The Morning Brew

As promised on Friday, today’s Brew is a bit of a monster – I always regret skipping a post on a UK Bank Holiday as the number of posts I have to wade through to put the next edition together is always massive, and today was no exception.

Software

• NHibernate 2.0 Final is out! – Ayende spreads the news that my favourite ORM has reached a final release of Version 2. This is great news, and it brings NHibernate on par with the Java Hibernate v3.2, so a whole host of new features to play with.
• Json.NET 3.0 Released – James Newton-King announces the release of Version 3 of the Json.NET library, containing a bunch of new features, the most significant it the support for use in Silverlight, along with improvements to the LINQ support and the serializer.
• Firebug 1.2 Released – John Resig announces the final release of the excellent FireFox extension FireBug 1.2 – If you don’t already have this and do any web development you really need this addon.
• IIsManager – A nice looking Class Library to enable you to work with IIS 6 from .NET. This allows for creation and modification of websites, application pools and virtual directories, and looks like it could be really useful for deployment work.

Information

• Streamlined BDD Using SubSpec for xUnit.NET – Phil Haack takes a look at Behaviour Driven Development, looking at a few different frameworks for writing tests, and finally, with some help for Brad Wilson looks at creating his own syntax using xUnit.NET. This is an interesting article, with some great comments too.
• Garbage Collection Notifications in .NET 3.5 SP1 – Sasha Goldshtein looks at a new API in .NET 3.5 SP1 which allows you to get notification of when Garbage Collection is about to occur.
• Working with .NET 1.1 in Visual Studio 2008 and Team Server – Lazy Developer – Ziemowit ‘Jimmy’ Skowronski shows how you can get Visual Studio and Team Server to work with .NET 1.1 Projects using MSBee and some project file hackery.
• No GoLive required to use ASP.NET MVC in production – Not new news, but first time I’ve seen it expressed, if you are using ASP.NET MVC Previews you are free to go live with them at any time, unlike the usual Microsoft Preview way.
• Coding Horror: Deadlocked! – Jeff Atwood talks about some of the deadlock problems he’s been encountering with the new StackOverflow site, and talks about the possible solutions.
• Deadlocked!: “read committed snapshot” Explained – Nick Berardi follows up on Jeff Atwood’s post by talking at more length about the Read Committed Snapshot option, how it works and some of the potential problems when using it.
• "C# Hooks For RRDtool". – A useful library for working with RRDTool allowing you to store data and generate graphs. This article provides a taster to the capabilities of the library, with more documentation provided in the library.
• Thread synchronization: Wait and Pulse demystified. – Nick Butler explains the use of the Wait and Pulse methods of the Monitor class, illustrating with an example.
• Primitive Contextual Intellisense – Ayende continues his Source Editor series with a look at in context auto completion
• Deep Zoom, MultiScaleTileSource and the Mandelbrot Set – Mike Ormond takes a look at the changes in DeepZoom in Silverlight 2 Beta 2, and illustrates using Mandelbrots for show the image generation.
• Fast Serialization – Greg Young talks about a real world case of implementing custom serialisation in order to gain performance. Greg is quick to point out that this was a solution for their specific problem (and has optimisations specific to it), and that it may not work well for you, but it still makes interesting reading.
• A Subtle DIfference in Catch Blocks – Jason Bock looks into some of the stranger bits of exceptions handling, where the things being thrown aren’t exceptions.
• The Evolution of MVC – Stephen Walther traces back the history of of the MVC pattern, and how the idea has shifted over the years.
• How to get ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 to run with .NET SP1 – Daniel Cazzulino shows how Binding Redirects allow you to get ASP.NET MVC working with the SP1 implementations of Routing and Abstractions.
• MVC Storefront Part 19a: Windows Workflow Followup – Rob Conery follows up on some of the comments about his Windows Workflow implementations, and puts some polish on the Order Process and enhances the unit tests
• PRG Pattern in the ASP.NET MVC Framework – Tim Barcz explains the benefits of the Post Redirect Get Pattern for web page interactions, and shows how you can achieve it using the ASP.NET MVC
• Core .NET Refcard Available – DZone add to their series of quick reference cards with a reference card for the .NET Framework 3.5

Community

• ThoughtWorks geek night – reminder – Andrew Stopford promotes a relatively new event held in Manchester, where he will be talking on MBUnit as part of a double bill of talks. I’ve attended one of these events before and it was very interesting – I’m looking forward to this one one Wednesday

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Monday is a Public Holiday in the UK, so in keeping with ‘brew’ tradition I will be skipping a post on Monday, returning on Tuesday with a bumper weekend round up, back at my normal early posting times. Have a good weekend one and all.

Software

• Ajax Control Toolkit released for .NET 3.5 SP1 – Bertrand Le Roy announces the release of an updated ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit which has been built against .NET 3.5 SP1, and includes a number of community patches and a new control.

Information

• ASP.NET Futures – Generating Dynamic Images with HttpHandlers gets Easier – Scott Hanselman takes a look at the new ASP.NET Generated Image and how it makes creating images dynamically so much easier. Scott gives a simple example, and looks at its use in ASP.NET and MVC.
• Shared Source CLI 2.0 Internals Draft – Joel Pobar and Ted Neward have been working on updating the Shared Source CLI essentials book, and will be releasing it for free as an E-Book (and also in printed format). The draft version is available for download now, and should give you more than enough information on how the CLI works under the hood.
• New ASP.NET MVC Videos and Tutorials – Sounds like Microsoft are pushing out the boat on the ASP.NET MVC site, with loads of new screencasts and tutorials, along with free chapters from a number of upcoming ASP.NET MVC books.
• Basic intellisense – Ayende continues his series on code editing by looking at adding intellisense to his editor
• Localize text in JavaScript files in ASP.NET – Mads Kristensen looks at a useful technique for localising strings in your JavaScript
• How C# Array Initializers Work – Bart De Smet look under the covers at one of the language features many of us take for granted, looking down at the IL level to discover what actually happens when you use an array initializer.
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data – Simple 5 Table Northwind Example – Matt Berseth runs through the new ASP.NET Dynamic Data by creating a simple example using everyone’s favourite database schema.
• Exploring System.Web.Routing – Justin Etheredge looks at the System.Web.Routing functionality, originally part of ASP.NET MVC, that has shipped as a part of the .NET 3.5 SP1, allowing us all to easily create great URL structures.
• StyleCop Addin – SharpDevelop gets StyleCop integration, allowing StyleCop to be invoked manually from within the IDE, or to be run as a part of the build process.
• A very easy intro to Microsoft .Net Speech Synthesis (VB, C#, C++) – A very simple sample application showing how easy it is to get speech synthesis into your applications built on .NET 3.0+
• LINQ to JSON – Mike Ormond takes a look at LINQ to JSON, one of the SilverLight 2 Beta 2 features, which allows you to query data retuned as JSON without needing to define classes for the data to be deserialised into.

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Software

• .NET Reflector – Yesterday RedGate announced, to a very mixed response, that they have acquired Reflector, the tool created by Lutz Roeder which easily allows disassembly of .NET assemblies allowing you to see how they work under the covers. RedGate will be carrying the development forward, maintaining a free community version.
• Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.1 – Keyvan Nayyeri highlights the availability of an updated Visual Studio 2008 SDK – now Version 1.1. There are improvements for developing for the Visual Studio Shell, along with reductions in the size of the redistribution packages produced. Keyvan links to the download.

Information

• Get the .NET Framework Fast – Scott Hanselman has created a simple single page site which, via browser testing, attempts to offer the user the smallest download possible to obtain the .NET Framework
• New Issue of the Architecture Journal: Article on "Claims and Identity, On-Premise and Cloud Solutions" – Issue 16 of the Architecture Journal is released, the theme this edition is Identity. A direct download link is provided in this announcement post.
• How To: Get 100% code coverage with C# Switch Statements – Anil Revuru talks about an interesting and unexpected code coverage issue when testing a switch statement. The framework was generating additional code which was causing the coverage to drop. A rather ugly workaround is provided, which I personally think is unnecessary as 100% code coverage should be an aim, but not required, especially in instances like this.
• Client profile explained.. – Jaime Rodriguez gives the lowdown on what the .NET Client profile is and how it will work, along with a note that the Windows Update side of this is not up and running yet.
• Excluding particular derived types in NHibernate queries – Derek Fowler shows how you can obtain all objects from an inheritance hierarchy except for specific types using NHibernate’s class property in queries.
• Minimalist Meta-model for CRUD applications – Olivier Giulieri looks at the level of information needed to allow mapping of data into the database and the definition of the UI for collection and maintaining this information. I’ve produced similar systems to this in the past and the key is always providing suitable extension points for the inevitable custom logic needed in real applications.
• Changing Your Garbage Collector Settings on the Fly (.NET Memory Management: Part 5) – Rick Minerich talks about the .NET 3.5 and .NET 2.0 SP1 capability which allows you to change the garbage collectors mode at runtime by code, and explains the meanings of the settings.
• Custom Syntax Highlighting – Ayende continues his syntax highlighting series with a look at using SharpDevelop’s editor with custom syntax definition provided by an XML File.
• SQL Server Indexing Tips and Tricks – William Vaughn shares some of the things he learnt about SQL Server indexing and optimisation he learnt at a Redmond .NET User group talks by Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randall.
• Support Visual Studio Test Runner – James Newkirk askes the community what the xUnit.NET team should do about Visual Studio integration, considering all the specifics of integrating this way.
• Bare bones ASP.NET MVC Project Template – Chris Carter shares a striped back to the bare essentials ASP.NET MVC project template

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