The Morning Brew

Software

• IKVM 0.38 Release Candidate 0 – Jeroen Frijters announces the first Release Candidate of IKVM 0.38. IKVM is a Java virtual machine that runs under Mono and the .NET Framework.
• SequenceViz 0.9 :: WPF based Sequence diagram viewer – Nauman Leghari announces a new release of SequenceViz, an application that allows users to construct UML Sequence diagrams. This update means that the program now uses WPF to draw the diagrams removing some of the issues caused by the old SVG + IE solution.
• PipelineTesting v1.2.0.0 Released – Tomas Restrepo announces the release of PipelineTesting v1.2.0.0, a library to help the unit testing of pipeline component, schema and that actual pipelines in BizTalk 2006

Information

• ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support Refreshed! – Jimmy Schementi walks through the recent ASP.NET Dynamic Language support release, showing (using plenty of screen shots) the construction of a simple web app in Python.
• Why you REALLY need to think about your interfaces – Brian Genisio talks about a problem he ran into with an existing interface, and how if the original developer had put some more thought into the interface before it was set in stone solving this problem would have been a lot easier
• Guidelines and Coding Standards Complete List Download – Pinal Dave puts together a short document covering Coding Standards and best practice guidelines for developers working in SQL.
• Five Tips for Floating Point Programming – Floating point numbers are strange things, and many developers forget their quirks. In this article John D. Cook looks at the five most important things to consider when working with floating point numbers.
• Browser Rendering Differences and Browser Resets – Rick Strahl examines the rendering differences between browsers that drive developers potty. Rick then explains the solution to this problem, using CSS Browser resets to ensure that every browser sets out at the same point before applying your CSS.
• Use jQuery with ASP.NET with jQuery.noConflict() – Steve Michelotti shows how, using a neat feature of jQuery, the Microsoft AJAX javascript library and jQuery can happily co-exist in the same page.
• "Zermatt" Resources for Developers and Architects – Rick Rainey rounds up a good collection of links on ‘Zermatt’, the forthcoming framework for claims based identity from Microsoft.
• How NOT To Optimize LINQ Statements – Nick Berardi tells of an unsuccessful attempt to optimise the SQL produced by Linq to SQL by changing the query. Optimisation is always the hardest part of using any ORM.

Coffee

• Off Topic: Latte Printer – Latte Art goes high tech with the ability to print designs on to the top of your drink – this looks really cool – I wonder if we will see these in the real world.

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Seeing lots of interest in Google’s Android across the developer community – not surprising since they are going to give away $10million to developers targeting the platform.

Software

• Krypton 3.0 Released – Component Factory announce the release of Version 3 of their WinForms control library. Licences start at $299.
• Refreshing ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support – Phil Haack announces the release of an update to his other project at Microsoft, ‘ASP.NET Dynamic Language Support’ brings DLR/IronPython support to ASP.NET. Currently only IronPython is supported, but future releases will also contain IronRuby support.

Information

• Learning and craftsmanship – Ian Cooper (who it was very nice to meet briefly at the Alt.NET UK Conference) follows on from Roy Osherove’s recent post about TDD adoption by talking about how he adopted TDD, and how he teaches others to adopt the practices. Ian closes on a a key point – you don’t have to master every part of something before starting using it.
• How Not To Compromise Security Through ASP.NET Validators – Adam Tibi shares a number of things to check to help enhance the security of your sites
• Delegate Type Inference in C# – Noah Coad looks at the evolution of Delegates in C# and how Type Inference makes them even nicer.
• Understanding State Pattern – Mars Rovers – Sean Feldman looks at the State Pattern with an example based in the Mars Rover providing the background to his implementation.
• SharpZipLib Versus 7-Zip for Large File Sets – Rob Reynolds looks at implementing large file set zipping using two of the most common Zipping libraries – useful reference should you ever need to compress files.
• Aggregating Aggregates and UNION vs. UNION ALL – John Paul Cook looks at some SQL techniques for combining aggregate queries, along with some gotchas that can catch out the un-wary developer.
• I love FirstOrDefault – Chris Brandsma shows how Linq’s FirstOrDefault extension method can improve your code.
• Reading Erlang: Inspecting CouchDB – Ayende continues his examination of Erlang with an in-depth look at CouchDB, complete with some translations of the concepts into C# to help us .NET guys out
• Update on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and Windows Update – Scott Hanselman shares details of the plans for distributing .NET 3.5 SP1 via Windows Update, answers a number of questions you may have, and lists a number of known issues/bugs.
• Getting rid of spaghetti code in the real-world: a Case Study – Patrick Smacchia shows how NDepend can help analyse, identify and improve code in the real world
• Bumper-Sticker API Design – Joshua Bloch shares some API design best practices in short concise statements

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I varied my coffee drinking this morning by trying Nescafe’s Instant Espresso from their ‘Collection’ range, which is surprisingly nice (however I’m not going to link to their site as its the slowest bit of flash I’ve seen in ages).

Software

• Pex 0.7 Released – Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of version 0.7 of Pex (Program EXploration) the framework for generating unit tests from parameterized unit tests. 0.7 is a bugfix and enhancement release.
• The Snippet Designer is Released!!!! – Matthew Manela announces the release of a project he started as an intern in the summer of 2006. Snippet Designer aims to make it easy to create new and explore snippets for Visual Studio
• SQLite for ADO.Net 1.0.59.0 Released – Greg Duncan highlights the latest release of SQLite for ADO.NET, a great embedded database. I experimented with SQLite a while back and was very happy to find that NHibernate worked well with it, and this post has just reminded me of that (which will probably help with a little project I’m working on)

Information

• Commented-Out Code and Broken Windows – Jan Van Ryswyck talks about code quality, and that warning sign of commented out code.
• Jeremy’s First Law of Continuous Integration – Jeremy D. Miller gives one rule for CI, and follows up with a larger list in Jeremy’s Other Laws of Continuous Integration, and closes with Jeremy’s Penultimate Law of Continuous Integration.
• PDC2008 Hard Drives, Services, Windows 7, and More – Mike Swanson gives some of the details of what people can expect of PDC 2008 – Despite not attending, I have a feeling that October 26-30th will be a very busy week for me and the Morning Brew judging by what I’ve been reading about the event this year.
• Arrays considered somewhat harmful – Eric Lippert talks about the bad aspects of Arrays, and looks at some instances where they really are not a good choice. Eric makes a set of very good points here, and I will think twice when using arrays in the future to ensure I’ve considered these points.
• Designing Erlang# – Ayende is reading about Erlang, and starts expressing the ideas of Erlang in some C# Code – a great way of assisting .NET Devs t understand the basic ideas behind the Erlang way of doing things.
• Inside F#: How does functional programming affect the structure of your code? – An interesting article from Brian who is a Dev on the F# Team, talking about how functional programming changes the structure of your code, looking at the effects at three different levels.
• Why SOLID? GIMME AN L! – Dave Laribee continues his series on SOLID principles with a look at the Liskov Substitution Principle.
• Flattening The Learning Curve – Your Input Needed – Tim Barcz also weighs in on the issue of adoption of TDD and unit testing.
• Testify – Roy Osherove’s recent post seems to have got people talking about the difficulties they encounter adopting TDD and getting others to adopt TDD. In this Post Tony Rasa talks about his experiences, and the comments include contributions from others, well worth reading.
• My wish-list for F# – Laurent Le Brun assembles a wish list of features for F#, containing some interesting ideas.
• Passing objects to SubControllers – Matt Hinze gives a code example of using the new ASP.NET MvcContrib feature, SubControllers

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