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The Morning Brew #559

Posted by Chris Alcock on 15 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

Information

Community

  • UK AzureNET User Group: Phoenix from the Flames - The UK Azure Usergroup revive themselves for an evening of talks attached to the end of the UK TechDays event being held in Thursday 15th April in the Fulham Broadway, London Vue Cinema. The UK TechDays week is shaping up to be a real good one with lots on offer beyond the official content.
  • Watch Microsoft MIX10 Live Keynotes March 15 & 16 - ‘Dr. Z’ highlights the live streaming of the Keynote presentations from MIX10 from speakers Bill Buxton, Scott Guthrie, Dean Hachamovitch and Joe Belfore. The keynotes kick off at 9am PDT (GMT-9)
  • Measuring real-world application usage in Visual Studio 2010 - Tomorrow sees the next Linked In .NET User Group virtual event which sees Terry Clancy and Sebastian Holst talking on the application analytic capabilities of Visual Studio 2010, and related 3rd party projects. The event starts at 11am PST

The Morning Brew #558

Posted by Chris Alcock on 12 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • ASP.NET MVC 2 Released! - Phil Haack announces the RTM release of ASP.NET MVC 2. This release will work for both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2010 RC (although it a little more tricky to install there). Scott Guthrie also weighs in on the release with his announcement post ‘ASP.NET MVC 2 Released‘ talking about some of the key features of the V2 release, and Scott Hanselman highlights a number of resources to help you learn more in his ASP.NET MVC 2 Released announcement post.
  • WikiPlex v1.3 Released - Matt Hawley announces the latest release of WikiPlex, the Wiki engine that runs the Wiki on CodePlex. This release comes with all new and improved documentation, along with support for embedding Channel 9 videos and syntax highlighting for PowerShell code.
  • Policies for PostSharp 1.5 Legacy - Gael Fraiteur outlines the support plans for the existing free PostSharp 1.5 release now that the PostSharp library is moving to being a commercial library.

Information

  • Code Bubbles - A very interesting coding UX - John V. Petersen highlights a research project from Andrew Bragdon looking at an alternative ‘way’ for the IDE to operate. Check out the video demo of ‘Code Bubbles’ for a glimpse of a possible future for the programmers best weapon the IDE
  • A Visual Look At The LINQ SelectMany Operator - Justin Etheredge takes a look at the very powerful SelectMany LINQ operator illustrating the way it works using a series of simple diagrams, and talking about how it is different from other LINQ operators
  • IHttpModule Gotchas - The Init() Method Can Get Called Multiple Times
    - Dominic Pettifer talks abotu the HttpModule implementation in ASP.NET and highlights the fact that multiple instances of a single HttpModule can exist in your applications, meaning that the Init method may be called multiple times, and shows how you can use a double check locking strategy to avoid doing unnecessary Init work multiple times.
  • A Thoroughly Modern Developer - Peter Gillard-Moss discusses what he considers to be the key traits for a good developer in this new decade, casting out the stereotypes of old and introducing his ‘Thoroughly Modern Developer’
  • Advanced Castle Windsor - generic typed factories, auto-release and more - Krzysztof Kozmic takes a look at a simple example of a Command-Handler messaging application to explore having generic typed factories returned from the Windsor container, and discusses automatic releasing of transitive components.
  • WebForms vs MVC (again) - Karl Seguin discusses the points made in the latest ASP.NET Website video on choosing between ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC, discussing each of the benefits put forward for both technologies in the videos
  • Do not name a class the same as its namespace, Part Two - Eric Lippert continues his discussion of why it is bad to have a type with the same name as its containing namespace with an example about generated code, and how the code many generators create can easily be broken by bad naming.
  • Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - Composing Callbacks - Matthew Podwysocki continues his exploration of the JavaScript Reactive Extensions with a real example building on the concepts previously discussed. This worked example looks at combining Ajax calls using callbacks and the Reactive Extensions to perform translations using the Microsoft Translator API.
  • Entity Framework 4 - Modified Self-Tracking Entity framework that supports Code-Only and Persistence Ignorance - Adriaan de Beer shares some extended templates based on the Entity Frameworks standard Self Tracking templates, which add a number of extensions to the base offering, and shows them in use in a sample project

