C# Cup of T Mug

I must have one of these…

Windows 7 has been released to manufacturing

News from the Windows blog here.

Testing ASP.NET MVC Routes with MVC Contrib

I am starting to make some progress with my side project that I am building out using ASP.NET MVC and SubSonic 3.

That said testing routes is something that I am not doing at the moment but has been nagging away at me especially when the application gets to a decent size.

Well it seems that the MVC Contrib project has something that can help me out here (via a tweet from Dave Bush).

WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2 0 - Sample application

The chaps over at MSDN have released a sample application built with ASP.NET and the WCF Rest Starter Kit Preview 2 that consumes search, maps and social networking api’s in a RESTful manner.

"Litware Training" - Sample Mashup App built with WCF REST Starter Kit

iPhone Development Introduction Video

A good intro video from the ALT.NET chaps that goes into Objective-C and interface builder

Mono links

The Mono Migration Analyzer (MoMA) tool helps you port existing .NET applications to the mono framework.

Mono Tools for Visual Studio allows you to port .NET applications to Mono and Linux without leaving Visual Studio.NET. However this is in private beta at the moment…

ELMAH – Logging Framework

Just stumbled across the Error Logging and Handlers for ASP.NET framework  that is a logging framework for .NET that can be dropped into an already running website without the need for re-compilation or re-deployment.

Looks fantastic. This is going into my side project as well!

Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader to finally come to the UK – and by Christmas?

So say the register… That’s my Christmas present sorted then :)

PhotoView – Reference application for developing for Windows 7

This sample application also named XP2Win7 from Microsoft shows off some of the following Windows 7 specific features:

• Windows Search
• UAC
• Scheduled Task
• Windows 7 Taskbar Integration
• Transactional File System
• IO Optimization
• Event Tracing for Windows (ETW)
• Microsoft Management Console
• Windows 7 Libraries
• Windows 7 Sensor and Location Platform
• PowerShell
• Preview Handler
• Aero Glass
• Trigger Start Services

Download it here

S#arp Architecture 1.0 RTM

The Sharp Architecture ASP.NET MVC and NHibernate framework has reached an important milestone.

Some cracking work has gone into this project and it’s a project that I have blogged about before.

Here are some of the improvements in this release (lifted straight from the Billy’s blog post):

• Compatible with ASP.NET MVC 1.0

• All upgraded dependencies including NHibernate 2.1 CR 1

• We now have a community site at http://www.sharparchitecture.net, still a work in progress (a flippin' ginormous thank you to Kyle Baley for setting this up)

• S#arp Architecture documentation may now be found at http://wiki.sharparchitecture.net, still a work in progress (a huge thanks to Joe Lowrance for migrating the docs)

• Strongly typed action link for areas (SharpArch.Web.Areas.ActionLinkForAreas<> and BuildUrlFromExpressionForAreas<> - thanks Brad Buhrkuhl!)

• Fluent NHibernate now using configuration classes

• (Re)Introduced support for IIS 7 integrated mode

• Support for WCF has been added as SharpArch.Wcf for server support and SharpArch.WcfClient.Castle for auto-closing of the connection on the client (thanks Frank Laub!)

• SharpModelBinder has been introduced for much better form binding, including support for all association types; e.g., one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-one Entity associations

• Support for multiple databases outside of WCF communications (thanks Russell Thatcher, David Longnecker, James Broome and Howard van Rooijen for suggestions and input!)

• A CI home at http://teamcity.codebetter.com/overview.html (thanks Kyle and Simone!),
• Updated compatibility with the latest T4 Toolbox for a much faster and stable CRUD Scaffolding generation experience

Top Stuff.

Subsonic simple repository and auto migrations

Rob Conery has posted a video and a blog post explaining one the cooler features of the new Subsonic 3.0 ORM product which is the Simple Repository that can also create the database schema on the fly as you drive out the domain model of your application.

I think this has pretty much convinced me to use subsonic in the side project I am working on alongside GIT and Kanban.

Entity Framework 4.0 – Supports POCOs

Not really been keeping an eye on Microsoft’s Entity Framework as I think that earlier versions didn’t really support the notion of persistence ignorance and Plain Old C# Objects.

