The Morning Brew

There wasn’t massive demand for an ‘almost brewed’ link post, so I’m putting that idea on the back burner.

Software

• Introducing Crack.NET - Josh Smith releases Crack.NET, a tool which allows you to inspect and manipulate the managed objects in the memory of another process. Also it allows you to write scripts in IronPython and have them run in Crack.NET allowing you to do all kinds of manipulations.
• Jack - Jack is a JavaScript library providing mocking capabilities for testing in JavaScript.
• Neptune (personal SMTP testing server) - Donovan Brown releases Neptune, an SMTP server which doesn’t actually relay messages - it simply accepts them, and provides means for you to inspect the content of the messages. This is a really useful addition for anyone who is writing tests for mail sending applications.
• Mono 2.0 OSX Installer Ready - Miguel de Icaza announces the release of an installer for Mono on Mac OSX

Information

• Dependency Inversion: ‘Abstraction’ Does Not Mean ‘Interface’ - Derick Bailey explores the meaning of the term Abstraction, and looks at how it applies to the Dependency Inversion Principle.
• 7 of my favorite jQuery plugins for use with ASP.NET - Dave Ward highlights his 7 favourite JQuery plugins, and talks about using them in ASP.NET Applications, including any difficulties encountered, and links to samples.
• Using Windows SDK Vista Bridge Sample Library - The Microsoft Windows SDK Blog talks about the Windows Vista Bridge which provides access from .NET to some of the new Vista APIs
• Mapping entities to multiple databases with NHibernate - Mike Hadlow talks about working with NHibernate and entities which are spread over multiple databases, and shows how the schema attribute on the hibernate-mapping element allows you to work with this setup when the databases are on the same server.
• NHibernate 2.0, SQLite, and In-Memory Databases - Justin Etheredge looks at getting NHibernate 2 and SQLite working together, and runs into some interesting problems.
• How to Install Windows Service Programmatically - Erwien Saputra shows how you can install a service using .NET code rather than using InstallUtil.exe
• Exploring Database Schemas on SQL Server - Theo Spears shows how you can explore the structure of your SQL Server database using the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.* system views to view the tables, columns, etc.
• WCF vs ASP.NET Web services - Kalyan Bandarupalli looks at the differences between ASP.NET web serices (ASMX) and WCF web services.

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Every day I have a number of items that I’ve glanced at that may be ‘Brew worthy’ but that I’ve not had a chance to read fully, or might not fit precisely with what I’m trying to talk about with the Morning Brew (outside the area of interest, or just totally irrelevant) - would people be interested in another link blog series of these links (without commentary) posted later in the day? - let me know your views in the comments.

Software

• Report Builder for SQL Server 2008 RTM’s - Greg Duncan highlights the release of SQL Server 2008 Report Builder 2.0, a report authoring environment for SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services.
• PAL - Performance Analysis of Logs - Ricardo Henriques highlights a really useful looking tool for monitoring the different types of logs that your infrastructure produces. Ricardo walks through some of the steps in setting up the tool, and based on what I see where this looks well worth investing a little time having a play with if you are in any way responsible for running servers.
• Composite WPF and Silverlight - Release: Prism V2 - Drop 3 - I’m a little late on this one, as drop three of Prism V2 was released last week, but I think its still worth mentioning.
• WSCF.classic: WSCF 0.7 now open source on CodePlex - Christian Weyer announces that ThinkTecture’s WSCF 0.7 (for Soap Services) is now available in source form on CodePlex - its really nice to see commercial organisations opening up their code to the community.