The Morning Brew #557

Posted by Chris Alcock on 11 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Visual Studio 2010 Professional - $250 off and get an MSDN Essentials subscription offer - Eric Ligman highlights the online availability of a good offer to get you Visual Studio 2010 and a 12 month MSDN Essentials subscription for $549, which seems like a pretty good deal, although I’m unsure if you can order it from outside the US.
  • Start-PowerShellPoint - John Robbins shares a neat looking PowelShell script which provides the core functionality of presentation software (ala PowerPoint) from the comfort of your console window.
  • Migrating ASP.NET MVC 1.0 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM - Eilon Lipton announces the release of his ASP.NET MVC Application Project Upgrader tool which will now take your ASP.NET MVC project up to the ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM level (which has yet to be released).
  • Deleporter: Cross-Process Code Injection for ASP.NET - Steve Sanderson shares a neat experimental library which provides a means for an external process to feed code into an ASP.NET application, intended for integration testing to allow the tests to set up mock data, etc in the ASP.NET from the test runner process.

Information

  • We moved your ASP.NET website cheese, in a good way - Scott Hanselman announces the first in a series of updates to the ASP.NET Website, refocusing the site on the core concepts of getting started, getting the software, hosting your application and participating in the community. Another Microsoft website to get a make over yesterday was theMicrosoft TechNet site
  • When "Activator" is just to slow - ‘JoeGeeky’ takes a look at the relative performance of the Activator for creating new instances of objects, a common use case in IoC container, and other reflection based code, and shows how better performance can be obtained using lambda expressions.
  • Strengthening your domain: Encapsulated collections - Jimmy Bogard continues his discussions on building better domain models with a look at why in general you don’t want to expose collections as it affords the consumer of your code too much flexibility, and shows how you can better express your domain model’s intent by encapsulation.
  • Getting Started With CI Using Hudson For Your .NET Projects - Bob Cravens talks us through the process of getting up and running using the Java powered Husdon Continuous Integration Server to build and manage .NET projects in this nice screenshot rich step by step post.
  • POCO Template Code Generation Options - Sheetal Gupta of the Entity Framework Design Team talks about the recent release of templates for working with Entity Framework and Plain Old CLR Objects (POCO), and set out various options for taking these template forward, soliciting community feedback on the team’s ideas.
  • FluentPath: a fluent wrapper around System.IO - Bertrand Le Roy sharse a Fluent interface implementation which wraps the common and dated System.IO API functions. Full code is available and licensed under a BSD license.
  • Debugging .Net framework source code within Windbg - Naveen shows how you can debug into the .NET Framework source from your own applications using the Windbg debugger, allowing you to set breakpoints in the framework code
  • Programming Practices: Part 1 - Watching from a distance - Brian Harry begins a series of posts talking about how he codes, in this first part talking about the way he tends to work and some of his core principles and techniques, and in his second post ‘Programming Practices: Part - Thoughts on TDD‘, he shares his thoughts on Test Driven Development, discussing how he dislikes Test Driven Development mechanisms, however likes the overall aims of TDD. Despite its seemingly inflammatory statement this is a very interesting read to hear one of the other sides to the argument.
  • Guest Post: Using IronRuby and .NET to produce the "Hello World of WPF" - Eric Nelson hosts another guest post on his blog, this time from Edd Morgan who talks through creating a simple WPF application using IronRuby

The Morning Brew #556

Posted by Chris Alcock on 10 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Open Source WPF UML Design tool - Omar AL Zabi shares a WPF based editor for the plantuml UML diagram generation tool which allows you to create nice UML diagrams using a simple language. The editor contributes with a text editor, and easy creation and management of the graphic representation generation. Full details of the implementation and source are available in his Code Project article PlantUML Editor: A fast and simple UML editor using WPF

Information

Community

The Morning Brew #555

Posted by Chris Alcock on 09 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

