The Morning Brew

A rather large post today, but hopefully that will keep your .NET appetites satisfied until Monday

Software

• NUnit 2.5 Alpha 2 Released – Charlie Poole announces the Beta 2 Release of Nunit 2.5
• Ease your SSMS experience: SSMS Tools PACK 1.0 is out! – Mladen Prajdic.releases version 1.0 of his free Sql Server Management Studio tools, including lots of nice to have functionality to make SSMS a little more bearable.

Information

• Your API Fails, Who is at Fault? – Matthew Podwysocki talks more about Design By Contract, looking at the passing of invalid parameters, and techniques for handling this in Erlang and Spec#.
• The Linq SelectMany Operator – Justin Etheredge looks at one of the less well know LINQ operators.
• Designing With Lambdas – Part IV – Sergio Pereira continues his series with a look at Lambdas being converted to expressions, and illustrates by showing how they can be used to convert objects to JSON.
• NUnit Best Practices – Scott White offers some introductory advice for unit testing with NUnit.
• Private Method Anti(?)-Pattern – Patric Fornasier discusses whether private methods are really an anti-pattern
• WPF, from this to that..Wow! – Glenn Block shows the difference a bit of UI design has made to the Prism reference implementation,
• Castle demo app: ActiveRecord basics and unit testing – Gojko Adzic shows how to use activerecord and some samples of how to unit test the database mapping layer. I look forward to further parts of the series.
• How to validate a method’s arguments? – Fredrik Normén shows a few different techniques for validating the arguments of a method.
• Building an F# powered indexing system – The first part of what I hope will be a really good series on using F# to produce some real functionality.
• MVC Storefront, Part 9: The Shopping Cart – Rob Conery continues his ASP.NET MVC Screen Cast Series with part 9, this time looking at spiking his shopping cart implementation to test getting things back into the database.
• Don’t wait for your Page_Load to finish if you don’t have to. – Albert Pascual shows how you can gain a performance boost in your ASP.NET by handling some of the support functionality in a fire and forget thread.
• Prism vs Framework XXX – Glenn Block asks people not to compare apples to oranges, and explains how Prism is different to most other frameworks
• Mock Framework Benchmarks – Aaron Jensen compares the performance of a number of mocking frameworks, and gets disappointing results from Rhino Mocks, however before I get round to posting he has already found the problem, patched it and re-run his tests, showing a marked improvement – another win for open source?
• Reserved words: what are they good for? (Absolutely nothing?) – An interesting discussion of the important (or lack of importance) of reserved words, and also a bit of information about how the VB team avoid creating lots of new reserved words during language upgrades
• Exception Handling – Do’s and Dont’s – A good roundup of exception handling best practices

Community

• Liverpool Users of .NET May Meeting – Next Thursday (15th May 2008) marks the second official Liverpool.NET usergroup meeting -at which I will be giving an introductory presentation on F#

1 Comment »

Last night I attended an interesting event on Domain Driven Design, organised by the nice folks from ThoughtWorks‘s new Manchester office. This was the second of these events (I missed the first), but based on last night I will be attending again.

Information

• Comments in Code Indicate Functions Trying To Escape – Steven Smith discusses cases where you have a small comment explaining what a chunk of code does, and questions if this should really be a function in its own right.
• Day-to-day with Subversion – Bil Simser gives the indepth details of day-to-day life with Subversion, covering all the common activities you perform with source code control.
• A Limitation of Lambda Expressions and Overloaded Extension Methods – Omer van Kloeten highlights a limitation of Lambda expressions (no ref parameters), and shows how overloaded extension methods can work
• AddIn Enabled Applications – Sacha Barber gives a great introduction into the new System.Addin functionality, with plenty of code to illustrate.
• Decorating Your Domain Entities – Joel Ross looks at the use of attributes in domain entities by IOC containers, and questions if this is something that is ‘the right way’ of doing things
• Unescape my Strings – Sergio Pereira shows a neat use of a macro to help make it possible to see unescaped strings more easily
• ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions… What are the new features anyway? How can I get started? – Carlos Figueroa gathers together the downloads and support forums for the ASP.NET 3.5 Extenions
• Workflow Foundation 101 – Maurice de Beijer gives an introductory overview of Windows Workflow Foundation, with examples in VB.NET
• A .NET Cryptography Primer, Part Four – Will @ Slate Street Gang complete his series on cryptography with a look at asymmetric encryption, and specific code for RSA encryption
• MethodBase Without Reflection – Adam Buenz shows an alternative technique for getting at the methodbase by using stack frames. I question if this is actually reflection free – I suspect stack frame is making use of reflection – but it does illustrate the useful functionality of the stackframe.
• Loading a complex object graph – Gabriel Schenker looks at using NHibernate to load a complex object graph from an access database, and shows some tricks to reduce the number of queries being issued

1 Comment »

I ended up rejecting a number of the links I had left over from yesterday, so today is a little light.

Information

• The Bookshelf – James Kovacs offers a selection of book recommendations which are technology agnostic, covering developer practices, Design patterns, Refactoring, and Agile practices
• Always One Step Ahead – Unit Test for Missing Attributes – Casey Charlton, inspired by some recent work by Ayende and Glenn Block, shows how you can create a unit test to check for missing attributes
• Introducing LINQ To Regex – Roy Osherove implements a custom LINQ provider for talking to regular expressions.
• Command-Query Separation and Immutable Builders – Matthew Podwysocki takes a further look at Command-Query Separation and questions if builder methods with side effects really violates CQS.
• Huffman Coding with F# – LukeH talks a little about Huffman Coding, and shows how it can be implemented using a number of features of the F# language
• Understanding Model-View-Controller – Jeff Atwood gives a really nice explanation of what Model View Controller really means
• LINQ to XML, namespaces and VB – Daniel Moth encounters problems with LINQ to XML due to namespaces, and shows how to work round it nicely using VB.NET

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #88