The Morning Brew

My feed reader was unusually empty this morning (only about 60% of the usual number of posts) so today’s edition is a little shorter than the norm. Additionally, a number of articles today come from the blogs.msdn.com site, which at the time of writing this seems to be returning ‘Bad Request - Request Too Long’ for most requests from my ISP, but hopefully this is only affecting me.

Software

• A Project Dependency Graph Utility For Visual Studio 2008 - Marc Clifton shares a nice simple utility which exposes the inter-project dependencies of your Visual Studio 2008 solutions

Information

• More on Late-Bound Invocations with Expression Trees - Jimmy Bogard talks about using Expression Trees to help improve the performance of his AutoMapper, and looks towards the future features of Expression Trees in .NET 4 to further enhance things
• A new and improved ASP.NET MVC T4 template - David Ebbo continues improving his ASP.NET MVC T4 Templates, this time moving from runtime code generation to design time code generation, talking about the chalenges in moving between the two types
• Troubleshooting "Velocity" Series - Amit Kumar Yadav of the Velocity Project team talks about some of the common problems that people encounter when using the Velocity Distributed Cache
• Pex to the rescue - ‘alkampfer’ takes an introductory look at the PEX tools from Microsoft Research looking at how you can get started when and what Pex can do for you.
• Vary with Care - Eric Law shares and article from the Fiddler site, talking about the differing and problematic behaviour of Internet Explorer versions when it encounters the vary HTTP Response header
• Introduction to WF Designer Rehosting (Part 2) - Matt Winkle gets down to the business end of implementing the WF Designer in his own application in this second part of a series post. The first part was an introduction, and in this part Matt gets on with implementing the sample project, starting at ‘File>New Project’
• WCF Instancing, Concurrency, and Throttling - Part 2 - Rick Rainey explores some of the concurrency facilities in WCF, looking at the different types of service they result in
• Opinionated Input Builders- Part 8 the Auto Form - Eric Hexter continues his series on his Opinionated Input Builders for ASP.NET MVC with a look at the natural next step, generating the whole form automatically from the model with a single line in the view.

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Software

• Small Basic : The newest, leanest and the meanest is here! - The Small Basic team announce the release of v0.5 which adds in their most requested features along with bugfixes
• MVVM light toolkit (Silverlight edition) posted - Laurent Bugnion announces the release of his Model-View-ViewModel toolkit for Silverlight. This article also gives a run through it in use

Information

• First look at debugging .NET 4.0 dumps in Visual Studio 2010 - Tess Ferrandez takes a good look at the support for working with .NET 4 debug dumps in the new Visual Studio Beta, looking at the pros and cons of working in VS over windbg
• Resisting Dependency Injection - Patrick Kua looks at a number of things that code can do which makes it harder to do Dependency injection
• LLVM - the future? - Granville Barnett starts off a new blog focusing on lower level things with an opening post on Low Level Virtual Machines
• Announcing FabrikamShipping, in-depth semi-realistic sample for Geneva Framework - ‘Vibro’ shares the announcement of a Geneva sample application which has a more real world slant
• The Joel Test – Updated for 2010 - Bill Tudor suggests an updated set of criteria for the Joel Test in 2010
• Functional Programming Battles GOTOzilla - K. Scott Allen responds to a recent post from Steve Wellens and some of the comments to that post surrounding the use of GOTO in code
• System.Data.OracleClient Update - ADO.NET team talks about their future roadmap and where the System.Data.OracleClient does (or more accuratly, does not) fit in
• Isolating Dependencies in Tests Using Mocks and Stubs - Claudio Lasalla talks about how you can ensure that your unit tests are real unit tests by using mocks and stubs. Code samples included with the article
• You can do the TODOs today too! - Bertrand Le Roy talks about the TODO comments, a much used, and often much forgotten about, feature

Community

• Easy deadlock detection- get a free license for Typemock’s Racer launch - Typemock are offering bloggers free licenses for their new product TypeMock Racer, a deadlock and concurrency testing tool. All you have to do is review their product.

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Information

• Life After Loops - Justin Etheredge takes a look at the evolution of the humble for loop looking at the improvements in syntax and introduction of features such as lazy evaluation
• Introducing F# - Four part webcast series - Tomas Petricek shares his 4 part web cast series on Introducing F#, exploring the functional programming concepts, consuming and creating .NET libraries, and performing async operations. In total about 1.5 hours of video content
• Mocking indexer setters with Moq - Bertrand Le Roy looks at using the Moq Mocking framework to mock indexed properties.
• Joining NHibernate Transaction with ADO SqlTransaction - Derik Whittaker looks at how you can drop right down to ADO.NET when working with NHibernate, and here talks about a problem he had with transactions, along with a solution to the problem
• Speeding up the build – ditch the SSD and go for the RAM drive - Jeffrey Palermo attempts to gain the most performance increase he can in his build times, exploring SSD and Ram drives along the way
• F#: Using C# extension methods - Mark Needham is experimenting with using C# built libraries in F#, and when trying to use Rhino Mocks came up agains the fact that extension methods are not available where you might expect them to be in F#
• Struct vs class and immutability - David Blomqvist looks at the differences between structs and classes, especially surrounding immutability
• Code Contracts Primer - Part 4: Utilizing Pre & Post Conditions - Derik Whittaker continues his series of posts on the new Code Contracts functionality which will be included in Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4, in this part exploring Pre and Post Conditions
• 7 hours of free .NET learning for any INETA member! by InnerWorkings - Jose Rolando Guay Paz highlights a great offer of 7 hours of free training materials on Silverlgiht, MVC, Threading and ADO.NET Data Services.

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I’ve had a surge in traffic and (twitter followers) over the weekend due to Scott Hanselman including ‘The Morning Brew’ in his Bytes by MSDN video interview - thanks for the plug Scott!

Software

• Caliburn v1 Release Candidate - Rob Eisenberg announces the Release Candidate of Caliburn, an application framework for WPF and Silverlight which provides implementations of a number of common UI patterns
• CHESS release v0.1.30610.2: Data Race Detection, ChessBoard, Refinement Checking - The CHESS team announce the latest release of CHESS a tool for finding concurrency bugs managed code. This release includes a number of new features as well as the usual bugfixes from the previous version
• Mono Tools for Visual Studio Preview Released - The Mono team announce a closed preview release of Mono Tools for Visual Studio, bringing integration Mono into Visual studio allowing you to run your code through mono, both locally and remotely and also debug

Information

• Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework - Microsoft Windows SDK Blog highlights some of the features of the Windows API Code pack for .NET, including screenshots which show each of the features that the SDK exposes.
• WPF Bindings and CurrentCulture Formatting - Rick Strahl discovers an interesting issue with localization in WPF applications, along with the fix.
• Reducing Code Coupling - Service Locator - Grant Palin takes a look at Service Locator implementation, showing how it can help you to decouple your code in this real world example
• Auto Quote Table/Column names - Fabio Maulo talks about a recent improvement to NHibernate which deals with automatially quoting table names to avoid problems with reserved words
• How PLINQ processes an IEnumerable<T> on multiple cores - ‘igoro’ looks at the ways that you could divide up work when processing an enumerable list using PLINQ, arriving on the final solution that is used in the framework
• I love 100% coverage! - Patrick Smacchia shows the types of bugs you will catch in your code when you get towards 100% coverage - showing that it is important to cover your code well.
• Opinionated Input Builders Part 6 - Performance of the builders - Eric Hexter continues with his Opinionated Input Builders series with a look at the performance of the builders. Be sure to read back through the posts in this series, and also check out Chad Meyers posts and Eric’s reply all linked from this article
• ASP.NET AJAX testing made easy using Visual Studio 2008 Web Test - Omar Al Zabir takes a look at using the Visual Studio 2008 Web Test functionality to test ASP.NET Ajax functionality in his applications
• ref on Reference Type?! - Chris Eargle looks at why you might want to pass reference types into your methods using the ref keyword
• X is for… XML Literal - Jim O’Neil takes a look at one of the most interesting and different features of Visual Basic .NET, the XML Literal syntax
• JavaScript: Not your father’s inheritance model - Part 1 - Sergio Pereira continues his JavaScript Demystified series with a look at inheritance JavaScript style. Continued in Part 2

Community

• Scot ALT.NET: An Evening of O/RM - Colin Angus Mackay highlights the forthcoming Scotish Alt.Net event on 7th July, where Chris Canal will be talking on FluentNHibernate, and Colin Gemmell will be comparing NHibernate to the Entity Framework
• When agile goes bad: how to stay calm and move forward with Sebastien Lambla - Seb Lambal discusses his first hand experiences of agile methods in this VBUG event to be held in Nuneaton on 14th July

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Software

• XNA Game Studio 3.1 - Coding4Fun announces the release of XNA GameStudio 3.1, the latest version of the SDK for building XBox games in C#. Lots of new features in this much anticipated release
• Pex 0.14.040610.2: Fix Suggestions for Invariant Methods and Natural properties for Stubs. - Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces the latest release of Pex and runs through the significant new feature, Suggestions for Invariant Methods and Natural properties for stubs

Information

• Brad’s Sure Guide to Indexes - Brad McGehee gives a very interesting and detailed exploration of indexing in SQL Server, looking at the more tradiional features, right through to some of the new bits in 2008
• Integration Testing Your ASP.NET MVC Application - Steve Sanderson explores ways of performing integration testing on your ASP.NET MVC applications using the MvcIntegrationTestFramework
• Getting Started With Selenium For ASP.NET Developers - Robert Johnson gives a brief introduction to the Selenium testing platform working in C#
• ASP.NET MVC TDD using Visual Studio 2010 - Maarten Balliauw shows how you can apply Test Driven Design principles in ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio 2010 to create a new Controller. Plenty of screen shots in this quick run through
• What does the optimize switch do? - Eric Lippert explores some of the optimisations that the C# compiler can perform when the optimize switch is specified
• Entity Framework Design : Code Only - Alex James talks about the Entity Framework Team’s ideas for Code First model production in the Entiry Framework. None of this is set in stone and they are looking for your feedback on the ideas, so this a fantastic opportunity to help shape the final product
• LINQ to NHibernate, part IV - Steve Strong gives another update on the progress being made with the full NHibernate Linq To NHibernate implementation
• Playing With SQL Server CLR Integration Part I - Paulo Morgado starts a series on working with the .NET CLR within SQL Server, and quickly follows up with Part II and Part III
• You’re Not Your Data Access - Rob Conery talks about simplicity and the importance of keeping things simple and not following every complex technique in every project

Community

• Internet Explorer 8 - Better Browser - Microsoft are running a campaign to increase adoption of Internet Explorer 8, with the added incentive that if you download it from this site they will donate 8 meals to the charity ‘Feeding America’ - if you are planning to upgrade your browser this is a great opportunity to do some good in the world in the process
• London AltNetBeers #9 - At the glass house - Seb Lambla announces the 9th London Alt.Net Beers event, to be held on 17th June

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Software

• JetBrains TeamCity 4.5.2 Available - Jose Rolando Guay Paz shares the announcement of the release of JetBrains TeamCity 4.5.2, a second bugfix release which focuses in compatibility of integrations and stability.
• Free, for MSDN Subscribers/reg-ware, WPF Controls from Telerik (Limited time only!) - Greg Duncan highlights a special offer for MSDN Subscribers to get a free developer license for Telerik’s WPF controls

Information

• Visual Studio: Why is there no 64 bit version? (yet) - Rico Mariani talks about some of the reasons we don’t yet have a 64bit version of Visual Studio, and some of the things that have to be considered before making a program 64bit.
• Breaking All The Rules with WCF - Scott Hanselman talks about some interesting real-world problems he encountered working with a web service produced in a non .NET language which supposedly confirmed to WS-Security, and shows how the extensibility of WCF lets you work with dubious service implementations
• Subversion 1.6, Tree Conflicts, and the Incompatibility of Subversion 1.5: What You Need to Know - Rob Reynolds highlights some of the issues surrounding mixing Subversion 1.5 and 1.6 - worth being aware of
• More on Structs - Chris Eargle digs down into some of the details of Structs following on from his post from earlier in the week
• SubSonic 3.0: The SimpleRepository - Rob Conery talks about the simple repository implementation in SubSonic
• SubSonic 3.0: ActiveRecord - Rob also explores the use of SubSonic as an ActiveRecord implementation achieved using T4 Templates
• Coding: Keep method/variable names positive - Mark Needham talks about a few techniques for keeping names of methods and variables easily understandable
• Update on Velocity upcoming release - CTP4 - The Velocity distributed cache is nearing CTP4 release and the team give a heads up on some of the new features
• Managed Extensibility Framework 101 (b) - Malisa Ncube continues on from his previous post (back at the end of May) with a look at the Aggregate and Directory Catalogues, and accessing the host application from a plugin.
• NHibernate - query only properties - Ayende looks at a nice technique that allows you to have items in your mappings which do not present in the model classes but are available to query through NHibernate
• NHibernate : Some Naked Thoughts - Karl Seguin shares some thoughts on NHibernate, talking about the need for OR Mappers, the perceived ‘lack of control’, and some of the good and bad bits of NHibernate

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Software

• ASP.NET MVC Installer For Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 And Roadmap - Phil Haack announces the release of an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 installer for VS2010 users (it was omitted in the VS release as it hadn’t yet hit 1.0 RTM when the code freeze occurred)

Information

• Introduction to StructureMap - Chad Myers provides a nice introduction to the StructureMap IOC / DI implementation in this article for DotNetSlackers
• Release Roadmap for .NET RIA Services - Brad Abrams highlights a Silverlight Forum post which outlines the forthcoming release strategy from the Microsoft Rich Internet Applications Services team.
• Let your Inversion of Control tool work for you - Joshua Flanagan looks at one of the common mistakes people make when using Inversion of Control frameworks - they take dependency on the container internally, rather than using the Dependency Injection features
• Working with memory mapped files in .NET 4 - Salva Patuel takes a look at Memory Mapped Files, a new feature of .NET 4.0 which provides a simple high performance way of sharing Data
• Opinionated Input Builders for ASP.Net MVC using partials - Part I - Eric Hexter builds on work from a number of other folk in the creation of this new series of posts on constructing input screens using opinionated conventions.
• Opinionated Input Builders for ASP.Net MVC - Part 2 Html Layout for the Label - In Part 2, Eric talks about his conventions surrounding the label positioning
• Interfaces with static methods, reducing the cost of extensibility - Sebastien Lambla talks about the possibility that already exists which allows you to have static methods which are part of an interface, by way of extension methods
• SilverBullet #1 - System.Environment - Timmy Kokke starts a new series of tips posts for Silverlight Developers with a look at the static properties of System.Environment which are available in Silverlight, and in the SilverBullet #2second SilverBullet, Timmy looks at the JSON serialisation support
• AnyCPU Exes are usually more trouble than they’re worth - Rick Byers talks about some of the problems you can encounter when using AnyCPU architecture executables
• 11 keystrokes that made my jQuery selector run 10x faster - Dave Ward looks at a few techniques which can help make working with Id’s from .NET easier in JQuery
• Code Contracts Primer - Part 1: Introduction - Derik Whittaker embarks on a series of posts looking at the use of Code Contracts, a technology cooked up at MS research which will meet the general public in VS2010/.NET 4. Part 1 is an introduction to the concepts, and Code Contracts Primer - Part 2: Handling Legacy Code looks at the uses of code contracts when working with legacy code

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Information

• Why is ASP.NET encoding &’s in script URLs? A tale of looking at entirely the wrong place for a cause to a non-existing bug - Bertrand Le Roy looks at how a wrong assumption can cause you to start chasing bugs that don’t exist - in this case due to incorrect assumptions about encoding of ampersands
• Generic Value Object - Jan Van Ryswyck looks at the implementation of a generic base for a value object, implementing all the important parts which can be shared between implementations
• How to test WF4 Workflows with Microsoft.Activities.Simulation - Ron Jacobs takes a look at implementing automated tests for his workflow based code
• Stop Using Structs Everywhere - Chris Eargle appeals to the developer community to only use structs where appropriate based on a list of critiera in this post.
• High Test Coverage Ratio is a good thing, Anyway! - Patrick Smacchia talks about High Test Coverage, and how this is can be a very good thing if you have method contracts as this automatically implies that your methods are doing what they should.
• When Do I Use Interfaces? - K. Scott Allen looks at one of the key OOP principles, ‘Program to an interface, not an implementation’, and explores where and when he uses interfaces
• ASP.NET MVC HttpModule Registration Under IIS Integrated Mode vs. Classic Mode - Jeffrey Palermo highlights one of the more subtle differences between IIS6 mode and IIS7 mode in IIS7 when it comes to registering HTTPModules
• Analyzing a performance problem - Is a prisoner dangerous? - Ayende look at some badly performing NHibernate based code, and takes a look at what can be done about it. He also revisits the database obsfucation idea with some slightly more better names his his post NHibernate- Get Thou Out Of My Database- 2nd Edition
• Git For Windows Developers - Git Series - Part 3 - Jason Meridth continues his series of posts on GIT for Windows with a look at the meanings of the files in the .git folders where GIT stores all its configuration and version information
• Fluent Silverlight- Part 3 - Binding Events to Commands - Gabriel Schenker continues his series of posts on the work he has been doing to create a fluent interface for Silverlight, with a look at command event bindings

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