The Morning Brew

Information

• MVC Storefront Part 14: Ajax With Shawn Burke – The latest part in Rob Conery’s screen cast series on creating an ecommerce site with ASP.NET MVC. In this part Rob teams up with his boss to insert some ASP.NET Ajax into the store front
• SubSonic 3.0: IQueryable Update – Rob Conery talks about the development of the IQueryable interface support in Subsonic.
• Waltzing Through the Parallel Extensions June CTP: Synchronization Primitives – Sacha Goldshtein begins a monster series (All posted in one day) looking at the latest release of the Parallel Extensions – this first part discusses the new synchronisation primitives
• Waltzing Through the Parallel Extensions June CTP: Tasks – In part two Sacha looks at the Task support in the Parallel Extensions framework, with task continuations and the new scheduler.
• Waltzing Through the Parallel Extensions June CTP: Collection Classes – in Part three of his series, Sacha looks at the new System.Threading.Collections namespace, and discusses the different collection classes available.
• Waltzing Through the Parallel Extensions June CTP: Known Issues – Sacha Goldshtein continues by looking at the know issues in the latest release of Parallel Extensions
• Parallel Extensions and Native Code? – Sacha Goldshtein follows up on his series with a look at the parallel options for C++ developers.
• InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of Type ‘X’ to ‘X’ – Henning Krause encounters a strange looking issue of not being able to cast an object to the type of the object when assemblies are loaded in different ways (from different places)
• The Language of Mocks (or is that Test Doubles) – Casey Charlton discusses the correct terms for the various types of ‘mock’
• Windows UX Taskforce – A digg like site for people to record their gripes with the Windows Vista UI – interesting to the programmer a it provides a great resource of things to avoid doing when developing a UI – as all of these are real things that annoy users.
• TDD : Introduction to Moq – Stephen Walther takes a look at Moq, one of the newest mocking frameworks on the scene. This article is a nice getting started guide.
• Two Loosely Coupled Code – Part 2 – Sean Feldman follows up with an example of some loosely coupled code and talks about its advantages.
• Neat Tricks with StructureMap – Chad Myers shares his good fortune of working with StructureMap’s author by giving a sneak peek at some of the new v2.5 functionality

Community

• Giveaway!!! Visual Studio Team Suite 2008 with MSDN Premium – Alvin @ Vapor Blog has 3 Visual Studio Team Systems with MDSN Premium licenses to give away to the community – to enter send in 2 paragraphs detailing why you should be considered.

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Software

• SQL Server 2008 RC0 – The RC0 release of SQL Server 2008 is now available for download by the general public.
• Open XML SDK v1 Available From Today – Mike Ormond highlights the availability of the Open XML SDK v1

Information

• BackgroundWorker Closure and Overridable Task – Patrick Smacchia looks at how you can cancel and run again on background workers for the situations where you have a background process that takes longer than a re-occurrence of the triggering event can.
• Northwind N-Tier Blueprint Application Using WPF/WCF/LINQ to SQL – A NorthWind sample application which uses much of the modern Microsoft Development Technologies in a multi tier fashion – I plan to have a read of the source at some point soon as seeing how this all plays together will be interesting.
• Too Loosely Coupled Code – Sean Feldman considers if it is possible to have code that is too loosely coupled – a couple (no pun intended) of interesting response in the comments.
• Visual State in Silverlight Control Templates – Ian Griffiths takes a look into the Visual State Manager in Silverlight 2 control templates
• To Cache, To Static, or To Session "When?" is the question – Jay Kimble gives an overview of how he decides where to locate data – in the cache, session or static members on classes.
• Stop Polluting the UI Thread – Use a ThreadBarrier – A very interesting article the ThreadBarrier pattern, which demonstrates a better way of doing multi threaded applications that interact with the UI. Samples are provided for both WinForms and WPF
• Help Decide Sandcastle’s Fate – SandCastle the .NET Code documentation tool has been removed from Codeplex as it does not publish the source code. This is bad news (compounding the bad news that NDoc is no longer developed)
• Zip method added to Dizzy – Jason Etheridge continues development of his ‘Dizzy’ High Order function library, with a multi list element combining method
• Performance Tip: Return Only Necessary Columns Using LINQ – Jason N. Gaylord offers a useful reminder about only retrieving the data you need – this applies to much more than just LINQ.
• What really went wrong ? Check the inner exception – Peter van Ooijen takes a look at the use of the Exception’s InnerException property in order to find out what really went wrong.

Community

• ICFP Programming Contest – Matthew Podwysocki highlights the 11th International Conference on Functional Programming Programming Contest – a language agnostic functional programming contest running until mid July.
• JBuilding A Solid Core – Your Future Is Right Ahead Of You – The Contest!!! – Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo is running a contest (of a similar nature to the one mentioned last week on another site). To enter you need to submit a short (true) story of how you have an impact on the personal and professional lives of the people you work with – full details on the site.

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A lot of continuations of series and software releases in today’s brew – I think we might be in the slump of people recovering from TechEd

Software

• ReSharper 4.0 GA – ReSharper, the Visual Studio Addin which provides a huge number of enhancements to the IDE has made it to a V4 release – Personal Licences available from 105 Euro
• LLBLGen Pro v2.6 has been released! – Frans Bouma announces the availability of LLBLGen Pro v2.6, a commercial OR Mapper, with support for LINQ to LLBLGen, .NET 3.5 support, better memory usage and support for a wide range of databases it looks like a good release. Prices from 179 Euro per seat.
• Dizzy published – Justin Etheredge releases ‘Dizzy’, a library of high order methods (such as map, foreach, repeat, etc). Source code available, along with 100% coverage unit tests!
• jQuery UI v1.5 Released, Focus on Consistent API and Effects – While not specifically .NET, the jQuery UI is interesting enough to web developers to cross platform boundaries, especially as it has a shiny new release.

Information

• Delayed execution and "yield return" – Justin Etheredge shows how yield return can enable delayed execution and give you a means of generating infinite series of numbers without having to create them upfront.
• Premature optimizations – Ayende gives some concrete evidence to the idea that premature optimisation is a bad thing.
• Silverlight Roles, Profile and Authentication Example Updated for Silverlight Beta2 Now with Visual State Manager (VSM) goodness! – Brad Abrams looks at the latest Silverlight beta, and upgrades one of his samples and in doing so takes a look at the Visual State Manager.
• SyntacticNoise – Martin Fowler talks about the noise generated by the syntax of the language we use for our DSLs
• RhinoCommons, NHibernate and ASP.NET MVC Part 5 – LINQ to NHibernate – Ryan Lanciaux looks at LINQ to NHibernate with the aim of simplifying hhis data access code in this latest part in his series.
• Castle Demo App #4: Unit testing Monorail web sites – Gojko Adzic continues his series on the Castle Project, and in this part looks at testing controllers in isolation
• SOA: Making the Paradigm Shift Part 8 of N – Sam Gentile continues his series on SOA – in this part Capabilities and the Microsoft IO Capability Framework are examined.

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