January 2011

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #781

Posted by on 31 Jan 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

I had a splendid weekend at the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 9 conference in Reading – it was a great event, with wonderful content and excellent people. I will be posting a DDD9 link round up later this week (to give people some time to blog about it – if you do get in touch).

Software

  • Announcing PostSharp 2.1 CTP 1 – Gael Fraiteur announces the first CTP release of PostSharp 2.1, the .NET Aspect Oriented Programming Framework. This new version brings considerable build time performance improvements making builds of projects which utilise PostSharp considerably quicker.
  • Hobocopy Lives! – Craig Andera has been able to give some attention to an old project of his – HoboCopy is a RoboCopy clone which utilises the Volume Shadow Copy service to allow it to copy locked files.
  • Debug Analyzer.NET – A debugging utility, written in .Net, for .Net developers, to help debug .Net applications – Greg Duncan highlights Debug Analyzer.NET, a tool hwhich helps take the pain out of performing analysis on memory dumps and allows you to use pre-defined analysis routines against your own memory dumps to help identify problems.
  • Microsoft Research Released Windows Phone 7 + Cloud Services SDK (Codename – Project Hawaii) – Avkash Chauhan announces the January release of Project Hawaii, an SDK combining the power of the Windows Phone 7 with that of Windows Azure. This SDK contains features which help aid interaction with the cloud. A February release is also planned which will bring OCR and Text To Speech support to your mobile applications.
  • GPS Emulator for Windows Phone 7 – Joey deVilla highlights the Windows Phone GPS Emulator, a wonderful looking tool to help develop Windows Phone applications which utilise the GPS from the comfort of the Windows Phone Emulator.

Information

  • Code metrics from the command line – Cameron Skinner highlights the release of the CodeMetrics power toy which brings an .exe tool which can calculate the code metrics statistics that the Visual Studio IDE is capable of doing, allowing you to automate. In this post Cameron shows off its capabilities
  • Introducing RouteMagic – Phil Haack has bundled up all his Routing helpers, and extensions for both ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET into a single NuGet package providing a really easy way to get this functionality into your projects.
  • OData and Windows Phone 7 – Mike Ormond walks through the consumption of OData feeds in the Windows Phone 7 Platform showing the process in a step by step fashion supplemented by plenty of helpful screenshots.
  • Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 41 – How query expressions work & Part 42 – More optimization – Jon Skeet (who it was nice to meet briefly at DDD9) continues his fantastic EduLinq series with a look at how Query Expressions work in Linq, and also explores further the optimisations that are possible following up from comments on a previous post.
  • Nancy, the little community-powered framework that could – Andreas Håkansson talks about the success of his Nancy project discussing the features that have been added by the community, and puts out an appeal for someone to design a logo for the project.
  • Internals of Exception Handling – Abhishek Sur continues his series of posts looking at the internals of various features of C# and the .NET framework taking a look in todays post at how exception handling works at the Intermediate Language (IL) level.

Community

  • #DDDHack Competition at DDD9 – Rachel Collier shares the details of a competition unveiled at DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 9 involving a basic Windows Phone application and your creativity. The task at hand is to add any feature you like to the base application and submit it back. The competition winner will recieve a Windows Phone 7 Device.

The Morning Brew #780

Posted by on 28 Jan 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Scale-out computing on DevLabs – Somasegar announces three new projects hosted under the DevLabs banner which make up a part of the Technical Computing Initiative. All are CTP releases, and build on .NET and Visual Studios capabilities for working with and debugging on HPC. the projects are TPL DataFlow (which builds on Axum), Dryad (support compute intensive applications) and Sho (providing interactive data analysis capabilities) are all available to download via connect now.
  • RocketSVN fly’s to freedom. RocketSVN Server/RocketSVN for VS now free (as in free) and open sourced too! – Greg Duncan highlights a change in licensing and price for RocketSVN, a full featured Subversion server and Visual Studio addin, along with the release of the full source code as open source.

