The 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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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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IMPORTANT: ASP.NET Security Vulnerability

If you run ASP.NET websites, you need to pay attention to the contents of this section:

• Microsoft Security Advisory (2416728): Vulnerability in ASP.NET Could Allow Information Disclosure – The official Microsoft Advisory about the publicly reported ASP.NET encryption attack which can result in private data disclosure. At the time of writing there is no fix available, so the recommendation is to implement the workaround involving the use of custom error pages.
• Important: ASP.NET Security Vulnerability – Scott Guthrie discusses the issues surrounding the vulnerability, the workaround, and also highlights forums for raising questions about this specific issue.
• Fear, uncertainty and and the padding oracle exploit in ASP.NET – Troy Hunt looks into the exploit which enables this vulnerability, discussing what is meant by an ‘Oracle Attack’ (nothing to do with Oracle Databases), shares the video showing what can be achieved by an attacker using this exploit against .NET Nuke and discusses the workaround
• ASP.NET Custom Errors Security Flaw – Steve Smith takes a look at the steps to protect yourself using the official workaround.

Software

• Pex and Moles v0.94: MSBuild support for Moles – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces the latest release of the Pex and Moles project which brings with it support for the inclusion of support for Moles in MSBuild, removing the requirement to check in generated code allowing the tooling to run well under TFS.
• jQuery UI on the Microsoft CDN – Stephen Walther highlights the inclusion of jQuery UI 1.8.5 on the Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network, a free to use CDN for a variety of JavaScript libraries, offering you a way to increase the performance of your sites by including common resources from the public CDN
• Windows Phone Training Kit has been updated – Alex Yakhnin highlights the release of an updated version of the Windows Phone 7 Training Kit, updated to reflect the changes in the RTM version of the developer tooling.

Information

• Best Practices for ASP.NET MVC – The ASP.NET and Web Tools Developer Content Team share a collection of ASP.NET MVC best practices based on a document from Ben Grover. This post covers best practices for Models, Views, Controllers, Routing, Extensibility, Testability, Localisation and Globalisation, Security and Performance.
• Published Software Design Patterns For Everyone Ebook – Anoop Madhusudanan releases an collection of a number of his blog posts on Patterns as a 30 page e-book. The e-book looks at the creation of a ‘Soccer Engine’ and looks at how patterns can be applied to a variety of development problems .
• Code rant: Implementing a "Money" type in an ASP.NET MVC and NHibernate application. – Mike Hadlow re-visits the Money example from Kent Beck’s Test Driven Development book, exploring its implementation in an ASP.NET MVC application with an NHibernate data access backend
• Inversion of control (IOC containers) .NET IOC patterns – Viacheslav Agafonov explores the concepts of Inversion of Control, discussing the variety of implementation of Inversion of Control Containers discussing their performance, looks at the importance of their use in providing good testability, and exploring a simple implementation of an IoC container
• Dependency injection options for Windows Workflow 4 – Rory Primrose discusses two options for bringing Dependency Injection to the world of Windows Workflow
• Non-iterable collection initializers – Jon Skeet discusses some limitations of Collection Initializers which can force you to partially implement the IEnumberable Interface, and proposes a couple of better alternatives which could be implemented in the language (or possibly as AOP).
• Writing Windows Shell Extension with .NET Framework 4 (C#, VB.NET) – Part 1 – All-In-One Code Framework Team take a look at creating a Windows Shell Extension using managed code, and explore a simple sample which adds an extension to the context menu.
• Silverlight, Out-Of-Browser and Multiple Windows – Mike Taulty explores the possibility for multiple windows in a Silverlight Application, looking at communication between multiple instances of an application to simulate MDI, and looks at the further complications of Out of Browser support.
• Windows Phone 7 Developer Tips and Tricks – Tim Heuer shares a collection of tips and tricks tweeted by Jeff Wilcox on the subject of Silverlight Development on the Windows 7 Phone
• Cloud + Device: Combine the power of Windows Azure, IE 9, and Windows Phone 7 – Part 1 , Part 2 & Part 3 – The Windows Azure Technical Forum Support Team discuss the importance of the Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Phone 7 releases last week to the vision for Azure, and how they support the principle ‘The cloud wants smarter devices’
• Refactoring Step-Wise vs Wrapping and Delegating – John Sonmez takes a look at two processes for refactoring code to remove static method dependencies, discussing which is the better technique

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