The Morning Brew

Software

• : Smells like service spirit : WSCF.blue: The WSCF tool for WCF now on CodePlex – Christian Weyer, of ThinkTecture, announces that WSCF.blue (Web Services Contract First) for WCF Services is now an open source projects on CodePlex. I’ve been a fan of their ASMX product for a long time now, and this is great news for the community that they are releasing their new tool in this way.

Information

• Font Survey: 30 of the Best Programming Fonts – Hans Dietrich compares (with screen shots of code from the IDE) 30 Programming fonts in both their ClearType and non-ClearType forms, along with download links to obtain the font – this is a nice easy way of helping us to pick a good developing font
• The Bejeweled Puzzle in SQL – Alex Kozak posts a puzzle to be solved in TSQL, based on the Bejeweled game – this looks like a fun challenge if your Friday has the time 🙂
• First Steps with Post Sharp – Ayende spends some time playing with Aspect Oriented Programming in PostSharp, and likes what he finds.
• Validation in WPF using PostSharp/AOP – Inspired by a developer event where AOP in PostSharp was discussed, Rudi Grobler takes a look at using PostSharp to implement Validation in WPF
• Ideavine – An open source hosting project – Faisal highlights a new Open Source .NET Project hosting site – it only launched recently, and is currently hosting SubText and NInject
• What’s The Point Of Delegates In .NET? – Derick Bailey thinks about Delegates, and comes up with (what sounds like a Linq influenced) reason for their existence.
• Auto-generating help with NAnt and CC.net – Garry Pilkington walks through generating documentation from your code using Cruise Control .NET, NAnt and SandCastle.
• Having Console apps write out Xml so you can parse their output – Tim Stall talks about parsing the output of console applications, and reminds us that we, like many tools vendors, can output XML which makes this task much easier.
• Cheat Sheet: patterns & practices Catalog at a Glance Posted to CodePlex – J.D. Meier posts the largest list of Patterns and Practices content I’ve ever seen – plenty of goo stuff in there.

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Information

• DI and IoC: Creating And Working With A Cloud Of Objects – Derick Bailey talks about the reasons and the how of using Dependency Injection and Inversion Of Control Containers in this nice article.
• Setter Injection in StructureMap 2.5 – Jeremy D. Miller, as part of creating the documentation for StructureMap 2.5, talks about using setter injection with StructureMap, with plenty of code and config samples.
• Using Brail View Engine with ASP.NET MVC – Keyvan Nayyeri returns after a short break from blogging with a look at using the Brail view engine in ASP.NET MVC, going from the config to the first page produced in this walk through.
• Old Code, New Testing Tricks – breaking old habits – Steve Hebert talks about a tricky threading situation that made unit testing very difficult, and how he solved it by thinking about the problem in a different way.
• Exceptional Exception Handling Behavior – Davy Brion posts about some strange behaviour with exceptions and generics in and out of the debugger. Davy has posed this as a question, so the answer to the problem may be in the comments by the time you read this.
• Encodo C# Handbook – A coding style guide produced at Encodo System which covers the full range of conventions – I find these types of document really interesting, as there is usually at least one good practice you aren’t already following that you can adopt.
• The Object Relational “Impedance Mismatch” – Its been a while since I’ve seen people talking about the underlying problem that ORM software solves, and Dimitar Kapitanov does a nice job of just that in this article.
• Mapping from a type to an instance of that type – Jon Skeet investigates a problem I’ve encountered before for mapping between the type of an object and an instance of the object using a dictionary – its one of the places that generics don’t work, and Jon shows an implementation which works but is not as elegant as he’d like.
• ASP.NET Performance: Dynamically Loaded Assemblies Cause Application Recycles (Problem and Solution) – Alik Levin shows the steps he took to investigate a strange problem with IIS and dynamically compiled code.

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Quite a lot of software in today’s edition

Software

• MassTransit 0.4 Released – Chris Patterson announces the release of version 0.4 of Mass Transit, a lean service bus implementation. This new release adds a bunch of new features along with a number of improvements and fixes.
• Karvonite – Agile Persistence Framework – Karvonite is a persistence framework for the .NET Compact Framework and XNA Framework, and aims to help developers in moving in memory objects to the data store. This project has just reached its first CTP (September 2008)
• Clean that Project – Ron Jacobs releases a little utility to clean out your solution ready to zip up and send to other developers, focusing on removing bin and obj directories, along with test results, etc.
• SubSonic MVC Scaffold Addin – Rob Conery releases a Visual Studio Add-in which generates scaffolded views and controllers for ASP.NET MVC using Linq to SQL for the data connections. Rob plans to add support for SubSonic to this tool at a later date. Both MSI installer and Binary zip are available, along with a screen cast so you can see what its all about before installing yourself.
• Announcing the Test Driven Development Productivity Plugin for Resharper – Eric Hexter releases a neat ReSharper plugin which allows you to move classes between projects, and talks a little about how his need for this came from test driven development where classes that didn’t exist were being created by resharper in his test projects rather than his actual implementation project.

Information

• Reducing SQL Lookup Tables and Function Properties in NHibernate – Steve Smith talks about moving lookup data from the database into your application as objects. This is an interesting solution to a common problem, and the article and comment discussions are well worth reading.
• ActiveRecord and a Custom NHibernate PrimitiveType – Patrick Steele follows on from Steve Smith, by looking at implementing these status / lookup POCO objects as NHibernate Primitive Types.
• Rhino Mocks Challenge: Implement This Feature – Ayende challenges the community to get involved with the Rhino Mocks project by contribution a new feature for Rhino Mocks based on Type Mock’s fluent mocking.
• (Breaking) Changes Coming in xUnit.net 1.1 – Brad Wilson gets the news out about some breaking changes taht will be in xUnit.net 1.1, and shares the rationale behind these changes.
• If the .Net BCL is drywall, Extension Methods are spackle – Jeremy D. Miller talks about the good aspects of Extension Methods, and gives examples of places he finds their use indispensable.
• Check out the New Look for CodePlex Projects – CodePlex projects gain the ability to customise the appearance of their projects pages.
• All you need to know about .NET Remoting – A nice introduction to Remoting, covering the common uses of remoting technology, accompanied by some sample code.
• Introduction to LINQ and the Entity Framework – A quite wordy Code Project article on the components of the Entity Framework and how they all connect together.

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