The Morning Brew

Software

• Mono 2.0 is out! – Miguel de Icaza announces the release of Mono 2.0 – the list of what is included in this release is very impressive – its great that we can write .NET code and have it run on platforms other than Windows.
• .NET Micro Framework V3.0 RC0 Now Available! – Steve Maillet, program manager for the .NET Micro Framework announces that the first release candidate of Version 3 of the framework is now available on Connect.
• MSBuild Extension Pack (Think “FreeToDev MSBuild Tasks Suite” but now they’re cooking with gas! 😉 – Greg Duncan highlights the latest update to the MSBuild Extension Pack – a (huge) number of MS Build tasks for .NET 3.5 which add support to MSBuild for a vast array of operations from interactions with the GAC to playing sounds.

Information

• ASP.NET website Continuous Integration+Deployment using CruiseControl.NET, Subversion, MSBuild and Robocopy – A nice detailed article from Omar AL Zabir on using Continuous Integration tools to automate your ASP.NET site build and deployment
• Formatting strings – Jon Skeet posts on the subject of Format Strings, and looks at how their performance suffers compared to simple concatenation, and muses over the reasons why this might be.
• The big news from MS BI Conference are out – Mosha Pasumansky reports on some of the big news announcements about SQL Server coming from the Microsoft Business Information conference.
• ASP.NET MVC with NHaml – F# Edition – Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at what you need to do to get ASP.NET MVC working with F# and the NHaml view engine – it looks like it takes a bit of setting up for the project, but once that is done it seems to work well.
• Long strings in Visual Basic 2008 – Eric Nelson posts a neat trick for Visual Basic programmers who need long multiline strings – using the XML literals to make the code clearer – I wonder what if any performance penalty this incurs.
• Preventing third-party derivation, part two – Eric Lippert continues his series on preventing developers taking derivations of your classes with a look at some metadata based ways of achieving this using security attributes.
• Sammy The Snake: An XNA game for the Zune – Nick Gravelyn writes at length about the construction of a game for the Zune using XNA Game Studio 3.0. This is a code along article (and is quite long), but looks like a great intro if you are wanting to have a go at game development.
• .NET 1.1 and VS2003 Mainstream Support Ends on Oct 14, 2008 – David Jung posts about the end of mainstream support for Visual Studio 2003 / .NET 1.1 – The extended support phase runs for another 5 years, so if you are still developing on .NET 1.1 you are not completely without support.
• jBlogMvc : part 2 Editing, Deleting, Paging Posts and Rss feeds – Amr Elsehemy continues his series on building a Blogging engine on ASP.NET MVC and JQuery – this part looks at dealing with posts and the construction of RSS feeds from first principles. As usual there is a code drop included for this post.

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Software

• Rhino Mocks 3.5 RTM – Ayende declares Rhino Mocks 3.5 to be done, and releases the final binaries and documentation. This version has a number of changes from the last, most notably, the enw Assert Act Arrange syntax for mocking, along with a host of other changes, bugfixes and patches.
• NHibernate Validator – Validate Business Objects in NHibernate Applications – David Hayden highlights the NHibernate Validator, a port of the Java Hibernate Validator which has been extended as well as ported. The NHibernate validator is a part of the NHibernate Contrib library.
• C# your way to Amazon’s S3 – ThreeSharp, a .Net Amazon S3 Library – Greg Duncan links to a useful looking library for anyone wanting to work with Amazon S3 – this one seems to cover most of the features of S3, and comes with code samples.

