The Morning Brew

Update: Looks like I forgot to assign the Tags/Categories to this post, so some of you may have missed out on it. I’ve added them now - thanks to Dan Puzey for spotting it

Software

• Microsoft Project Code-Named ‘Houston’ CTP 1 (August 2010 Update) - The SQL Azure team announce the August 2010 CTP release of ‘Houston’ their light weight database management tool for SQL Azure. This CTP update features improved navigation and search, better visibility of database statistics, table, view and stored procedure designers. This preview version has also been deployed to all datacenters allowing you to experience better performance by using an instance local to your database.

Information

• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - Buffering - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts exploring the Reactive Extension for JavaScript with a look at the various techniques the framework provides for collecting values from observables and buffering them into an array which is then returned to your code.
• A quick primer on .NET web frameworks - Chad Myers gives an overview of some of the more common ASP.NET based web frameworks, looking briefly at what each does well and does badly.
• Chakra: Interoperability Means More Than Just Standards - Allen Wirfs-Brock discusses some of the types of decision the team implementing the Internet Explorer 9 JavaScript engine had to make relating to the standards compliant implementation they are creating
• MSDEV Video Series Highlights Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) - Bruce Kyle highlights a new series of videos from MSDev exploring some of the new key concepts in the Internet Explorer 9
• LightSwitch & Source Control & LightSwitch on the wire - Ayende rounds up this series of posts sharing his initial impressions of Visual Studio LightSwitch with a look at how LightSwitch’s generated code will work in Version Control system environments, and finds that if you include images in your data (and those images are large) then you are in for a wait while the LightSwitch screens download.
• Profilers, in-process side-by-side CLR instances, and a free test harness - David Broman looks at the requirement for profilers in .NET 4 which implement ICorProfilerCallback3 to be aware of side-by-side CLR instances, exploring what this Side-By-Side feature is, and how your profiling code can be made to accommodate it.
• Inspecting Local Root Lifetime - Sasha Goldshtein looks at the SOS debugger command !GCInfo which allows you to workout when local variables become active or inactive
• MVC 3 Preview 1 VS 2010 Template w/ Razor, Html 5 Boilerplate and OpenId Authentication | Adventures in HttpContext - Michael Hamrah shares an ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 Visual Studio 2010 project template which combines the Razor view engine with HTML5 Boilerplate from Paul Irish, and replaces the MembershipProvider with OpenID authentication implemented using DotNetOpenAuth.
• Experiments with WindowChrome - ‘ jwalk’ explores the WindowChrome WPF class included in the WPF Shell Integration Library which shipped as a part of the WPF Microsoft Ribbon Control, looking at some of the additional window styling that this class enables.
• An easier way to unit test INotifyPropertyChanged in Silverlight/WPF - Benjamin Day shares a simple class to help make testing IPropertyNotified implementations in classes much easier

Community

• Behind the scenes at mvcConf: How we ran a free virtual conference - Jon Galloway talks about his experience as one of the organisers of the very successful mvcConf virtual conference, discussing how the team organised the virtual event, the things that worked and the things that they could improve on for next time.
• Open Source? There’s an annual award for that… "Welcome to the 2010 Open Source Awards" - Greg Duncan highlights the Open Source Awards 2010, a virtual award organised by Packt Publishing, with projects nominated and voted on by you. Nominations are open unitl 17th September, so if you know of a worthy project get it nominated.

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Software

• SubMain acquires GhostDoc, releases new version, integrates it with CodeIt.Right - SubMain have taken on the GhostDoc tool, and have been further developing it to add in VB support, VS2010 support and done some re-architecting. Part of the agreement is that GhostDoc will continue to have a free version. Roland Weigelt, the orignial creator of Ghost Doc gives further details in his post The Future of GhostDoc
• Nova Commons - Nova Software make their first release of Nova Commons an application architecture for MVC which pulls together a number of common patterns along with a number of other open source frameworks and tools
• MsSqlSchemaDoc Version 4.2 Released - Henk Oberholzer announces version 4.2 of his Sql Server Schema Documentation tool. This release fixes problems with triggers linked to more than one event.

