The Morning Brew

Software

• Mono 2.4 and MonoDevelop 2.0 released - Miguel de Icaza shares the announcement of the final release of both Mono 2.4 the Open Source implementation of the .NET Framework, featuring some significant performance improvements, and also the release of Version 2 of MonoDevelop, the IDE product now featuring integrated debugging
• Paving my machine for a fresh 2009 - First-Pass Must-Haves - Scott Hanselman lists his essential utilities for his 2009 reformat of his desktop machine
• redgate .NET Reflector 5.1.5.0 Released - Paulo Morgado highlights the release of the latest version of Reflector. This update is being supplied over the automatic update on application startup, however the website does not yet appear to have been updated
• Announcing the free ViewModel Tool - Daniel Cazzulino shares the latest update to his Visual Studio Custom tool which takes some of the pain out of creating some of the boiler plate code required to implement ISupportInitialize, ISupportInitializeNotification and IChangeTracking
• MassTransit 0.6 Release Candidate - Chris Patterson announces the release candidate release of MassTransit 0.6, a .NET Service bus implementation for building loosely coupled .NET applications. This release contains a number of new features and other changes, outlined in this post

Information

• Configuring NHibernate with ASP.NET - Alessandro Gallo gives a introduction to the configuration of NHibernate, and looks at how you can use it in web application context in this beginners tutorial
• Using NHibernate with multiple databases - Karl Seguin explores using multiple databases with NHibernate, and finds that its not especially difficult however there is a lack of documentation in this area
• Must Everything Be Virtual With NHibernate? - Davy Brion looks at the reason NHibernate wants all methods and properties to be virtual, and talks about hiw dynamic proxies are used to provide usefuly functionality such as Lazy Load. Davy also shows how you can turn off this functionality and therefore no longer require virtual properties
• Some ASP.NET compiler black magic - Bertrand Le Roy looks at some of the interesting and less well known features of the ASP.NET Compiler and engine
• Notes from SQL Server Premier Field Engineer : SQL Server 2005/2008 database tuning - picking low hanging fruits - part I - ‘Yuriy’ looks at some if the Dynamic Management Views that can help with performance tuning your SQL by helping to identify missing indexes
• Heisenberg And Lambdas - Justin Etheredge looks at a technique of using lambdas to attach events, exploring the potential of this method to leak memory and looks at how applying weak references can help with this
• HighBall Part Duex (#01) - Adron Hall talks about the creating his latest project using a User Experience first and TDD approach, starting in this part with mocking some screens and adding some implementation to support.

Community

• WebDD ‘09 - Reading - 18th April 2009 - Register - Registrations for this year’s WebDD event to be held at Microsoft’s Reading campus in mid April opened yesterday, and are going fast - by the time you read this there may only be waiting list places available

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The SQLBits IV conference was very interesting, I’m now looking forward to the team behind the event releasing the videos of the sessions so I can see some of the sessions which clashed with others I was interested in.

Software

• IronPython 2.6 Alpha 1 - Harry Pierson announces the release of IronPython 2.6 Beta 1 which further closes the gap in performance between IronPython and CPython
• Prototype 1.6.1 RC2: IE 8 Here we come - Ajaxian highlights the release of a second release candidate of the Prototype javascript library. This latest release makes the library properly support Internet Explorer 8 in full ’super standards’ mode and also on compatibility mode, along with adding a few new features to the library
• StyleCop for ReSharper - Release: 1.0.0.000 (compatible with ReSharper 4.1) - The latest release of StyleCop for Resharper (stable) brings the supported version of StyleCop up to 4.3.1, adds a new automatic updater, and fixes a number of issues. For those on the bleeding edge, there is also a V1.5 beta which supports the (not yet released) Resharper 4.5

