The Morning Brew

Software

• WOHOO!!!, Debug Diag 64bit is finally released - Tess Ferrandez highlights the release of DebugDiag 1.1 for 64bit allowing you to debug 64bit processes.
• Visual Studio 2010 Editions Quick Reference Poster - still BETA, but we have revision 2 available - Willy-Peter Schaub highlights a useful poster outlining the various editions of Visual Studio showing which components go into which edition allowing you to make a better decision about the one you need
• VS2010 Beta 2 Feedback Survey - Jason Zander on behalf of his Team requests that if you have been making use of Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 you should fill out a simple survey to allow them to focus on the final issues being raised

Information

• The HornGet Project: Bringing "apt-get install" to .NET Projects - Billy McCafferty highlights the HornGet Project, an excellent utility which enables you to get the latest versions of dependencies for various .NET OSS projects. I first saw this in operation at the Alt.NET UK conference this year, and agree with Billy, it really is great.
• ASP.NET MVC 2 Templates, Part 4: Custom Object Templates - Brad Wilson presses on with his series of posts on ASP.NET MVC2 Template with part 4 looking at Custom Object Templates, and part 5 exploring
• Master Page Templates -
• LINQ Overview, part three (Anonymous Types) - ‘.NET Nomad’ picks up a slow burning series with a new post on typing, the var keyword and anonymous types, looking at how these support Linq
• HTML5, a 3 minute guide - Leon Bambrick shares a simple example of HTML5, showing how it compares to the HTML we are familiar with and summaries some of the key differences.
• Running Mono - an Overview - Pedro Santos gives an overview of how a recent project which was deployed on Mono worked, talksing about the setup of the server, and some of the issues they ran into with the applications
• Coding: Consistency when invariant checking - Mark Needham cals for consistency in the way we go about checking invariants in our code, and talks about situations which can give rise to inconsistencies in these checks
• It’s all about the delivery - Hadi Hariri talks about how important the delivery of the ideas and concepts of programming can be in influencing how developers adopt and react to new techniques, exploring an alternative way to introduce dependency injection
• Mentoring Juniors - A Juniors view - Sara Stephens talks about her experiences as a junior developer being mentored by more senior staff, explaining what worked well / not so well in the process. Its nice to see this from the other side as so many articles are from the Point of view of the senior staff member, not the junior
• Building a Service Gateway Using MassTransit, Part 2 - Chris Patterson continues his series looking at building a service gateway implementation using C#, MassTransit, NHibernate and ASP.NET MVC
• I have a Fit, but a lack of Focus. - Eric Lippert talks about ReferenceEquals with a real work illustration of how it works

Community

• Next European VAN on 18 November 2009 - The next European Virtual Alt.Net meeting will be 18th November 2009 featuring Mark Nijhof looking at DDD/CQRS/SOA principles with a deep dive into the code of his CQRS sample application

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Software

• Would you like a _ with that $? New library gives JS what it should have - Ajaxian highlights a new library called Underscore.js from Jeremy Ashkenas and the DocumentCloud team, which brings lots of functional programming helpers to JavaScript allowing you to write nicer functional JavaScript

