The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing the NCover 3 Beta Program – NCover release Beta 1 of NCover 3, a Code Coverage tool for .NET
• Pex 0.8 Released, featuring Code Digger and Stubs – One day after showing off the interesting forthcoming functionality of Pex, Nikolai Tillmann announces that Pex 0.8 is released. This release includes the Code Digger (mentioned in yesterday’s Brew), along with Stubs, and a number of bug fixes.

Information

• Debugging Large ViewState – Zach Kramer look into dealing with large ASP.NET viewstate, working out what is in there any why it is so large
• .NET Reflector: Soup to Nuts – Andrew Clarke gives a comprehensive run through of the features and techniques for working with Reflector, the tool originally by Lutz Roeder, now acquired by RedGate.
• The Weekly Source Code 35 – Zip Compressing ASP.NET Session and Cache State – Scott Hanselman looks into compression of Session and Cache items to gain significant additional storage of items. Looks like a useful technique when working on a Memory bound/CPU idle server.
• October 22nd Links: ASP.NET, Visual Studio, WPF and Silverlight – ScottGu provides his regular link post of WPF, ASP.NET and Silverlight content. About 75% of the links have not been featured in the Brew, so there is some good stuff there.
• Survey RESULTS: What .NET Framework features do you use? – Scott Hanselman shares the results of his recent survey on .NET features in use – the results look pretty much how I expected they would.
• Singletonitis – Sean Feldman talks about a common affliction, having singletons / static classes when you don’t really need them, and shows how you can remove them from your application, along with the benefits of doing so.
• DDD and Complexity – Colin Jack talks about the complexity of DDD, and how you can gain many of the advantages of DDD by adopting parts of the process / not following it to the letter.
• Where are the DDD sample applications? – Jimmy Bogard talks about why there are no real example applications for Domain Driven Development.
• C# Generics when working with Enum – johanvw shows how use of generics can make working with Enums a little easier
• Using Reflection To Extract Values From a Static Class – Adam Pooler delves into reflection on static classes by looking at an example of accessing items from the HTTPContext using reflection.
• Covariance and Contravariance in delegates – Elroy Dsilva examines tow interesting delegate features, illustrating with examples of each.
• Astoria futures: offline-enabled data services – Pablo Castro, software architect for the Astoria project at Microsoft talks about some of the early planning and thinking for offline functionality.
• Attaining IE8 Site Compatibility – Short Reference – Alexander Strauss talks about getting your website to work correctly in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8

Community

• Developer Day Registration is open – Ian Cooper announces that registrations for DDD 7 are open, and within 4 hours all the places were gone. They are still accepting registrations for reserve list places, which is worth registering for as there are usually a number of people who register and drop out.
• MIX09 | Web Design and Development Conference, March 18 – 20, 2009 – Registration is now open for the US MIX09 event, with early bird discounts of $200

1 Comment »

Software

• CopySourceAsHTML 3.0 has been released – Jan Schreuder highlights the availability of Version 3 of CopySourceAsHtml, a Visual Studio plugin which copies source from VS into nicely formatted HTML – ideal for code samples on blogs.
• LiveRun – a VS plugin to see the output of your program immediately – Lucian Wischik shares a neat plugin for demos which captures the current text buffer and compiles and runs writing the output to a window – ideal for those short demos in talks.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC Beta Source Code Release – I forgot to include this one yesterday – the sources for ASP.NET MVC Beta are now available on CodePlex
• Sneak Preview: Code Digger — The New Pex Experience – Nikolai Tillmann talks about a forthcoming feature of Pex which will examine existing code which has no tests and generate some tests by analysing the method. This looks really interesting, I can’t wait to try this out.
• C# Yellow Book – Rob Miles and the University of Hull share a PDF book which is used as the basis of their first year programming course. This is a nice introduction to both programming in C# as a language.
• CarTrackr – Sample ASP.NET MVC application – Maarten Balliauw shares a complete ASP.NET MVC sample application running on Beta 1, which makes use of a number of ASP.NET/ASP.NET MVC features, best practices, etc.
• Pex It: The File System, Abstraction, Mocking , Modeling – Jonathan de Halleux talks about how Pex can help with testing against the file system, looking at a implementation of the IFileSystem interface propsed by Brad Wilson which allows Pex to do its magic.
• Caliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and Silverlight – Caliburn , a framework for developing WPF and Silverlight applications, which provides implementations of a number of common UI patterns has found a new home on CodePlex
• Mass Transit – Part 2 of N – Tim Barcz continues his series looking at Mass Transit, an open source messaging system. In this part he looks at one of the supplied samples which come with Mass Transit.
• AjaxWorld Talk: Building a Great Ajax application from Scratch – Brad Abrams provides a huge blog post which walks through the creation of them demo application he presented at AjaxWorld. Lots of screenshots along the way, and a download of the source for the demo application are included.
• Almost IQueryable with NHibernate HQL – Tobin Harris looks at Linq’s IQueryable and NHibernate IQuery and attempts to find a middle ground when working with Hibernates HQL queries (as Linq for NHibernate is not finished yet)
• View Model Inheritance – Torkel Ödegaard talks about how he is using inheritance between views to provide common functionality in views in a base view and have the individual pages views inherit from this to get the functionality.
• Essential Visual Studio Tips & Tricks that Every Developer Should Know – Stephen Walther shares some simple tricks and tips for working in the IDE – most of them will probably be familiar to you, but its always worth checking, you never know what might save you some time.
• Back to Basics – The Default Keyword in Generic Code – Gil Fink talks about one of the less well know parts of generics, the default keyword which allows an instance of a generic type to be obtained.
• Different ways how to escape an XML string in C# – Mladen Prajdi? shows 4 different ways of escaping special characters in XML

1 Comment »

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.

1 Comment »