The Morning Brew

Looks like the .NET blogging crowd have been busy this weekend…

Software

• A Graph Tree Drawing Control for WPF – A useful looking WPF library for drawing tree graphs with auto layout. I think the source code might be interesting reading for me as I’m trying to get into WPF.
• QuickGraph 3.0 – Jonathan ‘Peli’ de Halleux has upgraded his Graphing library to C#3 and .NET 3.5, making changes to the API to take advantage of Extension methods and delegates
• ScrewTurn Wiki 3.0 Alpha2 – ScrewTurn Software announce the release of the second alpha of their Free and Open Source Wiki Software
• Released: CodeIt.Right Build 1.1.08262 – SubMain announce the release of CodeIt.Right 1.1, a major upgrade to their Static Code Analysis + Automatic Refactoring tool. This release brings in support for .NET 3.5 along with a host of other new features.

Information

• Prism 2.0 – First Drop – David Hill announces the first (pre)release of Prism 2.0. Looks like the team have been hard at work since making their V1 release.
• Avoiding Dependencies – Steve Smith looks at the Facade and Strategy Patterns as a way of avoiding dependencies to help with development and testing.
• MvcContrib – now with SubController support for ASP.NET MVC – Jeffrey Palermo announces the inclusion of support for SubControllers within the ASP.NET MVC MvcContrib add on library.
• Goodbye mocks, Farewell stubs – Roy Osherove talks about the difficulties people have in adopting Test Driven practices, and looks at what can be done to make mocking easier for people, along with suggesting an alternative name which he believes makes the ideas clearer.
• Interfaces and isolation – Jimmy Bogard follows on from Roy’s post, discussion how his mocking skills progressed, and the proposed name ‘isolation’
• Silverlight and WPF – Sharing Library Projects – Mike Taulty looks at techniques which allow you to share code between WPF and sliverlight applications, the first being a create a copy, the second being some cleverness with build targeting
• Cosmos – C# Open Source Managed Operating System – Cosmos is an Operating System Kit, that allows you to write code in C# (or any .NET language that compiles to IL) and then Cosmos post compiles down to machine code allowing you to run the program as a real operating system. This looks like a lot of fun, and hopefully I’ll find some time to have a play with this.
• What is your strategy for becoming a better developer? – Justin Etheredge asks his readers what they are doing to make themselves a better developer, shareing two of his own ideas, and announces a competition to win copies of The Pragmatic Programmer for the best replying entries.
• What is your strategy for becoming a better developer? – Ryan Lanciaux continues on the same theme, giving his tips for becoming a better developer.
• ASP.NET MVC Beta1 in a few weeks and v1 by end of year – Simone Chiaretta sets a lot of developers minds racing as to which end of year ScottGu meant when talking about the final V1 release of ASP.NET MVC
• Introducing the "Dirty Little Secrets" Screencast – Shawn Wildermuth announces his new screen cast series, aiming to share some of the interesting things he’s learned in a twice monthly 10-15 minute format. The first episode covers creating a slide out panel in Silverlight 2
• ViewState management using AOP – PostSharp4ViewState – Another interesting use of AOP techniques. Szymon Pobiega looks at using PostSharp to create an easy way of persisting values to and from viewstate in web controls.
• Introducing jBlogMvc – Amr Elsehemy sets out on a new development series, this time looking at building a blogging engine in ASP.NET MVC and JQuery.
• Threading Basics: Race Conditions, Part 1 – Jason Olson gives an example of a race condition, in the hope of raising developer awareness to this type of problem
• SharePoint for Developers: 3. Introduction to SharePoint Data Structures – Gunnar Peipman continues this series on SharePoint development looking at the key data structures (lists, fields and content types).
• Herding Code Episode 18 – Functional Programming and F# – My favourite functional programming blogger, Matthew Podwysocki, is featured on the latest edition of the Herding Code Podcast, talking on Functional programming in both C# and F#.

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Software

• Introducing Blacklight – our new (Silverlight) CodePlex project – Martin Grayson announces the start of a new project to gather together great Silverlight (and other technologies it would seem) controls, samples and visuals. This could become a really useful resource – especially for the design challenged like me.
• Free Silverlight Controls And Tools For Brighter Websites – WebResourcesDepot have put togehter a list of free Silverlight Controls, ranging from data grids to image viewers to video players – a good resource if you are on a tight budget.

Information

• Codebehind Files in ASP.NET MVC are Evil – Steve Smith talks about the existence of Code Behind Files for ASP.NET MVC Views, looking at both the good and bad aspects of their existence.
• ASP.NET Designer Control Problem in VS 2008 SP1 – Rick Strahl has been having some problems with the Visual Studio Designer, and in this post talks about the common causes of these problems. Unfortunately for Rick, none of these are the solution to his problem, and he has to restart Visual Studio to fix – does anyone have any ideas?
• Windsor Config Parameters With Non-Primitive Types – Tim Barcz shows how you can initialise a component with parameters of more complex types using the Windsor Container XML Config.
• jQuery and JavaScript Coding: Examples and Best Practices – I know that a number of .NET folks are really getting into JQuery, so this best practices list from Smashing Magazine will be of interest to a number of people.
• Storing Contextual Data in Web and non-Web applications – Context gets used a lot in Web Applications as a place to store some information, and in this post Joel Varty shows how you can achieve similar things for your non-web applications
• Running jQuery QUnit tests under Continuous Integration – Joshua Flanagan talks about combining QUnit with NUnit and WatiN to allow your CI Server to perform unit tests on JavaScript.
• What’s the Difference Between Dispose() And Close()? – Tyler Holmes talks about the differences (and similarities) between the Dispose method and the Close method.
• Some Managed/Unmanaged Exception Tricks – Steve Hawley talks about some of the problems he had in tracking down a strange bug, and gives a very useful tip for getting the last exception when debugging.
• Point distance, imperative vs. functional style – Edgar Sánchez compares a function program in F# and a C# equivalent for finding the point closest to another point, and compares the brevity of the implementations.
• Web-Application Framework – part V – Enter into Catharsis – adding new Entity – Radim Köhler looks at how the Catharsis uses the Guidance framework to make adding a new entity to the framework simpler and involve less code authoring.
• Web-Application Framework – Catharsis – part VI – Framework Architecture – Radim Köhler follows up part 5 by talking about the underlying architecture of the Cathasis Web Application Framework in part 6 of this series

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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 Prajdi? 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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