The Morning Brew

Software

• IronPython Beta 5 - IronPython 2.0 Beta 5 is out, ans is the last planned beta release - judging by the mailing list announcement there are a lot of fixes that have made it into this release.
• XNA Game Studio 3.0 beta - Microsoft launch the Beta of their XNA Game Studio game development framework, allowing game development for XBox and Zune. This beta will run side by side with the V2 release.
• Functional C# - Matthew Podwysocki has updated his Functional Programming in C# examples library to V0.5

Information

• ASP.NET Dynamic Data - Gunnar Peipman gives a quick run through of the new (.NET 3.5 SP1) feature ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• Test Driven Development With Parameterized Unit Tests - Jonathan ‘Peli’ de Halleux talks about the differences between doing Traditional TDD, and doing TDD with Parameterized unit tests (using the Pex framework).
• Introduction to ADO .Net Sync Services - Vishal Shukla gives a simple run through of the ADO.NET Sync Services, with an example in VB.NET (Source provided), and a slide deck to accompany.
• Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part III - Roles - Radim Kohler continues his tour through the Catharsis Web Application Framework, looking at roles and users in this part.
• Implement Observer Pattern in absolutely easy example - Nguyen Anh Vu gives a simple implementation of the observer pattern, useful for the people who like a concrete example rather than the abstract definitions.
• Using Moq ExpectSet - Damian Mehers gives a nice simple example of using the Moq Mocking Framework ExpectSet functionality.
• Back To Basics: Algorithms and Going Back To Virtual School - Scott Hanselman talks about school, Algorithms, and some of his personal traits, along the way highlighting some great resources for learning the more traditional Computer Science content.
• Normalization for databases is like Dependency Injection for code - Mladen Prajdić makes an interesting claim, which on the surface doesn’t seem to be the case, however his argument is good in that both support the same aims.
• SharePoint for Developers: 2. Development Environment - Gunnar Peipman continues his SharePoint for Developers series by looking at what you need in order to have a god working environment for Share Point development.
• DLR Namespace Change Fire Drill - Harry Pierson talks about some internal changes to the DLR
• Q&A Reader emails about .NET memory leaks and random questions - Tess answers some emailed in questions, mainly on memory leaks and debugging - including some good links to Debugging Resources
• Ajax quick start FAQ - A useful looking FAQ on AJAX development, using the ASP.NET Ajax (Atlas), answering a number of common issues.

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Typically, on a day where I’m aiming to be early the Ma.gnolia web service is broken again, meaning I’ve had to spend time manually wrestling with HTML(again)

Software

• SDEdit - Free Sequence Diagram Editor - Shahar Y highlights the availability of this free, open source, and feature rich tool for creating Sequence Diagrams.
• - Karl Shifflett announces a new update release of his Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Add-In which generates WPF XAML code for common tasks
• Release: IronSmalltalk v0.1 - SmallTalk joins the Iron family of languages with this first release of an implementation built on the DLR
• StyleCop Plugin for ReSharper - Release: 0.0.14136 - An interesting sounding plugin for ReSharper, which allows StyleCop 4.3 to run as you type, meaning you will have warnings for rule violations available almost immediately. I’ve not tried this (yet) but I do wonder how processor intensive it will be.

Information

• MVC Storefront Part 21: Order Manager and Personalization - After a bit of a break, Rob Conery resumes his screencast series on building an ECommerce Shop using ASP.NET MVC. This part deals with some more Windows WorkFlow, and Rob also looks at an alternative approach.
• Lambdas - Know Your Closures - Jason Olson looks at one of the potentially confusing aspects of Lambda expressions
• XAML Power Toys v2 Released (finally) Code Name: Hawaii - Karl Shifflett announces a new update release of his Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Add-In which generates WPF XAML code for common tasks
• Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part II. - Radim Kohler continues his series looking at the features of the Catharsis Web Framework, which is based on ASP.NET MVC and NHibernate 2
• SQL Server 2008 eBook from MSPress (and free) - Greg Low highlights the availability of a Free EBook from Microsoft Press on SQL Server 2008 (of which he is one of the co-authors)- Chapter one is completely free, for the rest of the book you will have to give your details, but its still free.
• Resolving arrays with Windsor - Mike Hadlow looks at resolving dependencies which are an array of a specific interface using the Windsor container, and also comments how other frameworks function in this regard.
• Functional C# - Pattern Matching - Matthew Podwysocki recaps Pattern Matching concepts in C# in preparation for a talk he will be giving at the beginning of next month
• Integrating StructureMap and NHibernate with WCF - Jimmy Bogard, inspired by other tutorials on using WCF, NHibernate and the Windsor container, has compiled a similar tutorial on using StructureMap to manage his NHibernate Session creation when used in WCF Services.

