August 2010

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #675

Posted by on 31 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • New Version of My Free GUI for the Microsoft Ajax Minifier – Jorge Ramon shares the latest version of his GUI wrapper for the Microsoft Ajax Minifier which helps you to produce the smallest most optimal version of your JavaScript code without having to use the command line providing a simple UI to configure and perform the minification.
  • I find you "Ultra!" – Ultra Find VS2010 Add-in (Think "Find in Files++") – Greg Duncan highlights Ultra Find, a Visual Studio extension, available on the Visual Studio Gallery, which provides powerful search capabilities as a replacement for the standard find in files functionality, offering searches for classes and methods, exclude file patterns, and much more.
  • posh-git Release v0.2 – Keith Dahlby announces the release of posh-git v0.2, a set of scripts which provide integration of git into the PowerShell environment
  • CSLA 4 version 4.0.1 released – Rockford Lhotka announces version 4.0.1 of his CSLA application framework which is a bugfix release which addresses a number of issues in the 4.0 release
  • Visual Studio LightSwitch beta Training Kit Now Available for Download – ‘gduthie’ highlights the release of a Developer Training Kit for the LightSwitch beta release which contains demos and hands on labs sessions which walk through the process of creating a LightSwitch application, and building and packaging extensions for users to use.

Information

  • Compiler|Interpreter Warnings Are Important Learning Opportunities – Davy Brion talks about the role of Compiler / Interpreter warnings as a useful educational tool for helping you to write better code, and how you can enable Warnings as Errors which will prevent your build from succeeding if there are errors.
  • Managing business object locks on application level – Gunnar Peipman takes a look at building a solution for locking business objects on a single server at the application level, allowing your application to safely work with a particular object while preventing other threads from accessing that object. Full code is provided for download.
  • The Joy of Moq – Multiple Interfaces – The ‘Bare Bones Coder’ shows how the Moq mocking framework allows you to construct mock objects which implement multiple interfaces.
  • Implementation of an Observer – Abhishek Sur looks at implementing the Observer pattern to provide a way of implementing notifications, exploring the origins of the Observer and some of the theory behind them, along with sample code showing the implementation.
  • The Task Parallel Library Series – The Task Class – Steve Strong continues his series of posts on the Task Parallel Library introduced in .NET 4 with a look at how the Task class makes it very easy to implement parallelized work with the ability to know when the parallel work is completed.
  • HTTP Optimization the easy way: Part 1, how do I know? – Scott Galloway talks about optimising the performance of your web applications by reducing requests to the server and making the data you do transmit make the most of the available bandwidth.
  • Crack .Net Applications 101 – Part 1 – Mark Pearl takes an introductory look at disassembly of .NET executables using Reflector and Reflexil, and how these tools make it quite easy to view and alter the contents of .NET assemblies.
  • Overview of Data Validation in LightSwitch Applications – Prem Ramanathan takes a look at the validation support provided in Visual Studio LightSwitch which allow you to add data integrity rules to your application with little effort, exploring a variety of different validations in a sample application.
  • More on SVG – Jennifer Yu of the Internet Explorer Team talks about the importance of SVG for the modern web, HTML5 and the hardware accelerated support for it in Internet Explorer 9
  • Performance: Profiling how different web sites use browser subsystems – IEBlog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Jason Weber (also of the IE team) discusses the different amounts of use that different website generate on the core components of the Web Browser, and how understanding this breakdown can help to optimise the browser platform for optimal use.
  • Rx on the server, part 4 of n: Buffering output to a stream – Jeffrey van Gogh continues his series looking at the use of the Reactive Extensions for .NET on the server-side, looking in this part at the use of Rx in providing buffering for stream output.
  • Testing Rx – Jeffrey van Gogh highlights a Channel 9 video in which he discusses the new testing functionality which is now a part of the Reactive Extensions
  • Demonstrating CLR Side-by-Side Execution – Sasha Goldshtein shares a sample which illustrates the ability to run .NET 2.0 and .NET 4 side by side in the same process by having two COM libraries written in managed code each targeting different versions of the framework, and loading them both in a C++ application.
  • TSQL: Passing array/list/set to stored procedure (MS SQL Server) – Denis Gladkikh looks at the variety of different ways of passing an array of values into a stored procedure in SQL Server, exploring delimited strings, bulk insert and the newly introduced table valued parameters.
  • The Bricks Game – Tetris for Silverlight – Marcelo Ricardo de Oliveira walks through the creation of a Tetris clone created in Silverlight 4 using the styles and themes and MVVM style of development
  • I am an Exception Extremist – John Sonmez talks about his dislike of throwing exceptions, discussing some defensive programming techniques we can use in preference to throwing exceptions, and sharing some best practices for web we really have to throw exceptions.
  • PropertyOf and INotifyPropertyChanged.PropertyChanged without strings – Fabrice Marguerie looks at a technques which allows you to write INotifyPropertyChanged and PropertyOf implementations which do not rely on strings
  • Experimenting with enterprise level bus messaging – Sacha Barber takes a detailed introductory look at the NServiceBus project for implementing a message passing architecture exploring the theory behind the architecture and how NServiceBus implements it.
  • The Programmer’s Body – Scott Hanselman reminds us not to take our bodies for granted and to look after ourselves as our profession as programmers does tend to keep us trapped (hunched) behind a desk, and how that can have serious knock on effects on our health.

