The Morning Brew

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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Software

• Unity refresh (v1.1) – The details of what’s new in Unity 1.1 (which is included in the latest release of the Enterprise Library)
• Enterprise Library 4.0 – May 2008 – The latest update to the Enterprise Library – now including the Unity IOC Application block
• RFC2396 URL 1.0 Released – Keyvan Nayyeri announces an update to his RFC2396 Url handling library

Information

• A Web based application configuration wizard – An article on creating an ‘installer wizard’ for configuring settings of your web application once the files are uploaded
• Immutability and Concurrency – Part I – Getting to Know Immutable Data Structures – Rob Pickering starts a series on Concurrency and Immutability, starting with a simple mutable example in C# and moving it to a immutable F# implementation.
• Why Pluggable Applications Fail in NUnit? – Shahar Y encounters problems unit testing a pluggable application using NUnit. The good news is that there is a simple solution, disabling the shadow copy.
• Tough Questions about unit testing – Your comments required – Roy Osherove needs your help with a section of his forthcoming book.
• Implicit polymorphism and lazy collections in NHibernate – Derek Fowler has been playing with NHibernate a lot lately, and has run into an interesting bug – here he shows how to solve it using the Visitor Pattern
• Beginners Guide To Threading In .NET Part 1 of n – Sacha Barber starts another series, this time covering threading
• Auto-registration in ASP.NET MVC – Kyle Baley looks at auto registration of types with the IOC Container
• Extension Methods Roundup: IndicesWhere, TakeEvery, Distinct – Omer van Kloeten shares a few more extension methods
• Rhino Mocks – Arrange, Act, Assert Syntax – Ayende shows off the new Arrange Act Assert syntax of Rhino Mocks 3.5 beta
• Rhino Mocks 3.5 Beta Released – Ayende announces the latest beta release of Rhino Mocks – currently a .NET 3.5 only release, however the final release will also support 2.0
• Mandelbrot revisited – benchmark edition – Jon Skeet generates Mandelbrot sets in a host of different ways to demonstrate the performance characteristics of each way of parallelism.
• What Determines High Quality Code? – Casey Charlton considers the factors that determine code quality, and principles that can be applied to achieve this
• Reading Code Over the Telephone – Eric Lippert asks how we should pronounce the => operator

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