Software

• Bing Maps Silverlight Control 1.0 Released - Chris Pendleton, Bing Maps tecnical evangelist highlights the release of the Bing Maps Silverlight Control 1.0 bringing a number of great features to the mapping, along with the nice user experience of the Silverlight rendering and interaction with the maps
• Compatible with Windows 7 Software Logo Toolkit Goes RTM - Bruce D. Kyle highlights the RTM release of the Windows 7 Software Logo Toolkit, a kit which aims to help ISVs get their software Windows 7 logo approved. Bruce also outlines the process of achieving logo status
• Mono Tools for Visual Studio - Miguel de Icaza talks about the release of Mono Tools for Visual Studio, bringing tool support within Visual Studio to deploy Mono applications to Linux, including support for Winforms, ASP.Net and console applications, along with remote debugging support, portability reviews, packaging for Linux and support for generating appliances
• Free ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010 Beta Hosting to help you get up to FOUR ! : Misfit Geek - Joe Stagner highlights a beta offering from the web hosting company MaximumASP, giving free ASP.NET 4 enabled hosting accounts, allowing you to get started and deploy .NET 4 powered apps

Information

• Interface Inheritance Esoterica - Phil Haack explores some of the deeper aspects of inheritance, looking at the difference between instance and interface inheritance, and how this can have an effect on what happens when you reflect on types, along with the implication for ASP.NET MVC Model Binding
• Adding Microsoft Bing Maps to your Web Applications - ‘Dr. Z’ takes a look at using the new Silverlight Bing Maps control to add mapping to your applications, be they web pages or Silverlight applications.
• Calling the Google Closure Javascript Compiler - Code - Kim shares the code discussed in the post linked from Monday’s Morning Brew looking at combining Google’s Closure Compiler with Visual Studio
• Patterns for Parallel Programming with the .NET Framework - Stephen Toub explores the various common patterns for working in a parallel way using .NET, exploring Parallel loopsm Mapreduce, Aggregations, Lazyness, shared state and much more in this 100+ page white paper
• Code Contracts Preview: Assert & Assume - Dino Esposito continue exploring Code Contracts in his DotNetSlackers article series. This part looks at the use of Contact.Assert and Contract.Assume, and the design implications of using them in your applications
• A Move Into The Cloud Is Inevitable - Justin Etheredge discusses the topic of cloud computing, following on from discussions at his local Software Craftmanship Group
• C# FileAssociation class - Aidan F provides a simple snippet of code which allows you to configure file associations to associate certain file extensions with your applications.
• Request/Response Service Layer: Processing Requests - Davy Brion continues his series on the Request Response service layer with a look at the processing of requests in this post, and
• Handling Requests - in his next part. Both posts have a healthy amount of code showing some rela implementation details, including addressing some of the cross cutting concerns
• ExifLibrary for .NET - Ozgur Ozcitak shares a useful library for reading EXIF image information data from image files, along with a discussion of the format of EXIF data

Community

• GL.net - GL.net Group Meeting #11 - Wednesday 9th December sees the 11th meeting of the Gloucestershire .NET User Group, with a presentation on unit testing and Mocking from Ronnie Barker and Stephen Oakman of The Agile Workshop. I had the pleasure of chatting with both of these guys at the Alt.Net UK conference earlier this year, and they are both very knowledgeable on all things agile, so this is bound to be a good session
• Gabriel Schenker introduction to NHibernate and Fluent NHibernate. - The Virtual Alt.Net Usergroup has a presentation from Gabriel Schenker this evening 8pm GMT-6, so one targeted for US developers (and those in the UK with strange sleeping habits). Like previous talks I expect that a recording will be made available after the event.
• Brighton ALT.NET Beers - Notes from November meet-up - Iain Holder shares his notes from last weeks Alt.Net Beers event in Brighton. Sharing the details of what goes on at these events is a really good idea, both for people from other areas to pick up on topics, and also for showing people who may be interested in attending what they can expect

Software

• SQL Server 2008 R2 November CTP Released - Vidhya Sagar highlights the release to MSDN subscribers of the November SQL Server 2008 R2 CTP, with general availability of this CTP release on 11th November. If you experiment with it and fid a bug, don’t forget to report it through Connect
• Announcing the RTW release of Application Request Routing V2 for IIS7.0 - Don Raman highlights the final release of the Application Request Routing module Version 2 for IIS 7 which allows for an IIS server to act as a proxy forwarding on requests to application servers based on routing rules based on headers, load balancer rules, etc
• Canadian Developer Connection : The Facebook/.NET SDK - Joey deVilla highlights the release of Version 3 of Microsoft’s Facebook SDK (The Facebook Developer Toolkit), which now has official support status from Facebook. his library provides the simlest way to build Facebook enabled applications on the .NET framework
• Microsoft Acquires Teamprise technology - David Jung shares the news (and related links) that Microsoft have aquired Teamprise bringing their tools which allows for Non-Visual Studio users to access TFS servers inside Microsoft.
• Magellan - Paul Stovell announces Magellan, a framework to build navigation based WPF applications easily using the MVC pattern ontop of WPF, with behaviours , transitions and commands to navigate between pages along with integration with Composite WPF. In addition to all this, there is also a nice set of documentation / tutorial available

Information

• Fields and virtual members - Jimmy Bogard talks about problems he encountered using fields to back virtual properties, and looks at using automatic properties, ending on the question ‘are there any valid reasons to keep using fields for holding state?’ - check out the comments for some answers
• Aleviating Memory Fragmentation in Mono - Miguel de Icaza talks about the work being done on a compacting garbage collector for Mono, and highlights a call for testing of Mono’s new Compacting GC
• Dependency Injection 101 - Billy McCafferty runs through the principles and practices of dependency injection in this nice introductory article, with just the right blend of code and narative (and pictures of robots!). Billy also highlights a similar article Dependency Injection For Dummies by Kevin Pang which gives another angle on the subject
• Asp.Net MVC JavaScriptView - Chris Brandsma shares his implementation of a JavaScriptView for ASP.NET MVC providing a means of building JavaScript outside of the page content but with the ability to get all the paths correct within the JS content
• Legacy Code: Sensing - Mark Needham talks about Michael Feathers’ concept of Sensing within legacy applications, looking at the changes needed to check that a piece of code is doing what we expect, showing tests, some legacy code and the refactorings he used.
• What is BDD (Behaviour Driven Design)? - Garry Shutler looks at the question of ‘What is BDD?’ exploring some of the BDD myths, the origins and key concepts of BDD. Check out the comments for an interesting discussion with Neil Robbins too.
• Getting started with BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) in .NET - Tom Janssens takes a look at working in a BDD way with this CodeProject article exploring BDD testing using his own BDD framework called Aubergine.
• F# Language Details (Gotchas) - Chris Smith explores some of the common mistakes people make when working with F#, looking at the confusion that can be caused with overrides to Equals and Not Equals, along with the differences in performance of different types of range expression
• Tip 42 - How to create a dynamic model using Code-Only - Alex James looks at how you can work without a strongly typed Context derived from object context using Entity Framework, and how this allows for dynamic models through code only support
• .NET Generics and Code Bloat (or its lack thereof) - Carlo Colombo digs under the hood of .NET Generics, looking at how they are implemented at the IL level, and shows techniques using the debugger to dig into and understand what is going on behind the scenes
• NHibernate - Cross session operations - Ayende takes a look at using entities across sessions using detaching to disassociate the entity from the current session, and how this can sometimes cause problems due to violations of the uniqueness of entities in the identity map
• Use Google’s Closure Compiler in C# - Mads Kristensen provides a simple class to access Google’s Closure Compiler Service, allowing you to get the benefits of this ‘Compiler’ in your applications

Community

• Party with Palermo: PDC ‘09 edition - 6 days and counting - With PDC approaching Jeffrey Palermo reminds attendees of PDC of his Party with Palermo event, one of the best ways to meet fellow devs at PDC, do a little networking and even win some prizes. Entry is free (one business card)

• Paint.NET v3.5 (Final) is now available! - Paint.Net the Paint / photo editing package written completely in .NET recieves its latest update with a while host of new features, and A new license for Paint.NET v3.5
• The RC of Windows Identity Foundation is here! - Vibro announces the release candidate build of Windows Identity Foundation the new name for Geneva, the SDK and programming model for federated identity and claims based authentication for .NET
• Windows Identity Framework (WIF) Announcements - Sam Gentile has a number of related news and announcements over at his blog
• Microsoft .NET Services SDK (Nov 2009 CTP) - The latest .NET Services CTP release has been made available on MSDN.

