The Morning Brew

Well, this has been a busy week. Tomorrow I’m heading over to the first Manchester BarCamp for what I hope will be an enjoyable day. If you are a .NET Developer based in the North west of England, check out the link in today’s community section for another exciting community development.

Software

• Web Client Software Factory 2.0 shipped! - Glenn Block announces the release of the WCSF 2.0, now targeting Visual Studio 2008/.NET 3.5

Information

• Lead-Developer Compression Ratios - Larry O’Brien talks about the trade off of delegation of development work to more junior staff. Comment number 4 contains a suggestion of another way of achieving the same.
• Creating objects - round 2 - Ayende corrects a few numbers from last time, with the same conclusions
• IIS.net : Home : The Official Microsoft IIS Site - The portal site for IIS gets revamped for the IIS7/Windows 2008 era!
• EntLib/Unity roadmap - The Unity IoC library has only been about for a week or so, and in 2 weeks will be going RTM!
• To close or not to close, that is the question. - Justin Etheredge gives a well balanced argument for and against making your framework very open (protected and virtual), or close up shop (internal)
• ETL World Record! - Some interesting information about high performance Extract Transform and Load (ETL) using Sql Server Integration Services.
• The Inline SQL application - Six Months Later - Paul Stovell has an imaginary (I hope) discussion about some of the horrors of inline SQL

Community

• Liverpool .Net Users Meeting at Glow New Media (Tuesday, March 11, 2008) - Thom, myself and a few others have been discussing setting up a User group in Liverpool for .NET developers for a while now. If you are a .NET developer in Liverpool or the surrounding area this is hopefully something you will want to get involved in. The first gathering is really about meeting people and seeing what people would like to do. Email Thom if you are interested.

1 Comment »

The Microsoft ‘Heros Happen {here}’ launch events kicked off yesterday, so lots of people are talking about that. I have to wait until the middle of next month for the Birmingham, UK event

Software

• XML Pathfinder: a Visual Basic Utility - A usefult looking utility to help build XPath statements
• TypeMock Isolator 4.2 released - The TypeMock Team ship version 4.2
• Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition - February 2008 - Microsoft release the latest build of thiese resources to help build web services to best practices and patterns
• New: ShellRunas v1.0 Updates: Autoruns v9.13, Process Explorer v11.10, Sigcheck v1.52 - Updates of some old friends and a new release from the SysInternals team

Information

• Be Careful of Your Passion - David Starr talks about the dangers of getting carried away when writing the bits of an application that you find most interesting.
• Continuous Environment Validation - Some interesting thoughts on testing the environment your application is running in to ensure the best conditions for your application
• Creating objects - Perf implications - Ayende compares a few techniques for creating instances - interesting reading
• Prism is alive ! - Ohad Israeli announces Prism, a Composite UI Application Block designed specifically for WPF
• How should you layout code? - Tony Davis talks about code formatting and layout tools and best practices
• Sandcastle and API Documentation - Brian Peek shows how you can create good API documentation using SandCastle
• Common console commands for the typical ASP.NET developer - A collection of console commands to manage and work with IIS
• Retrofitting Code for the Web - Joel Ross shows how code can be refactored to make it usable in more than one situation - in this case making it possible to use on the web

1 Comment »

Today is a little short on links, I had a small internet outage which cut down the time available, and I also had a disturbed nights sleep, being work up by an earthquake so didn’t get up that early!

Software

• ASP.NET MVC Framework Scaffold Generator - Something to take the hard work out of CRUD in ASP.NET MVC

Information

• DLRScript Project - Revealed… - Jay Kimble starts talking about his latest project which helps make developers life easier by only needing 1 programming language for the whole stack - server and client side.
• Try/Catch Blocks Can Hurt Performance Significantly - The Try/Catch performance debate continues…
• Visualising the Mandelbrot set with LINQ - yet again - Jon Skeet demonstrates a slightly different use for LINQ
• What is the long-term support for the MS Deploy tool? - The IIS Team reveal the support plans for the Deployment tool released as a preview a few weeks back
• IoC and the Unity Application Block Once Again - Matthew Podwysocki covers Unity, Windsor and StructureMap in an IOC showdown.
• Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry? - An interesting piece, suggesting that we should all taste some foreign ideas from time to time.
• My Commitment To Support Silverlight 2 Developers - Jesse Liberty reveals his plans for lots of educational Silverlight content once V2 is released - Looks like we will be bombarded with tutorials, tips, videos etc - Good stuff

