The Morning Brew

50 editions of the Morning Brew already – time flies when you are reading far too many TechBlogs! I’m still playing catchup from the weekend so today is a little lighter than planned.

Software

• Firefox 3 beta 4 now available for download – Latest Beta of Firefox 3 is now available – I wonder how it stacks up agains IE8
• Graphics Debugger Visualizer. – A neat CodeProject sample, wich gives a functional Visual Studio Debugger visualiser for Graphics objects

Information

• Professional Visual Studio Extensibility – Finally Released – Keyvan Nayyeri announces the official release of his book on Extensibility
• Constructor Chaining – C# 411 shows a nice way of making all your constructors share code.
• Fitting Linq To Sql into a real world datalayer – Justin Etheredge looks at using Linq to Sql in his data tier, highlighting some of the common pitfalls
• A Question of Programming Ethics – Coding Horror highlights a horrific abuse of user supplied information
• Inside Vista Sidebar – A nice overview of the functionality provided in the Vista Sidebar for developers.
• Visitors and Multiple Dispatch – K. Scott Allen looks at implementing multiple dispatch with Expression<T>, but doesn’t get a particularly great outcome.
• Thoughts on ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 and Beyond – Phil Haack reviews the latest MVC beta, and looks towards future enhancements

Community

• Liverpool .Net Usergroup – 1st Meeting – Tonight marks the first meeting of the newly founded Liverpool .NET usergroup

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I’ve had a busy week, and so has the .NET community judguing by the amount of good stuff written this week – more of the weekends links will be posted tomorrow

Information

• Single-Entry, Single-Exit, Should It Still Be Applicable In Object-oriented Languages? – Peter Ritchie looks at an old software development principle, and considers its worth in OO code. There is some good discussion in the comments – I personally like a single exit from a function
• Write more empty lines! They will be read! – Philippe Leybaert talks about white space to enhance code readability.
• A few reasons to like NHibernate – Ayende reviews his favourite features of NHibernate
• Reasons to like NHibernate and ORM – Darren Stokes replies to Ayende’s post with some more details on some points.
• IoC Container, Unity and Breaking Changes Galore – Matthew Podwysocki reviews the changes in the latest release of Unity
• Recommended reading: IHttpContext and Versioning – Paul Stovell talks about the issues revolving about the recent changes to IHttpContext in the MVC Framework
• Watch out for Collection property Setters in ASP.NET Controls – Rick Strahl runs into a strange problem with collection properties on a server control.
• Caching with HttpContext.Cache and HttpRuntime.Cache – Keyvan Nayyeri talks about how you can easily get caching using System.Web.HttpRuntime.Cache rather than the cache instance in the HTTP Context
• A simple trick to code better and to increase testability – Patrick Smacchia talks about nesting level, and KISS to help make your code clearer, with a few nice examples.
• Advanced mocking: auto-interaction testing – Jimmy Bogard uses Rhino Mocks partial mock capabilities to help test changes to a legacy system with no unit tests
• DebuggerStepThroughAttribute – Craig Andera talks about an attribute to make your debugging a little simplier
• SOLID Principles – The start of a series on OOP principles, this post with some links to documents on the key principles – Single Responsibilities, Open Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, and Dependency Inversion

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OK, I’m now suffering from MIX08 content overload – there is an awful lot being blogged out of MIX08, and lots of it is interesting, but if I see any more posts of the same SilverLight samples and the same links I think I might go crazy. That said, a few MIX links made it into today’s brew.

Software

• Gopi 2.0 Released – Keyvan Nayyeri releases version 2 of his store and send email library
• The IE8 VPC – IE8 the easy way – Greg Duncan highlights a safer way to get IE8
• PowerShell Plus 1.0 Soft Launch – A PowerShell host and development library – 30 day trial, free for non-commercial use, and commercial licenses are $79

Information

• Link building 101 with ASP.Net MVC – Derik Whittaker shows three ways of building a link in ASP.NET MVC
• Just writing unit tests is not good enough – Matt Berther talks about TDD and writing tests before you write production code then using the IDE to help build the required code
• Forms Authentication with the MVC Framework – Mike Hadlow shows how traditional ASP.NET functionality still applies with the new ASP.NET MVC framework, showing how you can implement forms authentication MVC style
• SQL Server tools suck, do you agree? – Simon Sabin attempts to get support for the idea of moving the SQL Server tools out of the engine release cycle, so the tools can be improved and released more frequently
• MIX | Sessions – All the videos of sessions from MIX are being gathered here – so if all the blog chatter about the releases hasn’t put you off there is a wealth of information still to be gained.
• New drop of ASP.NET MVC Framework now available – Jeffrey Palermo gives his impressions on the new MVC framework features.
• Sensible Debugging in IE 8 – Rick Strahl talks about some of the developer features of IE8 – I wonder if the final release of IE8 will include the developer features as standard

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