The Morning Brew

We must be reaching the (ASP.NET MVC RTM Date) + (Time it takes to update and publish Book) time, as today’s edition contains details of a couple of ASP.NET MVC book releases (in their own special section)

Software

• VS2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions - Somasegar announces the release of the Visual Studio 2008 AJAX Profiling Extensions which let you measure the performance of the client side interactions of your Web Applications using any browser.
• YSlow Release - The Yahoo! Developer Network announce a new release of YSlow their website performance analyser for Firefox, which now includes the ability to create custom rulesets allowing you to tailor the rules to those that are suitable for your application
• All-In-One Code Framework : 2009-4-27 release of All-In-One Code Framework - ‘colbertz’ announces an updated edition of the All-In-One Code Framework, a one stop shop for bas implementations of many Microsoft Technologies (in many Microsoft Technologies too). This update contains changes to/additions of 17 projects

ASP.NE MVC Books

• ASP.NET MVC NerdDinner Walkthrough - Phill Haack announces the release of his (and Scott Hanselman, Rob Conery and Scott Guthrie’s) book on ASP.NET MVC on Amazon
• Now Published: Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework (Apress) - Steve Sanderson announces the release of his book ‘Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework’ covering the RTM release of the ASP.NET MVC framework
• Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 - Sample Chapter Available - Keyvan Nayyeri shares a sample chapter from the Beginning ASP.NET MVC bok he is writing with Simone Chiaretta.

Information

• Ten Reasons to Try NUnit 2,5 - Charlie Poole shares his top 10 reasons you should check out NUnit 2.5
• S#arp Scaffolding with Ext JS - Billy McCafferty shares a CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) outline project which uses the S#arp Architecture Project and the Ext JS Grid control.
• Let us burn all those pesky Util & Common libraries - Ayende talks about why Common Function libraries / Util Libraries can be considered evil
• What’s new in Beta 1 for Parallel LINQ (PLINQ)? - The Parallel Programming with .NET blog highlights the changes from the CTP in the Parallel LINQ implementation in the Parallel Extensions Beta.
• Practicing patterns : how to build an outlook style application with prism v2 – Part 2 - Erwin van der Valk continues from a post in early March looking at some of the things not mentioned in the previous post about building an Outlook style application using the Prism V2 Framework
• Events and Races - Eric Lippert looks at a useful technique for calling Events to ensure that you don’t calla null delegate, and that you get thread safety of the event handlers you call. Eric goes on to look at the possible race conditions these techniques can cause.
• NHibernate IPreUpdateEventListener & IPreInsertEventListener - Ayende looks at the NHibernate Before Update and Before Insert events and how they can usefully be used

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Software

• Update - SQL Blocked Process Monitor - Jonathan Kehayias announces an updated release of his SQL Blocking Process Monitor for SQL Server 2005 and 2008, which are now split into two downloads to avoid dependency problems.

Information

• The asp.net <deployment retail="true" /> attribute - Lasse Eskildsen highlights a useful Machine.Config setting which overrides the standard ‘debug’ attribute in web.config to force all ASP.NET Applications out of Debug mode
• Free ASP.NET MVC "NerdDinner" Tutorial Now in HTML - ScottGu announces a new format for the ASP.NET MVC NerdDinner Tutorial from the Professional ASP.NET MVC book, now available as multi part HTML (and also as a PDF, but then you already knew that)
• NHibernate Unit Testing - Ayende talks about testing NHibernate based code by using an in-memory database to persist to, allowing you to test quickly with (almost) the full stack.
• What’s been happening in Fluent NHibernate land? - James Gregory gives an update on the state of the Fluent NHibernate Project, and talks about the danger of possible regressions due to the amount of change being made.
• The Weekly Source Code 41 - Searching Code, Sharing Code, and Reading Code (and Comments) - Scott Hanselman continues with his Weekly Source Code series with a look at code search engines, easy means of sharing your code snippets along with some of the interesting comments he’s encountered in code.
• JavaScript for C# developers: date basics : Algorithms for the masses - Julian M Bucknall takes a look at dates in JavaScript with a view from the side of a C# Programmer
• How I handle JSON dates returned by ASP.NET AJAX - Dave Ward looks at how to work with dates reutned from ASP.NET AJAX calls in JavaScript.
• What developers should be doing in readiness for Windows 7 - Eric Nelson talks about Application compatibility with Windows , along with shareing some great links on the subject. Also worth checking out some of Eric’s other posts on the subject from the last few days, including details of UK compatibility workshops.
• Validation - Part 3 - Server-Side - Karl Seguin continues with his series on from the ground up validation with a look at the server side portion, and also releases a sample application in his post Presenting CodeBetter.Canvas
• JQuery: Die 22 besten Modal - Fenster Plugins - Dennis S shares a list of 22 implementations of Modal Popups in jQuery. Don’t let the German in the title put you off, the post is screenshots and links.
• Singletons vs. Static Classes - Lee Dumond compares and contrasts the Singleton and the simple static class to see what and why there are differences.
• WPF Application Quality Guide v0.5 Released! - Ivo Manolov announces the 5th CTP release of the WPF Application Quality Guide, with both new and updated content, including some good content on building test suites in a range of frameworks
• Creating Visual Studio Templates from your Web Projects - Rick Strahl talks about the process of taking a Web Project and making it into a template web project for use in Visual Studio