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 2 Templates, Part 1: Introduction - Brad Wilson kicks off a series (already up to part 3) looking at the ASP.NET MVC 2 Templates functionality, exploring Model MetaData in part 2 showing how you can annotate your model classes, and takes a look at Default Templates in part 3
• Verify JavaScript syntax using C# - Mads Kristensen shares a useful technique for verifying that your JavaScript files are valid as a part of your Application unit tests by utilising JScript to check they parse correctly
• 12 ASP.NET MVC Best Practices - Simone Chiaretta shares12 ASP.NET MVC best practice tips, along with a slide deck which complements these tips
• MVPs Contribute to Free Developer eBook - Jas Dhaliwal highlights a free ebook being offered by Microsoft which was created by Derek Hatchard and contains 17 articles by Microsoft MVPs and Regional Directors
• Visual Studio 2010 - Functional Testing - Balagans gives a tour round the Functional Testing capabilities of Visual Studio 2010 Team Test, looking at the CodedUITest showing how tests can be created, recorded, developed and maintained
• Add Reference Dialog Improvements (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) - Scott Guthrie continues is VS2010 / .NET 4 series of posts with a look at the latest batch of enhancements to the Add References Dialog in the latest release. These changes do sound as though they will finally give this often maligned piece of functionality the speed it truely needs
• ASP.NET MVC Translated for the Web Forms Programmer (5 in a series) - What the Frig is a View Model? - Sara Chipps takes a look at what View Models are all about showing a simple example in use with a little dose of humour along the way
• An epic bug story - Ayende tells a good tail of a fictitious bug in a substantial system, a story which will be familiar to many of us, and is interesting reading
• Building A Service Gateway Using MassTransit, Part 1 - Chris Patterson begins a series of posts looking at using MassTransit, C#, StructureMap, ASP.NET MVC and NHibernate to create a Service Gateway implementation. This first part looks at some of the exchanges that occur within Web services
• Multiple Strongly Typed Partial Views in MVC - Garry Pilkington demonstrates how you can use a CombinedViewModel to join a number of types together allowing you to have multiple strongly typed partial views feed off the parts of the CombinedViewModel
• Attach a Debugger When a Process Starts - Sasha Goldshtein shows how you can use the Global Flags application to add flags to other applications to have the debugger (or another process) start up and attach when ever that application is started, very useful for debugging applications that are impossible to start from the debugger such as services

Community

• 4th November, London, Edge User Group Hosting IE8 Session - Mike Taulty highlights the next London Edge User Group (formerly Vista Squad) meeting which sees Giorgio Sardo talksing about Internet Explorer, the new features of IE8, HTML5, Super Preview, etc
• Upcoming events in Cambridge and Gloucester - Steve Sanderson highlights two developer events in the next few days where he will be doing sessions live coding, and also talking about security in ASP.NET MVC applications.

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Software

• DevHawk - IronPython 2.0.3 and 2.6 RC2 - Harry Pierson announces a further two releases of IronPython to take their total for a week to 3. These two releases are minir, the 2.6 release is a bugfix release fixing a memory leak, and the 2.0 release back ports a few bugfixes along with a fix for Partial Trust on Windows 7
• CopyPasteKiller - Free Code Similarity Finder - Jon von Gillern announces CopyPasteKiller a simple utility which aims to identify areas of code which may have been copy pasted allowing you to identify and remove this type of duplication
• TestDriven.Net 3.0 Alpha - Support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 - Jamie Cansdale announces the latest Aplha release of TestDriven.Net which adds support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Information

