The Morning Brew

Software

• Interactive Code Dependencies Graph – Patrick Smacchia announces the release of NDepend v2.10, and give a nice preview of Interactive Code Dependency Graphs, the significant new feature of this release. NDepend just seems to keep getting better – I really need to get round to having a play with it again.
• NConsoler – command line parser library for .NET – Maxim Tihobrazov shares a library which gives a nice simple way of working with command line parameters when construction command line tools.

Information

• Logging enumeration flow – Jon Skeet examines the IEnumerable.Intersect function and along with way shows how you can add logging into your IEnumerables to help see when they are evaluated.
• ASP.NET Memory – Identifying pages with high Viewstate – Tess shows how you can identify pages which have large viewstate from a memory dump using the debugger
• Persistence Ignorance (POCO) Adapter for Entity Framework V1 – Jaroslaw Kowalski shows how you can use your POCO (Plain old CLR Objects) with the entity framework by using adapters to add in the the EF change tracking functionality.
• Unity – Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control Container – Misbah Arefin looks at the concepts behind Dependency Injection, and examines the functionality offered by the Microsoft Unity framework.
• Expose New Linq Operations from the Screaming HashSet<T> Collection – Damon Wilder Carr looks at the combining Linq and the HashSet<T> class to provide high performance querying, illustrating this is an example based on scanning the registry.
• Microsoft IE8 and Google Chrome – Processes are the New Threads – Scott Hanselman looks at the new vogue for isolating browser tabs in their own process, and looks at how implementations differ across platforms.
• Enterprise Library 4.0 now Open Source – Miguel de Icaza shares some more good news for Mono, recent changes to the license for the Enterprise library have brought it under the MS-PL license which is an open source friendly license.
• NHibernate Deep Grok – Tobin Harris announces a new Google custom search powered search site which aims to provide good quality NHibernate context search results.
• Comparing .NET DI (IoC) Frameworks, Part 2 – I missed the first part of this series which seems to be a very good considered review of IOC/DI frameworks for .NET. I always find these types of comparisons to be very useful when making technical decisions
• When to use Type Inference – Type inference seems to be one of those topics that split the developer camp – some love it and some hate it. This short article explains one of the view points regarding adoption of ‘var’.
• Transparent Windows in WPF – Dwayne Need takes a look at how WPF creates transparent windows, and how those windows behave once you’ve got them transparent.
• Tech-Ed Training Sessions DVD – Austin Avrashow considers the value of the Tech-Ed 2008 conference DVD set – at $1.25 per hour for good technical content it almost makes me wish I had a long commute to work where I could watch this stuff.
• New PDC Topics Published – PDC 2008 is looking like its going to be Christmas come early at the end of October. The (still growing) session list contains some real gems already – I look forward to some of this content becoming available online post conference.

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Software

• CodeTextBox – another RichTextBox control with syntax highlighting and intellisense – A simple looking Code Editor control with syntax highlighting, where the whole set up is possible using the properties grid in the Visual Studio Designer.

Information

• Getting started with Managed Extensibility Framework – Szymon Kobalczyk walks through one of the samples of the MEF, explaining what is going on.
• Retrieving Web Resources and Content Types in Code – Rick Strahl looks at getting his embedded CSS and Javascript resources suitably tidy and compressed for delivery to the browser.
• ASP.NET MVC Application Building: Forums #4 – Server-Side Form Validation – Stephen Walther continues his ASP.NET MVC best practices exploration series with a look at serverside validation.
• Build the tools that aren’t there – Ayende talks about the benefits of having an automated build
• Does ASP.NET magically handle thread safety for you? – The ‘How do you do that?’ blog looks at thread safety in ASP.NET, compiling a list of what is and isn’t thread safe – useful information if you’ve never thought about this kind of thing.
• Interactive C# Shell – Miguel de Icaza talks about the C# Interactive Shell he recently created, which will be included in Mono 2.2 (and is already included in the Mono SVN if you wish to compile it yourself)
• High maintenance – Eric Lippert examines a simple IEnumerable method that uses yield return to run through the lines of a file, and picks apart some of the bad things its doing which would increase the maintenance requirements of this method.
• There’s no I in Interface. Oh, wait… – An interesting idea when it comes to naming interfaces, as the interface what it does. Seems to work pretty well too.
• The Ultimate Steal is back – One for the Students (and teachers) – you can get Office 2007 Ultimate for £38.95, which is a huge saving over the list price. This page is for the UK, however I have seen mention of a similar offer for US based students.
• Microsoft to end licensing Window 3.11 for the embedded industry – I thought Windows 3.11 had been killed off long ago, but it seems that it has lived on in the embedded industry (until November). It seems like there is quite a back lash from the embedded developer community judging by some of the comments on the linked article.
• FREE! SQL Server 2008 {JumpStart} Training – A huge collection of Power point slides, documents, hands on labs sessions and videos covering a huge range of SQL 2008 topics. You’ll need Office 2007 viewer apps for some of these.
• Simplicio: A Free Icon Set – I’m no graphic designer, so I always appreciate the efforts of others in creating great icons, and I like them all the more if they are royalty free.
• SqlClient Timeouts Revealed – MattN posts up lots of information about the situations where SQLClient can give a timeout.
• Singletons – Ricardo Peres looks at singletons, and how Serialization can break the principles behind using a singleton. Ricardo also proposes some additions to your singletons which help protect them further.

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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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