The Morning Brew

Trying out some slightly different formatting of the post today – hopefully it might render better in some of the more difficult RSS Readers

Software

• P/Invoke Library – VS2005 & 2008 Add-in – A Visual Studio Add in to make it much easier to get the method signatures for P/Invoke calls.

Information

• Workflow Foundation 101 – Maurice de Beijer shows how Windows Work Flow Foundation can help with process intensive business applications
• Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes – Jakob Nielsen outlines 11 common mistakes that reduce usability.
• Writing Better Code — Keepin’ it Cohesive – Mathew Cochran shows step by step refactoring of a code sample to attempt to increase its cohesion
• Five Different Ways To Return Data From One Table Which Doesn’t Exists In another Table – Denis Gobo shows some different ways of solving the same problem – I think most developers will know the first 3, but the SQL 2005 specific ones may be new to many.
• Understanding IoC Container – Part 2 – Sean Feldman continues his series on Inversion of Control
• WPF: A Beginner’s Guide – Part 5 of n – Sacha Barber continues his series with an article on WPF DataBinding.
• Manage your ASP.NET Web.config Files using NAnt – Using Nant to create your configuration at build time, based on templates – this article will show you how, including making different configurations for different machines.
• Do try…catch blocks hurt runtime performance? – One of the commonly cited mantras is ‘Don’t use exceptions apart from in truly exceptional cases’ and here is why
• Implementing Table Inheritance in SQL Server – Inheritance isn’t just for our OO langauges, similar effects can be obtained in the database, as Jeff Smith shows in this article
• Kigg – Building a Digg Clone with ASP.NET MVC Part – 1 – The first in a series by Kazi Manzur Rashid about building Kigg using some of the latest bits of the .NET framework
• Test Supported Development (TSD) is NOT Test Driven Development (TDD) – Troy DeMonbreun talks about how a reduced set of the Test Driven Approach can still give many of the benefits.

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Software

Nevron .NET Vision Q4 2007 Released – Nevron announce the latest release of their commercial data visualisation components

Microsoft SharedView Beta2 – This beta screen sharing software has been generating quite a buzz this week.

Information

Creating Your Own Provider Framework – Detailed run through of creating you own providers in the MS way.

Monorail Hands-On – Using MonoRail to build a sample application against the NorthWind database

Incorrect Results With Path.Combine – Hilton Giesenow demonstrates a case where Path.Combine might not do what you think it does – this is good to know, as I make quite a bit of use of Path.Combine

.NET 3.5 Client Product Roadmap – ScottGu gives an outline of the future for .NET Client Product developers

Using Localization in ASP.NET – A quick run through of using Resource files in ASP.NET applications

Tools for Digging Deeper Into .NET – A brief round up of some must have .NET tools – all well worth a look if you don’t already use them

Microsoft DreamSpark – If you are a student in one of the countries supported, this is an excellent opportunity to get full versions of Windows 2003 Server, Visual Studio Pro 2005/8, Expression studio, SQL Server Developer Edition. Its a shame I’m not a student any more – this is a great offer.

Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (And some workarounds) – Following the release of the Office Document specifications, Joel Spolsky reviews some of the reasons they are so complex

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Software

Graffiti 1.0 Released – Telligent release Graffiti CMS, with free licenses (3 users) for not for profits, and commercial licenses starting at $399

Rhino Mocks 3.4 Released – Oren Eini (Ayende) announces the release of version 3.4 of this mocking framwork – and is already planning 3.5

Information

IoC and the Unity Application Block – Matthew Podwysocki gives an introduction to Unitiy, the Microsoft IoC project

Unity Application Block Feb 2008 CTP – Kurt Claeys ports a Spring.NET example to Microsoft’s IoC CTP

Application Architecture, Software Development Frameworks, ORM, MVC/P and the Holy Grail – Part 1 – Tim Huffam talks about some of the key technology decisions that need to be made before you start any project

The custom MSBuild task cookbook – A step by step guide to building custom MSBuild Tasks, with lots of screenshots

Data Caching Using Custom Attributes – An example of how you can cache method calls based on attributes specifying the cache settings

A tale of Parallel.For in ParallelFX – A real comparison of parallel and non-parallel code doing matrix multiplication, including some of the pitfalls

SQL: If Exists Update Else Insert – Jeremiah Clark gives a good tip on making the Save stored procedure a little more efficient

Kigg – A Digg like application developed in ASP.NET MVC – Kazi Manzur Rashid has been busy building a sample application for the .NET MVC framework – using MVC, LINQ to SQL, ASP.NET Ajax, VSTest and NUunit, and Rhino mocks – along with powering a live site it certainly looks worth a look.

Sound of one man testing – Derik Whittaker talks about the effect of having one person doing TDD within a non TDD team

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