The Morning Brew

Very busy at the moment, so the next few days of posts might be a little shorter than usual, normality should be resumed after the weekend.

Information

• PTOM: The Composite Design Pattern - Ray Houston continues on with the ‘Pablo’s Topic of the Month’ theme at Los Techies with a look at the composite design pattern.
• Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory - Mark Russinovich gives a huge amount of information about Virtual Memory, and explores the extremes of Windows memory support.
• Vista Bridge on Code Gallery! - Kate Gregory announces the release of a samples library for the Vista Bridge which contains .NET support for some of the new Vista Features.
• Lazy loading BLOBS and the like in NHibernate - The NHibernate FAQ looks at the use of Blobs in objects retrieve from NHibernate.
• Data Parallelism in Functional Programming - Frank Thomsen looks at one of the often touted major benefits of functional programming, parallelism, looking at data structures that allow parallelism, and some methods of dividing the work up.
• Project Velocity - David Myers gives a nice summary of Project Velocity, Microsoft’s Distributed Cache, including the published time line for releases.
• Consuming Extension Methods in IronPython - Saveen Reddy looks at consuming extension methods from IronPython by using a number of attributes to allow your methods to be called.

Community

• Announcing: ALT.NET Online Open Meeting - Chad Myers announces a virtual Alt.NET meeting which would seem to be a great way to interact with the Alt.NET community around the world without increasing your carbon footprint. The only problem for me is the time and timezone as it starts at about 3am in the UK, but great if you are US based.

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Software

• Spackle.NET is Published - Jason Bock gathers together all little utility projects into a single project called Spackle.NET and hosts the lot of them on CodePlex

Information

• Functional .NET 4.0 - Tuples and Zip - Matthew Podwysocki looks at two more of the Functional Programming concepts that have made it into .NET 4.0 - this time round the tuple and Zip operation get the once over.
• .NET Array Weirdness - Jeroen Frijters looks under the hood at some of the stranger aspects of the .NET array type.
• Extending MVC: Returning an Image from a Controller Action - Jeremiah Clark shows how you can return images (and other data types) from your actions in ASP.NET MVC
• Update on Silverlight 2 - and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 - ScottGu reflects on the release of Silverlight 2, and looks to the future giving a peek at Silverlight 3
• Cuyahoga - Ayende plugs Cuyahoga, a Content Management System based on NHibernate, which is nice and simple to extend - I’ve used Cuyahoga a few times and found it to be quite capable.
• PTOM: The Decorator Pattern - Sean Chambers picks up the Topic of the Month over at Los Techies, and looks at the decorator pattern.
• Single Letter Variable Names Still Considered Harmful - K. Scott Allen talks naming schemes for variables, and remarks that lambda expressions tend towards people using bad single letter variables names when they really should choose better variables names.
• Chain of Responsibility Using Castle Windsor and a First Experience With StructureMap - Jan Van Ryswyck revisits the Chain of Responsibility pattern having now found a use for it. Initially Jan uses the castle Windsor Container, but in part two looks at using Structure Map instead.
• How to call controllers in external assemblies in an ASP.NET MVC application - Simone Chiaretta looks at a way of calling controllers from other assemblies in ASP.NET MVC, allowing further segregation of the parts of your application.
• Testing is hard but debugging just sucks A$$ - Derik Whittaker looks at the common arguments against testing, and offers counter arguments

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Information

• Rendering A Single View Using Multiple ViewEngines - Phil Haack looks into an interesting aspect of the ASP.NET MVC view rendering which allows you to use a different engine to render partial views to that of the main view.
• Windsor Components, the ASP.NET MVC Framework, and Bug Verification Tests - Tim Barcz talks about a real world problem he encountered and how introducing a test ensured it was fixed
• Update on the GDR that is coming for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 - Scott Hanselman gives an update on the General Distribution Release of .NET 3.5 SP1 over Windows Update.
• .NET Code Contracts and TDD Are Complementary - Matthew Podwysocki looks Code Contracts and TDD and shows how they can be combined to make a much more powerful whole.
• What Does that .NET Namespace Mean: System.* and Microsoft.* - Brad Abrams asks the community what they believe to be the logic behind the System.* and Microsoft.* namespace divide, offering three plausible reasons for the difference asking which you believe to be true.
• The fallacy of IRepository - Ayende follows up on Rob Conery’s post about using Object Relational Databases to reduce development friction
• RESTful Live Search Service - Nikhil Kothari looks at the new REST API for Microsoft Live Search
• An Overview of C# 4.0. - Buu Nguyen gives a nice overview of the new functionality of C# 4 in this Code Project article.
• C# Dynamic and Multiple Dispatch - Curt Hagenlocher shows how the new dynamic functionality in C#4 can allow an easy way of implementing multiple dispatch
• Styling a Silverlight Twitter Application with Expression Blend 2 - ScottGu shows off the power of Expression Blend 2 by showing how a simple Silverlight application can be visually improved
• Amazon EC2 on Windows - Brian Desmond highlights two articles he has written on Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Developers, one covering ASP.NET on EC2 and the other SQL Server
• Common Interfaces for Tool Families - Colin Ramsay talks about the idea of having common interfaces for standard types of tool, allowing developers to choose their favourite tool for a job and use it with all components of their application.

