November 2008
Monthly Archive
The Morning Brew #233
Posted by Chris Alcock on 28 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Finally caught up with my reading thanks to a quiet day of posts due to Thanksgiving.
Software
- xUnit.net 1.1 Released – Brad Wilson announces the release of xUnit 1.1. This updated release contains breaking changes, so be sure to read the blog posts about the release before upgrading.
- Are You Fussy About Markup? – Derek Hatchard highlights a usefult code formatter Visual Studio Add-in for ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight developers which improves the formatting of your markup.
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- Back to Basics: Delegates, Anonymous Methods and Lambda Expressions – Karl Seguin continues his Back To Basics series with a detailed look at delegates, anonymous methods and lambda expressions, along with how, when combined with generics, they can be used to solve very complex problems.
- Controlling Your Festive Lights with the .NET Micro Framework – Rob Miles runs through a nice festive project for the .NET Micro Framework to control a set of festive lights based on pulling data from an RSS feed – a nice introduction to working with the .NET Micro Framework
- Volatile fields in .NET: look inside – Vitaliy Liptchinsky talks about how Volatile fields work on the processor, and gives a simple example to show why you might want to use them
- Nullable Structs – An interesting ‘Gotcha’ – Jason Crease explores nullable types, and shares an interesting case which occurs when you use structs with nullable types.
- Transactions Made Simple with Windows Communication Foundation – Steve Stefanovich looks at how WCF makes it easy to implement Transactional Serices
- Creating a Custom View Engine in ASP.NET MVC – Timothy Khouri shows how easy it is to create your own view engine for ASP.NET MVC
- Slightly Different Way To Write Unit Tests – Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo proposes a new way of writing tests inspired by MSpec, and discusses the merits of this style. Good discussion in the comments too.
- Lambda in C#: Conciseness v Readability – Mark Needham talks about his initial dislike of Lambda expressions in C#, and how they can be more difficult to understand for less experienced programmers
- C# quiz – try-finally – Changhong shares a little C# puzzle about try finally blocks, explaining why the output might not be what you expect by looking at the IL of the program
- Working With Large Models In Entity Framework – Part 1 – Srikanth Mandadi, of the Entity Framework Team, looks at some of the problems you can encounter when working with a large Entity Framework model, and offers some solutions to those problems.
- Event Handlers returning Values – Pedro M. Pinheiro explores C# event handlers which return values
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The Morning Brew #232
Posted by Chris Alcock on 27 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Happy Thanksgiving Day to all my US based readers!
Software
- Early Christmas from Iron Languages and DLR – Harry Pierson highlights three significant release of Iron languages and the DLR – IronPython 2.0RC2, IronRuby 1.0 Alpha 2 and a new home for the DLR source code on Codeplex, including the initial 0.9 beta release of the DLR
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- Visualizing LINQ expressions in the debugger – Jimmy Bogard talks about Visualising Expressions, and looks at tools that help you to see what your expression looks like in the debugger.
- PTOM: Descriptive State Enumeration – Derick Bailey continues with the Novemeber Design Patterns topic at LosTechies with a look at the use of enumerations to track state, and follows up with a look at Mapping a State Pattern with NHibernate
- Object Oriented F# – Encapsulation with Object Expressions – Matthew Podwysocki continues his look into OO F# with a loot at the object expression F# feature, and why (in his opinion) this makes F# a better OO language than C#
- ASP.NET MVC on IIS 6 Walkthrough – Phil Haack shows how to setup ASP.NET MVC on IIS6 for both .mvc/.aspx extension URLs and extensionless URLs
- Isolation Syntax for VB.NET – Your comments please – Roy Osherove asks the community for comments on a proposed syntax for Typemock Isolator’s VB.NET syntax
- Addicted To MEF – Part 1 – Justin Etheredge starts a new series exploring the Managed Extensibility Framework which has just reached preview 3
- 10 Ways To Programaticly Shoot Yourself In The Foot – Part B – Shahar Y follows up from part A with a few more bad things that we as developers often do which makes our life harder later on,
- Yet Another Use of a Unit Test Framework – David Star talks about using Unit Testing Frameworks for more than your traditional unit testing.
- Everyday programming technique – C# Enum – Hugo Pereira covers a lot of ground on using Enums in your code, including some more advanced uses and some best practices advice.
- Unit Testing in JavaScript – Mark Levison rounds up the Javascript Unit Testing Frameworks and mocking tools that are about, looking at the pros and cons of each
- Generating Temporary Files – BlackWasp look at creating temporary files using random filenames in the correct location using some of the methods on the Path class.
The Morning Brew #231
Posted by Chris Alcock on 26 Nov 2008 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Still not quite caught up with my backlog of posts to read, but I think normality will be restored tomorrow – I’m down to the low signal to noise feeds now, so I don’t anticipate a huge deluge of old content will be being posted now.
Software
- Treemap + Silverlight => Gasp! – Wade Dorrell highlights a new Silverlight control which renders treemaps – a visualisation I really like
- Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR – RTM – Data Dude rounds up the features included in the RTM release of Visual Studio Team Systems 2008 Database Edition GDR (what a mouthful!) which was released to web yesterday.
- MEF Re-factored, Preview 3 has shipped. – Glenn Block announces the release of Preview 3 of the Managed Extensibility Framework, along with a number of other changes, the great news about this release is that its licensed as MS-PL, the Microsoft Permissive License, allowing you to use the source in other environments.
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- Sorting 1PB with MapReduce – An interesting article from the Official Google Blog, talking about performance testing their sorting algorithms. Further proof that computation on a Google scale is incredible, they are sorting 1PB of data using 4000 computers!
- How to update assembly version number automatically – Sergiy Korzh shares a simple utility which makes it easy to update the build number of an application from the command line / build script by changing the AssemblyInfo.
- Processes in .NET Part 1 – Launching Processes and Managing the Scheduler – Rick Minerich starts a series on managing external processes with a look at starting processes and manipulating their running environment, changing their processor affinity and process priority.
- Did you know… Visual Studio comes with an image library for you to use in your applications? – #364 – Sara Ford highlights a useful free resource that comes with Visual Studio – an image library which also contains templates to help you create your own versions.
- P&P Pocket Software Architecture Guides Released – The Patterns and Practices team seem to be releasing new stuff every day, and this week announce the release of 6 pocket architecture guides covering Agile, Web Applications, Mobile, RIA (Rich Internet Applications), Rich client and serivice architectures.
- Best Practice – <GeneratePublisherEvidence> in ASPNET.CONFIG – Zach Kramer talks about changing a setting in the ASP.NEt configuration to help improve the performance of application startup
- New ASP.NET Charting Control: <asp:chart runat="server"/> – ScottGu shows off the recently released ASP.NET Charting Control which allows you to produce nice looking charts in your applications.
- My durable WCF RESTful calculator – Pablo M. Cibraro looks at implementing a Durable Service in WCF by way of a simple example of a calculator
- Windsor WCF Integration – Mike Hadlow explores the Windsor IOC Container integration with WCF which has seen some recent development.
