July 2010
Monthly Archive
The Morning Brew #651
Posted by Chris Alcock on 27 Jul 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Class Designer PowerToys for Visual Studio 2010 is Released – ‘wanglie1986’ announces the release of the Class Modelling Power Toys for Visual Studio 2010. These tools improve the experience of working with the class designer in 2010 providing features like pan/zoom functionality, improved formatting support, HTML Export, and nested type creation
- FluentValidation 1.3 Released – Jeremy Skinner announces the release of FluentValidation 1.3 his C# based validation library with a Fluent Interface, available for Silverlight and standard .NE, with the Silverlight build now targeting Silverlight 4, with improvements to the testing support, NotEmptyValidator, cascade and When/Unless. Jeremy also outlines the future plans for FluentValidation 2.0
- YUI 3.2.0 Preview Release 1: Touch Event Support, Gestures, Transitions, CSS Grids, ScrollView, Uploader, and More – Eric Miraglia announces the preview release of the Yahoo User Interface library 3.2.0, available to download or hosted on the Yahoo CDN, this release provides an early look at some of the features they have planned for the actual 3.2.0 release
- ASP.NET dynamic language support is open source – Jimmy Schementi announces the release of the supporting library for ASP.NET dynamic languages support under the Apache License (Version 2) meaning that the library is now Open Source
- SQLCop A Tool To Highlight Potential Problems With Your Database – SQLDenis announces the first release of SQLCop, an FxCop like tool which will inspect your database and report on any potential problems it finds, along with providing information on resolving the issues
Information
- Rx on the server, part 2 of n: Asynchronous StreamReader – Jeffrey van Gogh continues his series looking at the use of the Reactive Extensions for .NET on the server side looking at how the reactive extensions can help make the synchronous StreamReader into an asynchronous implementation.
- The Boy Scout Rule – Hans-Eric discusses the Boy Scout Rule for software as popularised by ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin looking at its role in your software development process and some of the benefits it brings.
- Graph Colouring, Part Four – Eric Lippert continues his series on graph colouring with a look at colouring the South America map, looking at representing the geographic relations between countries and applying the solver to work out the colourings
- The Future of .NET Open Source Software Delivery – Rob Reynolds discusses the current approach to .NET package management, and outlines how the nu project helps solve these issues making it easier to get the dependencies you need.
- LINQ to JS – ‘nmarun’ looks at the use of the LINQ to JS JavaScript library which brings some of the power of LINQ to browser based programming allowing you to work with Enumerable collections in JavaScript as you can on the server side, illustrating with some sample use cases.
- How To Build Custom Rake Tasks; The Right Way – Derick Bailey shares the simplest way of creating a Rake task implementation, learnt the hard way during the development of his albacore project
- Code Contracts and Automated Testing are pretty much the same thing – Patrick Smacchia discusses Code Contracts, an new addition to the .NET tool set in .NET 4, and looks at how they are actually very similar to automated testing practices.
- Designing on different levels of abstractions with Event-Based Components & Improving the Event-Based Components Desktop Calculator – Ralph Westphal continues his series of posts exploring using Event based design practices to design software, sharing a worked example based on a calculator
Community
- Glasgow Scot Alt.Net beers – The Scotish Alt.Net group announce their Alt.Net Beers event to be held in Glasgow on the evening of Friday 6th August, where much beer be consumed and development will be discussed
- Going to the MVP summit next year? Why not sign up with GeekGive? – Barry Dorrans highlights a GeekGive event being organised for around the MVP Summit in February 2011 where volunteers will work with Northwest Harvest in Seattle to help feed the hungary.
- YouTrack for OSS Projects – Hadi Hariri announces the availability of a hosted JetBrains YouTrack instance for people running open source projects. The installation is being hosted along side the CodeBetter TeamCity instance which currently build many popular open source projects from their version control systems.
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The Morning Brew #650
Posted by Chris Alcock on 26 Jul 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Good morning #NHibernate 3 … – Fabio Maulo tweets the release of NHibernate 3.0.0 Alpha1 available in both Binary and Source from SourceForge this version sees the usual bugfixes and improvements, along with new features such as Lazy Loading of individual columns, alias delimiting in generated SQL and improved support for DetachedCriteria use with IStatelessSession. There is also a breaking change in the handling of null values in maps / dictionaries
- An intro to what OpenWrap is – Seb Lambla takes the wraps off Open Wrap, his latest project and an answer to those package management problems we’ve all encountered. OpenWrap is designed to make obtaining the correct version of libraries easy be it at development, deploy or runtime.
