The Morning Brew

I’m managing to keep up with the items in my RSS Reader, keeping the unread items at zero - this seems to be having an effect on the number of links getting posted here as we seem to be getting more items per post - is this a good thing?

Software

• Announcing Gallio Alpha 3 Update 3 - Jeff Brown points to the latest alpha release of the Gallio testing framework, along with giving a list of the significant new features.

Information

• An Introduction to Software Factories - Gunther Lenz gives a good detailed overview of the software factories paradigm, talking about the building blocks, and looks at the results a project which was developed with these techniques.
• Dizzy has added a few more methods - Justin Etheredge continues development of his High Order functions library, and this blog entry talks about the partition method in some detail.
• Design Patterns Refcard Released Today - Jason McDonald point to a new reference card on Design Patterns hosted over at DZone. You will need to be a member of the site to get a copy of this (or any of the other references on subjects such as jQuery, PowerShell, etc) but it looks like it might be worth while joining up
• Separation of Concerns - how not to do it - Jimmy Bogard takes a look at some of the sample applications that exist, and considers if they really do represent good practice for separation of concerns.
• Linq to LLBLGen Pro: feature highlights, part 1 - Frans Bouma gives a tour of the features of Linq support in the recently released version of LLBLGen .
• Maintainable by whom - Sergio Pereira looks at the key issues around maintainability - what the aims were for the project, the quality of the project, and the very important factor of who will maintain the software, and enabling them to do so.
• Unity and ASP.NET Screencast - David Hayden offers a screen cast on using the Microsoft IOC container Unitywith ASP.NET.
• Command-Query Separation Principle - Sean Feldman takes a look at the Command-Query Separation Principle, with a nice clear concrete example which illustrates the principle clearly.
• How is my C# code converted into machine instructions? - A brief look at how the C# Cod is converted into instructions via the JIT Compilation.
• Method Type Inference Changes, Part One - Eric Lippert takes a look at type inference in methods, and in this part looks at the why and a little of the how, and also about when it goes wrong.
• Test Your NHibernate Mappings! - Dave Laribee talks about the importance of testing your configuration files - especially NHibernate mapping files. I do agree with the comments, its always worth testing these against a real database as a final test too, as there is no guarantee that the column names are correct.
• Portable PowerShell - v1 and v2 side by side - even on Server Core. - Karl Prosser taks about making PowerShell into a portable application (the kind that will run off a USB stick with no install), and explains that it is possible, however it can’t be distributed due to the licensing. I have a suspicion about how he’s achieving this, and am looking forward to the next part of this article where the actual process is revealed.
• Saving a few lines of code. Part I - Infinite loops. - Hristo Kosev looks at different ways of creating infinite loops
• Insides of LINQ. - Tariq A Karim looks at the underlying language features which are needed to support Linq and then gives an overview of Linq

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Software

• Mozilla Firefox 3 - Today is Firefox 3 launch day (although the site has yet to be updated, I think we might need to wait for the American contingent to wake up)
• Ninject 1.0 Goes Gold - Nate Kohari announces the release of NInject 1.0. NInject is a lightweight dependency injection framework which runs on .NET 2, 3 and 3.5, along with .NET Compact 2 and 3.5 and Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2
• OpenCSV# - OpenCSV# is a port of the Java OpenCSV project to native .NET. It provides a good means of reading CSV data without a number of limitations of the Microsoft Text Driver.

