The Morning Brew

Software

• FileGenerator For Reflector – Jason Bock has updated his generator pluing for Reflector. This plugin creates code, resource files and a visual studio project file for any module, assembly, namespace or type from within Reflector.
• NHibernate Query Analyzer Updates – Ayende highlights a updated version of NHibernate Query Analyser (for NHibernate 2.1) which has now flown his nest and is being maintained elsewhere.
• Prism V2 – Drop 8 Available – The Prism team announce their latest drop of code and binaries on CodePlex of this Composite WPF and Silverlight application block.
• New SilverLight Spy release, now with Trees…(visual and logical tree of the UI structure) – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of a new release of Silverlight Spy which now includes tree views representing the visual and logical structures.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery and Upcoming View Improvements with the ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate – ScottGu gives his usual detailed rundown of the new and exciting features in ASP.NET MVC along with the information that the ASP.NET MVC Release candidate will be released in January
• A Little Holiday Love From The ASP.NET MVC Team – Phil Haack gives an update on ASP.NET MVC Progress and talks about a new feaure allowing for views without code behind and the ASP.NET MVC Design Gallery
• Functional Programming Unit Testing – Part 4 – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on Unit Testing in Functional Languages, exploring Test Coverage in this part with a look at Haskell Program Coverage (HPC) for Haskell code, and Test Driven.NET with NCover for F#
• NH Prof Public Beta Date – Ayende announces that the public beta of his NHibernate Profiler will be available by the end of the year – this is one tool I’m really looking forward to, so can’t wait to give it a spin.
• Getting value out of your unit tests – Jimmy Bogard gives 4 simple rules which, if followed correctly, should help you to extract the maximum value from your unit tests
• The Death of System.DateTime? – Omer van Kloeten talks about the DateTimeOffset class and how he finds it far more useful than the standard DateTime, along with a number of things to note about the use of DateTimeOffset.
• Lazy Loading Considered Harmful – Scott Bellware discusses Lazy Load, and how it can cause unpredictable results, but in the right situations it can be a very valuable tool.
• Piecemeal Expression evaluation – Jimmy Bogard looks at the relationship between Expressions and Reflection / Reflection.Emit
• The Resolvable – Davy Brion propses a technical solution to his recent problems due to not releasing components from the Windsor IOC container by creating a wrapper which ensures that the object gets cleaned up correctly.
• 10-4 | Shows | Channel 9 – Channel 9 have started a new podcast, ’10-4′ which is going to look at the new features of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4
• Oxite Review – The discussions about Oxite continue, and in this post Chad Myers talks about what he feels the biggest problems are. Ayende weighs in on the topic from a slightly different angle, talking about how the release was handled. To wrap up, Casey Charlton gives a nice roundup of the different viewpoints involved

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Software

• .NET 3.5 SP1 GDR is available to download – Scott Hanselman highlights the availability of .NET 3.5 SP1 GDR which rolls-up all the fixes to .NET 3.5 SP1 based on customer reported issues.

Information

• This could be big. Sueetie is online! – Dave Burke announces his latest project, Sueetie, a community site and software project which aims to bring together some of the best open source .NET applications into one cohesive whole community with common authentication and database. Source code will be released on CodePlex.
• MVC Controllers and Forms Authentication – Nikhil Kothari looks at an alternative way of implementing Forms Authentication in ASP.NET MVC, having a controller return an ActionResult that does the work rather than having the controller interact with forms authentication directly.
• Periodic Execution in .NET – Mebyon Kernow explores a few techniques for performing operations periodically.
• WPF Application Quality Guide v.0.4 Released! – Ivo Manolov announces the release of the 4th preliminary version of the WPF Application Quality guide, with new sections on testing included in this version.
• T-SQL Anti-pattern of the day: ‘all-in-one’ queries – ‘arvindsh’ explores one of the common T-SQL mistakes that gets made, combining queries into one with optional parameters, passed as null. In this article the reasons this is bad are explored. This is often something developers from other languages get wrong as the only solution to this is often to break the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle
• Updated version of the free Data Structures and Algorithms book available! – Granville Barnett announces an update to his free e-book on Data structures and Algorithms. Something for my Christmas reading list I feel.
• An investigation into routes – Kyle Baley, spured on by an addition to MCVContrib that makes testing them easier, explores routing in ASP.NET MVC, looking at ordering of routes, and avoiding matching on the wrong route.
• Explaining Delegates in C# – Part 1 (Callback and Multicast delegates) – Rahul gives some simple to understand examples of Delegates in C# in the hope of removing some of the confusion that surrounds them for many developers – part two of this series does the same for events
• (Very) Tentative Steps with the Live Framework SDK – Mike Taulty begins exploring the Live Framework SDK, and shares his findings as he goes.

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Slow day yesterday for posts, looks like we may be heading into the holiday season earlier than I had expected.

Information

• Windows Update Now… – Greg Duncan highlights a very important security patch for Internet Explorer 5, 6, and 7. Make sure you get this patch installed as the vulnerability that is fixes has been publicly disclosed.
• Choosing Between WebForms and MVC – Vaibhav looks at the criteria by which you can make a decision between Microsoft’s two web platforms, looking at the benefits and disadvantages of each, along with a simple decision flow.
• Migrations in C# using RikMigrations – Justin Etheredge explores RikMigration, a Ruby on Rails like Database Migration framework for .NET
• Continuous Integration Builds – Do’s And Don’t’s – Igor Brejc looks at some continuous integration best practices in the form of a Do and Don’t list
• Performance optimization of ASP.NET applications on client-side – Khurram Shehzad explores the possible performance optimisation of an ASP.NET from the client side, looking at what you can do to improve the client side experience by tweaking Javascript, CSS, etc
• Publish Server Performance Monitors with MsChart – Muhanad Younis explores the Microsoft Chart Library and combines it with Windows Performance counters to give some web visibility to performance counters.
• Optimizing your route collection for URL generation in ASP.NET MVC (and more!) – Eilon Lipton looks at a few techniques to help your ASP.NET MVC routing (and anywhere else its used) perform more optimally.
• Do you suffer from this condition? – Ryan Lanciaux coins an amusing term relating to the Oxcite debate. I really do hope that people are NOT becoming afraid of releasing their code, after all feedback from our peers is how we should all be improving ourselves.
• ASP.NET MVC Samples, Oxite, and Community – Scott Hanselman extracts some of the positives of the Oxcite debate, and also talks about the importance of reading lots of sample code, drawing your own conclusions, and remembering that they are just samples after all, and are not gospel.
• Oxite Refactor, Take 1 – Rob Conery takes positive action on the Oxcite CMS debate by rolling up his sleeves and getting involved in the project.
• Rhino Service Bus – Ayende talks about his latest project, a simple Service Bus implementation written in C#3 and using MSMQ4. Access to the source is provided.

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