24th Feb at SkillMatter in London, and registration is required.
• Sign my petition to the PM to demand the UK Govt. reviews it’s failed IT processes - Rob Bowley is attempting to get the UK Government to review their IT system processes following a number of high profile failures over the years by way of a official E-Petition. If you are a UK resident and agree with Rob’s cause, I encourage you to sign the petition.
• Crockford on JavaScript - Volume 1: The Early Years - The Yahoo Developer Network provide the video content of the first part of Douglas Crockford’s 5 part series on the JavaScript Programming Language. In this first part he talks about his computing history,and more generally the history of computing and programming.

• MVC Turbine v2.0 for MVC2 (.NET3.5) - Javier G. Lozano announces the release of his ASP.NET MVC Turbine project which is compiled against the ASP.NET MVC 2 RC and runs against .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008, allowing devs on this platform to make use of the library.

Information

• Refactoring for Unit Testing - Nizar Noorani looks at some of the process of refactoring a legacy code base to allow it to be better unit tested, working through a simple example to show the changes needed to test the example code.
• API Testing: Testing in Layers - Bj Rollison presents the case for functional testing at the API level as a key way of identifying functional problems in the application, and how we don’t have to just test at the end user level.
• How I Approach a Defect - Chris Missal talks about the process he uses when he works to resolve a defect in some code, and how he ensures that the solution is a good one.
• IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera - what browser does a .Net developer choose? - Jeffrey Palermo talks about the great browser debate, discussing the market share of the browsers, his feeling on browser choice, what browsers his organisation supports, and what the future may hold. Davy Brion is also musing browser states in his post on Browser Usage
• Performance: Using dynamic code to copy property values of two objects - Gunnar Peipman follows on from a post from last year looking at matching properties of objects and copying values, looking at the matching process, and showing three ways to copy the value each with different performance characteristics, showing that over numbers of iterations the best way is still to use dynamically generated code.
• Coding: Wrapping/not wrapping 3rd party libraries and DSLs - Mark Needham talks about the practice of wrapping 3rd party libraries in your own code, highlighing the disadvantages of this approach, along with where the benefits come in providing a nice api for your use cases, and how it can be a decision you regret not making.
• ADO.NET Entity Framework and .NET 4 & SQL Profiler : Lazy Loading of Entities - Bruno Terkaly continues his EF4 / ADO. NET 4 series with a look at Lazy Loading of entities, and shows how the SQL Profiler can be used to see the queries as they happen
• Multi-tenancy in ASP.NET MVC - Why do we want it? - Rob Ashton begins his blog post series looking at the area of ASP.NET MVC Multi-Tenancy which he spoke about at DDD8. This post introduces the background to multi-tenancy and some of the key concepts
• Packaging UI Components in MVC - Simon Ince talks about the different approaches available to package up ASP.NET MVC UI components, looking at Render Partial, Custom Action FIlters, Custom Rendering Extensions, RenderAction, UI Extensions and Custom Display and Editor Templates.
• Learning in the Open: II - first relation and more ActiveRecord - Krzysztof Koźmic resumes his series looking at Castle Active Record with this second part looking at adding a collection of related entities to the already defined User object, along with testing and a little trouble shooting.
• C# vs Java Part 1: The Languages - John Sonmez begins a series of posts providing a comparison between C# and Java taking into account both the language differences and the underlying frameworks and virtual machines. This post is continued in the second half of part 1 C# vs Java Part 1: The Languages (Continued)

Developer Developer Developer 8

• Not Everything Is An Object - Gary Short shares the slide deck from his DDD8 presentation on functional programming.
• C# on the iPhone with MonoTouch - Chris Hardy’s session on using MonoTouch for iPhone Development in .NET is the first session video to be posted from the DDD8 conference last weekend

Software

• AutoMapper 1.0 RTW - Jimmy Bogard announces the V1.0 RTW release of his AutoMapper project which provides easy means of mapping between Domain objects and view models, and much more. This release is the official 1.0 release, and includes a few new features, along with enhancements and bigfixes over previous releases.
• Windows Azure Tools and SDK 1.1 Released - The Windows Azure team announce the release of the Windows Azure Tools and SQK 1.1. This is the February 2010 release of the Azure tools, and will run against Visual Studio 2008, and the forthcoming Visual Studio 2010 RC release (but not the current Beta 2 release). The team also share some details of the Windows Azure Drive functionality which is also included in this release in a separate post Beta Release of Windows Azure Drive
• NServiceBus 2.0 Release Candidate 2 Available - Udi Dahan announces the 2nd release candidate release of NServiceBus 2.0, an open source Enterprise Service Bus implementation
• IIS SEO Toolkit v1.0.1 - ‘CarlosAg’ announces a minor update to the IIS SEO Toolkit, taking its version to 1.0.1. This release includes bugfixes for the important bugs raised on the IIS.NET SEO Forum, and is compatible with the 1.0 release.
• BlogEngine.NET 1.6 Released - Al Nyveldt highlights the release of version 1.6 of the open source .NET based BlogEngine.Net project. The two significant features of this release are improved widget support and a new Comment Management system allowing you to plug anti-spam into the process.
• CSLA .NET 3.8.2 released - Rockford Lhotka announces a minor update to his CSLA application Framework. This update fixes a number of bugs, and has been heavily beta tested. There is one breaking change relating to detecting Design time and Runtime mode in the data portal, which has been disabled to avoid possibility of errors arising under high load in production,