Information

• Neat VS10 Feature: Pinning A Debugger Watch - Phil Haack highlights another nice new feature of Visual Studio 2010’s debugging capabilities, the ability to pin a watch window to the editor, meaning it will be anchored to a point in the code, allowing you to see the value of a variable alongside the code.
• ASP.Net MVC Portable Area - Part 4 IoC framework support - Eric Hexter continues his series on the development of Portable Areas in ASP.NET MVC with a brief look at adding support to the portable areas for Inversion of Control
• HDI Video: Generate from Usage in Visual Studio 2010 with Karen Liu - Charlie Calvert highlights a video by Karen Liu looking at the new Generate from Usage feature of VS2010, giving a non-video summary of the content of the video
• Equality and Comparison Constraints in F# - Don Syme talks about the two new constraint added to F# in the 1.9.7 release for dealing with equality and comparisons, giving a nice summary of the background to the problem, and an introduction to the new features.
• Sproc Executing Slow? It Might be This - Rob Reynolds talks about a configuration setting which can make massive differences to the speed of execution of your stored procedures in SQL Server, and vast differences between the different ways of running procs. This one is well worth knowing about, I’ve been bitten by this one on more than one occasion
• IronRuby and Cucumber - Cucumber Tutorial (Part 3 of 3) - Greg Malcolm wraps up his series on IronRuby and Cucumber for BDD testing with a look at Cucumber, illustrated with a healthy number of examples.
• The Number of Classes Is Not A Good Measure Of Complexity - Eric Lee talks about the danger of using the number of classes as a metric for complexity, arguing that having more classes makes things less complex if done correctly
• Request/Response Service Layer Series - Davy Brion beigns a new series of posts on the Request /Response service layer, with his first post Requests And Responses looking at the basics of the Request Response service layer
• Integrating Google Javascript Compiler in Visual Studio - Kim talks about some work on integrating the Google Closure Javascript compiler into the Visual Studio IDE via the REST API. This looks very promising work, and I look forward to seeing a release of the code / Add-in
• Jumping the trampoline in C# - Stack-friendly recursion - Bart De Smet digs into recursion looking at how it can be made easier on your stack trace in another of his epic posts - this one is another I’m going to have to take a while to read over.
• DWORD - Duct Tape Programmers - Roy Osherove starts a new video cast blog series called DWORD, and in this edition takes an amusing look at the Duct Tape Programmer debate

Community

• Architect Cafe November 2009 Series | Online Webcasts - Architect Cafe highlights 2 webcasts for architects coming up in the next few weeks, the first looking at Silverlight 3, and the second looking at cloud computing and Azure. These are US events around noon PST, so should be watchable from western Europe at not too later hour
• Expect the Unexpected - Microsoft are running a competition to win a trip to the Galapagos Islands, or a Smart Car, along with a number of other smaller prizes, all for sharing your story about something you achieved with the .NET Framework

• Google releases Closure, the tools behind the JS geniuses - Ajaxian highlights the release of Closure the JavaScript library that powers the Google Application offerings, including an optimizer (’Closure Compiler’), a JavaScript library, along with templating in both Java and JavaScript,

Information

• Hanselminutes on 9 - Debugging Crash Dumps with Tess Ferrandez and VS2010 - Scott Hanselman talks with Tess Ferrandez about ASP.NET Debugging, and Tess shows Scott how to debug a dump of an ASP.NET application using some of the new features in Visual Studio 2010.
• Retrieving Nested Properties from Lambda Expressions - Elton Stoneman looks at getting ProperyInfos for properties using Lambda expressions, and how it gets a little more tricky when you want to access properties off objects referred to by a property
• IronRuby and Cucumber - Installation (Part 1 of 3) - Greg Malcolm shares a 3 part series based on his recent Usergroup demo. This first part looks at getting IronRuby and Cucumber installed correctly, and the second part ‘A quick look at IronRuby‘ takes a tour around IronRuby, with Part 3 yet to be published looking at BDD with Cucumber and IronRuby
• November’s Toolbox Column Now Online - Scott Mitchell highlights the contents of his Toolbox column for MSDN Magazine’s November edition, which means that the rest of the magazine is online too - follow the link at the end of his post to get into the full column and the rest of the magazine
• Now Available: patterns & practices Application Architecture Book - J.D. Meier highlights the release of the Patterns and Practices groups Application Architecture book as a physical printed book. The whole content of this (and may other useful guides from P&P) is available online as PDF, links at the end of this article.
• Creating something from nothing, asynchronously [Developer-friendly virtual file implementation for .NET improved!] - ‘Delay’ adds some enhancements to the virtual file creation using drag and drop from a previously linked article, improving the UI by keeping it responsive while creating the files which were downloaded through the application
• WPF RichTextBox Subscript and Superscript Without Font Restrictions - Steven Robbins shares a work around for WPF applications using the RichTextBox wanting to include Superscript and subscript text regardless of the font being OpenType and having a suitable variant for super/subscript
• Writing WPF/Silverlight compatible code. Part 2: Dependecy Properties - Alan Mendelevich is on part 2 of a series looking at writing WPF and Silverlight compatible code in the currently stable version (WPF3.5 and Silverlight3). This part looks at working with dependency properties in ways that will work in both Silverlight and WPF
• It’s Okay To Write Unit Tests - Justin Etheredge responds to post about unit testing with a 7 step plan which should help you to unit test better and more effectively
• Enabling X-Domain access to your Data Services - The ADO.NET Data Services Team talk about how you can grant access to your ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) services to other domains using the ClientAccessPolicy file

Community

• Virtual ALT.NET Recordings - A reminder that all of the Virtual Alt.Net presentations are archived on the VirtualAlt.Net site, with recent additions of Billy McCafferty S#arp architecture talk and Ayende Rahien on Building NHProfiler. A great resource and a useful means of seeing talks from other timezones

• Visual Studio 2010 Power +25 with PowerCommands 10.0 - Greg Duncan highlights the release of PowerCommands 10.0 which bring the PowerCommands Extensions to Visual Studio up to date with VS2010 support offering extensions within numerous parts of the IDE
• ADO.Net Entity Framework Community Technology Preview Released! - The ADO.NET Entity Framework Team announce the release out their latest Features CTP, which brings a number of new enhancements to Code Only support, code generation support for self tracking entities for WCF / multi tier applications. This release supports Visual Studio 2010 beta 2
• Introducing Debugging for MonoTouch - Miguel de Icaza announces the release of MonoTouch 1.2, the library that brings multi touch support to Mono for developing iPhone/iPod applications. The significant new feature for this release is the ability to debug on the simulator and iPhone
• Code Review Plug-in for Visual Studio 2008, ReviewPal - Chathuranga K.W. releases a Visual Studio Plug-In which adds support for performing Code Reviews to Visual Studio 2008. This is very similar to an Add-in I started writing a while back, and looks like it might be very useful, one to check out for sure
• OpenRasta 2.0 RC - Seb Lambla announces the Release Candidate release of OpenRasta 2.0, his resource oriented framework for building MVC web applications.

Information

• Getting Started with Clojure in .net - on code - ‘On Code’ blog highlights the existence of a CLR port of the Java Clojure language with the start of this series looking at the installation and some of the getting started concepts of the language
• Selective Unit Testing - Costs and Benefits - Steve Sanderson discusses the merits of testing different types of code, looking at the how the costs of testing vary, along with the difficulty of testing cost benefit analysis of testing certain types, suggesting that it may be worth investigating other types of testing where TDD offers less value return
• F# 1.9.7 Language Specification Now Available - Don Syme highlights the availability of the F# 1..9.7 language specification which matches with the team’s latest releases. They plan some minor updates the the document over the coming weeks
• Introduction to WPF 4 Multitouch - Jaime Rodriguez gives a nice introduction to the MultiTouch support for raw-touch and manipulation in Windows Presentation Foundation 4, sharing sample applications to illustrate the various points in the tutorial
• A RouteHandler for IHttpHandlers - Phil Haack explores how you could implement RouteHandlers for your IHttpHandlers to allow you to register routes to particular HttpHandlers, along with a sample project illustrating the technique
• Automapper Auto Profile Registration - Eric Hexter talks about his experiments with smaller Automapper profiles, and shows a method of registering them more easily which is a massive help when you have lots of small ones
• Letters from the editor : What’s new for extenders in Beta 2? - Noah Richards highlights some of the differences in Visual Studio Editor extensibility between Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases, a useful translation when, if like me, you are investigating extensibility in Beta 2 and finding lots of resources talking about beta 1
• Visual Studio 2010: UML modeling projects - Gunnar Peipman shows some of the support for UML Modelling available in Visual Studio 2010 Modelling Projects, illustrated with a series of screenshots
• Revisiting randomness - Jon Skeet looks at providing a better version of his static Random Number generator which aims to improve the randomness of numbers by not constantly recreating the random generator with similar seeds, and to offer better multithreading support than his previous version
• Writing Presentable Code Pt.1 - Properties and Variables - David Whitney discusses his coding style in detail, providing his justifications to certain decisions. This one is probably most useful if you don’t agree with the standards David uses as it provides the reasoning you might need to see why people do do things that way.
• Using Windsor to inject dependencies into ASP.NET MVC ActionFilters - Patrick Steele pieces together a means of allowing a Windsor Container to be used to inject dependencies into ASP.NET MVC ActionFilters, drawing on a number of posts from elsewhere to utilise some of their techniques

