The Morning Brew

Almost caught up with the backlog of posts, but Tomorrow may include a few more ‘older’ posts in a final push to get back to Zero unread items in my feed reader.

Software

• Announcing Isolator for Sharepoint with a free full license for bloggers – Roy Osherove announces TypeMock’s latest product, ‘Isolator for SharePoint’ which allows developers to unit test sharepoint code without having a Share point server, along with a competition for bloggers to get a free copy of the full Isolator product for a specific mention on their blog.
• Packer for .NET 4.0.1 Released – Brennan announces the latest release of Packer for .NET a tool to minify (shrink) CSS and Javascript files to help improve download time of your pages.
• Download Prism Drop 6 – David Hayden highlights the latest code release of Prism the Composite Application Guidance Application Block for WPF and Silverlight from Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices Team.

Information

• Code Contracts – TDD in a DbC World – Matthew Podwysocki looks at the role of Test Driven Development in Design By Contract programming.
• Web Platform Installer now supports XP – And the Master Plan continues – Scott Hanselman shares the good news that the Web Platform Installer is now supporting Windows XP, along with the inclusion of ASP.NET MVC Beta and URL Scan 3.1 as options in the installer.
• RenderPartial vs RenderAction – Derik Whittaker looks at two different ways of rendering Usercontrol style content in ASP.NET MVC, looking at the pros and cons of each.
• ORM Is NOT Inherently Evil – Davy Brion addresses one of the common developer opinions that Object Relational Mappers are evil
• Looking back at MicrosoftPDC.com (from the inside) – Jon Galloway talks about his experiences building the Microsoft PDC websites for this years conference. Interesting reading.
• SQL Server Precision And Scale Problems – An interesting look at how SQL Server decides on its data types for calculated data.
• jQuery Ajax uploader plugin (with progress bar!) – Steve Sanderson shows off an nice way of improving the User Experience of uploading files using this JQuery file uploader control. The ease Steve integrated this in his DDD7 talk on MVC last weekend (which I really enjoyed) really sold me on it.
• CodeRush Shortcuts and Templates – Quick Start Sheets – Mark Miller shares a PDF keyboard shortcut quick start sheet for Code Rush – I’m a Resharper guy myself, but I know that lots of folk use CodeRush (or even both), so hopefully this will come in handy for a few of you.
• F# and Silverlight 2.0 – John Liao shares a simple sample Silverlight 2.0 application written in F#
• MVC Storefront: Episode 25 Preview – Rob Conery gives a taste of what is to come in the next part of his MVC adventure story ‘MVC Storefront’, with a good helping of DDD in the next part, Rob explains his reasoning for exploring these concepts.
• Getting started with Automated White box Testing (and Pex) – Jonathan de Halleux and Nikolai Tillmann give a nice introduction to PEX in VS2010 and 2008 in this code project article.
• New and Improved CLR 4 Thread Pool Engine – Daniel Moth talks about some of the changes in the CLR 4 Thread Pool, and how you can exploit them for better performing code by using the new System.Threading.Tasks type, along with some details on how the new features work.
• Basic Linq in the Real World – Glenn Burnside looks at a real world application of Linq which helped improve a codebase he works with.
• Developer Tools and Utilities – Steve Michelotti shares his list of must have developer tools – I always like these lists, and since I’m in the process of re-installing one of my machines it couldn’t be timed better!
• Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcut Tip: Ctrl+- – Scott Mitchell shares a useful keyboard shortcut for navigating back through locations in source code – this is one function I use a lot (although I do it by the toolbar buttons, but a keystroke will be much more efficient)
• How to clean up a folder tree with NAnt – Simone Chiaretta shares a useful NANT file which cleans up a Visual Studio folder structure for distribution removing all the settings, and temporary files, and also uses regular expressions to show how you can modify some of the code too (removing Company Names, etc)
• PTOM: Bend 3rd Party Libraries to Your Will With the Adapter Pattern – John Teague picks up the Topic Of The Month at LosTechies with a look at using the Adapter Pattern with some third party class.

