Software

  • Announcing the Mindscape NHibernate Designer – Mindscape release a visual designer for NHibernate based models, based on a similar design to their LightSpeed ORM tooling, providing access to common object mapping features, along with Model to Database and Database to model synchronisations. 14 day trial version is available, with the full version costing $249, but until Friday 4pm you can save 50% with a discount code.

Information

  • One Good Reason to Upgrade to .NET 4.0 – Elton Stoneman looks at the Parallel Extensions included in .NET 4, sharing a sample which makes use of these extensions to show the kind of dramatic performance increases it can easily bring to your applications.
  • .NET Debugging and C++ Debugging Resources – Sasha Goldshtein shares a good list of software tools and documentation regarding debugging both .NET and C++ based code categorised and drawn from a variety of sources
  • Versioning Issues With Optional Arguments – Phil Haack looks at the use of the .NET 4 Optional Parameters and Named Parameters as a means of helping the versioning of your API’s discovering that this technique doesn’t work well due to the way that the compiler works with optional parameters, and thus you should be very careful when using this feature.
  • Are Private Members Inherited? – Chris Eargle discusses a particular interview questions about inheritance of private members, showing that the specification does allow this to happen in particular circumstances (nested classes).
  • Everybody thinks about CLR objects the wrong way (well not everybody) & When does an object become available for garbage collection? – Raymond Chen continues CLR week with a follow up on the comments from his previous day’s post looking at Auto-disposal based on scope, and how the CLR works differently to unmanaged code. Raymond then continues the story with a look at when objects become eligible for garbage collection on the CLR.
  • IoC patterns – partitioning registration – Krzysztof Kozmic looks at the organisation of your component registrations within an IoC Container, suggesting that if you keep registration code granular it will make it easier for new developers to identify the types being used in a certain context
  • Coding4Fun – Part 1 of the Windows Phone Picture Effects App and Roadmap – René Schulte highlights the release of his article on Windows Phone 7 on the Coding4Fun site. The article explores the process of writing a Windows Phone 7 picture effects application, with full source available licensed as MS-PL
  • A F# Silverlight Template – Daniel Mohl releases another F# project template, this time for Silverlight, which is now available from the online templates section in Visual Studio 2010.
  • Exploring FubuCore: Convert a string value to any type of .Net class with the ObjectConverter – Jeremy D. Miller begins a new series of posts looking at the FubuCore library of utility functions which is a part of the FubuMVC project, but has applications outside this project. This first part explores the ObjectConverter implementation.
  • Xaml Toolkit: Manipulation of Xaml – Lester looks at the use of the Xaml Toolkit for sanitizing Xaml Code copied from an application, and how it makes it easy to remove elements which refer to methods, events, etc which are not available in a particular context.
  • Using DynamicObject to implement general proxy classes – ‘OlliFromTor’ explores using the Dynamic Object in .NET 4 to wrap any type with implementations of common interfaces such as INotifyPropertyChanged, IEditableObject, etc in this CodeProject Article.
  • Bankers Rounding in Math.Round Method – Vikram Lakhotia reminds us all that it is dangerous to assume anything about methods, highlighting that the standard numerical rounding in .NET may not do what you assume it would, and shows the way of instructing it to do the rounding you require.

Community

  • SQL Social – Kent – Jamie Thompson announces the first SQL Social event to be held in Maidstone, Kent, UK on the eventing of 18th August. This inaugural event features Dave Ballantyne giving an overview of PASS, Neil Hambly talking on the subject of Replication, and Allan Mitchell looking at Complex Event Processing.
  • FubuMVC at C4MVC Tomorrow (Now Today) – Jeremy D Miller will be presenting an online brown bag session today (Wednesday) beginning at 12pm CDT (6PM BST by my calculations) looking at FubuMVC, its differences from MS MVC, its integration if IoC and Composition and their configuration features.