- CSLA 4 release – Rockford Lhotka announces the official release of his CSLA 4 application framework which now in includes support for .NET 4, Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010. This a major upgrade from the version 3 release, and as such includes a number of major new features and improvements, along with the occasional breaking change, so be sure to read the changelog.
- Web Farm Framework 2 Beta released – Chris Alexander highlights the release of the Web Farm Framework 2 Beta, a system which makes it easy to scale out your web applications in both configuration and deployment. The Web Farm Framework is based on the Web Platform Installer and Application Request Routing and handles the complex cases of deploying web applications across a farm of servers.
Information
- Solution Navigator: Killer replacement for Solution Explorer – Gunnar Peipman highlights one of the most popular components of the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools, the Solution Navigator which gives an improved implementation of the Solution Explorer including search and filtering capabilities.
- Prototypes and Inheritance in JavaScript – Scott Allen writes about Inheritance and Prototypes in JavaScript on the Script Junkie section of MSDN, exploring the concepts behind prototypes and how you can construct objects using the new operator and constructor functions.
- Event-Based Components – Leaving the beaten path of canonical object orientation – Ralph Westphal discusses the difficulties in designing even a simple system using traditional Object Oriented design processes, and looks at the use of a more event based process for design.
- VS 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts for C#, VB, C++, F# Now Available in Letter (8.5x11in) and A4 (210×297mm) Print-Ready Sizes – Lisa Feigenbaum announces the release of a new set of Keyboard short cut cheat sheets for Visual Studio 2010 in a number of different language based editions. These new sheets are designed for printing on standard sized paper, and now include only the keyboard short cuts, no annoying clip-art images.
- Table Per Hierarchy Inheritance in Entity Framework & Mixing Table Per Hierarchy and Entity Splitting – Gil Fink on .Net – Gil Fink explores the Table Per Hierachy Inheritance approach available in Entity Framework illustrating with a step by step example in this CodeProject article, and follows up on one of the questions with a blog post looking at combining Table Per Hierarchy with Entity Splitting techniques into one model.
- Entity Framework 4 "Code-First": Custom Database Schema Mapping – Scott Guthrie continues looking at the Code First approach to Entity Framework with a look at how you can customise the way data is saved to the database by overriding the default persistence mapping rules with your own to allow you to use a custom database schema, illustrating with an example based on the Nerd Dinner sample application.
- ASP.NET MVC: Using dynamic type to test controller actions returning JsonResult – Gunnar Peipman looks into using the .NET 4 dynamic support to help test anonymous types returned as JSON data from ASP.NET MVC Controllers
- Degrees of reality in sample code – Jon Skeet highlights his latest article which looks at overloading in C#, and discusses the difficulty of creating good example code for articles, and how its important to define the scope of the example as to whether it is giving an example of a technique or showing a good example of its use.
- Rendering with XNA Framework 4.0 inside of a WPF application – Nick Gravely shares his experiments in including XNA based content inside of a WPF based application using public and supported APIs, sharing the code that achieves it.
- How do you test asynchronous code? Part I & Part II – Stefan Lieser writes about testing asynchronous code in your applications successfully, looking at the use of mocks to fake via constructor injection, and exploring the use of tools like TypeMock Isolator to mock using the profiler API when you don’t have the ability to control the method used.
- Principles 2: Principles of Software Testing – Ivo Manolov shares 6 less discussed high level principles for testing software (Hight Test Stability, High Test Performance, Minimum Dependencies, Fundamentals, Test Development Principles and Continuous Training), giving each an introduction and then fleshing out the definition with some interesting discussion.
- Technical Debt around release time – Mark Needham discusses technical debt management by way of a nice analogy from J.B. Rainsberger, comparing two different approaches to Cleaning the Kitchen and Cleaning the Garage.