Information

  • Spot the defect: Bad comparisons, part three – Eric Lippert continues his series of posts looking at bugs due to bad comparison implementations with another look at implementing string length comparison, and looks at some of the fringe cases in this comparison where it can fail.
  • C#/.NET Little Pitfalls: The Dangers of Casting Boxed Values – James Michael Hare kicks off a parallel series of posts to his ‘Little Wonders’ series. ‘Little Pitfalls’ looks at some of the things you can do that are dangerous / may trip you up. In this first post of the series he look at the potential problems in type conversions and casting.
  • Announcing SpecsFor: Yet Another BDD Framework For .NET! – Matt Honeycutt announces the forthcoming release of SpecsFor, a BDD testing framework for .NET which focuses on the developer experience rather than bridging the gap between requirements and tests. The first release of the project is immanent, however before then Matt wants your feedback about the direction of the API for writing specifications
  • Dynamic V Strongly Typed Views – ‘Ricka’ takes a look at both strongly typed and dynamic views in ASP.NET MVC3, showing how both care implemented, and sharing a sample project illustrating both types.
  • Web Page Extension To Associate Domain Models With View Page – Sreejith Gopinathan shares a base page class for WebForms development which brings ASP.NET MVC like model class support, providing EditorFor, ModelState validation, and strongly typed models to the world of WebForms.
  • The Big Rewrite – K. Scott Allen discusses the thorny issue of the ‘Big Rewrite’, responding to a post from Steve Blank on this subject. Good discussions in the comments to this one.
  • Stop Thinking About It. Let It Happen. – Rob Conery follows on with the rewrite discussion, sharing his views on the subject, and also discussing writing software as a creative process.
  • SQLite on WP7 – Rudi Grobler follows on from his look at the Sterling Object Database for Windows Phone 7 with a look at using SQLite as a relational database on the Windows Phone Platform.
  • Using DbContext in EF Feature CTP5 Part 1: Introduction and Model & Part 2: Connections and Models – Arthur Vickers of the Entity Framework team kicks off a new 12 part series looking at the new API for using DbContext features contained in the CTP5 release. The first post in the series outlines the model that is going to be used in all the subsequent examples, with part two exploring how to connect to the the database in the various ways of working with Entity Framework.
  • HTML5 & CSS3 in Visual Studio 2010 SP1 – The Visual Web Developer Team discuss the intellisense and validation support introduced in Visual Studio 2010 SP1 for HTML5 and CSS 3.
  • Imperative vs. LINQ Performance on WP7 – Bil Simser highlights a nice post from Jesse Liberty on Imperative, Linq and fluent programming to populate list box entries, and builds on its content to explore the performance of each option.

The Morning Brew #779

Posted by on 27 Jan 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Information

  • How Do I Use StructureMap with ASP.NET MVC 3 – Steve Smith looks at how you can use the StructureMap Inversion of Control container in your ASP.NET MVC 3 sites, looking at where to handle the registrations, and how to bolt the container into the ASP.NET MVC pipeline
  • Clean and clear configuration with StructureMap – ‘thangchung’ is also exploring StructureMap, looking at the best way to create the configuration code to keep the intent clear
  • Basic JavaScript Part 8: Namespaces – Jan Van Ryswyck continues his series on JavaScript with a look at the use and implementation of namespacing to help organise code and avoid naming collisions.
  • Reimplementing LINQ to Objects: Part 40 – Optimization – Jon Skeet continues with the wrapping up of this series on re-implementing the core Linq To Objects technology. In this post Jon explores and discusses the tricky topic of optimisation of his Linq to Objects implementation.
  • Date/Time Support in NHibernate – James Kovacs takes a look at how NHibernate handles the plethora of date and time types that are available in databases and frameworks, and explores some of the issues with working with local vs UTC time. Source is available for the samples.
  • HTML5 Blizzard: Full Hardware Acceleration in Action – Jason Weber discusses the construction of the Internet Explorer 9 Christmas Demo, looking at the consituent parts of the demo, and discusses the performance characteristics of the demo.
  • RavenDB vs MongoDB – Why I don’t usually bother – Rob Ashton answers one of the common questions he gets asked about the differences between the MongoDB and RavenDB document databases, and throws CouchDB in for good measure in the comparisons.
  • Taking Sterling for a Test-Drive – Rudi Grobler takes a look at using the Sterling object oriented database implementation on the Windows Phone 7 platform, sharing a simple example of it in use.
  • Back to Basics: Mock Eliminating Patterns – John Sonmez continues looking at unit testing and the removal of the requirement for mocking types in tests. In this post John explores reducing the dependencies of classes to help reduce the need for mocking.
  • Adding collections to a custom ConfigurationSection – Derek Fowler goes back to basics and looks at the confusing realm of collections of values in custom configuration sections, exploring the subject by way of a worked example.
  • It’s Design – K. Scott Allen discusses encapsulating logic from if statements into properties, and how this leads towards a better more OO design for your code, and discusses some of the common objections to this practice.

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