The Morning Brew

I attended the first meeting of the Manchester SQL Server Usergroup last night, with a good turnout and some interesting techniques discussed things look promising for the future of this event.

Software

• JSONView: JSON browser from within Firefox - Dion Almaer over at Ajaxian highlights a useful looking Firefox add-in for anyone who works with lots (or even a little) JSON data.
• Prism V2 Refreshed - ‘brumfb’ announces the release of an updated Prism V2 (Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight V2) release on MSDN which fixes a few issues found in the initial release
• The Caliburn Beta is Live - Rob Eisenberg announces the beta release of Caliburn, a WPF and Silverlight application framework which implements a number of common UI patterns (MVP, MVVM, etc)

Information

• How to determine which language(s) were used to build a .NET assembly - Rick Minerich explores assemblies developed in different .NET languages and looks to find a means of identifying the language used from the assembly alone.
• Great UI: Clarity and Color on the Presentation Layer - Mark Miller continues his series on UI design with a look at the use of colour and contrast in your UI design.
• DDD: Why Have I Gone All Quiet? - Casey Charlton explains the reasoning behind the pause in posts on DDD topics, and also announces a new site which will house the content longer term.
• TechnicalDebt - Martin Fowler talks about the concept of Technical Debt looking at the details of the metaphor
• 14 lessons to get you started in C# and .NET - Stefano Mapelli highlights a large C# and .NET E-book which is freely available, covering a good range of topics.
• My analysis of the recent Visual Basic Survey + an extra graph - Eric Nelson gives his analysis of the results of his recent VB6 survey run in the UK.
• Functional C# - Fun With Folds - Matthew Podwysocki looks at creating some functions as folds in C# using the Aggregate Linq operator
• OAuth on ASP.net MVC Projects - Owen Evans shares his work on implementing OAuth authentication on ASP.NET MVC
• Implementing UnitOfWork Pattern In Linq To SQL Application - Kazi Manzur Rashid looks at the implementation of the Unit of Work pattern in an ASP.NET MVC application using Linq to SQL
• NH2.1.0: generators behavior explained - Fabio Maulo explores the way the different Identity generators interact with the database in NHibernate 2.1.0

Community

• LiDNUG: March ‘09 event - All you ever wanted to know about ASP.Net….. - Brian H. Madsen shares the details of the March virtual meeting of the Linked In .Net User Group. This is a virtual meeting starting 17:00 GMT (9am PST) broadcast using Live Meeting. This months topic is the ASP.NET Runtime.
• 3 days until Party with Palermo. RSVP now. Guests welcome - Jeffrey Palermo is running has ‘Party With Palermo’ event in conjunction with the Alt.Net / MVP Summit in Seattle on the 1st March. As usual this is a great opportunity to meet with fellow developers, and all it costs you is one business card.
• Recording of Sebastien Lambla @ E-VAN 25 February 2009 - Jan Van Ryswyck shares the recording of the European Virtual Alt.Net User Group, featuring Seb Lambla talking about REST and the OpenRasta Framework. Good job too as I completely forgot about the virtual gathering this time round.

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Software

• Ninject 2 Reaches Beta! - Nate Kohari announces the first beta release of Ninject 2, which started life as a spike based on the 1.x version but has turned into a re-write of the code base in order to bring in use of and support for Linq. V2 contains a bunch of new features, but there are also a few things that have been removed, more details in Nate’s post
• Introducing SilverUnit - Roy Osherove announces the release of TypeMock’s latest product, a real unit testing framework for Silverlight. SilverUnit itself is an open source project, however as it it based on top of Typemock’s API you will need a license for Typmock.