• IronRuby 0.9.2 - IronRuby reaches its 0.9.2 release in the build up to a 1.0 release, and this one closes a further 44 bugs and also introduces an MSI based installer.
• Ample SDK Goes Open Source! - Ajaxian highlights Ample SDK, a GUI toolkit now released under the GPL/MIT license, which makes it easy to create cross browser vector graphics along with powerful webforms UIs using standard web technologies such as SVG, XUL, etc
• ASP.NET Debugger Extension for IIS 7 - Vijayshinva Karnure shares a new extension for IIS7 which provides additional functionality for debugging ASP.NET Applications allowing you to easily identify modules which were built in debug mode, view the callstack of threads inside the worker process, and monitor the trace output of processes. Both 32 and 64 bit versions are available

Information

• Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control are not rocket surgery - Scott Koon shows how the techniques of Dependency Injection and Inversion of control are not as complicated as may developers believe, looking at definitions of the techniques and showing simple examples of both.
• Reading Code: Unity - Mark Needham discusses the technique termed ‘Effect Sketching’ by Michael Feathers, and how it can help you to understand a codebase by identifying interactions between fields and methods of classes. Mark also shows how Graphviz can help visualise such work
• ASP.Net MVC Portable Areas - Part 3 - Eric Hexter continues his series looking at creating and using ASP.NET MVC Portable Areas to allow you to share functionality between MVC applications. This part looks at the use of the Portable Areas created last time
• Html Encoding Nuggets With ASP.NET MVC 2 - Phil Haack talks about how they have managed to create a single ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 DLL built against .NET 3.5SP1 which is shared between VS2010 and VS2008 and can utilise .NET 4 functionality when it runs under that runtime
• I Command MVVM - Rishi talks about the ICommand interface and its implementations in nRoute.Toolkit’s MVVM implementation, showing how it is the key part in exposing and consuming the View Model in the framework
• New Article by Bill Wagner on Dynamic Method Bags in C# 4.0 - Charlie Calvert highlights a new C#4 article from Bill Wagner looking at Dynamic Method Bags, and how you can use the dynamic functionality to call your own C# objects without using reflection
• Improving JavaScript Skills - K. Scott Allen looks at the use of jQuery and qUnit combined with the Kata style problems to help aid learning and improving JavaScript skills
• The WPF Starter Kit – A simple, barebones, pick it up in an afternoon, MVVM/Navigation/Commanding Framework - Gerg Duncan highlights the WPF Starter Kit CodePlex project which provides a simple head start to creating an MVVM WPF application
• VM Workshop: Model View ViewModel (MVVM) and the Presentation Model Pattern in 5 UI Platforms - Craig Shoemaker tlaks bout a new project called the VM Workshop which aims to provide MVVM and Presentation Model patterns implemented in a number of common technologies. This is an open source project and contributions are welcome.
• A URL Resolver Module for ASP.NET MVC - Dylan Beattie shows how by intercepting the output stream of an ASP.NET MVC page you can re-write parts of the HTML, and provides an implementation of this which provides the same support for ~ in URLs that WebForms developers make use of to have URLs re-written to the application base.
• TDD is not about testing, it’s about how we develop software - Thomas Weller reflects on his 2 years of experience of Test Driven Development, talking about some of the common ideas behind doing TDD, sharing his experience of these benefits.
• Transparency 101: Basic Transparency Rules - ’shawnfa’ talks about the basics of Security Transparency and Secuirty Critical code and how the two relate within the in .NET 4

Community

• Brighton ALT.NET Beers - Wed 4th Nov 7pm at The Lord Nelson - Iain Holder issues a reminder of tonight’s Alt.Net Brighton Beers event, starting at 7pm in The Lord Nelson pub, a great opportunity to meet and talk with fellow .Net developers over a pint

• Uploaded ASP Classic Compiler Build 0.5.4.34834. This build supports VS2010 and Silverlight. - Li Chen announces an updated release of ASP Classic Compiler, a project which takes classic ASP files written in VBScript and compiles them to .NET executables using a VBScript compiler and the Dynamic Language Runtime
• Prism 2.1 (Composite Application Guidance for WPF & Silverlight 3) just released (updated version for Silverlight 3) - Damian Schenkelman highlights the latest release of the Prism Composite Application Guidance Framework for WPF and Silverlight. This latest release now targets Silverlight 3 and contains a few minor changes to support this move
• Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 is now available for download - The Mozilla Team announce the first beta release of FireFox 3.6 which runs on the Gecko 1.9.2 engine and introduces a number of nwe developer features. Binary releases are available for Windows, Mac and Linux, although be aware that your favourite add-ins won’t necessarily work

Information

• ASP.Net MVC Portable Areas - Part 2 - Eric Hexter continues with his series of posts looking at implementing Portable Areas in ASP.NET MVC using the MvcContrib library, in this part looking at the actual construction of a portable area sample
• New article: How to detect and avoid memory and resources leaks in .NET applications - Fabrice Marguerie highlights his latest article available in both French and English, published on MSDN in English and DotNetGuru in French. This article takes a look at what memory leask are, how to sport them, common causes, how to fix them and tools and resources to find out more.
• Using ASP.NET and Jcrop to crop images online - Gunnar Peipman shares some simple Javascript and ASP.NET Code to allow you to easily crop images from within a Web Applciation using the JCrop library for jQuery
• Simple names are not so simple - Eric Lippert takes us on a tour of some of the rules about where and when you can name a variable, revisiting the concepts of declaration space and scope and showing some examples of the stranger things that can happen
• Free eBook - Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 - Matt McSpirit highlights a free e-book of ‘Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2′ from Microsoft Press, allowing you to get up to date with the latest Server class OS from Microsoft
• What kind of logging should you do in production? - Ayende talks about the types of logging he uses in production applications, and how it depends on the type of application and the support levels of the application as to how much logging he includes and how that logging is presented
• An xVal Provider For NHibernate Validator - Scott Kirkland shares an xVal provider for the NHibernate Validator allowing the NHibernate validator metadata to be used
• An Introduction to Fluent Interfaces & Internal DSLs in C# - Steven Holdsworth shares a simple introduction to the concepts of Fluent Interfaces and Internal DSLs with a simple code example to illustrate, showing that these concepts don’t have to be big and complicated
• WCF 101: The Simplest WCF Example You’ll Ever See - Youssef Moussaoui shares the simples possible WCF example, so short it easily fits on a single screen and shows how WCF is another technology which doesn’t have to be complicated
• Introduction to the Reactive Framework Part II - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the Reactive Framework with a look at the duality of Enumerable and Observable
• WF4 Beta1 => Beta2 Breaking Changes Document Published - Matt Winkle highlights a document from Microsoft which outlines the changes that have been made to the Windows WorkFlow implementation between Beta 1 and Beta 2 of .NET 4
• Unit testing ASP.NET MVC routes - Thomas Weller takes a look at unit testing his ASP.NET MVC Routes, showing why this can be hard to achieve, and how ASP.NET MvcContrib and a custom base class can make the process easier
• NHibernate feature: SaveOrUpdateCopy & Merge - Torkel Ödegaard explores two of the less well know NHibernate persistence methods, SaveOrUpdateCopy and Merge, showing how they can be used and what situations they suit
• Lifting T out of Task with dynamic dispatch - Joe Duffy takes a look at using Tasks to generate an object and then calling a method, showing how traditionally this would result in you blocking until the taks completed, and looks at an alternative way of doing this using the C#4 Dynamic support
• Search and Messaging - Udi Dahan talks about the use of Messaging to perform searches, and how it can be a suitable fit to the problem

• NHibernate 2.1.1 Released - Ricardo Peres highlights the release of NHibernate 2.1.1 GA on Saturday. From the look of the Release Notes (and the version number) its a bugfix release with some minor improvements
• Mvc Turbine v2 RC - Javier G. Lozano announces the release candidate for the second version of Mvc Turbine, a plug-in which brings improved support for Inversion of Control (IoC) , Auto-Registration of View Engines, Filters, Controllers, Routes and custom IHttpModules, along with a set of core components refered to as Blades for MVC, routing and web components

