The Morning Brew

Software

• MSDN Library for VS SP1 (April 2007 Edition) - MSDN Library update for VS 2005 SP1. This also includes Vista developer documentation, along with updates to the Windows Driver Kit documentation, SQL Server 2005 documentation, and many others.
• Transitionals - A WPF Framework for building transitions (think Powerpoint) between UI Views. This project uses parts of the Microsoft Acropolis research project.

Information

• Hacking Visual Studio to Use More Than 2Gigabytes of Memory - Steve Harman shows how you can allow Visual Studio to use up to 3GB of RAM - A useful trick if you have a large solution
• Grow Your Own SyncRoot - An interesting article on locking - explaining why the SyncRoot property exists
• Designing With Lambdas - Part III - Sergio Pereira takes another look at using Lambdas in your API to make the code simpler.
• Improve Web Application Performance - Adnan Aman looks at web application performance - mostly common knowledge, but useful if you’ve not considered this stuff before.
• Implementing Generic Caching - An interesting article looking at how to do locking to prevent multiple generation of cache items when the generation takes a long time.
• Prefer Composition Over Inheritance - Steve Rowe looks at composition and inheritance, and explains why composition is often better
• MVC Storefront, Part 6: Catalog Completion and Initial UI - Latest instalment of Rob Conery’s MVC tutorial screencast. In this part Rob starts looking at the UI, talks a bit more about the Repository pattern and implements lazy loaded lists,

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Information

• From zero to logging with System.Diagnostics in 15 minutes - Josh Twist looks at the trace functionality provided in the .NET Framework
• Q: Is IQueryable the Right Choice for Me? - Bart De Smet looks at the IQueryable interface, and alternatives to it
• Managed Extensibility Framework - Krzysztof Cwalina talks about the creation of a new team responsible for providing extensibility within the framework products, and solicits for ideas of what to allow extensibility on.
• Making Spec# a Priority - Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at the need for Spec#
• Inversion of Control, ASP.NET MVC and Unit Testing - An interesting article on the use of IOC to help with unit testing ASP.NET MVC controllers well.
• MVC Membership Starter Kit - 1.2 - Troy Goode updates his MVC Membership Starter Kit to support the latest interim release of the ASP.NET MVC
• Microsoft presents The Ultimate Steal - If you are a student then this is another fantastic offer for you - get MS Office Ultimate 2007 for £13 for a year license, or £39 to own it be quick - only 1 day, 15hours left….
• Looking at the finalization queue - The ASP.NET Debugging blog continues from their last post on finalization by looking at the contents of the Finalization Queue
• TestDriven.Net 2.13: Support for NUnit 2.4.7 - Jamie Cansdale introduces NUnit RowTest support in TestDriven.NET
• LINQFarm: Understanding IEnumerable<T>, Part I - Charlie Calvert looks into the IEnumerable<T> interface in the first part of this LINQ series

Humour

• Extreme Patterns with Oren - Glenn Block posts a video of a discussion with Oren Eini (Ayende) where he expresses some interesting views on how you can get developers to learn about patterns

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For the first time in a long time the preparation of the Morning Brew has been accompanied with coffee - happy days

Software

• GData .Net Assembly 1.1.4.0 Released. Now .Net Framework 2, VS (2005) Templates, and support for Google Contacts - Greg Duncan highlights the availability of a new GData library which has been updated for .NET 2.0 and also has support for the Google Contacts.

Information

• Foundations of Programming - pt 7 - Back to Basics: Memory - Karl Seguin takes an in-depth look at memory - interesting reading
• A First Look At Machine.Migrations - Jacob Lewallen introduces the Rails-like migrations that are a part of his ‘Machine’ utility project.
• Keyboard Jedi on Vista x64 - James Kovacs looks at how you can change the target platform without recompiling the assembly.
• Variable Scoping in Anonymous Delegates in C# - Rick Strahl writes about Scoping within delegates, and ends up becoming more comfortable with closures in Javascript as a side effect.
• A Smarter (or Pure Evil) ToString with Extension Methods - Scott Hanselman revisits an old ToString method for displaying more information about your objects.
• CHAPTER 4: Learning and adapting - Dan Bunea continues releasing chapters of his Agile mini-book. This part looks at learning
• Test Data Builders Refined - Jan Van Ryswyck takes a look at Test Data Builders (also know as Object Mothers), and how fluent interfaces can be used for building test data.
• Understanding when to use a Finalizer in your .NET class - The ASP.NET Debugging blog talks about one of the more difficult parts of .NET, Finalization
• ASP.NET Page Life Cycle - Vital information for anyone developing ASP.NET applications - if you are not already familiar with it you really should read up on it.
• NHibernate and Castle Active Record (Part 1) - Gabriel Schenker starts a series on using NHibernate and the Castle Project Active Record implementation
• The Prism team and how we develop - Glenn Block talks a little about how the distributed team who develop Prism work, and some of their practices.
• xUnit.net Goes 1.0 and Unit Testing F# - Matthew Podwysocki, now blogging over on CodeBetter.com, talks about xUnit 1.0 and F# unit testing
• Hack: Parallel MSBuilds from within the Visual Studio IDE - Scott Hanselman moves his attention to Visual Studio in his quest to make best use of multi-core processors

