The Morning Brew

Some technical problems with my ADSL line this morning has resulted in a smaller than usual Morning Brew this morning. Tomorrow’s edition may be larger as a result.

Information

• Challenge: What is wrong with this code – Ayende has posed up a piece of broken code, and is asking for people to guess what si wrong with it. Only a few guesses so far, I look forward to seeing what people come up with.
• Define Recursion – See Recursion – Matthew Podwysocki takes on Scott Hanselman’s Back To Basics theme, and looks at recursion – with examples in C# and F#
• Composite Application Guidance – What is it? – Glenn Block posts up an overview of the Composite Application Guidance (Prism) which gives a good summary of what the project is all about.
• Back to Basics – This is not the object you’re looking…wait, oh, it is the object – Scott Hanselman continues his back to basics series with a look at downcasting and the WebBrowser control.
• How to Programmatically tell if an IIS AppPool is 32-bit or 64-bit – Scott Hanselman shows how you can see which app pools are 32 or 64 bit – very useful when trouble shooting strange IIS COM issues.
• ASP.NET Inline Tags – A nice reminder of the ASP.NET inline tags – I suspect everyone will know the most common, however the ones like the serverside comment are less well known.
• Event Chain – Marc Clifton looks at creating a multicast delegate that can be stop calling event handler delegates at the command of one of the delegates.

Humour

• Array Indices: Start from 0 or 1? – One of the famous debates.

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Software

• Tree Surgeon 2.0 Released – Bil Simser announces the release of Tree Surgeon 2.0 – a tool for producing template visual studio development trees, now supporting VS2005 and VS2008 (in addition to VS2003 that v1 supported) and unit testing with MBUnit or NUnit. Well worth checking this tool out – V1 has saved me quite a bit of time in the past.
• BlogEngine.NET 1.4 is now available – Al Nyveldt announces the latest release of BlogEngine.NET including a number of interesting new features.
• Rhino Mocks 3.5 RC 1 Refresh – Ayende updates Rhino Mocks 3.5 RC1 with a few missed patches.

Information

• GUIDs are globally unique, but substrings of GUIDs aren’t – Raymond Chen talks about how GUID’s are created, and how they are made to be unique – interesting reading.
• Database Performance: The Web Layer – Kenneth Downs talks about the database techniques applicable to the web layer of an application in order to control performance. Kenneth’s blog is a great resource for all things database programming related.
• SOA: Making the Paradigm Shift Part 10 of N – Sam Gentile continues his series on SOA, in this part he takes a look at the concept of the Enterprise Service Bus.
• A Lap Around Microsoft "Velocity" – Cache It NOW! – Bart De Smet takes a tour around Velocity the Microsoft Distributed cache, working through the installation, configuration and into the simple use of the cache in this screenshot rich article.
• Beginners Guide To Threading In .NET Part 3 of n – Sacha Barber continues his series on threading with a detailed look into the techniques available for synchronisation within the .NET framework
• An Introduction to xUnit.net for ASP.NET MVC Developers – Stephen Walther takes a detailed look at using xUnit.NET to test ASP.NET MVC, from install right through to detailed testing.
• Scale Cheaply – Sharding – Karl Seguin introduces one of the most common scaling techniques used by web 2.0 companies to manage their massive database loads
• System Documentation: 10 Recommendations – Keith Johnson gives some coding related tips for helping create great system documentation. Many developers are really bad at documenting their work – hopefully this list will help a few out
• My Last Words to Bill – There has been lots of blog chatter from the Microsoft people about the end of Bill Gate’s reign at Microsoft. This post from Rico Mariani is one of the nicest tributes I’ve seen and sums up what a lot of people are saying.
• Inherit to Be Reused, Not to Reuse – Peter Provost talks about the use of inheritance, and how a number of software development principles apply to it.

Community

• The Agile Primer – ThoughtWorks Manchester GeekNights – ThoughtWorks continue their Manchester events programme with a talk on Agile by Pat Kua to be held on Monday 21st July
• VBUG Manchester: Where’s my data? An intro to Spatial Queries in SQL Srv 08 (24 Jul 2008) – An interesting (free) talk from Colin Angus MacKay at VBUG Manchester later this month – I’m really looking forward to this one.

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