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Thank goodness its Friday!

Software

• IIS7 Request Routing and Load Balancer Release Candidate Available for Download - BillS announces the release candidate of the IIS7 Application Request Routing Extension, which allows IIS to offer routing and load-balancing based on HTTP level rules.
• S#arp Architecture 0.9 Released! - Billy McCafferty announces the release of V 0.9 of his application architecture based on ASP.NET MVC Beta, NHibernate and DDD principles
• Updated ZoomIt from Microsoft (Sysinternals) - Thomas Lee highlights the availability of an update to ZoomIt, a great tool for zooming and annotating your screen, ideal for presentations.
• First CodePlex Project: WCF Test Harness - Jeffrey Chilberto announces a first release of his first CodePlex Project. WCF Test Harness is a utility which is similar to WCF Load Test, and allows you to reference or generate proxies, edit requests as XML, capture response time, and save and load tests.
• MSSqlSchemaDoc Version 2.0 Released - Henk Oberholzer announces the release of his second iteration of a tool that extracts schema information out of SQL Server into XML form. Unfortunatly this article doesn’t seem to have a download link, but you can get it from the projects CodePlex site

Information

• Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4.0 Training Kit Available - Chris Bowen highlights the availability of some detailed training kits for the .NET 4.0 technologies
• The Future of WebForms And ASP.NET MVC - Phil Haack gives his take on what the future holds for ASP.NET MVC and its more established brother, ASP.NET Web Forms, and how that relationship will progress.
• Using Crowdsourcing for Expanding Localization of Products - Scott Hanselman looks at the options to help with localization of your software, including how MSDN is attempting to improve its translations.
• TextBoxFor(u => u.Name) - Unleash the power - Karl Seguin puts together an implementation of TextBoxFor, a concept for MVC that Jeremy Miller and Chad Myers have also talked about.
• Advance NHibernate Workshop Video - Ayende highlights the availability of a video from his talk at KaizenConf on Advanced NHibernate. This should be a good watch, although I believe the audio quality of this video is not too good

Community

• Ed Gibson, Microsoft’s Chief Security Advisor in the UK, 2009 - Having seen Ed Gibson talk at DDD a few years back this event to be held in Bradford on the 21st January should be an interesting and entertaining one

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Software

• SubSonic 3.0 Preview 2 - Rob Conery announces Preview 2 of Version 3 of his SubSonic Data Access layer, and in this post gives some details about how it all works and how tto use it. Download link is towards the end of the post.
• NCover v3.0.6 is now available. - NCover have been busy, with an update to NCover 3.0 beta and a minor improvement and bugfix release of NCover 2.1.2
• RichText Builder (StringBuilder 4 rtf) - seeblunt shares a useful looking string builder equivalent for building RTF documents using a nice simple fluent looking interface.

