The Morning Brew

Today’s edition is a little lighter than I wanted it to be – it appears that FeedBurner’s feeds.feedburner.com server is down (at least from my network location), which resulted in lots of the articles I wanted to link to this morning being unreachable from their feeds. To add insult to injury, Ma.Gnolia’s web service was also down this morning making putting the post together harder too. I may do a post later today with some of the missing links – or I might wait and include them in tomorrow’s post.

On a happier note, I’d like to extend my congratulations to all the 2009 MVPs, and especially to the first time MVPs – keep up the good work.

Software

• PowerShell Analyzer now 100% free. – Karl Prosser announces that PowerShell Analyser, the IDE/Editor and PowerShell host is now completely free.
• Microsoft Silverlight Unit Test Framework – A Silverlight specific unit testing framework, which has been updated to the RC0 level.

Information

• Amazon EC2 with Microsoft Windows Server Notification – Amazon announce that they will be offering Windows Servers and SQL Server on their EC2 Cloud Computing service from later this season
• Parallel Computations in C# – Andrew Kirillov looks at implementing parallelism using only the standard language features – I always think there is a lot of value at looking at the basic implementation of this kind of thing before using some of the (very clever and good) frameworks.
• Lazy LINQ and Enumerable Objects – K. Scott Allen talks about why Linq methods return IEnumerables rather than lists.
• Unit Testing decoupled from TDD as well== Adoption – Roy Osherove continues looking at the adoption of testing and Test driven development, and in this post discusses separating Unit testing as a skill from Test Driven Development, as good unit testing does not mean you have to do TDD
• Three Free .Net eBooks: “.NET Enterprise Solutions …Best Practices for the Connoisseur”, “…Interoperability for the Connoisseur” and “…Software Engineers on their way to Pluto” (you just have to love the title of that last one) – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of three free eBooks
• Isolator feature focus: Live objects in unit tests – Roy Osherove shows of a neat feature of TypeMock Isolator which looks to help readability and understandability in unit test

1 Comment »

I had another very enjoyable evening at Geekup Liverpool last night learning a little about iPhone Development, and having my friendly group of Ruby on Rails fans try to convert me to Rails over Chinese food after the event.

Software

• Updates: Process Monitor v2.0, ZoomIt v2.11, Sigcheck v1.54, Contig v1.55 | A new Mark’s Blog post: The Case of the Sloooow System | New Vista Springboard webcast – A number of Sysinternals tools got an update yesterday – with the most significant changes taking place in Process Monitor
• SQL Server Books Online – August released – Greg Low highlights the availability of an updated SQL Books Online, and urges people to try to keep ontop of the updates for BOL.
• Monitor your SQL Servers on the Cheap (with source too) – Greg Duncan highlights a Free SQL Monitoring tool, which was recently a finalist in the SQL Hero Competition – worth a look if you have to look after SQL servers.

Information

• How Do Locks Lock? – Jeff Moser takes a detailed look at locking, and talks about how locks actually work. The comments also make good reading.
• Emulating Java Enums in .NET – F# Edition – Matthew Podwysocki looks at Java style Enums in the .NET space, with a bit of consideration for C# and a shows how F# Discriminated Unions are a good fit for Java Style Enums.
• More code review errors – Ayende follows up on from yesterday with another method simplification , again concentrating on nest level of if statements. One worthy reminder, when doing this type of refactoring it is vital to have some certainty (i.e some tests) which help guarantee that you aren’t breaking things without noticing.
• Decorator Pattern – David Hayden shows two implementations of the decorator pattern, showing how this is an alternative to using techniques like Postsharp AOP and unity policy injection.
• Generic C# WinForms – Chris Brandsma looks at using Generics in his winforms to help gain reuse of common functionality with strongly typed specific controls.
• F# WiKi – Paul Mooney highlights a great looking F# resource from Rob Pickering
• Testing – It’s About Ensuring Correctness – Tim Barcz enthuses about the worth and importance of testing – and also talks about the importance of even testing those things that are very simple (as they often have mistakes too).
• Separate Assemblies != Loose Coupling – Jeremy D. Miller talks about needless complexity caused by separating everything out into separate assemblies, and how that doesn’t directly help achieve Loose coupling.

Community

• Oren Eini is coming to Bristol – The DotNetDevNet user group, based in Bristol, UK are going to be the luck recipients of a talk from Oren Eini (possibility better known as Ayende Rahien) on the 13th October – based on the interviews and screencasts I’ve seen this should be well worth attending if you are in the area as Ayende is a well respected and very knowledgeable guy in the .NET space.

1 Comment »