The Morning Brew

Today’s edition will be delayed a while – I’m having issues with the Ma.gnolia web services which I use to put the post together each morning. Hopefully what ever is causing the time outs will be resolved later and I’ll be able to post (or I’ll put the post together manually)

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Its a busy conference weekend in the UK this weekend with SQL Bits, the Alt.Net UK Conference, and Barcamp in Bath being the ones I know people who are attending. I’m going to be at the Alt.NET event, and I’m really looking forward to it – I just hope my train back isn’t as disrupted as the maintenance schedule suggests.

Software

• .NET Application Modeling Language (nAML) Specification and Tools – nAML (.NET Application Language) is a modeling tool for modelling .NET applications down to a low level. It looks like an interesting project, and this beta release contains specification documentation along with samples, and a Visio stencil for drawing the diagrams in Viso.

Information

• My default asp.net architecture – Chris Brandsma shares the structure of his default architecture of ASP.NET. Every developer / architect should have a default architecture that they use for projects as its vital to be able to hit the ground running on projects. Just don’t forget to question and refine it occasionally.
• Visual Studio Tip: Creating Your Own Code Snippets – Kevin Babcock gives a detailed run down of the creation of Code snippets for use in Visual Studio – lots of screenshots / samples help make it clear
• History of the browser user-agent string – Aaron Andersen gives a slightly humorous look at the history and origin of the browser user agent string – a useful prelude to the next item today….
• The .NET Framework and the Browser’s UserAgent String – Scott Hanselman talks about the Browser Useragent string from a .NET perspective, and canvases for opinions from the community about what it should contain.
• The ALT.NET Criterion – Glenn Block talks about the key areas of interest for the Alt.NET community
• Another new find for me – MyVBProf.com – Eric Nelson highlights a good VB related screen cast resource.
• How do you construct your objects? – Brian Di Croce looks at object construction and suggests that its a good idea to really think about your constructor, and ensure that they leave the constructed object in a good state to use.
• NHibernate – When the Fun Begins – Sara Chipps has gone through the pain barrier of mapping here classes, and now looks at the fun part of NHibernate, actually querying and working with the classes, where the framework takes care of the database queries.
• The Weekly Source Code 33 – Microsoft Open Source inside Google Chrome – Scott Hanselman continues his quest to improve as a developer by reading source code, this week looking at the recently released Google Chrome and the open source technologies from MS that it uses.
• Introducing Lullaby – Ryan Olshan explores Lullaby (currently in beta), an attribute based REST API for building REST services in .NET
• Developers: will you or have you signed for ribbon rights? – Tim Anderson talks about the legal restrictions on using the Ribbon UI – If anything is going to restrict the uptake of this UI Feature it’ll be lots of legal red tape – for me certainly.
• Get Involved in the SQL Server Community – Brad McGehee talks about the benefits for DBAs of getting involved in the SQL Server Community – although his points apply equally to all the other technology communities, so if you aren’t already involved, look up what is available in your area and start getting involved.

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Software

• JSON for the Compact Framework – Karl Seguin announces an early release of JsonCF a compact framework 2.0 JSON serializer and Deserializer which can be used in the Compact Framework as well as the Full Framework.

Information

• Evolving a .NET Framework 2.0 Application to .NET Framework 3.5 – Brad Abrams highlights a paper about migrating a .NET 2 application to .NET 3.5, looking at the choices that will need to be made.
• C# Eval: An Embeddable Compiler – Following on from the C# Interactive Shell, Miguel de Icaza has made some changes to allow Eval functionality in C#.
• Vexing exceptions – Eric Lippert explains how he classifies exceptions into four categories, and then when trying to write exception handling code uses these classifications to help decide how to handle the exception.
• NHibernate 2.0 and Linq – Ayende explains the plan for Linq to NHibernate, and highlights the current community offering which will run on NHibernate V2.
• Object Oriented F# – Extension Everything – Matthew Podwysocki looks at Extension Methods in C# 3,0 and F#, and talks about the differences.
• TDD and Hard To Test Areas, Part 2 – Ian Cooper follows up on the first part from a few months back, looking at the things that are difficult to test for developers adopting TDD, and shows techniques that can help in a number of situations.
• Improve your C# with IronRuby – Justin Etheredge suggests that we can learn some interesting things about C# development by looking at the MS-PL licensed code for IronRuby – and I’d have to agree, I think the best way to learn and improve your command of any language is to read some code written by other developers.
• Building the “Good Enough” Framework – Keith Elder shares his notes from an open spaces session held by DevLink about things to consider when building a framework.
• Why a comparison of a value type with null is a warning? – Kirill Osenkov asks the C# Compilter Team a seemingly simple question, and gets a really well considered answer
• Silverlight Foundations: Hello, World! – Kevin Babcock gives a quick start guide to getting up and developing using Silverlight 2.0, working through the required components to install, through to the basic hello world.
• Quality and code coverage – Jimmy Bogard questions the motivation to get to 100% code coverage, argues that the last few percent will take an inordinate amount of work
• ASP.NET MVC Tip #42 – Use the Validation Application Block – Stephen Walther looks at implementing Model Based validation in ASP.NET MVC using the Patterns and Practices Validation Application Block.
• Client & Server Side Validation in ASP.NET MVC – It looks like validation in ASP.NET MVC is a hot topic at the moment, and in this article Emad Ibrahim looks at implementing client side validation in JQuery, and server side validation using Castle Validator.
• Subversion Support Comes to CodePlex… Sorta’ – Steve Harman explores SVNBridge on CodePlex, allowing access to the CodePlex TFS using Subversion

Community

• MSDN Social Bookmarks – Dan Rigsby talks about a new MSDN feature of social bookmarking which has been introduced this week.

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