Information

• ObjectMother and TestDataBuilder - Ian Cooper compares two different methods for creating your test data for use in unit tests, explaining why in his current projects they have moved from ObjectMother to TestDataBuilder.
• Frustration Friday - How NHibernate Can Waste Your Day - Casey Charlton talks about some problems he encountered with NHibernate / NHSearch, and remarks on the power behind these projects in the form of the Community.
• Introduction to CLR - Simple Example of CLR Stored Procedure - Pinal Dave gives a simple getting started tutorial for SQL Server CLR showing how you can write your Stored Procedures in .NET and run them in the database engine.
• MSTest 2008 Reports for CruiseControl.NET - Jonathan de Halleux shares 2 XSLT templates for rendering MSTest 2008 output within CruiseControl.NET.
• ASP.NET Completion and MonoDevelop Debugger Packages - Michael Hutchinson talks about some of the recent enhancements that have been being made to MonoDevelop, and are now creaping into the trunk releases.
• Test Automation Brain Dump - Jeremy D. Miller shares some thoughts on automation of tests, testing all tiers of the application starting at the application, passing right down to the database and all the way back. Hopefully this will get some discussion going in the comments on Monday when the working world returns to the blogsphere
• Deep Clone of a business object: the quick and dirty way - Giorgetti Alessandro looks at easy Deep Cloning functionality for Silverlight, WCF and WPF.
• ASP.NET: Alternatives to Dynamic Controls - Part 1 - Adam Pooler starts a serise looking at alternative ways of achieving Dynamic Control like behaviour in ASP.NET in ways which (in certain situations) are easier and better

Community

• Can’t Go To PDC? Attend the MSDN Developer Conference - One for my US based readers, Angela Binkowski highlights a series of events being held across the US in December and January, which at $99 look to be quite interesting. I hope something like this will happen in a few locations in the UK too.

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As predicted this morning I was inundated with posts about ASP.NET MVC, so for the second time this week we have a special section given over to the release.

ASP.NET MVC Beta

• ASP.NET MVC Beta Released - ScottGu does his usual epic announcement for the new ASP.NET MVC Beta release. This one is a good read, and most other announcements are referring to parts of this post.
• ASP.NET MVC Beta Released! - Phil Haack gives the details about the way that ASP.NET MVC Beta was announced, and talks a little about some of the changes
• Upgrading Dimecasts.Net to the MVC Beta - Derik Whittaker talks about the steps he took to upgrade hisDimeCasts screen cast website (well worth checking out if you haven’t already) to the ASP.NET MVC Beta
• ASP.NET MVC Beta released - Coolness Ensues - Scott Hanselman talks a litle about the beta ASP.NET MVC release.

Software

• Announcing Gallio and MbUnit v3.0.4 - Jeff Brown announces the release of Gallio and MbUnit 3.0.4 which contains a number of new features along with the usual improvments of a point release. Jeff’s post is a very comprehensive run through of what has changed, and makes good reading.

Information

• Functional .NET - Fighting Friction in the BCL with Directory.GetFiles - Matthew Podwysocki looks at rewriting part of the BCL using generics and lazy evaluation to provide a much nicer API.
• Custom user configurable SQL Server Profiler events - Mladen Prajdić talks about the custom SQL Server Profiler events which you can use in your Stored Procs to get information out into the trace. This post includes an example, and this looks like a really useful trick to getting information out of SQL Server when debugging
• Microsoft Web Application Installer - Open Source Web Apps Delivered and Installed - Scott Hanselman shows off the new Web Applications Installer, and talks about the changes going on inside Microsoft regarding Open source software.
• Thoughts On Domain Validation - Part 2 - Justin Etheredge continues looking at Validation in Domain entities, looking this time at moving his rules out of code and into the database, including compiling the code at runtime.
• C# Anonymous Object Tip - Brad Wilson shares a nice shortening trick for Anonymous types in C# which he learnt from a ReSharper tip.
• F# Cheat Sheet - Chance Coble highlights a nice 5 page cheat sheet for F# from A6 Systems covering most of the important syntax.
• Increasing Code Coverage May Be Harmful - Dan Manges talks about why code coverage shouldn’t be considered the be all and end all of unit testing. Examples in this post aren’t .NET, but the principles still apply.

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Another late edition today - normal posting schedule will resume tomorrow. Today there is still a lot of chatter about the Silverlight 2 release, and surprisingly little about the MVC beta - I bet I’ll be knee deep in those posts tomorrow.

