The Morning Brew

Software

• Updates: Process Explorer v11.20, ZoomIt v2.0, Sigcheck v1.53, Handle v3.4 and introducing Sysinternals Live beta. - Sysinternals update a few tools, and provide a new way of getting them - a WebDav enabled site which will allow direct access to the .EXE for all the tools to make i much easier to get the tools on a particular machine.
• xUnit.net 1.0.1 Released - Brad Wilson announces the release of xUnit.net 1.0.1 - a bug fix release, with support for ASP.NET MVC preview 3, and Support for newer builds of F#

Information

• Fluent Interfaces And Readability - Joel Ross considers the implementation and readability of Fluent interfaces.
• Foundations of Programming - pt 8 - Back to Basics: Exceptions - Karl Seguin continues his series on programming basics with a look at exceptions
• nHibernate many-to-many collections. (OR mapping is not one table one class) - Peter Van Ooijen talks about collection mapping in NHibernate.
• The Unit Testing Story in F# Revisited - Matthew Podwysocki looks at unit testing in F# again, reviewing the changes in the testing frameworks (xUnit.net and Gallio) that make F# testing work again.
• Ways of Performance in .NET - Part1 - Tao Wang starts a series on performance techniques in .NET
• What’s Wrong with this? - Alan Mendelevich argues for the use of ‘this.’ before any field of the object to allow distinctions from local variables.
• Community Call to Action: NOT Northwind - Scott Hanselman is fed up of the Northwind sample database and is now looking to create a new example database.
• Cool ScriptManager stuff I missed… - Jay Kimble highlights some of the aysnc functionality of the Script Manager
• .Net Equality - Will Smith reminds us all that there are multiple ways of testing equality.
• ActiveLinq - Scott Watermasysk prototypes an active record like implementation using Linq to Sql

Community

• Call for Party with Palermo RSVPs. Reserve your spot now for the Tech Ed party - Jeffrey Palermo announces his latest event at TechEd 2008

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Information

• Secure Persistent ASP.NET Forms Authentication - Brant Burnett improves the security of Forms Authentication by implementing two cookies, one for secure hosts and one for insecure hosts (which does not allow you onto the secure host without re-authenticating).
• Dependency Injection using Spring.NET - Niranjan Kumar looks at implementing dependency injection using the Spring.Net library
• Another C# Idea: Interface Method Chaining - Matt Hamilton considers the possibility of allowing interfaces to have method chaining - an interesting idea, not sure how often you would use it though.
• Extended LINQ: additional operators for LINQ to objects - Igor Ostrovsky offers a collection of extension method operators for LINQ to objects
• The Open/Closed Principle on MSDN - Jeremy D. Miller’s latest article has been published in MSDN Magazine, covering the open/closed principle - a nice interesting read
• PetriDish: Multi-threading for performance in C# - Nick Butler looks at some advanced concurrent programming techniques
• Multiple File Upload User Control - SAMir Nigam offers a useful file upload user control which allows the use to upload multiple files using a nice interface.
• Static versus Dynamic Languages - Attack of the Clones - Matthew Podwysocki weighs in on the classic Static vs Dynamic debate
• MVC Storefront Challenge Kickoff - Jimmy Bogard starts his MVC Storefront challenge - to switch out the tools Rob Conery is using with Open Source alternatives.

Community

• PDC2008 Professional Developers Conference October 27-30, 2008 - Microsoft PDC 2008 registration has opened, with savings of $200 for early registrations.

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I had a thoroughly enjoyable evening last night at the monthly GeekUp Liverpool meeting - if you are in the North of England I encourage you to take a look at GeekUp - there are groups operating in many of the larger cities in the North and its a great place to meet people with like minds (and some others who look at the world from a whole different angle).

Software

• ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Release - The ASP.NET MVC reaches an official Preview 3 release. This replaces the interim source release as the most up to date release of the MVC framework, and, as usual, ScottGu has the low down on the new features

Information

• [ANN] Dimecasts.net is Alive and Kicking - Derik Whittaker announces his latest project - A screen cast site with screen casts aimed to be 10 minutes in length, covering a range of topics at a range of levels (beginner to advanced). Currently there are 4 episodes, but the plan is for 1-2 a week, so one to watch for sure
• Entity Framework: The Cribsheet - Amirthalingam Prasanna gives an overview in Crib sheet form with samples of the whole Entity Framework development process
• RhinoCommons, NHibernate and ASP.NET MVC Part 4 - The MVC Application - Ryan Lanciaux continues his ASP.NET MVC with castle and Rhino tools series with a look at the application
• Envy Code R preview #7 (scalable coding font) - Coding Font is a very personal choice, but one that seems to be very popular in the communuty is Envy Code R, which has just had an update
• Authenticating with ADO.NET Data Services - Mike Taulty looks at securing the REST-ful interface of ADO.NET data servvices, considering a number of standard ways of doing authentication
• Updated Northwind Demo For ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 - Phil Haack updates his Northwind ASP.NET MVC sample to work well with Preview 3
• The future of .NET, Visual Studio and more - Joni Moilanen attempts to predict the future direction of the Microsoft Development world by looking at what Microsoft are recruiting developers for - interesting idea

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Many thanks to all those people who left kind comments and emails on the 100th edition of the Morning Brew. Today’s edition is a relatively large one due to the Bank Holiday Weekend, and there will be a few more links from the weekend making their way into tomorrow’s Brew too.

Software

• Microsoft Source Analysis for C# - Microsoft Release the first public release of an internal tool known as StyleCop, a source analyser which considers best practices for layout, readability, maintainability and documentation. Unlike FxCop, this tool is based on looking at the actual source rather than the compiled output. More details behind the link.

Information

• What Is the Future of C# Anyways? - Matthew Podwysocki looks at what the future may hold for C# and the .NET Framework, looking at influences of F# and functional programming.
• Ending a Response without Response.End() Exceptions? - Rick Strahl looks at ways of implementing Fire and Forget functionality in ASP.NET so he can serve content, and end the request whilst continuing some back end server processing after the request ends.
• MVC Storefront, Part 11: Hooking Up The Shopping Cart And Components - Rob Conery starts integrating the shopping cart and starts testing his controllers in part 11 of his series on building an online shop using ASP.NET MVC
• MVC Storefront, Part 12: Mocking - Rob Conery continues with his MVC StoreFront with a lok at mocking to aid his testing
• Hobocopy Needs a New Daddy (or Mommy) - Craig Andera is looking for someone with C++ skills to take over an open source project he started
• How to Build Your Very Own Provider Model - Part 1 - Keyvan Nayyeri starts a short series of articles on implementing a provider model from scratch
• How to Build Your Very Own Provider Model - Part 2 - The continuation of this series on implementing a Provider Model
• Red Gate Software - Download The Best of Simple Talk ASP.NET - Red Gate are offering a free download of Jit ‘N Run, an book on ASP.NET topics by well known community authors. You can get the book on its own, or get it with a 14 day trial of ANTS Profiler.
• Flickr viewer - An Asp.net MVC photo app for Flickr - Mehfuz releases a sample application which uses his Linq to Flickr and ASp.NET MVC to implement a flickr like application.
• Pex Docs - Jonathan de Halleux points to some key resources for anyone interested in getting started with PEX
• Part 1 - Virtual PC Tuning Tricks - Getting the best possible performance from your VPCs - Don Roessler provides a step by step guide to improving VPC performance - a must for all of us who use VPC images often.
• Boo: Obscure Programming Language of the Month - DevTopics Obscure Programming Language of the Month series continues with a brief look at BOO - with some links to further information.
• Microsoft Source Analysis - Chris Brandsma looks at some of the rules in the Microsoft Source Analysis tool, and consider the possibility of conflicts in rules between similar tools.
• Castle Demo App #3: Saving time and effort with advanced Monorail features - Gojko Adzic continues his series on the Castle Project with a loog at some of the advanced features of the Monorail MVC framework
• Dynamic Code Integration with CodeDom - An article on using CodeDOM and Reflection to allow the user of an application to provide some code to be run within the application

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So, I’ve made it to 100 editions of the Morning Brew - When I started this back in January I really didn’t expect it to last this long - and now with 100 editions, with no days missed out (apart from the planned UK Bank Holidays), and having been overseas a couple of times and still managing to get the brew out I think I’ve got the process licked.