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Thankfully things are working again, so no delays in today’s posting. Due to the problems yesterday there were a number of links from the weekend that didn’t make it into the post, but any that missed out are included today, hence its a slightly longer than usual edition.

Software

• Xml Visualizer v.2 - Lars Hove Christiansen shares V0.2 of his XML Debug Visualiser for Visual Studio, allowing better exploration of XML at debug time
• NUnit 2.5 Alpha 4 Released - Charlie Poole announces the latest alpha release of NUnit.
• CodePlex.Snippets - Release: 1.0.0.0 Production (VS2008) - This collection of snippets for Visual Studio 2008 contains 50 snippets many based on snippets used by developers within the Visual C# team at Microsoft.
• Data Structures and Algorithms 0.6 released! - Granville Barnett announces the release of version 0.6 of his data structures and Algorithms library. This release adds three major new features, and a number of minor fixes and changes.
• XML Explorer - XML Explorer, a nice simple and lightweight XML file viewer, has reached version 2. Notabale features include a small memory foot print, even when working with big documents, schema validations, and the evaluation of XPath.
• SharpWidgetsUI version 1.0 released - Aflava announce the release of ShapeWidgetsUI, their UI control library. Licenses start at 299 Euro, which includes a 12 month updates subscription.

Information

• .NET Memory Management – Resources - Scott Dorman shares a great collection of resources about memory management in .NET
• Simple aspect for NHibernate and virtual keyword - Michal Dabrowski shares a PostSharp Aspect which aims to assist NHibernate developers, by ensuring all public members are marked as virtual, thereby allowing NHibernate to do its Lazy Load magic.
• Use INFER.EXE to Create XML Schemas - Eric White highlights a useful rool from Microsoft for creating schema documents from example XML documents.
• nAML: A New Revolutionary Way to Model Your .NET Applications! - Mohammad Ashraful Alam gives the lowdown on what nAML is really all about, following on from the release of the Spec and Visio tools last week.
• Web-Application Framework - Catharsis - part I - Radim.Kohler shares the details of Catharsis, a web application framework, distributed and implemented as a Guidance package, with full source available on CodePlex.
• Creating a Silverlight Layout Panel - Ray Houston shows how simple it is to create your own layout controls for SIlverLight
• SharePoint for Developers: 1. Introduction - SharePoint is one of those technologies I really don’t know enough about, and this series by Gunnar Peipman looks like it might solve my ignorance.
• Closures - Eric White looks at closures in LINQ, giving a nice explanation of where the closure is, and how we as developers are often able to use a concept without even noticing it.
• Scripting in F# - Chris Smith looks at F# for scripting on the desktop, looking at some of the integration and language features which make it a good scripting language, complete with some starting blocks for you to write your own scripts.

Community

• Then a Miracle Occurs - Public Beta - Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky throw open the doors on Stack Overflow, their new Developer Q&A community site.

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Well the Ma.gnolia web services still seem to be down, so I’ve put together a small edition of the Brew manually. Normal Service should be restored tomorrow - I’ll be ready tomorrow for there to be no webservices so the brew will go out as usual

Information

• The Two ALT.NET Criterion - Having just returned from the second UK Alt.Net Conference, this summary of what Alt.NET is all about by Dave Laribee hits the nail on the head
• Are .net interfaces required - Chris Brandsma hosts an interesting discussion about the use of interfaces and tDD. The comments are well worth checking out on this one.
• Interfaces and Testing - Steve Smith follows up on Chris Brandsmas post about interfaces as a requirement for TDD
• Still trying to figure out what DI/IoC is but afraid to speak up? - Greg Duncan highlights a nice Code Project article introducing concepts of Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control.
• Some IoC Container guidelines - Jimmy Bogard shares his guidelines for using IOC Containers
• Critical .NET Security Vulnerability - Jeroen Frijters talks a little about an exploitable security issue he discovered in the Rotor source.
• Targeting the .NET runtime version 2.0 matters - Patrick Smacchia talks about the care that needs to be taken when deciding to take a dependency on a component, and how sometimes that can have a large effect on your deployment.
• Side Effects and Functional Programming - Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at the imperative side of programming in F# with a look at exceptions, resource handling and lazy evaluation.
• Object Oriented F# - More Extension Everything - Matthew Podwysocki looks at some of the other types of extension that can be performed in F#
• F# for game development: Introduction - The introduction to a 6 part (so far) tutorial about using F# for game development - the other parts of the series are linked in the side navigation of the site.
• Exploring the F# Language Series Part 4 - Imperative Features - Kevin Hazzard also explores the imperative side of programming in F# in the forth part of this series.

