The Morning Brew

As promised on Friday, today’s Brew is a bit of a monster – I always regret skipping a post on a UK Bank Holiday as the number of posts I have to wade through to put the next edition together is always massive, and today was no exception.

Software

• NHibernate 2.0 Final is out! – Ayende spreads the news that my favourite ORM has reached a final release of Version 2. This is great news, and it brings NHibernate on par with the Java Hibernate v3.2, so a whole host of new features to play with.
• Json.NET 3.0 Released – James Newton-King announces the release of Version 3 of the Json.NET library, containing a bunch of new features, the most significant it the support for use in Silverlight, along with improvements to the LINQ support and the serializer.
• Firebug 1.2 Released – John Resig announces the final release of the excellent FireFox extension FireBug 1.2 – If you don’t already have this and do any web development you really need this addon.
• IIsManager – A nice looking Class Library to enable you to work with IIS 6 from .NET. This allows for creation and modification of websites, application pools and virtual directories, and looks like it could be really useful for deployment work.

Information

• Streamlined BDD Using SubSpec for xUnit.NET – Phil Haack takes a look at Behaviour Driven Development, looking at a few different frameworks for writing tests, and finally, with some help for Brad Wilson looks at creating his own syntax using xUnit.NET. This is an interesting article, with some great comments too.
• Garbage Collection Notifications in .NET 3.5 SP1 – Sasha Goldshtein looks at a new API in .NET 3.5 SP1 which allows you to get notification of when Garbage Collection is about to occur.
• Working with .NET 1.1 in Visual Studio 2008 and Team Server – Lazy Developer – Ziemowit ‘Jimmy’ Skowronski shows how you can get Visual Studio and Team Server to work with .NET 1.1 Projects using MSBee and some project file hackery.
• No GoLive required to use ASP.NET MVC in production – Not new news, but first time I’ve seen it expressed, if you are using ASP.NET MVC Previews you are free to go live with them at any time, unlike the usual Microsoft Preview way.
• Coding Horror: Deadlocked! – Jeff Atwood talks about some of the deadlock problems he’s been encountering with the new StackOverflow site, and talks about the possible solutions.
• Deadlocked!: “read committed snapshot” Explained – Nick Berardi follows up on Jeff Atwood’s post by talking at more length about the Read Committed Snapshot option, how it works and some of the potential problems when using it.
• "C# Hooks For RRDtool". – A useful library for working with RRDTool allowing you to store data and generate graphs. This article provides a taster to the capabilities of the library, with more documentation provided in the library.
• Thread synchronization: Wait and Pulse demystified. – Nick Butler explains the use of the Wait and Pulse methods of the Monitor class, illustrating with an example.
• Primitive Contextual Intellisense – Ayende continues his Source Editor series with a look at in context auto completion
• Deep Zoom, MultiScaleTileSource and the Mandelbrot Set – Mike Ormond takes a look at the changes in DeepZoom in Silverlight 2 Beta 2, and illustrates using Mandelbrots for show the image generation.
• Fast Serialization – Greg Young talks about a real world case of implementing custom serialisation in order to gain performance. Greg is quick to point out that this was a solution for their specific problem (and has optimisations specific to it), and that it may not work well for you, but it still makes interesting reading.
• A Subtle DIfference in Catch Blocks – Jason Bock looks into some of the stranger bits of exceptions handling, where the things being thrown aren’t exceptions.
• The Evolution of MVC – Stephen Walther traces back the history of of the MVC pattern, and how the idea has shifted over the years.
• How to get ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 to run with .NET SP1 – Daniel Cazzulino shows how Binding Redirects allow you to get ASP.NET MVC working with the SP1 implementations of Routing and Abstractions.
• MVC Storefront Part 19a: Windows Workflow Followup – Rob Conery follows up on some of the comments about his Windows Workflow implementations, and puts some polish on the Order Process and enhances the unit tests
• PRG Pattern in the ASP.NET MVC Framework – Tim Barcz explains the benefits of the Post Redirect Get Pattern for web page interactions, and shows how you can achieve it using the ASP.NET MVC
• Core .NET Refcard Available – DZone add to their series of quick reference cards with a reference card for the .NET Framework 3.5

Community

• ThoughtWorks geek night – reminder – Andrew Stopford promotes a relatively new event held in Manchester, where he will be talking on MBUnit as part of a double bill of talks. I’ve attended one of these events before and it was very interesting – I’m looking forward to this one one Wednesday

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