Information

• View Model pattern and AutoMapper in ASP.NET MVC Applications - Shiju Varghese takes a look at the use of AutoMapper in a simple example ASP.NET MVC application using the AutoMapper to move between a view model with view specific data capture fields and validation to the domain entities which implement the backend functionality.
• .NET 4.0 and System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentStack - Justin Etheredge continues his series of posts looking at the Concurrent collections available in .NET 4 with a look at the concurrent stack implementation, and shows in a number of code snippets how it is used.
• Functional C#: Writing a ‘partition’ function - Mark Needham continues his series looking at writing more functional code in C# with a look at the implementation of a partition function to allow collections to be split.
• A Kick in the Monads - Writer Edition - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on Monads with a look at the Writer Monad, exploring the motivation for it to exist, showing an implementation, and putting it to work in a simple example.
• Style follows semantics - Eric Lippert talks about how coding style and what the code does are not always as separate as we might think, illustrating with a few examples which while seemingly equivalent are not actually when side effects are taken into account.
• Software on the Cheap - ‘Uncle ‘ Bob Martin talks about the real cost of software arriving at a cost of about 12 dollars per line, and argues that this is the cheapest that software should be developed, and that while cheaper options exist they tend to work out more expensive in the long run.
• ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.0 & Introduction to Quadrant - Bruno Terkaly continues his ADO.NET / EF4 series with an introductory look at the Quadrant data editing tool including plenty of screenshots which give a good idea of how it works.
• Your First S#arp Project in 15 Minutes] - Billy McCafferty gives a quick start tutorial to get users up and running with their first S#arp Architecture based project quickly and easily, taking you from downloading and installing to a running app in 23 steps.
• Hosting MEF within application and libraries - Glenn Block talks about the various ways that the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) can be hosted inside applications and libraries, urging you to be aware of them all allowing you to choose the best strategy for your case.

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper8

• DDD8 - A Developer’s Guide to Encryption - Barry Dorrans
• Lessons Learned in Unit Testing Session - DDD8 - Andrea Magnorsky
• Multi-tenancy and ASP.NET MVC - Rob Ashton, who is starting a series of posts on this topic too (Multi-tenancy and ASP.NET MVC)
• DDD 8 Entity framework follow up - Will cast(column as int) allow use of an index - Simon Sabin
• DDD 8 (Automating Testing Using Windows Virtual PC) - Guy Smith-Ferrier

Software

• Q&A: What are the UK prices for the Windows Azure Platform - Eric Nelson highlights the UK pricing for the Windows Azure platform, pointing to the official pricing, along with including a 29th Jan snapshot of the prices for the various components available
• Pex v0.22.50128.1: Bug fixes, bug fixes, bug fixes - Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces another minor update to the Pex testing framework which bring a number of improvements to its use with ASP.NET and Sharepoint. Pex also teams up with Nikolai Tillmann for a short video demo looking at the Mole functionality of the framework (Moles - Replace any .NET method with a delegate)
• .Net Performance Testing and Optimisation - Free eBook - Paul Glavich highlights the availability of the first part of his new book (co-written with Chris Farrell) on Performance Testing and Optimisation in .NET. The best bit, its available as a free download from Red Gate.

Information

• Validating a variable length list, ASP.NET MVC 2-style - Steve Sanderson follows on from his previous post on lists in ASP.NET MVC with a look at applying validation to such a list using ASP.NET MVC2 techniques
• Remote Validation with ASP.NET MVC 2 - Brad Wilson talks about a feature which didn’t quite make it into ASP.NET MVC2 (but sounds like it will be included in the MVC Futures release) which deals with validation on the client side but performs behind the scenes calls to the web server to validate the values provided.
• ADO.NET Entity Framework and .NET 4 & Visual Studio 2010 Modeling Tools - Writing Code And Working with Entities to Add Data - Bruno Terkaly continues his series of posts on the Entity Framework with a look at using the Modelling features included in Visual Studio 2010 to create entities for use with the Entity Framework and looks at interacting with those entities and the database
• Implementing Domain Queries - John Teague looks at expanding on his current repository interface which is based on the one included in early versions of FluentNHibernate, introducing a version of the Domain Query pattern to help reduce repeated code in his applications.
• Iterator-based Microthreading - Michael Hutchinson talks about implementing a microthread scheduler which simulates multithreading using only a single real thread, something which is quite common practices in games programming. Interesting reading.
• What didn’t get into VB10: a wish-list for future versions of VB - Lucian Wischik starts a series of posts looking at features that the VB team are interested in implementing by which didn’t make it into the VS2010/.NET 4 release of Visual Basic.
• ASP.NET 4.0: How to use application warm-up class - Gunnar takes a look a the new Application Warm-Up functionality of ASP.NET 4, showing how to configure ant utilise it.
• Generic or Specific Routes? - Simon Ince considers deleting the default route in his ASP.NET MVC routing configuration and expressing each controllers route individually, and looks for feedback on the idea.

Developer Developer Developer 8

• DDD8 - Tim Ross
• DDD8: Mixing functional and object oriented approaches to programming in C# - Mark Needham
• Ben Hall’s Blog: DDD8: Albacore and Testing ASP.net Web Applications using Ruby
• My DDD8 Talk: An Introduction to IoC Containers with Castle Windsor - Mike Hadlow
• My MonoTouch session at DDD8 - Chris Hardy
• Commercial Software Development - my presentation for DDD8 now available for download - Liam Westley
• Entity Framework how to stop your DBA having a heart attack - Simon Sabin

Software

• Announcing PostSharp 2.0 CTP 3 - Gael Fraiteur announces the release of the 3rd CTP release of PostSharp 2. This release is mostly a bugfix release over the previous CTP2 release and is set to expire on 1st March 2010
• Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework 2010-1-25: brief intro of new samples - All-In-One Code Framework got an update earlier this week which added a number of new samples for Azure, WorkFlow, Visual Studio Extensibility, and much more
• NDepend v3 is now 100% integrated in Visual Studio - Patrick Smacchia talks about the new NDepend 3 Beta, and how it integrates tightly withVisual Studio, and the lengths they went to in ensuring that it performs well in the IDE. The Beta is available now, and works with VS 2005/2008 with support for some VS2010 builds.

