September 2010
Monthly Archive
Posted by Chris Alcock on 30 Sep 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
Information
- Understanding Silverlight releases (and the September 2010 2nd service update) - Tim Heuer discusses the 1st September 2010 Silverlight release, explaining the terminology the Silverlight team use to describe releases, putting it into the context of other similar terms other Microsoft Teams use, and looks at a the solution and explanation for a common problem developers encounter when upgrading.
- Monads in C#: Which Part Is The Monad? - Derick Bailey explores the concept of Monads in C#, discussing the relationship of monads to LINQ, looking at the implementation of the Maybe<T> monad, and exploring the pipelined execution.
- RavenDB - Image Gallery Project (III) - The Application Lifecycle - Rob Ashton presses on with his RavenDB example application looking at the hosting of RavenDB inside his application, and using StructureMap to manage the creation and disposal of connections to the database
- Capturing memory dumps for 32-bit processes on an x64 machine - Tess Ferrandez talks about correctly capturing memory dumps of 32bit processes on 64bit machines, and why if you use the 64bit tools you will get a memory dump of limited use.
- The Ins and Outs of CSS Resets - Dave Ward, posting on ScriptJunkie, discusses the use of CSS Resets to provide a level playing field for your CSS layouts to be implementation on top of.
- Add Aspects to Object Using Dynamic Decorator - Gary H Guo looks at creating Aspect Oriented Programming functionality to add behaviours to business entities to implement functionality like security. The implementation here is a thin (and understandable) layer over the built in .NET Proxy functionality, and looks like a nice example of AOP principles and implementation.
- New XNA Game Studio 4.0 Developer Education Content Available! - The XNA Game Studio Team highlight 10 new training kits for XNA development on the Windows Phone 7, covering a variety of topics from using the Accelerometer in 3D games, using the Microphone, Push Notifications, creating dynamic audio, and much more
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Posted by Chris Alcock on 29 Sep 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
UPDATE: The ‘Agatha 1.2 Is Available’ and ‘NLog 2.0 Beta 1 has been released’ links got entwined by a bit of broken HTML which is now resolved (an both should be visible). Thanks to Krzysztof Koźmic for spotting it and letting me know.
Software
- Patch For ASP.NET Vulnerability Available - Paulo Morgado highlights the release of the Out Of Band Security Update which addresses the ASP.NET Padding Oracle vulnerability
- Agatha 1.2 Is Available - Davy Brion announces the 1.2 release of Agatha a Request Response Service Layer implementation for .NET. This release targets .NET 4 / Silverlight 4 only and brings client side caching support, improvements to DI/IOC Container support and much more.
- NLog 2.0 Beta 1 has been released - The NLog team release their 1st beta of NLog 2, a logging framework written for .NET and providing rich logging and routing functionality. The V2 release is focusing on adding .NET 4 / Silverlight 4 support
- Microsoft Expression Blend 4 SP1 - Rachel Collier highlights the release of Expression Blend 4 Service Pack 1 which adds support for Windows Phone 7 projects, adds support for FXG documents and addresses a number of user reported bugs.
- Team Foundation Installation Guide for Visual Studio 2010 - Microsoft release the latest edition of a CHM (Help) based guide to installing Team Foundation Server, Team Foundation Server Proxy and Team Foundation Build Services
Information
- ASP.NET MVC, session state and concurrent requests: not what you’d expect - ‘Rudi’ explores some performance problems in an ASP.NET application, discovering a bottle neck in the application caused by Session State, resulting in only a single request from a user executing at the same time. Rudi then explores techniques for improving this in ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC applications.
- Custom Ordering of Action Filters in ASP.NET MVC - Greg Shackles explores the use of ASP.NET MVC Action Filters, looking at their default order of execution, and looking at how you can control the order of the filters being applied.
- Logical Call Context: Flowing Data across Threads, AppDomains, and Processes - Jeffrey Richter talks about Thread Local Storage, and its limitation when working with ThreadPools, and explores the use of CallContext as an alternative sharing a simple example.
- Reaching Unreachable Code - Jason Bock discusses some differences between the C# and VB.NET Compiler, looking at the case of some un-reachable code being included in methods after compile in certain modes.
- RavenDB - Image Gallery Project (II) - Setting Up - Rob Ashton presses on with his series on building a RavenDB application, discussing where to get RavenDB from, and looks at the choice of client code to access the database.
