The Morning Brew

I’ve had a busy weekend, with a Charity walk up Snowdon in aid of the Wales Air Ambulance which has left me with slightly aching legs - all for a very good cause though. Looks like the .NET world has been busy this weekend, so a few of the weekends links will flow into tomorrows brew too.

The post time of The Morning Brew may be a little more erratic this week as I’m on leave from work, so have no pressing ‘must get out of bed’ reason this week.

Software

• 60 Free WinForm and WebForm Controls from DevExpress – Reg-ware, yet usable in commercial, biz, etc, applications - Greg Duncan highlights a great offer from DevExpress

Information

• The Most Funny Interface Of The Year … IQueryable<T> - Bart De Smet looks at the implementation of the IQueryable<T> interface in this swift overview of what is quite a complex beast.
• Proceedings of the 2008 Canadian ALT.NET Open Space Conference - This weekend was the Alt.NET Canada Conference, and this page on the AltNetPedia contains videos of a few of the sessions. There is about 2 hours of content there discussing DDD and Build Files
• What do you think about using a presentation model for presenting your domain model? - Fredrik Normén canvases opinion on creating presentation classes for your domain classes using the Presentation Model pattern.
• ASP.NET MVC Tip #33 – Unit Test LINQ to SQL - Stephen Walther shows how you can fake the LINQ to SQL DataContext to help make unit testing LINQ to SQL code better.
• Introducing Table-Valued Parameters - Part 1 - Himanshu, from the ADO.NET team talks about one of the most interesting features of SQL 2008 (in my mind), table valued parameters, at last we are free from having to encode tables of data as binary to pass lists into the database via a parameter on a stored proc.
• The ABCs of Alpha, Beta, CTP - Phil Haack decodes the alphabet soup that is release terminology with this handy guide to the key terms.
• Async Computation Expressions - Resource and Exception Management - Matthew Podwysocki looks at working with resources (such as text files) and handling exceptions using Async Computation Expressions, and how they make this stuff quite simple.
• Framework Design Guidelines 2nd Edition Available today on Rough Cuts - Brad Abrams announces the release of they updated edition of the Framework Design Guidelines as a ‘Rough Cut’ PDF - I look forward to seeing what has changed as the first edition is a classic .NET book in my mind.
• An example of bad test, part 1 - Ayende posts two posts about some things to watch out for when writing tests - the second part is linked at the top of the article
• Developing Client Components with ASP .NET AJAX - Xun Ding shows how the ASP.NET Ajax Framework can be used to create client side components in this DotNetSlackers article.
• MVC Storefront Part 19: Processing Orders With Windows Workflow - Rob Conery spikes within his MVC Store Front project looking at using Windows Workflow for handling the order processing part of the system.
• .NET Memory Management - Davy Brion looks at Garbage Collection, Finalisation and and the dispose pattern

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Software

• Microsoft FxCop 1.36 - FxCop has been updated to support .NET 3.5 SP1

Information

• Know Issues / Breaking changes in ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 - Scott Galloway is maintaining a list of Know issues and breaking changes for the ASP.NET 3.5 SP1, which he will be keeping up to date
• Free Silverlight and WPF goodness for all! - Andrew den Hertog highlights a new WPF and Silverlight component site, allowing community submissions of free components.
• More on Device Filtering With ASP.NET Server Control Properties - Ryan Farley continues looking at browser filtering for asp.NET server controls, this time looking at how it can be archived in code rather than the declarative markup.
• Aspects of Functional Programming in C# Presentation and Code Redux - Matthew Podwysocki issues a post presentation collection of links to articles, sample code and podcasts about Functional Programming and F#.
• LINQ and Dynamic Predicate Construction at Run-time - Dave Dolan look at a way of dynamically building LINQ Predicates from a search form.
• C# Tutorial - Weak References - Michael Kuehl talks about the Weak Reference in .NET and shows where it can be used.
• Test Doubles: When To (Not) Use Them - Davy Brion gives some guidance for choosing when to use the real component and when to use a test double in its place when writing tests.
• Filters in ASP.NET MVC CodePlex Preview 4 - Phil Haack talks about the four types of filter introduced in ASP.NET MVC Preview 4
• Inversion of Control is NOT about testability - Jeffrey Palermo reminds us that IOC is about improving the quality of our code/design, and that testability is a happy side effect of the good code/design. He ends by making a very good point - Programming is about coupling after all
• ASP.NET gets no Respect - Rick Strahl talks at length about the reasons he feels that ASP.NET gets a lack of respect from the general web development community - a long but interesting (and not particularly biased) article
• 12 Unit Testing Tips for Software Engineers - Its sometimes a good idea to remind yourself what the best ways and reasons for doing something are.