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Software

• Introducing Html Utilities for Silverlight - Brian Genisio announces HTML Utilities for Silverlight, a library which in this version aims to improve the testability of some of the Silverlight HTML functionality.
• New Codeplex Tool - SQL Blocked Process Monitor - Jonathan Kehayias shares a tool to help monitor blocking processes in SQL 2005/2008. Shame there is no Sql2000 support as I could really do with a tool that does this for some work I’m doing at the moment.

Information

• Validation - Part 1 - Getting Started - Karl Seguin starts a series on validation, looking at rolling his own solution from start to finish and blogging about the progress. Part 2, looking at Client side validation is also available
• LINQ-To-Everywhere - List of LINQ Providers - ‘knom’ shares a list of Linq-to-* implementations for a wide range of products and services.
• Script and CSS Management in ASP.NET MVC - Kazi Manzur Rashid looks at a technique for managing you JavaScript resources in ASP.NET MVC
• IRouteHandler in ASP.NET MVC - Keyvan Nayyeri continues his series of more detailed posts based on a list from Simone Chiaretta. In this post Keyvan examines the IRouteHandler and lookst at how MVC can be extended from here.
• NHibernate Futures - Ayende gives an introduction to the Futures functionality of NHiberate 2.1, showing how it can be used to enhance performance
• Unlambda .NET- With a Big Dose of C# 3.0 Lambdas - Bart De Smet talks about the creation of an Unlambda Interpreter in C#. Lots of complicated stuff in this article, one to read slowly - and still not understand fully
• Poco, Mef, and custom type systems. Are you ready to take the red pill? - Glenn Block shows how it is possible to use the Managed Extensibility Framework with POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects) and no attributes by building a custom type system.
• Lock Pages In Memory in SQL Server Standard Edition - WesleyB highlights a new feature which will be added to SQL Server 2005 and 2008 by way of Service Pack and Cumulative Update which will allow you to lock certain pages in memory preventing them being swapped out.

Community

• Next European VAN on 06 May 2009 - Jan Van Ryswyck announces the next European accessible Timezone Virtual Alt.Net Event, which will include a presentation on Front Controller style MVC

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Software

• TestApi v.0.2 Released! - Ivo Manolov announces the latest release of TestApi, a set of standalone libraries that make it easier for WPF developers to test their applications. This release brings with it a number of new features along with samples for xUnit and NUnit.
• Windows 7 Release Candidate Update - Windows 7 Team announce to the world that the Windows 7 RC will be made available to MSDN subscribers on 30th April , and to the general public on 5th May.

Information

• The Case for Multiple DBs in Multi Tenancy situations - Anne Epstein looks at unsing multiple databases for multitenancy applications, over putting all clients in the one database and using a column to mark the owner of the data in each table.
• There is no right way - Chris Brandsma comments on and links to the recent discussion between Ayende and Greg Young regarding the repository pattern
• 6 Tips for ASP.NET MVC Model Binding - K. Scott Allen shares 6 good tips for working with the ASP.NET MVC Model Binding functionality covering both best practices and technical features
• You should NOT use ASP.NET MVC if. . . - Jeffrey Palermo takes an alternative stance to all the ‘You should use ASP.NET MVC’ posts by looking at why you shouldn’t move to ASP.NET MVC
• Using Obscure Windows COM APIs in .NET - Jeff Moser takes a look at getting access to some of the more obscure and interesting Windows COM APIs from his .NET code
• SPRING.NET + iBATIS.NET With ASP.NET MVC - Part 1 - ‘moonhyuk’ starts a series of posts about using the ASP.NET MVC with a slightly less mainstream set of tools, notably iBatis instead of NHibernate / Linq to SQL, and Spring.NET instead of Castle Windsor.
• No bandwidth MSDN: Reflector - James Newton-King suggests that using reflector on the .NET framework often provides enough information for you to get on without MSDN documentation, along with some other useful side effects.
• Redgate is doing it again- A metric ton-load of free eBooks (and their suite of tools too) is just a quick reg away - Greg Duncan highlights the latest Free E-Book offerings from RedGate.
• Functional C# - Forward Functional Composition - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on Composition in Functional C# with a look at Forward partial application, and continues with Functional C# - Reverse Functional Composition exploring the other direction
• Suteki Shop is now a sample application on the official MVC Framework site - Congratulations to Mike Hadlow on having his Suteki Shop ASP.NET MVC application accepted as a sample on the Official ASP.NET website.
• Live Data Binding using ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 Preview 4 - Iftekharul Anam explores one of the new ASP.NET Ajax features. I recently saw this demonstrated, and it looks like a great innovation.