Information

• Irony - Kirill Osenkov takes a look at Irony the .NET Compiler Construction Framework created by Roman Ivantsov, showing how to create an expression tree via expression parsing
• Castle Dynamic Proxy tutorial part XV: Patterns and Antipatterns - Krzysztof Kozmic closes out this considerable series on Castle Dynamic Proxy 2.1 with a look at some of the problems people often run into when working with dynamic proxying along with a reminder about applying the Single Responsibility Principle to interceptors
• ASP.NET MVC Resource Guide - Chris Bowen presents a number of useful resources for getting started with and looking deeper into ASP.NET MVC which complements the talk he gave with Patrick Hynds at the Stack Overflow DevDays Conference in Boston
• DDDD: Why I Love CQRS - Jonathan Oliver talks about Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) talking about the basic concept and how it can be applied
• ASP.Net MVC Portable Areas via MvcContrib - Eric Hexter talks about the concept of Portable Areas in ASP.NET MVC, and how Version 2 of the framework makes achieving this functionality in the MVC Contrib project possible
• Character Testing with the Char Structure - BlackWasp highlight some useful methods available on the Char class which allows you to easily check the characters for particular properties such as being numeric, whitespace, etc.
• Should I use MEF with an IoC container? - Part 1 - Glenn Block answers the question which is complementary to that answered in a previous post, looking at if you need / should use the Managed Extensibility Framework with an IoC Container
• T4 Preprocessed Text Templates in Visual Studio 2010 - Karl Shifflett explores the new VS2010 functionality for Preprocessed T4 Templates, showing what they are, and how they can be utilised
• NHProf and Caliburn Testability - Rob Eisenberg shares some of his experience on UI Testability by talking about how he did he UI testing on NHProf
• The Bad Practices of Exception Handling - Hans-Eric Grönlund shares his top 3 exception handling worst practices, which I’m sure we’ve all seen in code, and probably written at some point too.
• State Pattern, Enumeration Class and Fluent NHibernate (Oh my!) - Richard Cirerol talks about refactoring from simple enums to a full state pattern implementation and some of the bits surrounding persistence that he found troublesome
• Simple way to cache objects and collections for greater performance and scalability. Free source code and programming help - Omar Al Zabir shows how caching can drastically improve application performance, and shows how you can easily implement caching using Aspect Oriented Programming techniques with the AspectF library
• Coding: Invariant checking on dependency injected components - Mark Needham continues discussing invariant checking, this time looking at checking on the dependencies that should be being provided by the Dependency Injection framework, asking if this is necessary, and if there is a better place to check these dependencies
• You see that database? OFF WITH HIS HEAD! - Ayende reminds us that set based database operations are far and away the best way of working with databases for performance
• Contract classes and nested types within interfaces - Jon Skeet talks about the use of contract classes with interfaces, and discusses where it is best to locate these classes

Community

• ThoughtWorks Quarterly Briefings in December - Jim Webber highlights the ThoughtWorks Quarterly Briefing Events to be held on 7th December where he will be speaking on web based SOA. These events are held in both Manchester and London, with the London event being a breakfast event, and Manchester an evening

• WOHOO!!!, Debug Diag 64bit is finally released - Tess Ferrandez highlights the release of DebugDiag 1.1 for 64bit allowing you to debug 64bit processes.
• Visual Studio 2010 Editions Quick Reference Poster - still BETA, but we have revision 2 available - Willy-Peter Schaub highlights a useful poster outlining the various editions of Visual Studio showing which components go into which edition allowing you to make a better decision about the one you need
• VS2010 Beta 2 Feedback Survey - Jason Zander on behalf of his Team requests that if you have been making use of Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 you should fill out a simple survey to allow them to focus on the final issues being raised

Information

• The HornGet Project: Bringing "apt-get install" to .NET Projects - Billy McCafferty highlights the HornGet Project, an excellent utility which enables you to get the latest versions of dependencies for various .NET OSS projects. I first saw this in operation at the Alt.NET UK conference this year, and agree with Billy, it really is great.
• ASP.NET MVC 2 Templates, Part 4: Custom Object Templates - Brad Wilson presses on with his series of posts on ASP.NET MVC2 Template with part 4 looking at Custom Object Templates, and part 5 exploring
• Master Page Templates -
• LINQ Overview, part three (Anonymous Types) - ‘.NET Nomad’ picks up a slow burning series with a new post on typing, the var keyword and anonymous types, looking at how these support Linq
• HTML5, a 3 minute guide - Leon Bambrick shares a simple example of HTML5, showing how it compares to the HTML we are familiar with and summaries some of the key differences.
• Running Mono - an Overview - Pedro Santos gives an overview of how a recent project which was deployed on Mono worked, talksing about the setup of the server, and some of the issues they ran into with the applications
• Coding: Consistency when invariant checking - Mark Needham cals for consistency in the way we go about checking invariants in our code, and talks about situations which can give rise to inconsistencies in these checks
• It’s all about the delivery - Hadi Hariri talks about how important the delivery of the ideas and concepts of programming can be in influencing how developers adopt and react to new techniques, exploring an alternative way to introduce dependency injection
• Mentoring Juniors - A Juniors view - Sara Stephens talks about her experiences as a junior developer being mentored by more senior staff, explaining what worked well / not so well in the process. Its nice to see this from the other side as so many articles are from the Point of view of the senior staff member, not the junior
• Building a Service Gateway Using MassTransit, Part 2 - Chris Patterson continues his series looking at building a service gateway implementation using C#, MassTransit, NHibernate and ASP.NET MVC
• I have a Fit, but a lack of Focus. - Eric Lippert talks about ReferenceEquals with a real work illustration of how it works

Community

• Next European VAN on 18 November 2009 - The next European Virtual Alt.Net meeting will be 18th November 2009 featuring Mark Nijhof looking at DDD/CQRS/SOA principles with a deep dive into the code of his CQRS sample application

• Would you like a _ with that $? New library gives JS what it should have - Ajaxian highlights a new library called Underscore.js from Jeremy Ashkenas and the DocumentCloud team, which brings lots of functional programming helpers to JavaScript allowing you to write nicer functional JavaScript

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 2 Templates, Part 1: Introduction - Brad Wilson kicks off a series (already up to part 3) looking at the ASP.NET MVC 2 Templates functionality, exploring Model MetaData in part 2 showing how you can annotate your model classes, and takes a look at Default Templates in part 3
• Verify JavaScript syntax using C# - Mads Kristensen shares a useful technique for verifying that your JavaScript files are valid as a part of your Application unit tests by utilising JScript to check they parse correctly
• 12 ASP.NET MVC Best Practices - Simone Chiaretta shares12 ASP.NET MVC best practice tips, along with a slide deck which complements these tips
• MVPs Contribute to Free Developer eBook - Jas Dhaliwal highlights a free ebook being offered by Microsoft which was created by Derek Hatchard and contains 17 articles by Microsoft MVPs and Regional Directors
• Visual Studio 2010 - Functional Testing - Balagans gives a tour round the Functional Testing capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 Team Test, looking at the CodedUITest showing how tests can be created, recorded, developed and maintained
• Add Reference Dialog Improvements (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) - Scott Guthrie continues is VS2010 / .NET 4 series of posts with a look at the latest batch of enhancements to the Add References Dialog in the latest release. These changes do sound as though they will finally give this often maligned piece of functionality the speed it truely needs
• ASP.NET MVC Translated for the Web Forms Programmer (5 in a series) - What the Frig is a View Model? - Sara Chipps takes a look at what View Models are all about showing a simple example in use with a little dose of humour along the way
• An epic bug story - Ayende tells a good tail of a fictitious bug in a substantial system, a story which will be familiar to many of us, and is interesting reading
• Building A Service Gateway Using MassTransit, Part 1 - Chris Patterson begins a series of posts looking at using MassTransit, C#, StructureMap, ASP.NET MVC and NHibernate to create a Service Gateway implementation. This first part looks at some of the exchanges that occur within Web services
• Multiple Strongly Typed Partial Views in MVC - Garry Pilkington demonstrates how you can use a CombinedViewModel to join a number of types together allowing you to have multiple strongly typed partial views feed off the parts of the CombinedViewModel
• Attach a Debugger When a Process Starts - Sasha Goldshtein shows how you can use the Global Flags application to add flags to other applications to have the debugger (or another process) start up and attach when ever that application is started, very useful for debugging applications that are impossible to start from the debugger such as services

Community

• 4th November, London, Edge User Group Hosting IE8 Session - Mike Taulty highlights the next London Edge User Group (formerly Vista Squad) meeting which sees Giorgio Sardo talksing about Internet Explorer, the new features of IE8, HTML5, Super Preview, etc
• Upcoming events in Cambridge and Gloucester - Steve Sanderson highlights two developer events in the next few days where he will be doing sessions live coding, and also talking about security in ASP.NET MVC applications.

