The Morning Brew

Software

• Web Deployment Tool Beta 1 (Go Live) just released – The Microsoft Web Deployment Team Blog announces the release of Beta1 of the Web Deployment Tool – and this looks like it includes a go live license too, so can be used in production now!
• First Moonlight Release – Miguel de Icaza announces the first release of Moonlight, the Mono SilverLight implementation. This release supports Silverlight 1.0 functionality

Information

• Beyond Mocks – the Partial – Karl Seguin gives one of the best explanations of partials in mocking terms I’ve ever read
• MVP & MVC simply put – Andrew Stopford explains the difference between MVC and MVP in a succinct way.
• Lambda Expression and Object Mappers – Claudio Lassala looks at a few techniques for mapping from one type of object to another type of object.
• Castle demo App #2: Monorail basics – Gojko Adzic turns his attentions to the MonoRail MVC framework in the second part of this series
• The Power of Programming With Attributes – K. Scott Allen has some joking commentsin this post, but ends with a good question – I’m hoping for some interesting discussions in the comments on this one.
• DefaultDotAspx.com – A newly launched ASP.NET knowledge base
• The Why and How of .NET Profiling – Amirthalingam Prasanna discusses profiling c# code using the CLR Profiler and Performance Monitor
• Using the unit of work-per-request pattern in ASP.NET MVC – Andrew Peters looks at implementing a testable unit of work per request in ASP.NET MVC. The article has example using MindScape’s Lightspeed ORM, however the principles apply across most other ORM products.
• DataContracts without attributes (POCO support) in .NET 3.5 SP1 – Aaron Skonnard looks at a new .NET 3.5 SP1 feature – the ability to serialise types in WCF which have not been decorated with the usual [DateContract] [Serialisable] types of attributes.
• Behavior Driven Development: As Human As Possible – SecretGeek talks about naming conventions for Behaviour Driven Development , and proposes how the test runner could be improved to make the process friendlier
• The Big Finale – Jonathan Pobst announces a very important milestone for the Mono Project – API completeness for the Winforms public API
• FullTrust on the LocalIntranet – The .NET Security Blog talks about a change I’ve been waiting a long time for which occurs with SP1 of .NET 3.5 – allowing applications full permissions when launched off a network share.
• .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta: Changes Overview – Patrick Smacchia continues on from Scott Hanselman’s post yesterday by analysing the .NET 3.5 SP1 beta changes using NDepend.

Community

• Liverpool Users of .NET 15th May – Tomorrow evening I will be giving an introductory talk on F# at the Liverpool .NET user group – pre-registration for the event is required, so get your name on the list if you are interested in attending

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The big news from the last 24 hours has to be the release of the beta of Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. Lots of coverage of this, so much so that it gets its own section today!

Software

• NArrange – .NET Code Organizer – James Nies highlights this build time tool for organising .NET code. Looks like it might be useful on occasions – although I’d be a little scared of letting something like this loose on a project that was in source code control – imagine the diffs it would cause.
• dasBlog 2.1 Released – Eran Kampf announces the latest release of the dasBlog blogging engine.. V2.1 is a bug fix release, with a few new features added. More details behind the link.
• SoapBits is now open source! – Good news for those working with SOAP – saopbits the soap testing tool has been open sourced and renamed to STORM.

Information

• Trivial Projections Are (Usually) Optimized Away – Eric Lippert follows on from his last post, and gives an example of where the computer is not so dumb when dealing with LINQ
• Validation Across Class Hierarchies and Interface Implementations. – An example of how validation can be introduced into an object model.
• Thinking in Concurrently in .NET – Matthew Podwysocki looks at the .NET options for concurrent programming.
• Creating Views using XSL in ASP.NET MVC – Derek Fowler looks at using XSLT to create views in ASP.NET MVC
• Implicit Conversion – Jason Bock revisits an old c# trick for converting from one type to another.
• XLinq’n in the new world – Data access comparisons with Xml/XPath – Derik Whittaker compares LINQ to XML with the more traditional XPath method of dealing with XML
• Hacking IronRuby – An interesting way of trying IronRuby without installing anything, Oleg Tkachenko has implemented a web based shell for Iron Ruby allowing use of the interactive shell via a web page.
• Introducing Waegis : – Keyvan Nayyeri introduces his latest project, an Akismet like anti spam system written in .NET
• A Series on GPU-based Effects for WPF – Greg Schechter has started a series of posts on GPU effects in WPF – a new .NET 3.5 SP1 feature. 4 parts of this series were published today – the linked post is the index.

Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta release

• Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta – ScottGu officially sets the ball rolling with his detailed announcement of SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5
• Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 "SP1" Beta – Brad Abrams looks at the best bits of this release from the point of view of Web Developers, Client Server developers, VB developers, C# Developers, Data Developers, and Service Developers.
• VS2008 and .Net 3.5 SP1 Beta – Should You Fear This Release? – Scott Hanselman looks at the fear factor of this beta release of SP1, and looks at the scale of the differences units NDepend
• Introducing the Third Major Release of Windows Presentation Foundation – Tim Sneath gives a detailed insight into the Windows Presentation Foundation release that is a part of the SP1 bundle for VS2008 and .NET 3.5
• .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta and Its Effect on MVC – Phil Haack talks about the Beta release of SP1 and how it relates to ASP.NET MVC. The significant thing is the inclusion of the URL Routing, however ASP.NET MVC doesn’t make it in. There are also details of some problems with SP1 and the Preview 2 of the MVC.
• WCF-related features in .NET 3.5 SP1 & VS 2008 SP1 – Christian Weyer summarises some of the new features of Windows Communication Foundation included in the SP1 release for .NET 3.5 and VS2008
• New XSD Functionality in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta 1 – The Microsoft XML Team give the details of their offing in Visual Studio 2008 SP1.
• Introducing JScript Formatting in VS 2008 SP1 – Another summary of some new SP1 functionality, JScript gets its own preferences of Colourisation, validation, intellisense and formatting.
• Notes from updating an Astoria project to the new SP1 Beta bits – Julie Lerman also shares notes on upgrading Astoria Projects to SP1 beta level.
• Notes from updating some Entity Framework apps to the SP1 Beta bits – Julie Lerman shares her notes on upgrading your Entity Framework applications to work under the SP1 beta.
• Error installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta and Silverlight Tools Beta 1 – A warning for anyone who uses the Silverlight tools beta 1 – its incompatible with SP1. There will be a future beta 2 release which will work with SP1 – more details in the post.

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Software

• Introducing RockScroll – Scott Hanselman introduces the world to RockScroll, a Visual Studio scroll bar replacement which swaps the scroll bar for a visual representation of the current code file
• IronXSLT v0.3 released – An update to IronXSLT, which adds dynamic XSLT intellisense to Visual Studio, and has improved VS2008 compatibility.

Information

• Delegating Action Result – Phil Haack follows up with a generic ActionResult which allows you to support many other cases by using delegates.
• ASP.NET MVC – Using Post, Redirect, Get Pattern – Matt Hawley looks at the basic patterns that underpin ASP.NET MVC – HTTP GET, POST and redirects
• TypeConverters: There’s not enough TypeDescripter.GetConverter in the world – Scott Hanselman extols the virtues of TypeDescripter.GetConverter to convert from one type to another.
• Computers are dumb – Eric Lippert looks at a few cases where computers are stupid when it comes to large collections of objects – a few things to watch out for here
• Slightly Different Way To Assert That Exceptions Are Thrown – Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo shows how he has been testing that exceptions are thrown in his code using extension methods and lambda expressions.
• Read-only properties using automatic properties in C# 3.0 – Sandor D has a nice quick tip for read only properties using the C#3 automatic properties
• The easiest way to start with ASP.NET 3.5 Dynamic Data – Carlos Figueroa gives a step by setup guide to getting up and running with the ASP.NET 3.5 Dynamic Data
• Fast ASP.NET web page loading by downloading multiple javascripts in batch – Omar AL Zabir looks at improving site performance by gathering together all the ScriptResource.axd requests into one call.
• Implement MetaWeblog API in ASP.NET – Keyvan Nayyeri looks at implementing the MetaWeblog API in the simplest way he can.

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