Community

• Have You Seen the Linked .NET User Group? - Chris Bowen highlights a very active .NET focused Linked In group which has been organising a number of online events recently. Worth checking out.

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Software

• Show me the memory: Tool for visualizing virtual memory usage and GC heap usage. - Tess Ferrandez shares a quick and simple version of a tool that one of her colleagues created for internal use, which allows you to visualise the memory allocations in the GC Heap and Virtual Memory

Information

• Code Injection With CCI - Part 2 - Jason Bock continues his series looking into using the Common Compiler Infrastructure to inject aspects into an assembly, in this part exploring the supporting framework code which is required to do the outer part of the process
• How we do MVC - Jimmy Bogard shares a number of views on ASP.NET MVC based upon his 9 months working with it on a production project. Hopefully this list will be expanded into a series of posts going into more detail on each in the near future - real world influenced best practices at work
• Scripting ASP.NET MVC Views Stored In The Database - Phil Haack shares some thoughts and a prototype of the ability to make your ASP.NET MVC views be stored in the database, and allow your users to customise the views to their purposes, using scripting and markup.
• ASP.NET MVC View Location and Performance Issue - Kazi Manzur Rashid digs into the the implementation of View Location in ASP.NET MVC and looks at the performance characteristics of the implementation
• ELMAH: Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET (and MVC too!) - Scott Hanselman highlights the wonderful error management provided by the ELMAH project, allowing you to track errors in your application with full details. This is good stuff, and I agree with Scott that something like this being baked into the framework would be really good.
• LINQ to Objects - Debugging - Bart De Smet shares some useful techniques to help debugging Linq queries
• Enhance your ASP.NET Membership-based website by adding Identity Provider capabilities - ‘Vibro’ explores the idea of implementing the Geneva Identity Provider functionality in a standard ASP.NET Membership powered site,allowing you to take advantage of single sign in and claims based authentication. Vibro also provides an introduction to the ASP.NET Membership functionality in the article ‘Create a Minimal ASP.NET Membership Website (that will come in useful in another post)‘
• Repository is Dead: Long Live Repository - Greg Young and Oren Eini (Ayende) are having an interesting discussion about the Repository Pattern. This piece is Greg’s reply to Ayende’s first comments, and Ayende follows up with a reply to Greg in ‘Night of the living Repositories‘
• Functional C# - Composing Through Partial Application - Matthew Podwysocki looks at Functional C# again, with a lookat using partial application in C# to achieve Composition.

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Today’s post is a milestone of sorts - one third of the way to the magical 1000 post mark!

Software

• VSDB 2008 GDR R2 Released or DataDude for 2008 GDR++ RTM&#8217;ed or Latest and coolest version of Data Dude now available - Greg Duncan highlights the latest release of DataDude which seems to include a significant number of bugfixes along with a few enhancements

