The Morning Brew

Too many interesting posts this weekend – I didn’t get through my full list of feeds this morning, and even still had links left over – some of which will make an appearance over the next couple of days.

Software

• NHibernate 2.0 Beta 1 Released – NHibernate 2 has reached Beta 1 Status – which based on previous experience of the betas will be quite usable. This release is meant to bring it inline with Hibernate 3.2 in terms of functionality.
• Rhino Mocks 3.5 Release Candidate – Ayende announces that Rhino Mocks 3.5 is now at Release Candidate status
• Release: Composite Application Guidance for WPF 2008 RC1 – Prism goes Release candidate – Composite Application Guidance for WPF 2008 RC1 is a framework to help enterprise application developers who use WPF to create flexible applications using loosely coupled design

Information

• A Back To Basics Case Study: Implementing HTTP File Upload with ASP.NET MVC including Tests and Mocks – Scott Hanselman digs into HTTP File uploading in ASP.NET MVC and uses it as a vehicle for talking about mocking and testing
• MVC Storefront, Part 15: Code Review With Ayende – Rob Conery releases the latest part in his MVC project screen cast series. This part is a code review with Ayende – I’m looking forward to watching this one tonight
• Introducing psake – James Kovacs introduces psake – a PowerShell inspired build automation tool both written in and using PowerShell.
• Tree Surgeon is Looking for a Logo – I hadn’t released that Bil Simser hat taken custody of this project – Tree surgeon is a tool which creates a development tree structure for your new projects – configuring projects, solutions, and test projects for you – and it needs a logo!
• Custom Web Service Test Page Design – Robert Robbins shows how you can enhance the appearance of your web service test page, by replacing it completely with your own page.
• ASP.NET Performance Tips – Haroon Waheed lists a number of things you can do to enhance your ASP.NET performance. Most of these tips are purely configuration – turning off bits of the framework you don’t need – something that is often neglected by developers when it comes to performance tuning.
• Design Patterns – Decorator Pattern – David Cumps continues his series on design patterns with a look at the decorator pattern. Also check out his followup to Thursday’s post on the Observer/Event pattern (linked in the left nav)
• My first impressions with Rhino Mocks 3.5 (beta) – Derik Whittaker looks at the latest version of Rhino Mocks
• Before you use an IoC tool, some concepts to know first – Jeremy D. Miller writes about Inversion of Control fundamentals
• Extended Thread Pool – An interesting Code Project project dealing with improved threadpool functionality – things like priorities, bounding and extensibility

Community

• RefactorMyCode.com – Get some support from your fellow developers with this new community site where the community is invited to refactor some code. Looks like it could be a useful learning tool.
• Silverlight Control Builder Contest – A contest for US based Silverlight 2 Beta 2 developers – with some quite impressive prizes

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Subscriber numbers took a bit of a dip (back down below my magic milestone) so the celebrations will have to wait 😉

Today’s post is also a little light on content – I’ve decided to avoid the Entity Framework Petition Debate, as there is so much back and forth it would be too difficult (and dangerous) to sumarise by picking a few links and still keep it fair.

Information

• IronPython Integration In SharpDevelop 2.2 – Matt Ward highlights the availability of a early alpha Sharp Develop Addin which adds support for Iron Python 1.1
• State Machines in C# 3.0 using T4 Templates – Andrew Matthews writes in some detail (and plenty of code) about creating state machines using an XML definition and some T4 templates
• Separation of Concerns by example: Part 3 – Jimmy Bogard continues his series on removing dependencies code with some further refactoring of his customerfinder class.
• Two free SQL Server DBA eBooks from Red-Gate, "How to Become an Exceptional DBA" and "SQL Server Best Practices" – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of two free SQL related E-Books.
• Design Patterns – Observer Pattern – David Cumps continues his posts on patterns with a look at the observer pattern – once again keeping with his strategy game examples.
• MSDN Low-Bandwidth Rendering Option – Craig Andera gives a useful tip to speed up access to MSDN content.
• NotNorthwind – Update #1 – All Your Northwind Are Belong To Us – Scott Hanselman gives an update on his ‘NotNorthwind’ campaign – it would seem that Northwind is going to survive, getting some updates and a few new features.

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Tuesday’s subscriber count hit a quite significant subscriber milestone – many thanks to all of you who are subscribed and reading the Morning Brew every day. Here’s hoping that the level is maintained for the rest of the week – Tomorrow’s post will contain a little celebratory item.

Software

• VSLab – Visual Studio Lab is aiming to provide functionality in Visual Studio similar to a tool like MatLab or Mathematica, and utilises F# as the underlying engine. From the screen shots it looks very interesting
• Hobocopy x64 Build Available – Craig Andera releases an x64 version of HoboCopy, and reminds us all he is still looking for someone to take over the maintainer role on the project.

Information

• Some guidelines for readable F# code – Chris Smith looks at some good style and conventions for writing code in F#
• ExifTagCollection – EXIF metadata extraction library – Lev Danielyan has created a library to read EXIF 2.2 headers from image files – one of my side projects (currently very idle and very basic) is a photo management application similar to Picasa – this will come in handy.
• Design Patterns – Strategy Pattern – David Cumps takes a look at the Strategy pattern using an example of a strategy game involving tanks and soldiers.
• Replacing ExpectedException in NUnit – James Newkirk looks at an alternative (and much nicer) way of unit testing that exceptions are thrown using the Assert.Throws syntax rather than the method level ExpectedException. This is a new feature of NUnit 2.5, however there is a download to provide the capability now.
• NMemcached: A WCF experiment – Ayende continues experimenting with his .NET MemCached implementation, this time porting it to WCF. There are some interesting comments on performance tuning it.
• 10 Tools Which I Still Use, Even I Have VSTS 2008 – Mohammad Ashraful Alam follows up his post linked in yesterday’s Brew with a list of tool that he still uses after his move to VSTS
• The var war is brewing – Derik Whittaker weighs in on the var ‘discussion’ with his ideas on when you should and shouldn’t use var. Many interesting comments attached to this post.
• How to Build a Task Scheduler System for the ASP.NET – Part 2 – Keyvan Nayyeri completes this series on implementing a simple task scheduler in ASP.NET, and ends with the good news that he is going to release a more general framework as an open source project.
• Dependency Injection, or how to make simple concepts sound difficult – Jani Hartikainen provides a very simple explanation and example of each of the three types of Dependency Injection

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