• DevHawk - IronPython 2.0.3 and 2.6 RC2 - Harry Pierson announces a further two releases of IronPython to take their total for a week to 3. These two releases are minir, the 2.6 release is a bugfix release fixing a memory leak, and the 2.0 release back ports a few bugfixes along with a fix for Partial Trust on Windows 7
• CopyPasteKiller - Free Code Similarity Finder - Jon von Gillern announces CopyPasteKiller a simple utility which aims to identify areas of code which may have been copy pasted allowing you to identify and remove this type of duplication
• TestDriven.Net 3.0 Alpha - Support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 - Jamie Cansdale announces the latest Aplha release of TestDriven.Net which adds support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Information

• What is Model-Based Testing? - Nico Kicillof of the Spec Explorer Team talks about the concept of Model Based Testing discussing how this lightweight formal method of testing works, and talking about where Spec Explorer fits into this
• Stop Exposing Collections Already! - Davy Brion talks about the bad practice of exposing collections to all and sundry, and by doing so allow them to manipulate and change the collection. Davy then explains a number of techniques that let you expose information from collections safely without fear of someone changing things without your knowledge
• LinqLite - Jason Allor talks about implementing custom Linq Providers, and shares LinqLite, a library he created which helps take some of the pain out of the process of parsing the linq expressions making it easier to create custom providers
• Implementing IEnumerable and IEnumerator - Brendan Enrick looks at the IEnumerable and IEnumerator interfaces, and shows how you don’t need a collection to work with and utilise these interfaces
• Running IronPython Scripts from a C# 4.0 Program - Charlie Calvert continues his exploration of IronPython with a look at calling IronPython scripts from within C# 4 code utilising the new dynamic keyword
• ASP.NET 4 Web Server Here Shell Extension - Phil Haack shares a neat registry hack (no pun intended) for both 32 and 64bit Windows which enables a context menu entry for creating a web server instance for any arbitrary directory
• Expanding the Cloud: The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) - All Things Distributed - Werner Vogels highlights and discusses Amazon’s entry into the Cloud based Relational database arena with the Amazon Relational Database Service, which would seem to be their answer to SQL Server in the cloud
• Using T4 Templates for Simple DTOs - K. Scott Allen explores the use of T4 templates to create data transfer objects for arbitrary CSV files, along with sharing a useful list of things he learned in the process
• A Chance to Influence the MSDN Visual Studio Documentation (Help System) - Charlie Calvert highlights a survey from the documentation team at Microsoft which is hoping to gather your opinion on the MSDN Technical library, so spare them 5 minutes of your time to help them improve the docs.
• MVC Web Testing Strategies - verifying content - Jimmy Bogard follows on from his recent presentation on testing ASP.NET MVC’s last mile, the rendered output, and in this post talks about a number of strategies for verifying content
• Website Background Services Are Hot - Peter Seale looks into the background services capabilities offered as a part of the Oxcite CMS, looking at their implementation, and asking if this is a good solution to the problem
• Provide immediate feedback to the browser on Long Running Tasks - in Asynchronous ASP.NET pages - Shahed Khan has a series of posts looking at different solutions to the problem of providing users with feedback about long running processes in a number of MS web technologies. This post looks at Async ASP.NET Pages, and subsequent posts address other techniques such as streaming regular ASP.NET pages and using regular web handler
• Simple Kick Start Example using MEF (Preview - Derik Whittaker looks at the Managed Extensibility Framework Preview 8 and shows how to get up and running with it using a simple example

Community

• Free WPF, Silverlight and 3.5 SP1 training for UK Developers - Eric Nelson highlights an offer from Microsoft which enables UK based developers to gain access to 3 training programmes covering RIA with Silverlight, .NET 3.5 SP1 Changes, and Rich User Interfaces using WPF, each with between 5 and 12 hours of content for free

• Spec Explorer: A Model-Based Testing tool - Soma Somasegar announces the latest DevLabs project to see the light of day, Spec Explorer a model based testing tool which allows you to view your models as UML and generate tests which can later be run in a number of test frameworks. This one sounds quite interesting, and the
• Spec Explorer Team Blog - is one that I will be keeping an eye on over the coming months.
• SSMS Tools Pack 1.7 is out! New feature: SQL Snippets - Mladen Prajdić announces the latest release of SSMS Tools Pack, an add in for SQL Server Management Studio which brings a number of greate additional features to the environment. New in the 1.7 release is support for SQL Snippets which, like in Visual Studio, allow you to type a short cut and have it expand out into a full statement with replacement slots you can tab through
• Caliburn v1 RTW for WPF, Silverlight 2.0 and 3.0! - Rob Eisenberg announces the RTW release of his UI pattern implementation library for Silverlight and WPF giving a head-start in implementing applications using this well defined design patterns

Information

• WPF 4 (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) - ScottGu continues looking at the new features of Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 with a look today at the improvements and new features for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), covering new controls, graphics improvements, text rendering, Windows 7 integrations, along with some improvements to the core of WPF
• Channel 9 Learning Center - Just Launched! - Channel 9 announce the launch of their learning centre, currently populated with courses on Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 and Windows 7, all broken down into units and lessons allowing you to break your learning into bite sized chunks. Future courses will include Sharepoint 210, Azure, Win2008R2 Server and Office 2010
• ClientIDMode in ASP.NET 4.0 - Rick Strahl examines another of the great ASP.Net Webforms features in .NET 4, the ability to control the way that identifiers are being created, allowing you to guess and tightly control the IDs along with the default auto assignment, making it much easier to create nice JavaScript using those IDs
• Creating something from nothing [Developer-friendly virtual file implementation for .NET!] - Delay takes a look at creating files on the file system from your applications by allowing the user to drag and drop from your application into the filesystem using the .NET drag and drop functionality to do this
• Roadmap for Outlook Personal Folders (.pst) Documentation - Paul Lorimer, Group Manager of the Microsoft Office Interoperability Team talks about the opening up of the file format of the Outlook PST file
• Extending Visual Studio 2010 UML Designers - Part 1: Getting Started - Peter Provost begins a new series of posts looking at the extensibility points of the Visual Studio 2010 UML functionality . This first post covers the ground work for creating such extensions, showing the Hello World of this type of extensibility work
• WF4 Performance - David Paquette talks about the possibility of using Windows Workflow Foundation Flowcharts to model the business rules of his system, causing him to explore the Workflow performance in .NET 4 and to look at the performance tools available in Visual Studio 2010
• Playing with JQuery Validation Library, Part 2 - Chris Brandsma resumes his series looking at JavaScript validation using the JQuery Validation Library, and in this part tackles validation using AJAX validators to check back with the server to see if a value is valid
• NHibernate and Execution Plans - ‘Naz’ talks about some factors that can affect the efficiency of NHibernate generated queries due to the way parameter lengths are created causing more execution plans to be generated than would be ideal, and shares details of resolutions of this problem
• Unit Testing: An Introduction - Deborah Kurata starts a nice series of posts on the unit testing facilities in Visual Studio (2008 pro, and later), exploring test generation, execution and code coverage in the first 3 parts

• Small Basic : Happy Birthday Small Basic - The Small Basic Team celebrate its first anniversary with a new release. 0.7 brings more international versions, along with a new feature called ‘Graduate’ which upscales a small basic project to a Visual Basic Project

Information

• VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) - ScottGu’s Blog - In his tenth post in the series, Scott Guthrie takes a look at the improved Intellisense support in Visual Studio 2010, comparing it with that in VS2008
• Language Integrated Query Support in the F# Power Pack - Don Syme shows off the new LINQ support that is being introduced into F# via the F# PowerPack beta 1/2 release
• Overview of type inference in F# - Brian, inspired by recent discussions on Hanselminutes, looks at how type inference works using F# as an example, bringing in examples from elsewhere when needed
• Getting Started with IronPython - Charlie Calvert runs through the process of getting up and running with IronPython, right from obtaining and installing through to running your first simple Python program
• Using C# dynamic to call static members - David Ebbo explores the use of Dynamic to call static methods on types declared dynamically, giving a static method duck typing, and finds that this doesn’t immediately work in .NET 4
• Value objects: Immutability and Equality - Mark Needham explores the concept of the value object and immutability of such objects with a real world example along with some techniques to work around some of the difficult parts of the implementation
• .Net Framework 4.0: System.IO.File supports now IEnumerable<string> - Gunnar Peipman is exploring a number of the new features of .NET 4 with a series of posts on the new bits, including this look at the ability to enumerate files, and the support for Complex numbers
• Collection covariance with C# 4.0 - Mike HAdlow explores a real world case where the new Collection Covariance introduced in C#4 really helps
• How to Get Started with Multi-Core: Parallel Processing You Can Use - Bruce D. Kyle (with some help from Jeffrey Richter and Rob Bagby) explores some of the options available for parallel processing in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010
• Naming Anonymous Types with Generate from Usage - Dustin Campbell shows how the refactoring tools in Visual Studio can help you to convert from an anonymous type to a named type in just a few easy steps
• I don’t do math, or how to get a 50Euro discount to NH Prof - Ayende highlights the launch of Rob Connery’s new venture TekPub a new high quality subscription screencast tutorial site, where this is a series on NHibernate which includes money off NHProf
• Iterating atomically - Jon Skeet looks at how to create a threadsafe atomic iterator which allows you to safely iterate over a collection from multiple threads avoiding any duplication of entries returned
• Thread-safe data structures .NET 4.0 (part 1) - Vitaly Dilmukhametov looks at some of the threadsafe collections which have implementations in .NET 4 and shows them in use
• Extension methods ain’t Trojan horses - A tale on a covariant city built in and protected by C# 4.0 - Bart De Smet tells the tail of the trojan war by way of Extension methods and Covariance, in yet another post which I’m going to have to read at least twice to understand, looks like good stuff
• DTOs, Business Entities and Persistency - Uri Lavi looks at Data Transfer Objects and how they can relate to Entities and the persistence of information

Community

• ScottGu Manchester ASP.NET MVC Video - Mike Taulty posts up the high qulaity video taken at the Manchester UK Guathon event where Scott Guthrie presented a number of topics including this monster session on ASP,NET MVC

• Windows 7 Virtual Presskit - Windows 7 Launch day seems to have gone pretty well, with lots of press coverage, and plenty of blog posts over the past 2 days. This link will take you to the video of Steve Balmer presenting the keynote from the New York Launch event.

