The Morning Brew

I’ve just noticed that since I upgraded to WordPress 2.6 I’ve been forgetting to tag posts against any categories (mainly because the UI to do that is below the fold). Hopefully this hasn’t caused you to miss any posts, and I’ve now updated all the posts missing tags to include them.

Software

• ASP.NET Generated Image Control – The ASP.NET Team have released a new control to make it easier and quicker to generate dynamic images for use in ASP.NET Sites. The linked page is a tutorial about using the controls, the release download is linked from here.
• Typemock Isolator 5.0 Released – The latest release of TypeMock has gone gold, and is available in three different licenses – Commercial, Personal and open source. A significant new feature of this release is the Arrange Act Assert syntax.
• Microsoft StyleCop – Release: StyleCop 4.3 – Microsoft’s Source Code Analysis tool StyleCop reaches V4.3. This release contains numerous bug fixes, improved Visual Studio Integration,, documentation about the rules, and a bunch of new rules.

Information

• Probably The Most Powerful LINQ Operator: SelectMany – Bart De Smet takes an indepth look at the SelectMany LINQ operator
• Pluralsight’s WCF/WF Developer Screencast Series – Aaron Skonnard highlights a screencast series developed by Pluralsight in conjunction with the WCF/WF teams at Microsoft
• Smarter Syntax Highlighting – Ayende follows up on yesterdays simple syntax highlighting with a better way (reusing some existing functionality)
• SubSonic Scalin – Rob Conery runs some large record count benchmarks on Subsonic to answer some questions about its scalability.
• A little refactoring that pleased me – Mark Burnett shares a nice little refactoring which made his code clearer, separated responsibilities and allowed for better testing. Its always nice to see examples of refactorings.
• Pitfall: Static Field Inline Initialization Order of Execution – Omer van Kloeten shares an interesting ‘gotcha’ about the initialisation of static readonly fields – order is important here!
• Clone Detective for Visual Studio – An interesting Visual Studio Addin which analyses C# projects looking for potentially duplicated code
• To Inline or not to Inline: That is the question – Vance Morrison talks about the inlining optimisation changes in the .NET 3.5 SP1 CLR , and how sometimes its best not to optimise.

2 Comments »

Information

• Practical Concurrency Patterns: Immutability (Freezables) – Sasha Goldshtein continues his series on concurrency with a look at immutable objects and how they really help in concurrent environments.
• Poor man’s syntax highlighting – Ayende shows how simple very basic syntax highlighting is using the rich text box control for winforms.
• The Tarantino Project – automated database migrations and more\ – Jeffrey Palermo announces the Tarantino Project, an interesting looking project which currently deals with database migrations on SQL Server, and helpers for sites deployed in web farms, with Configuration, scheduling, etc coming soon. They are also on the lookout for developers to help with Oracle Support for the database migrations.
• Using LINQ to SQL XML Mapping Files – Step by Step – Dan Wahlin looks at creating LINQ to SQLXML Mapping files by hand to allow better control over the mapping between classes and database tables
• Only In A Database Can You Get 1000% + Improvement By Changing A Few Lines Of Code – SQLDenis talks about the dramatic differences in performance that can be obtained by making queries make good use of indexes
• I’m Missing My Default Parameter Values – Mike Taulty laments the lack of optional parameters in C#
• Fluent NHibernate – Configuration – Chad Myers shows off the configuration capabilities of Fluent NHibernate. Personally I’m not really convinced that this bit is strictly necessary as the raw NHibernate way of doing this in code isn’t much longer and only tends to need to be written once in any given project, although the fluent interface does look quite shiny
• Constrained Generics and Return Values – Jason Bock talks about an how clever compilers are these days when it comes to things like evaluating the validity of statements where generics are involved.
• Why you should always unsubscribe event handlers – Davy Brion talks about one of the most common causes of memory problems caused by the Garbage collector not being able to remove object because other objects still hold references to them via event handlers.

1 Comment »

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

1 Comment »