Information

• Free ASP.NET 4.0 beta hosting available - Gunnar Peipman highlights the availability of free ASP.NET 4.0 hosting from the team over at ORCSWeb. The hosting is free until October, allowing you to host your .NET 4 creations making use of SQL2008 and all the new toys in the .NET Framework
• Git For Windows Developers - Git Series - Part 1 - Jason Meridth starts a series looking at running the Git version control system on Windows machines. This first part runs through the setup and gets you up and running with your code in Git.
• Starting Out in Web, SharePoint or Mobile Dev? Why not Ramp Up? - Mike Ormond highlights the Ramp Up series of online training in Web, SharePoint and Mobile Development on the Microsoft platforms
• Why goto Still Exists in C# - Steve Wellens looks at s situation where he considers the goto statement to be vital to improve the readability and comprehension and simplicity of code.
• Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices - Utils Class - Chris Missal continues his Anti patterns series with a look at the somewhat nasty catch all of a Utils class, suggesting that you should actually create classes for the particular purposes of your utility functions.
• Abstract Class Vs Interface - Arati Kadi explores the differences between abstract classes and interfaces in this Code Project article
• Fluent Silverlight - Part 1 - Gabriel Schenker introduces the work he and Ray Houston have been doing on creating a fluent interface for Silverlight to help improve the easy of working with Silverlight and implementing the Model View View Model. The Second part (Fluent Silverlight - Part 2 - Binding Properties) of the series explores property binding in their framework
• NHibernate Mapping - <list/> - Ayende talks about the <list /> mapping type in NHibernate looking at its differences from other types of collection and looking at how the data is stored.
• Is Code Complete? - Saurabh_Saxena gives a brief run down of a number of common key software development principles illustrating a number of them with code examples.

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Software

• YUI 2.7.0 Released - The Yahoo User Interface library team announce the release of YUI 2.7.0, which brings with it new functionality in the form of the StyleSheet utility, improves support for IE8, fixes a load of bugs and promotes three components out of ‘beta’ status

Information

• New Release: Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight v2.0 (PRISM) - J.D. Meier announces the official release of the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight Version 2, often referred to as ‘Prism’. Also, Blaine Wastell shares some screenshots of the sample application from Prism V2 and links to a number of resources about the parts of this release, along with some video content.
• DDD: What Kind of Applications Is It Suited To? - Casey Charlton continues his DDD series with a look at how well Domain Driven Design fits with different types of application development.
• System.Linq.Enumerable.Aggregate - Better Know an Extension Method Part 1 - Chris Hampson gives a nice example rich introduction to the Aggregate Linq extension method.
• Implement Linq to Objects in C# 2.0 - Think Before Coding - Jérémie Chassaing explores how you can implement a lot of Linq like functionality in C#2, looking at how Linq works and how an implementation can be achieved in C#2
• Types of testing - Laila Bougria offers definitions for the various types of testing that can occur in a software project. Many people seem to get bogged down in the idea that testing == unit testing and then actually create ‘unit test’ which are actually different types of test (such as integration test, load test, etc)
• Fluent Interfaces: What am I missing? - David Starr considers what Fluent Interfaces are, and if they are actually useful in many contexts.
• GOF’s Adapters and Some Magic - Erich Ledesma examines the Gang of Four Adapter pattern, and shows how you can antomatically generate Adapter functionality to make implementation easier.
• C#: Extensions methods != Open classes - Mark Needham reminds us that extension methods do not mean our classes all instantly become Open Classes (in the sense of the Open Closed principle). One of the key missing features is the ability to override using extension methods.
• Reflection Speed Test - How slow is it really? - Grant Barrington looks at one of the common uses of reflection, to get a name for an enumeration value, and pits its performance against a number of other ways of achieving the same.
• The M Programming Language - Part 2 - Collections and Extents - Bart De Smet continues his series on the M programming language with a look at implementing collections and extents, comparing to implementations in C# and Linq.
• Effective Error Handling with WCF & REST - Rob Bagby looks at providing good error handling in WCF based REST services using HTTP status codes and error descriptions.