• What is Model-Based Testing? - Nico Kicillof of the Spec Explorer Team talks about the concept of Model Based Testing discussing how this lightweight formal method of testing works, and talking about where Spec Explorer fits into this
• Stop Exposing Collections Already! - Davy Brion talks about the bad practice of exposing collections to all and sundry, and by doing so allow them to manipulate and change the collection. Davy then explains a number of techniques that let you expose information from collections safely without fear of someone changing things without your knowledge
• LinqLite - Jason Allor talks about implementing custom Linq Providers, and shares LinqLite, a library he created which helps take some of the pain out of the process of parsing the linq expressions making it easier to create custom providers
• Implementing IEnumerable and IEnumerator - Brendan Enrick looks at the IEnumerable and IEnumerator interfaces, and shows how you don’t need a collection to work with and utilise these interfaces
• Running IronPython Scripts from a C# 4.0 Program - Charlie Calvert continues his exploration of IronPython with a look at calling IronPython scripts from within C# 4 code utilising the new dynamic keyword
• ASP.NET 4 Web Server Here Shell Extension - Phil Haack shares a neat registry hack (no pun intended) for both 32 and 64bit Windows which enables a context menu entry for creating a web server instance for any arbitrary directory
• Expanding the Cloud: The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) - All Things Distributed - Werner Vogels highlights and discusses Amazon’s entry into the Cloud based Relational database arena with the Amazon Relational Database Service, which would seem to be their answer to SQL Server in the cloud
• Using T4 Templates for Simple DTOs - K. Scott Allen explores the use of T4 templates to create data transfer objects for arbitrary CSV files, along with sharing a useful list of things he learned in the process
• A Chance to Influence the MSDN Visual Studio Documentation (Help System) - Charlie Calvert highlights a survey from the documentation team at Microsoft which is hoping to gather your opinion on the MSDN Technical library, so spare them 5 minutes of your time to help them improve the docs.
• MVC Web Testing Strategies - verifying content - Jimmy Bogard follows on from his recent presentation on testing ASP.NET MVC’s last mile, the rendered output, and in this post talks about a number of strategies for verifying content
• Website Background Services Are Hot - Peter Seale looks into the background services capabilities offered as a part of the Oxcite CMS, looking at their implementation, and asking if this is a good solution to the problem
• Provide immediate feedback to the browser on Long Running Tasks - in Asynchronous ASP.NET pages - Shahed Khan has a series of posts looking at different solutions to the problem of providing users with feedback about long running processes in a number of MS web technologies. This post looks at Async ASP.NET Pages, and subsequent posts address other techniques such as streaming regular ASP.NET pages and using regular web handler
• Simple Kick Start Example using MEF (Preview - Derik Whittaker looks at the Managed Extensibility Framework Preview 8 and shows how to get up and running with it using a simple example

Community

• Free WPF, Silverlight and 3.5 SP1 training for UK Developers - Eric Nelson highlights an offer from Microsoft which enables UK based developers to gain access to 3 training programmes covering RIA with Silverlight, .NET 3.5 SP1 Changes, and Rich User Interfaces using WPF, each with between 5 and 12 hours of content for free

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Software

• Spec Explorer: A Model-Based Testing tool - Soma Somasegar announces the latest DevLabs project to see the light of day, Spec Explorer a model based testing tool which allows you to view your models as UML and generate tests which can later be run in a number of test frameworks. This one sounds quite interesting, and the
• Spec Explorer Team Blog - is one that I will be keeping an eye on over the coming months.
• SSMS Tools Pack 1.7 is out! New feature: SQL Snippets - Mladen Prajdić announces the latest release of SSMS Tools Pack, an add in for SQL Server Management Studio which brings a number of greate additional features to the environment. New in the 1.7 release is support for SQL Snippets which, like in Visual Studio, allow you to type a short cut and have it expand out into a full statement with replacement slots you can tab through
• Caliburn v1 RTW for WPF, Silverlight 2.0 and 3.0! - Rob Eisenberg announces the RTW release of his UI pattern implementation library for Silverlight and WPF giving a head-start in implementing applications using this well defined design patterns

Information

• WPF 4 (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) - ScottGu continues looking at the new features of Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 with a look today at the improvements and new features for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), covering new controls, graphics improvements, text rendering, Windows 7 integrations, along with some improvements to the core of WPF
• Channel 9 Learning Center - Just Launched! - Channel 9 announce the launch of their learning centre, currently populated with courses on Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 and Windows 7, all broken down into units and lessons allowing you to break your learning into bite sized chunks. Future courses will include Sharepoint 210, Azure, Win2008R2 Server and Office 2010
• ClientIDMode in ASP.NET 4.0 - Rick Strahl examines another of the great ASP.Net Webforms features in .NET 4, the ability to control the way that identifiers are being created, allowing you to guess and tightly control the IDs along with the default auto assignment, making it much easier to create nice JavaScript using those IDs
• Creating something from nothing [Developer-friendly virtual file implementation for .NET!] - Delay takes a look at creating files on the file system from your applications by allowing the user to drag and drop from your application into the filesystem using the .NET drag and drop functionality to do this
• Roadmap for Outlook Personal Folders (.pst) Documentation - Paul Lorimer, Group Manager of the Microsoft Office Interoperability Team talks about the opening up of the file format of the Outlook PST file
• Extending Visual Studio 2010 UML Designers - Part 1: Getting Started - Peter Provost begins a new series of posts looking at the extensibility points of the Visual Studio 2010 UML functionality . This first post covers the ground work for creating such extensions, showing the Hello World of this type of extensibility work
• WF4 Performance - David Paquette talks about the possibility of using Windows Workflow Foundation Flowcharts to model the business rules of his system, causing him to explore the Workflow performance in .NET 4 and to look at the performance tools available in Visual Studio 2010
• Playing with JQuery Validation Library, Part 2 - Chris Brandsma resumes his series looking at JavaScript validation using the JQuery Validation Library, and in this part tackles validation using AJAX validators to check back with the server to see if a value is valid
• NHibernate and Execution Plans - ‘Naz’ talks about some factors that can affect the efficiency of NHibernate generated queries due to the way parameter lengths are created causing more execution plans to be generated than would be ideal, and shares details of resolutions of this problem
• Unit Testing: An Introduction - Deborah Kurata starts a nice series of posts on the unit testing facilities in Visual Studio (2008 pro, and later), exploring test generation, execution and code coverage in the first 3 parts

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Software

• Small Basic : Happy Birthday Small Basic - The Small Basic Team celebrate its first anniversary with a new release. 0.7 brings more international versions, along with a new feature called ‘Graduate’ which upscales a small basic project to a Visual Basic Project

Information

• VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) - ScottGu’s Blog - In his tenth post in the series, Scott Guthrie takes a look at the improved Intellisense support in Visual Studio 2010, comparing it with that in VS2008
• Language Integrated Query Support in the F# Power Pack - Don Syme shows off the new LINQ support that is being introduced into F# via the F# PowerPack beta 1/2 release
• Overview of type inference in F# - Brian, inspired by recent discussions on Hanselminutes, looks at how type inference works using F# as an example, bringing in examples from elsewhere when needed
• Getting Started with IronPython - Charlie Calvert runs through the process of getting up and running with IronPython, right from obtaining and installing through to running your first simple Python program
• Using C# dynamic to call static members - David Ebbo explores the use of Dynamic to call static methods on types declared dynamically, giving a static method duck typing, and finds that this doesn’t immediately work in .NET 4
• Value objects: Immutability and Equality - Mark Needham explores the concept of the value object and immutability of such objects with a real world example along with some techniques to work around some of the difficult parts of the implementation
• .Net Framework 4.0: System.IO.File supports now IEnumerable<string> - Gunnar Peipman is exploring a number of the new features of .NET 4 with a series of posts on the new bits, including this look at the ability to enumerate files, and the support for Complex numbers
• Collection covariance with C# 4.0 - Mike HAdlow explores a real world case where the new Collection Covariance introduced in C#4 really helps
• How to Get Started with Multi-Core: Parallel Processing You Can Use - Bruce D. Kyle (with some help from Jeffrey Richter and Rob Bagby) explores some of the options available for parallel processing in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010
• Naming Anonymous Types with Generate from Usage - Dustin Campbell shows how the refactoring tools in Visual Studio can help you to convert from an anonymous type to a named type in just a few easy steps
• I don’t do math, or how to get a 50Euro discount to NH Prof - Ayende highlights the launch of Rob Connery’s new venture TekPub a new high quality subscription screencast tutorial site, where this is a series on NHibernate which includes money off NHProf
• Iterating atomically - Jon Skeet looks at how to create a threadsafe atomic iterator which allows you to safely iterate over a collection from multiple threads avoiding any duplication of entries returned
• Thread-safe data structures .NET 4.0 (part 1) - Vitaly Dilmukhametov looks at some of the threadsafe collections which have implementations in .NET 4 and shows them in use
• Extension methods ain’t Trojan horses - A tale on a covariant city built in and protected by C# 4.0 - Bart De Smet tells the tail of the trojan war by way of Extension methods and Covariance, in yet another post which I’m going to have to read at least twice to understand, looks like good stuff
• DTOs, Business Entities and Persistency - Uri Lavi looks at Data Transfer Objects and how they can relate to Entities and the persistence of information

Community

• ScottGu Manchester ASP.NET MVC Video - Mike Taulty posts up the high qulaity video taken at the Manchester UK Guathon event where Scott Guthrie presented a number of topics including this monster session on ASP,NET MVC

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Software

• Windows 7 Virtual Presskit - Windows 7 Launch day seems to have gone pretty well, with lots of press coverage, and plenty of blog posts over the past 2 days. This link will take you to the video of Steve Balmer presenting the keynote from the New York Launch event.

Information

• Repositories don’t have save methods - Richard Dingwall argues that a correct DDD style repository does not have a save method, and should instead have a collection like interface, meaning Add is more appropriate
• Linq to NHibernate Progress Report - Steve Strong gives another update on his work on a full Linq provider for NHibernate, showing the improvements he has been making to the translation from Linq to NHibernate queries, including correct parametrisation of queries
• Where is C# in the Programming Language Lifecycle? - K. Scott Allen asks an interesting question about where in its lifecycle the C# Language actually is, based upon a lifecycle defined by Robin Sharp. I’m looking forward to some interesting discussion on this one.
• No JavaScript IntelliSense in VS 2010 Beta 2? Reset your Settings - Rick Strahl highlights a problem he encountered wtih the JavaScript Intellisense (or rather a lack thereof), along with the fix to get it working. If you are in a similar situation, resetting your settings will unleash one of the more incredible features of VS2010 - I was very impressed with the JS Intellisense when I saw it demoed
• Migrating to Postgresql with my friend NHibernate - Karl Seguin talks about the process of changing database engine when you have utilised NHibernate as a persistence framework, highlighting some of the problems they encountered along the way. Ayende follows up showing a work around for handling DB errors better between dialects in his post ‘Database independence with NHibernate‘
• The Microsoft Ajax Library and Visual Studio Beta 2 - Stephen Walther talks about the Microsoft Ajax Library in Visual Studio 2010 beta 2, about the name change from ASP.NET Ajax and why the team have moved to out of band releases rather than packaging with a particular version
• Castle Windsor forwarded types and proxies - Krzysztof Kozmic digs into some more advanced Castle Windsor functionality, allowing for the same component to be used for multiple services, and proxying such a component
• Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Available Now! - Chris Schmich shares some screenshots showing the Performance Analysis features of Visual Studio 2010 in operation, yet another feature to add to the ‘must check out’ list
• New features in Entity Framework impacting providers - Noam Ben-Ami & Kati Iceva highlight some of the changes in Provider support within Entity Framework which will affect people developing their own providers
• C# Static interfaces - Jérémie Chassaing muses about the possible uses of static interfaces if they were provided, and clarifies in a follow up post illustrating with a clearer example in the post ‘C# Static interfaces - Take 2‘

Community

• C4MVC UI Testing screencast posted - Jimmy Bogard shares the link to the video of his session for the virtual Community for MVC.Net event on testing the UI in ASP.NET MVC earlier this week. I enjoyed watching the parts I saw live (I had some internet connection issues) and will be catching up on the bits I missed with this video
• Announcing the first Cambridge AltNetBeers &#8211; StackOverflow edition - Seb Lambla announces a new AltNet Beers event to be held in Cambridge after the StackOverflow Dev Day to allow you to get your fix of open spaces discussion after the Dev-Day event