- Custom Windows Workflow activity for dependency resolution–Part 2 - Rory Primrose continues his series of posts looking at Dependency Injection / Resolution in Windows Workflow. In this part Rory talks about the code that makes his custom WF activity bring this functionality to the workflow.
- This one’s for you, Gregor Mendel [Code to animate and fade Windows Phone orientation changes now supports a new mode: hybrid!] - David Anson shares some further code for providing nice animation for Windows Phone 7 orientation changes, providing a hybrid of AnimateOrientationChangesFrame and FadeOrientationChangesFrame which gives the nice effect whilst hiding some of the complexities of the process.
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Posted by Chris Alcock on 28 Sep 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
ASP.NET Padding Oracle Vulnerability
- ASP.NET Security Update Shipping Tuesday, Sept 28th - Scott Guthrie announces the planned release of the ASP.NET Padding Oracle Vulnerability official fix, scheduled to be pushed out today (Tuesday 28th September) at 10am PDT. Before then, you can read about the fix in the advance notification security bulletin, and if you have any questions there will be a webcast at 1pm PDT to answer questions about the fix.
Software
- Virtual Machine Servicing Tool 3.0 - A useful utility which allows users of Virtual Machines to apply updates to those machines and template machines allowing them to be kept up to date and to close off security threats.
Information
- Ambiguous Optional Parentheses, Part Three - Eric Lippert continues his series looking at the complexities of Syntactic sugar showing further examples of the ambiguity that can be caused by the introduction of certain syntactic sugar and explaining a few other language features in this context.
- MEF in the Wild: A Retrospective - Jeremy Likness takes a look back at some of the actual uses of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) from a number of actual projects undertaken using MEF, covering View Model Routing, Validation,Commands, Service integration and a whole lot more.
- RavenDB - Image Gallery Project (I) - Rob Ashton kicks off a new series of posts looking at building a sample application against the RavenDB Document Database using ASP.NET MVC 2, following a TDD methodology for the core RavenDB infrastructure and usage.
- C# As a Scripting Language in your .NET Applications - Using Mono’s Compiler As a Service - Anoop Madhusudanan has been exploring uses of the Mono Compiler as a Service functionality, looking in this post in the series at how it enables C# as a scripting language in your applications, having previously explored filtering and querying and code evaluation in previous posts.
- nHibernate making updates and inserts much faster - Christiaan looks at the batching functionality in NHibernate and how it can provide a significant speed improvement by reducing the time spent making round trips to the database.
- Introducing jstub - Karl Seguin shares the source for his lightweight JavaScript Mocking Framework which provides the Stubbing functionality he was looking for. Code is available on GitHub.
- User Experiences: Quieter Notifications - Ritika Virmani talks about the UI changes in Internet Explorer 9 surrounding alerts and notifications, and how they have removed many of the blocking messages up into the notification bar.
- Functional stateful programming in F# - Matthew Manela takes a look at how you can write functional programs in F# where you need to manipulate state, there by not being pure functional looking at techniques and practices which make this type of development possible.
- Cloud Architecture: The Scheduler-Agent-Supervisor Pattern - Clemens Vasters talks about a pattern which he keeps finding uses for in the Cloud applications space, and presents the pattern here in a generic form, showing how it work and how it handles failures.
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Posted by Chris Alcock on 27 Sep 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
Information
- Microsoft Developer Guidance Maps - J.D. Meier highlights the Developer Guidance Maps from Microsoft which mapp out the developer technology space, providing access to code samples, tutorials, how-to’s and Product docuementation.
- Separation of Concerns with Domain Events - Mike Hadlow takes a look at applying the Domain Event pattern to his SukekiShop open source ECommerce system, explaining how the pattern helps avoid methods which break the single responsibility principle and avoids the need to inject services into entities.
- A Refactoring: Explicit Modeling And Reducing Duplication - Derick Bailey pulls together advice on a variety of topics, such as Implicit vs Explicit Modeling, Reducing Duplication and Readability and Understandability) into on worked example looking at improving some code
- Update on ASP.NET Vulnerability - Scott Guthrie gives a further update on the ASP.NET Team’s efforts to get an official patch out for the recent ASP.NET Padding Oracle vulnerability, along with providing a revised version of the best practice to defend against the attack.
