Reflective Perspective

Software

• IronRuby 0.6 Released! - Jimmy Schementi announces the release of IronRuby 0.6, which brings further improvements to performance and Ruby compatibility, along with a bunch of new features and a return for Silverlight support
• Sandcastle Release - The SandCastle team announce the latest code release, releasing the source for the version of the SandCastle Documentation Generation tool that was used to build the VS2010 documentation

Information

• Pretty Code #1 - Building SelectListItems - K. Scott Allen launches a code beauty contest, this time looking at the most ‘pretty’ way of translating from a list of product objects into a list of SelectListItems
• Changing Windows Service Runtime Behavior with Typemock Isolator - Travis Illig talks about a rather unorthadox use of TypeMock’s Isolator product, which is typically employed as a mocking framework, but in this case is being used to change the internal behaviour of a windows service.
• HandleUnknownAction in ASP.NET MVC - Be Careful - David Hayden highlights some additional factors which might result in an action call being deemed to be an Unknown Action in ASP.NET MVC, which you may want to take into account in your HandleUnknownAction implementation
• Samples for the Undo Framework - Kirill Osenkov shares some samples for his recently released Undo/Redo framework providing a minimal implementation and a WinForms example
• Data Access Guidance Drops available - Michael Puleio announces the second public release of the Data Access Guidance from Patterns and Practices that he has been working on.
• Preventing SQL Injection Attacks with Visual Studio Team System 2010 - Habib Heydarian talks about how the Code Analysis features of Visual Studio 2010 help identify possible SQL Injection attacks in your code.
• Not blocking the UI in tight JavaScript loops - Stuart Langridge looks at a few techniques you can use to avoid locking up your users browser when your JavaScript is performing looping operations
• Firebug Network Monitoring Quick Reference Guide - Renso Hollhumer has a couple of posts on FireBug, the FireFox JavaScript (and more) debugger. This post looks in detail at the Network Monitoring aspects of Firebug, and be sure to check out his other post ‘Firebug Console Quick Reference Guide‘ for a reference of how to work with the console in FireBug
• Fluent NHibernate and Linq2NHibernate - Demo Project. - ‘emiaj’ shares a simple but complete sample to illustrate the concepts of using FluentNHibernate to easily map a domain to the database using NHibernate, and also looks at using Linq to query the model

Fun

• Looking For A Mental Challenge? Here It Is. - Jeff Blankenburg announces ‘The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever’, a 30 level puzzle aimed at software developers, geeks and nerds, and the perfect thing to while a way a few minutes on a Friday afternoon!

No Comments »

Software

• Announcing PostSharp 1.5 RC2 - The PostSharp Team announce the second release candidate release of V1.5, with 10 minor fixes ovoer the previous version, of which they consider two require testing by the community before 1.5 can be called stable

Information

• Three IIS Concepts ASP.NET Developers Should Know - K. Scott Allen highlights a video he produced for Pluralsight which aims to teach the basics of IIS websites, Virtual Directories and applications. If you are an ASP.NET Dev you owe it to yourself to know this stuff
• From NUnit to MSTest - Patrick Weibel looks at the differences between these two testing frameworks as a part of the process of moving from NUnit to MSTest
• WPF Localization Guidance Paper Posted on CodePlex - Rick Strahl announces the publication of his guidance paper on performing Localisation in WPF Applications, looking at the various different ways of achieving localisation using LocBaml and Resx resources along with some custom implementations
• The Videos for NDC 2009 are online - Jeremy D. Miller highlights the availability of the videos of sessions from the recent Norwegian Developers Conference which seems to have attracted a large number of well known speakers, so it’ll be good to watch a few sessions from it after the event.
• Reporting against a domain model - Peter van Ooijen looks at creating reports using his NHibernate backed Domain Model and the client side reporting capabilities introduced in VS2005
• Acceptance Test Engineering Guide Beta 2 Now Available - J.D. Meier announces the second beta release of the Patterns and Practices team’s Guide to Acceptance Test Engineering, a document which over 19 chapters goes through all the planning, creating, measuring and refining of an acceptance test process
• 7 July release of the new .NET Services CTP - Philippe Destoop shares some information on the forthcoming .NET Services CTP release, which includes a temporary removal of workflow services
• Small Basic : Sample of the week: Gorillas - Its great to see Small Basic recapturing (and in this case reimplementing) some of the fun that programming was back in the 8bit and Qbasic era. I was only recently talking with a number of friends about Gorillas and nibbles and the fun that could be had hacking on the source, so its good to have a modern rebuild for the next generation
• Save Some Time With The Right Testrunner - Davy Brion highlights the significant difference in test running speed between different test runners, one of the reasons why I use the NUnit runner for full test runs and the ReSharper runner for individual tests and debugging tests
• ASP.NET WebForms: Taking Back the HTML - Dave Reed takes a look at a technique you can use to get more control over the HTML created by your web forms controls

Community

• Win $10,000 in Silverlight Coding Competition - DevTopics highlights this year’s Summer Silverlight Coding Competition which is being hosted by ComponentArt, but you’ll have to get busy quickly as community voting starts on 7th July
• Win a free PDC 2009 scholarship and more by playing with your favorite .NET controls! - Telerik are running a competition for users of their .NET Controls where you can win one of two expenses paid trips to PDC 2009, along with a number of other prizes

No Comments »

Impressive thunderstorms here in Liverpool last night, unfortunately it still feels like today is going to be another warm and humid day.