Since this is a significant edition, here are some (useless) facts:

• To date, there have been 1118 links planned for inclusion within the Morning Brew ( a few escape as I typo the tags needed for inclusion) - giving an average of 11 links per day
• According to Google Reader Trends, I read the most blogs in the hour of 7am in the morning (when I typically prepare the day’s edition)
• Another Google Reader statistic, during the past 100 editions of the Brew I will have read about 17000 blog entries from some 400 subscriptions.

Anyway, my thanks to the people that are actually reading and enjoying The Morning Brew, and now on with the normal content:

Software

• Pex 0.5 Released - Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of Pex 0.5 under the Microsoft Research License. Pex is a tool that automatically (and intelligently) generates unit test for many edge cases, and uses techniques like parametrized units tests and Dynamic Symbolic Execution. All very interesting stuff - I really need to have a play with this stuff.
• ReSharper 4 Beta - A beta release of Resharper 4 has been released, while they mention that its not a complete product yet there is still a lot of excellent features included

Information

• Signing Requests (or anything) with Hashes - Karl Seguin looks at signing HTTP query strings with a hash to help detect any meddling with the values being passed.
• RhinoCommons, NHibernate and ASP.NET MVC Part 1 - Setup - I missed the start of this series a few days back, Ryan Lanciaux pulls together all the tools and libraries he will be using
• RhinoCommons, NHibernate and ASP.NET MVC Part 2 - Configuration - Ryan goes over how to configure Rhino-Tools and NHibernate for use with Castle Active Record and the ASP.NET MVC Pattern.
• RhinoCommons, NHibernate and ASP.NET MVC Part 3 - The Model - Ryan Lanciaux looks at the model classes, their database tables and the mapping through active records in part three of this series
• Providing Security for Web Applications and Infrastructure: Best Practices for Managing Security Risks « Journey to SQL Authority with Pinal Dave - Pinal Dave highlights a Microsoft Presentation on Security risk management from the Windows Live Security Team
• Integrated social networking in ASP.NET - A nice simple general implementation of tagging for use in ASP.NET social network applications.
• How to auto update your application - Mike Hall shows how easily you can implement auto updates in your .NET applications.
• .NET Framework Client Profile - Brad Abrams gives some details of the .NET Framework Client Profile, and links to some useful resources which detail how to use it and what is actually included
• Return Within a C# Using Statement - Brendan Enrick highlights the usefulness of the C# using statement

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Last double digit edition of the Morning Brew today - Tomorrow I enter the triple digits!

Information

• Entities, Value Objects, Aggregates and Roots - Jimmy Bogard gives some excellent definitions of a number of key Domain Driven Design concepts and terms.
• C# 3.0 Implicit Type Declarations: To var or not to var? - Dare Obasanjo looks at the use of the var keyword for implicitly typed variables, and considers if they really are a good idea in the the cases ReSharper suggests
• Implementation of the Visitor pattern using .NET Generics - Derek Fowler implements the Visitor Pattern using .NET generics.
• The Functional Subset of D - Hans-Eric Grönlund looks at functional programming in the D programming language. I’m getting quite interested in functional programming of late, and I always like to see the same concepts in other languages.
• Red, Green, Chris - Darrel Carver show a refactoring session he had with Chris Brandsma, showing the stages from his first cut to the final code - Its always nice to see how others do this sort of thing.
• Creating a custom ViewEngine for the ASP.NET MVC framework - Maarten Balliauw looks at implementing a alternative View Engine in the ASP.NET MVC
• MVC Storefront: Client Progress Meeting - Rob Conery explains the aims of the MVC Store Front project, both his own and that of his ‘client’
• Rob’s Not So Lazy MVC Storefront - K. Scott Allen takes a look at some of the issues Rob Conery encountered with LINQ to SQL and the number of queries being issued.
• The MVC Storefront Challenge! - Jimmy Bogard considers putting together a crack team of two to pair program a conversion of Rob Conery’s MVC Storefront from LINQ to SQL to NHibernate
• VSX Survey (Spring 2008) invitation - The VSX Team Blog appeals for participants for a survey on Visual Studio Extensibility.
• Thoughts on writing quality test code vs writing quality application code - Derik Whittaker looks at factors that give you an idea that your tests are good quality code, and considers what that might mean for your application code.
• The Fluent Interfaces or DSLs Conundrum - Sergio Pereira questions whether fluent interfaces are a good idea in C#.
• Directory.Copy In .NET - A useful tip if you need to copy directories in your code and you don’t mind adding references to Microsoft.VisualBasic
• SQL Server 2005: Immediate Deadlock notifications - Mladen Prajdić talks about how you can monitor deadlocks in your SQL Server 2005 databases.

