The Morning Brew

Software

• Cleaning a VS2010 solution with a sledgehammer - Rory Primrose shares a simple utility to forceably clean a build tree of any remnants of previous builds which can be installed into Visual Studio as an external tool. This tool was designed to scratch an itch of Rory’s where he was finding that old assemblies were sometimes getting loaded by MSTest projects causing problems.

Information

• MVP In Silverlight/WPF Series - Davy Brion begins a series looking at MVP as an alternative to the more commonly supported MVVM pattern when working with Silverlight and WPF. The first real part of this series ‘Architectural Overview‘ takes a look at the key architectural parts of the MVP pattern
• The false myth of encapsulating data access in the DAL - Ayende discusses the encapsulation of data access in a DAL, arguing that in the modern world where we are using ORM products which abstract and provide support for multiple data stores this is less important, and that by restricting ourselves we miss out on some of the best features of our ORM of choice.
• Code First Entity Framework Unit Test Examples - Jag Reehal takes a look at Entity Framework 4 CTP 4 and shows some ways of testing that your code first implementations work correctly using automated tests.
• The initial OpenWrap installation - Seb Lambla shows the install processes for his OpenWrap package management tool, a simple process of downloading a tiny bootstrapper which deals with the process of installing the tooling, and Seb then starts the journey of showing how to Add OpenWrap to an existing project (Part 1) looking at the process of installing OpenWrap into your project.
• Package management for .NET: Nu - Ayende discusses the other new package management solution, Nu from Dru Sellers & Rob Reynolds, discussing the simple process of using Nu to get dependencies
• Creating a "New" Gem for "Nu" - From 0 to 100 in 24 Hours - Bil Simser shares his experience of building a Nu Gem package for the AutoFac Inversion of Control Container, stepping through the process following Rob Reynolds step by step guide.
• Cancellation with .NET 4 (Part 2) - Christian Nagel continues his series of posts looking at the support for Cancelling asynchronous processes using the new .NET 4 cancellation framework
• MVC 3 - Supporting Custom View Engines - Jacques Eloff explores the support for multiple view engines in the new ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 release, looking at the process of utilising different view engines in your project, and looking at the process for installing 3rd party view engines. Arun Mahendrakar also digs a little deeper at how view engines are chosen in his post MVC3 WebFormViewEngine or CshtmlViewEngine
• Static Variable Gotchas - Are Static Variables in Base Classes Shared In Derived Sub Classes? - Dominic Pettifer takes a look at the humble static member and how instances of these members are shared between the base and derived classes, and shows how this can differ for classes which are generic and used as a base class.
• Cautiously Merging IL - Udi Dahan follows on from Dru Sellers’ post about the use of IL Merge sharing his experiences from working with IL Merge in the NServiceBus project
• CreateDelegate<T> - An Exercise in Using Expressions - Jan Van Ryswyck follows on from previous posts looking at using CreateDelegate as a performance improved alternative to using MethodInfo.Invoke with a look at improving the technique by making it strongly typed using Generics.
• Principles 3: Principles of Software Development (aka Principles of Shipping) - Ivo Manolov continues his ‘Principles’ series of posts, in this postsharing a series of rules and suggestions for ensuring that you ship good high quality software
• Using an NHibernate Formula to aid searching - Kyle Baley explores using calculated members in NHibernate to make searching for values easier. Be sure to check out the comments for some discussion of alternative methods for achieving this too.

Community

• The SQL Server Conference - SQLBits - The 7 Wonders of SQL - 30 - 02 Oct 2010 - York - The registration for the 7th SQL Bits conference is now open. This event is occurring in York, UK between the 30th September 2010 and 2nd October, with the first two days being pay-for conference days and the 3rd day being the free community conference day. Registrations are sure to fill up quickly so make sure you register if you wish to attend.