Software

• Firefox 3.5: The fastest fox has landed - Ajaxian highlights the release of FireFox 3.5, a significant upgrade to the FireFox Web Browser, brining with it a number of exciting (for web developers) features including Open Video Support, GeoLocation APIs, Native JSON, etc
• Updated TDD Productivity Plug-in for Resharper - Eric Hexter announces an update to his Resharper based plugin which brings a number of useful features into the IDE for performing Test Driven Development

Information

• Some Cool Mono Announcements - Miguel de Icaza shares some more exciting news from the Mono Project, with their latest release including the Open Source Microsoft ASP.NET MVC platform integrated, along with a huge number of other announcements. Also interesting is the MonoSpace Conference a recently announced 3 day event to be held in Austin Texas in October.
• What is Unit Testing? - Justin Etheredge talks about the actual definition of a Unit test, and how it differs from many of the other types of test, and urges you to give writing proper unit tests a try on your next project
• One Public Type Per File - Chris Eargle urges us to remember one of the rules layed out in the Framework Design Guidelines book by Krysztof Kwalina and Brad Abrahams of only having one public type per code file. I have to confess that not following this rule is one of my biggest annoyances when exploring other peoples projects
• 20 Most Interesting Silverlight Tutorials - AjaxLine pulls together links to 20 varied Silverlight tutorials, ranging from line of business style applications right through to a tetris clone
• 23 features of an enterprise data access layer - Tim Stall looks at the kind of features that you need in an Enterprise Data Access layer, breaking them into must have, good to have, and Wow levels
• Running development from a RAM disk - options and products - Jeffrey Palermo continues his discussions of working from a RAM disk for performance in testing and running the test database, looking at how this can be achieved
• The Four Pillars of Maintainable Software - ‘rsriley’ addresses the 4 key pillars of development, in this Code Project article

Community

• Want to see ScottGu talk ASP.NET MVC? [UK] - Mike Ormond highlights two events this week that ScottGu (yes, the real ScottGu) is talking at in the south of the UK. The first is tomorrow on Silverlight at the London.NET User group, and the second on ASP.NET MVC is Friday afternoon at Microsoft’s Reading offices
• Alt.NET Bristol Beers #1 - Guy Smith-Ferrier shares the announcement of the first Alt.NET Beers event to be held in Bristol, UK. The First event is on Tuesday 21st July, starting at 6pm

No Comments »

Information

• xUnit.GWT - Given When Then (GWT) extension for xUnit.net - Ben Hall explores the Given When Then style BDD testing using the xUnit.Net extension
• How we do MVC - View models - Jimmy Bogard talks about the conventions surrounding View Models which his team have gravitated to on their recent ASP.NET MVC project
• CodeRush Xpress for C# and Visual Basic inside Visual Studio 2008 - Mark Miller gives a detailed rundown of the features of the Free edition of CodeRush Xpress. For a free tool it has a lot of really good and useful features
• PowerShell Scripting for Microsoft project code named "Velocity" - The Velocity Team talk about how you can use Powershell to interact and configure the Velocity distributed cache
• Never worry about ASP.NET AJAX’;s .d again - Dave Ward looks at insulating yourself and your code from the problems with JSON from different versions of the ASP.NET framework
• Understanding expression trees - Marcin Kasprzykowski gives a nice summary of Expression trees looking briefly at how they are defined, constructed and applied in code
• ASP.NET 4.0 Enhancements to Data Controls - Mike Ormond continues looking at the improvements to ASP.NET in V4 with a look at some of the improvements that have been made to the databound controls
• Don’t Create Aggregate Roots - Udi Dahan looks at applying (or not applying) agreggate roots in your service layer
• Generating Code with Visual Studio’s T4 - Michael Ceranski gives a brief introduction to useing T4 templates in Visual Studio to generate code
• New CodePlex project: a simple Undo/Redo framework - Kirill Osenkov announces a new CodePlex project which provides a generic implementation of the Undo Redo functionality via an implementation of the Command Design Pattern
• The void is invariant - Eric Lippert looks at one of the places in C#2 that supported variance, but only if your method returned a reference type. Prepare yourself for some interesting and deep discussion of the .NET type system in this post

