The Morning Brew

The Morning Brew should be back to normal this week - being at home makes putting this together a lot easier.

Software

• Announcing IronEditor - An Editor for IronRuby, IronPython and other DLR languages - Ben Hall announces the release of Build 1.0.0.46 of his Editor for DLR based languages. This is an early preview of what is to come, and Ben clearly states that this release is purely part of his release early and often strategy to get some feedback.
• Abidar 1.0 Beta 1 - Keyvan Nayyeri gives the low down on his new task scheduler system developed with Dave Burke which originated as a series of blog posts. The Code and binary release of this beta is on CodePlex.
• Release: LinqToWMI Release 0.3 - LinqToWMI 0.3 is released. This is an updated version (to .NET 3.5) of some original work by Emile Bosch, allowing you to perform LINQ queries on all the information exposed by WMI.

Information

• StructureMap: Medium-level Usage Scenarios - Chad Myers moves on to the intermediate level features of Structure Map
• IronRuby With ASP.NET MVC Working Prototype - Phil Haack gets the ASP.NET MVC with IronRuby prototype working again for Preview 4 of ASP.NET MVC
• Foundations of Programming - Learning Application - Karl Seguin announces the release of a Learning Application to go along with his Foundations Of Programming E-book.
• Distributed in memory cache / storage - Ayende begins a mini series on Caching / Distributed Hash Tables. In this part he looks at the caching API, and the differences between Storage and Caching.
• Patterns for using distributed hash tables: Groups - Ayende looks at the idea of grouping data together in the cache/distributed hash table to help avoid Select N+1 behaviour.
• Patterns for using distributed hash tables: Locking - Ayende continues his series on Distributed Hash tables with a look at the locking considerations
• Exposing Custom Performance Counters in .NET - Sasha Goldshtein looks at custom performance counters, and offers some rough sample code showing how you can implement them in your applications.
• Customizing csproj files to autogenerate AssemblyInfo.cs - Michal Dabrowski shows how you can have your AssemblyInfo.cs file auto generated using MSBuild.
• Expressions and Lambdas - Jimmy Bogard looks at the subtle differences between Lambdas and expressions.
• Adding OpenID to your web site in conjunction with ASP.NET Membership - Dan Hounshell takes a step by step look at what is requried to get ASP.NET Membership and OpenID playing together.
• Extension Method + LINQ + Interface = Reusable Queries - Mike Hadlow looks at combining Interfaces with extension methods and Linqto create some useful methods on types for querying his objects.
• Announcing SecureDeveloper.com - Joe Stagner announces a new development security related blog

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Still playing catchup following my trip overseas so a few of these links are a little older than usual.

Information

• MVC Storefront Part 17: Checkout With Jeff Atwood - Latest edition of Rob Conery’s screen cast on building an ecommerce store using ASP.NET MVC. In this part he chats with Jeff Atwood about Open ID and Cardspace, the ideas for the checkout process and looks at setting up cardspace.
• IronPython Post 2.0 Roadmap - Harry Pierson shares the vision of the IronPython Team
• Nullable<T> Usage Guidelines - Krzysztof Cwalina provides some guidelines for Nullable<T> that are being added to the second edition of one of my favourite books, the Framework Design Guidelines book
• CodeStore - Part 1 of n (TreeSurgeon, Castle Windsor, Log4net) - Nauman Leghari starts a series of posts about a new pet project to extract information from assemblies and store in a database. This part looks at the first stage of the project setup using Tree Surgeon and getting Castle and Log4Net working.
• CodeStore - Part 2 of n (SQLite, NHibernate) - In the second part of this series Nauman Leghari looks at setting up NHibernate using the Castle NHibernate Facility and storing data in SQLite
• Setting up CruiseControl.NET to be a Continuous Monitoring Server - An interesting CodeProject article by Ralph Willgoss, outlining an alternative use for CruiseControl.NET as a monitoring server.
• Separation of Concerns by example: Part 5 - Jimmy Bogard rounds out his series in Separation of Concerns by introducing StructureMap to do some dependency injection.
• I Am So Tempted to Write the "Exception Handling in .NET" E-Book - Jason Bock is that fed up of seeing bad exception handling code. I do have to agree, it is a area that a lot of developers seem to struggle with.
• Design Patterns - Adapter Pattern - David Cumps takes a look at the Adapter pattern to convert from one type of interface to another
• ASP.NET MVC Preview 4: ComponentController Is Now RenderAction - Rob Conery looks at one of the changes in the ASP.NET MVC PR4

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A somewhat reduced size of posting again today - caused by problems with the Internet connection. Tomorrow will hopefully be a return to normal service.

Software

• Notes on ASP.NET MVC CodePlex Preview 4 - Phil Haack has the details of the latest ASP.NET MVC Preview release, now available on codeplex.
• CSLA Light preview release - Rockford Lhotka releases an early preview of his CSLA application framework
• Reintroducing Terrarium, now with 2.0 goodness! - Bil Simser announces the release of Terrarium on CodePlex. This was an early sample application (game) created by the .NET team in the 1.x times as a demo of what can be done in .NET. Now it has been updated a little over the years, and the source has been made available on Codeplex.