Information

  • Developer Certification WTF? - ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin discusses the thorny issue of Developer Certification, talking about some of the inherent problems with the current model of certification in our industry, comparing with other industries, and considering if internships actually may provide a solution.
  • Using Copy-On-Write In Multi-threaded Code To Reduce Locking Overhead - Davy Brion explores the ‘copy on write’ method of making a thread safe collection with lower locking overhead than the traditional lock on read and lock on write approach, discussing some of the more difficult issues with this way of working.
  • VcsSurvey - Martin Fowler follows on from his recent Version Control discussions by sharing some survey results on peoples satisfaction with the various version control systems in common use currently, giving some idea of wider feelings on the subject.
  • WPF and Text Blurriness, now with complete Clarity - Scott Hanselman talks about the improvements to text clarity in the latest WPF build, comparing its graphical output to that of the .NET 3.5 edition showing that while the differences in text rendering are small, they do make a big difference.
  • CQRS Performance Engineering: Read vs Read/Write Models - Derick Bailey looks at one of the useful side effects of Command Query Responsibility Separation, that in addition to providing easier to work with single purpose code, it also makes engineering the application for performance much easier.
  • Introducing the Earthquake Locator - A Bing Maps Silverlight Application, part 1 - Bobby Diaz looks at consuming Bing Maps in a Silverlight application and combining it with a data feed of earthquakes and volcanoes. Full source is provided for this worked example.
  • How to Create a Powershell 2.0 Module and Cmdlet with Visual Studio 2010 (Screencast included) - Saveen Reddy shares a step by step blog post and screen cast exploring building a module for use in Powershell 2, illustrating with a simple example module which shows the core concepts.
  • Building Hello MEF - Part IV - DeploymentCatalog - Glenn Block continues his series of posts looking at building his PDC HelloMEF dashboard with part 4 upgrading to the latest Silverlight 4 MEF bits and looking at the DeploymentCatalog, and Part V takes a look at moving the application to a View Model pattern.

Community

  • "Leading-edge Web Development with ASP.NET MVC" with Steven Sanderson - Tuesday 11th May sees Steve Sanderson deliver his talk on Web Development in ASP.NET MVC at DotNetDevNet hosted at The University of the West of England in Bristol. Steve is a well known speaker and author on the ASP.NET MVC framework, and this is sure to be a useful event.
  • Lessons learned from building the NHibernate Profiler - Ayende shares the video recording of his recent SkillsMatter session on ‘Lessons Learned from building the NHibernate Profiler’ giving some insight on the product, his development methodology, and the design of the products infrastructure

The Morning Brew #554

Posted by Chris Alcock on 08 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Pex and Moles become Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools - Nikolai Tillmann gives an update on some exciting news for the Pex project, the move to becomming a Visual Studio 2010 power tool including a re-grading of which versions / dditions of Visual Studio it will run in, and updated licensing.
  • New drop of the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) available - Bart De Smet announces a new release of the Reactive Extensions for .NET which includes support for the .NET 4 RC as well as .NET 3.5
  • Introducing Typemock Test Lint - Roy Osherove highlights a new tool from TypeMock which provides as you type lint style warnings for your test code. Operating against all the common .NET testing frameworks and running on VS2010 this free tool will help you write better tests.

Information

Community

The Morning Brew #553

Posted by Chris Alcock on 05 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