Information

• Repositories don’t have save methods - Richard Dingwall argues that a correct DDD style repository does not have a save method, and should instead have a collection like interface, meaning Add is more appropriate
• Linq to NHibernate Progress Report - Steve Strong gives another update on his work on a full Linq provider for NHibernate, showing the improvements he has been making to the translation from Linq to NHibernate queries, including correct parametrisation of queries
• Where is C# in the Programming Language Lifecycle? - K. Scott Allen asks an interesting question about where in its lifecycle the C# Language actually is, based upon a lifecycle defined by Robin Sharp. I’m looking forward to some interesting discussion on this one.
• No JavaScript IntelliSense in VS 2010 Beta 2? Reset your Settings - Rick Strahl highlights a problem he encountered wtih the JavaScript Intellisense (or rather a lack thereof), along with the fix to get it working. If you are in a similar situation, resetting your settings will unleash one of the more incredible features of VS2010 - I was very impressed with the JS Intellisense when I saw it demoed
• Migrating to Postgresql with my friend NHibernate - Karl Seguin talks about the process of changing database engine when you have utilised NHibernate as a persistence framework, highlighting some of the problems they encountered along the way. Ayende follows up showing a work around for handling DB errors better between dialects in his post ‘Database independence with NHibernate‘
• The Microsoft Ajax Library and Visual Studio Beta 2 - Stephen Walther talks about the Microsoft Ajax Library in Visual Studio 2010 beta 2, about the name change from ASP.NET Ajax and why the team have moved to out of band releases rather than packaging with a particular version
• Castle Windsor forwarded types and proxies - Krzysztof Kozmic digs into some more advanced Castle Windsor functionality, allowing for the same component to be used for multiple services, and proxying such a component
• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Available Now! - Chris Schmich shares some screenshots showing the Performance Analysis features of Visual Studio 2010 in operation, yet another feature to add to the ‘must check out’ list
• New features in Entity Framework impacting providers - Noam Ben-Ami & Kati Iceva highlight some of the changes in Provider support within Entity Framework which will affect people developing their own providers
• C# Static interfaces - Jérémie Chassaing muses about the possible uses of static interfaces if they were provided, and clarifies in a follow up post illustrating with a clearer example in the post ‘C# Static interfaces - Take 2‘

Community

• C4MVC UI Testing screencast posted - Jimmy Bogard shares the link to the video of his session for the virtual Community for MVC.Net event on testing the UI in ASP.NET MVC earlier this week. I enjoyed watching the parts I saw live (I had some internet connection issues) and will be catching up on the bits I missed with this video
• Announcing the first Cambridge AltNetBeers &#8211; StackOverflow edition - Seb Lambla announces a new AltNet Beers event to be held in Cambridge after the StackOverflow Dev Day to allow you to get your fix of open spaces discussion after the Dev-Day event

• General availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 - Daniel Walzenbach highlights the release to the general public of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 with this post which contains links to the downloads for all editions (Shell, Ultimate, Premium, Professional, Express[C#, VB, C++, Web Dev]) along with the standalone framework download, an other related downloads. My experiences downloading last night were pretty good, with all the bits I grabbed downloading at a good rate.
• All-In-One Code Framework : All-In-One Code Framework Release 2009-10-18: Brief introduction of new samples - ‘colbertz’ highlights the 18th October Release of the All-In-One Code Framework. This library of code gives samples of a vast array of Microsoft technologies in a form that should be easy for you to utilise in your applications
• IronPython and IronRuby CTPs for .NET 4.0 Beta 2 - Harry Pierson highlights the release of new CTP of IronRuby and IronPython which run against the .NET 4 Beta 2 release
• Microsoft Windows: Windows 7 - The other obvious news for the day is the official launch of Windows 7. My RSS reader was full of posts about this this morning however I’m not going to be giving it that much coverage, despite it being bigger than Harry Potter (Windows 7 breaks Amazon UK pre-order volume record, ousts Harry Potter)
• Unsure about upgrading to Windows 7? Tools to help - Brian Groth highlights some useful tools to help determine if your machine and peripherals are suitable for Windows 7

Information

• 77 Windows 7 Tips - Jas Dhaliwal gives you 77 things to try out with your newly installed Windows 7 gathered together from a number of sources
• Interesting findings in the diff between .NET Fx v4 Beta1 and Beta2 - Patrick Smacchia points his NDepend tool at the Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases of the .NET Framework 4 and discusses the details of the changes that it identifies between the two, and it would seem that there are a lot of changes since beta 1
• Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010 (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) - Scott Guthrie continues his VS2010 / .NET 4 series of posts with a look at some of the changes that have been made in Visual Studio 2010 to make moving about your code base easier. I actually saw Scott demonstrating these features at the Guathon event in Manchester last month, and they look like really good enhancements to the basic product
• What’s New in the BCL in .NET 4 Beta 2 - Justin Van Patten of the BCL Team highlights the significant new features of the Base Class Library with the Beta 2 release, looking at features such as complex numbers, Observable collections, new System.Environment features and a whole lot more
• New Visual Studio 2010 Built-in C# Snippets Cheat Sheet - John Sheehan has produced a simple but effective ‘Cheat Sheet’ for the Visual Studio 2010 code snippets detailing what each of them is and how and where you can utilise them
• Indexed Properties in C# 4.0 - Kirill Osenkov shows off one of the less well known features of C#4, the ability to use indexed properties created in other technologies as indexed properties without having to call the awkward get_Value and set_value functions. This should vastly improve writing COM Interop code
• Visual Basic "HowDo I" Videos - The Visual Basic Team are producing two series of videos one focusing on the 2010 VB language features, and the other on using VB within the Visual Studio IDE
• Getting Started with Visual Studio 2010 IntelliTrace: Hello IntelliTrace! - Habib Heydarian highlights another of the exciting Visual Studio 2010 features, IntelliTrace which allows you to record the execution of a .NET application and later on replay it, and also looks at the Historical Debugging capabilities in his post The future of debugging is here! Visual Studio 2010 now supports stepping back in the debugger.
• Mozilla and Microsoft work together on WPF\ClickOnce plugins - Brad Abrams talks about the recent decision to have FireFox block the ClickOnce add on for security reasons, and talks about the interaction between Microsoft and Mozilla
• Duck Typing with Castle - Elton Stoneman highlights a useful library from David Meyer which allows you to achieve duck typing by way of clever use of the Castle Dynamic Proxy.
• Some Smaller Features in the Latest Release of F# - Don Syme talks about a number of the smaller new features of the F# release available as a part of VS2010/.NET 4 and as a standalone for VS2008/.NET 3.5.
• Extension Methods to Make Thread Safe WPF Programming Easier - Simon Knox shows how some simple Extension methods can take away a lot of the clutter required to correctly update a WPF UI when your application is multi-threaded. The same principle could also be used for WinForms apps.
• Force .NET application to run in 32bit process on 64bit OS - Gabriel Schenker highlights a few places where you have to change settings to get your web applications to run in 32bit mode when your OS is a 64bit OS.
• Visual Studio Myths - busted wide open - Eric Nelson and the rest of the UK Developer Evangelist team share a Silverlight application which aims to dispell a number of common myths about the different versions of Visual Studio and peoples reluctance to upgrade

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - October Preview (aka VS2010 B2 version) released - Greg Duncan highlights the availability of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Training Kit, newly updated to take into account the changes in Beta 2. This kit includes presentations, hands on labs and demos covering C#, VB, F#, Parallel extensions, WCF, WPF, WF and much much more

