The Morning Brew

I can’t believe how cold and dull its getting in the mornings – September seems to have arrived and brought autumn with it.

Software

• FsUnit 0.6.0 – Ray Vernagus announces the 0.6.0 release of FsUnit, a specification framework for F#
• FsTest Updated with F# CTP – Matthew Podwysocki announces an update to FsTest, his testing DSL for F#, now updated for the September 2008 CTP

Information

• Optimistic Concurrency Updates using Entity Framework in N-Tier and N-Layer Applications (Part 2) – Cesar de la Torre talks about handling optimistic concurrency using the Entity Framework in a multi tiered and multi layered application. This is the second part of a series on N-Tier/N layer applications using the Entity Framework, and the first part is well worth a look too.
• Developer Tools in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 – IEBlog outlines the Developer tools in IE 8, which are looking pretty functional (and quite familiar to anyone who has worked with FireBug)
• Simple F# Game using WPF – Chris Smith shows that F# can be fun too – in the sense of using it to write a version of a Tank Wars type of game. F# would seem to be a good fit here sue to its mathematical nature.
• Nasty "Gotcha" with ASP.NET MVC and Views – Casey Charlton talks about an interesting problem encountered with ASP.NET MVC when there were some old files floating about.
• Introduction to Model Driven Development with Sculpture – Part 1 – Ahmed Negm looks at using the Sculpture Model Driven Development framework to develop an application. This is a nice step by step walk through using Sculpture ith plenty of screenshots.
• Functional Programming Notables #1 – Matthew Podwysocki provides what look like the start of a series of link posts about Functional Programming across a number of languages – welcome to the LinkBlog scene Matthew
• IIS6 to IIS7 migration tips / tricks – Steve Schofield gathers together a collection of resources about migration to IIS7, mostly revolving around Classic ASP applications.
• Finding Deadlocks with ReaderWriterLock and Typemock Racer – The Typemock Insider Blog shows off some of the functionality of Typemock Racer, in detecting deadlocks with ReaderWriterLock.
• XBAPs are Rich Internet Applications – Mike Taulty talks about why WPF applications can be considered to be Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) when they are deployed using XBAP.
• The SQL Toolbelt from Red Gate Software – The SQL Toolbelt is a collection of Redgate’s SQL tools supporting SQL 2000, 2005, and 2008. At the moment if you download the 14 day triaal of the Sql Toolbelt you get a free copy of ‘Brad’s Sure Guide to SQL Server 2008’ in eBook format. You can also download the ebook on its own.
• Visual Studio 2008 Multi-Targeting, .NET 3.5 after installing SP1 – A pointer to a couple of resources about Multi Targeting using Visual Studio 2008 with the .NET 3.5 and .NET 3.5 SP1 as targets.
• Welcome To The New – Todd Hile Hoffer gives simple sample which pulls together a number of the interesting and new technologies, including a look at LINQ, WCF, JSON and AJAX
• Subscribers will have limited site functionality this weekend – Useful information, MSDN Subscriber benefits are going to be offline this weekend, so if you are a subscriber and are likely to need to download anything get doing it now.

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A little short on content today – it seems everyone is playing with and writing about Google Chrome rather than blogging about .NET!

Software

• MassTransit 0.3 Released – Chris Patterson announces the release of MassTransit 0.3, a service bus implementation for .NET. Looks like there are a number of significant changes and new features judging by the list in this post.
• Babel Obfuscator – Alberto Ferrazzoli shows how to use the .NET code obfuscator he has created using the Microsoft Phoenix framework, a framework that helps create compilers, analysers, etc. No source code is available for the tool due to it being a security related tool.

