The Morning Brew

Another large edition of ‘The Morning Brew’ today as I still have a little catching up to do from being away this week - both on technology articles and sleep

Software

• ExceptionFinder For Reflector - Jason Bock releases his latest Reflector Add-in which will find all the exceptions that a given method may throw.

Information

• Data at the root level is invalid - Mads Kristensen shows a useful tip for dealing with the strange characters due to encoding at the start of your XML files
• Source control is not a feature you can postphone to vNext - Ayende talks about the importance of being able to perform merge and source code control in the output files of developer tools
• ASP.Net MVC Framework pre- Preview 3 - A Step by Step guide to create a simple web app. - Fredrik Normén updates his article featured in yesterday’s Brew to cover the recently released ASP.NET MVC pre-preview 3 code release.
• Help! My Web Application Throws an Insane Amount of TypeLoadExceptions! - Omer van Kloeten highlights an interesting problem and offers a solution in the form of the well known @Register directive.
• WPF 3D : Part 2 of n - Sacha Barber continues his 3D programming in WPF series
• Testing a Membership Provider - Tony Rasa looks at creating an in memory Membership provider for test use.
• A fluent repeater - Adrian Aisemberg offers a method using a fluent interface to repeatedly run some code until a criteria is met.
• Searching for derived types in an assembly - Yoav Sion crafts an extension method to help with finding derived types using reflection.
• CHAPTER 3 (continued) : 3.4 Collaborating - Dan Bunea continues the gradual release of his Agile MiniBook
• A Gentle Introduction to Mocking - K. Scott Allen talks a little about his recent talk on this subject and gives some code examples.
• Pattern Matching in C# - Part 8 - Bart De Smet continues at a pace with his series on Pattern Matching, this time looking at translation of patterns into executable forms
• Designing Efficient Immutable .Net2.0 Objects - Adil Akhter looks at creating immutable objects in C#, along with the reason that you might want to do this.
• LINQPad as a Code Snippet Execution Engine - Rick Strahl takes an appreciative look at this LINQ Expression testing and visualisation tool

Community

• Introducing Stackoverflow.com - Jeff Atwood announces his and Joel Spolsky’s new Joint Venture - an ‘anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world.’. Sounds interesting to me!

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A large edition of the Morning Brew, as I try to catch up with the weeks happenings. Looking forward to getting back to normal tomorrow.

Software

• ASP.NET MVC Source Refresh Preview - ScottGu announces the latest release of source for the ASP.NET MVC framework. This is not the latest preview release, it sites between Preview 2 and 3. More details in his post.
• Updates: Process Explorer v11.13, Process Monitor v1.31, and Handle v3.31 - A few more updates to the SysInternals tools
• Prism: Fourth drop published - Ezequiel Jadib announces the latest release of the Prism WPF Composite UI Application Block, which now includes a quick start guide and numerous other changes
• Coder Journal’s MVC Toolkit - Nick Berardi releases his set of tools to help support MVC, containing a number of Action Filter Attributes, along with a view engine and additional route support- Full source and binary distributions available.