Information

• Super Models, Part 1: Sexy Specifications - Dave Laribee looks at making the Specification pattern for entity retrieval criteria into a more ’sexy’ beast using operator overloading to make combining criteria easy.
• Immutability and Concurrency – Part II – A Review of F#’s Immutable Data Structures - Rob Pickering looks at the support in F# for working with Immutable data in part two of his series on Immutability and concurrency.
• Hook Methods - Dave Laribee looks at the template pattern, and defines a technique he calls ‘Hook Methods’ to provide further extensibility for edge cases.
• Avoiding Inheritance Dependencies Using Generics and Lambdas - Jason Olson considers the dependencies introduced due to inheritance, and then looks a the command pattern along with lambdas and generics as a means to work around these dependencies. Some interesting comments too.
• Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) at a Glance - Sidar Ok explores the Managed Extensibility Framework CTP, working through the initial stages of getting things working as intended.
• Overview of concurrency in .NET Framework 3.5 - Igor Ostrovsky takes a overview of the key concepts in concurrent programming on .NET, looking at Concurrent executions, synchronization and memory sharing.
• I understand that naming matters, so… - Ayende poses a simple question of naming for an interface - I agree, naming is very important, and its amazing how many different possibilities people list in the comments.
• Functional Programming in C# 3.0: How Map/Reduce/Filter can Rock your World - Dare Obasanjo looks at some real world uses of Functional Techniques within RSS Bandit.
• Prefix-casting versus as-casting in C# - An interesting post on the differences between the two ways of casting, and talks a little about cast performance.
• Keep your .config clean with external config files - Andre Loker talks about the real world scenarios where external config files really help. I always forget that you can actually do this!
• Software cell - What´s in a name? - Ralf Westphal shares an alternative view on the traditional N-Tier layered architecture, considering software to be composed of cells.
• Functional C# - Learn from F# and LINQ - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on Functional C# with a look at the framework implementations of some of the traditional functional/F# techniques, including Folding,Mapping, Iterators and filtering.
• Everything You Wanted To Know About MVC and MVP But Were Afraid To Ask - Phil Haack looks at the differences between MVC and MVP in this link laden post.

Community

• List of Technology User Groups within United Kingdom - A list of Microsoft technology based user groups in the UK. I’d like to add that Liverpool has a .NET User Group in the form of Liverpool Users of .NET, although we are not yet officially recognised.
• Join us with a Blog on weblogs.asp.net ! - weblogs.asp.net are looking for new bloggers, Joe Stagner has the details.

humour

• The friendly SCM neighborhood - Ayende takes an amusing pictorial look at a few of the competing SCM products.

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Monday’s come round too fast. Despite reading lots of posts this weekend (and getting down to zero unread items in my reader) today’s brew isn’t as massive as I thought it might be - perhaps I’m being too selective.

Software

• IronPython 2.0 Beta 3 - Iron Python gets an update in the form of Iron Python 2.0 Beta 3
• FitNesse.NET 1.7 Released - Gojko Adzic points to the latest release of this .NET implementation of the Framework for Integrated Test (Fit) tool.
• MassTransit 0.2 Now Available - Chris Patterson announces the availability of a new release of Mass Transit, a lean service bus developed using YAGNI principle (You ain’t gonna need it) to keep it as simple and lean as possble.

Information

• Mapping Collections in NHibernate (Part 1) - The NHibernate FAQ Blog looks in detail at the different ways of mapping of collections and working with mapped collections in the first part in this series.
• Function Composition - Chris Smith looks at functional composition and how the pipe-forward operator can help improve your code.
• CruiseControl.Net Tutorial - Part 2 - Matteo continues his series on Cruise Control Setup and configuration with part two, covering the actual build and publish.
• Understanding .NET Delegates and Events, By Practice. - Mohamad Halabi writes a nice article on the different types and uses of delegates within the .NET framework, giving examples along the way.
• C# Glorified : Nemerle! - Onur Gümüş gives an introduction to Nemerle, an alternative CLR language which offers a number of interesting features (outlined in the post).
• Added parallel abilities to Dizzy - Justin Etheredge continues developing his Dizzy High order method library by adding some parallel goodness into the map method.
• Why I Do Not Use ORM - Kenneth Downs looks at Object Relational Mapping (ORM) from a database point of view, and explains what he dislikes about it - its always good to see the other side of any argument.
• Writing your first Domain Specific Language, Part 1 of 2 - Daniel Flower gives a nice introduction to implementing your own languages using the Irony Compiler Construction Tool kit.
• Python in the Browser: Live Interactive Interpreter in an HTML Textarea - Michael Foord shows off Python in a Browser, a SilverLight powered browser based Python Interactive interperter
• Back to Basics - Life After If, For and Switch - Like, a Data Structures Reminder - Scott Hanselman offers some good advice that came out of a one-on-one coding session he had with a friend, showing some alternatives to the most common approaches.
• Why you should test code too silly to break - Ayende shows some tests for code which at first view looks silly, but in the end actually helps out.
• Performance Tweaks For Your Cache - Joel Ross looks at ways to improve the common caching pattern in order to get better performance when working with multiple threads.
• BDD, AAA Style Testing and Rhino Mocks - Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo shows off some test using BDD naming using the new Rhino Mocks 3.5 Arrainge Act Assert style.
• Custom Event Programming - Brent Stineman gives and end-end overview of event based programming.
• The "It Works on my Machine" Award - Ade Miller talks about a couple of common situations which relate to ‘it works on my machine’ syndrome.