Community
- Touch Me, Stretch Me, Squeeze Me: The Windows 7 WPF Multi-Touch Story – Guy Smith-Ferrier introduces his new usergroup talk on making use of the Windows 7 Multi-touch features in WPF applications, due to debut at VBUG Bristol on Wednesday 11th August, and also at the Cambridge Next Generation User Group on Tuesday 21st September
- mvcConf slides and code posted – Jimmy Bogard shares access to the slides and code from his mvcConf session on Refactoring your controllers into leaner implementations and John V. Petersen also shares his demo code and slides in his post Powerpoint and Code Demos from my MVCConf Presentation
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The Morning Brew #649
Posted by Chris Alcock on 23 Jul 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- MSDN: Double the Azure – Somasegar announces the doubling of the length of the MSDN Subscription Windows Azure Benefit, taking MSDN Subscribers complementary account to 16 months
- New Features in Fiddler 2.2.9.9 Beta – Eric Lawrence announces the beta release of Fiddler 2.2.9.9 which contains a number of new features and fixes including Regex support in Find, improved session compare, and some improvements to the SyntaxView inspector add-in
- Dojo 1.5 is Out and it’s Feature Packed! – Rey Bango over on Ajaxian highlights the release of version 1.5 of the Dojo JavaScript Framework, with a number of improvements to the Dijit UI library, HTML 5 and CSS3 feature support, along with some new features for mobile web apps.
- MVVM Light Hotfix for Windows Phone 7 developer tools beta – Laurent Bugnion announces a hot fix for his MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1. The hot fix updates the templates to support the reorganised assemblies of the latest Windows Phone 7 SDK beta.
Information
- Rx on the server, part 1 of n: Asynchronous System.IO.Stream reading – Jeffrey van Gogh starts a series of posts focusing on the use of the Reactive Extensions on the Server side, providing a different view on the topic than is provided in many client side tutorials for Rx. In this part Jeffrey looks at using RX to read a file.
- Improving testability with the Castle Dictionary Adapter – Ben Hall takes a look at the Castle Dictionary Adapter, soon to become a core part of Castle Windsor (in the 2.5 release), showing how it can be used to help break dependencies on the ConfigurationManager and provide a typed mockable interface onto the untyped values in the dictionary.
- Testing Routing and URL Generation in ASP.NET MVC – Brad Wilson shows how you can implement good tests for your incoming and Outgoing ASP.NET MVC routes, showing example tests and providing stub implementations for the dependencies
- Driving CRUD screens with BDD – Gojko Adzic talks about the use of Behaviour Driven Development to drive the development of Create Read Update Delete (CRUD) screen
- Graph Colouring with Simple Backtracking, Part Three – Eric Lippert continues his exploration of Graph Colouring taking a look at the implementation of a simple backtracking algorithm to solve the problem.
- 10 Commandments of Usability – David Laribee kicks off a series of posts looking at Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Commandments of Usability, looking at how they can be applied to software development. This first post is a introduction, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.
- Extension Methods and the Debugger – Jared Parsons looks into the occasional strange behaviour of the Visual Studio Debugger when looking at evaluating (or not evaluating) extension methods, discussing its cause due to lazy loading of assemblies.
- Windows Phone 7 Design Resources – UI Guide and Design Templates – Sean Jenkin highlights the recently released Windows Phone Developer Tools, along with the Version2 release of the UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7 and the Design Templates for Windows Phone
- C# Fundamentals: Combining Enum Values with Bit-Flags – James Michael Hare follows on from one of his earlier back to basics posts on enums, taking a look this time at the use of Enums as Bitwise values and the use of the Flags attribute
- Automate and Improve Your Database Maintenance Using Ola Hallengren’s Free Script – Brad McGehee highlights the Database Maintenance scripts from Ola Hallengren which provide a comprehensive suite of maintenance stored procedures which will help you perform the vital maintenance that DBAs recommend to keep your database in tip top condition.
- PowerShell Cookbook (site, not book)- Short, simple yet still sweet – Greg Duncan highlights the PowerShell Cookbook website (nothing to do with the O’Reilly book) which provides a nice collection of bite sized selection of tips and how-to mini-articles starting out at the installation and looking at common use cases for PowerShell scripts.
Community
- mvcConf recap: (M)egacool (V)irtual (C)onference – Brian Schroer shares his thoughts on mvcConf, the free virtual ASP.NET MVC conference held yesterday. I also enjoyed the parts of the conference I was able to watch (the time zones made it a little tricky for me) and am looking forward to watching the recordings when they are released.
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