July 2009
Monthly Archive
The Morning Brew #399
Posted by Chris Alcock on 28 Jul 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- STM.NET on DevLabs – Somasegar announces the availability of STM.NET an experimental enhanced version of the .NET Framework 4 beta 1 which brings Software Transactional Memory for C#, allowing you to create chunks of code that execute atomically
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- The First Few Milliseconds of an HTTPS Connection – Jeff Moser digs down into what goes on when we shift to an HTTPS connection. I’m a strong believer in understanding the underling principles of the technology we use, so a good understanding of things like HTTP (And HTTPS) are important as they underpin most of what a developer deals with these days, and Jeff provides a great run through of HTTPS in this article
- 6 Books That Should Be On Every .NET Developers Bookshelf – Charlie Chen highlights the 6 books he considers to be essentials for any .NET Dev, and I have to say I agree
- Improving Mono’s compatibility with .NET CLR – Miguel de Icaza talks about how the Mono team improving and filling in the gaps in Mono by making use of the Test suite for Silverlight Class Libraries which Microsoft have provided to create versions of Mono which better support the DLR based languages
- Pitfalls – Ayende talks about a specific bug in some sample code about DateTimes and starts a discussion of the common warning signs that indicate that there may be a problem in some code, and some of the common coding errors. Comments are well worth reading on this one.
- Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 12: DataSet – Brad Abrams continues his Silverlight 3 series with a look at using entities backed onto the ADO DataSet but still using the RIA toolset to deal with paging ad validation.
- Bugs in IE8’s Lookahead Downloader – Eric Law takes a look at one of the Internet Explorer 8 page performance enhancements, abut looks at some of the bugs and problems it can cause.
- Multithreading in C# (with Asynchronous Delegates) – Kevin Babcock talks about the use of Aysnchronous Delegates to easily introduce multi-threading into your applications, exploring the concepts vaia real world example.
- Log Elmah errors in Team Foundation Server – Martin Hinshelwood shows how you can integrate ELMAH (Error Logging Modules and Handlers) error logging into issues in TFS
- Iterator Blocks, Part Six: Why no unsafe code? – Eric Lippert closes out his series on Iterator blocks with a look at why you are not allowed to use unsafe code inside an iterator
- Polling by sleeping versus polling by waiting with a timeout – Raymond Chen talks about two different strategies for having background tasks run in you application, looking at the pros and cons of them, and offering an alternative way.
- Reading Code: Rhino Mocks – Mark Needham talks about a recent code reading session he had looking at the Rhino Mocks mocking framework, and sharing his experiences of the code reading process and a little about how Rhino Mocks works.
- Macto, or How To Build a Prison – Ayende gives a little more background on the problem space for his forthcoming end-to-end sample application series.
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The Morning Brew #398
Posted by Chris Alcock on 27 Jul 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- NHibernate Linq 1.0 released! – Ayende announces the 1.0 release of NHIbernate Linq, a Linq provider for NHibernate based entities which has been a part of NHContrib for a while, and is now a standalone NHibernate Release
- Caliburn v1 Release Candidate 2 is Available! – Rob Eisenberg announces the second release candidate of Caliburn 1, a library which aims to help in the development of WPF and Silverlight applications bringing implementations of common UI patterns.
- Process Monitor 2.5 – Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell share the news of the latest release of Sysinternals Process Monitor, introducing a number of improvements over the previous version such as IOCTL and error result decoding, Quick filtering in summary views and by-directory and by-extension views in the file summary dialog
- Blacklight v4.1 Update Released – Martin Grayson announces the latest update to BackLight, a 4.1 release which fixes a few bugs and adds a few features to the V4 release from last week
- Announcing Bling 3! – Sean McDirmid shares the latest release of Bling, a C# based library which uses a DSL to aid the creation of WPF UI including visual effects such as animation, interactions and visualisations
- Visual Basic gets some T4 Toolbox love – The T4 Toolbox now supports C# and VB as a template languages – Greg Duncan highlights the T4 Toolbox project which now supports both C# and VB.NET as templating languages
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- Is Your Application Ready for Windows 7 RTM? – Yochay Kiriaty talks about the steps you should be taking to ensure your Windows Applications are Windows 7 compatible, and also talks about how you can enhance your applications to take advantage of the new features in Windows 7
- How MassTransit Publish and Subscribe works – Mike Hadlow continues exploring the Mass Transit service bus with a look at how it implements the Publish Subscribe pattern
- Using an Associated Metadata Class outside Dynamic Data – David Ebbo looks at uses of the Associated Meta Data Class outside of Dynamic data to attach additional information to classes when they are defined partially
- Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 11: The Client-Only World – Brad Abrams continues his series of posts on Silverlight 3, with part 11 ignoring the RIA Services and looking at some of the client side functionality
- Generic Expression Builder – Jan Van Ryswyck shares some generic code which helps in the construction of Fluent Interfaces for expression builders for domain classes, using reflection to set properties.
- Selenium Test Powered by jQuery.parcel – ‘Luning’ talks about using jQuery.parcel to improve the writing of Selenium tests by making the code more expressive and succinct, comparing it to the normal way of writing selinium tests
- Guidelines for Better Unit Tests – Mark Levison gathers together some best practice guidelines for writing better unit tests from various recognisable names in the development sphere.
- Macto: An end to end sample – Ayende announces a series of posts and screen casts which will look at building an end to end sample application to illustrate many of the principles he talks about regularly, and in his post ‘More on Macto‘ he reveals that the problem domain will be a Prison Management system.
- Flow control in T-SQL Scripts – Merrill Aldrich looks at the common control flow structure in TSQL, exploring GO, RAISERROR, RETURN, and looking at combining them all in a sample
- .NET Support for More Than 64 Processors – Sasha Goldshtein announces a C++/CLI wrapper called Multi-Processor Extensions for .NET which aims to work around the .NET Limit of only being able to address 64 processors natively despite Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 supporting 256 processors. This library allows you to investigate the processors on the machine and assign .NET Threads to different processor groups.
- Refactoring challenge #2 – functionally illiterate – Jimmy Bogard sets his second refactoring challenge, once again based on some code in AutoMapper, this time looking at the configuration of the matching algorithm used to match members
- Introducing exception signatures – Markus Olsson talks about some work he did in his organisation to capture and group exceptions by introducing an Exception Signature which allowed similar exceptions to be gathered together. Code to do this is included in the post
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The Morning Brew #397
Posted by Chris Alcock on 24 Jul 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- ReSharper 4.5.1 is Available – JetBrains announce ReSharper 4.5.1, a maintenance build which contains a vast array of bugfixes and minor improvements to the product
- NHibernate Caches 2.1.0GA – The NHibernate Team share the news of a new release of the NHibernate Caches project taking its version to 2.1.0GA Also updated is NHibernate Validator 1.2.0 Beta1 , the NHibernate based validator framework which also now runs with NHibernate 2.1
- Two IronPython releases in 1 week – Dino Viehland shares the news of a busy week in the world of IronPython with two releases in one week, a bugfix release which is IronPython 2.0.2, and the second release being the second and final beta release of IronPython 2.6
- TestApi v0.3 Released! – Ivo Manolov announces the release of TestApi 0.3. TestApi is a collection of test and utility APIs which make testing WPF, winforms, and win32 applications easier
- Microsoft Tag API announcement – The Microsoft Tag Team announce the release of their API for the creation of Microsoft Tag images from the comfort of your own application
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- Basic Unit Testing Guidelines – Chris Eargle shares some great guidance for writing Unit Tests, looking at the structure and naming of tests along with highlighting the differences between Unit and Integration tests
- NHibernate and NDepend – skimming the surface – Ayende continues the discussion about NHibernate’s structure based on the NDepend analysis from Patrick Smacchia, and some further analysis carried out at Ayende’s request
- Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 10: LinqToSql – Brad Abrams continues his Silverlight 3 series with a look at using the RIA (Rich Internet Application) Services with Linq-toSql
- Speed Up the Visual Studio Toolbox – Steve Wellens shares a simple confuguration tip to improve the speed of the Visual Studio Toolbox for both Winforms and WebForms
- ComposedRegex – Martin Fowler talks about decomposing complex regular expressions into smaller chunks and then composing them together to produce the final regular expression to aid code clarity
- Wrapping collections: Inheritance vs Composition – Mark Needham talks about the two common techniques for wrapping collection classes using Inheritance or Composition, examining when each technique is more suited and looking at the ups and downs of each
- Introducing Fizzler – Colin Ramsey talks about Fizzler, a .NET Library which brings CSS3 style selectors to your .NET Code allowing you to select parts of HTML pages programatically in your .NET Code. Fizzler has just reached a 0.9 release, and is not far off the 1.0 mark.
- ASP.NET AJAX and Client-Side Scripting – Mike Snell shares Chapter 6 from his MCTS Exam book covering ASP.NET 3.5 Development. Chapter 6 looks at the use of ASP.NET Ajax, and looks at the extension controls such as the update panel, progress indicator and timer.
- Silverlight Toys – The folks at Content Master have opened a new site for Silverlight Developers and those who wish to learn Silverlight, containing a number of sample applications and tutorials
- .NET Framework 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, WCF Enhancements – Bruno Terkaly continues his series of posts on what’s new in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 with a look at Windows Communication Foundation changes, C# 4.0 – Dynamic Language Runtime and Covariance and Contravariance
- Feature by feature – Ayende talks about how he thinks about features in his application, looking at how he has been structuring application features recently in building composite applications
- The Template Pattern: A Benevolent Dictator – Ben Yoder takes a look at the template design pattern, examining how it maintains control at the top level, and how that can be both a good thing and a bad thing
- Introducing Rx (Linq to Events) – Jafar Husain talks about the Rx (Reactive) Framework which is included in the Silverlight 3 Toolkit, which he considers to be one of the most exciting additions to the .NET framework since Linq.
- Using IDisposables with LINQ – Keith Dahlby takes a look at working with IDisposable objects in Linq ensuring that items get disposed as consumed, and looking at how you can do deffered queries when you need to dispose
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