The Morning Brew

Software

• ACorns.Debugging - The .Net Deadlock Detector - Corneliu announces a new deadlock detection tool, currently a binary release only, but sourcecode will follow at a later date.
• Reflector AddIn Released - Christian Hornung tells of a plugin that brings integration of Lutz Roeder’s .NET Reflector to SharpDevelop 2 (and its built in in V3)
• Join the Early Adoption Program - Telerik are running an early adopters program where you try out their newest products and earn points for feature requests, bug reports, etc. These points then turn into discounts on their software.

Information

• Marker Interfaces and C# Attributes - Alex Mueller compares marker interfaces and attributes for allowing a class to be marked as having some specific behaviour. I think my preference would have to be the interface over the attribute in this case.
• A Routing Evolution - Ben Scheirman looks at the way ASP.NET MVC routes can evolve over the project, and looks at controlling that evolution and testing the routes.
• Password : You’re doing it wrong - Karl Seguin discusses rules for passwords. I especially like his closing remark.
• Practical Concurrency Patterns: Lock-Free Operations - Sasha Goldshtein continues his series of posts on concurrency with a look at the idea behind a lock-free queue.
• How to Implement Trackback Handler in ASP.NET - Keyvan Nayyeri shares a track back implementation for ASP.NET
• LINQ Aggregation and Bounding Boxes - Ian Griffiths shows how you can use LINQ to find bounding boxes of a collection of rectangles
• The Onion Architecture : part 2 - Jeffrey Palermo continues his series on the Onion Architecture with a real world illustration of the architecture in use.
• Using mbUnit’s RowTest Attribute in a TDD Scenario - Mike Bosch takes a look at MBUnit’s RowTest attribute using a real world test case from a project.

1 Comment »

I spent an enjoyable evening at Geekup Liverpool - unfortunately I missed most of the talk, only catching the discussions afterwards, but it was very nice to catch up with some people I’ve not seen in a while.

Information

• The Onion Architecture : part 1 - Jeffrey Palermo talks about a layered architecture which is a little different from the traditional layered architectures most will be familiar with.
• Countdown to F# CTP - Chris Smith hints at the good stuff that is coming in the next F# Release.
• Make your code more maintainable: The evils of the Return statement - Calvin Hsia talks about using a variable to gather your return value into before returning to make code more readable and easier to debug. This, along with having multiple returns in a method are two issues that I hold dear.
• Super Simple MVC Ajax With JQuery Demo - Phil Haack does an off the cuff screen cast on using JQuery with ASP.NET MVC
• There’s usually an easier way - Mike Hadlow follows up from his previous iteration post with another way of achieving the same output, this time using LINQ
• Dynamically create ASP.NET user control using JQuery and JSON enabled Ajax Web Service - Sanjeev Agarwal walks through creating a user control which uses JQuery to call an ASP.NET JSON web service.
• Survival guide to do resource localization using Compact Framework 2.0 - Jose A. Garcia Guirado talks about the steps required to make a Compact Framework Application localized.
• WCSF Application Architecture Tutorials - Layering and Design Patterns - David Hayden highlights a tutorial series by Simon Ince (along with some other resources) about working with the Web Client Software Factory.
• Avoid appSettings Usage in Controls or Shared Libraries - Steve Smith talks about the use of applications settings in controls and libraries, and explains why its a bad idea and that you should really be using your own config sections for the settings.
• How to show Log4Net info in NUnit (from NHibernate) - Chris Brandsma shows how you can get the NHibernate log information when running within NUnit - very useful when debugging problems with your mappings.
• Are You Throwing Exceptions Correctly? - Daily Coding takes a look at the right and wrong ways of handling rethrowing exceptions.

1 Comment »

Software

• Announcing the Microsoft Virtual Earth ASP .Net Server Control - A nice sounding (I’ve yet to have a play with it) control library for working with Virtual Earth mapping in your web apps from .NET - this one could be very useful
• Microsoft .NET Micro Framework 3.0 Beta Open - Michael Schwarz has the details of the .NET Micro Framework 3.0 Beta release
• CSLA .NET 3.5.1 RC0 available - Rockford Lhotka announces the release of Release Candidate 0 of his CSLA Application framework version 3.5.1

Information

• ASP.NET MVC Tip #26 – Create a Lightweight Control View Engine - Stephen Walther shows how you can create your own view engine by building a control view engine to help reduce embedded code in your views.
• ASP.NET MVC: Avoiding Tag Soup - Rob Conery addresses the contentious yet common comment about ASP.NET MVC being the return to the bad tag soup/Spaghetti code of the old classic asp days.
• TODO comments in Vs 2008 service pack 1 - Zeeshan Hirani shares some good news for anyone who makes use of TODO comments.
• Some finalizer pitfalls - Ayende considers some of the pitfalls of using finalizers, focusing on the errors that can occur when a finalizer runs on an object left in an invalid state due to exceptions during construction.
• Finalizer vs. Application: A Race Condition from Hell - Sasha Goldshtein looks at a strange issue to do with finalisation and Garbage collection.
• Guaranteed, Finalization Order Is Not - Sasha Goldshtein continues his look at finalisation by considering the order that things get finalised, and how that can cause some unpredictable results.
• How to Encrypt Query String Parameters in ASP.NET - Keyvan Nayyeri looks at protecting your query string variables by encrypting them.