Information

• Kona Screencast 1: It’s Baaaaack! - Rob Conery returns to screen casting with the first screen cast about the evolution of the ASP.NET MVC StoreFront application into Kona
• First steps with Lightweight Test Automation Framework - Steve Sanderson explores the Lightweight Test Automation Framework as a more streamlined replacement for the Selenium tests he’s been using with his xVal validator framework
• Framework Design Guidelines: the System.* namespace - Brad Abrams hosts a guest post from Kit George, the internal maintainer of the Framework guidelines at Microsoft, looking at the NameSpace guidelines and specifically the System.* and Microsoft.* namespaces
• My ReSharper NUnit Test Templates - Brian Genisio shares some ReSharper templates that he uses to speed up his unit test writing using NUnit
• AntiPaste, because Pasting Code Is Harmful - Tony Rasa proposes and shares the implmentation of an add on for your IDE that aims to reduce your reliance on Copy Paste development
• Experimenting With Fluent Interfaces in the Domain - Jan Van Ryswyck continues his series of posts on fluent interfaces with a look at an implementation in the domain model
• DDD Sample Application: Version 1.1.0 Released - Peter Backlund announces the release of an updated Domain Driven Design Application sample. This sample application, based around cargo shipments is a great bit of code to review and see how the principles of DDD can be applied
• Write ETL jobs in pure C# - ‘Paul B’ explores Rhino ETL, a C# library that brings DTS/SSIS functionality to your IDE, allowing you to do Extract Translate Load operations in pure C# code
• Functional Programming and Collective Intelligence - Matthew Podwysocki looks at how functional programming and Collective Intelligence can be combined.

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Looking forward to SQLBits IV tomorrow.

Software

• MvcContrib v1.0 Released! Download now - Jeffrey Palermo announces the release of MvcContrib, he library of extensions for ASP.NET MVC v1 including new view engines, controller factories and a whole load of other bits and pieces
• Announcing Gallio and MbUnit v3.0.6 - Jeff Brown announces the release of the latest version of MbUnit and the Gallio framework, giving a detailed run down of the included functionality
• Grommet: Linq, HTTP/1.1 and more for .NET Micro Framework - Blair Leduc announces Grommet, an implementation of many of the missing features of the full .NET framework on the .NET Micro Framework. This release includes Linq and HTTPWebRequest/Response.

Information

• Introduction to NHibernate, pt. 6 - Ian Cooper continues his series of posts on NHibernate, in the part looking at the NHibernate Session, and associated patterns such as Identity Map, Unit of Work and the standard CRUD operations
• MVC Beta to RTW upgrade issue - AddModelError and NullReferenceExceptions - Jimmy Bogard shares some of his pains in upgrading an ASP.NET MVC project from Beta to RTM releases
• The Weekly Source Code 39 - Commodore 64 Emulator in Silverlight 3 - Scott Hanselman explores a Silverlight Commodore 64 emulator in his latest Weekly Source Code post, looking at some of the more interesting parts of the project inlcuding the high performance video stream and the Disk Drive emulation. Scott also talks about this with the developer Pete Brown on his latest podcast. - Hanselminutes Podcast 155 - A C64 Emulator with Silverlight 3 by Pete Brown
• IE 8 Can Profile JavaScript - Steve Wellens highlights the JavaScript profiler available in the Internet Explorer 8 Developer tools
• Free Ebook: Mastering SQL Server 2005 Profiler - Jose Rolando Guay Paz highlights a free E-Book offer from RedGate on the SQL 2005 Profiler
• Database Scale-Out Strategies for Web Apps - Gil Shabat has written an interesting article on the various scale out methods for database driven web applications
• Enterprise Library 5.0 - tentative product backlog published, story/feature prioritization is open - your participation is invited! - Grigori Melnik calls out to the Enterprise Library community to vote for the features that they’d like to see in the Version 5 release of the Enterprise Library
• Why invest in UX? - Scott Barnes talks about why it is important to look at User Experience in your developments and that you should consider User Experience right back to the business processes your system is implementing

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Software

• Visual Studio 2008 Database Edition GDR v2 RC1 available (Previously called QFE) - The Visual Studio Team Systems DB Team announce the Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2008 Database Edition GDR v2. This is a short life release candidate intended to be used to verify fixes are in place before the final release which sounds like it will be in weeks rather than months time

