The Morning Brew

Software

• Mozilla Firefox 3 – Today is Firefox 3 launch day (although the site has yet to be updated, I think we might need to wait for the American contingent to wake up)
• Ninject 1.0 Goes Gold – Nate Kohari announces the release of NInject 1.0. NInject is a lightweight dependency injection framework which runs on .NET 2, 3 and 3.5, along with .NET Compact 2 and 3.5 and Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2
• OpenCSV# – OpenCSV# is a port of the Java OpenCSV project to native .NET. It provides a good means of reading CSV data without a number of limitations of the Microsoft Text Driver.

Information

• Super Models, Part 1: Sexy Specifications – Dave Laribee looks at making the Specification pattern for entity retrieval criteria into a more ‘sexy’ beast using operator overloading to make combining criteria easy.
• Immutability and Concurrency – Part II – A Review of F#’s Immutable Data Structures – Rob Pickering looks at the support in F# for working with Immutable data in part two of his series on Immutability and concurrency.
• Hook Methods – Dave Laribee looks at the template pattern, and defines a technique he calls ‘Hook Methods’ to provide further extensibility for edge cases.
• Avoiding Inheritance Dependencies Using Generics and Lambdas – Jason Olson considers the dependencies introduced due to inheritance, and then looks a the command pattern along with lambdas and generics as a means to work around these dependencies. Some interesting comments too.
• Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) at a Glance – Sidar Ok explores the Managed Extensibility Framework CTP, working through the initial stages of getting things working as intended.
• Overview of concurrency in .NET Framework 3.5 – Igor Ostrovsky takes a overview of the key concepts in concurrent programming on .NET, looking at Concurrent executions, synchronization and memory sharing.
• I understand that naming matters, so… – Ayende poses a simple question of naming for an interface – I agree, naming is very important, and its amazing how many different possibilities people list in the comments.
• Functional Programming in C# 3.0: How Map/Reduce/Filter can Rock your World – Dare Obasanjo looks at some real world uses of Functional Techniques within RSS Bandit.
• Prefix-casting versus as-casting in C# – An interesting post on the differences between the two ways of casting, and talks a little about cast performance.
• Keep your .config clean with external config files – Andre Loker talks about the real world scenarios where external config files really help. I always forget that you can actually do this!
• Software cell – What´s in a name? – Ralf Westphal shares an alternative view on the traditional N-Tier layered architecture, considering software to be composed of cells.
• Functional C# – Learn from F# and LINQ – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on Functional C# with a look at the framework implementations of some of the traditional functional/F# techniques, including Folding,Mapping, Iterators and filtering.
• Everything You Wanted To Know About MVC and MVP But Were Afraid To Ask – Phil Haack looks at the differences between MVC and MVP in this link laden post.

Community

• List of Technology User Groups within United Kingdom – A list of Microsoft technology based user groups in the UK. I’d like to add that Liverpool has a .NET User Group in the form of Liverpool Users of .NET, although we are not yet officially recognised.
• Join us with a Blog on weblogs.asp.net ! – weblogs.asp.net are looking for new bloggers, Joe Stagner has the details.

humour

• The friendly SCM neighborhood – Ayende takes an amusing pictorial look at a few of the competing SCM products.

1 Comment »

Monday’s come round too fast. Despite reading lots of posts this weekend (and getting down to zero unread items in my reader) today’s brew isn’t as massive as I thought it might be – perhaps I’m being too selective.

Software

• IronPython 2.0 Beta 3 – Iron Python gets an update in the form of Iron Python 2.0 Beta 3
• FitNesse.NET 1.7 Released – Gojko Adzic points to the latest release of this .NET implementation of the Framework for Integrated Test (Fit) tool.
• MassTransit 0.2 Now Available – Chris Patterson announces the availability of a new release of Mass Transit, a lean service bus developed using YAGNI principle (You ain’t gonna need it) to keep it as simple and lean as possble.

