The Morning Brew

A large edition of the Morning Brew, as I try to catch up with the weeks happenings. Looking forward to getting back to normal tomorrow.

Software

• ASP.NET MVC Source Refresh Preview – ScottGu announces the latest release of source for the ASP.NET MVC framework. This is not the latest preview release, it sites between Preview 2 and 3. More details in his post.
• Updates: Process Explorer v11.13, Process Monitor v1.31, and Handle v3.31 – A few more updates to the SysInternals tools
• Prism: Fourth drop published – Ezequiel Jadib announces the latest release of the Prism WPF Composite UI Application Block, which now includes a quick start guide and numerous other changes
• Coder Journal’s MVC Toolkit – Nick Berardi releases his set of tools to help support MVC, containing a number of Action Filter Attributes, along with a view engine and additional route support- Full source and binary distributions available.

Information

• Rhino Mocks and mocking Out/Ref params – Derik Whittaker looks at mocking methods with out/ref parameters using Rhino mocks, and finds that it is quite easy!
• Adventures in F# – F# 101 Part 8 (Mutables and Reference Cells) – Matthew Podwysocki also continues is Functional Programming series on F# with a look at imperative programming constucts
• Pattern Matching in C# – Part 7 – Bart De Smet continues his trip into the functional world using C#.
• Why do ASP.NET AJAX page methods have to be static? – Dave Ward takes a look at ASP.NET Ajax page methods, and how they relate to the page class – This is a good introductory article
• Never ever synchronize threads without specifying a timeout value – Pawel Pabich gives some good threading advice.
• A NET Cryptography Primer, Part 3 – Will @ Slate Street Gang continues his Cryptography series with a look at symmetric cryptographic algorithms
• HtmlControlWapper Javascript – Jason Haley has created a simple Javascript library to help with populating fields from data in HTML prototypes
• Book review: The Pragmatic Programmer – Jan Van Ryswyck discovers the delight that is ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’ – this is a book that I really like, and believe that all developers should read it. The other books in the series are also really good.
• Greg’s Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: Interested in template based code generation? Own Visual Studio 2008? Then guess what? You already have one… Say hello to the Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4) – Greg Duncan rounds up a few resources on T4 templates. If you find this interesting and are in North West England you may want to check out the Liverpool .NET Usergroup tonight – See the community section below for more details.
• ASP.Net MVC Framework 2 – A step by step guide to create a simple Web Application – Fredrik Normén provides a step by step guide to building an application with the Preview 2 release of ASP.NET MVC
• Unhandled Exceptions – Handle them – Details of how you can catch unhanded exceptions within your application to allow you to handle them globally
• IoC Container Benchmark – Unity, Windsor, StructureMap and Spring.NET – Torkel Ödegaard compares the speed of the leading .NET IOC Container implementations.
• Guidelines aren’t rules – Jimmy Bogard talks about cases where you may choose to ignore Design Guidelines with good reason.
• Common Solutions for T-SQL Problems – A useful microsite from Microsoft showing solutions to FAQ type T-SQL issues
• Basic Memory Housekeeping (.NET Memory Management: Part 1) – The second part of this series is new, the first slightly older, however I missed it first time round. Interesting overview on memory management within .NET managed languages.

Community

• Liverpool Users of .NET at AIMES (Thursday, April 17, 2008) – If you are in Liverpool UK, or surrounding areas, you might be interested in Tonight’s .NET Usergroup meeting – A talk on T4 templates and DSL tools. You need to sign up on the Upcoming event in order to get into the building.

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Software

• PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 – An Add=in that contains a number of useful extensions to the IDE, adding things like open folder from solution explorer, Copy/Paste Class, etc
• JMPInline: C# OpenID library DotNetOpenID 2.0 released – Update to this Open ID implementation adding full support for Open ID 2.0 while maintaining support for 1.x
• Spec# for Visual Studio 2005 – Microsoft Research release version 1.0.20411 of the C# Design By Contract extensions.

Information

• How to share configuration files between projects – Derik Whittaker looks at sharing application config files between projects in a solution
• Printing PDF documents in C# – Most of us are concerned with creating PDFs but printing them from code is non-trivial
• Creating a AutoMockingContainer with Microsoft Unity – Pretty darn simple. – Roy Osherove puts together an auto mocking container implementation using the new Unity IOC Container
• Thoughts on Testing an API – Derik Whittaker thinks about testing API implementations – and comes up with some good advice.
• Pattern Matching in C# – Part 6 – Bart De Smet continues his series on Functional Programming techniques in C# – so quickly I keep missing parts!
• Problems with the MVC Framework RenderComponent helper method – Mike Hadlow looks at sone of the less nice(with respect to their own design goals) bits of the ASP.NET MVC framework
• 30K application lines + 110K testing lines: Evidence of…? – Larry O’Brien talks about the ratio of program code to test , code and if anything can be deduced from that
• Unity Community Contributions and Interception – Matthew Podwysocki recaps where he’s up to, and continues on looking at unity – covering the Unity Community Contributions and taking a look at Interceptions.

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Software

• File Hash Generator Shell Extension – A neat little code sample with a real world use – a tool to calculate the a number of different file hash codes from the Explorer context menu – full .NET source available too

Information

• Designing With Lambdas – Part I – Sergio Pereira shows how the introduction of Lambda Expressions can changes the way we can write code.
• My philosophy on using new technologies – Rockford Lhotka talks about his criteria for adoption of new technology
• Mocking Events – Aaron Jensen looks at how you can mock events using Rhino Mocks
• NonNullable Class Wrapper – An interesting wrapper to help better handle and trap null values.
• ASP.NET Performance counters missing – A tip to get back missing performance counters – a number of these things are standard fixes for when ASP.NET goes wrong
• The empty try block mystery – Siddharth Uppal highlights an interesting tip discovered by reading the .NET Framework code.

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