That seems to have changed in the upcoming version 4.

Still not convinced that the Entity Framework is going to any better than some of the other ORM’s out there. That said I am still sore from having to work with the typed Dataset visual designer from Microsoft in earlier versions of Visual Studio…

MonoTouch – C# and .NET applications that run on the iPhone

How cool is this?!

Kanban agile project management

Today at the Gym I caught up with some podcasts and listened to Hanselminutes Podcast 170 – Kanban Boards for Agile Project Management with Zen Author Nate Kohari.

This approach to lean management of software projects is very interesting and differs from the SCRUM time boxed approach that I have worked with before.

I have decided to give this approach a go with a side project I have been meaning to work on and have signed up for the free account over at the Zen Project Management site.

For a bit more of an overview on Kanban head over to James Shore’s overview on Kanban systems.

Various links to some interesting articles

Build Better Data-Driven Apps With Distributed Caching

A good article on MSDN on using the pre-release version of Microsoft’s Velocity distributed caching framework

IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit Beta

A beta toolkit installer from the IIS.NET website that could help website’s search engine optimization.

Web Site Improvements Using jQuery and jQuery UI

The fifth instalment of a multipart article series on ASP.NET that covers some code examples and videos about improving a site with some jQuery magic.

Free eBook on developing with the Microsoft Stack

http://devshaped.com/files/developersdevelopers.pdf

SubSonic 3.0.0.2 released.

Looks like Rob Conery is squashing bugs and releasing versions pretty quickly!

Video of Scott Guthrie on ASP.NET MVC in Reading

Mike Ormand has uploaded the videos for the ASP.NET MVC session that I went to in Reading the other week.

Scott Guthrie at Vista Squad on ASP.NET MVC Part 1 - mike ormond - Channel 9

Scott Guthrie at Vista Squad on ASP.NET MVC Part 2 - mike ormond - Channel 9

Windows 7 RTM to be released on MSDN on Monday?

I hope all these are true as I have been holding off installing the time restricted beta’s and release candidates in favour of installing the real thing…

Windows 7 rumoured to be ready for RTM
Reports: Windows 7 heads to RTM July 13
Will Windows 7 be finalized next week?
Windows 7 Moves to Next Phase on July 13

Git!

I mentioned in my last post about BBC’s Glow framework source code being hosted with Git/GitHub.

Well Rob Conery the creator of the excellent ORM Subsonic has posted a blog post and video on how to get started with the Git version control system.

BBC Glow JavaScript framework released.

Surprisingly the BBC have released an open source JavaScript library called Glow.

The difference between this and other JavaScript libraries is that the BBC’s library looks like it supports older or ‘Level 2’ browsers.

Source Code
Documentation
Demo’s

On a side note the BBC are using Git and GitHub to host the source code. I really must have a play with Git as a source control provider.

SubSonic 3.0 released

The excellent open source ORM from Rob Conery who now works for Microsoft has been released.

Fluent NHibernate and Linq2NHibernate

Just read a good example of using the Fluent NHibernate project to map your POCO classes to the database design via a fluent interface rather than the standard mapping xml files.

Another quality Code Project article.

JSON Web Services and accessing them via jQuery

Continuing with jQuery day I have just read another cracking post that explains how to create a JSON web service that returns JSON formatted data and finally call the JSON web service with jQuery.

Excellent stuff.

Today is jQuery day!

The more I use jQuery the more I like it but one thing that would really help is intellisense in Visual Studio. Well that is actually possible it seems after reading a really helpful post that explains how to actually make that happen.

The same guy that wrote that post (who’s RSS feed has now been added to my every expanding Google Reader subscriptions list) has also written a cool post that explains how to use jQuery to give tables the striped alternating row colour effect known as zebra striping.

Its a technique I have used with both server side C# or JavaScript in the past but jQuery cuts down the amount of code to a couple of lines of JavaScript.

Another good read is a post on how to create the share a page with various social networking sites such as facebook or digg etc. This excellent tutorial again uses jQuery to achieve this.

Scott Guthrie - ASP.NET MVC Special Event

I’m off to Microsoft in Reading on Friday to see the ASP.NET MVC session by Scott Guthrie. Fantastic stuff!

Still 86 places available as well….