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The end of a very busy week - thank goodness.

Software

• Sandcastle Version 2.4.10520 at MS Download Center - Sandcastle finds a temporary home while the decision as to where to host it for real is made

Information

• A Tale of Two Compilers - Ed Maurer talks about the existence of two compiles on machines with Visual Studio, and explains how VS actually compiles code.
• .NET Coding Guidelines - Joe Stagner shares some .NET coding guidelines
• Script reference profiler - Bertrand Le Roy has created an ASP.NET control that you can place on your page during development to get all the script references that are generated so you can easily make use of the new capabilities of ASP.NET Ajax 3.5 sp1 to combine these scripts.
• SOA: Making The Paradigm Shift Part 9 of N - Sam Gentile continues his SOA series with a look at SOA Design Approaches, and looks in detail at the Middle-Out SOA approach.
• Compound Operators Or How T-SQL Is Morphing Into VB Or C# - SQLDenis show the new SQL Server 2008 Compound Operators
• Compress WebResource.axd in ASP.NET - Mads Kristensen implements a module and handler to compress the WebResource.axd
• UserControls with the MVC Framework - Henry Cordes looks at implementing a data grid using ASP.NET MVC user controls
• Free software from ComponentOne - Joseph Guadagno points to ComponentOne who are now giving away their community editions of their IDE Spell Checker and DemoWorks Screen cast too for free.
• IronRuby and ASP.NET MVC - John Lam talks about his recent Tech Ed demo of ASP.NET MVC working fully with IronRuby
• Functional C# - Unfolding Lists - Matthew Podwysocki continues his experiments with functional programming in C# with a look at list manipulation
• Pain reduction: creating ductile tests - Ayende runs into trouble with a brittle test and shows an alternative way of solving such issues
• My BDD experiment - Ayende is trying BDD, and is requesting that people comment on his list of specifications - I’m hoping for some interesting discussions in the comments of this one.
• Develop for Maintenance - Rob Reynolds offers some good tips on making your deliverables more maintainable