Information

• Recursing into List Processing - Matthew Podwysocki continues his Back To Basics series on Recursion witha look at list processing in F# and C#
• Don’t mix using statements and lambda expressions - Jared Parsons shares an interesting ‘Gotcha’ involving variable lifetimes - one to remember
• A C# library to write functional code - Part V - The Match operator - Luca Bolognese writes about the match operator in the final part of this series about functional programming concepts in C#.

Community

• The Alt.NET community on alternative .NET tools - An interesting looking event to be held at SkillsMatter in London on 31st July, with a number of recognised UK experts talking about the alternative .NET tools like NHibernate, etc

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Another shorter than usual post - normal service will be resumed at the end of the week.

Software

• IronPython 1.1.2 RC - Harry Pierson has the lowdown on a minor release of IronPython which contains some backported bug fixes.
• NHibernate 2.0 Beta 2 Released - I’m a little late picking this one up, but Symon Rottem has noticed, and now so have I

Information

• Design Patterns - Command Pattern - David Cumps continues his series on Design Patterns with a look at the Command Pattern. Check David’s previous posts too if you haven’t already for a tour of a number of other design patterns.
• New Modules for IIS7: Application Request Routing - Proxy and Load Balancing Module - Scott Hanselman looks at some of the new and exciting developments occurring on the IIS7 platform.
• West Wind Ajax Toolkit updated - Rick Strahl announces the latest release (1.90) of his AJAX toolkit, with a number of improvements over previous versions.
• ASP.NET MVC Tip #19 – Use the nVelocity View Engine - Stephen Walther shows how in just 6 steps you can be up and running with an alternative view engine in ASP.NET MVC
• Configuration via Typemock Interception - Roy Osherove (with his TypeMock hat on) shows how TypeMock can be used to gather configuration using code, and save this information away for later use.
• Optimizing LINQ Queries - K. Scott Allen looks at optimising LINQ Code, and talks about the dangers of doing too much optimisation.
• Getting IronRuby Up and Running - Justin Etheredge walks through the steps of getting IronRuby set up and running in this step by step screenshot rich article.
• Combinatorial Tests and Splitting Context From Specification - Chris Bilson looks at combinatorial tests, which are similar to RowTests except that they allow you to obtain the values from a factory method

Community

• Architecture Journal Issue 17 - Call for Papers - Simon Guest highlights the call for papers for the Architects Journal isue 17. The theme of the issue is Distributed Computing.

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Software

• CR_Documentor 2.0.0.0 Released: Now With Sandcastle Preview and Open Source Goodness - Travis Illig announces the availability of CR_Documentor 2.0.0.0 - an IDE plugin which gives you a preview of the XML comment as it would be rendered in the generated documentation.
• SQL Load Test Tool - Peter Provost talks a new tool for Team Systems which generates Team Systems unit tests from SQL Profiler traces allowing you to do database load testing.
• Announcing the .NET Extension Library - Karl Seguin is rethinking his earlier views on Extension Methods, and has released this library of Extension methods that add core functionality to help develop your projects. One suce example is some help for caching. Project is hosted on CodePlex.
• Open Source ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX Portal - Omar AL Zabir annouces an update to his DropThings sample portal written in .NET 3.5. Full source code is available on CodePlex.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 Release (Part 1) - ScottGu gives the low down on the upcoming ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 release - once again, lots of new and exciting things await us.
• Using an ORM? Think Objects! - K. Scott Allen urges developer making the switch to ORM for thair data access to reset their minds and start truly thinking about objects.
• Extension Method Factoid: They don’t override methods (even the override-able ones) - A useful reminder of the limitations of Extension Methods - this kind of behaviour could confuse people if they are not aware of it.
• Obsolete in Isolation - Ayende talks about his approach to brown fields projects, with some interesting discussion in the comments.
• Last In - First Out: Presumed Hostile - Your Application is Out to Get You - Michael Janke talks about things you should consider when thinking about your security model, particularly talking about trust.

Community

• LINQ to XML talk at Vista Squad, London on Wednesday of this week - Mike Taulty is speaking on LINQ to XML at the Vista Squad user group. The Blog entry states that there are only 11 places left so you might need to be quick if you want to attend.
• VBUG Manchester: XML - The missing LINQ with Dave McMahon (28 Aug 2008) - Dave McMahon will be talking about Linq to XML at the August VBUG Manchester meeting

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Software

• F# Compiler - The F# compiler has been updated to version 1.9.4.19

Information

• Understanding Dependency Injection - Mohammad Azam looks at Dependency Injection by implementing a simple container to illustrate the concept
• Object Equality in an Object Model - Dino Esposito looks at implementing your own equality operators and methods
• Lessons That I Learned From Waegis - Keyvan Nayyeri shares a number of things he learnt in launching his Spam checking service Waegis
• Practical Concurrency Patterns: Read-Write Cache - Sasha Goldshtein starts a series on caching with a look at the standard Read-Write cache.
• Practical Concurrency Patterns: Thread-Local Cache - Sasha continues by looking at Thread-Local caching, involving giving each thread its own copy of the cache, allowing it to access items safely without locking.
• Practical Concurrency Patterns: Safe/Unsafe Cache - Sasha finishes off by looking at a Safe/Unsafe cache, having a lock free collection for startup initialised items, and locking collection for runtime items.
• Putting the container to work: Refactoring NServiceBus configuration - Ayende puts some effort into making the container do more of the configuration of NServiceBus
• When to use many-to-one(s) vs. many-to-many with NHibernate - Billy McCafferty looks at one of the key questions in ORM
• Poll Results: Threading, Mock Frameworks and unit test frameworks - Roy Osherove shares the results of his survey about threading and unit testing.