Information

• Tips for Managing ASP.NET MVC Views - Michael Hamrah shares some good tips on managing the view part of ASP.NET MVC, drawing on best practices and general good coding practices.
• Splitting DateTime - Unit Testing ASP.NET MVC Custom Model Binders - Scott Hanselman further explores ASP.NET MVC model binding with a look at separating the date and time parts of a datetime into separate input fields in the UI
• Easy REST - Ron Jacobs gives a very simple 4 step process to making a simple REST based service in using WCF, simple to understand example.
• Plunging into the sea of jQuery plugins - Part I - Xun Ding begins a series exploring the vast array of jQuery plugins that are available, also showing how you can create your own plugins.
• An ACL-based authorization model with NHibernate. - Daniel Doubrovkine shows how you can create an Access Control List permissions model using NHibernate for your data access, and integrating it with ASP.NET Membership
• What is encoding? Cross site scripting and the AntiXSS encoding methods - Kirk Jackson explores the issues that occur when you don’t correctly encode data being sent out in a web page, and looks at the Microsoft solution to this in the form of the AntiXSS Library.
• Smart quotes: The hidden scourge of text meant for computer consumption - Raymond Chen talks about the one of the arch-nemisis’ of many programmers, smart quotes. Many times I have locked horns with them in Content copied from word into web content management systems
• VB6 Runtime Supported in Windows 7 - Andrew Coates highlights an update to MSDN which indicates that Windows 7 will ship with the VB6 runtime, meaning old VB6 applications should continue to operate in Win 7 out of the box.
• An Intro to Barrier, cont.d - Andrew Coates continues his series looking at the Barrier synchronisation class.
• Using Moq to Implement Tests (and Avoid Stubs) - Michael Hamrah talks about the use of the Moq framework in testing, and talks about preferring Mocks over stubs when testing.

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Another enjoyable night at Geekup Liverpool last night.

Software

• SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1 : CTP is available! - Aaron Bertrand highlights the CTP release of SQL 2008 Service Pack 1 for both Full SQL Server and SQL Express
• PostSharp - Announcing PostSharp 1.5 CTP 3 - The PostSharp team announce the 3rd CTP release of Version 1.5, which includes all the fixes from the 1.0 branch and also brings some dramatic speed ups along too.
• Safari 4: New look, but what about the engine - Ajaxian has the low down on the new Beta release from Apple of Safari 4, which includes a new JavaScript engine, Acid3 compliance and support for the CSS canvas (amongst others)
• SQL Compare 8.0 released - Red Gate announce the release of SQL Compare 8.0 the latest major version of the SQL database comparison tool, including new rules based selection of entities to compare, improvements to saving of comparison projects, difference synchronisation to SQL creation scripts, and a few more.
• Typemock Isolator Version 5.2.2 is out! - The Typemock team announce the release of Version 5.2.2 of their mocking framework, Typemock Isolator, including a number of new features and some bugfixes.

Information

• Web Dev .NET: ASP.NET MVC RC Compiler Post-Build Step - Elijah Manor highlights a useful feature of ASP.NET MVC which allows you to build your views at compile time to verify that there are no compile errors in the view code, all achieved by the use of the <MvcBuildViews /> element in the project file.
• DevLabs: Code Contracts for .NET - Somasegar gives the detailed lowdown on the Code Contracts for .NET released on the DevLabs site this week.
• JavaScript, inner functions and private members - Sergio Pereira continues his series on Javascript with a look at functions inside functions and how you can achive private members in Javascript.
• Announcing TeamCity.CodeBetter.com - James Kovacs announces a publicly available Team City build server for open source projects (presumably in the .NET space) a new service from CodeBetter in colaboration with JetBrains, IdeaVine and Devlicio.us. From the list of projects currently set up there this looks like it might be a very useful resource if your want to get hold of bleeding edge builds.
• MSDN Magazine: Automate Acceptance Testing With IronRuby - Ben Hall highlights the availability of the latest edition of the MSDN magazine, which includes the second part of his series on IronRuby and testing.
• When Method Overloading Goes Haywire - Jason Bock runs into some troubles with overloads of a method that uses params for additional optional parameters, and finds that it can be difficult to call the version of the method you want.
• A New Look for Visual Studio 2010 - Jason Zander shows off some screenshots of the New WPF powered Visual Studio 2010
• Unit Testing The MVC JsonResult - Jeremiah Clark explores some techniques for testing JSON results returned from ASP.NET MVC
• Creating an API testing framework 101 - Dennis "D.C." Dietrich looks at some of the theory and implementation of creating a simple API testing framework.

Community

• Alt.Net UK ‘In the North’ - Registration now open - Registration for the Alt.NET event for the north of England scheduled to take place 17/18th April is now open. I believe the number of places is limited to ~50 so you may need to get registered quickly as I suspect there will be quite high demand.
• An evening of mockery at Skills Matter on the 23 of March - Mike Hadlow announces a free evening event from Skillsmatter covering two of the most popular .NET mocking tools, Moq and Rhino.Mocks. Pre-registration is required for this event, although it is free to attend,

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Software

• Preview of Code Contract Tools Now Available - Melitta Andersen of the BCL team announces the release of a preview of the Code Contracts functionality which will be included in VS2010/.NET 4