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Today’s edition will be delayed a while - I’m having issues with the Ma.gnolia web services which I use to put the post together each morning. Hopefully what ever is causing the time outs will be resolved later and I’ll be able to post (or I’ll put the post together manually)

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Its a busy conference weekend in the UK this weekend with SQL Bits, the Alt.Net UK Conference, and Barcamp in Bath being the ones I know people who are attending. I’m going to be at the Alt.NET event, and I’m really looking forward to it - I just hope my train back isn’t as disrupted as the maintenance schedule suggests.

Software

• .NET Application Modeling Language (nAML) Specification and Tools - nAML (.NET Application Language) is a modeling tool for modelling .NET applications down to a low level. It looks like an interesting project, and this beta release contains specification documentation along with samples, and a Visio stencil for drawing the diagrams in Viso.

Information

• My default asp.net architecture - Chris Brandsma shares the structure of his default architecture of ASP.NET. Every developer / architect should have a default architecture that they use for projects as its vital to be able to hit the ground running on projects. Just don’t forget to question and refine it occasionally.
• Visual Studio Tip: Creating Your Own Code Snippets - Kevin Babcock gives a detailed run down of the creation of Code snippets for use in Visual Studio - lots of screenshots / samples help make it clear
• History of the browser user-agent string - Aaron Andersen gives a slightly humorous look at the history and origin of the browser user agent string - a useful prelude to the next item today….
• The .NET Framework and the Browser’s UserAgent String - Scott Hanselman talks about the Browser Useragent string from a .NET perspective, and canvases for opinions from the community about what it should contain.
• The ALT.NET Criterion - Glenn Block talks about the key areas of interest for the Alt.NET community
• Another new find for me – MyVBProf.com - Eric Nelson highlights a good VB related screen cast resource.
• How do you construct your objects? - Brian Di Croce looks at object construction and suggests that its a good idea to really think about your constructor, and ensure that they leave the constructed object in a good state to use.
• NHibernate - When the Fun Begins - Sara Chipps has gone through the pain barrier of mapping here classes, and now looks at the fun part of NHibernate, actually querying and working with the classes, where the framework takes care of the database queries.
• The Weekly Source Code 33 - Microsoft Open Source inside Google Chrome - Scott Hanselman continues his quest to improve as a developer by reading source code, this week looking at the recently released Google Chrome and the open source technologies from MS that it uses.
• Introducing Lullaby - Ryan Olshan explores Lullaby (currently in beta), an attribute based REST API for building REST services in .NET
• Developers: will you or have you signed for ribbon rights? - Tim Anderson talks about the legal restrictions on using the Ribbon UI - If anything is going to restrict the uptake of this UI Feature it’ll be lots of legal red tape - for me certainly.
• Get Involved in the SQL Server Community - Brad McGehee talks about the benefits for DBAs of getting involved in the SQL Server Community - although his points apply equally to all the other technology communities, so if you aren’t already involved, look up what is available in your area and start getting involved.

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Software

• JSON for the Compact Framework - Karl Seguin announces an early release of JsonCF a compact framework 2.0 JSON serializer and Deserializer which can be used in the Compact Framework as well as the Full Framework.

