The Morning Brew

Finally caught up with my reading thanks to a quiet day of posts due to Thanksgiving.

Software

• xUnit.net 1.1 Released - Brad Wilson announces the release of xUnit 1.1. This updated release contains breaking changes, so be sure to read the blog posts about the release before upgrading.
• Are You Fussy About Markup? - Derek Hatchard highlights a usefult code formatter Visual Studio Add-in for ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight developers which improves the formatting of your markup.

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• Back to Basics: Delegates, Anonymous Methods and Lambda Expressions - Karl Seguin continues his Back To Basics series with a detailed look at delegates, anonymous methods and lambda expressions, along with how, when combined with generics, they can be used to solve very complex problems.
• Controlling Your Festive Lights with the .NET Micro Framework - Rob Miles runs through a nice festive project for the .NET Micro Framework to control a set of festive lights based on pulling data from an RSS feed - a nice introduction to working with the .NET Micro Framework
• Volatile fields in .NET: look inside - Vitaliy Liptchinsky talks about how Volatile fields work on the processor, and gives a simple example to show why you might want to use them
• Nullable Structs - An interesting ‘Gotcha’ - Jason Crease explores nullable types, and shares an interesting case which occurs when you use structs with nullable types.
• Transactions Made Simple with Windows Communication Foundation - Steve Stefanovich looks at how WCF makes it easy to implement Transactional Serices
• Creating a Custom View Engine in ASP.NET MVC - Timothy Khouri shows how easy it is to create your own view engine for ASP.NET MVC
• Slightly Different Way To Write Unit Tests - Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo proposes a new way of writing tests inspired by MSpec, and discusses the merits of this style. Good discussion in the comments too.
• Lambda in C#: Conciseness v Readability - Mark Needham talks about his initial dislike of Lambda expressions in C#, and how they can be more difficult to understand for less experienced programmers
• C# quiz - try-finally - Changhong shares a little C# puzzle about try finally blocks, explaining why the output might not be what you expect by looking at the IL of the program
• Working With Large Models In Entity Framework – Part 1 - Srikanth Mandadi, of the Entity Framework Team, looks at some of the problems you can encounter when working with a large Entity Framework model, and offers some solutions to those problems.
• Event Handlers returning Values - Pedro M. Pinheiro explores C# event handlers which return values

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Happy Thanksgiving Day to all my US based readers!

Software

• Early Christmas from Iron Languages and DLR - Harry Pierson highlights three significant release of Iron languages and the DLR - IronPython 2.0RC2, IronRuby 1.0 Alpha 2 and a new home for the DLR source code on Codeplex, including the initial 0.9 beta release of the DLR

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• Visualizing LINQ expressions in the debugger - Jimmy Bogard talks about Visualising Expressions, and looks at tools that help you to see what your expression looks like in the debugger.
• PTOM: Descriptive State Enumeration - Derick Bailey continues with the Novemeber Design Patterns topic at LosTechies with a look at the use of enumerations to track state, and follows up with a look at Mapping a State Pattern with NHibernate
• Object Oriented F# - Encapsulation with Object Expressions - Matthew Podwysocki continues his look into OO F# with a loot at the object expression F# feature, and why (in his opinion) this makes F# a better OO language than C#
• ASP.NET MVC on IIS 6 Walkthrough - Phil Haack shows how to setup ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 for both .mvc/.aspx extension URLs and extensionless URLs
• Isolation Syntax for VB.NET - Your comments please - Roy Osherove asks the community for comments on a proposed syntax for Typemock Isolator’s VB.NET syntax
• Addicted To MEF - Part 1 - Justin Etheredge starts a new series exploring the Managed Extensibility Framework which has just reached preview 3
• 10 Ways To Programaticly Shoot Yourself In The Foot - Part B - Shahar Y follows up from part A with a few more bad things that we as developers often do which makes our life harder later on,
• Yet Another Use of a Unit Test Framework - David Star talks about using Unit Testing Frameworks for more than your traditional unit testing.
• Everyday programming technique - C# Enum - Hugo Pereira covers a lot of ground on using Enums in your code, including some more advanced uses and some best practices advice.
• Unit Testing in JavaScript - Mark Levison rounds up the Javascript Unit Testing Frameworks and mocking tools that are about, looking at the pros and cons of each
• Generating Temporary Files - BlackWasp look at creating temporary files using random filenames in the correct location using some of the methods on the Path class.

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Still not quite caught up with my backlog of posts to read, but I think normality will be restored tomorrow - I’m down to the low signal to noise feeds now, so I don’t anticipate a huge deluge of old content will be being posted now.

Software

• Treemap + Silverlight => Gasp! - Wade Dorrell highlights a new Silverlight control which renders treemaps - a visualisation I really like
• Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR - RTM - Data Dude rounds up the features included in the RTM release of Visual Studio Team Systems 2008 Database Edition GDR (what a mouthful!) which was released to web yesterday.
• MEF Re-factored, Preview 3 has shipped. - Glenn Block announces the release of Preview 3 of the Managed Extensibility Framework, along with a number of other changes, the great news about this release is that its licensed as MS-PL, the Microsoft Permissive License, allowing you to use the source in other environments.

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• Sorting 1PB with MapReduce - An interesting article from the Official Google Blog, talking about performance testing their sorting algorithms. Further proof that computation on a Google scale is incredible, they are sorting 1PB of data using 4000 computers!
• How to update assembly version number automatically - Sergiy Korzh shares a simple utility which makes it easy to update the build number of an application from the command line / build script by changing the AssemblyInfo.
• Processes in .NET Part 1 – Launching Processes and Managing the Scheduler - Rick Minerich starts a series on managing external processes with a look at starting processes and manipulating their running environment, changing their processor affinity and process priority.
• Did you know… Visual Studio comes with an image library for you to use in your applications? - #364 - Sara Ford highlights a useful free resource that comes with Visual Studio - an image library which also contains templates to help you create your own versions.
• P&P Pocket Software Architecture Guides Released - The Patterns and Practices team seem to be releasing new stuff every day, and this week announce the release of 6 pocket architecture guides covering Agile, Web Applications, Mobile, RIA (Rich Internet Applications), Rich client and serivice architectures.
• Best Practice - <GeneratePublisherEvidence> in ASPNET.CONFIG - Zach Kramer talks about changing a setting in the ASP.NEt configuration to help improve the performance of application startup
• New ASP.NET Charting Control: <asp:chart runat="server"/> - ScottGu shows off the recently released ASP.NET Charting Control which allows you to produce nice looking charts in your applications.
• My durable WCF RESTful calculator - Pablo M. Cibraro looks at implementing a Durable Service in WCF by way of a simple example of a calculator
• Windsor WCF Integration - Mike Hadlow explores the Windsor IOC Container integration with WCF which has seen some recent development.

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Almost caught up with the backlog of posts, but Tomorrow may include a few more ‘older’ posts in a final push to get back to Zero unread items in my feed reader.

Software

• Announcing Isolator for Sharepoint with a free full license for bloggers - Roy Osherove announces TypeMock’s latest product, ‘Isolator for SharePoint’ which allows developers to unit test sharepoint code without having a Share point server, along with a competition for bloggers to get a free copy of the full Isolator product for a specific mention on their blog.
• Packer for .NET 4.0.1 Released - Brennan announces the latest release of Packer for .NET a tool to minify (shrink) CSS and Javascript files to help improve download time of your pages.
• Download Prism Drop 6 - David Hayden highlights the latest code release of Prism the Composite Application Guidance Application Block for WPF and Silverlight from Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices Team.