Information

• Extensible Output Caching with ASP.NET 4 (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) - Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts on VS2010 and .NET 4, focusing this time on the new features for ASP.NET output caching, looking at how the provider model has been used to allow extensibility of the caching available. Scott also highlights a number of Nice "Quick Hit" Videos about ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010
• You have 10 votes. Why not use them! www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com - Eric Nelson highlights a means of feeding back to and helping the Windows Azure team focus their efforts on improving and extending the Azure platform. Eric also shares the Results of Cloud Computing Survey - Part 1: Is Cloud relevant?
• RIA Services - Displaying data with Silverlight 4 Beta & Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 - Bruno Terkaly continues his series of posts taking a step by step approach looking at lifting the lid on using the RIA (Rich Internet Application) Services with Silverlight 4 Beta and Visual Studio 2010.
• NHibernate new feature: No proxy associations - Ayende talks about another change to NHibernate’s Lazy load functionality, in this case providing a means of disabling the use of proxy. This change still maintains lazy loading, just removing the proxy class involvement meaning you don’t experience the ‘Ghost Object’ problem.
• Editing a variable length list, ASP.NET MVC 2-style - Steve Sanderson follows up on a previous post about maintaining a variable list, sharing an improved technique which has become his prefered method.
• C# 4.0 Optional Parameters - Exploration. - Jason Jarrett explores the use of optional parameters in interfaces, looking at some of the more complex scenarios which the use of optional parameters can cause.
• Reading Code, Spark’s Once Attribute - Chris Missal takes a look under the hood of the Spark view engine which is usable from ASP.NET MVC and MonoRail
• What’s new in Monorail 2.0 - Ken Egozi explores some of the new features of MonoRail 2.0 focusing on some of the config, binding and routing changes.
• Calling constructors in arbitrary places - Eric Lippert looks at calling other constructor of a type, and why you can only do this before your constructor body executes.

• Data Services Update for .NET 3.5 SP1 - Now Available for Download - Mike Flasko announces the (re)release of an updated version of the ADO.NET Data Services 1.5 (which is now called Data Services) with separate releases for Windows 7/2008 and other Windows editions. This release includes a number of new features including URI support for projections, feed customisation and two way data binding support.

Information

• NHibernate new feature: Lazy Properties - Ayende introduces a new feature for NHibernate, the ability to have properties which are lazy loaded only on first access, useful for properties which contain lots of data that may not be needed in all cases. Currently this implementation is in the trunk version and will only work with the Castle Proxy Factory, and has no implementation in the critiera API.
• Transparently releasing components in Windsor - Krzysztof Kozmic proposes some functionality for the Castle Windsor container to allow it to not just manage the lifecycle of the components it brings into being but to manage the release of these components without your intervention, backing the ideas up with a simple (and not production ready) prototype implementation.
• .NET 4.0 and System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentBag - Justin Etheredge explores the Concurrent Bag implementation included in .NET 4’s Concurrent Collections, looking at it in uses and the facility it provides to allow you to parallel program efficiently against it.
• It’s the maintenance, stupid! (or: Something is rotten in developerland.) - Thomas Weller shares a well thought out and researched piece on the problems with software development in terms of maintenance of existing projects, looking at the factors which makes maintenance more difficult.
• The Weekly Source Code 48 - DynamicQueryable makes custom LINQ expressions easier - Scott Hanselman follows on from his previous Weekly Source Code post revisiting the problem and (with the help of some community members) finding an improved solution.
• Securing Your Agatha Service Layer - Davy Brion talks about implementing security within his Agatha Service Layer project, which can be achieved by the usual WCF security methods, or as Davy explores in this piece by implementing custom authentication into the request processing.
• Hacking Mono.Cecil - allowing invalid opcodes - Paul Mason continues his series of posts on obfuscation with a look at hacking Mono.Cecil to allow it to happily ignore invalid opcodes and therefore read assemblies which contain them.
• Converting An Enter Key Press Into A Tab Key Press For Web Forms - Brian Jackett shares a simple bit of JavaScript which converts enter key presses into tabs having the effect that the enter key will move you into the next field on the Web Form rather than submitting the page.
• Simple Query Results Caching with EF4 - Danny Simmons explores Caching query results in Entity Framework 4, addressing a particular problem he encountered in the field, and highlighting a few useful .NET 4 and EF4 features along the way.
• Automated WPF functional tests using White - Laurent Kempé highlights a tool from ThoughtWorks which allows you to write functional tests for Rich Client Applications (Win32, WinForms, WPF, Silverlight and SWT) in .NET languages. White is based in the Microsoft UI Automation library, but abstracts away a lot of the complexity. Looks like a project to watch.

• Type initialization changes in .NET 4.0 - Jon Skeet looks at the differences in type initialization between .NET 3.5 and .NET 4, showing that .NET 4 has become more lazy than 3.5 about when it initializes types, waiting longer before actually doing the work.
• FAQ :: Are all of the new concurrent collections lock-free? - ‘dashih’ discusses the use of locks within the new concurrent collections available in .NET 4 and how they are not completely lock free, utilising locks in certain places, but do use lock-free techniques to increase performance in certain areas.
• Translating routes (ASP.NET MVC and Webforms) - Maarten Balliauw explores the use of Routes to provide translated URLs in WebForms and ASP.NET MVC instead of using country code and English phrases for the URL, with full support for all the MVC features such as action link and controller identification.
• I just installed Visual Studio 2010, now how do I get Code Contracts? - Melitta Andersen talks through the process of getting the new Code Contracts functionality in your Visual Studio 2010 install, highlighting the separate installer and the project property that needs setting to enable the functionality.
• Simulating Snakes and Ladders with a PLINQ Turbo boost - Samuel Jack looks at modelling the game of Snakes and Ladders and then set about analysing (by way of simulation) the typical lengths of game you can statistically expect, looking at improving the performance of the simulation using Parallel Extensions to LINQ,
• View Models in ASP.NET MVC - Simon Ince answers the question ‘Should I have a view Model in my ASP.NET MVC architecture?’ very quickly and then shows three ways of coding starting from the no view model, moving through a container view model and finally to a true view model implementation.
• Cross-thread operations with PostSharp - ‘Lesnikowski’ look at using PostSharp to inject code on method start to provide an easy means of calling methods on Winforms controls from any thread and ensuring that the call is made with BeginInvoke
• Software Development Do’s and Dont’s - Michael Ceranski shares some of his wisdom gained over the years in the form of some do’s and don’ts con software development practices
• Command Query Responsibility Segregation - Udi Dahan - Mark Harris shares video of Udi Dahan’s recent talk on Command Query Responsibility Segregation delivered at the Victoria .NET Dev SIG on 19th Jan 2010.
• Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network - Microsoft have updated their JavaScript CDN to include versions 1.4 and 1.41 of jQuery in addition to the 1.3.2 release. The one thing that does appear to be missing currently is the VSDOC version which gives intellisense in Visual Studio - hopefully that will appear soon.

