The Morning Brew

Software

• Microsoft FxCop 1.36 – FxCop has been updated to support .NET 3.5 SP1

Information

• Know Issues / Breaking changes in ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 – Scott Galloway is maintaining a list of Know issues and breaking changes for the ASP.NET 3.5 SP1, which he will be keeping up to date
• Free Silverlight and WPF goodness for all! – Andrew den Hertog highlights a new WPF and Silverlight component site, allowing community submissions of free components.
• More on Device Filtering With ASP.NET Server Control Properties – Ryan Farley continues looking at browser filtering for asp.NET server controls, this time looking at how it can be archived in code rather than the declarative markup.
• Aspects of Functional Programming in C# Presentation and Code Redux – Matthew Podwysocki issues a post presentation collection of links to articles, sample code and podcasts about Functional Programming and F#.
• LINQ and Dynamic Predicate Construction at Run-time – Dave Dolan look at a way of dynamically building LINQ Predicates from a search form.
• C# Tutorial – Weak References – Michael Kuehl talks about the Weak Reference in .NET and shows where it can be used.
• Test Doubles: When To (Not) Use Them – Davy Brion gives some guidance for choosing when to use the real component and when to use a test double in its place when writing tests.
• Filters in ASP.NET MVC CodePlex Preview 4 – Phil Haack talks about the four types of filter introduced in ASP.NET MVC Preview 4
• Inversion of Control is NOT about testability – Jeffrey Palermo reminds us that IOC is about improving the quality of our code/design, and that testability is a happy side effect of the good code/design. He ends by making a very good point – Programming is about coupling after all
• ASP.NET gets no Respect – Rick Strahl talks at length about the reasons he feels that ASP.NET gets a lack of respect from the general web development community – a long but interesting (and not particularly biased) article
• 12 Unit Testing Tips for Software Engineers – Its sometimes a good idea to remind yourself what the best ways and reasons for doing something are.

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I’ve introduced a temporary section for Service Pack 1 related items today to help separate them out from the normal stuff.

Software

• Free (Lite Version) Icon Editor Addin for Visual Studio 2008 – Axialis IconWorkshop Lite – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of a free icon editor for Visual Studio. I’m no artist, but having the correct tools makes making icons a little easier.

Information

• Recursing on Recursion – Continuation Passing – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on Recursion, focusing on Continuation Passing, and how that can help with parsing unbalanced trees.
• A fluent interface to NHibernate – Part 2 – Value Objects – The NHibernate FAQ blog continues looking at Fluent NHibernate, looking at mapping value objects and relationships to value objects in this post.
• Wanted: IE8 Beta Testers – The Internet Explorer team are not far from a Beta 2 release of IE8, and are now looking to get a team of beta testers together.
• What’s an Auto Mocking Container? – Mike Hadlow gives a nice simple introduction to the Auto Mocking Container in Rhino mocks
• Curry for dummies – Bart De Smet looks at the concept of Currying, and shows how it can be implemented in C#
• DSL Patterns – User Extensible Language – Ayende looks at improving the clarity and expression in DSL statements.
• SQL Server 2008 Management Studio tip: Status bar Custom Colors – One of the nice new features in SQL server Management Studio 2008, anything that helps avoid those awful ‘I’ve just run that on the wrong database’ moments has to be a good thing.
• Our New Book – Beginning ASP.NET MVC – Keyvan Nayyeri talks about his next project, a beginners book on ASP.NET MVC.

.NET 3.5 Service Pack 1

• Hidden Gems – Not the same old 3.5 SP1 post – Scott Hanselman gives a good overview of the new features in .NET 3.5 SP1
• .NET 3.5 SP1: Changes Overview – Patrick Smacchia runs over the changes in .NET 3.5 SP1 using NDepend to compare to original 3.5 release.
• Visual Studio SP1 and The Metification of REST – K. Scott Allen talks about the adding of metadata to REST webservices, and how it really helps out Sliverlight and ASP.NET web service interoperability
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 Allows managed code to be launched from a network share! – .NET 3.5 SP1 relaxes the restriction on running managed code from network shares – this has been a long standing grievance for me and may others, and I’m very glad to see its been fixed.
• How .Net 3.5 SP1 broke Rhino Mocks – Ayende reveals how .NET 3.5 SP1 breaks Rhino Mocks support for mocking F#, C++ and Spec#. There is a Connect Site Issue open with Microsoft about this breaking change which would appreciate your vote.

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The dust is still settling following the double Service Pack release on Monday – I’ve obtained the service pack now, but have yet to have the time to install. Last night I upgraded this Blog to WordPress 2.6, so if any one notices any bugs please let me know.

Also, Thanks to Davy Brion for recommending the Morning Brew in his recent post on Link Blogs.

Software

• SQL Server Express 2008 is now available – Aaron Bertrand reminds us that the 11th was not just VS SP1 and .NET SP1 day, it also marked the release of the Express Edition of SQL Server 2008
• Open source WPF Grid from the WPF Toolkit project released (CTP/Preview) – Greg Duncan points out the release a CTP of a Open Source WPF Grid control from Microsoft – This is good stuff, shame its goign to get lost in the SP1 Hype.

Information

• ASP.NET Performance: High CPU Utilization Case Studies And Solutions – Alik Levin gives three case studies of things that can cause high CPU Utilisation on an ASP.NET web server.
• System.Data.Services – Marcelo Lopez Ruiz gives a brief overview of the parts of the System.Data.Services name space.
• Most Common Performance Issues in Parallel Programs – The Parallel Extension Framework Team share some interesting thoughts on the factors that dictate how much speed up developers can expect to see by applying parallelism their programs.
• Microsoft Sync Framework : 2 New Sync Samples – The Microsoft Sync Framework team announce the release of two sample projects to the code gallery illustrating down load only sync and use the SQLSyncAdapterBuilder with Sync Services for ADO.NET V2
• Forms Framework with Validation for ASP.NET MVC – Nathan Stott shares his newly created forms framework which deals with the creation and validation of forms in the MVC framework preview 4. Not currently open source’d, but judging by the discussion in the comments it will be soon
• Encapsulating Test Data and Expectations – John Teague shares his recent experience of adopting the Object Mother / Test Data Builder patterns to help improve his testing code.
• On Fluent NHibernate – Ayende shares his thoughts on the Fluent NHibernate project, looking at ways it can be used to give an advantage over the native XML mapping files. Looks like a good discussion is starting in the comments too.
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1: LINQ perf improvements (LINQ to Objects and LINQ to SQL) – Dinesh Kulkarni talks about some of the changes to LINQ in SP1, including a breaking change to the Cast<T> extension method.
• ASP.NET Browsers Filter!! – Web Dev And Stuff – A neat little trick which allows you to send different content for properties of controls to different browsers – I’d never heard of this feature before, but its been about since .NET 2.0 apparently.
• Update for viewstate issues – The ASP.NET Debugging blog has some information on a change to viewstate ins SP1 which fixes a known problem.
• Released: .NET 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit – Charlie Calvert highlights the release of an updated .NET 3.5 Enhancements Training Kit, which has presentations, hands on labs and demos of new features in .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio SP1.

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