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• Code Contracts - TDD in a DbC World - Matthew Podwysocki looks at the role of Test Driven Development in Design By Contract programming.
• Web Platform Installer now supports XP - And the Master Plan continues - Scott Hanselman shares the good news that the Web Platform Installer is now supporting Windows XP, along with the inclusion of ASP.NET MVC Beta and URL Scan 3.1 as options in the installer.
• RenderPartial vs RenderAction - Derik Whittaker looks at two different ways of rendering Usercontrol style content in ASP.NET MVC, looking at the pros and cons of each.
• ORM Is NOT Inherently Evil - Davy Brion addresses one of the common developer opinions that Object Relational Mappers are evil
• Looking back at MicrosoftPDC.com (from the inside) - Jon Galloway talks about his experiences building the Microsoft PDC websites for this years conference. Interesting reading.
• SQL Server Precision And Scale Problems - An interesting look at how SQL Server decides on its data types for calculated data.
• jQuery Ajax uploader plugin (with progress bar!) - Steve Sanderson shows off an nice way of improving the User Experience of uploading files using this JQuery file uploader control. The ease Steve integrated this in his DDD7 talk on MVC last weekend (which I really enjoyed) really sold me on it.
• CodeRush Shortcuts and Templates - Quick Start Sheets - Mark Miller shares a PDF keyboard shortcut quick start sheet for Code Rush - I’m a Resharper guy myself, but I know that lots of folk use CodeRush (or even both), so hopefully this will come in handy for a few of you.
• F# and Silverlight 2.0 - John Liao shares a simple sample Silverlight 2.0 application written in F#
• MVC Storefront: Episode 25 Preview - Rob Conery gives a taste of what is to come in the next part of his MVC adventure story ‘MVC Storefront’, with a good helping of DDD in the next part, Rob explains his reasoning for exploring these concepts.
• Getting started with Automated White box Testing (and Pex) - Jonathan de Halleux and Nikolai Tillmann give a nice introduction to PEX in VS2010 and 2008 in this code project article.
• New and Improved CLR 4 Thread Pool Engine - Daniel Moth talks about some of the changes in the CLR 4 Thread Pool, and how you can exploit them for better performing code by using the new System.Threading.Tasks type, along with some details on how the new features work.
• Basic Linq in the Real World - Glenn Burnside looks at a real world application of Linq which helped improve a codebase he works with.
• Developer Tools and Utilities - Steve Michelotti shares his list of must have developer tools - I always like these lists, and since I’m in the process of re-installing one of my machines it couldn’t be timed better!
• Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcut Tip: Ctrl+- - Scott Mitchell shares a useful keyboard shortcut for navigating back through locations in source code - this is one function I use a lot (although I do it by the toolbar buttons, but a keystroke will be much more efficient)
• How to clean up a folder tree with NAnt - Simone Chiaretta shares a useful NANT file which cleans up a Visual Studio folder structure for distribution removing all the settings, and temporary files, and also uses regular expressions to show how you can modify some of the code too (removing Company Names, etc)
• PTOM: Bend 3rd Party Libraries to Your Will With the Adapter Pattern - John Teague picks up the Topic Of The Month at LosTechies with a look at using the Adapter Pattern with some third party class.

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A larger than average post today as I’m still catching up from being away for most of the past week - expect another larger than usual post tomorrow.

Software

• Cumulative update package 2 for SQL Server 2008 has been released - Denis Gobo highlights the release of the second Cumulative update package for SQL Server 2008
• VisualSVN | Version 1.6 Release Notes - VisualSVN, the Subversion plugin for Visual Studio gets an update and a few new features.
• The Snippy Reflector add-in - Jon Skeet highlights a new plug in for Reflector by Jason Haley which allows you to write complete programs from short code snippets

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• Beware exceptions in attribute constructors - Jimmy Bogard looks at some problems that occur when Attributes throw exceptions from their constructors.
• NHibernate and triggers - Michael Zilberstein talks about a common problem for NHibernate Developers who work with legacy databases, where triggers cause TooManyRowsAffectedExceptions
• Aspects of Domain Design - Ayende talks about a conversation he had recently which caused him to think about Aspects in a new light.
• The NHibernate Community - Ayende looks at the growth of the NHibernate community using two (indicative) statistics he had available. Things are looking good for the NH Community based on these figures
• Back to Basics: Generics - Karl Seguin goes back to basics and takes a look at generics and how they can be used with some ‘wild’ examples.
• Populating Entities From Stored Procedures With NHibernate - Davy Brion looks at using Stored Procedures with NHibernate to populate your entities, and then follows upwith a look at filling the associated entities from the same data set returned from the SP.
• Combining JQuery Form Validation and Ajax Submission with ASP.NET - Phil Haack takes a look at the JQuery Form Validation and looks at how it plays with ASP.NET Ajax Form submissions.
• Gallio and MbUnit v3 for Visual Studio 2010 CTP - I’m slightly late in spotting this one, but MBUnit and Galllio can now be used from within the VSTS test runner in the Visual Studio 2010 CTP with this updated V3 Release
• Silverlight DataBinding Basics - Timothy Khouri gives a nice simple introduction to Silverlight Databinding in this short article.
• jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 - ScottGu gives the lowdown on the Javascript intellisense feature of Visual Studio for JQuery (and other Javascript)
• Redirecting without the exceptions.. - Joel Varty shows a way of performing a Response.Redirect without getting a ThreadAbortException thrown.
• IIS7 – ASP.NET on Windows Server 2008 Server Core R2 - Hosam Kamel shares some good news for anyone who has to worry about deploying servers to run applications - Windows 2008 R2 Server Core will contain the .NET framework, meaning that finally it can be used for hosting ASP.NET Websites.
• Seadragon Ajax - A new bit of technology from Microsoft Live Labs, which implements the very popular Silverlight DeepZoom functionality in Javascript.
• Visual Studio 2010 Resources - Mike Taulty gathers together a bunch of good resources on Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 to support his article in the UK MSDN Flash.
• W3C Geolocation support in Firefox - Mads Kristensen looks at the new GeoLocation API in Firefox 3.1 (and available as an add-in in older versions) which will allow websites to obtain your location using Javascript.
• Producing readable log4net output - Bryan looks at a way of making Log4Net give output that is more easily processed in tools like LogParser or Excel by utilising some of the extension points the the Log4Net Framework gives.
• NHibernate Fact when Saving a Transient Entity with Second Level Caching Enabled. - Jan Van Ryswyck highlights some specific behaviour of objects being persisted being added in the NHibernate second level cache, and the specific condition where this happens.
• C#/AOP: Elegant tracing with PostSharp and Aspect-Oriented Programming - Saveen Reddy gives a nice simple runthrough of AOP in C# using PostSharp