Information

• Who Knew Domain Validation Was So Hard? - Justin Etheredge shares his thoughts on the current hot topic of Domain Validation
• JQuery Visual studio documentation - Amr ElGarhy highlights the availability of the updated Visual Studio documentation for jQuery 1.3.2
• Thoughts on the Code Contracts Preview for .NET 4.0 - K. Scott Allen explores the new Code Contracts preview release, showing how contracts are verified, and talks about some of the IL Rewriting features.
• Partial Classes, Default Constructors - watch Out! - Ron Jacobs talks about the use of generated partial classes, adn how when creating your own constructors for these types it is always a good idea to call the default constructor too in case some important generated code goes there
• Leveraging ILMerge to simplify deployment and your users experience - Daniel Cazzulino talks about using the ILMerge tool to combine assemblies to give a simpler deployment strategy, reducing the number of files to distribute
• With modern tools, Is a solution\project structure important? - Artur Trosin asks if the structure of projects / solutions is as important as it used to be, now that we have tools that make navigation between classes much easier. I have to admit that I only make ocasional use of the solution explorer these days, tending to use ReSharper’s goto type functionality
• JavaScript, time to grok closures - Sergio Pereira attempts to demystify closures in JavaScript, showing some real world like samples.
• Closures in C#: Variable Scoping and Value Types vs Reference Types - Derick Bailey follows on from Sergio with a look at the variable scoping of closures in C# with particular regard to Reference and value types
• Adding Parallel Extensions to F# - Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at an example of using the Parallel Extensions with F# code to help improve the performance of compute intensive code.
• Announcing Family.Show v3 - Our WPF Reference Application - Tim Sneath announces the release of FamilyShow V3, the 3rd significant release of the real world WPF sample application. The project is hosted on CodePlex (so code is available).

Community

• 1st XNA UK user group bar camp - registrations now open! - A 1 Day community event for XNA developers in the UK, being hosted at Aston Science Park on 21st March.

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Software

• Release: jQuery 1.3.2 - jQuery JavaScript Library - The jQuery team announce a second bugfix release of the recent 1.3 version. This release contains a number of bugfixes along with considerable performance improvements.
• Download a standalone installer for SQL 2008 Management Studio Express - Aaron Bertrand shares the news that there is now a standalone SQL 2008 Management Studio Express download. Strangely I was looking for just this last week and unfortunately ended up downloading the whole (huge) SQL Express installer.

Information

• DDD: The Repository Pattern - Casey Charlton continues his series on Domain Driven Design, with a look at one of the key patterns used, the repository, and in DDD: Living In The Enterprise continues with a look at how DDD fits into the enterprise application development space.
• Announcing xUnit.net Contrib - Brad Wilson highlights the start of the xUnit.net Contrib project, which initially contains improvements and fixes for the Resharper test runner for xUnit.
• Much Ado About Monads - List Edition - Matthew Podwysocki takes a functional look at Lists with examples in F# and using Linq
• Spiff Up Your ASP.NET MVC Forms With jQuery - Justin Etheredge show how a little bit of jQuery can offer drastic UX improvements for you form based web application
• Back To Basics: Handling overflow in mark stage - Abhinaba Basu continues his series on Garbage collection with a look at how stack overflows can be handled in mark-sweep garbage collection
• Troubleshooting common mapping bugs with NHibernate - Derik Whittaker explores 7 common errors encountered while working with NHibernate Mappings, looking at their causes and how to resolve them
• C#: Implicit Operator - Mark Needham explores the Implicit Operator, and shows how it can help with the builder pattern. Along the way he finds a few limitations
• Multiple Inheritance in C# using Dynamic Features - Can Erten looks at how the new Dynamic functionality in C#4 gives another approach to multiple inheritance

Community

• Alt.Net UK ‘In the North’ - The Alt.NET UK ‘In the North’ open spaces conference gets its own website, along with some more details of the event
• Asp.Net MvcContrib Logo Contest - The ASP.NET MVC Contrib project is after a logo, and Eric Hexter posts the details of a the design contest for the creation of a logo, along with details of the prize.
• NHibernate users mailing list going strong - Almost 10,000 posts and 1322 members - Jeffrey Palermo highlights the growth of the NHibernate community and the nhusers mailing list in particular.

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I had a very enjoyable night at the Thoughtworks Manchester Geek Night last night, where Jim Webber gave a very interesting and entertaining presentation on Web Based integration using HTTP based services as the middleware.