Community

• Geekup Liverpool - July - Tonight (29th July) is Liverpool Geekup, featuring a talk from Ian Forrester of the BBC covering BBC Backstage and the future of openness.
• Scottish Developers July Newsletter - Colin Mackay posts this months Scottish Developers news letter, highlighting some interesting (free) events in the coming months.
• Would you like a Visual Studio MSDN Premium License for a Year? - Greg Low will be giving away an MSDN Premium license via the podcast SQL Down Under. This post contains the details of what you have to do in order to be in with a chance of winning.

1 Comment »

Back to work today after a long weekend full of hot weather and me having a cold - why is it that I always get ill just before taking a break.

Software

• Tier Generator 1.0 - A simple code generator for building business entities and data access objects from the database schema - source code available

Information

• The Data Disconnect - Justin Etheredge continues the (more civilised) discussion stemming from the Entity Framework and now discussion ORM in general.
• Silverlight Problems That Affect Me - Rob Eisenberg talks about a number of issues and gotchas that he has encountered while working with Silverlight.
• Local const strings - do they give better performance? - Chris Skardon takes a look at the performance benefits of using the const keyword with local strings as ReSharper always suggests it.
• The Request/Response Service Layer - Davy Brion looks at building a request response service starting with the messages, and moving on to look at processing the requests, hosting the service and stubbing the service for testing.
• PowerShell for Team Foundation Server - Greg Duncan highlights some Powershell cmdlets for working with Team Foundation Server.
• More fun with ‘yield return’ - Mike Hadlow shows a good use for custom iterators using the yield syntax.
• C# 3.0 and Parallel FX/LINQ in Mono - Miguel de Icaza talks about work being done on Mono to bring the Parallel FX to the Mono world.
• Default Architecture: Layers - Ayende discusses his default architecture model and explains the types of code in each section and gives the benefits of his structure.
• Improve your debugging: Debugging Attributes to make your life easier - Corneliu talks about two attributes that you can apply to your code to help make debugging easier by not having the debugger step into those methods.
• What a C# Coder Should Know Before They Write VB - Updated - Kathleen Dollard updates her post about the differences between C# and VB.NET - interesting reading, even for those who are familiar with VB.NET.
• How to create IronPython objects of types defined in C# - An interesting post which shows two things - How to host a DLR script within a C# application, and also how to access the types defined in the hosting application from the script.

1 Comment »

I had a very enjoyable evening over at VBUG Manchester last night where Colin Mackay gave a interesting talk on the new Spatial Data Types in SQL Server 2008

Software

• Using Speech in Visual Studio - Phil Denoncourt shares an interesting little addin for Visual Studio which allows you to use voice commands for activating certain parts of the VS UI

Information

• TypeConverter, Arrays and ASP.NET - Tomas Restrepo talks about the Design Time support for properties of user controls, Type converters and the solution of a problem caused by his type converter.
• How to review NHibernate application - Ayende posts a useful list of things to watch out for when code reviewing an NHibernate based application.
• Impedance Mismatch Reframing - Greg Young posts an interesting response to a post about the Entity Framework debate - thankfully this one focuses on the technical argument, and is interesting reading.
• Introduction on how to use Reflector - A DimeCasts.Net screen cast on using the wonderful tool ‘Reflector’. It still amazes me that there are developers out there who aren’t aware of this tool.
• LINQ Farm: More on the LINQ Aggregate Operators - Charlie Calvert runs through the seven aggregate operators in LINQ
• Arrange Act Assert and BDD specifications - Jimmy Bogard looks at Arrange Act Assert style unit testing in Rhino Mocks, with a particular focus on splitting out his behaviour from the test setup in his BDD tests.
• Preview and Questions on the next Isolator API - The Typemock team show of the proposed new API for Typemock Isolator which is heading in an AAA (Arrange Actt Assert) direction. Now they want your feedback on the ideas to help improve the product.

1 Comment »

Another slow day in .NET land today - so a shorter than usual post.