Community

• You can take a horse to water, you can’t make it read the terms and conditions … - Phil Winstanley reviews last night’s Liverpool Geekup event - a very interesting talk on the Law and computers. If you are in the North of England, Geekup events are well worth a look (taking place in Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds)

1 Comment »

Software

• Cacheman - a fast distributed hashtable for Windows - Sriram Krishnan announces Cacheman, a MemCached style out of process distributed cache
• DotNetOpenId 0.1.1 has been released - David Christiansen tells of the latest release of this Open ID library

Information

• Notification Services in SQL Server 2008 - Not so much… (Notification Services are gone from SQL Server 2008. Dead, gone, no more, say goodbye, etc, etc) - Greg Duncan gathers the news on the demise of Notification Services - looks like Reporting services is going to provide that functionality from now on!
• SQL Cache Dependencies - Greg Low talks about cache invalidation for the ASP.NET Cache
• Just Do it! Parallel.Do in ParallelFX - Using ParallelFX to gain performance boosts for sorting and making web service calls. There seems to be real advantages in doing this stuff!
• High-Performance Stopwatch - I usually find the built in StopWatch sufficient, however this looks like a useful tip for when it isn’t
• Writing less code: The "else" statement - A very simple code sample sparks some interesting debate in the comments. I personally only like 1 return statement per method, although for very short methods like this it seems fine
• Profiling ASP.NET Applications Running on IIS with NCover - The folks over at NCover show how you can use Selenium to test your ASP.NET site and obtain code coverage reports using NCover
• .NET 3.5 Brings BREAKING Changes to ThreadPool - Michael C. Kennedy warns of some potentially breaking changes in the ThreadPool
• TDD Considered Harmful? - The Test Driven Development (TDD) vs Plain Old Unit Tests (POUT) debate rages on. This article discusses the subversion of ‘unit testing’ resources into Test Driven Development resources

No Comments »

The big news this weekend seems to be about Silverlight 2, other than that it seems things have been quite quiet.

Information

• First Look at Silverlight 2 - ScottGu tells all about the forthcoming Silverlight 2 Beta, along with links to an 8 part tutorial on building a Digg Client using Silverlight 2
• IoC and the Unity Application Block - Going Deeper - Matthew Podwysocki continues his coverage of the Unity IOC application block - this time comparing it with Windsor
• Reviewing Unity - Ayende reviews the functionality offered by Microsoft’s Unity IOC framework
• Implementing Deep Cloning via Serializing objects - Stephen Inglish reviews the Binary Serialisation method of deep cloning objects
• Extension Methods D’oh! Moment - Pete Brown talks about a problem he had with extension methods on Color due to it being a struct
• Ayende’s Design Guidelines: Rule #1 - Ayende offers up some advice on providing alternative overloads for Generic Methods.
• Announcing ASP.NET MVC in Action (from Manning) - Jeffrey Palermo announces the availability of the first few chapters of the book he is writing with Dave Verwer and Ben Scheirman on the new ASP.NET MVC framework
• Do SharePoint Developers Want a Developer Version of SharePoint? - Bil Simser puts out feelers to see if there is a demand for a developer edition of SharePoint
• NServiceBus - Enterprise .NET Communications Framework - Udi Danan gives the NServiceBus project a shiny new website all of its own
• Version numbers in a compiled assembly - Details on using AssemblyInfo.cs/vb to add version numbers to your assemblies, and also an explanation of how Visual Studio generates build and revision numbers.

No Comments »

Software

• DSA 0.4 released! - The latest release of the Data Structure and Algorithms library adds QuickSort, Unordered Set, Heap, ShellSort, InsertionSort, RepeatedWordCount and ToBaseN.
• CI Factory 1.0.1 - Jay Flowers announces the release of the CI Factory 1.0.1, a maintenance build on the recently release V1.0.0 - which I somehow missed.