Community

• Brighton ALT.NET Beers - 2nd February at The Skiff - Mike Hadlow gives notification of the next Brighton Alt,Net Beers event, to be held at a new venue, ‘The Skiff’ a co-working space in Brighton. Other than the location the format of the event will be as usual starting arround 7PM

• jQuery 1.4.1 Released - Hot on the heels of jQuery 1.4 comes the 1.4.1 release. This is mostly a bug fix release with other 20+ bugs addressed in the release, which also includes some API changes to address gaps in the product.
• IronJS - IronJS is a new project which aims to bring an ECMAScript 3 engine to the .NET framework via the Dynamic Language Runtime, and is built on .NET 4 Beta 2. The current version implements most of the ECMA standard, and the code should be considered alpha quality.
• "Test Scribe" Test Plan Tool Released for VSTS 2010 - David Baliles highlights the release of TestScribe a tool which connects to Visual Studio Team System and allows documentation to be generated in the form of a Word document from the test plans held in VSTS.

Information

• Measuring the Performance of Asynchronous Controllers - Steve Sanderson explores the use of Asynchronous Controllers in ASP.NET MVC 2 taking a look at their performance under heavy load, along with looking at some of the things that can catch you out when using them.
• .NET 4.0 and System.Threading.Tasks - Justin Etheredge explores the new .NET 4 tasks multi-threading functionality, showing how it improves on the best solutions currently available in pre .NET 4 code
• Using the Domain Service in ASP.NET Applications - ‘morebits’ shares some early documentation for the WCF RIA Services on how to access the domain services from an ASP.NET Web page, taking a step by step approach through the creation of a simple sample.
• Use Sensible Long-Lived Cache headers - Eric Lawrence talks about the Cache Control Max Age response header, and how by choosing very large numbers (larger than the spec allows) you may cause your items to not be cached at all.
• KISS Your ASP.NET MVC Routes - K. Scott Allen looks at the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) rule and how you should apply that to your ASP.NET MVC Routing rules.
• Why are unused using directives not a warning? - Eric Lippert addresses a common question about the using directives which import namespaces, and why unused ones do not generate any form of compiler warning.
• Don’t Use Try/Catch - Karl Seguin discusses whether you should be catching exceptions at low levels in your code or allowing them to bubble up higher, and talks about how you should never catch and ignore exceptions.
• A Kick in the Monads - Creating Extended Builders Part III - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts on F# Monads and expression builders with a look at implementing While and For loops and the use of yield.
• jQuery Code Does not have to be Ugly - Steve Wellens takes a look at writing cleaner more understandable jQuery code.
• Call for a Programming Language - John Sonmez considers how programming might be if things like Dependency Injection were baked into the language, along with a few other enhancements and illustrates with his new make believe language Tea# which shows these features in operation.
• Being an Evil Genius with F# and .NET - Chris Smith shares his slides and notes from a recent presentation at the CodeMash Conference where he looked at using F# and .NET to become an evil genius. This has to be one of the more inventive sessions I’ve heard about, and I like the way Chris has hooked the concept into all his real F# examples.
• Chrome OS the Web based OS of 2010? Nah, Win 3.11 - Ajaxian highligihts an entirely web based implementation of Windows 3.11 created using XHTML 1.0 strict, JavaScript and Ajax. Pretty impressive stuff, and performs as well as I remember Windows 3.11 working on my old 386.

Community

• Next European VAN on 08 February 2010 - The Europe Virtual ALT.NET season kicks off on 8th February with a session from James Gregory (most well known for Fluent NHibernate) talking on the Git Distributed Version Control application, focusing on getting started with Git.
• Aspect oriented development - The NxtGen Usergroup have Steve Strong visiting in April this year and he will be giving a talk on Aspect Oriented Programming at the Hereford branch of the NxtGen UG.

• FluentValidation 1.2 beta 1 available - Jeremy Skinner announces the Beta 1 release of the FluentValidation 1.2 library. This release includes ASP.NET MVC2 support, along with control of the validation cascade, new validation syntax, along with a breaking change in the form of the removal of DefaultResourceManager.
• Snippet Designer 1.2 Beta Release with Visual Studio 2010 Support - Matt Manela announces the latest beta release of Snippet Designer, a Visual Studio IDE plugin which makes it easier to construct snippets for us in your code. This release adds support for Visual Studio 2010
• Just released System.Web.Mvc.Extensibility Beta - Kazi Manzur Rashid announces the beta release of his ASP.NET MVC library System.Web.Mvc.Extensibility. Available for both ASP.NET MVC 1 and ASP.NET MVC 2, this beta release contains a number of changes and improvements over previous editions.
• Service Pack 2 for Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC released - Telerik announce an update to their Open Source ASP.NET MVC library. This release includes an upgrade to jQuery 1,4 which can be considered a breaking change if you are already using 1.3.2 in your sites for your own code.