Software

• MonoDevelop 2.0 Beta 1 - Miguel de Icaza gives a detailed run through of what is new in MonoDevelop 2.0’s first beta release. From the screenshots included its looking like a very nice IDE, and I especially look forward to some of the improvements they have planned for Windows users
• Announcing FsCheck 0.5 - Kurt Schelfthout announces the latest update to FsCheck, the F# port of QuickCheck, the Haskell automatic specification based testing tool
• StyleCop for ReSharper is Feature Complete. RC (refresh) Released. - Howard van Rooijen announces a new release of the StyleCop Plugin for Resharper. This release brings it to parity with StyleCop 4.3 and marks a significant milestone in the project.

Information

• Is a Crisp a Value Object? - Dylan Beattie gives a really nice explaination of the concept of a value object vs an entity, just (amongst other things) Crisps as an analogy
• CLR Team Blog : Why catch(Exception)/empty catch is bad - Andrew Pardoe, of the CLR team at Microsoft talks about why catching exceptions with empty catch blocks can be problematic, especially when it leaves the program in a corrupted state, and talks about a forthcoming VS2010 feature in this area.
• Parallel Programming with .NET : Getting random numbers in a thread-safe way - ‘toub’ explores some of the problems you can have when generating Random Numbers in multi-threaded applications, and looks at better ways of doing this.
• The Oxite Architecture: Good, Bad, and Meh Part 1 - Mike “Sampy” Sampson, who works on the Oxite project talks about some of the design changes that have taken place in the project, and gives some background on the development style and practices. This part talks about the use of Unity as a DI Container, and
• The Oxite Architecture: Good, Bad, and Meh Part 2 - Part 2 explores action filters with attributes.
• Soft-deletes are bad, m’kay? - Frans Bouma talks about Soft Deletes, where instead of deleting records, they are marked with a ‘Deleted’ status, and hidden from view. Frans continues with a suggestion of an alternative implementation, wher you move deleted records into an archive catalog.
• "Inappropriate Intimacy" points to the bleeding out of your domain logic - Ian Cooper talks about how having classes that know too much about each others internals violates the law of demeter and can lead to your domain logic getting fragmented and placed into places it shouldn’t be.
• Stubs and application scaffolding - Louis Salin talks about stubs, and how they can help simplify your development by providing solutions to complex problems you don’t yet need to solve, allowing you to get on with that other bits.
• Application logging - yes it is important - Ryan Ternier gives some good advice for logging within your application, suggesting that writing everything out to disk all the time is unnecessary, just logging exceptions doesn’t give enough information, and much more.
• Microsoft Press : Wait: more free e-books in February! - The Microsoft Press Blog highlights 2 other free titles that are availble this month in e-book format.

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Software

• YUI 2.7.0 Released - The Yahoo User Interface library team announce the release of YUI 2.7.0, which brings with it new functionality in the form of the StyleSheet utility, improves support for IE8, fixes a load of bugs and promotes three components out of ‘beta’ status

Information

• New Release: Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight v2.0 (PRISM) - J.D. Meier announces the official release of the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight Version 2, often referred to as ‘Prism’. Also, Blaine Wastell shares some screenshots of the sample application from Prism V2 and links to a number of resources about the parts of this release, along with some video content.
• DDD: What Kind of Applications Is It Suited To? - Casey Charlton continues his DDD series with a look at how well Domain Driven Design fits with different types of application development.
• System.Linq.Enumerable.Aggregate - Better Know an Extension Method Part 1 - Chris Hampson gives a nice example rich introduction to the Aggregate Linq extension method.
• Implement Linq to Objects in C# 2.0 - Think Before Coding - Jérémie Chassaing explores how you can implement a lot of Linq like functionality in C#2, looking at how Linq works and how an implementation can be achieved in C#2
• Types of testing - Laila Bougria offers definitions for the various types of testing that can occur in a software project. Many people seem to get bogged down in the idea that testing == unit testing and then actually create ‘unit test’ which are actually different types of test (such as integration test, load test, etc)
• Fluent Interfaces: What am I missing? - David Starr considers what Fluent Interfaces are, and if they are actually useful in many contexts.
• GOF’s Adapters and Some Magic - Erich Ledesma examines the Gang of Four Adapter pattern, and shows how you can antomatically generate Adapter functionality to make implementation easier.
• C#: Extensions methods != Open classes - Mark Needham reminds us that extension methods do not mean our classes all instantly become Open Classes (in the sense of the Open Closed principle). One of the key missing features is the ability to override using extension methods.
• Reflection Speed Test - How slow is it really? - Grant Barrington looks at one of the common uses of reflection, to get a name for an enumeration value, and pits its performance against a number of other ways of achieving the same.
• The M Programming Language - Part 2 - Collections and Extents - Bart De Smet continues his series on the M programming language with a look at implementing collections and extents, comparing to implementations in C# and Linq.
• Effective Error Handling with WCF & REST - Rob Bagby looks at providing good error handling in WCF based REST services using HTTP status codes and error descriptions.