Information

• Rhino Mocks and mocking Out/Ref params - Derik Whittaker looks at mocking methods with out/ref parameters using Rhino mocks, and finds that it is quite easy!
• Adventures in F# - F# 101 Part 8 (Mutables and Reference Cells) - Matthew Podwysocki also continues is Functional Programming series on F# with a look at imperative programming constucts
• Pattern Matching in C# - Part 7 - Bart De Smet continues his trip into the functional world using C#.
• Why do ASP.NET AJAX page methods have to be static? - Dave Ward takes a look at ASP.NET Ajax page methods, and how they relate to the page class - This is a good introductory article
• Never ever synchronize threads without specifying a timeout value - Pawel Pabich gives some good threading advice.
• A NET Cryptography Primer, Part 3 - Will @ Slate Street Gang continues his Cryptography series with a look at symmetric cryptographic algorithms
• HtmlControlWapper Javascript - Jason Haley has created a simple Javascript library to help with populating fields from data in HTML prototypes
• Book review: The Pragmatic Programmer - Jan Van Ryswyck discovers the delight that is ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’ - this is a book that I really like, and believe that all developers should read it. The other books in the series are also really good.
• Greg’s Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: Interested in template based code generation? Own Visual Studio 2008? Then guess what? You already have one… Say hello to the Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4) - Greg Duncan rounds up a few resources on T4 templates. If you find this interesting and are in North West England you may want to check out the Liverpool .NET Usergroup tonight - See the community section below for more details.
• ASP.Net MVC Framework 2 - A step by step guide to create a simple Web Application - Fredrik Normén provides a step by step guide to building an application with the Preview 2 release of ASP.NET MVC
• Unhandled Exceptions - Handle them - Details of how you can catch unhanded exceptions within your application to allow you to handle them globally
• IoC Container Benchmark - Unity, Windsor, StructureMap and Spring.NET - Torkel Ödegaard compares the speed of the leading .NET IOC Container implementations.
• Guidelines aren’t rules - Jimmy Bogard talks about cases where you may choose to ignore Design Guidelines with good reason.
• Common Solutions for T-SQL Problems - A useful microsite from Microsoft showing solutions to FAQ type T-SQL issues
• Basic Memory Housekeeping (.NET Memory Management: Part 1) - The second part of this series is new, the first slightly older, however I missed it first time round. Interesting overview on memory management within .NET managed languages.

Community

• Liverpool Users of .NET at AIMES (Thursday, April 17, 2008) - If you are in Liverpool UK, or surrounding areas, you might be interested in Tonight’s .NET Usergroup meeting - A talk on T4 templates and DSL tools. You need to sign up on the Upcoming event in order to get into the building.

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Software

• PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 - An Add=in that contains a number of useful extensions to the IDE, adding things like open folder from solution explorer, Copy/Paste Class, etc
• JMPInline: C# OpenID library DotNetOpenID 2.0 released - Update to this Open ID implementation adding full support for Open ID 2.0 while maintaining support for 1.x
• Spec# for Visual Studio 2005 - Microsoft Research release version 1.0.20411 of the C# Design By Contract extensions.

Information

• How to share configuration files between projects - Derik Whittaker looks at sharing application config files between projects in a solution
• Printing PDF documents in C# - Most of us are concerned with creating PDFs but printing them from code is non-trivial
• Creating a AutoMockingContainer with Microsoft Unity - Pretty darn simple. - Roy Osherove puts together an auto mocking container implementation using the new Unity IOC Container
• Thoughts on Testing an API - Derik Whittaker thinks about testing API implementations - and comes up with some good advice.
• Pattern Matching in C# - Part 6 - Bart De Smet continues his series on Functional Programming techniques in C# - so quickly I keep missing parts!
• Problems with the MVC Framework RenderComponent helper method - Mike Hadlow looks at sone of the less nice(with respect to their own design goals) bits of the ASP.NET MVC framework
• 30K application lines + 110K testing lines: Evidence of…? - Larry O’Brien talks about the ratio of program code to test , code and if anything can be deduced from that
• Unity Community Contributions and Interception - Matthew Podwysocki recaps where he’s up to, and continues on looking at unity - covering the Unity Community Contributions and taking a look at Interceptions.

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Software

• File Hash Generator Shell Extension - A neat little code sample with a real world use - a tool to calculate the a number of different file hash codes from the Explorer context menu - full .NET source available too

Information

• Designing With Lambdas - Part I - Sergio Pereira shows how the introduction of Lambda Expressions can changes the way we can write code.
• My philosophy on using new technologies - Rockford Lhotka talks about his criteria for adoption of new technology
• Mocking Events - Aaron Jensen looks at how you can mock events using Rhino Mocks
• NonNullable Class Wrapper - An interesting wrapper to help better handle and trap null values.
• ASP.NET Performance counters missing - A tip to get back missing performance counters - a number of these things are standard fixes for when ASP.NET goes wrong
• The empty try block mystery - Siddharth Uppal highlights an interesting tip discovered by reading the .NET Framework code.