Information

• Breaking changes to the String class - David Kean talks about some of the recently announced breaking changes to the string class which will be released in .NET 4.0
• Oslo’s Modelling Language ‘M’ To Be Published Under Open Specification Promise - Bruce Kyle talks about Microsoft’s aim to publish M, the Oslo Modeling Language, under the Open Specification Promise so that it may be integrated with other industry standards.
• Azure Services Training Kit Available - Ronan Geraghty highlights the first preview release of the Azure Services Training Kit which covers Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services and Live Services in 11 hands on labs.
• KaizenConf’08 Functional Programming Presentation Video - Matthew Podwysocki shares the video of his recent talk at KaizenConf’08
• Inside F#: On lambdas, capture, and mutability - Brian, of the F# Team at Microsoft, continues his series of posts in F#, picking up where he left off with his C# puzzle, and looks at hos that relates to F#
• The two interceptors: - HttpModule and HttpHandlers - Shivprasad Koirala talks about the two means you have of getting involved in the ASP.NET request process in this Code Project article
• ASP.Net MVC - inpractical web.sitemap in a dynamic context - Patrice Calve looks at implementing a more dynamic site map in ASP.NET MVC using attributes
• MVP with MEF - Glenn Block looks at implementing the MVP Triads using the Managed Extensibility Framework
• Where did CLR 3.0 Go? - mdavey asks an interesting question - where did CLR V3 go since we are going to get V4 in the .NET 4 release.
• Autocompletion Textbox in MVC Using jQuery - Jeremiah Clark puts together a simple implementation of a JQuery Autocomplete textbox using ASP.NET MVC

Community

• DDD Scotland 2 - 2nd May 2009 - Criag Murphy announces the dates for DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Day Scotland’s second event. DDD is a great free event (I’ve attended the Reading based event a number of times), and I hope to attend the Scottish incarnation this time round.

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Yesterday’s interim measures following the failure of my web host seem to have worked well, and after a little less than a 24 hour outage things are back up and running normally again. Any links to the temporary site/post will redirect to the real site/post.

Software

• New Release of StyleCop for ReSharper - Howard van Rooijen announces an update to his Stylecop for ReSharper plugin which allows ReSharper to show Stylecop violations in-line in your code and also offer fixes for them.

Information

• Writing Tests to Catch Memory Leaks in .NET - Brian Genisio looks at some techniques that you can use in test to help identify memory leaks in managed code (where you have references keeping an object in memory even after you’ve finished using it).
• Introduction to Code Contracts - Melitta Andersen of the BCL Team talks about what aspects of Code Contracts are included in the CTP release, giving some brief syntax examples.
• Choosing the Right Presentation Technology - J.D. Meier highlights the Patterns and Practices team’s cheat sheet for presentation technology choice which considers the pros and cons of the 15 major (Microsoft) presentation technologies available.
• C# 4.0 New Features Part 4 - Generic Contravariance - Justin Etheredge continues his C#4 series with a look at Generic Contravariance
• HTML Stripping Challenge - Phil Haack throws down the gauntlet to the community to attempt to write an HTML stripping method that can pass his battery of tests.
• Creating a WatiN DSL using MGrammar - Torkel Ödegaard looks at creating a DSL for WatiN using the Oslo MGrammar language
• Staying Technically Relevant - Ryan Rinaldi lists the technologies that he feels are things developers should be aware of now - and the good news is they also align with my interests and by extension the content of The Morning Brew
• Anders C# 4.0 Followup - Ray Jezek highlights a follow up interview with Anders Hejlsberg asking (and getting answers to) many of the questions that the community have been asking since the PDC announcement of C#4 (Note: the video linked in this post is currently timing out - hopefully it will be working by the time you read this)
• Application logging principles - Patrick Kua talks about the importance of good logging within your application, and how good logging can help to dramatically reduce debugging time and provide a better user experience for you application.
• [Demo Code] ASP.NET Dynamic Data Demo - Mike Ormond shares the code for his standard ASP.NET Dynamic Data demo application that he uses in talks
• Do NOT Explicitly Use Threads for Parallel Programming - Daniel Moth continues looking at threading in parallel programming by examining the dangers of creating as may threads as you have tasks to be done in terms of performance and memory cost.
• Did you know… You can press Ctrl+\, D to view the Code Definition Window – #354 - Sara Ford continues her daily Visual Studio Tip Series with a tip about the Code Definition Window (a feature I’d never seen before), and its been a while since I linked to this excellent series
• 10 Ways To Shoot Yourself In The Foot - Part A - Shahar Y highlights a number of common failures caused by common mistakes programmers make.
• Using quantifiers on Code Contracts - luisabreu has a nice series of posts on Code Contracts in .NET 4.0. This post is about quantifiers, but others in the series cover compatibility, contracts on interfaces, checking return values and much more.

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**Update** If you are reading this then things have returned to normal - apologies if you see duplicate entries in your feed reader as I switch the feed back to using the real blog feed.

