The Morning Brew

Software

• MSDN Library for VS SP1 (April 2007 Edition) – MSDN Library update for VS 2005 SP1. This also includes Vista developer documentation, along with updates to the Windows Driver Kit documentation, SQL Server 2005 documentation, and many others.
• Transitionals – A WPF Framework for building transitions (think Powerpoint) between UI Views. This project uses parts of the Microsoft Acropolis research project.

Information

• Hacking Visual Studio to Use More Than 2Gigabytes of Memory – Steve Harman shows how you can allow Visual Studio to use up to 3GB of RAM – A useful trick if you have a large solution
• Grow Your Own SyncRoot – An interesting article on locking – explaining why the SyncRoot property exists
• Designing With Lambdas – Part III – Sergio Pereira takes another look at using Lambdas in your API to make the code simpler.
• Improve Web Application Performance – Adnan Aman looks at web application performance – mostly common knowledge, but useful if you’ve not considered this stuff before.
• Implementing Generic Caching – An interesting article looking at how to do locking to prevent multiple generation of cache items when the generation takes a long time.
• Prefer Composition Over Inheritance – Steve Rowe looks at composition and inheritance, and explains why composition is often better
• MVC Storefront, Part 6: Catalog Completion and Initial UI – Latest instalment of Rob Conery’s MVC tutorial screencast. In this part Rob starts looking at the UI, talks a bit more about the Repository pattern and implements lazy loaded lists,

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Information

• From zero to logging with System.Diagnostics in 15 minutes – Josh Twist looks at the trace functionality provided in the .NET Framework
• Q: Is IQueryable the Right Choice for Me? – Bart De Smet looks at the IQueryable interface, and alternatives to it
• Managed Extensibility Framework – Krzysztof Cwalina talks about the creation of a new team responsible for providing extensibility within the framework products, and solicits for ideas of what to allow extensibility on.
• Making Spec# a Priority – Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at the need for Spec#
• Inversion of Control, ASP.NET MVC and Unit Testing – An interesting article on the use of IOC to help with unit testing ASP.NET MVC controllers well.
• MVC Membership Starter Kit – 1.2 – Troy Goode updates his MVC Membership Starter Kit to support the latest interim release of the ASP.NET MVC
• Microsoft presents The Ultimate Steal – If you are a student then this is another fantastic offer for you – get MS Office Ultimate 2007 for £13 for a year license, or £39 to own it be quick – only 1 day, 15hours left….
• Looking at the finalization queue – The ASP.NET Debugging blog continues from their last post on finalization by looking at the contents of the Finalization Queue
• TestDriven.Net 2.13: Support for NUnit 2.4.7 – Jamie Cansdale introduces NUnit RowTest support in TestDriven.NET
• LINQFarm: Understanding IEnumerable<T>, Part I – Charlie Calvert looks into the IEnumerable<T> interface in the first part of this LINQ series

Humour

• Extreme Patterns with Oren – Glenn Block posts a video of a discussion with Oren Eini (Ayende) where he expresses some interesting views on how you can get developers to learn about patterns

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For the first time in a long time the preparation of the Morning Brew has been accompanied with coffee – happy days

Software

• GData .Net Assembly 1.1.4.0 Released. Now .Net Framework 2, VS (2005) Templates, and support for Google Contacts – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of a new GData library which has been updated for .NET 2.0 and also has support for the Google Contacts.

Information

• Foundations of Programming – pt 7 – Back to Basics: Memory – Karl Seguin takes an in-depth look at memory – interesting reading
• A First Look At Machine.Migrations – Jacob Lewallen introduces the Rails-like migrations that are a part of his ‘Machine’ utility project.
• Keyboard Jedi on Vista x64 – James Kovacs looks at how you can change the target platform without recompiling the assembly.
• Variable Scoping in Anonymous Delegates in C# – Rick Strahl writes about Scoping within delegates, and ends up becoming more comfortable with closures in Javascript as a side effect.
• A Smarter (or Pure Evil) ToString with Extension Methods – Scott Hanselman revisits an old ToString method for displaying more information about your objects.
• CHAPTER 4: Learning and adapting – Dan Bunea continues releasing chapters of his Agile mini-book. This part looks at learning
• Test Data Builders Refined – Jan Van Ryswyck takes a look at Test Data Builders (also know as Object Mothers), and how fluent interfaces can be used for building test data.
• Understanding when to use a Finalizer in your .NET class – The ASP.NET Debugging blog talks about one of the more difficult parts of .NET, Finalization
• ASP.NET Page Life Cycle – Vital information for anyone developing ASP.NET applications – if you are not already familiar with it you really should read up on it.
• NHibernate and Castle Active Record (Part 1) – Gabriel Schenker starts a series on using NHibernate and the Castle Project Active Record implementation
• The Prism team and how we develop – Glenn Block talks a little about how the distributed team who develop Prism work, and some of their practices.
• xUnit.net Goes 1.0 and Unit Testing F# – Matthew Podwysocki, now blogging over on CodeBetter.com, talks about xUnit 1.0 and F# unit testing
• Hack: Parallel MSBuilds from within the Visual Studio IDE – Scott Hanselman moves his attention to Visual Studio in his quest to make best use of multi-core processors

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