The Morning Brew

Software

Graffiti 1.0 Released - Telligent release Graffiti CMS, with free licenses (3 users) for not for profits, and commercial licenses starting at $399

Rhino Mocks 3.4 Released - Oren Eini (Ayende) announces the release of version 3.4 of this mocking framwork - and is already planning 3.5

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IoC and the Unity Application Block - Matthew Podwysocki gives an introduction to Unitiy, the Microsoft IoC project

Unity Application Block Feb 2008 CTP - Kurt Claeys ports a Spring.NET example to Microsoft’s IoC CTP

Application Architecture, Software Development Frameworks, ORM, MVC/P and the Holy Grail - Part 1 - Tim Huffam talks about some of the key technology decisions that need to be made before you start any project

The custom MSBuild task cookbook - A step by step guide to building custom MSBuild Tasks, with lots of screenshots

Data Caching Using Custom Attributes - An example of how you can cache method calls based on attributes specifying the cache settings

A tale of Parallel.For in ParallelFX - A real comparison of parallel and non-parallel code doing matrix multiplication, including some of the pitfalls

SQL: If Exists Update Else Insert - Jeremiah Clark gives a good tip on making the Save stored procedure a little more efficient

Kigg - A Digg like application developed in ASP.NET MVC - Kazi Manzur Rashid has been busy building a sample application for the .NET MVC framework - using MVC, LINQ to SQL, ASP.NET Ajax, VSTest and NUunit, and Rhino mocks - along with powering a live site it certainly looks worth a look.

Sound of one man testing - Derik Whittaker talks about the effect of having one person doing TDD within a non TDD team

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Weekends always fly past too quickly

Software

ReSharper 4.0 Nightly Builds Available! - JetBrains announce the availability of nightly builds of ReSharper 4.0

Microsoft releases Unity, an IoC library - Chris Brandsma talks about Microsoft’s new IOC library - Unity - and gives an introduction to the concepts and competing products.

Enum Utilities - A library to make working with Enums a little more pleasurable

EfTidyNet :- Dotnet Wrapper for Tidy library - .NET port of a COM wrapper for TidyLib - a HTML tidier library

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.NET to C++ Bridge - An interesting article talking about the C++/CLI wrapper class method of calling managed code from unmanaged code

Fully Customizable Random Password Generator - Keyvan Nayyeri gives an implementation of a password generator.

Exploring GDI+ : Using The Brush - Amr Elsehemy covers the Brush classes available in the .NET Framework

Does Your Code Pass The Turkey Test? - Jeff Moser talks about the Turkey Test - a great article on the considerations you need to make to internationalise your applications.

Open XML Formats : Binary Documentation (.doc, .xls, .ppt) and Translator Project Site are now live - Brian Jones announces that Microsoft have opened up the documentation on the binary document formats for Word, Powerpoint, Excel and Office drawings, along with supporting technologies. This is great news for everyone - at last other programs will have good Office file compatibility

NHibernate in Visual Web Developer Express - Derek Fowler talks about getting NHibernate working in Visual Web Developer projects

WiX toolset on SourceForge marked Production/Stable. - Rob Mensching announces that the WiX toolset can now be considered stable

Eliminating obscure tests - Just because you have lots of test coverage doesn’t necessarily mean those tests are good. Obscure tests don’t help preserve the ‘Tests as Documentation’ ideal of TDD

Database Development: Table Structure Changes - Kenneth Downs talks about managing table schema changes during development

How to Create File Optical Images using IMAPIv2.0 - Sample Managed code to create ISO using the IMAPI v2 interfaces in Vista, and XP/2003

Building Domain Specific Languages in Boo: Available for early access - Oren Eini (Ayende) announces the availability of the first few chapters of his book

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Software

Hey Admins! Taking some of the pain out of analyzing perfmon captures. - Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) tool looks like a really useful tool for those of us who spend time looking at performance problems.

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Quick Tip: Failing Your Builds Based On Coverage Data - A quick NCover tip in video format - Failing the build on code coverage sounds a little harsh, but could be a useful trick.

Do .NET 2.0 SP1 Binaries Fail Without SP1 - Paul Wilson talks about a possibly scary problem with Serialisation and .NET 2.0 SP1. There is some good value in the comments too

Understanding IoC Container - Sean Feldman gives an introduction to how IOC works with lots of code samples

Does the order of columns in an index matter? - Some simple samples that explain a little pf how indexing works in databases - It always surprises me how many developers know so little of this kind of thing

Quick Attach and Detach Debugger - An interesting use of VS macros for manipulate the .NET debugger, and attach to specific process

Ruby Has Ranges, and So Does C# - Ranges seem to be a Ruby feature people get very excited about - this short piece shows how similar effects can be obtained in C# and F#

Getting over the TDD hump - A discussion of the process of introducing TDD

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I came up a little short on links again this morning - perhaps its time to widen the net again

Software

Announcing NCover 2.0.4 - The NCover team announce a bugfix release of their code coverage tool

Information

Mocks are a code smell - I think the title of this piece is a little misleading - this is a very interesting article by Greg Young about sending messages rather than calling methods

Andrew Arnott : Why double-clicking on an .SLN file doesn’t always launch Visual Studio - When the version detection goes wrong, soetimes you have to give it a helping hand

How to disconnect UI and Data in WPF (CachedObservableCollection) and some updates regarding ThreadSafeObservableCollection - Tamir Khason talks about delaying collection refreshes

Whois Client with .Net - A nice code sample demonstrating how to obtain whois information for a domain

Code Access Security, LinkDemand and Effective Sandbox - Thottam R. Sriram gives some more indepth information on CAS - this time testing LinkDemand

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Things seem to be a little quiet, so not a lot to report today…

Software

FastSharp - Write it, Execute it - Matthew Manela shows off his quick code testing utility which allows you to quickly run a few lines of code. This looks like a light weight version of snippet compiler, and I can see it being very useful

Information

Video.Show 1.0 Released to Web - Tim Sneath announces the availability of a Ready to Run solution for creating a video based website.