Information

• CodePlex now supporting native Mercurial - CodePlex now supports the use of the Distributed Version Control System ‘Mercurial’ This is available as a choice at the project level allowing you to choose between Mercurial or TFS / Subversion.
• About Technical Debates (and ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC debates in particular) - Scott Guthrie shares some good thoughts on the nature of technical debate, and looks at some points that relate to the debate on ASP.NET MVC vs Web Forms.
• WebForms aren’;t dead - Dave Sussman shares his thoughts on the WebForms vs MVC debate, talking about advantages and disadvantages of each, along with the developments that both are seeing. In The WebForms Rant, Karl Seguin also discusses this theme, coming down more heavily in the MVC camp. Quite a discussion is breaking out in the comments of this one.
• Input Validation vs. Model Validation in ASP.NET MVC - Brad Wilson talks about the changes that the ASP.NET MVC team have made in response to the feedback on his recent post about the Required Attribute.
• Screencast: Visual Studio 2010 - New debugging experience - Sven Vanoirbeek shares a screen cast which looks at the new debugging features in Visual Studio 2010, exploring collaborative debugging, historic debugging, and some new breakpoint features.
• Beginning Debugging in VS2010 Episode 1: Breakpoints and Locals - Michael Stum begins a screen cast series exploring Visual Studio 2010 debugging, with the first part looking at the basics of debugging in the form of Breakpoints and Locals
• Creating a Simple IoC Container - Tim Ross shares a simple Inversion of Control Container example, building the container and showing how it can be integrated into the ASP.NET MVC framework, ans showing how it can be used.
• Getting Started with RIA Services - Silverlight 4 Beta & Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 - Bruno Terkaly looks at the setup of an environment to develop Silverlight applications using Silverlight 4 beta and the Rich Internet Application Services. Bruno also takes a similar look at ASP.NET MVC in his post Getting Started with the ASP.NET MVC Framework - Installation and "Hello World" , and follows on with a followup postLearning: Part 2 - ASP.NET MVC 2.0 with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 looking at extending the simple example and learning about ASP.NET MVC
• State of VS 2010 Performance - Brian Harry gives an update on the performance changes to Visual Studio 2010, and shares some results from the user experience testing of the latest builds.
• Rejecting Dependency Injection Inversion - Ayende follows up on Uncle Bob’s post on Dependency Injection looking at the useage of DI and one of the big wins of DI in handling component lifecycles
• Inversion Of Control Containers And Factories Aren’t Mutually Exclusive - Davy Brion picks up on some feedback about the use of Factories as a part of the DI debate, ans shows how he goes about using factories with Inversion of Control.
• Mocking Mocking and Testing Outcomes. - ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin turns his attentions to the use of Mocking Frameworks, questioning when and where they should be used. I expect this one will spark some good debate (especially if the comments are anything to go by)
• The paradox of choice: best of breed or cheapest of the bunch - Ayende picks up some tweets from Roy Osherove and talks about the choice between commercial and OpenSource / Free products in the same arena. Good discussion starting in the comments here too.

• Advance notice for MS10-002 Internet Explorer out-of-band release MS10-002 with Q&A Webcast - Yesterday saw the release of a high priority security update to Internet Explorer which fixes vulnerabilities which have already been used in some recent attacks. This one sounds important, so make sure you patch yourself (and all your VMs) against this,

Information

• How to Change .NET Configuration Files at Runtime (including for WCF) - Youssef Moussaoui looks at how you can have a running application pickup changes to its configuration file by using the RefreshSection method of the Configuration Manager, allowing your changes to take effect without a restart of the process.
• Constructor over-injection smell - follow up - Jeffrey Palermo follows up on his Constructor Injection Anti-Pattern post with a more gentle titled post responding to the feedback received. This post includes a more comprehensive example which aims to show the pain that can be caused by this code smell
• What’s the difference between a destructor and a finalizer? - Eric Lippert continues his series of ‘what’s the difference’ posts with a look at the meaning of destructor and finalizer and how they relate to the C# and CLR specifications for such things.
• Much Ado About Monads - Creating Extended Builders Part II - Matthew Podwysock posts the second part of his Extended Builders posts looking this time at exception and resource handling for the custom computation expressions and the methods you can implement for this.
• Is my code Fluent? - Joe takes a look at the concept and definition of a Fluent Interface showing the implementation and use of a simple example of a fluent interface which fits this definition
• 18 Questions to ask yourself when choosing continuous integration and build automation tools - Roy Osherove shares some questions that he feels are important in helping to decide what CI and build automation tool to use. Some of these are the obvious ones (Cost, support) where as others highlight areas where tools differ greatly.
• Removing Invalid OpCodes From Obfuscated Assemblies - Paul Mason continues with his series of posts looking at building the NCloak code obfuscator, and in this part looks at the use of invalid opcodes and how they can cause problems, and how you can remove them.
• Sorted with F# custom operators - Phillip Trelford looks for a use of the F# custom operator functionality and comes up with a football (soccer for those in the US) related example to perform custom sorting on sets of data
• Server-side resizing with WPF: now with JPG - Bertrand Le Roy’ follows on from his experiments with using WPF to perform image manipulation rather than GDI+ with a look at outputting in JPEG format, comparing the quality with the PNG output.
• Advanced StructureMap: Diagnosing problems - Jimmy Bogard takes a look at diagnosis processes for StructureMap configuration problems, looking at how you can test the configuration using automated tests, and looks at how you can perform simple diagnostics using StructureMap functions to gain better insight at what is going on
• Why ASP.NET MVC 2 is Broken - Steve Mason posts about some of the parts of ASP.NET MVC2 which he feels are underdeveloped, or not quite ready for use, discussing those bits of functionality and doing a good job of updating the post with information as others respond to it. Interesting reading.
• The many cases of ByRef - Jared Parsons looks at the different forms that the CLR support for ByRef arguments can come in

Community

• Architecture Analysis Webcast 9am Friday - Jeffrey Palermo highlights a webcast event from the International Association of Software Architects which is being held today at 9:00 AM CST. This session will focus on some of the fundamentals of architecture focusing on ayering and dependency breaking

• Reflector Pro moves into beta! - Alex Davies highlights the Beta release of Reflector Pro, the commercial version of the Reflector tool aquired by RedGate last year. Reflector Pro includes Visual Studio integration, and the tool has had a number of improvements and enhancements, along with the inclusion of .NET 4 support.
• ASP.NET Support in ReSharper 5 - Hadi Hariri shows off some of the ASP.NET related features of Resharper 5, illustrating with screenshots of the features in use.
• .Net Coding metric released - Garren Smith releases a simple code metrics tool built on Mono.Cecil. Currently the tool calculates lines of code per method and cyclomatic complexity. Licensed as open source, the code is available on GitHub