Software

• ASP.NET MVC Beta - ASP.NET MVC goes to beta, with surprisingly little fanfare . With this and Silverlight released this week I wonder if there will be any developer software releases announced at PDC.
• New Open Source Application: .NET Task Service - Joseph Guadagno announces the release of his latest project on Codeplex. This is a task scheduler service which provides a common means to running code from assemblies at a schedule that you provide. This is something I’ve meant to get round to writing many times and never have, so its great to see someone else doing it

Information

• Simplicity is key to successful unit testing - Part 2 - Karl Seguin continues his series on testing with a look at simplicity in the context of unit testing (and the code being tested), and looks at breaking a single large method with multiple responsibilities into a number of smaller simpler ones to make the testing easier.
• Acceptable test failures - Jimmy Bogard talks about the importance of the right type of test failure when doing TDD
• Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Beta Released! - John Mandia wins the prize for being the only English language announcement of the ASP.NET MVC beta release I saw in my blog reading this morning. John gives some details of what is new and what is fixed in this release.
• Using ServiceLocator in an MVC Framework applicatio - Mike Hadlow looks at using the new Common Service Locator implementation to wrap his access to Castle Windsor in an ASP.NET MVC application.
• Making the complex trivial: Rich Domain Querying - Ayende looks at creating a means of querying a rich domain model using filter objects which can be combined to produce complex queries.
• Fluent hierarchical construction - Jimmy Bogard talks about creating a fluent interface for creating hierarchical object structures, providing a nice simple example of fluent interfaces along the way.
• Open Source apps on Windows - made easy! - Brian Goldfarb talks about the new Microsoft.com/web website which is aiming to make it easier to get a server up and running as a fully featured web server, including all the software bits needed by most web apps, using the Microsoft Web Platforms installer. In addition they are planning on packaging common Community software as easy installs onto servers using the Application Web Application Installer.
• Data and Services with Silverlight 2 - Table of Contents - John Papa’s new book on Data Services with Silverlight 2 is availabel to pre-order, and in this post he shares the Table of Contents to give you an idea of what is included.

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So, Silverlight 2 was released yesterday, and you’ve probably seen the hundreds of announcements already, so if that is the case skip over today’s special ‘Silverlight 2′ section, and on to the usual content.

Silverlight 2

• Silverlight 2 Released - ScottGu makes his announcement of the Official Silverlight 2 release.
• Silverlight - The Song - This one is from a few months back now, but seems fitting today. Dan Wahlin and Spike Xavier sing about Silverlight.
• Silverlight 2 Released: New controls, tools, announcements! - Tim Heuer talks about the Silverlight 2 release, looking at the tools available and the new features.
• Silverlight 2, Expression Blend 2 SP1 & Expression Blend 2.5 June 2008 Preview - ‘An ASP.NET Blog’ shares some installation tips for the latest release of Silverlight and its associated tools.

Software

• Free copies of SharpWidgetsUI - Aflava are offering free copies of their SharpWidgetsUI library to MVPs and Bloggers (assuming you meet some basic criteria)

Information

• Mono 2.2 Feature: Mono.Options - Miguel de Icaza talks about a nice command line options parsing library that is going to be included in Mono 2.2
• Pex gets a Stubs framework (I said stubs, not mocks) - Jonathan ‘Peli’ de Halleux talks about the new stub functionality coming in the next release of Pex.
• Exit Mocks. Enter Stubs! - The ‘Being Cellfish’ blog gives some code samples for the new Pex Stubs based on an internal only release.
• The law of demeter - Chrissie1 at Less Than Dot talks about the Law of Demeter, giving some simple code examples which highlight it in operation.
• Per Request Activation With Ninject - Joel Ross looks at using Ninject’s IOC container to manage the lifecycle of his NHibernate sessions.
• Functional C# - Implementing Async Computations in C# - Matthew Podwysocki looks at using a number of F# libraries from C#3 to implement Asynchronous Computations in C#
• If… - Jeremy D. Miller talks about the possibilities when all your tests pass first time. The comments on this post add more information to the discussion.
• T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) Code Generation - Best Kept Visual Studio Secret - Scott Hanselman, prompted by Rob Conery’s post yesterday, takes a brief look at T4 Templates in Visual Studio 2008. Scott’s post contains a number of useful links to T4 resources.
• Framework Design Guidelines 2nd Edition: Order Yours Now! - Brad Abrams announces that the second edition of Framework Design Guidelines is now available for order. I’m a really big fan of the first edition, and I’m looking forward to having a leaf through the new edition when it hits the shelves.