Information

• Obsolete Members and Compiler Warnings - Jason Bock investigates some strangeness with the Obsolete members attribute and compiler warnings only being generated in certain circumstances in VS 2008/C#3
• Running Tarantino With MSBuild - Rob Reynolds continues exploring the Tarantino database change framework with a look at running the changes using MSBuild, and provides a MSBuild sample
• Problems mixing functional and object-oriented paradigms: NHibernate - Alex Scordellis looks at the differences between functional programming style and more traditional OO programming when it comes to persisting with NHibernate
• Verify JavaScript with JSLint during build using Nant - Greg Gigon looks at adding JSLint to the NAnt build process to validate and verify the JavaScript component of the project. With more and more reliance being placed on custom JS in out web apps this is a very useful technique
• Introducing CodePlex Tips - Hot on the heels of last years Visual Studio Tips series, Sara Ford has started a new series of posts on Code Plex Tips, looking to bring some of the features of CodePlex to light, along with giving a sneak peek at some future features
• NHibernate and TooManyRowsAffectedException - Alkampfer shares a useful reminder about triggers in the database causing problems with Data Access code, in this case NHibernate, due to them returning extra ‘rows affected’ counts. The solution and and a contender for your best practice guide is of course useing NO COUNT in triggers
• My 100th blog post: Top 5 development practices you should care for! - Patrick Smacchia celebrates is 100th blog post with a look at 5 best practices for Software development that were applied to the development of NDepend
• Implementing A Value Object With NHibernate - Davy Brion looks at the specifics of implementing value objects when using NHibernate as your persistence framework
• Coding: Isolate the data not just the endpoint - Mark Needham suggests that you should also isolate the data returned from services as well as the service implementation in your code, illustrating with an example ased on a service returning the items for a drop down list
• An Extensive Examination of LINQ: The Ins and Outs of Query Operators - Scott Mitchell looks at query operators in Linq which are defined as extension methods on IEnumerable<T> which perform some work on the collection to return a result
• $(document).ready() and pageLoad() are not the same! - Dave Ward looks at the differences between jQuery document ready and the ASP.NET Ajax pageLoad, and looks at creating an ASP.NET AJAX equivalent of Document.Ready

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Software

• AgDLR 0.5 - Harry Pierson highlights the release of AgDLR 0.5, which is an integration between the Dynamic Language Runtime languages and Silverlight. These languages are currently IronRuby and IronPython, and this release includes support for Silverlight 3 beta
• Spice up your IE with spicIE - Writing IE7/8 Plugins in managed code in minutes (beta) - Greg Duncan highlights spicIE, a framework that makes it easy to create plug-ins for Internet Explorer 7 and 8 in Managed code

Information

• The Tarantino Project - Database Change Management - Rob Reynolds takes a look at the Tarantino Project, a tool for use from NAnt which deals with database changes allowing you to keep your databases up to date easily
• ViewState 101 - Tony Lombardo goes back to first principles on a classic pain point for Web Forms applications, the viewstate, looking at why it exists, how it works and what can be done about making it smaller
• Entities: Required Properties And Properties That Shouldn’t Be Modified - Davy Brion looks at a common mistake that gets made with NHibernate mappings, having getter and setter properties for all persisted properties, and looks at how you can improve your entities by avoiding this
• Persistence Patterns in MSDN Magazine - Jeremy D. Miller plugs his latest MSDN Magazine column which takes a look at the less well understood data acess patterns such as active record, data mapper, repositories, etc
• Building an Optimized, Graphics-Intensive Silverlight Application - Tim Sneath shares his notes from Seema Ramchandani’s MIX09 talk on creating high performance graphics applications in Silverlight, including discussions of testing using XPerf
• Dime Cast # 95 - Building a Progressive Fluent Interface - Derik Whittaker picks up on the article featured yesterday and looks at creating a Progressive Fluent Interface in his latest screencast at Dime Casts.
• Building Silverlight 2 and Silverlight 3 Beta applications on the same machine - Jeff Wilcox - Jeff Wilcox talks looks at how you can keep your development environment able to build Silverlight 2 while also being able to build Silverlight 3 beta projects
• Silverlight Cream - I’m not going to be covering Silverlight in huge detail, just linking to the od article I find interesting. If Silverlight is something you care about I suggest you also subscribe to this Blog which does an excelent daily post rounding up all the best Silverlight news and articles
• Tip of the Day #9 (The Project Location Is Not Trusted) - Colin Angus Mackay shares a useful tip about not trusted locations and how Windows uses the alternate file stream to store information about the security of items downloaded from the internet
• SQL SERVER - 2008 - SCOPE_IDENTITY Bug with Multi Processor Parallel Plan and Solution - Pinal Dave talks about an issue with SCOPE_IDENTITY() and multi processor systems on SQL 2008, offering a few solutions to the problem

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Software

• Live Framework Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio April 2009 CTP - The April 09 CTP edition of the Live Framework Tools for Visual Studio gives you the latest tools for creating Live Mesh enabled application in both .NET and Silverlight, along with JavaScript completion for Live Framework code and a number of bugfixes since the last release
• WPF Toolkit - March 2009 Release - An update to the already released WPF Tool Kit March Release as the previous release was missing one of the bugfixes it was meant to have. This release contains a number of controls from the Jan09 release along with a huge number of bugfixes and improvements
• One gets you Ten. One DLL, Ten free WCF Debugger Visualizers - Greg Duncan highlights the WCF Debugger Visualizers from E4D Learning, which bring 10 debugger visualizers including visualizers for Message, ClientRuntime, Binding, Security Context, Security, and a few more.
• Json.NET 3.5 Beta 3 - The latest beta release of this JSON serialization framework brings with it a few new features and a few bugfixes to existing functionality
• Krypton 3.5 Released - ComponentFactory announce the release of Version 3.5 of their Krypton Control Library, new date time and calendar controls. Also, this release now includes over 40 free controls
• asp:menu fix for IE8 problem available - Bertrand Le Roy announces a fix for the built in ASP.NET Controls which makes the Menu control render correctly for Internet Explorer 8.
• Hotfix for "Design view does not update HTML" and to "Designer inserts a lot of &nbsp;" - The Visual Web Developer Team announce the release of a Visual Studio / Office 2007 hotfix which patches shared components of both products to resolve an anoying problem with the HTML Desiger

Information

• The Dangers of the Large Object Heap - Andrew Hunter talks about the way that .NET allocates memory for our objects to live in in this interesting post on the Large Object Heap, the place any object with a size of >85000 bytes goes to live.
• Exploring the CoreCLR Inside Silverlight - Tim Sneath shares some notes from MIX on the refactoring of the CLR into the CoreCLR used within Silverlight
• My Visual Studio Twilight theme - Sean Biefeld shares his current Visual Studio theme, a rather nice dark looking theme, and one I think I’ll give a try at some point
• An Evening with Fluent NHibernate - Howard Dierking shares his first thoughts on Fluent NHibernate
• NHibernate POID Generators revealed - Tuna Toksoz expands on Fabio Maulo’s post on the generation of Persistant Object Identifiers and the drawbacks of native/identity generation
• .NET MVC vs Ruby on Rails - Simon Tokumine shares thoughts on ASP.NET MVC from the point of view of a Ruby on Rails Developer,
• ASP.NET MVC for RoR developers: do as locals do - Simone Chiaretta follows up on Simon’s post with a look at the things that Ruby on Rails developers need to know for ASP.NET MVC to make as it would do to seasoned .NET developers
• Core ASP.NET | Refcardz - A nice looking ASP.NET Web Forms Quick Reference Card from DZone written by Holger Schwichtenberg
• RESTful Services and Business Exceptions - Ron Jacobs talks about how you can include Soap Fault equivalents in REST based services using HTTP status codes

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Software

• IronRuby 0.3 Released - Jimmy Schementi announces the release of IronRuby 0.3, with source code and demo code included too. This release brings IronRuby to 80% completeness of the RubySpec test suite.
• CAT.NET New Build – 1.1.1.8 - The Connected Information Security Group announce the latest update to the Microsoft Code Analysis Tool for ,NET, which includes a number of bug fixes and a new export results to Excel feature
• CSLA .NET 3.6.2 Release Candidate available - Rockford Lhotka announces the release candidate release of his CSLA application framework for both Silverlight and Windows apps, with final release scheduled for the end of the month.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC Translated for the Web Forms Programmer (2 in a series) - Sara Chipps continues her series on ASP.NET MVC from the point of view of a WebForms developer, and in this part starts building an application using ASP.NET MVC
• Introduction to NHibernate, pt.5 - Ian Cooper continues his NHibernate series with a look at mapping Value types, one of the features that sets NHibernate apart from some other ORM products
• Test Review #1 - NerdDinner, Test Review #2 - ASP.NET MVC Unit Tests & Test Review #3 - Unity - Roy Osherove reviews some of the unit tests from a number of projects in screencast format, looking at the good and bad of each projects tests
• Extension methods: If you have a shiny new hammer - Andre Loker talks about the possible over use of Extension methods, along with a look at what they are capible of.
• Progressive Interfaces - Jan Van Ryswyck looks at the evolution of Fluent Interfaces into Progressive interfaces helping to make the aPI more discoverable
• Hosting .NET Reflector in your own Application - Nick Harrison looks at hosting the .NET Reflector in your own applications, and in this example constructs a web control which uses Reflector to disassemble the code of a method and outpit the code to the browser
• Efficient Tracing Using SOAP Extension in .NET - ‘ideafixxxer’ looks at implementing a Soap Extension to trace the in and out bound messages from a web service, looking at the problems that the standard implemetnations of this are prone to and looking at a good implementation
• To Inject Or Not To Inject - Justin Etheredge looks at why it is hard to see the benefits of Dependency Injection in simple samples and attempts to show where the real power of DI comes in
• Mix: Mobile Web Sites with ASP.NET MVC and the Mobile Browser Definition File - Scott Hanselman talks about his presentation at MIX09 and also about the work done by Microsoft Dublin on Mobile browser support
• MIX 09 Videos available now - ‘wzack’ highlights the availability of over 80 videos of sessions from Mix09 which are now freely available.
• Mix 09 Quick Video Link List - Greg Duncan has updated his PDC List Maker project to deal with the Mix09 video content, giving a easy access way of getting all the video content from the event

Community

• Alt.net London Beers #7 - Sebastien Lambla announces the next Alt.Net Beers event to be held in London on 31 March
• Brighton ALT.NET Beers: Tues 31st March 2009. 7pm. - Iain Holder announces a Brighton based Alt.Net beers event. If you re interested in attending, leave a comment on his post.

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Software

• Internet Explorer 8 - The big announcment yesterday was the release of Internet Explorer 8. Available in 25 languages across 4 operating system versions and 2 processor architectures this brings the best performing version of IE ever
• Introducing Docu - Simple doc gen for .Net - James Gregory announces Docu, a new project which aims to provide a simple API documentation solution for .NET development. This is more like NDoc of old (simple to use) rather than the very complex SandCastle, and I think it will be a good tool to have in the toolbox.
• Visual Studio 2008 extensions for SharePoint (VSeWSS) 1.3 addresses all common SharePoint Developer requests - Paul Andrew announces the release of the Final CTP release of the Visual Studio 2008 extensions for Sharepoint v1.3. This will be the final release of the tools with a whole new range of tools being included with Visual Studio 2010

Information

• Site Compatibility and IE8 - The Internet Explorer Team Blog has a post from a few days agao which now has a much higher importance, outlining the differences between native IE8 and the IE7 Compatibility mode.
• Eight Reasons to Fall in Love with Internet Explorer 8 - Tim Sneath highlights 8 of the highlight features of the new Internet Explorer 8 release
• Fun With Federation 1: ASP.NET, Geneva Framework & FedUtil.exe - ‘Vibro’ explores Federated Identity with the Geneva Framework and ASP.NET in this step by step tutorial
• ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 CTP1 - Server Driven Paging - The ADO.NET Data Services Team share an example of the use of their latest CTP release to implement paging data on the server side
• ASP.NET Security Architecture Cheat Sheet For Very Busy Architects - Alik Levin shares a cheat sheet outlining a number of the security considerations for ASP.NET applications and componenets, along with a questionnaire to help identify common threats and vulnerabilities
• Representation and Identity - Eric Lippert digs down into casting and looks at the way that boxing and unboxing works, talking about how the runtime handles these operations
• How NOT to write a logger & How NOT to write network code - Ayende shares two more code snippets of bad code, with interesting discussion of the types of problem in the comments
• Choosing A Mocking Framework - Tim Barcz looks at the factors to consider when choosing a mocking framework
• Case Switching on CLR Types - Johan Danforth looks at various implementations which allow you to perform switch/case operations with types of object
• log4net C# Code Snippets - Daniel Macey shares some Visual Studio Snippets which contain common log4Net operations, proving to be a useful simple case for learning how to use log4Net as well as providing a potential development speed-up for the common operations
• Sample chapter from ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly - Following on from Yesterday’s ASP.NET MVC release, Maarten Balliauw has now released a sample chapter from his upcoming book on ASP.NET MVC. This marks the start of the race for a huge number of publishers and authors to get their books out there now the software is ready

MIX 09

• What is .NET RIA Services? - Brad Abrams talks about the RIA Services annoucement, and references the presentation .NET RIA Services MIX ‘09 Talk - Slides + Code from Nikhil Kothari delivered at mix yesterday
• MIX09 Day 2 Keynote Pt 1: Dean Hachamovitch on Internet Explorer 8 - Tim Sneath continues his great coverage of the Mix09 Keynotes with part one on the IE8 announcement and MIX09 Day 2 Keynote Pt 2: Deborah Adler on Changing Behavior by Design, covering how design affects behaviour
• MIX09, SilverLight 3, Expression Blend 3, IE8, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 And Much More - SQLDenis provides a round up of the key software announcements and some of their significant features

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