Information

• [Required] Doesnt Mean What You Think It Does - Brad Wilson takes a look at the [Required] validation attribute and explains what it is intended for, and what it does not do, along with discussing some best practices for model binding.
• My Favorite Helpers For ASP.NET MVC - Rob Conery shares some of his favourite ASP.NET MVC Helper extension Methods
• A new feature request for C# I would like is fall through exceptions - Derik Whittaker outlines a feature he (and quite a few others) would like to see introduced in C# which would allow you to catch a range of exceptions and handle them all with the same exception handler.
• Announcing Enterprise Library 5.0 and Unity 2.0 Roadmap - Grigori Melnik shares the vision for forthcoming releases of the Enterprise Library and Unity along with how they allign with Visual Studio 2010 releases.
• Diving a Little Deeper into AutoMapper Part 1 - Deran Schilling begins a new series of posts looking at the AutoMapper project in use, using a worked example to illustrate the power of AutoMapper when dealing with mapping to and from a complex set of domain objects.
• Reducing Duplication By Passing Code - Charles Courchaine illustrates the use of functions as parameters with a WCF based example which shows how you can remove duplicate code surrounding code that varies by passing the variable bit of code into the method.
• Functional collectional parameters: Some thoughts - Mark Needham looks at how declaring a problem and solving it as a pair in an imperative way initially and then refactoring to an elegant declarative solution can be a good way of working, illustrating with an example.
• Debate: Comparing NHibernate and EF 4 - Abel Avram posts on InfoQ with a summary of some of the recent discussion on NHibernate vs Entity Framework providing a nice balanced of the views expressed by various interested (and well known) parties.
• Rebuttal: Constructor over-injection anti-pattern - Mark Seemann follows up on Jeffrey Palermo’s post on Constructor Over Injection as an anti-pattern with a look at an alternative way of solving the problem of expensive object creation, and responds to a comment in a follow up post ‘Enabling DI for Lazy Components‘ looking at making his lazy initialised component support dependency injection.
• Asking the Mountain To Come To You - Rob Conery follows up on Ian Coopers state of Alt.Net post, haring his views on the subject, and Steve Bohlen summarises and urges everyone reading these posts to also read the comments attached to them in his post ALT.NET: Looks Like its Introspection Time Again!

• Firebug 1.5 released! - Alix Franquet highlights the release of FireBug 1.5 king of Firefox developer tools which provides debugging support for CSS, HTML and Javascript. The 1.5 release is a major upgrade with a good number of really useful new features.
• New Cumulative Updates for SQL Server 2008 RTM & SP1 - Aaron Bertrand highlights the release of new Cumulative Updates packages for SQL Server 2008 in both SP1 and RTM configurations.

Information

• How many PCs in the world have the .NET Framework installed? - Scott Hanselman shares some of the official numbers about installed base of .NET based on information from Windows Update and other sources. Useful numbers to have one hand.
• Building an External DSL in C# - Nicholas Blumhardt looks at building a Domain Specific Language using C# and the Sprache parser creation library to create a questionnaire DSL example with source code provided for the sample.
• Use .NET Built-in Methods to Save Time and Headaches - Shay Friedman looks at common pieces of code that have better alternatives backed into the framework which provide safer and better solutions to this common programming requirements.
• 10 Advanced Windsor Tricks - 7. How to Write a Facility - Mike Hadlow presses on with his series of posts looking a the Castle Windsor Containers more advanced use cases with a look at creating your own facilities which provide the means of extending the behaviour of the container.
• Dependency Injection Inversion Rejection - Davy Brion picks up on some of the points in Uncle Bob’s recent post on Dependency injection mostly discussing the flip side of the pointsand how the suggested usage still causes too much coupling to the container. Jimmy Bogard also follows up on the same topic with his post Poor use of DI versus need for DI.
• Constructor over-injection anti-pattern - Jeffrey Palermo looks at a Dependency Injection Anti-Pattern where constructors require lots of dependent objects passing in and where some (or all) are not required for the operation of the component.
• LINQ to Rx: second impressions - Jon Skeet follows up on his first discussion provoking post about the Reactive Extensions posting up a summary of some of the discussion clarification setting the record straight.
• Are ORMs Solving Anything? - Shawn Wildermuth posts a discussion starting post about whether Object Relation Mapping Frameworks are helping or hindering. Lots of interesting discussion in the comments of this one, and I suspect there will be some follow-up posts before too long.
• Whither Alt.Net? - Ian Cooper discusses the current state of the Alt.Net Movement and reviews the initial progress of the movement, along the way comparing the motives to that of movements like Software Craftmanship. Discussion is starting in the comments and Sergio Pereira follows up with his post On ALT.NET and patience looking at the sorts of people involved in the movement and appealing for a little patience as changing ingrained behaviour takes time.

Community

• SQL Server Usergroup - Dundee Event Tonight - SQL Server MVPs Tony Rogerson and Allan Mitchell will be running a free event this evening at the Queen Mothers Building in Dundee University this evening with talks on Integration Services, SQL Server tools, along with a discussion about identity keys and a general Q&A Session

• Caliburn v1.1 Release Candidate Available! - Rob Eisenberg announces the release candidate release of Caliburn his WPF and SIlverlight UI pattern implementation library. This release includes lots of community driven changes along with bugfixes and improvements in a number of areas.
• VS 2010 Guidance Documents Released - David Jung highlights the release of 5 new guidance documents on Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 including reference documents on Upgrade, quick reference, branching and requirements management.
• jQuery Lint - James Padolsey introduces his jQuery-Lint runtime jQuery validation library. Unlike a lot of other Lint type tools this one is a runtime library which runs on the site in the browser validating pages for correct usage of jQuery. This project is young, but seems to be an interesting one.

Information

• Use C# 4.0 dynamic to drastically simplify your private reflection code - While not advocating using reflection on privates, David Ebbo shares a technique using the new Dynamic functionality of .NET 4 for performing this type of reflection more easily.
• Editable Routes Using App_Code - Phil Haack reworks his editable routes implementation to use app_code to allow it to work in a medium trust environment (where FileSystemWatchers don’t).
• Web testing with Selenium and xUnit.net - Joel Abrahamsson looks at using Selenium to test web applications using xUnit.Net rather than NUnit looking at how you can write more maintainable tests
• UML Modeling and Code Generation in Visual Studio 2010 - Oleg Sych gives a tour round the UML Modelling functionality of Visual Studio 2010, showing how you can customise the UML profiles, and looking at generating code from the model
• Much Ado About Monads - Creating Extended Builders - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts on Monads with a look at some of the other methods required to help build a rich programming model for the monads.
• Building a LINQ Provider - Pedram Rezaei runs through the process and buildof a custom IQueryable LINQ Provider implementation which, much link LINQ to SQL can perform queries, and create, update and delete operations in this comprehensive MSDN article
• CLR V4: Profiler Attach Part 2: Ok, now what? - David Broman continues his series on the .NET 4 CLR profiling APIs with a look at what profilers should be doing once they are attached to a running process
• Getting started with dependency properties - Luis Abreu takes an introductory look at dependency properties, looking at what they offer beyond the standard property implementation, and follows up with Dependency property and value inheritance.
• A Definite Assignment Anomaly - Eric Lippert takes us on another voyage of exploration of the C# compiler looking at some strange behaviour which can be allowed with external assemblies defining structs.
• FubuMVC - Define your actions your way - Joshua Flanagan talks about the support for different types of Action in the FubuMVC framework, which while being an opinionated framework allows you a good degree of flexibility in this regard.