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Software

• RestLess - A Simple REST Framework Part 2 - An update to this REST Framework fist posted a few brews ago. This version introduces changes to the casing of attributes, pretty URLs and changes to IRestWritable.
• TestDriven.Net 2.13: Support for Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 - Jamie Cansdale update TestDriven.NET, adding support for SilverLight 2

Information

• Stretching Type Inference - Paulo Morgado looks at Type inference in .NET 3.5/C#3, and looks at how it could be extended
• 47 ASP.NET MVC Resources to Rock Your Development - Craig Shoemaker gathers together a number (47) of excellent ASP.NET MVC related links.
• ASP.NET MVC: MVC Storefront, Part 5 - Globalization - Rob Conery continues his MVC series - In this part Rob introduces his ‘difficult’ client and looks at implementing Globalisation support.
• Interesting Extension Hack To Get Around NullReferenceException’s - Nick Berardi shows an interesting use of extension methods to help work round problems with te code bloat associated with checking nuls before you call methods.
• SQL SERVER - Better Performance - LEFT JOIN or NOT IN? - Pinal Dave reminds us that performance decisions are not always simple - the differences between the performance off these two all depends on the type of data and the type of query
• Performance impact of the readonly keyword - A look at the performance difference obtained by using the readonly keyword
• Name Those Patterns - Tony Rasa looks at the naming convertions for your implementation classes of well know patterns
• Updated ASP.NET Dynamic Data Bits Posted - Brad Abrams announces some updated samples for the recently released ASP.NET Dynamic Data feature.
• Faster Builds with MSBuild using Parallel Builds and Multicore CPUs - Scott Hanselman talks about using all (or more) of your CPU cores to increase your build performance
• Anatomy of a "Small" Software Design Change - Phil Haack talks about the complications of a ’small’ change, and tha large consequences that often follow. I like the Iceberg analogy.
• Contributing to NHibernate - Will Shaver talks about the process involved in adding features to NHibernate.

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Software

• xUnit.net 1.0 Released Today - James Newkirk announces the release of version 1 of the xUnit.net Test framework
• SvnBridge 2.0 Released! - Ayende releases version 2 of his Subversion/Team Foundation Server integration
• Linq Extensions Release 2 Now on CodePlex - Omer van Kloeten updates this project to run against the final release of .NET 3.5

Information

• Correct by Construction in F# - Jomo Fisher looks at one of the features of F# - which helps avoid null exceptions at compile time.
• Live Mesh Tech Preview - Microsoft launch a technology preview of their new cloud like services providing centralized storage across multiple devices and shared programs and live desktop.
• Live Mesh : Live Mesh as a Platform - Mike Zintel , Product Unit Manager on the Mesh and Storage Platform team, gives some more details on Mesh
• Give back to your testing framework - Yoav Sion looks at extending testing frameworks by using attributes to add Assignment, Serialization, the existence of attributes.
• Where should the ASP.NET team release stuff? - Scott Galloway summarises the current locations and then asks for advice. It is confusing that add-on parts are located all over the place - it makes finding them and keeping them up to date more difficult
• Wrong .Net Version being loaded - Sergio Pereira runs into one of the most frustrating issues with multiple .NET versions - the ‘Only One CLR per process’ problem
• ASP.NET MVC: MVC Storefront, Part 4 - Rob Conery resumes his MVC tutorial series after a break for the MVP summit. This instalment looks at data access strategies.

