The Morning Brew

Every day I have a number of items that I’ve glanced at that may be ‘Brew worthy’ but that I’ve not had a chance to read fully, or might not fit precisely with what I’m trying to talk about with the Morning Brew (outside the area of interest, or just totally irrelevant) – would people be interested in another link blog series of these links (without commentary) posted later in the day? – let me know your views in the comments.

Software

• Report Builder for SQL Server 2008 RTM’s – Greg Duncan highlights the release of SQL Server 2008 Report Builder 2.0, a report authoring environment for SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services.
• PAL – Performance Analysis of Logs – Ricardo Henriques highlights a really useful looking tool for monitoring the different types of logs that your infrastructure produces. Ricardo walks through some of the steps in setting up the tool, and based on what I see where this looks well worth investing a little time having a play with if you are in any way responsible for running servers.
• Composite WPF and Silverlight – Release: Prism V2 – Drop 3 – I’m a little late on this one, as drop three of Prism V2 was released last week, but I think its still worth mentioning.
• WSCF.classic: WSCF 0.7 now open source on CodePlex – Christian Weyer announces that ThinkTecture’s WSCF 0.7 (for Soap Services) is now available in source form on CodePlex – its really nice to see commercial organisations opening up their code to the community.

Information

• ObjectMother and TestDataBuilder – Ian Cooper compares two different methods for creating your test data for use in unit tests, explaining why in his current projects they have moved from ObjectMother to TestDataBuilder.
• Frustration Friday – How NHibernate Can Waste Your Day – Casey Charlton talks about some problems he encountered with NHibernate / NHSearch, and remarks on the power behind these projects in the form of the Community.
• Introduction to CLR – Simple Example of CLR Stored Procedure – Pinal Dave gives a simple getting started tutorial for SQL Server CLR showing how you can write your Stored Procedures in .NET and run them in the database engine.
• MSTest 2008 Reports for CruiseControl.NET – Jonathan de Halleux shares 2 XSLT templates for rendering MSTest 2008 output within CruiseControl.NET.
• ASP.NET Completion and MonoDevelop Debugger Packages – Michael Hutchinson talks about some of the recent enhancements that have been being made to MonoDevelop, and are now creaping into the trunk releases.
• Test Automation Brain Dump – Jeremy D. Miller shares some thoughts on automation of tests, testing all tiers of the application starting at the application, passing right down to the database and all the way back. Hopefully this will get some discussion going in the comments on Monday when the working world returns to the blogsphere
• Deep Clone of a business object: the quick and dirty way – Giorgetti Alessandro looks at easy Deep Cloning functionality for Silverlight, WCF and WPF.
• ASP.NET: Alternatives to Dynamic Controls – Part 1 – Adam Pooler starts a serise looking at alternative ways of achieving Dynamic Control like behaviour in ASP.NET in ways which (in certain situations) are easier and better

Community

• Can’t Go To PDC? Attend the MSDN Developer Conference – One for my US based readers, Angela Binkowski highlights a series of events being held across the US in December and January, which at $99 look to be quite interesting. I hope something like this will happen in a few locations in the UK too.

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As predicted this morning I was inundated with posts about ASP.NET MVC, so for the second time this week we have a special section given over to the release.

ASP.NET MVC Beta

• ASP.NET MVC Beta Released – ScottGu does his usual epic announcement for the new ASP.NET MVC Beta release. This one is a good read, and most other announcements are referring to parts of this post.
• ASP.NET MVC Beta Released! – Phil Haack gives the details about the way that ASP.NET MVC Beta was announced, and talks a little about some of the changes
• Upgrading Dimecasts.Net to the MVC Beta – Derik Whittaker talks about the steps he took to upgrade hisDimeCasts screen cast website (well worth checking out if you haven’t already) to the ASP.NET MVC Beta
• ASP.NET MVC Beta released – Coolness Ensues – Scott Hanselman talks a litle about the beta ASP.NET MVC release.