Community

• DDD Scotland - Vote for Sessions - Voting on the proposed sessions has opened for the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Scotland Event to be held in May in Glasgow. This is your chance to shape the agenda for the day, and to pick from a great range of proposed sessions.
• Wanted: Virtual Alt.Net Community Contributors, Organizers, and Presenters - Steve Bohlen issues an appeal on behalf of the Virtual Alt.Net Community for volunteers to help with the organisation of this Virtual User Group, present sessions virtually, or to help out more generally.

• Pex 0.21.50115.2: Bugs fixes and Stubs renamed to Moles - Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces the release of the latest version of Pex which fixes a number of bugs from previous releases, along with a migration to moles being the heart of the framework (and a corresponding rename for Stubs)
• Web Client Guidance Drop #6 Available on Codeplex - Blaine Wastell highlights the release of Drop #6 of the Web Client Patterns and Practices Guidance Package. This release includes some updates to the reference implementation application, along with a number of new guidance documents.
• Introducing MicroModels - the smallest ViewModels for WPF - Paul Stovell shares his small Model-View-ViewModel framework, which offers an interface which makes use of typedescriptors to define collections, properties and commands. Full source and binaries are available.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 2: Model Validation - Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts on ASP.NET MVC2 with a look at the new validation functionality using DataAnnotations, taking a look at the full process from enabling the functionality, to implementing client side validation, to extending the functionality and saving back to the database
• Editable Routes - Phil Haack looks at using dynamic compilation to allow you to edit routes in your ASP.NET MVC applications without having to recompile the whole application
• Create First Silverlight Application - Karl Shifflett continues his series of posts on Silverlight and WPF with a run through of the creation of a simple Silverlight Application, showing off the capabilities of the Designer in Visual Studio 2010
• C#: A functional solution to a modelling problem - Mark Needham takes a look at a more functional solution to a common modeling problem of running different functions in different input cases.
• First encounters with Reactive Extensions - Jon Skeet explores the Reactive Extensions, giving a quick tour of some of the functionality, and wondering if he is trying to push the library in a direction it was not intended to go in
• Is There A Good Reason To Hide Inherited Members? - Davy Brion looks at the language functionality which allows you to hide inherited members by supplying your own implementation, and highlights some of the pitfalls in doing this.
• Pair Programming session - Mark Nijhof talks about a recent good pair programming experience, and follows up with a post (Pair Programming continued) which looks at some of the factors and facilities required to make pairing a success.
• 10 Advanced Windsor Tricks - 4. How to register and use decorators - Mike Hadlow presses on with his 10 Castle Windsor Container IOC tricks, with this part looking at Windsor’s support for the decorator pattern, 5. The Startable Facility which looks at the functionality which allows services which last the application lifetime to be started upon registration, and 6. The Event Wiring Facility exploring the (slightly ugly) event registration syntax.
• Reducing Code Coupling - Inversion of Control - Grant Palin takes a look at Inversion of control, and looks at how it solves the problems of code coupling discussing the general functionality provided by Inversion of Control libraries rather than focusing in on a particular one.
• Dependency Injection Inversion - ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin talks about Dependency Injection, and how if used incorrectly it can result in the Dependency injection Framework being spread all over your codebase, and Bob shows some techniques which help avoid this.
• Coding: Missing abstractions and LINQ - Mark Needham looks at encapsulating the business logic that often leaks out with the power of Linq, capturing it inside classes rather than having Linq statements dotted around your code.
• Hey Microsoft, Our Databases Aren’t Services! - Davy Brion makes an appeal to Microsoft to stop making frameworks which loosely turn databases into remote services without all the usual architectural features of remote services.
• Eagerly loading entity associations efficiently with NHibernate - Ayende takes a look at eager loading of entities, looking at how Entitiy Framework and NHibernate perform their queries to achieve this.

• jQuery 1.4 Released - The 14 Days of jQuery - The jQuery Team announce the release of jQuery 1.4 in celebration of the projects 4th Birthday. A lot of the focus of this release has been on further improving the performance of the library, with the core functions receiving a performance boost in this release, along with new features such as easy setters, improved JSON support and much more.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Launch Date is Monday 12th April - Eric Nelson highlights the official release date for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4, and points UK users to the source for information on the Launch events to be held in the UK.
• ActiveRecord 2.1 released - Markus Zywitza highlights the release of Castle ActiveRecord which brings the dependencies up to date, along with new features for primary key type detection, and read only field support.

Information

• jQuery 1.4 Released: The 15 New Features you Must Know - James Padolsey writing for nettuts+ looks at the 15 key new features of the new release of JQuery.
• jQuery 1.4 API Cheat Sheet - Future Colours offer an updated jQuery cheat sheet for the 1.4 release, available in HTML, PDF and JPEG formats
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit (Jan. 2010 Release) - ‘Dr Z’ highlights the January 2010 release of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit, which contains presentations, demos and hands on labs for the whole range of .NET from C#4 to F#, Parallel extensions to WCF
• How can I disable batch compilation for my ASP.NET web pages so that the first user accessing the web site doesn’t experience slow performance? - Reuben Frost highlights a useful web.config setting which can help improve the startup time of your ASP.NET application by deferring some of the compiling until the first request for that page.
• WPF & Silverlight Designer : Setting Up Visual Studio for WPF and Silverlight Development - Karl Shifflett talks about configuring Visual Studio 2010 for working with Silverlight explaining to tools available, and suggesting which to enable. A video accompanies this post.
• WPF Extensibility Hacks - Preview 1 - Few interesting Triggers and Actions for WPF, Invoking Triggers based on Conditions etc - Anoop Madhusudanan shares the source and talks about the features of Wex a port of the Silverlight Project Slex to full WPF.
• A Field Guide to WPF Presentation Patterns - Paul Stovell talks about the three main patterns that are used for presentation using WPF and looks at how you can identify which pattern is being used.
• 2010 Survey Results: What .NET Framework features do you use? - Scott Hanselman shares the results from his survey late last year on the .NET Framework features that people are using
• The Rx Framework By Example - Phil Martin takes a look at the Reactive Extensions for .NET illustrating with real examples in this CodeProject article
• Why Can’t I Access A Protected Member From A Derived Class? Part Six - Eric Lippert picks up an old series based ona reader question about access to protected members, completing an answer given in a previous post (Which you will need to read to know what is going on)
• F#: Refactoring to sequence/for expressions - Mark Needham continues looking ways of migrating from the imperative way fo coding in F# and look at the use of sequences in F#