Information

• Mapping Collections in NHibernate (Part 1) – The NHibernate FAQ Blog looks in detail at the different ways of mapping of collections and working with mapped collections in the first part in this series.
• Function Composition – Chris Smith looks at functional composition and how the pipe-forward operator can help improve your code.
• CruiseControl.Net Tutorial – Part 2 – Matteo continues his series on Cruise Control Setup and configuration with part two, covering the actual build and publish.
• Understanding .NET Delegates and Events, By Practice. – Mohamad Halabi writes a nice article on the different types and uses of delegates within the .NET framework, giving examples along the way.
• C# Glorified : Nemerle! – Onur Gümü? gives an introduction to Nemerle, an alternative CLR language which offers a number of interesting features (outlined in the post).
• Added parallel abilities to Dizzy – Justin Etheredge continues developing his Dizzy High order method library by adding some parallel goodness into the map method.
• Why I Do Not Use ORM – Kenneth Downs looks at Object Relational Mapping (ORM) from a database point of view, and explains what he dislikes about it – its always good to see the other side of any argument.
• Writing your first Domain Specific Language, Part 1 of 2 – Daniel Flower gives a nice introduction to implementing your own languages using the Irony Compiler Construction Tool kit.
• Python in the Browser: Live Interactive Interpreter in an HTML Textarea – Michael Foord shows off Python in a Browser, a SilverLight powered browser based Python Interactive interperter
• Back to Basics – Life After If, For and Switch – Like, a Data Structures Reminder – Scott Hanselman offers some good advice that came out of a one-on-one coding session he had with a friend, showing some alternatives to the most common approaches.
• Why you should test code too silly to break – Ayende shows some tests for code which at first view looks silly, but in the end actually helps out.
• Performance Tweaks For Your Cache – Joel Ross looks at ways to improve the common caching pattern in order to get better performance when working with multiple threads.
• BDD, AAA Style Testing and Rhino Mocks – Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo shows off some test using BDD naming using the new Rhino Mocks 3.5 Arrainge Act Assert style.
• Custom Event Programming – Brent Stineman gives and end-end overview of event based programming.
• The "It Works on my Machine" Award – Ade Miller talks about a couple of common situations which relate to ‘it works on my machine’ syndrome.

1 Comment »

The end of a very busy week – thank goodness.

Software

• Sandcastle Version 2.4.10520 at MS Download Center – Sandcastle finds a temporary home while the decision as to where to host it for real is made

Information

• A Tale of Two Compilers – Ed Maurer talks about the existence of two compiles on machines with Visual Studio, and explains how VS actually compiles code.
• .NET Coding Guidelines – Joe Stagner shares some .NET coding guidelines
• Script reference profiler – Bertrand Le Roy has created an ASP.NET control that you can place on your page during development to get all the script references that are generated so you can easily make use of the new capabilities of ASP.NET Ajax 3.5 sp1 to combine these scripts.
• SOA: Making The Paradigm Shift Part 9 of N – Sam Gentile continues his SOA series with a look at SOA Design Approaches, and looks in detail at the Middle-Out SOA approach.
• Compound Operators Or How T-SQL Is Morphing Into VB Or C# – SQLDenis show the new SQL Server 2008 Compound Operators
• Compress WebResource.axd in ASP.NET – Mads Kristensen implements a module and handler to compress the WebResource.axd
• UserControls with the MVC Framework – Henry Cordes looks at implementing a data grid using ASP.NET MVC user controls
• Free software from ComponentOne – Joseph Guadagno points to ComponentOne who are now giving away their community editions of their IDE Spell Checker and DemoWorks Screen cast too for free.
• IronRuby and ASP.NET MVC – John Lam talks about his recent Tech Ed demo of ASP.NET MVC working fully with IronRuby
• Functional C# – Unfolding Lists – Matthew Podwysocki continues his experiments with functional programming in C# with a look at list manipulation
• Pain reduction: creating ductile tests – Ayende runs into trouble with a brittle test and shows an alternative way of solving such issues
• My BDD experiment – Ayende is trying BDD, and is requesting that people comment on his list of specifications – I’m hoping for some interesting discussions in the comments of this one.
• Develop for Maintenance – Rob Reynolds offers some good tips on making your deliverables more maintainable

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #114