July 2009

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #396

Posted by on 23 Jul 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • When will you get Windows 7 RTM? – Windows 7 hit RTM yesterday, and the Windows 7 Team Blog shares the details of when Windows 7 will be made available to different groups of users.
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 RTM’s! – Windows 2008 R2 also joins Windows 7 at RTM state yesterday, and this post from the Microsoft SMB Community Blog gives some of the headline new features
  • Microsoft Expression Studio 3 Released! – Microsoft also released Version 3 of Expression Studio, which goes hand in hand with Silverlight 3 to allow you to easily create UI beauty using the tools included such as Expression Belnd, Sketchflow, Expression Web, Expression Encoder and Expression Design
  • Latest Updates for SQL Server 2008 are Out – Buck Woody highlights the release of Cumulative Update 3 for SQL Server 2008 Sp1 and Cumulative Update 6 for SQL Server 2008 RTM
  • jQuery Ribbon 1.0 RTW and 2.0 sneak peak – Mikael Söderström releases version 1 of his JQuery based Ribbon UI linrary, and shares some insight into what he has planned for v2

Information

Community

The Morning Brew #395

Posted by on 22 Jul 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Information

  • Branch-Per-Feature Source Control. Part 2: How (Theory) – Derick Bailey continues looking at using branching for every feature in your source code control, looking in his part at how you actually implement this in theory with nice clear diagrams showing the branch and merge processes needed to make it work
  • NHibernate 2.1 Changes Overview – Patrick Smacchia runs the newly released NHibernate 2.1 through NDepend and compares it to the previous V2 release revealing the level of change involved in the creation of 2.1. Patrick also raises some concerns about the NHibernate code bas based on the NDepend metrics which Ayende responds to in his post Answering to NHibernate codebase quality criticism, where he makes the good point that code metrics are only a good indicator if the metric and the software being developed share the same principles and ideas
  • Introducing CodePaste.NET – Rick Strahl unvails his first ASP.NET MVC project. CodePaste.NET is a site for sharing snippets of code with people over social networking sites like twitter and facebook. With syntax highlighting for a number of languages and formats and comments this one looks like a useful tool
  • Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 7: ADO.NET Data Services Based Data Store – Brad Abrams fills in the gap in his series on Silverlight 3 Business Applications with part 7 which looks at using the Cloud based ADO.NET Data Services to store his data
  • Braindump on the Event Aggregator Pattern – Jeremy D. Miller shares a brain dump of his ideas on the Event Aggregator Pattern which will be forming the basis of a chapter in his book on presentation patterns
  • Simplify calling ASP.NET AJAX services from jQuery – Dave Ward looks at using the consolidation feature of JQuery’s $.ajax call to make calling ASP.NET AJAX Services easier
  • Sending mails, development machine, without actual mail server – Amr ElGarhy shares a useful tip about getting the framework to write emails to disk instead of sending them via SMTP using just config. This is a great little setting I think I will be making some use of in development lots.
  • Instantiating types with no public constructors – Kirill Osenkov looks into some details of the Activator.CreateInstance methods and looks at a technique that will allow you to create instances of types which do not have public no parameter constructors
  • Creating Games with Silverlight: A Simple Shooter – The Coding4Fun blog walks you through the creation of a simple Silverlight based in space shooting game, with code provided in C# and VB.NET. For added 1980’s computer magazine sample game feel, print the article out and copy type the source code 😉
  • Attaching SQL Server database without log file – Gunnar Peipman shows how you can manage to re-attach a SQL Server database with just having the MDF and not the LDF transaction log. Throwing away the LDF is not a good idea, however sometimes it is necessary to re-attach a database this way and this technique may come in handy in those instances
  • SOLID – L: Liskov Substitution Principle – Sebastian at Coding Efficiency has been posting a series of posts on the SOLID Principles. Now in the middle of the series taking a look at the Liskov Substitution principle, how concise and clear posts have been giving a nice overview of SOLID
  • Good Lazy and Bad Lazy – Mark Needham talks about Developer laziness and how it can be both a good thing and a bad thing
  • Don’t castrate your architecture – Ayende talks about how a traditional Web-Business-Data-Database application architecture may not be the best choice when working with NHibernate as you loose a lot of the good powerful features of NHibernate by introducing too many tier boundaries.
  • Use Code Analysis to measure the quality of sample code – Habib Heydarian shows how Visual Studio 2010 Team Systems code analysis feature can help identify problems in sample code allowing you to better judge the quality of the sample. That said, I’m of the belief that sample code should be simple and illustrate just the principles which are being demo’ed – too much validation (and other things you would have in production code) in a sample can hide the actual point of the sample.