Information

• Code Contracts Preview: Invariants - Dino Esposito continues his DotNetSlackers article series on the Code Contracts functionality of .NET 4 with a look at the use of invariants and looking at the role they play in inheritance and also in the class design process
• VS10 Beta 2 From an ASP.NET MVC Perspective - Phil Haack talks about the ASP.NET MVC 2 inclusion in Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 Beta 2, highlighting the significant features, and talking about upgrading projects to VS2010
• 31 Days of Refactoring eBook - Sean Chambers shares the PDF E-Book edition of his Refactoring Blog Series posted back in August kindly produced by Simone Chiaretta
• Testability Of Date-Dependent Code - Davy Brion talks about two common techniques to enable the reliable testing of Date based code either by providing the date obtaining routine with a service which can be overridden for testing, or by routing all calls for dates through a custom static method which can be provided with dates to return
• Strongly Typed ASP.Net MVC Helpers - Sean McAlinden shows how you can create strongly typed helper methods for use in ASP.NET MVC Views by using lambda expressions to specify what are often magic strings in the standard framework helper methods
• Set up Spring.Net IoC with ASP.Net MVC - Sean McAlinden also shows how you can utilise the Inversion of Control Container from Spring.Net in ASP.NET MVC by extending the default controller factory to create controllers through the Spring container
• MVC 2 Areas and Containers - K. Scott Allen also argues for the use of DefaultControllerFactory as a base class for your own controllerfactory implementations as it includes a lot of the namespace identification routines that support areas, and allow your controllerfactory to make use of that without any work
• Microsoft Ajax Minifier VS YUI Compressor - Ajaxian compares the newly released Microsoft Ajax Minifier with the more established Yahoo YUI Compressor, looking at the differences between the minification techniques used by each.
• Fixing the Visual Studio Add Reference Dialog - Quickly add a Project Reference - Brian Schmitt shares a macro which provides a quicker way to add interproject references between projects in the same solution by bypassing the standard Visual Studio 2008 References dialog
• SQLite Nunit & Fluent Nhibernate - Test your data access layer - Dan Watson shares a number of code snippets which utilise SQLite and Fluent NHibernate to allow you to test your data code by using an in-memory database rather than the slower out of process fully relational database to provide you with quick running tests.
• Writing Extension Methods in F# to Use in C# - David Morton shows that you can create extension methods in F# code and utilise them in your C#, perhaps providing a nice simple way of integrating and introducing functional F# code into your traditional C# projects
• How to create your own virtual machine. - ‘icemanind’ shares a tutorial on CodeProject which looks at how you can create a virtual machine written in C#, providing an interesting insight into how virtual machines are implemented and work
• To Brace or not to Brace in C# ifs and other Constructs - Peter Kellner asks one of the great coding style questions of all time, ‘do I have to use braces with that?’

Community

• Community For MVC.Net - Mid Oct Live Meeting - Tonight (UK) sees the Community for MVC.Net have their mid October live meeting. This meeting starts at 12 noon CST, which makes it early evening here in the UK. The speaker this time round is Jimmy Bogard talksing about testing the UI

Software

• Announcing Visual Studio 2010 and .NET FX 4 Beta 2 - Soma Somasegar announces the latest evolution in .NET4 / Visual Studio 2010, the Beta 2 release. This release is currently available to MSDN Subscribers, and will become generally available to the general public on Wednesday. More details on this to be found in today’s special .NET 4 / Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 section below
• ReSharper Early Access Program - JetBrains have made their first publicly available nightly build of Resharper 5.0. This is pre-release software, and the first release at that, so its likely to be a little shakey, but will be interesting to see what they have planned. Currently this seems to be a VS2008 only release
• IIS Media Services 3.0 Released - BillS IIS Blog has the lowdown on the newly released IS Media Services . This free download plugs into Windows 2008 / 2008R2 and provides a means of delivering true HD video streams with real time monitoring. Also available is teh Smooth Streaming Player Developer Kit which supports the video streams in Silverlight
• Sync Framework 2.0 Available for Download - LarenC of the Sync Framework team highlights the release of Sync Framework 2.0. This release builds on the previous version, making it easier to achieve more complex scenarios and extends the number of built in data providers to support more data sources.
• SharePoint 2010 - Yesterday also saw the announcements of SharePoint 2010 at the Sharepoint Conference. This post details a number of the new features that will be included. My blog won’t be offering much coverage of Sharepoint as its not a technology I work with, however for those wanting more information Arpan Shah has gathered links to a few suitable resource sites in his Welcome to SharePoint 2010 post
• Silverlight (and WPF) Data Visualization classes unsealed [Silverlight Toolkit October 2009 release now available!] - ‘Delay’ highlights the release of the October 2009 Silverlight Toolkit, whos most significant feature is support for Visual Studio 2010, along with common drag-and-drop support for Silverlight within the browser following the WPF API
• Migrating ASP.NET MVC 1.0 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 - Eilon Lipton shares a useful tool which converts Visual Studio projects from ASP.NET MVC 1 to the ASP.NET MVC 2.0 Preview 2

Information

• Mapping From IDataReader/IDataRecord with AutoMapper - Jan Van Ryswyck talks about the use of a patch he submitted for AutoMapper which allows mapping to and from data readers meaning you can easily remove a lot of boilerplate mapping code in those situations too.
• .NET Reflection: The untouchable? No, not at all. - Vikas Burman talks about how the ‘Reflection is slow’ argument that may developers have as their default view point can mean that you miss out on a lot of powerful functionality
• Dynamic lookup operator, aka duck typing in F# - Laurent Le Brun talks about duck typing in F# using the Dynamic Lookup Operator
• .NET Hang Case study: The danger of locking on strings - Tess Ferrandez shares more of her debugging wisdom with a look at an interesting problem you can encounter if you lock on strings in your application, offering some advice for the best way to do locking
• C# Frequently Asked Questions : Dynamic in C# 4.0: Creating Wrappers with DynamicObject - Alexandra Rusina looks at how you can create wrapper class functionality using DynamicObject in .NET 4
• My History of Visual Studio (Part 10, final) - Rico Mariani closes out his Visual Studio Series of posts with a look at the innovations in the Visual Studio 2010 release
• How to render the same template on the server and client with minimal redundancy - Tales from the Evil Empire - Bertrand Le Roy digs deeper into the templating support of the Microsoft Ajax Library, and shows how you can minimise the duplication between Server-side and client-side templates.
• What is this thing you call ‘thread safe’? - Eric Lippert looks into what is meant by Thread Safety, giving a basic introduction to the key concepts involved
• F# October 2009 CTP/Beta2 - F# + Rx Together At Last - Matthew Podwysocki talks about the new F# release which brings together F# and the reactive framework for the first time. This release is available as a part of the VS2010 Beta 2, and also as a standalone CTP release against VS2008

Community

• ScottGu Manchester Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Video - Mike Taulty shares the video footage from the Guathon event held in Manchester last month. This post contains the footage of Scott Guthrie’s talks on Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4, and ScottGu Manchester Silverlight Video contains the video for Scott’s Silverlight talk

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Beta 2 Release

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 - Scott Hanselman gives a good general overview of what is new in the Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 release covering the key enhancements to the product
• VS2010 Beta 2 Installed on a Previous Beta 1 System - Sam Gentile shares a few details on uninstalling the previous Beta 1 build of Visual Studio 2010
• WF4 Changes Between Beta 1 and Beta 2 - ‘mwinkle’ talks about the changes made to Workflow between the .NEt 4 Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases
• Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Videos Galore - Lisa Feigenbaum shares a barage of Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 resources including a good number of videos on the new features of the languages and IDE
• VS2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 Announced! - Elisa Flasko gives the lowdown on what is new in Beta 2 for data access, covering Entity Framework and ADO.NET
• ‘First-time Experience’ with Arch Tools - ‘camerons’ shows off some of the new Architecture related features of Visual Studio 2010
• Visual Studio 2010 beta 2: a quick web tour - Pietro Brambat explores the Web development features of VS2010 looking at ASP.NET WebForms, Silverlight 3 and ASP.NET MVC 2
• F# in Visual Studio 2010 Beta2 is now available ( plus matching F# CTP Update for VS2008) - Don Syme talks about the inclusion of F# in the Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 Beta 2 release.