Computer Measurement Group offers past papers to the public! - Rico Mariani points to lots of freely available performance related papers - there looks to be a lot of interesting information in these, I’ll have to find a bit of time to read a few.

Building an MVP Framework for .NET. Part 3: Designing a Windows Forms Views Engine. - Part three of this series looks at the construction of winforms UI

Project White: Automated UI Testing - Ben Hall goes on a voyage of exploration with Project White for testing Winforms UI

Adventures in F# - F# 101 Part 1 - Matthew Podwysocki starts an introductory series on F# - looks like a good place to start if you havn’t seen much about F# before

ASP.NET MVC Framework Road-Map Update - ScottGu reveals the plans and features of the forthcoming ASP.NET MVC framework preview

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Information

Why I Love being a Software Developer - Derik Whittaker talks about why he loves his job

Lock Down SQL Server 2005 - A good rundown of the steps involved in making Sql 2005 nice and secure

CRUD operations in Siverlight using ADO.NET Data Service - I first came into contact with ADO.NET Data Services (Project Astoria) last year at a VBUG talk but since then I’ve not heard much about it. This article talks about how you can use it from Silverlight

Building an MVP Framework for .NET. Part 1: The Basics of MVC and MVP - A new series which covers building an MVP framework - this first part introduces the concepts of MVP/MVC

Building an MVP Framework for .NET. Part 2: Implementing Core Functionality - And part two of this series continues with the core MVP functionality

Is ORM a Dead End? - An interesting discussion of the differences between the Object Relational Mapping Domain Driven Design methods vs Relational Data Model.

Use Custom Generic Collections Rather Than Generic Lists in Public API - Keyvan Nayyeri talks good sense about not using Generic Lists as part of a public API

jQuery Intellisense in Visual Studio - One of the fixes in the VS2008 rollup allows for intellisense for jQuery (pre hotfix it couldn’t parse jQuery), and Rick Strahl talks in length about this, and Javascript intellisense in general

Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit - A pointer to a free Microsoft Training Kit for VS2008 and .NET 3.5 which was released back in November

Hang caused by GC - XML Deadlock - An interesting analysis of a particular (now hotfixed) problem with the Garbage Collection - if huge stack traces scare you, this one isn’t for you

Pimp my ASP.NET web application - Part One - Phil Winstanley talks about the many facets of making your ASP.NET applications perform, and also about the dangers of premature optimisation.

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No policy type posts this weekend - mainly because it was nice and sunny for the first time this year, so I went out and took some photos.

Software

SQL Editor for Database Developers - A simple yet effective SQL tool - GPL’d source code too, which is interesting too me as some of the stuff in it looks like it might be very useful for a project I’ve had on the back burner for a while

VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix Roll-Up Available - ScottGu announces the availability of a hotfix that resolves a number of performance problems in VS web development

Microsoft XSLT Profiler - A short review of the new XSLT profiler lanuched last week - its a shame it only works in Team System edition though

Microsoft Team System NUnit Adapter - Exact Magic Software, release a free NUnit addin to run Team System unit tests

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Capturing the Screen Contents in .NET 2.0 - I never knew it was this simple to take screen captures!

WPF: A Beginner’s Guide - Part 4 of n - Sacha Barber continues his series, this time covering Dependency Properties

Using delegates - a simple sample - A nice simple sample of how delegate methods can really help make your code more reusable

Who’s On First? Solving the Top per Group Problem (Part 1: Technique) - Adam Machanic reviews a few techniques to solve one of the common SQL problems.

C# 4, part 4: My manifesto and wishlist - Jon Skeet continues his series on C# 4 features with the contents of his wishlist

Start With Something Simple - J.D. Meier talks about one of my favourite principles to apply to software development

Beattie’s First Rule of Application Development - Russell Beattie talks about the most important thing in application design - make it look pretty.

Community

ASP.NET Wiki - Latest Microsoft .NET site - a wiki! Its still in beta, but already looks promising

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The end of another week - this weekend you can expect a couple of ‘Morning Brew Policy’ posts, regarding things like reviews, what I will link to, and sponsorship - most of it will be like the policies of ‘The Daily Grind’ as I think that model worked well. If you’ve contacted me directly (and I’ve not yet replied) about any of these things, I will get back to you this weekend too.

Software

.NET Mass Downloader 1.1 Released - Only a few days since its 1.0 release, John Robbins announces the release of v1.1

Information

Beware the siren of yield return - Fritz Onion talks about the bad side of yield return - and reminds us that its important to make the right choice, not just the exciting new feature choice.

C# 4, part 2: Ideas from other community members - Jon Skeet continues his series by looking at the ideas others have suggested

C# 4, part 3: Ideas from Microsoft - … and in a third part of C#4 wish list features, Jon looks at the ideas from Microsoft

Using Extension Methods in .net 2.0 - Getting extension methods in .NET 2.0 via attribute faking

WPF and Property Dependencies Part I. - The start of a series on WPF databinding and controlling control dependencies

Visual Studio 2008 Performance Issues - If you are experiencing slowness in VS2008 it looks like there is some good news in the form of a hotfix on its way

Transparent Labels in WinForms - Rick Strahl covers a few techniques to make your labels see through

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