Information

• ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 Template Example - John Katsiotis looks at one of the new features of ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 Preview - template functionality making it easier to create complex content.
• Help Middle School students learn programming - Microsoft Visual Studio Middle School Power Toy 1.0 released - Greg Duncan highlights a PowerToy for Visual Studio that aims to make the Visual Studio IDE a good environment for teaching/learning programming to middle school students. There look to be some interesting features included.
• What NEW Windows SDK Features do you want? - The Windows SDK team ask the community to rank some ideas for new SDK features by spending a virtual $100 on the items in a list.
• Behind Brian the Build Bunny - Martin Woodward walks through the steps to create a real world build notification for TFS using a s Nabaztag bunny
• Microsoft Source Analyzer (StyleCop) Extensions Controversy – Part Two - Good news for the StyleCop enthusiasts - looks like the confusion over the custom rules has been resolved, and that StyleCop is getting some more development including an SDK to allow extension.
• TDD is how I do it, not what I do - Brett Schuchert talks about the benefits of the results of using TDD as a supporting case for doing TDD in the first place.
• Generate PDF Using C# - Predrag Tomasevic looks into using Open Office from C# to create PDF files

Community

• SQLBits III Cubed - 13th September 2008 - Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK - SQL Bits, the UK SQL Community Conference returns for the third time. Registration is open now, and there are also pay for training sessions running the day before. Unfortunately the conference clashes with the Alt.NET UK Conference, so that weekend we are spoilt for choice of UK tech events.

1 Comment »

A multitude of technical problems made preparing today’s edition more difficult than it should have - Looks like it might be one of those days.

Information

• ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 CodePlex Preview 1 available - The First Preview release of the forthcoming ASP.NET Ajax version 4 release has been made available on CodePlex
• NUnit: 2.4.8 Released - A bugfix release of the famous unit testing framework.

Information

• Distributed Caching - Strategies and Tips - Scott Watermasysk talks about distributed caching and shares some of the best practices he has picked up working with a distributed cache on Community Server
• Linq to NHibernate in 10 minutes - Matt Hinze examines Linq to NHibernate in the CodeCampServer project.
• No Slow Unit Tests with xUnit.net - Ade Miller shows how you can prevent slow unit tests from bogging your test run down with the use of the xUnit.NET StrictFact Attribute to enforce a timeout
• Unit Test Boundaries - Phil Haack talks about the single responsibility principle and how that should apply to unit testing
• MVC AJAX Support - Melvyn Harbour looks at the new Ajax functionality in the latest ASP.NET MVC preview release.
• Minimalist Coding Style - Mark Levison talks about some of his rules of programming
• Learn How to use NHibernate with the Summer of NHibernate Screencast Series - Scott Hanselman talks about screencasts for learning, and about NHibernate with reference to Stephen Bohlen’s ‘Summer of NHibernate Screencast Series’
• Thread Proxy Mediator Pattern - Michael Birken shows an implementation of a pattern to help with avoiding common GUI problems
• Introduction to Object-Oriented Javascript - A nice short introduction to a number of the more advanced Javascript programming techniques
• Name Your Threads - Daniel Moth encourages developers to name their threads to make debugging easier.

Community

• VBUG Manchester: Where’s my data? An intro to Spatial Queries in SQL Srv 08 - Tommorrow’s VBUG Manchester event should be interesting - Colin Angus MacKay will be talking about the new spatial features of SQL Server 2008

1 Comment »

I think the summer holiday season is starting to take hold - the .NET world seems a little quiet this week

Information

• Tips to Write a Good Bug Report - Its always useful for developers to have one of these posts on hand to use as a ‘here is how it should be done’ for people submitting bug reports.
• Skip lists are fascinating! - Igor Ostrovsky takes a look at a list data structure known as Skip Lists - interesting reading
• Design and Implementation of an Attribute-Driven, Caching Data Abstraction Layer. - A long and detailed Code Project article discussion an attribute-driven data abstraction layer with multi database support, intelligent caching, transparent encryption, multi-property sorting, property change tracking, etc.
• Sneak peeks into the new F# project system, part one - Looks like F# is getting better/more familiar Visual Studio integration in the next major release.
• Mocking dilemma - Davy Brion poses a question about mocking a particular abstract class and method set up - some interesting comments.
• Unstable code - Ayende has a series of posts on Unstable Code this morning - I’m not going to link to them all, but this appears to be the start of them. As usual lots of interest in the comments too.
• The Weekly Source Code 30 - Spark and NHaml - Crazy ASP.NET MVC ViewEngines - Scott Hanselman looks at two alternative ASP.NET MVC view engines in this weeks post in his Weekly Source Code series.
• ADO.Net Data Services with NHibernate - Ayende highlights some work by Shawn Wildermuth, who has implemented IUpdatable in Linq to NHibernate

1 Comment »