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Information

• MVC Storefront Part 14: Ajax With Shawn Burke - The latest part in Rob Conery’s screen cast series on creating an ecommerce site with ASP.NET MVC. In this part Rob teams up with his boss to insert some ASP.NET Ajax into the store front
• SubSonic 3.0: IQueryable Update - Rob Conery talks about the development of the IQueryable interface support in Subsonic.
• Waltzing Through the Parallel Extensions June CTP: Synchronization Primitives - Sacha Goldshtein begins a monster series (All posted in one day) looking at the latest release of the Parallel Extensions - this first part discusses the new synchronisation primitives
• Waltzing Through the Parallel Extensions June CTP: Tasks - In part two Sacha looks at the Task support in the Parallel Extensions framework, with task continuations and the new scheduler.
• Waltzing Through the Parallel Extensions June CTP: Collection Classes - in Part three of his series, Sacha looks at the new System.Threading.Collections namespace, and discusses the different collection classes available.
• Waltzing Through the Parallel Extensions June CTP: Known Issues - Sacha Goldshtein continues by looking at the know issues in the latest release of Parallel Extensions
• Parallel Extensions and Native Code? - Sacha Goldshtein follows up on his series with a look at the parallel options for C++ developers.
• InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of Type ‘X’ to ‘X’ - Henning Krause encounters a strange looking issue of not being able to cast an object to the type of the object when assemblies are loaded in different ways (from different places)
• The Language of Mocks (or is that Test Doubles) - Casey Charlton discusses the correct terms for the various types of ‘mock’
• Windows UX Taskforce - A digg like site for people to record their gripes with the Windows Vista UI - interesting to the programmer a it provides a great resource of things to avoid doing when developing a UI - as all of these are real things that annoy users.
• TDD : Introduction to Moq - Stephen Walther takes a look at Moq, one of the newest mocking frameworks on the scene. This article is a nice getting started guide.
• Two Loosely Coupled Code - Part 2 - Sean Feldman follows up with an example of some loosely coupled code and talks about its advantages.
• Neat Tricks with StructureMap - Chad Myers shares his good fortune of working with StructureMap’s author by giving a sneak peek at some of the new v2.5 functionality

Community

• Giveaway!!! Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 with MSDN Premium - Alvin @ Vapor Blog has 3 Visual Studio Team Systems with MDSN Premium licenses to give away to the community - to enter send in 2 paragraphs detailing why you should be considered.

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Software

• SQL Server 2008 RC0 - The RC0 release of SQL Server 2008 is now available for download by the general public.
• Open XML SDK v1 Available From Today - Mike Ormond highlights the availability of the Open XML SDK v1

Information

• BackgroundWorker Closure and Overridable Task - Patrick Smacchia looks at how you can cancel and run again on background workers for the situations where you have a background process that takes longer than a re-occurrence of the triggering event can.
• Northwind N-Tier Blueprint Application Using WPF/WCF/LINQ to SQL - A NorthWind sample application which uses much of the modern Microsoft Development Technologies in a multi tier fashion - I plan to have a read of the source at some point soon as seeing how this all plays together will be interesting.
• Too Loosely Coupled Code - Sean Feldman considers if it is possible to have code that is too loosely coupled - a couple (no pun intended) of interesting response in the comments.
• Visual State in Silverlight Control Templates - Ian Griffiths takes a look into the Visual State Manager in Silverlight 2 control templates
• To Cache, To Static, or To Session "When?" is the question - Jay Kimble gives an overview of how he decides where to locate data - in the cache, session or static members on classes.
• Stop Polluting the UI Thread - Use a ThreadBarrier - A very interesting article the ThreadBarrier pattern, which demonstrates a better way of doing multi threaded applications that interact with the UI. Samples are provided for both WinForms and WPF
• Help Decide Sandcastle’s Fate - SandCastle the .NET Code documentation tool has been removed from Codeplex as it does not publish the source code. This is bad news (compounding the bad news that NDoc is no longer developed)
• Zip method added to Dizzy - Jason Etheridge continues development of his ‘Dizzy’ High Order function library, with a multi list element combining method
• Performance Tip: Return Only Necessary Columns Using LINQ - Jason N. Gaylord offers a useful reminder about only retrieving the data you need - this applies to much more than just LINQ.
• What really went wrong ? Check the inner exception - Peter van Ooijen takes a look at the use of the Exception’s InnerException property in order to find out what really went wrong.

Community

• ICFP Programming Contest - Matthew Podwysocki highlights the 11th International Conference on Functional Programming Programming Contest - a language agnostic functional programming contest running until mid July.
• JBuilding A Solid Core - Your Future Is Right Ahead Of You - The Contest!!! - Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo is running a contest (of a similar nature to the one mentioned last week on another site). To enter you need to submit a short (true) story of how you have an impact on the personal and professional lives of the people you work with - full details on the site.