Community

• WebDD ‘09 - Reading - 18th April 2009 - The first of 2 clashing community events announced yesterday, Web DD is a Free conference to be hosted at Microsoft’s Reading campus. Like the other DeveloperDeveoperDeveloper events this is a Saturday event which will cover all things web and web related, and will have information about many of the things that are to be announced at Mix09. Speaker submissions for this event are now open
• Announcing the Alt.Net.UK ‘in the North’ Conference - Richard Fennell announces an ALT.NET event in the north of England, unfortunatly to be held on the same day as Web DD 09. This will be the usual Alt.Net style of an open spaces event with session planning taking place on the Friday evening and the main conference on the Saturday.
• Hereford Falls To The Mighty NxtGen Empire - Guy Smith-Ferrier announces the latest branch of the NxtGen usergroup to operate out of Hereford, with the first meeting being on the 17th May.
• Alt.net London Beers #6 - Sebastien Lambla announces the 6th Alt.Net London Beers event, a short open spaces session ina pub. This time round they event is sponsored by TeQUILA\UK and Thoughtworks

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Slightly later than planned, here’s today’s edition….

Information

• Creating a common generic and extensible NHiberate Repository - Chris Marisic shares his implementation of a Generic repository for use with NHibernate
• Hashing Algorithm Roundup - Beau Monday follows on from yesterdays encryption round up with a similar look at hashing algorithms.
• .NET Circuit Breakers - Tobin Harris looks at the concept of a Circuit Breaker in programming, and highlights the Lokad Shared Libraries which contain nice implementations of the Circuit breaker along with code for handling exceptions, retries, etc in an elegant way.
• ASP.NET 4.0: ViewStateMode…giving you more control over ViewState! - Scott Galloway, in continuation of his series of posts on ASP.NET 4.0 , explores some of the viewstate changes coming in ASP.NET 4.0
• Controlling Time - Patrick Kua looks at how you can provide time based tests with times you want by insulating your dependency on the actual time
• Parameter Order Should Be Consistent - Brendan Enrick writes about an annoyance I also discovered the other day about a lack on consistency in parameter order between some common (and related) exception constructors.
• Long division - Eric Lippert explores why when dividing an int by a long returns a long.
• Tales from High Memory Scenarios: Part 2 - Sasha Goldshtein continues his series on High memory use, looking further into the problems encountered, and talks about the use of the debugger to inspect what was going on.
• Much Ado About Monads – Maybe Edition - Matthew Podwysocki attempts to explain what Monads are and why we should care about them, exploring the origins in Haskell, and looking at implementations in F#
• Anonymous Methods, Lambdas, Confusion - Mike Taulty looks at the evolution of the language support for anonymous methods and lambda expressions, working from first principles through to the format we have available now.
• ConfigSectionHandler for Hierarchical configs - Rohit Gupta gives a (mostly code) run through of how you can easily build custom configuration section handlers to read nested config from the application configuration file.
• Annotating Code with .NET Reflector and Review Add-In - Ben Hall looks at using Reflector with a Reviewing add-in for performing code and API reviews
• ASP.NET MVC Source Code Now Available - The source code for the RC1 release of ASP.NET MVC is now available on the ASP.NET Codeplex site.
• User Experience Changes since Beta 2 - The Internet Explorer team talk about some of the User Interface refinements based on user feedback that went into the latest release of Internet Explorer 8 (RC1)
• ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RC1 and T4 Templates - Add Controller. - David Hayden looks into the new ASp.NET MVC IDE integration with T4 templating, providing nice templates for thinsg like controllers, etc
• SQL Server 2008 System Views poster is now available for download! - Aaron Bertrand highlights the availability of the SQL 2008 edition of the System Views poster which details the data contained and the relationships between the system views in the 2008 release of SQL Server

Community

• UK SQL Server User Group Event - Manchester - 5th Feb 2009 - The opening meeting of a new Manchester based SQL Server User group, with two talks, Tony Rogerson on Bits and Bobs to help the developer and DBA with TSQL and Martin Bell on Table Valued Parameters

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Problems with Ma.gnolia’s web service have delayed this mornings edition of the Morning Brew - as soon as I can build today’s edition I will post it up

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Software

• Minh T. Nguyen’s Mandelbrot Explorer 1.0 in Silverlight 2.0 with source code - I’m a sucker for a nice Mandelbrot Set, and Minh T. Nguyen has created a nice Silverlight application for exploring them, and provides details of how the application was created and full source too.

Information

• The Fat Controller - Ian Cooper explores a bad code smell in MVC projects, the Fat Controller Class (no, nothing to do with Thomas the Tank Engine), looking at how you can end up with Fat Controllers, the side effects and what you can do about them
• .NET Development on Linux - Eric Bergman-Terrell walks through the steps of getting up and running with developing .NET in Linux using a Virtual machine, and introduces some of the tools from the Mono project in this Dr Dobbs article.
• What make a good unit test? - Mark Needham explores what he considers makes a good unit test.
• The Private Life of a Public API - Jeff Moser talks about API design, best practices, and my favourite book (Framework Design Guidelines)
• Tip #32: Did you know… How to easily create your own project templates? - A nice tip about creating your own project templates in Visual Studio - had I know it was this easy I think I would already have made a bunch of my own
• The Weekly Source Code 28 - ASP.NET MVC Beta Obscurity - ModelState.IsValid is False because ModelBinder pulls values from RouteData - Scott Hanselman sees some weird behaviour in ASP.NET MVC due to the DefaultValueProvider, and goes exploring the source to see what is going on.
• Known Installation Issues With ASP.NET MVC - Phil Haack highlights two know installation issues with ASP.NET MVC and explains a work around in each case.
• F# + TestDriven.NET + xUnit.net = WIN - Matthew Podwysocki talks about some tools that he has been finding very useful when combined for developing F#
• Synchronization in WinForms with Lambdas - Patrick Steele shows a nice example of lambda expressions really improving the clarity of the code to deal with updating UI from different threads in WinForms applications.
• Isolation frameworks – lessons from the wild - Roy Osherove talks about some real world reactions to mocking / isolation frameworks based on his collection of students at a TDD master class. Some very good points raised here
• Fluent NHibernate’s AutoPersistenceModel: I Love it! - Chris van de Steeg talks about Fluent NHibernate’s AutoPersistenceModel which takes the pain out of object relational mapping using NHibernate by generating the mappings for you based on common conventions - looks really useful for quick projects.

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Today’s edition of the Morning Brew will be slightly delayed - a combination of factors (including me throwing my physical morning brew [mug of coffee] all over my desk, and the Ma.gnolia web service API timing out) have conspired against me this morning. If the WS doesn’t come back soon I’ll put the post together manually.

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Information

• Where TDD fails for me - Jimmy Bogard talks about some of his current problem areas when working in a test driven way.
• Multi-tenancy part 1: Strategy. - Mike Hadlow talks about Multi-Tenancy in Web applications, and considers what strategy will work well for his ECommerce project. Mike and I talked at length about this subject at the UK Alt.Net conference, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how he goes about doing it - can’t wait for part 2.
• Introducing IronPython - Harry Pierson looks at IronPython in this introductory article, looking at how it differs from C# and VB.NET and yet still allows you to make good use of your .NET experience.
• XML Documentation File For Your .Net Project - It’s Important - Shahar Y reminds us about the XML Documentation Generation in Visual Studio and how that helps with working with the code in the IDE.
• Spike Code and Source Control - K. Scott Allen makes some good sense about not throwing away any code by keeping all your spike code in source code control for a number of very good reasons
• Emergent Complexity - Justin Etheredge talks about complexity in code due to interactions between classes, in the hopes of making people consider complexity when writing their applications
• Constructors and Inheritance – Why is this still so painful? - Tom Hollander talks about the pain points of having lots of constructors that you also want in implemented in subclasses

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