Community

• Announcing UK.NET Events - Gojko Adzic has set up a calendar for .NET events in the UK - currently the list is heavily London based but this may well prove to be a good resource once it fills out a little more.

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Today is the 200th Edition of The Morning Brew - many thanks to all of you who read daily. I’d like to claim that the release of Silverlight 2 later today was timed to coincide with this publishing milestone, but I suspect that its unrelated really

Software

• FileMap now on GitHub - Tomas Restrepo announces some minor updates to his FileMap library, a wrapper for .NET to acess the Win32 Memory Mapped Files API.
• SequenceViz 0.11 :: Reflector Addin support - Nauman Leghari announces the release of SequenceViz 0.11, now including an addin for Lutz Roeder / RedGate Reflector, allowing you to obtain sequence diagrams within Reflector.

Information

• Silverlight 2 RTM - Guy Barrette has the links to the different parts of the Silverlight 2 release announcement.
• Microsoft Silverlight 2 Released - RealWorld Software Development have a nice write up on the Silverlight 2 release announcement.
• Client Templating with jQuery - Rick Strahl explores the power of templating in jQuery, with a look at the more traditional way of doing client side templates followed by a look at the jQuery way.
• Functional .NET - LINQ or Language Integrated Monads? - Matthew Podwysocki looks at the implementation of Monads in .NET with some background and examples of the Identity Monad, the Maybe Monad, the collection monad and the Asynchronous monad in both C# and F#
• Survey Time: What .NET Framework features do you use? - Scott Hanselman is running a simple 1 question poll to help Microsoft get an idea what technologies people are using in their projects. It takes all of 15 seconds to fill out, so go and help out.
• Mass Transit - Part 1 of N - Tim Barcz starts a series of posts looking at the messaging passing framework Mass Transit. This introductory piece talks about some of the background to products like Mass Transit.
• Custom Selection Heuristics in Ninject - Nate Kohari talks about some of the new features of the forthcoming NInject 1.5, focusing on how NInject decides what to inject where.
• IE8 and the horse’s mouth - Alan highlights a Technical Chat about Internet Explorer 8 beta where you can ask your questions and get answers from the IE8 product team.
• Make Visual Studio Generate Your Repository - Rob Conery looks at T4 templates for code generation in Visual Studio 2008 as a means of generating repositories for his SubSonic MVC Addin
• Architecture Journal 17 - Distributed Computing - Mike Walker announces the availability of the 17th edition of the Microsoft Architecture Journal, this month focusing on Distributed Computing. Looks like they’ve redesigned the cover too this month - I look forward to getting my paper copy in the post shortly.

Community

• Agenda for the 7th DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Day - After months of session submission and voting, the final agenda for Developer Developer Developer Day 7 has been announced - as usual the line up looks great - now I wonder when you will be able to sign up - watch this space and I’ll let you know as soon as I do.

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Slightly later posting than usual today - I’m on leave from work this week so this might be a recurring pattern this week as I can have lie-ins

Software

• Tinyject – IoC in an Evening - Lars Wilhelmsen had a need for a simple IOC container, so crafted a simple implementation in an evening. Lars hints at a version 2, and I look forward to seeing how this project progresses.
• Mocking and stubbing easier than ever with Moq 2.6 - Daniel Cazzulino announces the release of Moq 2.6 and talks about Moq 2.6’s new features, including recursive mocks and mocked default values