Information

• JavaScript Performance Rundown – Prompted by the release of Google Chrome, and its new Javascript engine V8, John Resig shares a collection of JavaScript benchmark results for the common browser JavaScript engines.
• Mock Object Frameworks: NMock, RhinoMock, TypeMock – Mark Michaelis gives a brief review and overview of the significant features of the three most common mocking frameworks. A useful resource if you need to make a decision about which to use
• Custom Collections with NHibernate, Part IV: Extensions! – Billy McCafferty continues his series on NHibernate compliant collections with part 5, discussing the use of extension methods to improve the way these collections work, allowing them to be more persistence ignorant.
• MSDN Article on "Prism" went to press – Glenn Block has an article on the new Composite Application Guidance framework published in this month’s MSDN magazine. Links in the article to the web based September Edition.
• DataTable JSON Serialization in JSON.NET and JavaScriptSerializer – Rick Strahl has modified his added support for JSON.NET into his Ajax Framework, and shares the wrapper functions to do serialisation in JSON.NET. Rick also shows how you can extend both JSON.NET and the JavaScriptSerializer to allow you to serialize DataTables.
• Opinionated ASP.NET MVC by Joshua Flanagan – Chad Myers highlights two articles by Joshua Flanagan, talking about the work they have been doing in their day job at Dovetail using the ASP.NET MVC
• BDD style unit test names – Mark Needham talks about his naming convention for tests.
• Close Encounters: The Making of ANTS Profiler 4 – Bart Read talks about the development of the recently released Ants Profiler 4, and links to a number of articles about features of the product written by both himself and others.

Community

• Fancy a chance to have Scott Guthrie watch you speak? – ‘Ready Steady Speak" is a community speaking competition which is going to be held at REMIX. The idea of the competition is to encourage new speakers to give a 5 minute talk to get them on the road to giving larger presentations at other events. Best speaker wins an XBox 360

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Software

• Google Chrome – Download a new browser – So the big news in the last 24 hours seems to have been Google’s entry into the browser market, focusing on making the browser a better place for running application, Google Chrome has certainly set the blogging world on fire. For use developers probably the most important thing it that its based on the WebKit rendering engine, the same one used in Safari.
• MSpec v0.2 – Aaron Jensen announces the release of MSpec (Machine Specification) v0.2. This release introduces some language changes along with improved reporting and a console runner.
• Performance and memory profiler for .NET code – RedGate have now released the official release of ANTS Profiler 4, commercially licensed with prices starting at £195
• SQL Server Monitor Version 1.1 – Shawn Wildermuth reconstructs using Reflector, and updates SQL Server Monitor, a systray utility which lets you control your MSSQL instances.
• ReSharper 4.1 is Released – The JetBrains team have been busy, and announce the release of ReSharper 4.1, which improves support for Visual Studio 2008 SP1, gives better ASP.NET experience, adds a few new features, and fixes an impressively large list of bugs. Sounds well worth the download.

Information

• Prevent Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) using ASP.NET MVC’s AntiForgeryToken() helper – Steve Sanderson shows how you can protect your ASP.NET MVC applications from Cross Site Scripting (XSS) exploits using the AntiForgeryToken helpers included in ASP.NET MVC PR5
• ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Form Posting Scenarios – Just when a few people were beginning to wonder what had happened to ScottGu, he makes his blogging reappearance with a monster post looking at some of the new functionality in ASP.NET MVC PR5
• Problems Upgrading ASP.NET MVC to Preview 5 – Casey Charlton posts about some of the problems he had in upgrading is ASP.NET MVC projects to PR5. In addition to this Phil Haack Twittered about some problems opening views in PR5
• What’s Wrong With This Code? (#20) – K. Scott Allen continues his series of ‘What’s Wrong with this code?’ posers with problem involving modelling answers to yes no questions and date time answers.
• Technical Currency Metric – David Starr looks at generating a metric of how technically current your application is. I like this way of generating a metric, and can see how it could apply to a number of other aspects.
• Windows Presentation Foundation, Event Samples – Mike Taulty gathers together a collection of samples he has used in presentations on Windows Presentation Foundation.
• NVelocity Server Control – Scott Watermasysk shows off a simple server control which brings NVelocity template support to ASP.NET ASPX pages.
• Using MSBuild to create a deployment zip – Ben Hall looks at using the MSBuild Community Tasks to automatically create deployment .ZIP file as a part of the build process.
• Introduction to CLR Database Objects – Rupesh kumar Nayak takes a look at using CLR objects in the Database, with an example written in VB.NET.

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