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The Ma.gnolia del.icio.us compatible API was down again this morning so the HTML for today’s post was prepared by hand again

Information

• Multiple Ways to do Multiple Inserts - A good overview of the many possible techniques to insert multiple records into a database.
• Convert from a MemoryStream to a string and back - A short introduction to the Memory Stream
• Programmatic Dependency Injection with an Abstract Factory - A Java based article, which applies well to a C# world, giving a sample of how you can do dependency injection using an Abstract Factory
• The Monostate Pattern - Jeremy Jarrell looks at the Monostate pattern, an alternative pattern to the singleton pattern
• Is [Serializable] == ISerializable? No! - Shahar A looks at the differences between the [Serializable] attribute and the ISerializable interface, including an example of implementing ISerializable.
• How to get Enterprise Library 3.1 working in VS 2008 - Guy Barrette highlights a fix to get the Visual Studio integration of the Enterprise Library working in Visual Studio 2008
• Nest related resources in Visual Studio - Mads Kristensen shows how he gets Visual Studio to group Usercontrols with associated JavaScript and CSS files.
• Exception Management Architecture Guide - The Patterns and Practices team release a document on Exception Management. The most up to date version of this content can also be found on MSDN
• Defining ASP.NET MVC Routes and Views in IronRuby - Phil Haack continues his DSL vs Configuration series by looking at creating ASP.NET MVC Routes in IronRuby
• Improving MoQ to allow arrange-act-assert testing style - Daniel Cazzulino looks at new functionality in the MOQ API which allows you to set up expectations and then verify them later on

Community

• ALT.NET Geek Code: Should you care about these ALT.NET guys? - Scott Hanselman gives an introduction to ALT.NET and encourges people to get involved.

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A little late this morning due to some technical difficulties

Software

• Krypton 2.8.0 Released - Component Factory announce the latest release of their Winforms ToolKit, which now includes 21 controls, 5 components and 1 form - the best bit - these controls are all free, even for commercial use.
• Windows XP Service pack 3 RTM, public release due April 29 - Glenn Slaven talks about the upcoming XP Service Pack
• VisualSVN 1.4 Released - Version 1.4 of this Visual Studio Subversion plug-in has been released
• Smart Client Software Factory April 2008 RC1 - The Smart Cleint Software Factory April 2008 RC1 release adds Visual Studio 2008 support (at the expense of VS2005 support) and can be run side by side with the May 07 release

Information

• Parallelism and CPU Affinity - Sacha Goldshtein talks about thread scheduling and common mistakes people make by not trusting the OS to schedule for them.
• .NET Installers - C# 411 has a round-up of the .NET Installer products on the market.
• Windows Live Application Based Storage API (Experimental) Windows Live Application Based Storage API (Experimental) - Greg Duncan highlights this interesting ‘cloud’ service from Microsoft to allow centralised storage of user settings.
• Not all UDFs are bad for performance. - Alexander Kuznetsov looks at the performance of User Defined Functions in SQL Server
• Retina.NET project active again - Andres G. Vettori revives an old project and looks for contributors to this ORM project.
• WPF Command-Pattern Applied - Jani Giannoudis implements the command pattern in WPF using a Rich Text Editor as the example.
• DSL Article on InfoQ - Ayende gets an article about BOO published on InfoQ
• On API Design - Ayende talks about the Rhino Mocks API, and considers his options to refine the API.

Community

• LINQ to XML - Everything but the kitchen sinq - On 10th June, in Glasgow, UK, Colin Angus Mackay will be talking on the new XML classes and using Linq (both with and without XML)
• DDD7 Date Is Set - Guy Smith-Ferrier announces the date for the Reading, UK based Developer Developer Developer conference.

• Announcing the Alt.net London Beers event - SerialSeb is organising an experimental regular meet up event for the Alt.NET Community in London

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Software

• A SQL Management Console for MSSQL 2000 & 2005, MySQL 5.0,…. - A useful looking SQL tool for working with multiple types of database. Both source and Binary releases available.
• RestLess - A Simple REST Framework - A library to help making REST web services easily

Information

• End-to-End Data Centric Application with Silverlight 2 - Brad Abrams gives a step by step guide to creating a SilverLight 2 application for managing data. Lots of steps and lots of screen shots.
• Why Unit Testing is so important? - Adil Akhter talks about the importance of Unit Testing
• Rhino Mocks Futures - Ayende gives a glimpse of what is to come in Rhino Mocks 3.5
• File Lock Issue in Visual Studio When Building a Project - Keyvan Nayyeri shows a solution for the ‘file locked’ error on build caused by the output dll being locked by another instance/program
• Dynamic Language DSL vs Xml Configuration - Phil Haack gives his view on configuration using XML files versus a Dynamic Language DSL
• Monkey Patching CLR Objects - Phil Haack looks at the Ruby technique of Monkey Patching
• LINQ to NHibernate in LINQPad - Oran Dennison looks at getting LINQ to NHibernate working in the LINQPad query editor/tester
• Writing Testable Objects - Mathew Cochran writes about creating testable objects using IOC and Dependency injection
• Digging into the Linq "let" keyword - Justin Etheredge looks at using the let keyword to make his LINQ expressions simpler
• UI Exception Handling vs. AppDomain Exceptions - Bil Simser looks at handling exceptions globally. Good resources in the comments too.

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