Community

  • Andreas Öhlund on NServiceBus on 29 September 2010 – The European Virtual Alt.NET group have a presentation from Andreas Öhlund on the evening of Wednesday 29th September 2010, starting at 7:00 GMT (8pm UK). In the presentation Andreas will be giving a hands on introduction to NServiceBus, showing how to get started developing with the project.
  • Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript – Scene 6: Loopage – (52 min.) – The Yahoo! User Interface team share the latest instalment of Douglas Crockford’s talk series on the JavaScript language. This sixth session looks at event loops and server side JavaScript, and the video of the session is available in a variety of formats.

The Morning Brew #674

Posted by on 27 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Monday is a public holiday here in the UK (the last one before Christmas Day – a depressing thought), and as is the Morning Brew tradition I shall be taking the day off so there will be no edition of The Morning Brew on Monday. Normal posting will resume on Tuesday. Have a good (long) weekend everyone.

Software

  • SigParse uploaded to MSDN Code Gallery – David Broman highlights the release of SigParse on the MSDN Code Gallery. SigParse is a code sample written by Rico Mariani which takes the method signatures in CLR metadata and parses out information about their components. This code is now licensed as MS-PL.
  • VS 2010 – Fix for hang on debugging ASP.Net 3.5 Apps – Joel Varty highlights the availability of a fix for Visual Studio 2010 users who have problems with the IDE hanging when debugging ASP.NET 3.5 applications

Information

  • Must I release everything when using Windsor? – Krzysztof Kozmic continues his series of posts looking at the lifecycle of components in the Windsor Container, looking in detail at the process for releasing components once you have finished with them, and looks at how Windsor makes it easier by doing most of the work for you.
  • Intro to RX – Scott Weinstein highlights a series of 7 posts from Lee Campbell looking at the Reactive Extensions for .NET, exploring the key concepts of Observables, subscribing, combining, flow control, and types of observables.
  • The Downside Of Providing An API Through Extension Methods – Davy Brion looks at one subtle difference between Moq and RhinoMocks in the form of its API, and use of Extension Methods, showing that an API which is heavy with Extension methods can result in very cluttered Intellisense.
  • C#/.NET Five Little Wonders That Make Code Better (1 of 3) – James Michael Hare starts a mini-series of three posts each consisting of 5 C# / .NET features which can make you code much better. This first part explores Null Coalescing, Auto Properties, ‘as’ casting, the Stopwatch and TimeSpan Factory methods.
  • PSSCor2: GC Heap Analysis Commands – Sasha Goldshtein continues exploring the PSSCor2 debugger extension showing some of the improvements it offers to the commands for exploring the managed heap
  • Coding: Mutating parameters – Mark Needham discusses a long held coding practice of not mutating or changing values passed as function parameters in functions, looking at the origins of the practice, and looking at some cases where its not been followed, questioning if it really is that important a principle
  • Writing Files from Low-Integrity Processes – Eric Lawrence looks at the ability to write files in processes started in Low Integrity mode, discussing the origins and uses of low and medium integrity processes using Internet Explorer as an example. Eric shares a solution to allow your low integrity processes to write to locations that aren’t normally allowed by creating the file initially as medium integrity and marking it to be allowed to be access from low integrity processes.
  • Release Management White Paper and Assessment – Jez Humble shares a white paper “Agile Release Management: Towards Frequent, Low-Risk Releases” and multichoice assessment looking at the release management process based in part on the content of his book ‘Continuous Delivery’
  • The Anatomy of a LightSwitch Application Part 3 – the Logic Tier – The LightSwitch team continue their series on the architecture behind LightSwitch applications, looking at the ‘logic’ tier which acts as the gateway to the data storage, including concepts such as Transactions, data providers, Data services, queries, etc.
  • TekPub Content is FREE this Friday! – Darcy_Lussier highlights a special 1 day offer of free content on TekPub in celebration of James Avery’s birthday. TekPub is a great resource of detailed screen casts and tutorials created by well known and respected developers covering a wide variety of tech concepts, and this is a great opportunity to check it out.
  • We’re Not Paid To Write Code – Phil Haack discusses what our primary goal as software developers is, and that its not writing code, its delivering solutions which provide customers with value

The Morning Brew #673

Posted by on 26 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew, Uncategorized

Update: Looks like I forgot to assign the Tags/Categories to this post, so some of you may have missed out on it. I’ve added them now – thanks to Dan Puzey for spotting it

Software

  • Microsoft Project Code-Named ‘Houston’ CTP 1 (August 2010 Update) – The SQL Azure team announce the August 2010 CTP release of ‘Houston’ their light weight database management tool for SQL Azure. This CTP update features improved navigation and search, better visibility of database statistics, table, view and stored procedure designers. This preview version has also been deployed to all datacenters allowing you to experience better performance by using an instance local to your database.

Information

Community

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