Information

• Evolving a .NET Framework 2.0 Application to .NET Framework 3.5 - Brad Abrams highlights a paper about migrating a .NET 2 application to .NET 3.5, looking at the choices that will need to be made.
• C# Eval: An Embeddable Compiler - Following on from the C# Interactive Shell, Miguel de Icaza has made some changes to allow Eval functionality in C#.
• Vexing exceptions - Eric Lippert explains how he classifies exceptions into four categories, and then when trying to write exception handling code uses these classifications to help decide how to handle the exception.
• NHibernate 2.0 and Linq - Ayende explains the plan for Linq to NHibernate, and highlights the current community offering which will run on NHibernate V2.
• Object Oriented F# - Extension Everything - Matthew Podwysocki looks at Extension Methods in C# 3,0 and F#, and talks about the differences.
• TDD and Hard To Test Areas, Part 2 - Ian Cooper follows up on the first part from a few months back, looking at the things that are difficult to test for developers adopting TDD, and shows techniques that can help in a number of situations.
• Improve your C# with IronRuby - Justin Etheredge suggests that we can learn some interesting things about C# development by looking at the MS-PL licensed code for IronRuby - and I’d have to agree, I think the best way to learn and improve your command of any language is to read some code written by other developers.
• Building the “Good Enough” Framework - Keith Elder shares his notes from an open spaces session held by DevLink about things to consider when building a framework.
• Why a comparison of a value type with null is a warning? - Kirill Osenkov asks the C# Compilter Team a seemingly simple question, and gets a really well considered answer
• Silverlight Foundations: Hello, World! - Kevin Babcock gives a quick start guide to getting up and developing using Silverlight 2.0, working through the required components to install, through to the basic hello world.
• Quality and code coverage - Jimmy Bogard questions the motivation to get to 100% code coverage, argues that the last few percent will take an inordinate amount of work
• ASP.NET MVC Tip #42 – Use the Validation Application Block - Stephen Walther looks at implementing Model Based validation in ASP.NET MVC using the Patterns and Practices Validation Application Block.
• Client & Server Side Validation in ASP.NET MVC - It looks like validation in ASP.NET MVC is a hot topic at the moment, and in this article Emad Ibrahim looks at implementing client side validation in JQuery, and server side validation using Castle Validator.
• Subversion Support Comes to CodePlex… Sorta’ - Steve Harman explores SVNBridge on CodePlex, allowing access to the CodePlex TFS using Subversion

Community

• MSDN Social Bookmarks - Dan Rigsby talks about a new MSDN feature of social bookmarking which has been introduced this week.

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Software

• Interactive Code Dependencies Graph - Patrick Smacchia announces the release of NDepend v2.10, and give a nice preview of Interactive Code Dependency Graphs, the significant new feature of this release. NDepend just seems to keep getting better - I really need to get round to having a play with it again.
• NConsoler - command line parser library for .NET - Maxim Tihobrazov shares a library which gives a nice simple way of working with command line parameters when construction command line tools.

Information

• Logging enumeration flow - Jon Skeet examines the IEnumerable.Intersect function and along with way shows how you can add logging into your IEnumerables to help see when they are evaluated.
• ASP.NET Memory - Identifying pages with high Viewstate - Tess shows how you can identify pages which have large viewstate from a memory dump using the debugger
• Persistence Ignorance (POCO) Adapter for Entity Framework V1 - Jaroslaw Kowalski shows how you can use your POCO (Plain old CLR Objects) with the entity framework by using adapters to add in the the EF change tracking functionality.
• Unity - Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control Container - Misbah Arefin looks at the concepts behind Dependency Injection, and examines the functionality offered by the Microsoft Unity framework.
• Expose New Linq Operations from the Screaming HashSet<T> Collection - Damon Wilder Carr looks at the combining Linq and the HashSet<T> class to provide high performance querying, illustrating this is an example based on scanning the registry.
• Microsoft IE8 and Google Chrome - Processes are the New Threads - Scott Hanselman looks at the new vogue for isolating browser tabs in their own process, and looks at how implementations differ across platforms.
• Enterprise Library 4.0 now Open Source - Miguel de Icaza shares some more good news for Mono, recent changes to the license for the Enterprise library have brought it under the MS-PL license which is an open source friendly license.
• NHibernate Deep Grok - Tobin Harris announces a new Google custom search powered search site which aims to provide good quality NHibernate context search results.
• Comparing .NET DI (IoC) Frameworks, Part 2 - I missed the first part of this series which seems to be a very good considered review of IOC/DI frameworks for .NET. I always find these types of comparisons to be very useful when making technical decisions
• When to use Type Inference - Type inference seems to be one of those topics that split the developer camp - some love it and some hate it. This short article explains one of the view points regarding adoption of ‘var’.
• Transparent Windows in WPF - Dwayne Need takes a look at how WPF creates transparent windows, and how those windows behave once you’ve got them transparent.
• Tech-Ed Training Sessions DVD - Austin Avrashow considers the value of the Tech-Ed 2008 conference DVD set - at $1.25 per hour for good technical content it almost makes me wish I had a long commute to work where I could watch this stuff.
• New PDC Topics Published - PDC 2008 is looking like its going to be Christmas come early at the end of October. The (still growing) session list contains some real gems already - I look forward to some of this content becoming available online post conference.

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