No Comments »

Information

• Principals, Code-Behind, & View Engines - K. Scott Allen highlights his article in MSDN Magazine this month (available online) on ‘Guiding Principles for your ASP.NET MVC Applications’, along with Justin Etheredge’s piece on ‘Building Testable ASP.NET MVC Applications’
• C# 4.0 Dynamics vs. Reflection - Kevin Rohling compares the performance of the new .NET 4 Dynamics to that of Reflection and direct property access. The results aren’t really a surprise, but the interesting bit is how close the dynamic gets to the direct property
• Elegant Code Project Structure Purse Fight - Chris Brandsma posts a summary of a recent healthy discussion on the Elegant Code private mailing list looking at the great debate of how to structure your .NET Solutions
• The MVC T4 template is now up on CodePlex, and it does change your code a bit - David Ebbo releases his ASP.NET MVC T4 Template, and discusses the implementation details, along with the feedback about having the template change some of your code.
• First Chapter for my selenium book - Manish Chakravarty releases the first chapter of a book on Selenium, the Web application testing framework from ThoughtWorks
• Code Samples, Documentation, and Twitter! - The Visual Studio Editor Team are looking to engage with the Developer community, and have released a number of samples for extending the Visual Studio Editor experience in VS2010, along with releasing updated documentation, and engaging with Devs over Twitter
• Z is for… Zermatt - Jim O’Neil reaches Z in his A to Z series, with a look at the ‘Geneva’ Identity and Access management Framework, which was previously known as Zermatt.
• Real World Refactoring - Joshua Flanagan talks about a recent real world refactoring he undertook on the Docu documentation generation tool (which takes .NET XML summary files and generates nice simple HTML documentation).
• Useful VS Key Sequences/Shortcuts - Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo shares some keyboard short cuts in Visual Studio, including both the long hand keyboard shortcut and any short versions too
• Fighting Fabricated Complexity - Patrick Smacchia looks at Fabricated Complexity, the complexity of a method due to its implementation, and looks at techniques for fighting this form of complexity
• Is It Too Late To Change JSON? - Phil Haack follows on from his recent post on hijacking JSON arrays with some discussion of what can be done to browsers and the JSON standard to help avoid this type of exploit

No Comments »

Update: Corrected the post number to 377, that is what I get for rushing in the morning - thanks to Bill Craun for pointing it out.

Software

• New release of WPF Toolkit, now with charts! - Jaime Rodriguez highlights the latest release of the WPF Toolkit (June 2009 Release), with the significant new feature of Charting, along with the usual bugfixes
• Windows 7: Be first. Save half. - ’sachinp’ highlights the Windows Pre-Order introductory offer, including some substantial savings on the list prices. Restrictions do apply, and sadly (for me) this also seems to be a US only offer

Information

• JSON Hijacking - Phil Haack talks about another JSON vaulnerability which affects a wider range of browsers, giving a really nice detailed explaination of how and why it can occur.
• Linq: Beware of the ‘Access to modified closure’ demon - Frans Bouma talks about a subtle kind of bug that can creep into your linq code without you even noticing
• ASP.NET MVC Validation Refresh: Best Techniques & Frameworks - Graham O’Neale provides a simple comparision grid for a numbe of the common ASP.NET MVC validation frameworks
• Mmm, Curry - Eric Lippert takes a look at Currying in C# from the point of view of Haskell programmers
• Privacy Guidelines for Developing Software Products and Services - Microsoft share their best practices for Software Developers when it comes to protecting customer privacy as collection of guidelines which are included in the Security Development Lifecycle
• The Weekly Source Code 43 - ASP.NET MVC and T4 and NerdDinner - Scott Hanselman looks at how T4 templates can help to enhance your ASP.NET MVC applications, and takes a look at some of the work by David Ebbo on this subject
• Thread.Sleep is a sign of a poorly designed program. - Peter Ritchie talks about Thread.Sleep as a wasteful antipattern due to the expense of creating threads, the costs of keeping them alive meaning that having one do nothing deliberately is a waste
• Canned, Stubbed and Mocked Fake Objects - Sarah Taraporewalla looks at the different types of fake object you may use when testing, classifying them into three categories
• NerdDinner on Azure - ‘mpapa’ looks at getting the ASP.NE MVC Sample Application ‘NerdDinner’ up and running on Microsoft Azure platform, looking at the bits that need to be changed along the way to make it all work

Community

• VAN Meeting with Ryan Svihla on the Castle Project - Zachariah Young announces two Virtual Alt.Net Events for the Folks in the US (8pm GMT-5 start is too late for me in the UK). These events features Ryan Svihla talking on the Castle Windsor IOC Container and also Castle Monorail, ActiveRecord and Brail

No Comments »

Is anyone else getting ‘Bad Request - Request Too Long’ errors on blogs.msdn.com all the time?