Community

• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 8 - Registrations - Registration for the 8th DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper event to be held at Microsoft Reading at the end of the month opens today (15th) at 13:00 GMT. This free event is a very popular one, and usually ’sells’ out very quickly, so you will need to be quick if you wish to attend. Once all the spaces go there is usually a waiting list situation, so don’t loose heart if you don’t get in on the first registration.

Software

• Gordon: Flash Runtime Implemented in JavaScript - Ajaxian highlights some work by Tobias Schneider in creating a Flash runtime which runs in the browser, and is written completely in JavaScript and HTML5 - impressive stuff, and I particularly like the name too.
• DotNet JQuery (DNJ) : new features in version 0.4.0 - Alaa-eddine KADDOURI shares the latest version of this ASP.NET Control library which adds controls for the common jQuery Controls such as Sliders, Accordion, tabs, panels, etc, making it easier to work with these jQuery controls in Visual Studio.

Information

• Visual Studio 2010 Tricks and Tips - Zain Naboulsi picks up Sara Ford’s daily Visual Studio tip posting responsibilities, and looks to be off to a good start. This looks like on that will be worth keeping a regular eye on.
• 10 Advanced Windsor Tricks - 3. How to resolve arrays - Mike Hadlow continues his series of posts on Advanced Windsor Container use with a look at how you can get Castle Windsor to resolve arrays of services when you have multiple components registered for that service.
• Take your MVC User Controls to the next level - David Ebbo takes a look at making ASP.NET user controls more like Render Helpers when working with ASP.NET MVC
• Fooling the Query Optimizer - Ben Nevarez shares some useful tricks which allow you to find out what the query execution plan will look like when your tables have different (larger) numbers of rows.
• Favor - Help Us Test .NET 4 Beta 2 on Windows Update (WU) - Scott Hanselman asks for community help in testing the Windows Update deployment of the .NET 4 Client Profile, before its release. In order to do so, you will need a machine without any .NET 4, and you have to edit the registry to make Windows Update show it
• Limitations of MVC2’s ModelValidatorProviders - Jeremy Skinner talks about some of the problems he ran into working with the ASP.NET MVC 2 ModelValidatorProvider API when trying to write a provider for the FluentValidation library.
• The Weekly Source Code 47 - ASP.NET 3.5 Dynamic Data: FilterRepeaters and Dynamic Linq Query Generation - Scott Hanselman resumes his Weekly Source Code series with a look into some of the ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 Dynamic Data features

Careers Special Feature

• Career Advice For Young Developers, Part 2 - Davy Brion shares some advice for up and coming developers keen on advancing up the Software Development Career ladder
• Selling Yourself: Why? (Part 1) - John Sonmez talks about the very difficult skill of selling yourself and your skills, and follows up with a <2nd Part looking at ways of marketing yourself
• If You’re Graduating Soon, Consider Working For The ASP.NET Team - Since today seems to be a careers oriented edition, Phil Haack and the ASP.NET Team are looking for a fresh graduate to bring into the team, and are also looking for a Ninja Quality Assurance person.

• Castle Windsor 2.1, Dynamic Proxy 2.2 and more released! - Krzysztof Kozmic announces the release of Castle Windsor 2.1 and Castle Dynamic Proxy 2.2, Castle Core 1.2, one of the significant new features is the inclusion of Silverlight versions 3 versions of a number of components

Information

• Microsoft Test Runner series - part 1 - History & Goals - Suresh Budhiraja of the Visual Studio Team Test Team starts off a series of posts looking at the MTLM Test runner in the beta 2. So far there are 7 parts to the series so check out the rest of the blog for the rest of the series.
• Occasionally Connected Clients - Queuing Messages - Bruno Terkaly talks at length about Occasionally Connected Clients, and looks at queued message approaches in this comprehensive post which includes a good detailed worked example
• ASP.NET Performance - Part 4 - CDN - Karl Seguin continues his series on ASP.NET Application Performance with a look at the use of Content Delivery Networks to provide a speed boast to your site.
• Writing plug-ins for ReSharper: Part 1 of Undefined - Hadi Hariri begins a new series of posts looking at ReSharper Plug-in functionality, exploring the basics of the plug-in infrastructure in this post.
• 10 Advanced Windsor Tricks - 1A. A Delegate Factory Facility - Mike Hadlow presses on with his series on the Castle Windsor Container, and gets distracted by some interesting extensions of the ideas in his Registering Delegates post.
• Free Developer Training for Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4 - On Demand from msDev - Greg Duncan highlights some great on demand training available from the MSDev website covering Visual Studio 2010 and .NET, including Parallelism, ADO.NET, F# and Office integration with more to come in coming weeks.
• Ambiguous Controller Names With Areas - Phil Haack looks at a common problem encountered in the ASP.NET MVC 2 Release candidate with regard to Controller naming and the new areas functionality.
• The TekPub LINQ Challenge And The Sieve Of Eratosthenes - Justin Etheredge continues his series of posts looking at Linq and the TekPub Linq challenge, looking at one of the famous algorithms for solving the problem.
• ASP.NET User Education : Website User Authentication - ASP.NET 4 Web Applications - Philip Attipoe shares his ground work looking at authentication support in ASP.NET 4

Community

• DDD8 - Vote for Sessions - The Session voting for the 8th DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Event to be held at Microsoft Reading at the end of the month. You have a few days to help filter down the proposed sessions by voting for the ones you’d like to see.