• Announcing Microsoft Ajax Library (Preview 6) and the Microsoft Ajax Minifier - Scott Guthrie announces the release of the 6th preview release of the Microsoft AJAX library, and the availability of the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. Preview 6 contains improved jQuery integration, a new Client-side script loader, and improved syntax for creating client controls. The Minifiier works by re-formatting and re-writing your JavaScript so it is smaller to transfer.
• Now Available: The IIS 7.5 Application Warm-Up Module - ‘thomad’ shares the news of the release of IIS 7.5 Application Warm Up Module which helps improve the performance of those first hits of an application by starting up worker processes before a request arrives
• One step toward becoming a Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcut Ninja - ShortcutVisualizer Visual Studio Addin - Greg Duncan highlights the ShortcutVisualizer Visual Studio Add-in which allows you to press keyboard shortcuts and find out what they do

Information

• Entirely unobtrusive and imperative templates with Microsoft Ajax Library Preview 6 - Bertrand Le Roy explores the newly improved Microsoft Ajax Library Templating support from preview 6, showing how the new imperative style makes life easier
• Using the New Microsoft Ajax Minifier - Stephen Walther digs deeper on the newly release Microsoft Ajax Minifier, showing how you can include the minifier in your build process via command line tool or Visual Studio build task
• T4 template consuming a WCF service - Abhijeet Patel shows an interesting technique for working with an un-friendly web service interface by combining WCF with T4 Templating to create a means to converting a web service dictionary response to a structured class.
• Test Review: MEF - Roy Osherove takes a look behind the tests of another well known project offering his critique of test of the Managed Extensibility Framework (20 min video)
• NHibernate Shards: Progress Report - Ayende gives an update on the progress being made on the NHibernate implementation of Sharding which allows your entities to seamlessly be stored in multiple databases / servers and be brought together by the library for use in your code without you even knowing.
• Inversion Of Control, Single Responsibility Principle and Nikola’s laws of dependency injection - Nikola Malovic offers up and discusses a set of rules for Inversion of control use and how to spot when you may be violating the Single Responsibility Principle
• MSDN.COM Refresh! - Lisa Feigenbaum highlights the newly released design refresh of the MSDN content pages. This redesign has been featured before on the Morning Brew, but has now gone world-wide and been applied to all the MSDN dev centres
• Introducing the Documentation tab for CodePlex projects - Sara Ford talks about the latest release of the CodePlex Software which powers the CodePlex site. This release brings about a new tab in the User Interface allowing documentation to be specifically located for each project.
• My Logic Is Undeniable : Why Not ICloneable<T>? - ‘chrimart’ talks about the possibility for a generic IClonable interface exploring some of the limitations of generic interfaces along the way
• My History of Visual Studio (Part 9) - Rico Mariani wraps up his series of posts on Visual Studio for the time being with a look at the post Whidbey to Visual Studio 2010 time frame
• SlimList - ‘aspdotnetdev’ shares an implementation of List which consumes less memory, and explores the related algorithms to show how it is achieved in this Code Project Article
• Coding: Role based interfaces - Mark Needham discusses how you can support different user interfaces for users in different roles using the MVC pattern
• Is Functional Abstraction Too Clever? - Keith Dahlby questions if a more functional style of code is sometimes too clever following on from a Stack Overflow question which he proposed a functional style answer. K. Scott Allen continues the discussion with his post What’s Wrong With This Code (#23).

• Microsoft SharedView 1.0 RTM/RTW - Greg Duncan highlights the RTW release of Microsoft SharedView, an easy to use screen sharing utility that allows up to 15 other people to view what is going on in your screen
• Pex 0.18 Released: New Tutorials, Moles work with Visual Studio 2010 - Nikolai Tillmann talks about the release of Pex 0.18, a maintenance release fixign bugs and refining features. Significant in this release is support for Moles in Visual Studio 2010, and a number of new tutorials to help you get under-way with Pex
• T4MVC 2.4.04 update: MVC 2 support, new settings, cleanup, fixes - David Ebbo makes a blog announcement about some of the recent improvements in his ASP.NET MVC Templates project T4MVC. This latest release includes support for ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 and improved output code quality

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Scripts Available on Microsoft CDN - Phil Haack announces the inclusion of the ASP.NET MVC 1 common JavaScript files on the Microsoft Javascript CDN, meaning you can get the benefit more caching, additional hostnames (to allow more stuff to load concurrently) and the geographic distribution of the CDN to help your page loads
• A generic way to find ASP.NET ClientIDs with jQuery - Rick Strahl shares a technique which can allow you to get the correct Id in your client side code using JQuery and ASP.NET Web forms
• Thoughts on Choosing an ASP.NET MVC Book - David Hayden gives a quick summary of the 6 most common ASP.NET MVC books available today, along with links to other reviews of each book
• More missing LINQ operators - Jimmy Bogard shares a few more ideas on methods that could be included in Linq but aren’t, along with shareing a simple test for each, and an extension method implementation.
• F# First Class Events – Composing Events Until Others - Matthew Podwysocki returns to F# First Class Events one more time to look at an implementation of the until event combinator which fires events until another event fires.
• There’s Only One Thing You Can Learn From Code Coverage - Davy Brion talks about the concept of code coverage as a metric, and argues that the only meaningful thing that can be derived is that when code coverage is low you have a problem
• Required Validator For NHibernate Validators - Scott Kirkland talks about the NHibernate Validators project, and shares the details of implementing a new validator to provide required field validation.
• CLR Team Blog : Automatically Capturing a Dump When a Process Crashes - Anton Tykhyy of the CLR Team show how you can configure the Just In Time Debugger to grab dumps as the process you care about crashes allowing you to be guaranteed good crash debug information with the minimal hassle
• Gtk# for .Net Developers, part II - Louis Salin continues his series on GTK development from a .NET background with a look at the form layout capabilities of GTK
• As Timeless As Infinity - Eric Lippert move onto a large concept, that of infinity, looking at how infinity is represented in the hardware and how you can end up with infinity as a result of your calculations

• Updated CTP for SQL Azure Database includes complete feature set for PDC 2009! - The SQL Azure Team announce the release of their latest CTP edition of SQL Azure. This is the feature set they will be taking to PDC, now including support for bulk inserts, firewalling, further TSQL support. This release has also been deployed on bigger hardware, and all existing users should have access to this new release.
• PowerCommands for Reflector 1.3 and Introducing Query Editor - Jason Haley has issued another update to his Reflector PowerCommands, taking the total commands to 26, and introducing two new commands, the simple sounding Open, and the more complex Query Editor which lets you write queries in C# Linq to locate types, members etc.
• Releasing psake v1.00 & psake v2.00 - James Kovacs announces the latest revision of his Powershell based build tool, 1.00 is the same as the 0.23 release, which targets Powershell 1, and 2.01 is PowerShell 2 targeting. This tool allows you to utilise the power of the PowerShell scripting language for automating your builds

Information

• SQL Azure Now Feature Complete for PDC 2009 Release - Roger Jennings has a whole host of additional information about the latest SQL Azure CTP release. If Azure is something you care lots about, be sure to subscribe to Roger’s blog as his primary focus is Azure / Cloud technology.
• TechnicalDebtQuadrant - Martin Fowler discusses the concept of Technical debt, and looks at classifying it into four regions on a grid of deliberate to inadvertent combined with reckless to prudent, and explores the further analogies based on this financial metaphor
• The Application Architecture Guide 2.0 Is Here! - David Hill highlights the completion of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Application Architecture 2.0 Guide. This is a significant update to the previous edition, and is available now on MSDN. Printed copies will also be available in the near future.
• View Source Tutorial: Sticky Notes With HTML5 and CSS3 - Ajaxian starts what could be a very interesting series titled ‘View Source’ which will b looking under the covers of sample applications, websites and applications looking at how they work. This post looks under the hood of the Webkit sticky notes demo and uncovers some CSS3 and HTML5 in use.
• My History of Visual Studio (Part - Rico Mariani presses on with his personal history of Visual Studio, with this post which talks about some of the CLR changes which were introduced for the Whidbey(2005) release
• There Can Be Only One. Or Two. Or Three, but Never Four. - Dylan Beattie shares a useful snippet of code which allows you to easily restrict the number of instances of an application you allow per machine.
• The Gradual Development Paradigm - Ivo Manolov discusses practice of delivering little features more often rather than huge chunks of a system in one go, highlighting how this makes it much easier to tell if things will be delivered on time or not, complete with some probability maths to support.
• LOGPARSER #0: Get started with logparser - Anders Lundström shares a 15 part series on using the LogParser library to write queries against log files to extract useful information. Anders’ posts look at IIS HTTP logs, with queries to help trouble shoot 500 errors, identify slow pages, etc.
• WeakReferences, GCHandles, and WeakArrays. - Paulo Zemek explores the .NET Framework’s Weak References, and GCHandles support looking at what they are and what they are useful for, along with looking at the construction of a WeakArray type.
• Performance Counters Added to MassTransit - Chris Patterson talks about the adding of performance counters to the Mass Transit Service Bus project to provide statistics about how the bus is performing to make problem identification easier
• StructureMap with Named Instance and With Method - Steve Michelotti looks at using named instances with StructureMap to work around a dependency which conditionally needs a boolean constructor passing in different situations

Community

• UK Imagine Cup - Calling all problem solvers! - The UK Academic Team at Microsoft announce the 2010 Imagine Cup, a competition for Students which sets a number of real world problems for them to solve with technology. This is a world wide competition with the Final this year being held in Warsaw Poland.