Information

• LINQ Terminology 101 for DBAs and Others Puzzled - Greg Low gives brief explanations of what the different bits of LINQ actually are.
• Automated UI Testing with Project White - Bil Simer starts playing with Project white testing a simple winforms test application
• Adventures in F# - F# 101 Part 2 - Matthew Podwysocki continues his F# Series talking about the practice of Currying
• The Art of Currying - Currying, this time in the C# World, using .NET 2.0
• Introduction to F# Active Patterns - Chris Smith reviews the F# feature known as Active Patterns.
• LINQ To SQL Samples - The official Microsoft 101 LINQ to SQL Samples in VB (Thanks for the link Simon)
• Versioning Issues With Abstract Base Classes and Interfaces - Phil Haack explains the reasoning behind the change from the IHttpContext interface to the HttpContextBase abstract bas class.
• Abstract Base Classes Have Versioning Problems Too - Phil Haack continues his discussion about abstract base classes with a part 2
• Re: Versioning Issues With Abstract Base Classes and Interfaces - Oren Eini (Ayende) follows up on Phil Haack’s discussions - talking about breaking changes to API’s and Framework Design Guidelines.

1 Comment »

Trying out some slightly different formatting of the post today - hopefully it might render better in some of the more difficult RSS Readers

Software

• P/Invoke Library - VS2005 & 2008 Add-in - A Visual Studio Add in to make it much easier to get the method signatures for P/Invoke calls.

Information

• Workflow Foundation 101 - Maurice de Beijer shows how Windows Work Flow Foundation can help with process intensive business applications
• Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes - Jakob Nielsen outlines 11 common mistakes that reduce usability.
• Writing Better Code — Keepin’ it Cohesive - Mathew Cochran shows step by step refactoring of a code sample to attempt to increase its cohesion
• Five Different Ways To Return Data From One Table Which Doesn’t Exists In another Table - Denis Gobo shows some different ways of solving the same problem - I think most developers will know the first 3, but the SQL 2005 specific ones may be new to many.
• Understanding IoC Container - Part 2 - Sean Feldman continues his series on Inversion of Control
• WPF: A Beginner’s Guide - Part 5 of n - Sacha Barber continues his series with an article on WPF DataBinding.
• Manage your ASP.NET Web.config Files using NAnt - Using Nant to create your configuration at build time, based on templates - this article will show you how, including making different configurations for different machines.
• Do try…catch blocks hurt runtime performance? - One of the commonly cited mantras is ‘Don’t use exceptions apart from in truly exceptional cases’ and here is why
• Implementing Table Inheritance in SQL Server - Inheritance isn’t just for our OO langauges, similar effects can be obtained in the database, as Jeff Smith shows in this article
• Kigg - Building a Digg Clone with ASP.NET MVC Part - 1 - The first in a series by Kazi Manzur Rashid about building Kigg using some of the latest bits of the .NET framework
• Test Supported Development (TSD) is NOT Test Driven Development (TDD) - Troy DeMonbreun talks about how a reduced set of the Test Driven Approach can still give many of the benefits.

No Comments »

Software

Nevron .NET Vision Q4 2007 Released - Nevron announce the latest release of their commercial data visualisation components

Microsoft SharedView Beta2 - This beta screen sharing software has been generating quite a buzz this week.

Information

Creating Your Own Provider Framework - Detailed run through of creating you own providers in the MS way.

Monorail Hands-On - Using MonoRail to build a sample application against the NorthWind database

Incorrect Results With Path.Combine - Hilton Giesenow demonstrates a case where Path.Combine might not do what you think it does - this is good to know, as I make quite a bit of use of Path.Combine

.NET 3.5 Client Product Roadmap - ScottGu gives an outline of the future for .NET Client Product developers

Using Localization in ASP.NET - A quick run through of using Resource files in ASP.NET applications

Tools for Digging Deeper Into .NET - A brief round up of some must have .NET tools - all well worth a look if you don’t already use them

Microsoft DreamSpark - If you are a student in one of the countries supported, this is an excellent opportunity to get full versions of Windows 2003 Server, Visual Studio Pro 2005/8, Expression studio, SQL Server Developer Edition. Its a shame I’m not a student any more - this is a great offer.

Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds) - Following the release of the Office Document specifications, Joel Spolsky reviews some of the reasons they are so complex

1 Comment »