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I’ve introduced a temporary section for Service Pack 1 related items today to help separate them out from the normal stuff.

Software

• Free (Lite Version) Icon Editor Addin for Visual Studio 2008 - Axialis IconWorkshop Lite - Greg Duncan highlights the availability of a free icon editor for Visual Studio. I’m no artist, but having the correct tools makes making icons a little easier.

Information

• Recursing on Recursion - Continuation Passing - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on Recursion, focusing on Continuation Passing, and how that can help with parsing unbalanced trees.
• A fluent interface to NHibernate - Part 2 - Value Objects - The NHibernate FAQ blog continues looking at Fluent NHibernate, looking at mapping value objects and relationships to value objects in this post.
• Wanted: IE8 Beta Testers - The Internet Explorer team are not far from a Beta 2 release of IE8, and are now looking to get a team of beta testers together.
• What’s an Auto Mocking Container? - Mike Hadlow gives a nice simple introduction to the Auto Mocking Container in Rhino mocks
• Curry for dummies - Bart De Smet looks at the concept of Currying, and shows how it can be implemented in C#
• DSL Patterns - User Extensible Language - Ayende looks at improving the clarity and expression in DSL statements.
• SQL Server 2008 Management Studio tip: Status bar Custom Colors - One of the nice new features in SQL server Management Studio 2008, anything that helps avoid those awful ‘I’ve just run that on the wrong database’ moments has to be a good thing.
• Our New Book – Beginning ASP.NET MVC - Keyvan Nayyeri talks about his next project, a beginners book on ASP.NET MVC.

.NET 3.5 Service Pack 1

• Hidden Gems - Not the same old 3.5 SP1 post - Scott Hanselman gives a good overview of the new features in .NET 3.5 SP1
• .NET 3.5 SP1: Changes Overview - Patrick Smacchia runs over the changes in .NET 3.5 SP1 using NDepend to compare to original 3.5 release.
• Visual Studio SP1 and The Metification of REST - K. Scott Allen talks about the adding of metadata to REST webservices, and how it really helps out Sliverlight and ASP.NET web service interoperability
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Allows managed code to be launched from a network share! - .NET 3.5 SP1 relaxes the restriction on running managed code from network shares - this has been a long standing grievance for me and may others, and I’m very glad to see its been fixed.
• How .Net 3.5 SP1 broke Rhino Mocks - Ayende reveals how .NET 3.5 SP1 breaks Rhino Mocks support for mocking F#, C++ and Spec#. There is a Connect Site Issue open with Microsoft about this breaking change which would appreciate your vote.

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The dust is still settling following the double Service Pack release on Monday - I’ve obtained the service pack now, but have yet to have the time to install. Last night I upgraded this Blog to Wordpress 2.6, so if any one notices any bugs please let me know.

Also, Thanks to Davy Brion for recommending the Morning Brew in his recent post on Link Blogs.

Software

• SQL Server Express 2008 is now available - Aaron Bertrand reminds us that the 11th was not just VS SP1 and .NET SP1 day, it also marked the release of the Express Edition of SQL Server 2008
• Open source WPF Grid from the WPF Toolkit project released (CTP/Preview) - Greg Duncan points out the release a CTP of a Open Source WPF Grid control from Microsoft - This is good stuff, shame its goign to get lost in the SP1 Hype.