Community

• WebDD ‘09 - Reading - 18th April 2009 - The first of 2 clashing community events announced yesterday, Web DD is a Free conference to be hosted at Microsoft’s Reading campus. Like the other DeveloperDeveoperDeveloper events this is a Saturday event which will cover all things web and web related, and will have information about many of the things that are to be announced at Mix09. Speaker submissions for this event are now open
• Announcing the Alt.Net.UK ‘in the North’ Conference - Richard Fennell announces an ALT.NET event in the north of England, unfortunatly to be held on the same day as Web DD 09. This will be the usual Alt.Net style of an open spaces event with session planning taking place on the Friday evening and the main conference on the Saturday.
• Hereford Falls To The Mighty NxtGen Empire - Guy Smith-Ferrier announces the latest branch of the NxtGen usergroup to operate out of Hereford, with the first meeting being on the 17th May.
• Alt.net London Beers #6 - Sebastien Lambla announces the 6th Alt.Net London Beers event, a short open spaces session ina pub. This time round they event is sponsored by TeQUILA\UK and Thoughtworks

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** Update: I’ve corrected the post number which I typo’d as 389 (although the perma-link will be a constant reminder of the mistake) **

Information

• References are not addresses - Eric Lippert chalenges the common idea that a reference variable stores the address of the object, and long the way explores the concept of references and pointers.
• A Quick Example of YAGNI / Simplest Thing Possible in Action - Jeremy D. Miller shares a real world example of applying the You Ain’t Gonna Need It principle involving a simple decision about using tables over CSS layout - the actual decision may be a contentious one, however the underlying principle behind the decision is sound
• Porting WPF Applications to the Microsoft Surface - Scott Hanselman talks about his experiences porting his BabySmash WPF application to the Microsoft Surface. Given that you have to actually own a Surface to get the SDK (and the surface costs $15K) I think this article will be as close as many of us will come to developing for this technology
• JetBrains RubyMine provides navigation and refactoring for Javascript - Jeffrey Palermo talks about RubyMine, an new IDE for Ruby on Rails from JetBrains, which in addition to offering support for Ruby also has some useful Javascript refactoring support.
• DDD: Services - Casey Charlton continues his series on Domain Driven Design with a look at Services / Domain Services, and how they fit into the DDD picture
• Use Bootstrapper in Your ASP.NET MVC Application and Reduce Code Smell - Kazi Manzur Rashid shows how you can construct and extensible startup boot strapper for your ASP. NET MVC applications to allow all your start up to be specified by configuration.
• Getting Mono and Visual Studio to play nice together - Chris Cyvas shares the results of his exploration into getting Visual Studio to work with Mono templates, the mono compiler and to continue working after upgrading mono.
• Multilevel Undo and Redo implementation in c# -Part I (Using Single Object Representing Change Approach) - RazanPaul has a nice series of posts on Code Project looking at three different ways of doing multi-level undo and redo. Series continues in Part II (Using Command Pattern) and Part III (Using Memento Pattern)
• Results of the Visual Basic Survey: Part 1 Language and Framework Usage - Eric Nelson shares the results from his recent survey about VB6 usage and upgrade plans.
• IronRuby ASP.NET MVC With Filters - Phil Haack talks about the update of an old ASP.NET MVC sample showing the ASP.NET MVC framework working alongside IronRuby
• Challange: The sample legacy database from hell - Ayende is looking for a small slightly evil legacy database for use in his new training course on NHibernate
• Mocking objects that change arguments - Alex Thissen talks abotu some of the more tricky aspects of mocking, dealing with out and ref parameters and how TypeMock deals with these things

Community

• DDD Southwest - Chris Hay shares some more detailed information about the format for the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Southwest event
• UK Gigs - Eric Nelson has put together a list of the upcoming events that the Microsoft UK Developer Evangelist team will be speaking at.

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