The Morning Brew #394

Posted by on 21 Jul 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Windows Azure Tools and SDK July 2009 CTP – Jim Nakashima shares the news of the July 2009 CTP release of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK. This release brings in support for multiple web or worker roles, TFS support and a number of stability improvements. Be sure to check out the two posts linked at the end of Jim’s post (also by Jim) which go into more detail on two of the new features.
  • Adventures of a ‘Devigner’ : Blacklight v4 for Silverlight 3 Released – Martin Grayson announces the release of Backlight 4 which now targets Silverlight 3, bringing a few new controls, and improvements to existing controls.
  • WiimoteLib 1.8 Beta 1 Posted – Brian Peek announces the beta release of WiimoteLib 1.8 the .NET library taht allows you to use your Wii remote with your .NET applications. This release brings support for MotionPlus.

Information

  • Fast Forward: Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 – Bruno Terkaly takes a look at some of the new .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 features in WPF and parallel programming in this detailed and screenshot/diagram rich post
  • Asynchronous programming in .NET survey – Josh Phillips of the Parallel Extensions Framework team appeals to the community to help them improve support for asynchronous programming by filling in a short questionnaire on Asynchronous Programming Model and Asynchronous Methods. If this stuff is something you care about go give them your opinion and help shape the future of .NET
  • Create NHibernate classes using T4 – Brendan Kowitz looks into using T4 templates to generate classes based on NHibernate Mappings. This is something that can be useful, and a few years back I wrote a Visual Studio custom tool which generated .NET classes from hbm files, so this is an interesting evolution of the idea
  • Comparing doubles can produce unexpected results – Kirill Osenkov reminds us to be aware of strange rounding issues when working with double precision numbers, and talks about a safer means of comparison.
  • New NCL Features in .NET 4.0 Beta 2 – The Network Class Library Team who look after the contents of the System.Net namespaces talk about some of the new features that will be being introduced in beta 2 of .NET 4, including enhancements to SSL Policy, Sockets, the SMPTClient, and HTTPWebRequest to name just a few
  • Unshackling IE8 Performance – Eric Law takes a look at some fo the common problems which cause Internet Explorer 8 to rune in a suboptimal way, a number of which apply to IE7 too.
  • Internet Explorer’s Cache-Control Extensions – Eric Law also shares some information about the extensions to Cache-Control included in Internet Explorer
  • Comparing Design Patterns in Ruby and C#: The Observer Pattern – John Miller continues a series of posts on Design Pattern comparisons in C# and Ruby with a look at the Observer Pattern, looking at the raw implementation in both languages, and also looking at where the languages make it easier to implement the pattern
  • Finding undisposed objects – S. Senthil Kumar introduces ‘Undisposed’ a tool he created to help identify undisposed objects in your code using the CLR profiling API to monitor finalisation of objects

  • What does an OutOfMemoryException in .NET (on 32 bit) really mean?
    – Robert Bogue takes a look at the actual meaning of a .NET Out of Memory exception and shares a few tips on things to do if you get out of memory exceptions without actually being out of memory on your machine
  • Iterator blocks Part Four: Why no yield in catch? – Eric Lippert continues his series on iterator blocks and the yield keyword with a look at why you can’t yield in the catch block of an iterator.
  • Monitor your ASP.NET Cache API Behaviour – Simon Ince shares some good information on the monitoring you can do to watch the ASP.NET Cache, and to establish how effectve your caching is.

Community

  • IronRuby Session – Video and Slides – Ben Hall shares the video and slides from his Vista Squad presentation on IronRuby delivered last week. I’ve been enjoying watching a number of the Vista Squad presentations, and the are building up quite a library.

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