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A lot of continuations of series and software releases in today’s brew - I think we might be in the slump of people recovering from TechEd

Software

• ReSharper 4.0 GA - ReSharper, the Visual Studio Addin which provides a huge number of enhancements to the IDE has made it to a V4 release - Personal Licences available from 105 Euro
• LLBLGen Pro v2.6 has been released! - Frans Bouma announces the availability of LLBLGen Pro v2.6, a commercial OR Mapper, with support for LINQ to LLBLGen, .NET 3.5 support, better memory usage and support for a wide range of databases it looks like a good release. Prices from 179 Euro per seat.
• Dizzy published - Justin Etheredge releases ‘Dizzy’, a library of high order methods (such as map, foreach, repeat, etc). Source code available, along with 100% coverage unit tests!
• jQuery UI v1.5 Released, Focus on Consistent API and Effects - While not specifically .NET, the jQuery UI is interesting enough to web developers to cross platform boundaries, especially as it has a shiny new release.

Information

• Delayed execution and "yield return" - Justin Etheredge shows how yield return can enable delayed execution and give you a means of generating infinite series of numbers without having to create them upfront.
• Premature optimizations - Ayende gives some concrete evidence to the idea that premature optimisation is a bad thing.
• Silverlight Roles, Profile and Authentication Example Updated for Silverlight Beta2 Now with Visual State Manager (VSM) goodness! - Brad Abrams looks at the latest Silverlight beta, and upgrades one of his samples and in doing so takes a look at the Visual State Manager.
• SyntacticNoise - Martin Fowler talks about the noise generated by the syntax of the language we use for our DSLs
• RhinoCommons, NHibernate and ASP.NET MVC Part 5 - LINQ to NHibernate - Ryan Lanciaux looks at LINQ to NHibernate with the aim of simplifying hhis data access code in this latest part in his series.
• Castle Demo App #4: Unit testing Monorail web sites - Gojko Adzic continues his series on the Castle Project, and in this part looks at testing controllers in isolation
• SOA: Making the Paradigm Shift Part 8 of N - Sam Gentile continues his series on SOA - in this part Capabilities and the Microsoft IO Capability Framework are examined.

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There is nothing worse (or sillier) than being ill with a cold when the weather outside is fair and sunny - but that’s been my weekend - feeling a bit better now though (thankfully)

Software

• Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released - ScottGu gives the lowdown on the new Silverlight 2 Beta 2 release, along with Expression Blend and Visual Studio tools to support it.
• ScrewTurn Wiki Version 2.0.32 + Other News - Latest update to this .NET powered Wiki Engine - This is the last significant release of the v2 line (except for bugfixes)
• Paint.NET v3.35 BETA is now available - Latest beta of Paint.NET, the MS Paint replacement written in .NET.

Information

• Refactoring Legacy Code - Part 1: Dealing with Static Cling - Sendhil Kumar R starts a series on legacy (code without unit tests) code, and in this first part looks at techniques to help work round static code.
• Where to start a new program - Chris Brandsma talks about where to start on a new project, outlining a number of possible ways to get started.
• Upgrading to Silverlight Tools Beta 2 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta - BradleyB gives some detailed instructions for installing the new Silverlight beta on different versions of VS2008
• MVC + Facebook == Wonderful Development Platform - Nick Berardi has been experimenting with the ASP.NET MVC with a view to creating FaceBook applications with it
• LINQ through PowerShell - Bart De Smet takes a look at consuming LINQ through PowerShell - I really need to spend some time playing with PowerShell there is so much good stuff it can do.
• SOA: Making the Paradigm Shift Part 7 of N - Sam Gentile continues his series on SOA, with a look at SOA using Web Services and some of the web service standards.
• Functional C# Revisited - Into the Great Void - Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at Functional Programming in C#, and runs into issues with the way Void is handled.
• Scratching an itch: NMemcached - Ayende has a go at implementing a native .NET version of Memcached - source available
• The Art of Assembly Versions - Tony Rasa talks version numbers, and why its important to ensure that they get updated.
• Why Developers should Do Testing - Soon Hui talks about the importance of getting developers to do a bit of testing to make them a better developer.

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