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Software

• General availability of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 - Daniel Walzenbach highlights the release to the general public of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 with this post which contains links to the downloads for all editions (Shell, Ultimate, Premium, Professional, Express[C#, VB, C++, Web Dev]) along with the standalone framework download, an other related downloads. My experiences downloading last night were pretty good, with all the bits I grabbed downloading at a good rate.
• All-In-One Code Framework : All-In-One Code Framework Release 2009-10-18: Brief introduction of new samples - ‘colbertz’ highlights the 18th October Release of the All-In-One Code Framework. This library of code gives samples of a vast array of Microsoft technologies in a form that should be easy for you to utilise in your applications
• IronPython and IronRuby CTPs for .NET 4.0 Beta 2 - Harry Pierson highlights the release of new CTP of IronRuby and IronPython which run against the .NET 4 Beta 2 release
• Microsoft Windows: Windows 7 - The other obvious news for the day is the official launch of Windows 7. My RSS reader was full of posts about this this morning however I’m not going to be giving it that much coverage, despite it being bigger than Harry Potter (Windows 7 breaks Amazon UK pre-order volume record, ousts Harry Potter)
• Unsure about upgrading to Windows 7? Tools to help - Brian Groth highlights some useful tools to help determine if your machine and peripherals are suitable for Windows 7

Information

• 77 Windows 7 Tips - Jas Dhaliwal gives you 77 things to try out with your newly installed Windows 7 gathered together from a number of sources
• Interesting findings in the diff between .NET Fx v4 Beta1 and Beta2 - Patrick Smacchia points his NDepend tool at the Beta 1 and Beta 2 releases of the .NET Framework 4 and discusses the details of the changes that it identifies between the two, and it would seem that there are a lot of changes since beta 1
• Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010 (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) - Scott Guthrie continues his VS2010 / .NET 4 series of posts with a look at some of the changes that have been made in Visual Studio 2010 to make moving about your code base easier. I actually saw Scott demonstrating these features at the Guathon event in Manchester last month, and they look like really good enhancements to the basic product
• What’s New in the BCL in .NET 4 Beta 2 - Justin Van Patten of the BCL Team highlights the significant new features of the Base Class Library with the Beta 2 release, looking at features such as complex numbers, Observable collections, new System.Environment features and a whole lot more
• New Visual Studio 2010 Built-in C# Snippets Cheat Sheet - John Sheehan has produced a simple but effective ‘Cheat Sheet’ for the Visual Studio 2010 code snippets detailing what each of them is and how and where you can utilise them
• Indexed Properties in C# 4.0 - Kirill Osenkov shows off one of the less well known features of C#4, the ability to use indexed properties created in other technologies as indexed properties without having to call the awkward get_Value and set_value functions. This should vastly improve writing COM Interop code
• Visual Basic "HowDo I" Videos - The Visual Basic Team are producing two series of videos one focusing on the 2010 VB language features, and the other on using VB within the Visual Studio IDE
• Getting Started with Visual Studio 2010 IntelliTrace: Hello IntelliTrace! - Habib Heydarian highlights another of the exciting Visual Studio 2010 features, IntelliTrace which allows you to record the execution of a .NET application and later on replay it, and also looks at the Historical Debugging capabilities in his post The future of debugging is here! Visual Studio 2010 now supports stepping back in the debugger.
• Mozilla and Microsoft work together on WPF\ClickOnce plugins - Brad Abrams talks about the recent decision to have FireFox block the ClickOnce add on for security reasons, and talks about the interaction between Microsoft and Mozilla
• Duck Typing with Castle - Elton Stoneman highlights a useful library from David Meyer which allows you to achieve duck typing by way of clever use of the Castle Dynamic Proxy.
• Some Smaller Features in the Latest Release of F# - Don Syme talks about a number of the smaller new features of the F# release available as a part of VS2010/.NET 4 and as a standalone for VS2008/.NET 3.5.
• Extension Methods to Make Thread Safe WPF Programming Easier - Simon Knox shows how some simple Extension methods can take away a lot of the clutter required to correctly update a WPF UI when your application is multi-threaded. The same principle could also be used for WinForms apps.
• Force .NET application to run in 32bit process on 64bit OS - Gabriel Schenker highlights a few places where you have to change settings to get your web applications to run in 32bit mode when your OS is a 64bit OS.
• Visual Studio Myths - busted wide open - Eric Nelson and the rest of the UK Developer Evangelist team share a Silverlight application which aims to dispell a number of common myths about the different versions of Visual Studio and peoples reluctance to upgrade

