The Morning Brew

Software

• jQuery 1.3.1 Released – The jQuery Team announce the release of V1.3.1, a bug fix only release fixing issues raised in 1.3

Information

• Don’t make ‘readonly’ fields less readable – Leon Bambrick talks about a very common UI problem with read only fields, and looks at alternatives to the standard ‘grey it out’ approach.
• AutoMapper: the Object-Object Mapper – Jimmy Bogard talks about his new Auto Mapper project which aims to provide a simple means, based on convention, for mapping data between objects.
• Things That Make You Go Hmmm – & Follow up post – Eric Lippert requested stories from readers about things in programming languages which are counter-intuitive, and got a really good response in the comments.
• Architecture FAQ for Localization and Globalization – Part 1 – & Part 2 -Shivprasad koirala looks at lots of the common issues and technological solutions to Internationalisation issues in .NET
• Some Common GroupBy Operations on List<> using LINQ – Suprotim Agarwal looks at some different groupings which are common groupings used in many types of application and how you can achieve them using LINQ
• Visio/IronPython/Powershell – How to draw nice diagrams from the command line – Saveen Reddy looks at automating Visio using Powershell and Iron Python to draw diagrams programatically.
• Five hours of webcasts on Windows Azure – Eric Nelson highlights 5 hour long web casts aimed as ISVs, but applicable to all, about the Windows Azure and .NET Services offerings from Microsoft.
• C# 4.0 Named Parameters for better code quality – Steve Michelotti talks about the use of Object Initialisers and the new Named Parameters to improve code readability.
• Explaining Delegates in C# – Part 4 (Asynchronous Callback – Way 1) – Rahul has a nice series on Delegates in C#. This part looks at Asynchronous call back, as does part 5 of the series.. Its worth going back the earlier parts too to pick up the rest of the story.
• New IIS 7 Configuration Reference – Scott Forsyth highlights a new Configuration Reference for IIS7 from the IIS Team.
• Creating MVC "Areas" as Subfolders under Views – Billy McCafferty talks about the concept of Areas in MVC, how he implemented this in this S#arp architecture, and how you can borrow that aspect to use with your own ASP.NET MVC applications.
• Many-to-One Mapping with Composite-ID’s with FluentNhibernate – Derik Whittaker continues looking at Fluent NHibernate with a look at how you can now perform many to one mappings using composite IDs thanks to a new patch to the Fluent NHibernate framework.

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Software

• Jimmy Bogard Spawns His AutoMapper OOM (object-object mapper) – Jeffrey Palermo highlights a new project by Jimmy Bogard. Auto Mapper is a convention based object mapping library which aims to make it easier to map from domain objects to DTOs
• XGENO.ORM – XGENO.ORM is a new Object Relational Mapper project release on the code.msdn.com site, which appears to be from a Bahrain based company. The empahsis on this project seems to be easy of use, simplicity and performance, so it may be one to watch.

Information

• Real Swiss don’t need SRP, do they? – Gabriel Schenker celebrates his move to Los Techies with an excellent and detailed post on the Single Responsibility Principle, including showing how you can refactor code that violates the SRP into code that conforms.
• ASP.NET MVC Tip #46 – Don’t use Delete Links because they create Security Holes – Stephen Walther highlights an important security consideration for the humble delete link, and how it can be exploited. Another problem with using delete links is that if someone uses one of the many tools to make a website available off line it will follow the delete links and your database will rapidly empty of valid content. Stephen looks at an alternative and safer implementation using AJAX
• Introduction to NHibernate, pt. 4 – Ian Cooper continues his series on NHibernate with a look at the support inheritance amongst entities.
• C#: Builder pattern still useful for test data – Mark Needham considers if the Object Builder pattern still has a place in the .NET 3.5 world where object initializers are now supported.
• Thoughts on Three Monitors for Developers – Just when you though your developers had enough screens, Roland Weigelt talks about life with 3 monitors. Contra to the popular belief, I’ve actually found myself being far more productive with just one (laptop) screen recently.
• Application Patterns for Application Architecture – J.D. Meier announces the Patterns and Practices Application Architecture teams latest patterns, a set of Application patterns covering REST, Rich Clients, Rich Internet Applications and Web Applications.
• All Microsoft SDKs in one place! – Karin Meier highlights a page on the Microsoft site which contains links to all the (50+) software development kits available from Microsoft.
• LINQ Overview Concept Map & Concept map of rough edges in ADO.NET 3.5 SP1 – Eric Nelson shares two concept maps of the technologies and relationships between them for ADO.NET and LINQ
• Shrinking code for the Mix09 10k challenge – Timmy Kokke talks about some code minimisation techniques that may come in handy when working on challenges like the Mix09 10k challenge. Of course you’d never use any of this in a normal system (would you?) but its still very interesting to see what can be done.
• Installing ReSharper 4.5 in an Experimental Visual Studio Hive – James Kovacs talks about his experiences installing the bleeding edge of ReSharper (v 4.5 nightly builds) into the Experimental Visual Studio Hive, allowing it to be kept separate from his main VS installation.
• I am being stalked by CLR bugs – Ayende runs into some strangeness with finalizer behaviour, while a number of commenter’s to the post suggest that this is actually the expected behaviour. Further proof that the devil is in the detail.
• Error Handling Customization for ASP.NET UpdatePanel – ‘msp.netdev’ looks at improving the error handling when dealing with update panels using a custom JavaScript error handler in this Code Project article.
• Free E-Book of the Month from Microsoft – David McCollough highlights two free e-books from Microsoft Press in celebration of their 25th year. The e-books are free in the sense that you do have to sign up for the Microsoft Press newsletter in order to get them. The books on offer this month are a SQL Server 2005 Integration Services book and the Winows Server 2008 Core Admin Pocket Consultant.