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A larger than average post today as I’m still catching up from being away for most of the past week – expect another larger than usual post tomorrow.

Software

• Cumulative update package 2 for SQL Server 2008 has been released – Denis Gobo highlights the release of the second Cumulative update package for SQL Server 2008
• VisualSVN | Version 1.6 Release Notes – VisualSVN, the Subversion plugin for Visual Studio gets an update and a few new features.
• The Snippy Reflector add-in – Jon Skeet highlights a new plug in for Reflector by Jason Haley which allows you to write complete programs from short code snippets

Information

• Beware exceptions in attribute constructors – Jimmy Bogard looks at some problems that occur when Attributes throw exceptions from their constructors.
• NHibernate and triggers – Michael Zilberstein talks about a common problem for NHibernate Developers who work with legacy databases, where triggers cause TooManyRowsAffectedExceptions
• Aspects of Domain Design – Ayende talks about a conversation he had recently which caused him to think about Aspects in a new light.
• The NHibernate Community – Ayende looks at the growth of the NHibernate community using two (indicative) statistics he had available. Things are looking good for the NH Community based on these figures
• Back to Basics: Generics – Karl Seguin goes back to basics and takes a look at generics and how they can be used with some ‘wild’ examples.
• Populating Entities From Stored Procedures With NHibernate – Davy Brion looks at using Stored Procedures with NHibernate to populate your entities, and then follows upwith a look at filling the associated entities from the same data set returned from the SP.
• Combining JQuery Form Validation and Ajax Submission with ASP.NET – Phil Haack takes a look at the JQuery Form Validation and looks at how it plays with ASP.NET Ajax Form submissions.
• Gallio and MbUnit v3 for Visual Studio 2010 CTP – I’m slightly late in spotting this one, but MBUnit and Galllio can now be used from within the VSTS test runner in the Visual Studio 2010 CTP with this updated V3 Release
• Silverlight DataBinding Basics – Timothy Khouri gives a nice simple introduction to Silverlight Databinding in this short article.
• jQuery Intellisense in VS 2008 – ScottGu gives the lowdown on the Javascript intellisense feature of Visual Studio for JQuery (and other Javascript)
• Redirecting without the exceptions.. – Joel Varty shows a way of performing a Response.Redirect without getting a ThreadAbortException thrown.
• IIS7 – ASP.NET on Windows Server 2008 Server Core R2 – Hosam Kamel shares some good news for anyone who has to worry about deploying servers to run applications – Windows 2008 R2 Server Core will contain the .NET framework, meaning that finally it can be used for hosting ASP.NET Websites.
• Seadragon Ajax – A new bit of technology from Microsoft Live Labs, which implements the very popular Silverlight DeepZoom functionality in Javascript.
• Visual Studio 2010 Resources – Mike Taulty gathers together a bunch of good resources on Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 to support his article in the UK MSDN Flash.
• W3C Geolocation support in Firefox – Mads Kristensen looks at the new GeoLocation API in Firefox 3.1 (and available as an add-in in older versions) which will allow websites to obtain your location using Javascript.
• Producing readable log4net output – Bryan looks at a way of making Log4Net give output that is more easily processed in tools like LogParser or Excel by utilising some of the extension points the the Log4Net Framework gives.
• NHibernate Fact when Saving a Transient Entity with Second Level Caching Enabled. – Jan Van Ryswyck highlights some specific behaviour of objects being persisted being added in the NHibernate second level cache, and the specific condition where this happens.
• C#/AOP: Elegant tracing with PostSharp and Aspect-Oriented Programming – Saveen Reddy gives a nice simple runthrough of AOP in C# using PostSharp

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Today’s edition of the Morning Brew will be slightly delayed – a combination of factors (including me throwing my physical morning brew [mug of coffee] all over my desk, and the Ma.gnolia web service API timing out) have conspired against me this morning. If the WS doesn’t come back soon I’ll put the post together manually.

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