Community

• Learning NHibernate? Join the email list with 600 other users - Jeffrey Palermo highlights the active community on the NHibernate nhusers Google Group

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Software

• AnkhSVN 2.0 Final Released… - A free Visual Studio integration for Subversion, supporting Visual Studio 2005 and 2008

Information

• Identity framework for .Net - René Løhde talks about the recently released Identity Framework from Microsoft
• Security.Cryptography.dll & Security.Cryptography.Debug.dll from the CLR Security Team (with full source) - Greg Duncan highlights a CodePlex project from the CLR Security Team providing additional crypto algorithms.
• Aspects of Functional Programming in C# Presentation and Code - Matthew Podwysocki posts up a slide deck and some great links about functional programming.
• Back To Basics - Everyone Remember Where We Parked (that memory)! - Scott Hanselman talks about some problems he had with playing sounds in his BabySmash application caused by memory getting cleaned up before the sound had played
• Poll: What threading features do you use? - Roy Osherove wants to know what threading features you use to help with the development of TypeMock Racer.
• Dismiss the ModalPopupExtender with Esc or Enter key - Casey Roach offers a solution to one of my pet hates about web applications - the fact that ‘dialogs’ can’t be dismissed using the escape key.
• Separation of Concerns by example: Part 4 - Jimmy Bogard continues his series on Separation of Concerns - in this part he looks at fixing a defect in the a class, showing how the separation of concerns makes it easier and safer to perform this fix.
• Static Singletons for ASP.NET Controls - Rick Strahl examines the use of the Singleton Pattern for ASP.NET Controls.
• Future Focus: Searching and Navigating to Symbols - Charlie Calvert draws attention to a series of articles about future Visual Studio features, and reminds us that we can comment on these proposals.
• BOSS — The Next Step in our Open Search Ecosystem - Yahoo open up their search with BOSS (Build your Own Search Service), a published API for their search systems with a number of great sounding features
• Mastering F# Lists - Chris Smith takes a detailed look at lists in F#, examining the common methods with some graphical representations.

Community

• Alt.Net.UK Summer Conference - The Alt.Net UK Conference registration is open - get your place for 12-13th September.
• CodePlex Project Developers Wanted for Research Study - Help out a PhD Student researching usability in open source software - only requirement is that you are a developer with a codeplex project

Humour

• Goodbye, World - It is Friday after all - why not!

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I relaxed and watched two DVD’s last night - its been a long time since I managed that. Anyway, on with today’s links:

Software

• SubSonic 2.1 Released - Rob Conery announces the release of SubSonic 2.1, with an appeal to any early adopters to write about the new features to aid with the documentation for this release.

Information

• MVC Controller Action Security Hole - Troy Goode looks at a potential security risk in ASP.NET MVC applications which pass request and cookie values straight into the controller as action parameters.
• User Input In Sheep’s Clothing - Phil Haack responds to the same issues by being technology agnostic and reminding everyone of one of the golden rule of programming - Never trust user input - no matter how you get given it.
• Signing an Unsigned Assembly (without Delay Signing) - OJ Reeves looks at signing third party unsigned assemblies in this step by step article with some nice diagrams.
• C# Mixins - Craig Andera looks at creating mixins using C# Extension Methods.
• EasyHook - The reinvention of Windows API hooking - Christoph Husse writes about the EasyHook CodePlex project in the code project article. EasyHook is a support library for hooking into Windows APIs and this detailed article shows its use in a number of ways.
• Classes that show up in every project - Jeremy D. Miller talks about the classes he ends up with in every project. One thing he doesn’t mention is if these are all created fresh each time, or if they are the same across all of his projects.
• Waegis – The Web Cleaner - Keyvan Nayyeri announces the official launch of his Waegis blog spam protection service, with free accounts for smaller sites, and plugins for the common .NET blogging products.
• Use this NHibernate wrapper to keep your repository classes simple - Jeffrey Palermo shares his SessionBuilder NHibernate Helper class. I think everyone who works with NHIbernate has something similar to this, but as always its good to see how others are going about it.
• Response.Redirect and Response.End - Gunnar Peipman talks about two of the survivors from the Classic ASP Days, and how they can be used to redirect a user to a page and continue processing the old request.

Community

• Alt.Net UK September - Ian Cooper announces the dates and venue for the next Alt.Net UK (un)conference. Registration opens on Friday (11th July) at 7am, and I suspect places will go quickly

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