The Morning Brew

Hope you all had an enjoyable Christmas, it turns out the .NET blogging world was busier than I had expected, so today’s post is a little later than I had planned.

Software

• Visual Studio Snippet Editor v2 Released – Formerly known as the “Visual Basic Snippet Editor” it now lives on in the source (VB) available world – Greg Duncan highlights the an updated Snippet Editor release which now includes source code for the application.
• Happy Holidays and look what Santa’s brought – Got Team? – Brian Randell announces the availability of updated Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 with SP1 virtual images for evaluation purposes. This VM’s are not licensed for production use, however they will run until 31st December 2009 giving you plenty of time to play with them.
• A Tool to Strip Zips of Unwanted Files before Submitting to CodeProject – Version 2 – Henry Minute talks about some changes he made to CodeProject Zip Stripper, a tool for removing all the bits and pieces that gather in a solution directory which don’t need distributing (or adding to source control). A useful tool for many of us, not just Code Project authors.

Information

• Thinking only of the Junior Developer – Chris Brandsma talks about how more senior developers should assist juniors to develop (career, experience and technique wise) into the next generation of Senior developers by challenging them with senior developer ideas. Davy Brion follows up asking if we should even differentiate between senior and junior. Interesting reading, and lots of comments.
• Problems with opening CHM Help files from Network or Internet – Rick Strahl shares a fix for something that often annoys me when trying to read downloaded CHM help files.
• NH Prof Deep Dive: Applying the Open Close Principle at the architecture level – Ayende has been busy working on his NHibernate Profiler of the festive period. In this post he talks about the extension points he is making use of, and how this architecture hooks together.
• NH Prof Alerts: Unbounded result set – Ayende shares some of the documentation for NHibernate Profiler which deals with alerts that the profiler will return when it detects certain dangerous practices. This article is about not restricting the number of records returned, and he ahs also posted two others on not using actual transactions in your interactions with the database, and the danger of lazy loading.
• What is Microsoft waiting for providing a descent path API? – Patrick Smacchia calls out for better path support in the .NET Framework, but in the interim reminds us of his library (used in NDepend) for handling paths in a more strongly typed way.
• Container-Managed Application Design, Prelude: Where does the Container Belong? – Nicholas Blumhardt looks at a number of different ways of integrating an Inversion of Control container into your applications architecture.
• Many-to-many relationships with data attached in NHibernate – Kyle Baley talks about intermediate classes when mapping many to many relationships using NHibernate where there needs to be data associated with the many-to-many relationship.
• Extract an msi before installing it. (like the ASP.NET MVC RC msi) – Jeffrey Palermo shows a useful trick to extract files from an MSI from the command line, allowing you to get at the contents without actually installing it.
• 40+ JavaScript and jQuery resources that will make you a better Web developer – Brian Reindel gathers together 40 resources for Javascript and JQuery, a nice collection of things to read if you want to improve your skills in this area
• Understanding: Dependency Properties in Silverlight – A reasonably detailed article looking at one of the key concepts of Silverlight and WPF
• Sshhh… it’s a secret – Matt Gertz explores some simple cryptography, along with a story prompted by a Christmas present and recalling events from childhood – nice reading.
• C# lambdas: How much context should you need? – Mark Needham considers one of the important questions when it comes to lambda expressions, how clear is it when you use the (x -> x.blah) notation, so we need to be more careful about our choice of name for x to improve clarity.
• Using JsonResult in ASP.NET MVC AJAX – Keyvan Nayyeri demonstrates jQuery fetching a JsonResult from ASP.NET MVC and using it in your page.

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