The Morning Brew

Software

• ACorns.Debugging – The .Net Deadlock Detector – Corneliu announces a new deadlock detection tool, currently a binary release only, but sourcecode will follow at a later date.
• Reflector AddIn Released – Christian Hornung tells of a plugin that brings integration of Lutz Roeder’s .NET Reflector to SharpDevelop 2 (and its built in in V3)
• Join the Early Adoption Program – Telerik are running an early adopters program where you try out their newest products and earn points for feature requests, bug reports, etc. These points then turn into discounts on their software.

Information

• Marker Interfaces and C# Attributes – Alex Mueller compares marker interfaces and attributes for allowing a class to be marked as having some specific behaviour. I think my preference would have to be the interface over the attribute in this case.
• A Routing Evolution – Ben Scheirman looks at the way ASP.NET MVC routes can evolve over the project, and looks at controlling that evolution and testing the routes.
• Password : You’re doing it wrong – Karl Seguin discusses rules for passwords. I especially like his closing remark.
• Practical Concurrency Patterns: Lock-Free Operations – Sasha Goldshtein continues his series of posts on concurrency with a look at the idea behind a lock-free queue.
• How to Implement Trackback Handler in ASP.NET – Keyvan Nayyeri shares a track back implementation for ASP.NET
• LINQ Aggregation and Bounding Boxes – Ian Griffiths shows how you can use LINQ to find bounding boxes of a collection of rectangles
• The Onion Architecture : part 2 – Jeffrey Palermo continues his series on the Onion Architecture with a real world illustration of the architecture in use.
• Using mbUnit’s RowTest Attribute in a TDD Scenario – Mike Bosch takes a look at MBUnit’s RowTest attribute using a real world test case from a project.

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I spent an enjoyable evening at Geekup Liverpool – unfortunately I missed most of the talk, only catching the discussions afterwards, but it was very nice to catch up with some people I’ve not seen in a while.

Information

• The Onion Architecture : part 1 – Jeffrey Palermo talks about a layered architecture which is a little different from the traditional layered architectures most will be familiar with.
• Countdown to F# CTP – Chris Smith hints at the good stuff that is coming in the next F# Release.
• Make your code more maintainable: The evils of the Return statement – Calvin Hsia talks about using a variable to gather your return value into before returning to make code more readable and easier to debug. This, along with having multiple returns in a method are two issues that I hold dear.
• Super Simple MVC Ajax With JQuery Demo – Phil Haack does an off the cuff screen cast on using JQuery with ASP.NET MVC
• There’s usually an easier way – Mike Hadlow follows up from his previous iteration post with another way of achieving the same output, this time using LINQ
• Dynamically create ASP.NET user control using JQuery and JSON enabled Ajax Web Service – Sanjeev Agarwal walks through creating a user control which uses JQuery to call an ASP.NET JSON web service.
• Survival guide to do resource localization using Compact Framework 2.0 – Jose A. Garcia Guirado talks about the steps required to make a Compact Framework Application localized.
• WCSF Application Architecture Tutorials – Layering and Design Patterns – David Hayden highlights a tutorial series by Simon Ince (along with some other resources) about working with the Web Client Software Factory.
• Avoid appSettings Usage in Controls or Shared Libraries – Steve Smith talks about the use of applications settings in controls and libraries, and explains why its a bad idea and that you should really be using your own config sections for the settings.
• How to show Log4Net info in NUnit (from NHibernate) – Chris Brandsma shows how you can get the NHibernate log information when running within NUnit – very useful when debugging problems with your mappings.
• Are You Throwing Exceptions Correctly? – Daily Coding takes a look at the right and wrong ways of handling rethrowing exceptions.

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Software

• Announcing the Microsoft Virtual Earth ASP .Net Server Control – A nice sounding (I’ve yet to have a play with it) control library for working with Virtual Earth mapping in your web apps from .NET – this one could be very useful
• Microsoft .NET Micro Framework 3.0 Beta Open – Michael Schwarz has the details of the .NET Micro Framework 3.0 Beta release
• CSLA .NET 3.5.1 RC0 available – Rockford Lhotka announces the release of Release Candidate 0 of his CSLA Application framework version 3.5.1

Information

• ASP.NET MVC Tip #26 – Create a Lightweight Control View Engine – Stephen Walther shows how you can create your own view engine by building a control view engine to help reduce embedded code in your views.
• ASP.NET MVC: Avoiding Tag Soup – Rob Conery addresses the contentious yet common comment about ASP.NET MVC being the return to the bad tag soup/Spaghetti code of the old classic asp days.
• TODO comments in Vs 2008 service pack 1 – Zeeshan Hirani shares some good news for anyone who makes use of TODO comments.
• Some finalizer pitfalls – Ayende considers some of the pitfalls of using finalizers, focusing on the errors that can occur when a finalizer runs on an object left in an invalid state due to exceptions during construction.
• Finalizer vs. Application: A Race Condition from Hell – Sasha Goldshtein looks at a strange issue to do with finalisation and Garbage collection.
• Guaranteed, Finalization Order Is Not – Sasha Goldshtein continues his look at finalisation by considering the order that things get finalised, and how that can cause some unpredictable results.
• How to Encrypt Query String Parameters in ASP.NET – Keyvan Nayyeri looks at protecting your query string variables by encrypting them.

Community

• Geekup Liverpool – July – Tonight (29th July) is Liverpool Geekup, featuring a talk from Ian Forrester of the BBC covering BBC Backstage and the future of openness.
• Scottish Developers July Newsletter – Colin Mackay posts this months Scottish Developers news letter, highlighting some interesting (free) events in the coming months.
• Would you like a Visual Studio MSDN Premium License for a Year? – Greg Low will be giving away an MSDN Premium license via the podcast SQL Down Under. This post contains the details of what you have to do in order to be in with a chance of winning.

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