- UrlScan Broke My Blog (And How I Fixed It) - Phil Haack follows on from Scott’s post with a brief discussion of some problems he ran into using URLScan caused by a dot in a real URL.
- Why sleep is good for your app’s padding oracle health - Troy Hunt continues exploring the ASP.NET Padding Oracle Attack and looks into why the random sleep in the recommended workaround is important when dealing with cryptographic vulnerabilities.
- Reactive Extensions in .NET Hot & Cold Observable - ‘Sankarsan’ continues exploring the Reactive Extensions for .NET with a look in this part at the concept of Hot and Cold Observables and what the difference is.
- Explaining What Action<> And Func<>; Are - John Sonmez highlights the Action<> and Func<> types and explains why they are so useful, particularly for dealing with situations where you have code duplication caused by common code wrapping specific functionality.
- Moving ASP.NET MVC Client Side Validation Scripts to Bottom - Imran Baloch takes a look at moving the JavaScript from the ASP.NET MVC Client Side validation to the end of your page as recommended for the best performance of your pages when rendering in the browser.
- Writing a Semi-Local Object Pool - Liran Chen looks at implementing Object Pools in .NET, explaining why there are certain circumstances where this technique can provide considerable performance improvement.
- How To Unit Test Workflows - Mocking Activities - Ron Jacobs continues his series looking at unit testing Windows Workflow, exploring techniques for mocking activities as a part of this testing .
- ASP.NET MVC: Using asynchronous controller to call web services - Gunnar Peipman takes a look at using the Asynchronous Controller feature of ASP.NET MVC to make calls to web services, showing how the MVC version of Async provides a more compact interface than the WebForms version. Gunnar also announces the availability of all his code samples from this (and previous posts) in his post Announcing public source code repository with my blog samples -
- Visual Studio Setup & Deployment Projects declared dead & retired. VS2010 will be the last… - Greg Duncan highlights the demise of out of the box support for Installer creation in Visual Studio
- MSDN Subscribers receive FREE Pluralsight On-Demand! Subscription - Aaron Skonnard highlights a free month of access to the Pluralsight On-Demand training resources to everyone who has an MSDN subscription.
Community
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Posted by Chris Alcock on 24 Sep 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Windows Phone + VB developers = Great Mobile Apps - Somasegar announces the release of the CTP of Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools which brings much requested support for creating phone applications using the VB.NET Language. A lot of people are interested in this release judging from the number of posts echoing this announcement I’ve seen. Here are a few which give some more information:
- CR_Documentor 2.5.0.0 Released - Travis Illig announces a new release of CR_Documentor, a DXCore plugin which gives a preview of the documentation that would be generated from your XML documentation comments
Information
Community
- Modern .NET Day - Reading - 23rd October 2010 - A Mini DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper day will be hosted at Microsoft’s Reading offices on Saturday 23rd October with a pre-arraigned agenda featuring Kathleen Dollard, Chris Hardy, Sebastian Lambla and Julia Lerman giving sessions. Registrations open on 1st October
- Steve Ballmer at UK Tech Day - Want to Come Along? - Ben Nunney has a competition for students to win some of the last remaining tickets to the UK TechDays event featuring a keynote from Steve Balmer and plenty of tech in the form of Windows Azure, Windows 7, Windows Phone 7 and IE9
- 5th October UK agile testing meeting - acceptance testing in the land of the startup - Gojko Adzic highlights the next UK Agile Testing User Group event, to be held on the 5th October at Skills Matter in London where Joseph Wilk will be presenting on the use of Agile Testing techniques in a startup environment
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Posted by Chris Alcock on 23 Sep 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- MbUnit/Gallio 3.2 - Andrew Stopford announces the release of version 3.2 of the MbUnit and Gallio test framework. This update brings updates to the the Icarus test runner, the ability to save test run reports in compressed ZIP format, improved IDE integration support using the VS10 Data Collector, and the new Mirror framework for testing non-public functionality
- Prism v4 - Drop 8 - The latest release of Prism V4, the Composite Application framework for WPF and Silverlight has been made available on CpodePlex. Drop 8 includes a number of new features along with a version of the library designed for Windows Phone 7
- Google Chrome Frame: Stable and Speedy - The Google Chrome team announce the removal of the beta label from Google Chrome Frame, the Internet Explorer add-in which allows developers to replace the IE rendering engine with a Chrome based one based on meta tags in the page.