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Today’s edition of the Morning Brew will be slightly delayed - a combination of factors (including me throwing my physical morning brew [mug of coffee] all over my desk, and the Ma.gnolia web service API timing out) have conspired against me this morning. If the WS doesn’t come back soon I’ll put the post together manually.

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Back in the UK again following my trip to Romania, and still have a huge list of posts to read through. Today’s edition is not comprehensive, but you can look forward to a large catchup post either Sunday or Monday. Looking forward to DDD 7 tomorrow - you you spot me there come over and say hello.

Information

• Microsoft Sues to Defend Visual Studio Users - Yet another good reason why software patents are a bad idea…
• [ANN] Programming Asp.Net MVC by O’Reilly - Derik Whittaker announces that he, along with fellow Devlicio.us blogger Tim Barcz and Chris Sutton will be collaborating on a new book on ASP.NET MVC. Congratulations guys, and I look forward to seeing some sneak peeks at the content over the coming months via your blogs.
• Anatomy of a Subtle JSON Vulnerability - Phil Haack looks at a Javascript Vulnerability explaining how it actually works
• So, what’s new in the CLR 4.0 GC? - Maoni talks about some of the changes and features of the Garbage Collector in the 4.0 CLR
• WPF and "Twistori": Part 1 - Mike Taulty has a 7 part series of posts about building a WPF based application which consumes the Twitter API. I’ve only read a couple of parts of this so far, but looks interesting this far.
• Debugging Parallel Applications with VS2010 - Daniel Moth gives a short screen cast looking at two of the new debugging features of Visual Studio 2010 - Parallel Tasks and Parallel Stacks.
• An easy and efficient way to improve .NET code performances - Patrick Smacchia talks about a couple of simple things which you can do to improve the performance of your code, like switching from foreach to for loops, etc, complete with some details of the testing methodology used.
• PTOM: Command and Conquer Your UI Coupling Problems - Derick Bailey joins in the LostTechies post series on Patterns, with a look at the command pattern
• Functionally dynamic? - Jimmy Bogard starts playing with some functional programming concepts in C#
• "Subsonic" for Services found: Subsonic 3 + ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) - Jay Kimble looks at combining Subsonic and Ado.Net Data Services (formerly known as Astoria) to provide a very simple solution for exposing data as a service. Sample code included
• Copenhagen C# talk videos now up - Jon Skeet highlights the availability of videos of his recent talk on C#
• Do you have to know English to be a Programmer? - Scott Hanselman asks an interesting question, and unsurprisingly gets a lot of responses - all the programmers I know speak English to some degree (far better than I speak any other language, that’s for sure), so I have no real frame of reference on this. That said, I do remember seeing a release announcement for VS2008 in Russian only a few weeks back, so if you had to wait for that you’d be a bit behind the curve.

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• Where TDD fails for me - Jimmy Bogard talks about some of his current problem areas when working in a test driven way.
• Multi-tenancy part 1: Strategy. - Mike Hadlow talks about Multi-Tenancy in Web applications, and considers what strategy will work well for his ECommerce project. Mike and I talked at length about this subject at the UK Alt.Net conference, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how he goes about doing it - can’t wait for part 2.
• Introducing IronPython - Harry Pierson looks at IronPython in this introductory article, looking at how it differs from C# and VB.NET and yet still allows you to make good use of your .NET experience.
• XML Documentation File For Your .Net Project - It’s Important - Shahar Y reminds us about the XML Documentation Generation in Visual Studio and how that helps with working with the code in the IDE.
• Spike Code and Source Control - K. Scott Allen makes some good sense about not throwing away any code by keeping all your spike code in source code control for a number of very good reasons
• Emergent Complexity - Justin Etheredge talks about complexity in code due to interactions between classes, in the hopes of making people consider complexity when writing their applications
• Constructors and Inheritance – Why is this still so painful? - Tom Hollander talks about the pain points of having lots of constructors that you also want in implemented in subclasses

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