The Morning Brew

Software

• Pex 0.13 Released: Unit Tests as Inputs, Fuzzing and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, F# Beta 1 support - Nikolai Tillmann announces the latest release of Pex, which has been updated to support Visual Studio 2010 Beta1, code contracts and F# Beta 1, along with the usual bugfixes and some new features such as support for Unit tests as inputs
• Get the Windows API Code Pack for the Microsoft .NET Framework - Bruce Kyle highlights the Windows API Code Pack 0.85, the new name for what was VistaBridge which brings the newer Windows API’s into .NET for easy consumption.

Information

• Can you @bing it? - Jared Parsons highlights the announcement of Microsoft’s new search engine, called ‘Bing’, a name which looks set to replace the ‘Live’ branding
• Taming the Pex beast: Well-behaved enums, multi-dimensional arrays and booleans - Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux looks at some of the problem data types for Pex, and talks about how a number of new attributes help make working with them easier
• Cross Site Scripting (XSS) - Alex Mueller gives a nice explanation of what Cross Site Scripting is, where you can be vulnerable to it and how you can prevent it
• Pattern Matching in .NET 4 - Jonathan Allen talks about pattern matching in .NET looking at the standard switch/case functionality, and showing how it can be used in a more terse way, and also takes a look at how F# handles the same
• Why Defer Loading in Entity Framework isn’t going to work - Ayende talks about why he feels that the new Defer Loading (AKA Lazy Loading) functionality of the Entity Framework is going to cause problems, comparing it to how NHibernate has implemented this functionality
• Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices - Monster Objects - Chris Missal continues his series with a look at the ‘god’ object which contains far too much stuff, and the law of Demeter
• Partitioning in PLINQ - ‘essey’ looks at the different partitioning strategies that PLINQ uses to divide up work.
• .NET Framework Performance Survey - The CLR and Framework Perf Blog are running a survey on the level of satisfaction with Performance of the framework - if you have something to contribute on the subject go give them some feedback
• NHibernate - Executable DML - Ayende highlights a new feature recently ported into NHibernate allowing you to run updates and deletes against complex inheritance models
• Lifecycle of an open source project - Chad Myers outlines an 8 phase lifecycle that Open Source projects tend to follow which might help when trying to decide how stable/mature an OS project is
• Actors in F# - The Bounded Buffer Problem - Matthew Podwysocki continues looking at Actors in F# with a look at using the Bounded Buffer for message passing

Community

• Leeds Area SQL Server User Group Meeting - Leeds hosts the next UK SQL Server User Group event, on the 3rd June. This event includes two sessions, both with a performance slant, with Iain Kick looking at end to end performance troubleshooting and Martin Bell talking on replaying trace files.

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Software

• Selenium 1.0 released!! - Thoughtworks announce the release of Selenium their automated web application testing tool which runs over multiple platforms. The blog post doesn’t contain a link to the project, which can be found here
• Samples for the "Oslo" May CTP - The Oslo team highlight the availability of a new separate download for the samples which go with the May 2009 CTP release of Oslo
• SP2 Available for Vista and Windows 2008 - As correctly pointed out by Mark Brackett in a comment to yesterday’s post, it was Service Pack 2 for Vista that was released, so lets have another go at linking to a (different) post about this release

Information

• Improvements to NGen in .NET Framework 4 - Surupa Biswas talks about some of the changes that have been made to the .NET Native Image Generator in the new version of the framework
• Parallel Stacks- Tasks view - Daniel Moth continues exploring the new functionality of the Visual Studio 2010 Beta which relate to parallel programming
• NUnit’s Assert.That - Peter Seale talks about his dislike of the new NUnit Assert.That syntax
• The Zen of Inversion of Control - Jon Stonecash looks at the the techniques of Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control, and looks at where and why you might want to use it - samples are in VB.NET
• Exiting from Parallel Loops Early - ‘toub’ looks at how the Parallel functionality of the .NET Framework will allow you to exit from parallel loops as you can from a normal loop
• Survey: Ajax usage among .NET developers in 2009 - Brad Abrams highlights a survey by Simone Chiaretta looking at how ,NET developers are using AJAX in 2009. I look forward to seeing some interesting comparisons with the same survey run in 2007
• Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices - The Arrowhead Anti-Pattern - Chris Missal kicks off his series of posts on anti-patterns and worst practices with a look at the arrowhead anti-pattern which comes from deeply nested if/loop combinations.
• PTOM: Black-box analysis of legacy applications - Jimmy Bogard posts on the Topic Of The Month over at Los Techies, looking at how you should go about examining legacy applications from the outside