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Software

• ThreeSharp - Version 1.3 - This library for accessing Amazon S3 from C# reaches version 1.3
• SCSF April 2008 Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 Published to CodePlex - Blaine Wastell announces the availability of the latest Smart Client Software Factory alpha release - this version supports VS 2008 only

Information

• Design for Performance Up-Front? - Scaha Goldshtein muses on the topic of performance, sparking further some interesting debates
• The cost of abstraction - Ayende has three posts in this series, talking about the relative performance costs of putting operations behind an interface
• ".NET 3.5 Enhancements" Training Kit Available (Hands on Labs) - Greg Duncan notes the availability of a new training kit covering the enhancements of the .NET 3.5 Framework - topics inclde MVC, Dynamic Data, Entity Framework, and a whole host more.
• Simpler Code Add-In for Visual Studio 2008 - In support of his book, Keyvan Nayyeri shows how you can build a simple Visual Studio Add-in
• NHibernate and the Unit of Work Pattern - Gabriel Schenker looks at implementing the Unit Of Work pattern using NHibernate - with good helpings of TDD, Unit Testing and Mocking - interesting reading.
• MVC: New Membership Starter Kit Release - Troy Goode announces an update to his Membership Starter Kit based on ASP.NET MVC
• A NET Cryptography Primer, Part Two - This part looks at hashing passwords and salt generation
• TDD: The Road So Far - Rob Conery expresses more of his thoughts on Test Driven Development.- Lots of interesting comments too
• CHAPTER 3: Communicating and Collaborating - Dan Bunea continues his agile mini books series looking at communication and requirements

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Software

• xUnit.net 1.0 RC3 Released Today - Brad Wilson announces the latest Release candidate of the xUnit.net testing framework - including CruiseControl.NET and ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 support.
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data Preview Available - ScottGu breaks the news of a new preview of the ASP.NET Dynamic Data library which allows automatic creation of rich Date editing UI for ASP.NET Web Forms apps backed by LINQ to SQL or LINQ to entities
• Paint.NET v3.30 — Final release now available! - Paint.NET 3.30 goes gold - this release has a number of new features over 3.22, so looks well worth the upgrade.
• Visual Linq query builder for Linq to Sql: VLinq - Some how I managed to miss this one first time - This Visual Studio 2008 Addin allows you to construct LINQ queries in a visual way
• Json.NET 2.0 Beta 3 - Turkey Test Approved - James Newton-King announces that the latest beta of Json.NET 2.0 is culturally aware in that it passes the Turkey Test - along with a number of other fixes

Information

• Framework Design Guidelines Digest v2 - Krzysztof Cwalina releases an offline copy of the slimmed down version of the book ‘Framework Design Guidlines’
• Make the most of your test coverage data - Patrick Smacchia talks about a new NDepend feature to obtain test code coverage information
• WCF REST Configuration for ASP.NET AJAX and plain REST Service - Rick Strahl looks at WCF and ASMX web services configuration, and the best decisions for REST and ASP.NET Ajax web services.
• How to Expose Your Collections Safely - A useful reminder of the ability to expose collections safely as read only using the ReadOnlyCollection class
• Pattern Matching in C# - Part 4 - Bart De Smet continues his series on this functional programming principle in C#
• Converting the Composite Web Application Block to Unity - Clean Up ICompositionContainer - Part three of this series on changing the Composite web application block to work with Unity IOC
• Upcoming Changes In Routing - Phil Haack explains some of the changes that are being made to ASP.NET MVC’s request routing
• Putting ASP.NET Dynamic Data into Context - One Scott announces the release, another fills in the details. Scott Hanselman delves into the details of the newly released ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• The Importance of Writing the Test First - Ben Scheirman talks about TDD, with some feedback on the discussions surrounding Rob Conery’s MVC store front series.
• ASP.NET MVC: MVC Storefront, Part 3 - Rob Conery responds to feedback, and continues development with the pipes and filters pattern

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I received my recently ordered copy of Keyvan Nayyeri’s book on Visual Studio Extensibility yesterday - First impressions are good - looking forward to digging into deeper it to assist with one of my personal projects.