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Another shorter post today - Google Reader was acting up this morning, giving me more errors than posts to read. Assuming things are working well tomorrow will b a catch up post.

Software

• Retina.NET 2.0 Core & Designer Released - Andres G. Vettori announces the Version 2.0 release of his ORM library
• Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 Beta - Keyvan Nayyeri talks about the latest beta release of the Visual Studio SDK. Download links are provided in the post

Information

• Creating cross platform GUI’s with IronRuby - Steve Eichert talks about Shoes, a DSL based library for creating GUI applications easily in code.
• The Weekly Source Code 27 - Suck Less Libraries - Scott Hanselman highlights three interesting libraries in this week’s Weekly Source Code - Umbrella (A helper layer over the BCL), Ukadc.Diagnostics (additional support in the Diagnostics space for logging to SQL, etc - created by the Microsoft UK Application Development Consulting team), and the IIS7 Hostable web core.
• MVC Storefront: Brainbender Intermission - Rob Conery runs into problems with his lazy loading in LINQ to SQL - here he explains the problems.
• MVC Storefront: Intermission’s Over, Made Some Changes - Rob Conery resolves his current issues with LINQ to SQL in the MVC Shop Front
• F# and Unit Testing - Some New Developments - Matthew Podwysocki looks at unit testing F# code, and explains a problem getting tests to run in the latest F# due to static classes being created. Thankfully, he also shows a work around for this problem.
• How Do I Get Started with the Entity Framework? - You can watch this 9 minute video… - Greg Duncan highlights this introductory video on the Entity Framework

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A little short on content today, a lot of the blogging in the past 24 hours seems to be taking the form of a ‘barfight’ about the Entity Framework (amongst others), and I don’t really want to cover that sort of thing.

Software

• Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1 - Service Pack Update for Virtual PC 2007 adding improved support for Windows Server 2008, Vista SP1 and XP SP3
• Gauntlet - A build time code generator for .NET which integrates tightly with MSBuild

Information

• Strict Mocking Semantics Is the only way to Mock - Derik Whittaker looks at strict mocking replay, and explains what he likes and dislikes about it.
• ASP.NET MVC: UI Validation Framework Update - Matt Hawley talks about some of the recent changes to his ASP.NET MVC validation framework, which will make an appearance in MVCContrib on the next build
• XAML: Level 100 - Daniel Moth gives a brief overview of eXtensible Application Markup Language(XAML) for those who are not aware of it.
• Poor Man’s Linq in Visual Studio 2005 - An interesting library to give LINQ like functionality in VS2005
• 7 tricks to simplify your programs with LINQ - Igor Ostrovsky has a nice write up of 7 programming improvements made possible by LINQ
• A Generic Constraint Question - Eric Lippert looks at generic constraints, and highlights the best way to work round some of the common areas of confusion.
• Writing Unit Tests as Programmer’s Warm-Up - I like the idea of using the writing of unit tests to get back into the zone - Its one way to ensure you are writing some tests as interruptions are pretty must guaranteed in the workplace.

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