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Software

• Oslo May 2009 CTP Available Now - Chris Sells announces the release of the May 2009 CTP of ‘Oslo’, including new setup routines, and a number of improvements and unified tools, including Quadrant
• Stuck with Vista? - Martin Hinshelwood highlights the release of Windows Vista SP1 to the general public
• Windows Server 2008 SP2 - Download available - Chris Samson highlights the release of Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2
• CSLA .NET 3.6.3 beta available - Rockford Lhotka announces the beta release of hist latest edition of the CSLA .NET framework for both Windows and Silverlight. This sounds like its really close to being the final release version too.

Information

• On The Journey : From DSLs and Models to ‘Quadrant’ using ‘Oslo’ May CTP - Part I - ‘dskaufman’ starts a series exploring the new May CTP release of Oslo, In this part looking at creating the model in MSchema
• About the’Oslo’ May 2009 CTP - The Oslo Developer Center review the May 2009 CTP release of Oslo giving the detailed information of the changes in this release
• Using Microsoft AJAX Control Toolkit with Visual Studio 10 Beta 1 - The Visual Web Developer Team Blog talks about some steps needed to get the Ajax Toolkit working in Visual Studio 2010 Beta
• Managed Extensibility Framework 101 - (a) - Malisa Ncube provides a simple sample of the Managed Extensibility Framework in action
• Known Issues in Parallel Extensions to .NET 4.0 Beta1 - ‘essey’ highlights a number of know issues in the Parallel Extensions that shipped with the .NET 4.0 beta release, along with a number pf items that have been removed since the release
• The Case of the Slow Keynote Demo - Mark Russinovich shows how he used the Sysinternals tools to diagnose so strange slowdowns in an application to demoed in a keynote
• My Dot Net Developer’s tools list, and more… - Latish Sehgal shares a pretty comprehensive list of .NET Developer tools with nice descriptions and details of the licenseing
• CLR 4 Garbage Collector - Inside Background GC - Channel 9 interview Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe who talks about their work on the Garbage collection in the .NET runtime.

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Software

• xUnit.net 1.5 CTP 1 - Brad Wilson announces the release of xUnit.NET 1.5 CTP1 which includes a new test runner, support for ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RTM and moves the ReSharper integration into xUnit.net Contrib
• Announcing FsCheck 0.6.1 - Kurt Schelfthout announces an updated release of FsCheck 0.6.1 which has been rebuilt against the latest F# release
• MockingBird- Beta 2 - Santosh Benjamin announces the release of MockingBird Beta 2 - the latest beta of this web service mocking tool, with a number of fixes and improved documentation
• SQL Server 2008 May Books Online Available - Greg Low shares the news of a new SQL Server Books Online release, and Aaron Bertrand shares some More info on the May 2009 update to SQL Server 2008 Books Online -
• TestApi v.0.2 Released! - Nitya announces the latest release of TestAPI a set of tests and utility APIs that aim to help with the testing of WPF applications

Information

• U is for… unchecked - Jim O’Neil continues his A to Z of .NET with a look at checked and unchecked arithmetic
• Mapping a Twitter like domain with Fluent NHibernate - ‘Bengtbe’ explores Fluent NHibernate through an example of mapping the entities involved in a twitter like application
• .NET 4 Cancellation Framework - ‘mikelid’ explores the new Cancellation functionality of the .NET Framework 4, looking at how it supports common use patterns for cancellation of long running events.
• Windows 7: What’s there for Developers? - Mike Taulty gives a round up of the new features of Windows 7 what are of particular interest for Developers, along with a collection of related video and non-video resources
• ‘Methodist’: Make .NET Reflector come alive with IronPython - Ben Hall introduces ‘Methodist’ a .NET Reflector add-in which brings the power of IronPython and the DLR to the .NET Reflector, allowing you to call methods and explore types as you would in your IDE. Ben also talks about the development of Methodist.
• Publisher/Subscriber… practical benefits from event-driven patterns - Michael Ballhaus explores the importance of publish subscribe events in Object Oriented code.
• SOLID and DRY - Jeremy Likness explores the SOLID and DRY principles in this two part series for Code Project. Part 2 is here
• Refactoring: Removing duplication more safely - Mark Needham talks about a technique he used when refactoring and removing code recently, with the aim of making it easier and safer to remove duplicated code.
• Tuple, a new type on .Net 4.0 - Hernan Garcia introduces the Tuple type which is being introduced in .NET 4.0, looking at what it is and when you should use it
• ASP.NET MVC Opinionated Software - Tony Rasa talks about how ASP.NET MVC conforms to the concept of Opinionated Software by enforcing a structure on your code.

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Monday is a public holiday here in the UK, and so as tradition dictates there will be no edition of The Morning Brew on Monday, with the usual daily posting schedule resuming on Tuesday. Have a good weekend everyone!

Software

• IronRuby 0.5 Released - Jimmy Schementi announces the release of IronRuby 0.5, with a bunch of enhancements and new features included in the release, the most notable is a significant performance improvement which makes a drastic difference for those running rails on IronRuby

Information

• NHibernate - Help us see who is using it - Ayende appeals to the NHibernate userbase to register their use of NHibernate so that the developers and wider community can see how widely and how people are using NHibernate.
• A quick analyze of the .NET Fx v4.0 Beta1 - Patrick Smacchia does his now usual comparison of the latest .NET framework release from Microsoft using NDepend. Looking at the first pictorial representation you can see that .NET 4 is a significant change to large parts of the framework
• The Architecture Journal - Nick MacKechnie highlights the last 5 editions of the (now online only) Architects Journal from Microsoft.
• Demo Dashboard and IDE Extensions - Whirlwind Tour around .NET 4 (and Visual Studio 2010) Beta 1 - Scott Hanselman continues his tour round the new VS2010 and .NET 4 features of the beta release with a look at the extensibility capability of VS, and talks about how much easier it has become to work to extend the IDE
• Don’t use Response.End() with OutputCache - Rick Strahl talks about the problems that Response.End calls cause for the Output Cache
• ASP.NET MVC Domain Routing - Maarten Balliauw digs down into the innards of ASP.NET MVC with the hope of achieving routing capabilities using the parts of the domain name as well as the path.
• POCO in the Entity Framework: Part 1 - The Experience - Faisal Mohamood explores the new POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects) support in Entity Framework 4.0, and starts running through a demo of the functionality
• What’s new in the Concurrency Runtime and the Parallel Patterns and Asynchronous Agents Libraries - Rick Molloy highlights some of the new features of the .NET Framework in the areas of Parallel Patterns, Concurrency, Async Agents
• Protecting against XML Entity Expansion attacks - Tom Hollander talks about a Denial of Service type attach which originates from a seemingly innocent XML document
• Using The Guid.Comb Identifier Strategy - Davy Brion looks at the Guid.Comb NHibernate Identity strategy which helps avoid index fragmentation in the database due to the traditionally random nature of GUID values.

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Software

• Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 with F# is now available, plus matching F# CTP Update for VS2008 - Don Syme talks about the F# included in Visual Studio 2010, and also about the release of a CTP for VS2008 users
• IronPython 2.6 Beta 1 - Harry Pierson announces the release of IronPython 2.6 Beta 1, with the major new features that you can now call into unmanaged DLLs from IronPython, and the ability to explore the callstack from code.
• FireAtlas - Firebug for ASP.NET Ajax - Joe Stagner highlights a tool from Laurent Chesnais which brings added support for seening what is going on in ASP.NET Ajax from the browser using Firebug.
• Released: CodeIt.Right version 1.6.09139 - now fully compatible with VS2010 Beta 1! - SubMain announce the latest release of their CodeIt.Right product, which now supports Vs2003 through to VS2010 Beta 1

Information

• Two free e-books available in May - Microsoft Press continues their 25 year celebrations with another 2 free e-books, this time the Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services Resource Kit and The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention
• Indian MVP Releases Free SQL Server Ebook! - Jacob Sebastian has published a free E-Book on SQL Server and usig XSD for powing XML Schema Collections
• A First Look at Moq - Brett Schuchert’s latest role has involved a different testing and mocking setup from his previous roles, which has lead to him taking a look at the Moq mocking framework.
• Announcing Pablo’s E-Books! Book #1: Pablo’s SOLID Software Development - Derick Bailey announces the release of Los Techies first E-Book - titled ‘Pablo’s SOLID Software Development’ it explores the SOLID principles which were the topic of the month for March on Los Techies.
• Back to Basics: Using Fusion Log Viewer to Debug Obscure Loader Errors - Scott Hanselman continues his Back To Basics series with a look at how you can debug loading issues with .NET assemblies.
• Art Of Unit Testing (The Samurai Book) - Get it now, it’s done. - Roy Osherove announces the release of his book - ‘The Art of Unit Testing’ - Chapters 1,2 and 3 are freely available, with the e-book available to purchase now. Printed copies will be available, but are currently still pre-order (with a price that reflects)
• The state of Open Source in the .NET ecosystem: A five year summary - Ayende reflects back on his 5 years of Open Source on the .NET platform experience, suggesting that things have come a long way and are looking promising, but we still have a way to go.
• Program to an interface, not an implementation - Mark Jensen explores one of the fundemental OO principles, that of programming to an interface rather than an implementation.

Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4

• Samples for Parallel Programming with the .NET Framework 4 - ‘toub’ highlights the availability of some sample code for the new Parallel features of .NET 4.0
• Parallel Stacks - another new VS2010 debugger window - Daniel Moth gives us a tour of one of the new debugging features of VS2010 which allows you to visualise the call stack of your threaded/parallel code.
• IronPython 2.6 CTP for .NET 4.0 Beta 1 - Harry Pierson talska bout the IronPython CTP which is included in the Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 beta 1 release, and how this is equivalent to the Alpha 1 release (not to be confused with the beta 1 release mentioned in the software section)
• C# 4 and the dynamic keyword - Whirlwind Tour around .NET 4 (and Visual Studio 2010) Beta 1 - Scott Hanselman continues his series of posts exploring the .NET 4 and VS2010 Beta 1 release, this time looking at the how and why of the dynamic keyword
• A little VS2010/.Net 4 Training Kit with your Beta 1? - Greg Duncan highlights the May Preview of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Training kit from Microsoft, a great way to get some training in on the new releases.

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Software

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 First Look - At some point today Visual Studio 2010 will be released to the general public. I’m going to assume that the main site will contain a link to the download, and Charles Sterling in his post Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 Day One FAQ provides a short FAQ about the release
• Introducing Typemock Racer 1.0 - Find multithreaded deadlocks - Roy Osherove announces the release of TypeMock Racer 1.0, Typemock’s production ready equivalent of the Microsoft Research CHESS project

Information

• ASP.NET MVC - Poll Result, jQuery UI MVC Component Demo and More Feedback Required - Kazi Manzur Rashid shares the results from his recent poll about ASP.NET MVC and related technologies
• NHibernate - Mapping a single domain model to multiple physical data models - Ayende looks at some of the more interesting ways of achieving inheritance structures in NHibernate, looking dowan at the query level to see what is going in
• Friends Don’t Let Friends catch (Exception) - Lee Dumond talks about some of the best practices in handling exceptions.
• NHibernate Queries - Examples - Ayende provides a reference to the different ways of querying against NHibernate. If you want to try these out for yourself, check out his previous post where there is a link to the sample database and models
• Video: Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 1.0 - Dan Wahlin shares a video from his ASP.NET MVC 1.0 talk delivered at the Best of Mix 09 Phoenix
• Silverlight Frankenstein - Rod Paddock looks at using Silverlight, Isolated storage and Javascript technologies to provide state saving in a rich web application

VS2010 and .NET 4

• ASP 4 - Whirlwind Tour around .NET 4 (and Visual Studio 2010) Beta 1 - Scott Hanselman gives a quick tour round some of the new bits in ASP.NET 4, and in ‘ CLR and DLR and BCL, oh my! - Whirlwind Tour around .NET 4 (and Visual Studio 2010) Beta 1‘ Scott revews some of the CLR and BCL enhancements and talks about hos it makes COM Interop easier
• .Net Framework 4.0: Using System.Lazy<T> - Gunnar Peipman looks at the new Lazy Initialisation supporting collection in .NET 4
• Tasks documentation - Daniel Moth highlights the availability of the online MSDN documentation for the System.Threading.Tasks (and indirectly the rest of the .NET 4 Framework)
• WF 4.0: Building a Hello World Sequential Workflow - Guy Burstein has a series of posts looking at the Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0 based on the beta VS2010 release
• Removing Slowness from Visual Studio 2010 (Dev10) - Gary Short shares a tip which may help you gain better performance for the new VS2010 Beta when running in a virtual machine.

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Information

• ASP.NET MVC For Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 - Phil Haack explains why ASP.NET MVC is not included in the Visual Studio 2010 Beta release. The reason give an idea of how long it takes to get a release of something as large as VS out to the public
• Who is the responsible party? - Ayende talks about which object should be responsible for taking actions, and where the code should live for this.
• Unit Testing JavaScript with FireUnit - Stephen Walther explores the FireUnit Javascript unit testing framework created by JQuery Creator John Resig
• Preview of ReSharper for Visual Studio 2010 Coming Soon - JetBrains give a sneak peak at their upcoming release of ReSharper for Visual Studio 2010. Early releases will be made in June
• Visual Studio Team System 2010 Beta 1 Ships - Martin Hinshelwood explores this weeks release of Visual Studio Team Systems 2010 Beta 1. Be sure to check out Martin’s other recent posts for more details of a number of the features
• "Practical UML(tm): A Hands-On Introduction for Developers" from the Embarcadero Developer Network - Greg Duncan highlights a good introductory tutorial on UML
• MSDN Flash Podcast Pilot Show 2 for May 6th 2009 - Eric Nelson shares the second pilot edition of the MSDN Flash podcast a new initiative from the UK MSDN Flash team
• Sneak Preview: Entity Framework 4.0 Testability Improvements - Diego Vega gives some information about the changes made to the Entity Framework 4.0 to enhance its testability.
• Roadmaps for Major Products Announced at TechEd - Bruce Kyle gathers together all the TechEd information about what developer treats are on the horizon and build out a roadmap of what has been publicly announced.
• XAML in .Net 4.0: Serialization and Deserialization using XamlServices - Guy Burstein looks at XAML serialisation in .NET 4.0, reviewing the whole round trip from object to serialized content and Deserialization back to object
• Fabulous Adventures In Coding :"foreach" vs "ForEach" - Eric Lippert talks about the lack of ForEach method on sequences, looking at why it has not been implemented

Community

• Free Typemock licenses - Welcome the ASP.NET Unit Testing Bundle - Roy Osherove announces a deal for .NET Bloggers which will allow you free license(s) of TypeMock Isolator

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