Software

• Json.NET 2.0 Beta 3 - Turkey Test Approved - James Newton-King announces that the latest beta of Json.NET 2.0 is culturally aware in that it passes the Turkey Test - along with a number of other fixes

Information

• InternalsVisibleToAttribute and Strong Named Assemblies Step by Step - Using specific attributes it is possible to expose the internal classes of one assembly to another - a useful technique for unit testing if you like separate projects for tests
• Prism: Third drop published - Ezequiel Jadib announces the latest release of Prism, a set of tools for developing Composite WPF applications.
• Unit Test Project Structure Poll - Phil Haack puts out feelers for how people organise and structure their unit tests.
• Entity Framework & ADO.NET Data Services to Ship with VS 2008 SP1 & .NET 3.5 SP1 - The ADO.NET Team announce when two of the big post release 2008 features will ship - sort of.
• Unit Test Projects or Not? - Bil Simser responds to a Phil Haack post about the organisation of unit tests.
• Functional programming - Is it worth your time? - The Wandering Glitch looks at the reasons to look into Functional Programming.
• Soft Deletes - The NHibernate FAQ Blog shows how you can implement deletes via a deleted status rather than removing the record from the DB using NHibernate
• Unity 1.0 EventBroker Sample CAB Style - Scott Nichols highlights the Event Broker that comes with Unity and shows how you can integrate it with your applications.
• How to: Use strings in a secure manner with SecureString class - An oft forgotten .NET 2.0 Framework class to allow you to store strings in memory more securely.

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This morning’s Morning Brew has been plagued by technical difficulties - First FireFox, next my utility for assembling the post, and now my laptop battery is about to run out - so I’m dreading what else will go wrong today.

Software

• Announcing the Community Server 2008 Release Candidate! - The well known blogging and community platform, Community Server 2008, moves to release candidate
• Web Client Development Download Day from Microsoft - Greg Duncan gathers together a number of recently released Web Client Application and reference blocks.
• Silverlight 1.0 - New Maintenance Release Available - Tim Sneath tells of an update to Silverlight 1.0 - there are a few different fixes in this release.
• Updates: Process Explorer v11.12, Process Monitor v1.30, Handle v3.31, and a new blog post from Mark - Updates to a few of the much used SysInternals tools.
• CPU Scheduling Simulator 1.0 released! - Granville Barnett announces the 1.0 release of his tool for helping design and analyse CPU Scheduling Algorithms

Information

• 4 Key Differences Between Implicit and Explicit Interface Implementation - An interesting post about the differences between the two says of implementing interfaces.
• Disconnected N-Tier objects using EntityFramework - Ruurd Boeke looks at using the Entity Framework for disconnected applications - including Silverlight
• Pattern Matching in C# - Part 2 - Bart De Smet continues his series with parts 1 and 2 of his series on Pattern Matching in C#
• Try/Finally Pattern - Take a different path when an exception has occurred. - Alois Kraus shows a neat trick to establish if an exception has occurred and allow you to do different clean up in your finally handler.
• Removing Duplicate Code in Functions - Alex Mueller looks at a few techniques (delegates and AOP) for eliminating duplication of code - examples include logging on start and end of functions.
• Improve scalability in ASP.NET MVC using Asynchronous requests - Steve Sanderson takes steps to add Asynchronous Processing to ASP.NET MVC by implementing Async versions of the Controller and handlers
• ASP.NET MVC: MVC Storefront, Part 2 - Rob Conery continues his screen cast series on building a Store using MVC. This part adds significantly to the unit test and repository
• Partial Mocks explained - Chris Brandsma takes a look at partial mocks, following on from his previous post about mocking nested methods.

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