The Morning Brew

I’ve had a busy long weekend, and from the amount of good stuff written these past 3 days it looks like the .NET community has too. In the interests of not making this post too large, I’ve saved a few links for tomorrow’s brew.

Software

• Json.NET 2.0 Released – James Newton-King – James Newton-King releases version 2.0 of this JSON supporting library, complete with quick starts and API documentation.
• IronPython 2.0 Beta 2 – Harry Pierson announces the latest beta release of IronPython V2 – this release has had a focus on the performance of IronPython, along with the usual bug fixing.
• F# 1.9.4 Now Available: Making F# Simpler and More Consistent – The Spring Refresh of the F# compiler – Don Syme gives the low down on what has changed.
• dotTrace 3.1 is Released! – JetBrains release an minor upgrade to their .NET profiler – this release includes support for Visual Studio 2008 and Windows Vista and 2008
• LINQ.Flickr 1.3 – Mehfuz releases a new version of a LINQ implementation for the Flickr API.

Information

• RouteEvaluator For Unit Testing Routes – Phil Haack takes a look at how you can unit test routes, and offers a Route Evaluator class to make doing this easier.
• Windows PowerShell V2 CTP2 – Windows PowerShell V2 CTP2 adds significantly to the functionality of V1 – however this is very much a pre-release version, so the usual caveats apply.
• Unit testing events – Patrick Klug looks at how you can unit test your event based code, checking that the events fire the correct number of times
• MVC Storefront, Part 8: Testing Controllers, Iteration 1 : – In this episode Rob Conery gets his demo up and running, looks at testing his controllers and applies the DRY principle to avoid duplication of logic in his views.
• How To Not Screw Up Your Application Object Model – Don’t Go All OOP On Me! – Keith Elder looks at how going for a pure OO model can cause you more problems that it solves – I think that this article is more about pre-conceived ideas over complicating the problem and how you should focus on your clients needs first, and have the OO design come out of those.
• Code Based Repeater for ASP.NET MVC – Phil Haack looks at using Lambda expressions with parts of the template as parameter to produce a better repeater than ForEach for the ASP.NET MVC
• Castle Windsor – One Small Step Towards Better Software – Casey Charlton re-publishes an old article on the benefits of using Castle Windsor IOC to improve the design and testing of an application.
• Adventures in F# – F# 101 Part 9 (Control Flow) – Matthew Podwysocki continues his excellent F# series with a look at Control Flow in F# – one of the bits that is similar to most other languages.
• Foundations of Programming – pt 7 – Addendum – Karl Seguin adds two additional points to his recent 7th part of this series – covering memory leaks with events and Deterministic Finalisation.
• PrismShouldNotReferenceUnity – Glenn Block talks about a pairing session he had with Ayende, and how they implemented a test for one of the team’s conventions
• Manage states in a multi-threaded environment without the synchronization pain – Patrick Smacchia looks at the alternatives to synchronisation for multi threaded programming.
• Accessing the ASP.NET Authentication, Profile and Role Service in Silverlight – Brad Abrams gives a tutorial on using the WCF services for ASP.NET authentication, profile and role services from a Silverlight client application.
• Go with High End Solutions – Ayende tells tales of how with a complex solution things can go well – it sounds like the key to all this is the knowledge sharing that went on
• Hidden Undocumented Feature of Visual Studio 2008 – Dynamic XSLT Intellisense – A very useful undocumented feature of Visual Studio 2008 – real intellisense for XSLT. This article includes lots of screen shots of it in operation, and the required registry hack at the end of the article
• RefactorCode Released!!! ….. BETA 🙂 – GridViewGuy (AKA Mohammad Azam) announces the beta of his new site, a site which allows users to submit code, and have other users offer refactorings to make the code more beautiful.
• NUnit 2.4.7, 2.5, 3.0: What’s With That? – Charlie Poole clears up any confusion with the version number roadmap for the NUnit unit testing project – sounds like there are interesting features in both 2.5 and 3.0

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The end of another week – and the start of a long weekend here in the UK – what this means for the Morning Brew is a 3 day break, with the next instalment on Tuesday morning. Have a good weekend everyone.