Information

• ASP.NET Performance: High CPU Utilization Case Studies And Solutions - Alik Levin gives three case studies of things that can cause high CPU Utilisation on an ASP.NET web server.
• System.Data.Services - Marcelo Lopez Ruiz gives a brief overview of the parts of the System.Data.Services name space.
• Most Common Performance Issues in Parallel Programs - The Parallel Extension Framework Team share some interesting thoughts on the factors that dictate how much speed up developers can expect to see by applying parallelism their programs.
• Microsoft Sync Framework : 2 New Sync Samples - The Microsoft Sync Framework team announce the release of two sample projects to the code gallery illustrating down load only sync and use the SQLSyncAdapterBuilder with Sync Services for ADO.NET V2
• Forms Framework with Validation for ASP.NET MVC - Nathan Stott shares his newly created forms framework which deals with the creation and validation of forms in the MVC framework preview 4. Not currently open source’d, but judging by the discussion in the comments it will be soon
• Encapsulating Test Data and Expectations - John Teague shares his recent experience of adopting the Object Mother / Test Data Builder patterns to help improve his testing code.
• On Fluent NHibernate - Ayende shares his thoughts on the Fluent NHibernate project, looking at ways it can be used to give an advantage over the native XML mapping files. Looks like a good discussion is starting in the comments too.
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1: LINQ perf improvements (LINQ to Objects and LINQ to SQL) - Dinesh Kulkarni talks about some of the changes to LINQ in SP1, including a breaking change to the Cast<T> extension method.
• ASP.NET Browsers Filter!! - Web Dev And Stuff - A neat little trick which allows you to send different content for properties of controls to different browsers - I’d never heard of this feature before, but its been about since .NET 2.0 apparently.
• Update for viewstate issues - The ASP.NET Debugging blog has some information on a change to viewstate ins SP1 which fixes a known problem.
• Released: .NET 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit - Charlie Calvert highlights the release of an updated .NET 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit, which has presentations, hands on labs and demos of new features in .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio SP1.

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Yesterday was Service Pack 1 day - I think every other post I read this morning was people telling me that, so I suspect the first few links won’t be that new to you…

Software

• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 Release to Manufacturing - As outlined in the release timetable following the SQL 2008 release, yesterday was Service Pack 1 day for .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. Peter Provost has the details from the press release and the download links to the key components. From what I’m reading it is well worth running the Service Pack Preparation Tool , and also bear in mind that you may need your original installation media for VS2008 too.
• ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 - Details of the changes to ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1 - this is not a separate install, it comes as part of the SP1 install.
• NArrange .NET Code Organizer Adds StyleCop Compatibility - James Nies announces the latest release of NArrange, the code organiser. New in this release is support for StyleCop member ordering.
• A WPF taskboard for Scrum\VSTS - Andrew Stopford highlights a neat looking set of addins that enable Scrum in Visual Studio TS, including a really nice looking task board - shame I don’t run TS though

Information

• Representing dependencies in code - Kirill Osenkov talks about dependencies in code, and how they can be represented - interesting reading.
• A question of Scale - Ayende talks about when to scale and when not to scale, and the reasons to be wary of unnecessary scaling.
• Introduction to D3DImage - A number of major new feature in WPF were included in the .NET 3.5 SP1, and D3DImage is just one of them - this article runs through all the getting started aspects of D3DImage
• ASP.Net Load Testing and Optimization Toolkit - So you want to be a hero - A nice run down of 9 types of tool for performance and load testing and optimization, complete with recommended tools with a mini review.
• .NET Framework Assistant - Julian M Bucknall highlights one of the new features of .NET 3.5 SP1 for users who use FireFox 3 - now you get a helper for click once applications!
• ISO-11179 Naming Conventions - SQLDenis highlights the ISO-11179 standard for database naming conventions - might be worthy of consideration when creating coding standards documents.
• C# Refcard Available - A nice Reference Card for C# created by C# MVP Jon Skeet, covers all the important areas.

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Software

• SequenceViz - A neat tool for generating Sequence diagrams from your code, has just rached v0.7 (alpha), and is starting to look like a really useful tool.
• NUnit Test Case Code Generator - An interesting tool for automatically generating NUnit tests for your code based on inspection. I’m always slightly scared of automatically generated tests, but I suppose they are better than nothing and do provide a starting point for some real testing - that said they can give a false sense of coverage.
• Subtext 2.0 Released - Phil Haack announces the release of SubText 2.0, containing a number of new features and bug fixes

Information

• The Queryable Domain Property Problem - Mike Hadlow looks at the problems with tools like Linq to SQL (and other ORM mappers) when it comes to querying on a Domain Model Property which is in some way computed.
• Low-Latency GC in .NET 3.5 - Sasha Goldshtein talks about the use of Low Latency mode for Garbage collection in .NET applications.
• Beginners Guide To Threading In .NET Part 5 of n. - Sacha Barber continues his excellent series on Threading, looking at UI threading in Winforms, WPF and Silverlight
• New Web Developer Tips and Tricks Blog - Brad Abrams announces a new Tricks and Tips blog targeted at Web Developers
• ASP.NET Under Attacks - Keyvan Nayyeri talks about the latest round of SQL Injection style attacks which have been targeting a number of high profile .NET Bloggers (amongst others)
• Recent SQL Injection Attacks against Server - Rick Strahl has also been seeing these SQL Injection attacks, and shows the details of the signature of the attack and a simple way of mitigating by imposing query string size limits.
• Fluent NHibernate and those sweet LINQ repositories - Tobin Harris looks into Fluent NHibernate and talks about some one the nice things it includes - an in memory repository which uses LINQ and allows you to work disconnected from a database - ideal for tests.
• MVC Storefront Part 18: Creating An Experience - Rob Conery starts to wrap this series up with this episode, looking at some of the refactorings he has done, and then finally putting the initial application together.
• Patterns for using Distributed Hash Tables: Conclusion - Ayende concludes his series on Distributed Caching, after posting a swath of posts this weekend. All the posts are linked at the top of this one, and are all very interesting reading. Topics include Item Groups, Transactions, Locality, and much more.

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Shorter post today, as I think everyone is off downloading and playing with SQL server 2008. Happy 08-08-08 day everyone.

Software

• ANTS Profiler 4 Beta: The facelift is almost complete - Redgate announce the availability of a Beta release of ANTS Profiler 4. The beta release is free to download, but will only last until 17th August 2008, still should be interesting to see what that have planned for this release.

Information

• Understanding Tail Recursion - Chris Smith looks at Tail Recursion, showing how it is crucial for creating efficient and safe functional code, explaining how the stack works and what can cause stack overflows, and then looking at how to avoid all this with tail recursion.
• Visual Studio Theme Generator - Ryan Lanciaux has created a Visual Studio theme generator which creates .VSSETTINGS which can be imported into Visual Studio. Looks very simple to use, and I think I’ll be trying this out on my development machine later today
• Crazy Extension Methods Redux (with Oxygene) - Colin Angus Mackay gets inspired by a feature from Oxygene (an object Pascak language which targets .NET) and shows how a similar effect can be created using extension methods.
• Speedy C#, Part 2: Optimizing Memory Allocations - Pooling and Reusing Objects - Robert Paveza continues his series on Speedy C# with a look at what goes on with memory when you create and destroy objects, and what the Garbage collector gets up to.
• Make the debugger show the contents of your custom IList class - Qwertie shows how adding a few simple attributes to your custom collections can help enhance your debugging experience.
• Skinning the Cat with Fluent NHibernate - Robert Johnson looks at Fluent NHibernate and walks through its use with a quickstart which is based on the NHibernate quickstart for mapping the cat class.
• Single instance applications - Matt Ellis talks about an alternative way (compared to Scott Hanselman’s recent post) of creating single instance applications using some old school COM methods.
• Moving my Site onto a 64 Bit Server - Rick Strahl talks about his experiences moving his sites and applications onto a 64 Bit Windows 2008 machine, with some good tips for anyone who needs to run older 32 bit apps alongside 64 bit apps in IIS.

