The Morning Brew

Tuesday’s subscriber count hit a quite significant subscriber milestone - many thanks to all of you who are subscribed and reading the Morning Brew every day. Here’s hoping that the level is maintained for the rest of the week - Tomorrow’s post will contain a little celebratory item.

Software

• VSLab - Visual Studio Lab is aiming to provide functionality in Visual Studio similar to a tool like MatLab or Mathematica, and utilises F# as the underlying engine. From the screen shots it looks very interesting
• Hobocopy x64 Build Available - Craig Andera releases an x64 version of HoboCopy, and reminds us all he is still looking for someone to take over the maintainer role on the project.

Information

• Some guidelines for readable F# code - Chris Smith looks at some good style and conventions for writing code in F#
• ExifTagCollection - EXIF metadata extraction library - Lev Danielyan has created a library to read EXIF 2.2 headers from image files - one of my side projects (currently very idle and very basic) is a photo management application similar to Picasa - this will come in handy.
• Design Patterns - Strategy Pattern - David Cumps takes a look at the Strategy pattern using an example of a strategy game involving tanks and soldiers.
• Replacing ExpectedException in NUnit - James Newkirk looks at an alternative (and much nicer) way of unit testing that exceptions are thrown using the Assert.Throws syntax rather than the method level ExpectedException. This is a new feature of NUnit 2.5, however there is a download to provide the capability now.
• NMemcached: A WCF experiment - Ayende continues experimenting with his .NET MemCached implementation, this time porting it to WCF. There are some interesting comments on performance tuning it.
• 10 Tools Which I Still Use, Even I Have VSTS 2008 - Mohammad Ashraful Alam follows up his post linked in yesterday’s Brew with a list of tool that he still uses after his move to VSTS
• The var war is brewing - Derik Whittaker weighs in on the var ‘discussion’ with his ideas on when you should and shouldn’t use var. Many interesting comments attached to this post.
• How to Build a Task Scheduler System for the ASP.NET – Part 2 - Keyvan Nayyeri completes this series on implementing a simple task scheduler in ASP.NET, and ends with the good news that he is going to release a more general framework as an open source project.
• Dependency Injection, or how to make simple concepts sound difficult - Jani Hartikainen provides a very simple explanation and example of each of the three types of Dependency Injection