September 2009

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #441

Posted by on 25 Sep 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 – Yesterday saw the release of the Web Platform Installer V2, by far and away the easiest way of getting and installing IIS, .Net, SQL Express, PHP, and a whole bunch of tools, extras and applications. If you’ve not tried it, I highly recommend it
  • Web Deployment Tool 1.0 has shipped! – The Web Deployment Team announce the official release of the Web Deployment Tool 1.0, a tool that makes it easy to package up web application, migrate them between servers, keep your webfarms in order, all by way of command line and MMC tools
  • Announcing Web Application Toolkits – Microsoft release 7 toolkits for web application developers intended as a quick step up the ladder to allow you to quickly add rich functionality to your web applications. The kits cover IE8 extensibility features for web apps, bing search integration, REST services, mobile apps, templated email, social networking and FAQs
  • Six Ways to Help Customers Extend their Web Sites – Mark Wisecarver highlights a number of IIS related tools which recieved an update today as a part of the WebSiteSpark programme announcements.

Information

  • Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program – ScottGu shares the announcement of the enw WebsiteSpark programme, which joins DreamSpark and BizSpark as being an excellent way to get hold of Microsoft software when you are starting out. WebsiteSpark is aimed at web developers, and includes server licenses for Windows Server and SQL Server, along with web development tools such as Expression and Visual Studio. Enrolling in the programme is free, but there is a $100 cost at the end of the 3 year programme
  • Why is covariance of value-typed arrays inconsistent? – Eric Lippert takes a look at the way arrays are handled in the framework, and how the differences between the C# type system and the CLI type system can lead to some interesting results
  • PostSharp – Introducing PostSharp 2.0: #2 – Amazing Runtime Performance Enhancements – Gael Fraiteur talks about some of the major performance improvements which have been made to PostSharp 2, looking at how the generated code has changed to bring about such improvements
  • Content Aware Image Resizing… in JavaScript – Ajaxian highlights some work by Stéphane Roucheray creating a content aware image resizer in JavaScript using the HTML5 Canvas element to enable the image processing. I find Content aware resize to be quite an interesting topic, and its always nice to see a new implementation
  • Debugger Visualizers not working in ASP.NET Medium Trust – Rick Strahl highlights one of the limitations of running your development websites in medium trust mode, the debugger visualizers can’t operate in the debugger when connected to a medium trust (or lower) process
  • Adventures in System.Diagnostics – The Intermission – Ralph Wheaton continues his series on using System.Diagnostics to direct trace logs to various logging targets. In this post, Ralph discusses some strange exceptions he encountered using the TraceSource caused by a full event log.

Community

  • SQL injection attacks and tips on how to prevent them – Colin Angus Mackay will be talking about SQL Injection, looking at the problem, along with what you can do to prevent such injection attacks at the Dundee Scottish Developers event on the 28th October.
  • Scot Alt.Net – AltNet Beers – Tonight sees the Scot Alt.Net group host an AltNet Beers event in Glasgow, with special guest Seb Lambla. These events are a hour long open conference, followed by good discussion in the bar afterwards. Well worth attending.

The Morning Brew #440

Posted by on 24 Sep 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • IronPython 2.6 Release Candidate – Harry Pierson announces the Release Candidate release of IronPython 2.6, with the plan being that this will become the RTW official release in about a month. This release includes a number of great new features, bringing in Python 2.6 functionality, adaptive compilation and lightweight debugging, and 417 bug fixes.
  • MvcContrib 1.0.0.987 released – Jeffrey Palermo announces the release of MvcContrib 1.0.0.987, which brings in all the patches released since March 2009 along with the work done by Eric Hexer on Opinionated Input Builders
  • Sharp Tests Ex 0.3.0 : fluent and lambda assertions for MsTests, NUnit and xUnit – Fabio Maulo announces the release of #TestsEx 0.3, a library of extensible extensions which work with a number of different testing frameworks (MSTest,NUnit, xUnit.Net, and others) to bring fluent and lambda assertions to these frameworks
  • PowerCommands for Reflector 1.1 – Jason Haley has added a further 5 commands to his Reflector PowerCommands library bringing the grand total to 20 commands. The new commands include a bookmark menu, and a number of commands to open files with other programs

