The Morning Brew

I had a fantastic weekend at Bar Camp Liverpool this weekend, many thanks to the organisers, sponsors and other attendees for making Liverpool’s First BarCamp an event to remember.

Software

• Financial Functions for .NET released ! – Luca Bolognese announces the release of his Financial functions library for .NET – this is a library of functions which aims to mirror the behaviours of the functions in Excel’s Financial Formula functions in .NET code.
• StyleCop for ReSharper v0.0.14220 released – Howard van Rooijen announces an update to this Resharper Plug-in which brings StyleCop rules into the Resharper Suggestions as you code. This release contains a number of new features, improvements and bugfixes.
• NCover v3.0.8 is now available – The NCover team announce the latest update to their NCover 3 Code Coverage program.
• ASP.NET MVC XForms released on CodePlex – Maarten Balliauw highlights a new project to bring XForms to ASP.NET MVC – this is something I was considering writing after seeing XForms support in browsers demoed at DDD7 last month, so its great to see that its already in progress.

Information

• Contributions to Entity framework community – Zeeshan Hirani reappears on the blogging scene with a fantastic resource for the Entity Framework community, a 500+ page PDF learning guide for EF – I look forward to having some time to page through this one.
• MVC Storefront Part 25: Getting Started With Domain-Driven Design – Rob Conery continues his excellent MVC Storefront screencast series with a look at Domain Driven Design and Development – I’ve been looking forward to this episode since Rob gave a teaser post last week.
• What is a good test? – Sarah Taraporewalla explores what she considers makes a good test, and continues with a look at how TDD can work within a pair programming situation with this interesting conversation based post
• Evolution of the ASP.NET Test Process (Part 2) – This is the continuation of a series started a while back on the way that the Asp.Net QA Team have evolved their QA processes over time – interesting reading once more.
• Data Visualization with the Virtual Earth ASP.NET Controls – Colin Angus Mackay explores the ASP.NET controls for Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and shows how easily you can add geographic visualisations to your web applications using these controls.
• Get SOLID: Single Responsibility Principle – Karl Seguin starts looking at the SOLID principles with a look at the Single Responsibility Principle.
• Functional Programming Unit Testing – Part 1 – Matthew Podwysocki continues his exploration of Unit Testing for functional programming languages with a look at the world of Haskell using HUnit. Please note, this article has no .NET specific content but I always find that seeing how you can do things in other languages is a great way to improve what we do in our languages.
• A fluent approach to C# parameter validation – A nice article which looks at applying a fluent interface to validation, and how this is a particularly elegant solution to validation resulting in nice simple to read code.
• Use ExcelPackage to Manipulate Open XML Excel Files – Keyvan Nayyeri looks at extracting information from and pushing information into Open XML Excel files using ExcelPackage – a nice introductory article for something we developers often have to do.
• Redesigning System.Object/java.lang.Object – Jon Skeet talks about what he feels is wrong with the root of all our objects, System.Object, with a look at methods and capabilities that are both present and shouldn’t be and missing that should be there.
• Starting with BDD vs. starting with TDD – Sean Chambers gives a nice explanation of the differences between Test Driven Development and Behaviour Driven Development, illustrated with examples.

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