Information

• Stubs: Comparison with other mocking frameworks - Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux compares the lightweight mocking library, Stubs, with some of the others that are available, talking about how and why it is different, and looking at the performance of the Stubs mocks.
• Code Injection With CCI - Part 1 - Jason Bock looks into the use of the Common Compiler Infrastructure to inject code into an assembly
• Challenges of Multi-Tenant, Enterprise ASP.NET Applications - Travis Illig talks about some of the challenges surrounding creating good Multi-Tenant large scale applications
• Test Code Is Just Code - Ian Cartwright talks about a number of Anti-patterns which can make dealing with Test Code much more difficult
• Dynamic base classes in C# 4 - Chris Burrows looks into an interesting use of the new Dynamic functionality in C#4 to provide base classes based on dynamic types.
• NHibernate Tidbit - using <set/> without referencing Iesi.Collections - Ayende shares a useful NHibernate 2 Tip which allows you to remove a dependency on the Isei Collections library when working with NHibernate
• I Spose I’ll Just Say It: You Should Learn MVC - Rob Conery links to and responds to a number of recent post on ‘if you should learn ASP.NET MVC’
• Running Asp.Net websites outside of IIS - Ritesh Ramesh provides a means of running ASP.NET applications without using IIS with a simple application that implements a web server for ASP.NET in this Code Project article
• Life and Times of an ASP.NET MVC Controller - K. Scott Allen highlights his latest MSDN magazine article exploring how ASP.NET MVC controllers work
• Thread Pool Engine in MS CLR 4, and Work-Stealing scheduling algorithm - Haytham El-Fadeel talks about the changes to the Thread Pool in .NET 4 and looks at the Work Stealing algorithm which is used to schedule the work across worker threads
• Silverlight Animation Part II: Sprites - Charlie Calvert continues his series on Silverlight animation with a look at Sprites

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Software

• Pex 0.11 Released: Delegates, Exception Trees, and Stubs - Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of Pex 0.11 which adds the ability to work with delegates as parameters, a new Exception tree view, and stubs for Recursion and events, along with a few fixes os issues with the previous releases.
• TestDriven.Net 2.20: Improved NCover Integration - Jamie Cansdale announces V2.20 of TestDriven.NET which improves the integration with NCover and TypeMock, along with better support for 64 bit Windows, and a few more features too.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) - Maarten Balliauw looks at combining the ASP.NET MVC and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) to have controllers served from plugins via MEF.
• Silverlight 3 - Out of Browser Applications on the Mac - Mike Taulty screencasts to show the new Silverlight Out Of Browser application experience for Mac users
• NHibernate Mapping - <many-to-any/> - Ayende continues his series of NHibernate Mapping elements with today’s post looking at the <many-to-any> mapping, the logical extension of yesterday’s post on the Any mapping
• Extending ASP.NET MVC - Hernan Garcia looks at extending the ASP.NET MVC to make it behave exactly as he want it to.
• Functional Solution for the Shortest Path Problem - Matthew Podwysocki looks at re-writing one of his previous algorithms for calculating the shortest path using only immutable collections and pure functional code
• "Vice" Testing - Sean Chambers talks about a testing technique that can possibly help to bring some level of tests to a legacy (and not easy to test) system without making significant changes to the code, allowing you to establish a baseline for the system to allow you to start doing safe refactoring

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Software

• NBuilder - Gareth Down makes his first significant release of NBuilder, a tool which uses fluent interfaces to generate test instances of your objects with the properties automatically populated. Both binary and source releases are available.

Information

• FREE MSDN Flash eBook with 13 technical articles spanning dynamic languages to game development to cloud computing - Eric Nelson announces the release of a collection of articles which have been featured in the UK MSDN Flash newsletter, now to be released as an e-book
• To mock or not to mock, that is the question - Part 1 - Gabriel Schenker explores two of the most popular mocking frameworks, Rhino and Moq, looking at why you would want to mock, and how you go about using the frameworks to achive this.
• SharpLife.NET - ASP.NET MVC Free eBooks - Mahdi Taghizadeh shares a collection of links to free chapters of ASP.NET MVC books. There seem to be a lot of books on this subject coming up, so this is a really good opportunity to try a bit of each before you buy.
• NHibernate Mapping - <any /> - Ayende continues his tour of the NHibernate Mapping elements with a look at Any, which allows data for objects to come from any of a number of tables.
• CodeBox 2: An extended and improved version of the CodeBox with line numbers - Ken Johnson shares an article about CodeBox2, a WPF based syntax highlighting code editor.
• Fluent NHibernate and Linq2NHibernate - Demo Project. - ‘emiaj’ shares a sample project which uses NHibernate along with the FluentNHibernate for mappings, and Linq2NHibernate, giving a simple ‘demo code’ introduction to these technologies
• Mailbag: Do I need still need older versions of the .NET Framework on my system after installing .NET Framework 3.5 SP1? - Aaron Stebner answers an interesting question I’ve heard people asking before about the need for older versions of the .NET Framework.
• JavaScript Unit Testing Part 2: JSSpec - Elijah Manor continues his series on Javascript Unit testing with a look at the JSSpec testing framework.
• P is for… Partial Method - Jim O’Neil explores Partial Methods as part of his A-Z series of posts on .NET.

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