Despite lots of reading through all my feeds over the course of the weekend picking out the best articles putting together The Brew’ this morning still took an inexplicably long time – maybe its the Monday Morning slowness of brain!

Software

  • Microsoft Extensibility Framework released on CodePlex – Brad Abrams announces the release of the Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF). This release includes source code of the framework, guidelines for use, sample, along with a number of features suggested by the community.
  • FFlib.NET released! – This is the first (alpha) release of FFLib.NET, a .NET/FFMPEG based video conversion library which is available fro free to both personal and commercial users. The team behind the project are also working on PHP, C++ and COM versions of the library too.
  • Announcing the First CTP of Open XML SDK V2 – Open XML SDK V2 has reached public CTP status. Open XML is a set of standards for documents like spreadsheets, word processor documents, etc which is represented using XML and stored using ZIP.

Information

  • Oslo – There seems to be a lot of chatter in the .NET blogs this weekend about ‘Oslo’, which looks to be a new modelling platform for .NET 4.0. I look forward to all the interesting announcements that the PDC at the end of October will bring. There are a number of other posts about this topic linked in the trackbacks to this posting from Don Box.
  • CLR Inside Out: Unhandled Exception Processing In The CLR – Gaurav Khanna writes about unhandled exception processing in this interesting article in the September 2008 edition of MSDN Magazine
  • Firefox, ClickOnce, XBAPs and .NET 3.5 SP1 – Scott Hanselman explores the .NET 3.5 SP1 support for FireFox, allowing for a better experience for XBAP and Click Once applications.
  • ASP.NET MVC Application Building: Forums #1 – Create the Perfect Application – Stephen Walther has started a series of posts, aiming to uncover and promote the best practices for building ASP.NET MVC applications along the way. This is the first part of the series, with parts 2 and 3 also published to his blog already.
  • Avoid the Managed Extensibility Framework – While many people are very happy about the release of the Managed Extensibility Framework, Miguel de Icaza is not as happy, due to the license that has been applied to the openly released source code making it difficult for it to be ported to the open source CLI.
  • Microsoft F# Developer Center – With the release of the latest F# CTP, Microsoft seem to be throwing some weight behind this functional programming language, and now F# has its own developer center pulling together F# content from all over. Also available on the developer center are three chapters from Expert F#.
  • Testing Windows Form using TypeMock – Soon Hui takes a look at testing the UI interactions of an application using mocking and specific code structure.
  • Announcing: Project Rosetta – Shawn Wildermuth talks about a new website launched by Microsoft. Project Rosetta aims to help designers and developers get up to speed with Silverlight, using their existing skill set (Flash)
  • How to create fully encapsulated and simple Domain Models – Morten Lyhr looks at encapsulation of the domain model, offering another solution to a problem posed elsewhere. The original article by Udi Dahan and associated comments also make interesting reading.
  • Getting rid of strings (3): take your app settings to the next level – Andre Loker continues his quest to get rid of strings from your code with part three in a series. This part looks at better ways of managing application settings, and looks at the standard AppSettings approach before moving on to use the Castle DictionaryAdapter to further improve the situation.
  • In Praise of Nested Classes – Kathleen Dollard reviews Nested Classes, giving an example of why she considers them so useful, and why its a shame that many people fail to understand them.
  • Introducing TDD: How I Would Do It – Davy Brion is putting together a 10 minute pitch for Test Driven Development. Here is what he has so far, and he’s canvassing opinions for anything more that should be added or expressed differently
  • Applied Use of LinFu/Cecil and Aspect-Oriented Programming Concepts – A Library – An interesting article about getting unit tests running again buy using AOP to intercept calls to the database and record and replay those function calls.

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