Information

  • The Benefit Of Attending User Group Meeting – Marlon Ribunal talks about the benefits of attending usergroup meetings, be they in person or virtual. This is something I feel quite passionate about, as usergroups are a really good way of meeting people who care about the same things as you do.
  • Entity Framework 4.0 Resources – documentation links, best blog posts and more – Eric Nelson is preparing for his sessions at the Software Architect conference, and has produced a great resource list of article, posts, documentation and best practices for the Entity Framework 4.0.
  • A basic introduction to the Unity Application Block – Giorgio Minardi takes a look at the Unity Application block, touches on the theories of Inversion of Control and dependency injection, and looks at the benefit of loosely coupled code in his example.
  • MultiBrowser or CrossBrowser Testing and deconstructing Microsoft Expression Web SuperPreview – Scott Hanselman takes a look at the support in Expression Web for testing your web pages in multiple browsers, highlights the existence of the free Internet Explorer only version of SuperPreview, and looks at the other approaches to cross browser testing
  • A thread static instance? – Ayende sets another of his ‘What will happen when this runs’ code thought questions, this one looking at what would happen if you have a Thread Static instance variable
  • Simplicity in Design – Jon Dalberg talks about the Single Responsibility Principle, and look at applying it to ASP.NET MVC Global.asax and route registrations.
  • Prototype Design Pattern – ‘SmartAllen’ explores the Prototype design pattern, how it integrates with the Builder pattern to provide a means of copying an existing object
  • Albacore: A Suite Of Rake Build Tasks For .NET Solution – Derick Bailey announces his new project, to build a suite of Rake Build Tasks specifically for .NET solutions. The library currently contains two tasks, one for MSBuild and one for updating AssemblyInfo
  • Will Git Drive Open Source Contribution – Chris Missal looks at tha adoption of Git, how DCVS like Git offers certain benefits over traditional version control, and looks at the impact on the Open Source community

Community

The Morning Brew #439

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

Software

  • Debugging your interaction with other people’s code – Reflector 6 is in EAP! – Alex Davies highlights the early access programme for Reflector 6, allowing you to get hold of some of the new debugging functionality it adds to Visual Studio before it goes into mainstream release
  • Chrome Frame: Inject Chrome into IE – Ajaxian highlights the Chrome Frame project which is a browser add-in for Internet Explorer which, dependent on a meta tag in the page, allows your page to be loaded and rendered by the Chrome engine rather than the IE engine.
  • web.config Security Analyzer – A useful looking utility which parses your web.config file looking for any setting which may result in a security vulnerabilities, now with a friendly GUI

Information

  • Make BDD Your BFF – Rob Conery dips his toe into the Behaviour Driven Design world and shares his experiences as a nice getting started guide to get you up and running with Machine Specifications (MSpec) and TestDriven.Net/Resharper, and writing some BDD tests
  • A Mess is not a Technical Debt. – (‘Uncle’) Bob Martin talks about the true meaning of the concept of Technical Debt, and also discusses technical mess, and how this is not proper technical debt despite many people using that term to cover it
  • Strongly Typed Session Variables in ASP.NET MVC – Patrick Steele looks at an alternative way of having strongly typed session based variables in both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET WebForms
  • Viewstate length limitation via web.config – ‘eugene.K’ highlights a not particularly well known web.config setting which allows you to have viewstate broken up into multiple hidden fields. Also well worth checking out the rest of this blog for a large number of useful short How To articles.
  • A First Look at ASP.NET MVC 2 – Ben Scheirman introduces ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1 in this DotNetSlackers article. The article looks at the new release in the context of a sample scenario, exploring the new templating functionality and the new project areas to allow better organisation of your code
  • Two Chapters from Agile Estimating & Planning Available – Mike Cohn highlights the availability of two sample chapters from his forthcoming book on Agile Planning and estimating
  • SQL SERVER – How To Handle Deadlock – Nitin Chilka looks at some techniques you can use within TSQL to help avoid and handle deadlock situations in SQL Server in this CodeProject article
  • Programming for Absolute Beginners – Scott Hanselman gathers together a number of great resources for programming beginners to give them a good starting point on learning the craft of programming. While not necessarily directly useful to the readers of his (and my) blog it is the type of resource that comes in very handy when you get asked ‘so how do I learn to program?’

Community

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