Information
- What is Functional Programming? Part 4, Linq - Christopher Bennage continues his excellent series of posts on Functional Programming, looking this time at the functional programming that most C# developers will be most familiar with - Linq.
- Domain Models, Dependencies And Fighting Anemia - Derick Bailey discusses the difficulty of creating a good non-anaemic domain model which does not take reference to services and other dependencies, discussing a number of options for avoiding this, illustrated with a real-world example of the problem, and looking for suggestions of a good solution. I expect there to be some good stuff in the comments of this one.
- Real World Monitoring and Tuning ASP.NET Caching Part 2 - Steve Smith continues his look at ASP.NET cache monitoring and tuning, discussing the cause of his caching problems, some seemingly fine ASP.NET cache access code which exhibited problems due to lack of locking and poor SQL Cache Dependency use.
- Windows Phone 7, Reactive Extensions, OData, MVVM - John P Alioto shares his experiences building a Windows Phone 7 application making use of MVVM and the Reactive Extensions for Silverlight to access an OData Data source.
- WP7 Code: Using the GeoLocation API - Dragos Manolescu also looks at using the Reactive Extensions of the Windows Phone 7, this time exploring their use with the Geolocation API features of the Phone, and looks at writing queries against the resulting event stream.
- Windows Phone 7 Tutorials: Maps, GPS and Accelerometer - Nigel Sampson shares three more sample Windows 7 Phone tutorials with sample applications. These three explore the use of the Accelerometer, the GPS and mapping, and appropriate use of the Reactive Extensions to work with the GPS and Accelerometer event streams.
- WCF REST Services Inside MVC Projects - Steve Michelotti looks at getting WCF Rest Services and MVC-style web services to co-exist happily in one web project looking at the routing configuration steps involved
- ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 - Global and Conditional Filters - Malcolm Sheridan takes a look at the Global and Conditional filters functionality in ASP.NET MVC Preview 1 whicha allows filters to be registered once, removing the need to apply attributes to every controller that you want to use the filter.
- Evercookie - using a lot of solutions to force a persistent cookie - Chris Heilmann over at Ajaxian highlights the Evercookie library which tries a vast array of tricks to get cookies stored on the client even if the user has disabled cookie support.
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Posted by Chris Alcock on 22 Sep 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Point point one release for Windsor and Castle.Core - Krzysztof Kozmic announces the release of a minor update to Castle Windsor and Castle.Core. These changes are mostly minor improvements and bugfixes, including the removal of a logger to remove dependency on System.Web, improvements to the debug view of Windsor managed components showing their dependencies
Information
- Patterns and Practices guide: Developing Applications for the Cloud - Jim Galasyn highlights the release of a new Patterns and practice guide to Developing Applications for the Cloud which looks at using the Windows Azure Platform to develop real world applications illustrated by some TailSpin sample applications.
- Moving containers beyond testability - Jimmy Bogard talks about some of the more advanced features of Inversion of Control containers provide and how they allow you to better compose applications from well defined components.
- Finding count of a item in List using LINQ - Deven Sawant takes a look at some of the more advanced uses of the Count Linq extension method allowing you to easily get the count of specific instances in the list.
- Robust Software / Beware .Count() - Garry Shutler warns against using the Count() extension method to check if there are any items in an Enumberable, showing that using Any instead offers better performance.
- Javascript Mocking - Damn, That’s Easy. - Karl Seguin continues his discussions of testing JavaScript code with a look at mocking Ajax calls, talking first about specific frameworks for performing this, and then looking at implementing his own.
- ASP.NET Security Vulnerability Error Handling Project Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3 - Nannette Thacker reacts to the recent ASP.NET security vulnerability byb looking at her error handling functionality, and combines error handling best practices from a number of sources into a re-usable library
- The SQL Server DMV Start Pack (eBook and T-SQL) from Red Gate and more Dynamic Management Views (DMV) stuff - Greg Duncan highlights a number of great resources for getting to know and use the power of Dynamic Management Views available in SQL Server 2005+
- Clean Code, Saves Money or Is Art? - John Sonmez discusses the importance of observing the Clean Code principles, highlighting the importance of taking pride in your code, and the benefits of the added safety that clean code brings
- Analyzing historical data and playing with interactive extensions - Gabriel Schenker takes a look at the less know part of the Reactive Extensions, the implementation of a number of additional extension methods for IEnumerable which make up the Interactive Extensions. In this post Gabriel looks at Zip, Concat, TakeLast, and Last methods applying them to his Zoo domain model.