Software

• YUI 3.0.0 beta 1 Available for Download - Yahoo release the first beta release of YUI (Yahoo User Interface), their JavaScript library for creating complex UI

Information

• Mind if my MVC T4 template changes your code a bit? - David Ebbo talks about a technique he discovered which allows T4 templates to modify the other code in your solutions by way of the Visual Studio Code Model API, and he asks the questions, is it alright for his templates to do this?
• It Already Is A Scripting Language - Eric Lippert follows on from his previous post about top level methods, responding to some of the comments on that post, and looking at C# as a scripting language
• New WPF 4.0 Features - A nice summary of some of the new features of WPF in .NET 4 relating to text clarity and rendering.
• Avoid Using NHibernate With NUnit 2.4.6 - Davy Brion highlights an interesting difference between NUnit 2.4.6 and 2.4.7 and how changing version helped shave a third off the build and test time for NHibernate
• Using PostSharp and log4net to Set Up Controller Logging in ASP.net MVC - Alex Cuse applies Aspect Oriented Programming using PostSharp to implement logging in his ASP.NET MVC Controllers in this walk through of his implementation
• Session Attacks and ASP.NET - Part 2 - Jason Montgomery continues looking at the security of ASP.Net sessions. This part looks at some forms authentication scenarios, and looks at what you can do to reduce the risks and what counter measures you can apply
• Moving to scenario-based unit testing in .NET - David Tchepak talks about test case organisation when writing test, looking at the common test organisation of one test fixture per class under test, and offers an alternative structure based on scenarios
• Parallel For Loops over Non-Integral Types - ‘toub’ looks at how you can use the Parallel For loop when you don’t have and int32/int64 loop variable

Community

• E-VAN - Alan Dean talking on REST (6th July 2009) - Colin Jack announces the next European Virtual Alt.Net event, to be held on 6th July

1 Comment »

A lot of video content in today’s edition…

Software

• Still on the Windows 7 Beta? - John McClelland shares a timely reminder about the expiry of the Windows 7 Beta release - only a few days before it goes into 2 hour shutdown mode.
• Velocity Administration Console - Gil Fink announces a nice little project to create a WinForms administration console for the Velocity distributed cache. I look forward to it being added to CodePlex
• A new day for DotNetNuke, 5.1 Released - Chris Hammond highlights the release of DotNetNuke 5.1, a significant improvement over the V5.0 release which fixes all the know issues introduced as breaking changes in 5.0, along with a number of new features.

Information

• Enterprise Library 5.0: Some Architecture Changes - Bob Brum talks about one of the major architectural changes that the Enterprise Library team have undertaken for the V5 release
• Vista Squad: OWASP Top 10 Security Vulnerabilities Video - Barry Dorrans highlights the availability of an extended edition of his recent UserGroup talk on security. This talks has been delivered at a few events I’ve been to, to much praise, so if you haven’t already seen it this video is worth a look
• Three Men and a Whiteboard: Windows Azure - Eric Nelson releases the second and third ‘Three Men and a Whiteboard’ videos where Eric and the two mikes talks about specific technologies, in the case of the 3rd episode Windows Azure, and in the second edition its Windows Client Technologies. The First video on MVC was great, so I’m looking forward to watching these this evening
• Managed Extensibility Framework: Part 1 - Sriharsha Vardhan takes an introductory look at the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) examining why you would want to use it, and how to go about it. Continued in Part2 which contains the example use
• AjaxView, Performance Profiling of AJAX web sites | Peli at RiSE - An interesting sounding video from Channel 9 (another for me to watch tonight) where Ben Livshits and Emre Kiciman talk about the Ajax Profiling Extensions (AKA AjaxView) which enables you to profile your client side code
• Improving performance and scalability with DDD - Gojko Adzic talks about the use of DDD in Distributed Systems, specifically the use of aggregates, looking at how they can help improve performance of your distributed system if applied correctly
• Enumerable.Except(T) and IEqualityComparer - a little help - Arnold Matusz looks at the role of the IEqualityComparer in making Linq operators work
• Microsoft forums - where they are? - Gunnar Peipman highlights the existence of official Microsoft forums for most Microsoft developer related technologies in this useful list.
• Back to Basics - Trust Nothing as User Input Comes from All Over - Scott Hanselman highlights one of the most important developer related security issues with a real world example. Never trust any input that a user or external system has been involved in….ever
• NHibernate - <natural-id/> - Ayende continues his look at all the aspects of the NHibernate Mapping syntax, with a look at Natural ID which allows you to use another column in your table as in identifier for entities (such as username in his example)

No Comments »