Software

• Announcing Gallio and MbUnit v3.0.4 – Jeff Brown announces the release of Gallio and MbUnit 3.0.4 which contains a number of new features along with the usual improvments of a point release. Jeff’s post is a very comprehensive run through of what has changed, and makes good reading.

Information

• Functional .NET – Fighting Friction in the BCL with Directory.GetFiles – Matthew Podwysocki looks at rewriting part of the BCL using generics and lazy evaluation to provide a much nicer API.
• Custom user configurable SQL Server Profiler events – Mladen Prajdi? talks about the custom SQL Server Profiler events which you can use in your Stored Procs to get information out into the trace. This post includes an example, and this looks like a really useful trick to getting information out of SQL Server when debugging
• Microsoft Web Application Installer – Open Source Web Apps Delivered and Installed – Scott Hanselman shows off the new Web Applications Installer, and talks about the changes going on inside Microsoft regarding Open source software.
• Thoughts On Domain Validation – Part 2 – Justin Etheredge continues looking at Validation in Domain entities, looking this time at moving his rules out of code and into the database, including compiling the code at runtime.
• C# Anonymous Object Tip – Brad Wilson shares a nice shortening trick for Anonymous types in C# which he learnt from a ReSharper tip.
• F# Cheat Sheet – Chance Coble highlights a nice 5 page cheat sheet for F# from A6 Systems covering most of the important syntax.
• Increasing Code Coverage May Be Harmful – Dan Manges talks about why code coverage shouldn’t be considered the be all and end all of unit testing. Examples in this post aren’t .NET, but the principles still apply.

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Another late edition today – normal posting schedule will resume tomorrow. Today there is still a lot of chatter about the Silverlight 2 release, and surprisingly little about the MVC beta – I bet I’ll be knee deep in those posts tomorrow.

Software

• ASP.NET MVC Beta – ASP.NET MVC goes to beta, with surprisingly little fanfare . With this and Silverlight released this week I wonder if there will be any developer software releases announced at PDC.
• New Open Source Application: .NET Task Service – Joseph Guadagno announces the release of his latest project on Codeplex. This is a task scheduler service which provides a common means to running code from assemblies at a schedule that you provide. This is something I’ve meant to get round to writing many times and never have, so its great to see someone else doing it

Information

• Simplicity is key to successful unit testing – Part 2 – Karl Seguin continues his series on testing with a look at simplicity in the context of unit testing (and the code being tested), and looks at breaking a single large method with multiple responsibilities into a number of smaller simpler ones to make the testing easier.
• Acceptable test failures – Jimmy Bogard talks about the importance of the right type of test failure when doing TDD
• Microsoft ASP.NET MVC Beta Released! – John Mandia wins the prize for being the only English language announcement of the ASP.NET MVC beta release I saw in my blog reading this morning. John gives some details of what is new and what is fixed in this release.
• Using ServiceLocator in an MVC Framework applicatio – Mike Hadlow looks at using the new Common Service Locator implementation to wrap his access to Castle Windsor in an ASP.NET MVC application.
• Making the complex trivial: Rich Domain Querying – Ayende looks at creating a means of querying a rich domain model using filter objects which can be combined to produce complex queries.
• Fluent hierarchical construction – Jimmy Bogard talks about creating a fluent interface for creating hierarchical object structures, providing a nice simple example of fluent interfaces along the way.
• Open Source apps on Windows – made easy! – Brian Goldfarb talks about the new Microsoft.com/web website which is aiming to make it easier to get a server up and running as a fully featured web server, including all the software bits needed by most web apps, using the Microsoft Web Platforms installer. In addition they are planning on packaging common Community software as easy installs onto servers using the Application Web Application Installer.
• Data and Services with Silverlight 2 – Table of Contents – John Papa’s new book on Data Services with Silverlight 2 is availabel to pre-order, and in this post he shares the Table of Contents to give you an idea of what is included.

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