The Morning Brew #217

Information

• Static Compilation in Mono – Miguel de Icaza talks about the new Static Compolation feature of Mono which will allow for (for example) writing mono applications and having them run on an IPhone without having to jail break. It sounds like the compilation process is a little complex currently, but I’m sure they will improve that over time.
• DSL Tools in Visual Studio 2010 – Stuart Kent looks at some of the improvements for DSL development in the Visual Studio 2010 CTP
• Virtual Earth meets MVC – Simon Ince steps through building some functionality using WCF services, ASP.NET MVC Beta and Virtual Earth, looking at a few of the sticking points along the way
• When to call Dispose – Kim Hamilton talks about the differences in opinion about calling Dispose, and suggests some guidance with considerations to special cases too.
• Such a deal! MSDN for startups – The ‘All About Interop’ blog highlights BizSpark, a new initiative from Microsoft which gives free access to MSDN Subscriptions for qualifying organisations (Small Software Startups). There are also links to a number of other similar schemes which may apply if this one doesn’t
• ActiveRecord lessons learnt: #1 Never forget there’s a database – Stuart Caborn talks about how ActiveRecord (and NHibernate) help you forget about the database, but that this is not a good idea in the long run – showing a few cases where forgetting about the database really harms your application.
• Extending Reflector: Menus, ContextMenus and Toolbars – Jason Haley looks at the extension API for RedGate’s Reflector, showing how you can easily hook your own functionality into this excellent little utility.
• Getting started with NUnit’s RowTest – Michael Eaton gives a very simple and clear introduction to the RowTest functionality in NUnit
• Designing a language is hard, and M won’t change that – Frans Bouma casts a critical eye over the new Oslo Modeling Language M, and talks about how building a language is difficult
• Working with ADO.NET Data Services in AJAX – Jim Wang walks through the creation of a website using the new ASP.NET Ajax support for ADO.NET Data Services which was introduced in the recent Preview 3 release on CodePlex
• Donut Caching in ASP.NET MVC – Phil Haack talks about caching of output in ASP.NET MVC, and specifically leaving holes in cached elements for insertion on every page load, looking at solutions, and hinting that a solution *might* make it into V1 of ASP.NET MVC
• KaizenConf Wrapup – Approaching Functional Programming – Matthew Podwysocki shares some notes from his recent talks at KaizenConf on Functional Programming.
• Messaging Concepts – Conversation > Saga > Message – Ayende continues talking about Messaging, this time looking into the definitions of three common terms, ‘Message’, ‘Saga’ and ‘Conversation’
• Pablo’s Topic of the Month – November: Design Patterns – Ray Houston announces LosTechies.com’s topic of the month for November. I’m looking forward to seeing some great posts on design patterns from over there in the coming weeks.