My web hosting went offline last night and has yet to return, so this is an interim measure, hopefully the hosting will be back up tomorrow, and things can return to normal. Thankfully I upgraded my Wordpress installation last week and as a result have a full backup of my important sites and the databases, so if the worst comes to the worst I can restore from that.

Software

• Prism V2 – Drop 5 (Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight) - Erwin van der Valk announces the release of the latest drop of Prism, the composite application guidance for WPF and Silverlight. As usual there are a number of new features, and Erwin gives a quick rundown of the new bits.
• URLRewrite for IIS 7.0 released - Steve Schofield announces the release of the IIS 7.0 URLRewrite module, available in both x86 and x64 versions.
• XSLT Debugging with .NET - Mark Wiggins announces the release of his XSLT Debugger for Visual Studio - not a lot of information, and I’ve not had the time to try it for myself yet, so proceed at your own risk

Information

• Visual Studio | Channel 9 - This week (10th to 14th November) is Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 week on Channel 9, with a whole host of videos and resources going to be published this week.
• What we should know about CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture? - Vitaly Zaiko talks about the differences between CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture in the .NET Framework.
• Using ASP.NET Dynamic Data with the Windows Workflow Foundation Rules Engine - Kirk Evans walks through the construction of a simple application using Dynamic Data with the Windows Workflow rules engine providing the business logic.
• The DBA Script Thumb - Rodney Landrum talks about the most crucial of his library of queries which he uses on a regular basis as a SQL Server DBA.
• CLR 4.0: Managed Languages - Scott Dorman has been hard at work writing a number of nice short articles on different aspects of the CLR 4.0. This particular one is about managed languages, but I urge you to check out the otherrecent posts on his blog
• JSLitmus: Testing JavaScript Performance - Ajaxian highlights JSLitmus a tool for testing the performance of javascript, allowing you to obtain graphs showing the performance of your own javascript tests.
• A collection of great Silverlight Charting resources! - Delay publishes a good collection of resources for getting the most out of the charting capabilities of the Silverlight Toolkit

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Software

• SubSonic 3.0 Preview 1: Linq Has Landed - Rob Conery announces the first preview release of SubSonic 3.0 which promises a huge range of improvements over version 2, not least support for Linq. In this post Rob walks through the setup, and getting started and the new features. A download link is provided at the end of the post so you can have a play with the preview.
• Papercut – Easy Email Testing - Scott Watermasysk highlights Papercut, a simple SMTP Server which captures the messages which are passed to it and displays them in a GUI rather than actually sending them - great when you need to test email sending without actually wanting to send to an actual recipient.

Information

• Code Contracts for .NET 4.0 - Spec# Comes Alive - Matthew Podwysocki introduces the new Code Contracts Library and shows it in use in a simple example
• Transforming Tree Surgeon using the Adaptive Console Framework - Bil Simser talks about improving the command line utility part of Tree Surgeon by using the Adaptive Console Framework to process his command line functionality.
• Visual Studio Tip: Debugging Hints - Kevin Babcock shares some debugging tips, looking at a few of the new debugging features in VS 2008 SP1
• IE7 user agent bug - Vladimir Enchev highlights an interesting bug which is likely to be on the increase given the huge amount of information being crammed into the User Agent string these days.
• Be careful with optional parameters in C# 4.0 - Jan Van Ryswyck highlights some potentially surprising behaviour of derived types and optional parameters
• How to Use Visual Studio jQuery IntelliSense Supported Through Hotfix - Bill Beckelman talks about the hotfix for Visual Studio that adds support for -vsdoc.js documentation files for JavaScript code allowing you to get full intellisense for JavaScript without having to pollute your actual JS files.
• The F# "ref" type - Brian, who is on the F# Team, talks about one of the less used F# types, showing how it works, and posing a related C# puzzle at the end.
• Fine Grained Parallelism - Daniel Moth talks about Fine Grained Parallelism and how your code should allow the framework to be able to take as much advantage of the underlying hardware available
• Hiding generated code from Code Analysis, Metrics and Test Coverage - Terje Sandstrom looks at the behaviour of a couple of attributes when it comes to hiding code from code analysis and metrics.
• Demeter’s law (suggestion) and tell don’t ask - Part 1 - Sriram Narayan looks a Demeter’s Law and illustrates it in practice with a short code sample.
• Converting VS2010 CTP to Hyper-V - Grant Holliday shares the steps to enable you to run the Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4.0 CTP Virtual PC image in HyperV, allowing you to make use of more of your physical PC hardware.

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