Information

• Three simple Rhino Mocks rules – Jimmy Bogard takes a look at the new Arrange, Act, Assert syntax of Rhino Mocks 3.5, finding that using this style his tests are less brittle and more expressive.
• Agile Testing tools List – Roy Osherove shares a great list of testing related tools of all kinds – well worth a look as there are bound to be ones you’ve never heard of – shame they aren’t links, but its not hard to search for them once you have the name.
• Using the RhinoAutoMocker that is part of StructureMap 2.5 – Derik Whittaker takes a look at the Auto Mocking container that is a part of StructureMap 2.5, allowing you to have mocked dependencies injected into your code automatically for testing.
• Querying With NHibernate – Davy Brion explores the construction of complex queries in NHibernate using the criteria API, including looking at creating sub queries, and compares the underlying SQL to a hand crafted original.
• Best practices for creating websites in IIS 6.0 – Omar AL Zabir gives a nice walk through the process of setting up a website in IIS6 – this is a useful reference for those who don’t do this type of thing regularly.
• Isolator feature focus: Recursive Fakes – Roy Osherove shows off another of the more unique features of TypeMock Isolator – this looks really simple to use (and quite powerful).
• Paging with NHibernate using a custom Extension method to make it ‘easier’ 🙂 – Stefan Sedich shares a class and extension method to help with paging through sets of data when using NHIbernate.
• REMIX UK Sessions on the Web – Mike Taulty announces the availability of the slides and videos for the sessions are REMIX 08 UK – plenty of good content here, so well worth a look, especially if you weren’t able to attend the conference.
• Free SQL Server Ebooks/Resources – Donabel Santos highlights 7 free SQL Server e-Books – I’ve linked to a couple of these before – but the rest are ones I’ve not seen.

Community

• developerFusion community relaunches – James Crowley announces the re-launch of Developer Fusion, a long running developer community site – I’ve been a fan of Developer Fusion for a long time, and the new look and feel, and functionality seem really good – well done, and good luck James.
• Learn to use Castle Windsor: London October 23rd – A great free event if you are in or around London – Mike Hadlow and Gojko Adzic (both of whom I met at the Alt.NET UK Conference) will be talking about Castle Windsor, Dependency injection, and also delving deeper into the framework to look at some of the AOP-like things that can be achieved.
• Win $500 for your WinForm application – John Kellar announces Telerik’s developer competition – If you are using their controls, and are able to send in screenshots then this is the competition for you. The competition will be judged by the community.

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Thank goodness its Friday – its been a long week this week. Unfortunately the week ends on a sad note for me, as my friend and colleague Derek Fowler is leaving today to move down to the south of England – best of luck for the future Derek.

Another shorter than usual edition today – I’m still having problems reaching feeds.feedburner.com which is making it very difficult to get to the actual posts from my RSS reader. The problems looks to be caused by routing issues at my ISP, so hopefully will be resolved soon – I may do a special catch up edition this weekend if there is enough quality behind the links I can’t get to.

Software

• IServiceLocator a step toward IoC container / Service locator detente – Glenn Block announces the release of a new project on CodePlex based on an idea from the community and lot of community consultation, which aims to allow a common interface for accessing your IOC container of choice.
• YUI 2.6.0 Released – Latest update to the Yahoo User Interface has been released with a few new controls, a few more controls that have moved out of beta, and a huge list of improvements and bugfixes.

Information

• The A-Z of Programming Languages: C# – Computerworld are interviewing key people involved with a huge range of programming languages. This interview for C#, and is with Anders Hejlsberg, and talks about the development of the language, and some of the reasoning behind the way certain features work.
• October 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data – ScottGu shares a nice collection of links covering ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Dynamic Data.
• Microsoft changes the Managed Extensibility Framework License – Miguel de Icaza had issues with the original license that the MEF was under, and raised the issue. The great news is that the powers that be listened, and now the MEF is under a much more friendly license (MS-PL).
• Plug-In Hybrids: ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.MVC and ASP.NET Dynamic Data Side By Side – Scott Hanselman puts together one older piece of technology and two newer bits to show that they all work together (and do complement each other)
• Comparing Silverlight and the .NET Framework – Patrick Smacchia does his usual trick of pointing NDepend at some of the latest releases to see what has changed between that release and release minus one – as always, interesting reading.
• Nothing is too trivial to test – Charles Miller gives a real example of why you should test even the simple stuff

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