Community

• SQL Server Heroes Unite Contest! - The External Links & References Blog has the details of a competition for anyone developing an interesting application on Codeplex using SQL Server 2008 - you will have to be quick though, the competition closes at the end of August

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A longer than average post today due to SQL 2008 finally being RTM’d, although it seems that Visual Studio folks should hold off untill the 11th August when the RTM of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 will be made available.

Software

• SQL Server 2008 on MSDN Subscriber Downloads - SQL Server 2008 has arrived, and teh RTM release is available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads now!
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Release Notes - Get the low down on the SQL Server 2008 release, as there are a number of considerations when installing.
• Microsoft Sync Framework - Microsoft Sync Framework V1 is released, providing easy ways of adding sync support to applications. This release also includes Sync Services for ADO.NET allowing offline working against ADO data sources.
• SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 Released - Steve Lasker announces the release of the SQL Server Compact edition V3.5 SP1, which now supports the entity framework and 64bit support. This will also be included in Visual Studio SP1
• SQL Server 2008 RTM samples are up on CodePlex now. - A new SQL Server, and we also get some new Community samples on Codeplex
• SQL Server 2008….Finally - Some key dates for the other parts of the SQL 2008 release coming in the next month.
• Pex 0.6 Released - Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of Pex 0.6, which now supports installation on 64 bit Windows. along with UI improvements and some other new features.
• IronPython - Release: 2.0 Beta 4 - The IronPython team announce the release of Beta 4 of Iron Python 2, now featuring an MSI Installer, static compilation, some performance improvements over Beta 3, and a host of other features.
• Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net - A .NET port of the YUI Compressor Java Project, allowing compression of CSS and Javascript

Information

• Unused code is the worst of the 7 Wastes of Software - Derik Whittaker talks about why unused / not needed code is bad
• What Have We Been Up to? - The Visual Studio Extensibility Team share what they have been working on - looks like there are some good things just around the corner.
• Write your own NUnit constraint (in VB) - Part 2 - Andrew Stopford continues looking at NUnit Constraints, in the part looks at creating some nice ‘Syntax sugar’ to allow his code to say This.Is.EqualTo’
• On Documentation for (and by) Developers - Peter Bromberg reminds everyone of the importance of XML documentation on your code, and explains how to get that documentation when your code is referenced in another application.
• Documenting Coding Standards - Less is More - Andrew Tokeley offers some best practices for writing coding standards documents.
• Visual Studio .NET Platform Target Explained - Darren Stokes talks about the Platform Target choices available in Visual Studio, explaining what they actually do.
• A Practical Review of ASP.NET MVC - Joshua Charles talks about his experiences using ASP.NET MVC from the point of view of a Ruby on Rails user - interesting to see what people from the other side think.
• Log4PostSharp - AOP and logging - Michal Dabrowski shows how AOP can improve your logging with this article on the implementation of logging using PostSharp
• Rating of Open Source AOP Frameworks in .Net. - V. Gnanasekaran looks at how different Aspect Oriented Programming frameworks can be compared - useful if you find yourself needing to pick one.
• Always use Nullables for Dates: C# and VB.NET - Rob Reynolds looks at Nullable dates and show how and why you should be using them.
• The best feature in SQL Server 2008 – sqlps.exe? - Eric Nelson takes a look at the Powershell functionality included in SQL Server 2008 - looks good
• Static Compilation of IronPython scripts - Srivatsn talks about static compilation of IronPython scripts, a feature from the 1.0 version that has now been re-introduced into the V2 edition.

Community

• Bad News, Good News - stackoverflow - Stackoverflow, the new community from Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky has entered beta, and there is a form you can fill in to get onto the beta linked from this post.

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