The Morning Brew

Software

• Spackle.NET is Published – Jason Bock gathers together all little utility projects into a single project called Spackle.NET and hosts the lot of them on CodePlex

Information

• Functional .NET 4.0 – Tuples and Zip – Matthew Podwysocki looks at two more of the Functional Programming concepts that have made it into .NET 4.0 – this time round the tuple and Zip operation get the once over.
• .NET Array Weirdness – Jeroen Frijters looks under the hood at some of the stranger aspects of the .NET array type.
• Extending MVC: Returning an Image from a Controller Action – Jeremiah Clark shows how you can return images (and other data types) from your actions in ASP.NET MVC
• Update on Silverlight 2 – and a glimpse of Silverlight 3 – ScottGu reflects on the release of Silverlight 2, and looks to the future giving a peek at Silverlight 3
• Cuyahoga – Ayende plugs Cuyahoga, a Content Management System based on NHibernate, which is nice and simple to extend – I’ve used Cuyahoga a few times and found it to be quite capable.
• PTOM: The Decorator Pattern – Sean Chambers picks up the Topic of the Month over at Los Techies, and looks at the decorator pattern.
• Single Letter Variable Names Still Considered Harmful – K. Scott Allen talks naming schemes for variables, and remarks that lambda expressions tend towards people using bad single letter variables names when they really should choose better variables names.
• Chain of Responsibility Using Castle Windsor and a First Experience With StructureMap – Jan Van Ryswyck revisits the Chain of Responsibility pattern having now found a use for it. Initially Jan uses the castle Windsor Container, but in part two looks at using Structure Map instead.
• How to call controllers in external assemblies in an ASP.NET MVC application – Simone Chiaretta looks at a way of calling controllers from other assemblies in ASP.NET MVC, allowing further segregation of the parts of your application.
• Testing is hard but debugging just sucks A$$ – Derik Whittaker looks at the common arguments against testing, and offers counter arguments

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Information

• Rendering A Single View Using Multiple ViewEngines – Phil Haack looks into an interesting aspect of the ASP.NET MVC view rendering which allows you to use a different engine to render partial views to that of the main view.
• Windsor Components, the ASP.NET MVC Framework, and Bug Verification Tests – Tim Barcz talks about a real world problem he encountered and how introducing a test ensured it was fixed
• Update on the GDR that is coming for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 – Scott Hanselman gives an update on the General Distribution Release of .NET 3.5 SP1 over Windows Update.
• .NET Code Contracts and TDD Are Complementary – Matthew Podwysocki looks Code Contracts and TDD and shows how they can be combined to make a much more powerful whole.
• What Does that .NET Namespace Mean: System.* and Microsoft.* – Brad Abrams asks the community what they believe to be the logic behind the System.* and Microsoft.* namespace divide, offering three plausible reasons for the difference asking which you believe to be true.
• The fallacy of IRepository – Ayende follows up on Rob Conery’s post about using Object Relational Databases to reduce development friction
• RESTful Live Search Service – Nikhil Kothari looks at the new REST API for Microsoft Live Search
• An Overview of C# 4.0. – Buu Nguyen gives a nice overview of the new functionality of C# 4 in this Code Project article.
• C# Dynamic and Multiple Dispatch – Curt Hagenlocher shows how the new dynamic functionality in C#4 can allow an easy way of implementing multiple dispatch
• Styling a Silverlight Twitter Application with Expression Blend 2 – ScottGu shows off the power of Expression Blend 2 by showing how a simple Silverlight application can be visually improved
• Amazon EC2 on Windows – Brian Desmond highlights two articles he has written on Amazon EC2 for Microsoft Developers, one covering ASP.NET on EC2 and the other SQL Server
• Common Interfaces for Tool Families – Colin Ramsay talks about the idea of having common interfaces for standard types of tool, allowing developers to choose their favourite tool for a job and use it with all components of their application.

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Thank goodness its Friday!

Software

• IIS7 Request Routing and Load Balancer Release Candidate Available for Download – BillS announces the release candidate of the IIS7 Application Request Routing Extension, which allows IIS to offer routing and load-balancing based on HTTP level rules.
• S#arp Architecture 0.9 Released! – Billy McCafferty announces the release of V 0.9 of his application architecture based on ASP.NET MVC Beta, NHibernate and DDD principles
• Updated ZoomIt from Microsoft (Sysinternals) – Thomas Lee highlights the availability of an update to ZoomIt, a great tool for zooming and annotating your screen, ideal for presentations.
• First CodePlex Project: WCF Test Harness – Jeffrey Chilberto announces a first release of his first CodePlex Project. WCF Test Harness is a utility which is similar to WCF Load Test, and allows you to reference or generate proxies, edit requests as XML, capture response time, and save and load tests.
• MSSqlSchemaDoc Version 2.0 Released – Henk Oberholzer announces the release of his second iteration of a tool that extracts schema information out of SQL Server into XML form. Unfortunatly this article doesn’t seem to have a download link, but you can get it from the projects CodePlex site

Information

• Visual Studio 2010 & .NET 4.0 Training Kit Available – Chris Bowen highlights the availability of some detailed training kits for the .NET 4.0 technologies
• The Future of WebForms And ASP.NET MVC – Phil Haack gives his take on what the future holds for ASP.NET MVC and its more established brother, ASP.NET Web Forms, and how that relationship will progress.
• Using Crowdsourcing for Expanding Localization of Products – Scott Hanselman looks at the options to help with localization of your software, including how MSDN is attempting to improve its translations.
• TextBoxFor(u => u.Name) – Unleash the power – Karl Seguin puts together an implementation of TextBoxFor, a concept for MVC that Jeremy Miller and Chad Myers have also talked about.
• Advance NHibernate Workshop Video – Ayende highlights the availability of a video from his talk at KaizenConf on Advanced NHibernate. This should be a good watch, although I believe the audio quality of this video is not too good

Community

• Ed Gibson, Microsoft’s Chief Security Advisor in the UK, 2009 – Having seen Ed Gibson talk at DDD a few years back this event to be held in Bradford on the 21st January should be an interesting and entertaining one

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