Information

• NotImplementedException and the Interface Segregation Principle - Jimmy Bogard talks about the Interface Segregation Principle, and how not applying it can result in lots of method implementations which simply throw NotImplementedExceptions.
• My 10 common mistakes in ASP.NET - Mads Kristensen posts a list of ASP.NET things that he needs to do better - and I think that most of these things will apply to any ASP.NET Developer.
• Thoughts On Domain Validation - Part 1 - Justin Etheredge starts what looks to be a very interesting series on validation of Domain entities. Justin starts by drawing on the work of others to build a validation interface and forms this into a full solution.
• Microsoft F# and TestDriven.Net 2.16 - Jamie Cansdale talks about adding F# support into TestDriven.NET
• ASP.NET MVC and the new IIS7 Rewrite Module - Scott Hanselman looks at moving from ISAPI_Rewrite and Apache modrewrite rules to the new IIS7 Rewriter module, and also considers the SEO implications of this and ASP.NET MVC
• Request for comments: Changing the way dynamic mocks behave in Rhino Mocks - Ayende polls for opinion on a change to the way Rhino Mocks dynamic mocking works with multiple calls to the same mocked method.
• An Unexpected Benefit of Using an IoC Container - Joel Ross had been questioning the need for IOC and DI, but, with some refactoring has rediscovered why its such a powerful technique that enables conformance with a number of development best practices
• Parallel Programming and the .NET Framework 4.0 - The Parallel Programming with .NET Blog announces that the Task Parallel Library and PLINQ will both be parts of the forthcoming .NET 4.0 release.
• Migrator.NET - Bart Merchtem takes a look at Migrator.NET a .NET based database migrations framework that aims to make maintaining your database easy as you develop.
• Using the ASP.NET MVC Framework as a JSON Service Provider for Richer Web Applications with MS Ajax Templates and jQuery - Corey J Gaudin looks at using a collection of technologies to expose model objects as JSON to a JQuery front end
• MVC Storefront Part 22: Restructuring, Rerouting, and PayPal - Rob Conery continues his excellent screencast series on building a real world ecommerce store using ASP.NET MVC. In this part Rob restructures some of the site and improves his routing structure, and finishes by adding PayPal payment integration.
• How To Write Testable ASP.NET UserControls - Davy Brion follows on from a past post about writing testable webforms, with a look at doing the same with User Controls
• October 10th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, IIS - ScottGu continues his series of ASP.NET related links - a few of his links this week have already been featured in The Morning Brew, but there are plenty of other good links there too.

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Software

• : Smells like service spirit : WSCF.blue: The WSCF tool for WCF now on CodePlex - Christian Weyer, of ThinkTecture, announces that WSCF.blue (Web Services Contract First) for WCF Services is now an open source projects on CodePlex. I’ve been a fan of their ASMX product for a long time now, and this is great news for the community that they are releasing their new tool in this way.

Information

• Font Survey: 30 of the Best Programming Fonts - Hans Dietrich compares (with screen shots of code from the IDE) 30 Programming fonts in both their ClearType and non-ClearType forms, along with download links to obtain the font - this is a nice easy way of helping us to pick a good developing font
• The Bejeweled Puzzle in SQL - Alex Kozak posts a puzzle to be solved in TSQL, based on the Bejeweled game - this looks like a fun challenge if your Friday has the time
• First Steps with Post Sharp - Ayende spends some time playing with Aspect Oriented Programming in PostSharp, and likes what he finds.
• Validation in WPF using PostSharp/AOP - Inspired by a developer event where AOP in PostSharp was discussed, Rudi Grobler takes a look at using PostSharp to implement Validation in WPF
• Ideavine – An open source hosting project - Faisal highlights a new Open Source .NET Project hosting site - it only launched recently, and is currently hosting SubText and NInject
• What’s The Point Of Delegates In .NET? - Derick Bailey thinks about Delegates, and comes up with (what sounds like a Linq influenced) reason for their existence.
• Auto-generating help with NAnt and CC.net - Garry Pilkington walks through generating documentation from your code using Cruise Control .NET, NAnt and SandCastle.
• Having Console apps write out Xml so you can parse their output - Tim Stall talks about parsing the output of console applications, and reminds us that we, like many tools vendors, can output XML which makes this task much easier.
• Cheat Sheet: patterns & practices Catalog at a Glance Posted to CodePlex - J.D. Meier posts the largest list of Patterns and Practices content I’ve ever seen - plenty of goo stuff in there.

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