Information

  • Creating and Sharing Project & Item Templates - Aaron Marten of the Visual Studio Platform Team talks about new features of Visual Studio 2010 which allow for easier use and sharing of Template for Projects and items
  • Events get a little overhaul in C# 4, Part I: Locks - Chris Burrows talks about a C#4 language change to how events are handled by the language / framework, showing how locks used to be used when attaching and removing event handlers, and talks about how it has changed in C#4
  • Too much reuse - Eric Lippert gives some background on why rethrowing exceptions using ‘throw ex’ is bad due to the way exceptions are not completely immutable.
  • ASP.NET 4.0 Part 10, A Handful Of Little Things - Dan Maharry looks at a number of the smaller changes in ASP.NET 4 as a part of his series, exploring new Redirects, Inline HTML Encode, and the inclusion of the chart controls.
  • ASMX and JSON - Common mistakes and misconceptions - Dave Ward talks about the ASMX web service, and how, despite preconceptions, it can be used to serve JSON formatted data for use in JavaScript. Prashant Khandelwal illustrates this quite nicely with a look at consuming an ASP.NET Web Service in his post ‘Calling ASP.NET Web Service Using Jquery - Part I
  • There’s no such thing as a "JSON Object" - Ben Alman sets the record straight about the meaning of JSON, what it is, and how its defined
  • MEF will not get easier, its’ cool as ICE - Maarten Balliauw talks about the three key concepts / keywords in the Managed Extensibility Framework , Import, Export and Compose, which make up the initials ‘ICE’, showing simple examples of each phase.
  • NHibernate: Mappings path - Fabio Maulo illustrates the NHibernate Mapping structures showing how they interact with each other and the various functionalities of NHibernate in this useful diagram
  • Tamper Proofing - an implementation (Part 3) - Paul Mason gives a recap of the work he undertook to add tamper proofing to NCloak, and talks about some of the problems he ran into when debugging
  • Using Mongo With LINQ - Rob Conery talks about the work he has been doing (with some help from others) on creating a Linq supporting C# driver/provider for the MongoDB Document Database, showing off the features of the provider with a simple example
  • Using Reactive Extensions in Silverlight - Pencho Popadiyn explores the use of the Reactive Extensions in Silverlight, as possible in the .NET 4 release. This post covers some of the theory behind, along with showing Silverlight related examples to illustrate the concepts.
  • Combining Higher Order Functions in C# - Mike Hadlow performs some functional programming gymnastics with C# functions which gets him under way with his Windsor CurryFacility implementation
  • Poll: IoC Containers for .NET - Oliver Sturm is canvassing the community on their choice of and opinions of Inversion of Control containers for .NET via a simple poll - spare him 2 minutes to fill it in, and then have a read of the results if you are interested

Community

  • Video of C4MVC talk on MvcContrib Portable Areas - Jeffrey Palermo highlights the availability of the video of his C4MVC virtual event presentation from late last month on ASP.NET MVC MvcContrib Portable Areas.
  • Community For MVC.Net - March Meeting - The Community For MVC.Net (C4MVC) also have their next virtual event planned for 17th March at 1PM CST where Brad Wilson will be presenting on Templated Helpers and Testing in ASP.NET MVC

The Morning Brew #552

Posted by Chris Alcock on 04 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

Information

  • Message-Based Systems for Maintainable, Asynchronous Development - Billy McCafferty looks at the concepts and techniques behind message passing and looks at how it is a natural fit for asynchronous problems.
  • Behavior Driven Development (BDD) with SpecFlow and ASP.NET MVC - Steve Sanderson talks about the history and background to Behaviour Driven Development, the types of specifications that you can create using these techniques, and looks at using SpecFlow, WatiN, NUnit and ASP.NET MVC to provide a pure .NET BDD solution.
  • Challenge: Robust enumeration over external code - Ayende posts an interesting (and simple looking) problem base on enumeration, which seems to be significantly more complex than it appears based on the comments - interesting reading.
  • 1 Simple Step for Commanding in Silverlight - Christopher Bennage talks about the Silverlight 4 implementation of Commanding, a technique borrowed from Silverlight’s Big Brother WPF, and shows how this same technique can be implemented using his Caliburn framework.
  • What is Projection? - Chris Missal puts a pattern name to a code implementation face with a look at projection from one list of types to another, showing a traditional C# implementation along with a LINQ based example.
  • Lambda Expressions: Join - Deborah Kurata takes a look at the Join methods use in Lambda expressions allowing an easy way of combining two lists of items into one, illustrating with an example in both C# and VB.NET
  • Is MSpec an Internal DSL?…And is that okay? - Richard Cirerol follows on from a comment on a recent post of his, discussing the types of Domain Specific Language, looking at what type of DSL MSpec is, and looking at other examples of DSLs we probably use without noticing.
  • .NET Remoting Events Explained - Silic0re09 takes a look at implementing events over a .NET Remoting interface, showing a code example illustrating both server and client, along with some best practices for eventing over remoting.
  • Tips to Optimise asp.net Web Applications - Prasenjit Das gathers together a number of tips for improving the performance of your applications, focusing on Web Applications, but there are plenty of tips there which are relevant for most types of application.

Community

  • UK Events Of Interest (March\April 2010) - Dan Maharry highlights a number of interesting .NET related events occurring across the UK this and next month.
  • Ok official call for inter … - Rory Becker uses Twitter to identify is there is demand for a .NET Usergroup in the Poole / Bournemouth area - If you are, or know people who might be please help him spread the word.

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