- AntiXSS 4.0 Release notes - Barry Dorrans shares the release notes for the forthcoming release of the AntiXSS 4.0 security library
Community
- Image recognition & XPF - Windows Phone 7 - On the 6th October, in London the Windows Phone User Group welcome Cortexica and Red Badger who will be giving presentations on their image recognition and XNA layout framework
- Getting Good at Parallel - NxtGenUG’s Southampton group host Josh Twist on the 28th October. Josh will be giving a presentation on using the Task Parallel Library in C#, sharing patterns and best practices for their use.
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Posted by Chris Alcock on 21 Sep 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Web Application Configuration Analyzer v1.0 RTW is live! - Anil RV announces the release of the Web Application Configuration Analyzer 1.0. This tool allows you to scan servers and have them tested against a range of security best practices, test your code to ensure it will function in a secured environment
- Quartz.NET 1.0.3 Released - Neon Quach announces the release of Quartz.NET 1.0.3. This release of this open source job scheduling system is a maintenance release, and corresponds in functionality to the 1.6 version of the Java Quartz implementation
- Windows HPC Server 2008 R2: The next step in High Performance Computing - Somasegar highlights the release of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, the latest evolution of Microsoft’s High Performance Computing Platform, highlighting how applications can be developed using Visual Studio and 3rd party extensions to make the most of HPC server resources.
Information
- Frequently Asked Questions about the ASP.NET Security Vulnerability - Scott Guthrie answers a number of the more common questions abut the ASP.NET Security Vulnerability which came to light over the weekend, including questions about the scanning tool, the way the workaround works and the question of what an attack against a server looks likes in logs
- The Secret Ninja Cucumber Scrolls - Gojko Adzic highlights the release of a free e-book / step-by-step guide to Cucumber mostly written by David de Floriner with contributions from Gojko. The e-book looks at the use of Cucumber for Java, Ruby and .NET projects and is available as a PDF download or to read online.
- 7 Freely available E-Books/Guides I found essential for .NET Programmers and Architects - Anoop Madhusudanan highlights 7 great resources for software developers on the .NET platform. Many of these resources have been linked to in the past on the Brew, but are well worth mentioning again.
- Ambiguous Optional Parentheses, Part One - Eric Lippert looks at the optional parameters in the object initializer and collection initializer syntax, and discusses the design choices made in the introduction of this feature back in 2004, discussing the cost analysis used to look at adding syntactic sugar to the language.
- My Programming Sins - 1. [Not] Testing JavaScript - Karl Seguin discusses the value of testing your JavaScript code, especially as in many web applications the JavaScript is becoming an increasingly important part of our applications. Karl looks at using QUnit to test a jQuery Plugin he developed.
- WCF RIA Services Part 7 - Authentication and Authorization - Brian Noyes continues a comprehensive series of posts on using the RIA (Rich Internet Services) library in Silverlight applications. This part (7) looks at Authentication and Authorization, and there are a further 3 posts to come on debugging, structuring services and exposing services to other clients.
- Using WCF on Windows Phone 7: Walk-through - Andy Pennell looks at how you can consumer WCF services from the Windows Phone 7 devices showing a simple example service and client application to illustrate this in operation.
- Windows Phone Memory Constraints - René Schulte discusses the memory constraints in place on Windows Phone 7 devices, both in total memory use, memory available and PhoneApplicationPage.State limits. René also provides a code snippet which allows you to get the memory consumption of your applications.
- MVC 3’s IValidatableObject - Ben takes a look at the ASP.NET MVC 3 validation mechanism provided by IValidatableObject implementations, illustrating with a simple example.
Community
- DDD9 - 29th Jan 2011 - The DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Team announce the 9th DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper event to be held at Microsoft UK in Reading. As usual, the conference is by the community, for the community, with sessions proposal now open, which will be followed by community voting to generate the final agenda. Registrations for the conference open on 1st January 2011
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