The Morning Brew

Software

• Free Silverlight datagrid released – Download now – Devexpress announce the release of their Free Silverlight Datagrid AgDataGrid

Information

• Announcing FsTest – The Testing DSL for F# – Matthew Podwysocki announces the Testing DSL for F# he has been working on, and explains how it works behind the scenes.
• Separation of Concerns by example: Part 1 – Jimmy Bogard post up the first real part of a series on applying the principle of separation of concerns. In this part he makes some refactorings to eliminate some static methods.
• Portable Powershell – Part 2: Roll your own, plus a challenge – Karl Prosser explains how he created a portable version of PowerShell – and it wasn’t the way I thought.
• Unit testing non-public types using reflection – Dennis "D.C." Dietrich looks at using reflection to enable the unit testing of private and protected members
• How to Build a Task Scheduler System for the ASP.NET – Part 1 – Keyvan Nayyeri looks at implementing a task scheduler within your ASP.NET application – a strange idea if you have lots of access to the machine hosting your site (as there are many better alternatives) but for people with more basic web hosting accounts, this type of scheduler will be very useful.
• SubSonic: Writing Decoupled, Testable Code With SubSonic 2.1 – Rob Conery shows how it is possible to write good decoupled code using SubSonic, and shows how it can easily be tested
• Scalable COMET Combined with ASP.NET – When I first heard about COMET, I thought it was just Non-Parsed Headers from the olden days – however there is more to it, and this is the first article I’ve seen about a .NET implementation – interesting reading.
• Exploring OOPS – JavaScript Style: Part 1 – Encapsulation – The first of three articles (the others are linked from this one) about using Object Oriented Programming techniques in Javascript.
• Dianose Assembly Binding Failures – Shahar Y highlights the Fusion Log Viewer as a means to help diagnose the problem of the .NET framework not being able to find a specific assembly. I used to encounter this type of issue quite a lot, and this toll really would help – although I’ve not had problems with this in a while

Community

• Webcast – The Net Coffee Break Show – Details of a new monthly webcast series from the Irish Developer community. You have to pre-register, however registration is free. Supplement your Morning Brew with a Coffee Break show 😉
• Microsoft Tech·Ed EMEA 2008 – Developer – TechEd Europe which is to be held in Barcelona in November is now open for registration with early bird savings of €300, making the registration €1,945 + 16% VAT

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Many thanks to those who responded to my question about post length in yesterday’s Morning Brew. The responses varied dramatically from people asking for more links, to those suggesting only 3 a day. I’ve tried to be a little more selective today, and think I’m going to settle on around about the average from the first 100 posts of about 8-12 links a day depending on the content available. I’m also going to try to get my preparation time back down to an hour (it’s been rising quite a bit lately).

Information

• Working faster and fewer mapping errors with NHibernate – Jeremy D. Miller explains how he tests his NHibernate mappings as a response to yesterday’s post by David Laribee
• Concurrency in .NET – Learning from Erlang – Matthew Podwysocki borrows some ideas on concurrent programming from the Erlang Language. During my recent F# talk there were a number of questions and comments about F# supporting some of these techniques, and here Matthew looks at message passing.
• Deploying Database Developments – Alexander Karmanov as written a detailed article on managing and deploying databases, including details of upgrades, best practices for developing on the database. This is a very interesting article, and I think most teams could improve their process by adopting some (or all) of these techniques.
• Foundations of Programming – pt 9 – Proxy This and Proxy That – Karl Seguin continues his series with a look at the virtual keyword, and the wonders of dynamic proxies in frameworks such as NHibernate and RhinoMocks.
• MVC guru == PhD wannabe? – Paul Lockwood puts out an appeal to the community to not let articles on ASP.NET MVC suffer from feature creep by bringing in too many concepts which may be unfamiliar to the average (or below) developer. I agree whole heartedly – getting these good developer practices adopted should be done via baby steps, introducing a little bit at a time.
• Introducing ConcurrentStack < T > – Cristina Manu talks about one of the Synchronised collections available as a part of the Parallel Extensions library.

Community

• Manning – One Free Ebook a day – Manning are running a daily draw with the prize being a free EBook from their collection, and every entrant is eligible for every days draw, and a chance to win the whole library in 1 months time.

1 Comment »

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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