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Software

• Microsoft Web Platform Installer 1.0 Released – The Microsoft Web Platform Installer has been officially released. This installer makes is really easy to get a web server up and running with all the important bits (like SQL Server and .NET, etc)
• SQL Server 2008 Cumulative Update 3 is available – Aaron Bertrand highlights the latest Cumulative update release for SQL Server 2008 which will take your database engine to version 10.0.1787.0
• NCover v3.0.9 beta is now available – The NCover team announce their 2.0.9 beta release, including a number of performance increases, reports and Cruise Control .NET integration

Information

• DDD: Specification or Query Object – Greg Young looks at using Specifications with repositories and explores some of the ups and downs of this approach compared to the Query Object approach.
• LINQ to Objects and Buffer<T> – Alex James talks about some problems he ran into when working with custom collection classes and LINQ to Objects due to incorrect counts being returned from the collection class.
• BDD With MSTest – Eric Lee shares an adapter class which he is using to make writing BDD style tests using MSTest in his preferred style.
• ADO.NET Data Services – Enforcing FK Associations and a Fix for Deleting Entities – Beth Massi continues her series on the ADO.NET Data Services frameowrk, and in this part looks at enforcing constraints between tables when creating and deleting entities.
• Getting started with NLog – Mike Comstock explores getting up and running the the NLog logging framework
• Design principles – Laila Bougria talks about a number of the best practice design principles for software development. Breifly covering Solid, DRY, YAGNI and the law of demeter with links to other resources on the subject.
• CHESS: Find and Reproduce Concurrency Heisenbugs – Madan Musuvathi shares some details of the CHESS project from Microsoft Research. This project provides a custom scheduler for threading which aims, with unit tests to find concurrency bugs in code by analysing different ways the code could be run. CHESS was featured on the MS Research at PDC edition of the Hanselminutes podcast.
• Custom ASP.NET Server Controls and Language Localization – Dan Wahlin looks at using satellite assemblies for localising his ASP.NET Server Controls
• How does ASP.NET MVC work? – ‘gopalk’ explores how ASP.NET MVC works within the ASP.NET Environment, looking at how your requests get from IIS to the ASP.NET MVC execution.
• Functional Programming Unit Testing – Using Type Classes – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on Function Programming Testing with another look at QuickCheck and FSCheck, this time looking at the concept of Type Classes for implementing operators for property based tests.
• Fluent NHibernate: Auto Mapping Components – James Gregory continues his series on the Fluent NHibernate project with a look at automapping for components from database columns in the same table as the entity data to a related object off the entity.
• Enterprise Library Logging 101 – David Starr shows the steps required to get up and running with the Patterns and Practices Enterprise Library Logging Framework.

Community

• Last call for Thursday: opensource .net mini conference in London – Gojko Adzic reminds us about this Thursdays Open Source .NET exchange conference in London. This evening conference has an impressive agenda and will be covering a good number of interesting topics. There are over 200 people registered for this free event, however there are still spaces available, but you do need to register before the event.
• Inaugural Meeting Of The Gloucestershire .NET User Group – Guy Smith-Ferrier announces the line up and date ffor the first meeting of the new Gloucestershire .NET User Group
• Introducing DotNetShoutout.com – Kazi Manzur Rashid announces the launch of DotNetShoutOut.com, a site running on the KiGG codebase, which was developed as a sample application based on ASP.NET MVC and borrowing heavily from the ideas behind sites like Digg.
• Did You Know? I’m speaking at a the SSWUG Virtual Conference! – Kalen Delaney is going to be speaking at the SSWUG SQL Server virtual conference to be held on 22nd-24th April. Kalen has a discount code which entitles you to a further discount on top of the early bird rate of $80.

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