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Software

• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit - October Preview (aka VS2010 B2 version) released - Greg Duncan highlights the availability of the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Training Kit, newly updated to take into account the changes in Beta 2. This kit includes presentations, hands on labs and demos covering C#, VB, F#, Parallel extensions, WCF, WPF, WF and much much more

Information

• Code Contracts Preview: Invariants - Dino Esposito continues his DotNetSlackers article series on the Code Contracts functionality of .NET 4 with a look at the use of invariants and looking at the role they play in inheritance and also in the class design process
• VS10 Beta 2 From an ASP.NET MVC Perspective - Phil Haack talks about the ASP.NET MVC 2 inclusion in Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 Beta 2, highlighting the significant features, and talking about upgrading projects to VS2010
• 31 Days of Refactoring eBook - Sean Chambers shares the PDF E-Book edition of his Refactoring Blog Series posted back in August kindly produced by Simone Chiaretta
• Testability Of Date-Dependent Code - Davy Brion talks about two common techniques to enable the reliable testing of Date based code either by providing the date obtaining routine with a service which can be overridden for testing, or by routing all calls for dates through a custom static method which can be provided with dates to return
• Strongly Typed ASP.Net MVC Helpers - Sean McAlinden shows how you can create strongly typed helper methods for use in ASP.NET MVC Views by using lambda expressions to specify what are often magic strings in the standard framework helper methods
• Set up Spring.Net IoC with ASP.Net MVC - Sean McAlinden also shows how you can utilise the Inversion of Control Container from Spring.Net in ASP.NET MVC by extending the default controller factory to create controllers through the Spring container
• MVC 2 Areas and Containers - K. Scott Allen also argues for the use of DefaultControllerFactory as a base class for your own controllerfactory implementations as it includes a lot of the namespace identification routines that support areas, and allow your controllerfactory to make use of that without any work
• Microsoft Ajax Minifier VS YUI Compressor - Ajaxian compares the newly released Microsoft Ajax Minifier with the more established Yahoo YUI Compressor, looking at the differences between the minification techniques used by each.
• Fixing the Visual Studio Add Reference Dialog - Quickly add a Project Reference - Brian Schmitt shares a macro which provides a quicker way to add interproject references between projects in the same solution by bypassing the standard Visual Studio 2008 References dialog
• SQLite Nunit & Fluent Nhibernate - Test your data access layer - Dan Watson shares a number of code snippets which utilise SQLite and Fluent NHibernate to allow you to test your data code by using an in-memory database rather than the slower out of process fully relational database to provide you with quick running tests.
• Writing Extension Methods in F# to Use in C# - David Morton shows that you can create extension methods in F# code and utilise them in your C#, perhaps providing a nice simple way of integrating and introducing functional F# code into your traditional C# projects
• How to create your own virtual machine. - ‘icemanind’ shares a tutorial on CodeProject which looks at how you can create a virtual machine written in C#, providing an interesting insight into how virtual machines are implemented and work
• To Brace or not to Brace in C# ifs and other Constructs - Peter Kellner asks one of the great coding style questions of all time, ‘do I have to use braces with that?’

Community

• Community For MVC.Net - Mid Oct Live Meeting - Tonight (UK) sees the Community for MVC.Net have their mid October live meeting. This meeting starts at 12 noon CST, which makes it early evening here in the UK. The speaker this time round is Jimmy Bogard talksing about testing the UI

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