Software

• Paint.NET v3.31 is now available! – The Paint.NET team release a bug fix release, including new support for the Window Clippings screen capture tool
• Silverlight: The First Rich Text Editor – An article detailing the development of the first SilverLight Rich Text Editor – released code on CodePlex (linked in the article)

Information

• Side Effecting Functions are Code Smells – Matthew Podwysocki looks at non-pure functions, why he considers them to be a code smell, and how Design By Contract and Spec# can help.
• Side Effecting Functions Are Code Smells Revisited – Matthew Podwysocki follows up he earlier post with some more information, including a discussion of Command Query Separation
• Grrr…poor use of singletons and a very cool Generic Singleton pattern! – Scott Galloway looks at the singleton pattern, and explains why there is no reason to implement it badly
• Dynamic Data and 3rd party o/r mappers is a fact – Frans Bouma talks about some excellent news about Dynamic Data for anyone who is already invested with other O/R Mappers
• New "Level 200" Threading and Synchronization Article – Greg Duncan highlights a good introductory article on Threading and Synchronisation.
• MVC Storefront, Part 7: Helpers and Routing – Rob Conery continues his ASP.NET MVC Screencast series. In this part Rob continues with his UI and looks into Routing, discussing this with Scott Hanselman
• Writing a Simple Role Playing Game with C# .NET and the State Design Pattern – A look at using patterns in the context of creating a (very) simple role playing game.
• Using NHibernate (years after I should have been) – Ryan Lanciaux give a nice introduction to NHibernate, having recently adopted its use
• Mocks – It’s A Question Of When – K. Scott Allen looks at how to decide when to use mock objects, and answers a few other common questions that arise from the though of using mock objects.

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Software

• CC.NET Community PlugIns – Release: 1.0.430.10581 Beta – An update to this collection of plugins for the CruiseControl.NET Continuous Integration Server.
• WPF performance profiling tools – The WPF Performance Suite is a small collection of performance monitoring tools specifically for WPF applications. Includes support for monitoring the rendering, profiling of services, and many other standard monitoring featues

Information

• Journal 15 – Issue 15 of the Architects Journal is now online – This edition looks at the role of an Architect, and a number of the supporting skills needed
• The Weekly Source Code 25 – OpenID Edition – Scott Hanselman takes a look at OPenID implemenations in DasBlog, ASP.NET Webforms and ASP.NET MVC, and how Cardspace fits in with all this.
• Model-based Client-side Validation for ASP.NET MVC – Steve Sanderson looks at validation in ASP.NET MVC applications, with the validation being handled in the model classes rather than the View or controller as often happens
• New Date and Time types in SQL Server 2008 – Chris Brandsma looks at two of the new datatypes in SQL 2008
• Sexagesimal Conversions in .Net – Dan Rigsby looks at the importance of Sexagesimal – a base 60 number system- and how it relates to time (60 minutes in an hour) and more significantly Longitude and Latitude.
• Unit Testing Denial Pattern #1: Pretending the test is no longer valid – Roy Osherove talks about the danger of ignoring a problem bacause you don’t think its relevant any more..
• Unhandled Exception handler (UnhandledExceptionEventHandler) to collect more information about unexpected exceptions – Thottam R. Sriram looks at how you can handle your unhandled exceptions
• Why .NET IEnumerable predicates are cool – A nice simple example of how the new IEnumerable predicates help with code readability.
• Building a Simple Blog Engine with ASP.NET MVC and LINQ – Part 4 – Keyvan Nayyeri has the last part of his ASP.NET MVC follow along series on building a simple blog engine published. His blog post includes links to the earlier parts in case you missed them
• LINQ To XML: I’m hooked! – Luis Abreu starts looking at the LINQ to XML object model
• LINQ To XML: building documents with a functional approach – Luis Abreu continues looking at the new XML API, building documents
• MSDN Updates – Craig Andera talks about the recent changes at MSDN – most notably the switch over the the new MSDN on the main host.
• Generic reordering – Mike Hadlow looks at creating orderable lists in MVC
• The Cardinal Rule of Automated Testing – Alan Keefer discusses an important premise of testing. His tests seem to be more like integration tests than unit tests, byt a lot of the principles discussed apply to both

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