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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Christmas Eve already! Thankfully I’ve finished all my christmas shopping and wrapped presents, so I’m ready for tomorrow. Christmas Day and Boxing Day (26th Dec) are Bank Holidays in the UK and, as is the brew tradition, will be skipped, and then the next two days are weekend so the Morning Brew will return on the the 29th.

All that remains is to wish you all a Happy Christmas!

Software

• Create Word Documents using .NET without Interop – Gayan Perera announces the release of a component to help build Word documents (as .docx) from templates created in Word using replacements strings.

Information

• How to Use .NET 3.5 Features and C# 3.0 Syntax in .NET 2.0? – Rinat Abdullin looks at how you can include some of the new .NET 3.5 and C#3 features even if you are still having to target .NET 2.0.
• SALT and PEPPER – 3 TIER and LINQ – Shivprasad koirala talks at length about construction of a 3 tier application architecture using LINQ in this Code Project Article.
• VAN (Virtual ALT.NET Meeting) Update – Chad Myers gives an update on the Virtual Alt.NET meetings that he has been organising. I particularly like the suggestion of having the meeting hosted in EMEA as I suspect the time might be a little more accessible for me in the UK (I think the meetings were happening at about 4am my time)
• Getting good dumps when an exception is thrown – Rick Byers explores the possibilities for capturing a memory dump of your application when it has crashed.
• Pixastic – Javascript image processing library – Hackszine.com highlight Pixastic a Javascript library which uses the HTML5 Canvas element to provide image manipulation in the browser – nice idea with a lot of potential
• Asp.net 4 – ‘deniss’ rounds up information from a number of sources to discuss the new features of ASP.NET 4.
• Dynamically Loading ASP.NET User Controls with jQuery – Sam Mueller looks at using User Controls in an Ajax way by using jQuery to load them in after the page has loaded, and handling the JavaScript they may contain in a nice way.
• Using SQLite for fast database testing – technical gotchas and wider lessons learned – Alex Scordellis shares some lessons he has learn when working with SQLite as a database for testing applications using NHibernate and Castle Active Record.
• How will you parallelize your existing codebase? Try R.A.S.P. – Rick Minerich talks about a technique for revisiting old code with a view to Parallelizing it
• Improve your jQuery – 25 excellent tips – Jon Hobbs-Smith gives 25 useful tips for anyone working with jQuery, covering topics such as improving the load time of your page to writing your own selectors.
• Shouldn’t the Silverlight ToolKit include VB Code Samples? – Julie Lerman rallies the VB Developers to try and get more of the samples in the Silverlight toolkit to include VB.NET versions.
• Silverlight Feature Requests – Joe Stegman gathers together a number of Silvelight feature requests from a number of sources including forums and blog post comments. This may be an interesting post to help us guess what will be included in future releases as certain features are requested a lot.

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Another major milestone in the Morning Brew’s history – edition 250, however I’m going to save the celebrations and statistics for the end of year wrap up next week

Software

• Managed ESENT v1 released – Managed/.Net access to the free embedded database (“Extensible Storage Engine/ESE”) that ships with Windows – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of a wrapper for accessing the built in Windows embedded database from your .NET Code.
• Early Christmas: Sticky Notes – Don Smith highlights the availability of StickyNotes, a Visual Studio 2008 Add-in which brings everyone’s favourite yellow stick on notes to the Visual Studio IDE. This looks like a useful utility, the only downside being that its not free (but is cheap @$9.99)

Information

• Single Responsibility Principle – Jarod Ferguson shows off a image which should be on the wall of any development office.
• Testing internal classes – Fredrik Eriksson reminds us of the InternalsVisibleTo assembly attribute which allows a known assembly access to internals of your assembly.
• Return an empty IEnumerable<T> from a yield iterator – David Kean talks about two methods that will allow you to return an empty IEnumerable when using the yield keyword.
• Holiday Goodie Bag: Free C# and VB Coding Standards Reference Documents – Clint Edmonson shares both C# and VB.NET versions of of his standard reference coding standards guide, releasing them with the intention of people using them as a basis for their own documents and customising them to suit their purposes.
• jQuery 1.3 beta: Sizzling and feature testing – Ajaxian announces that the first beta release of jQuery 1.3 is now available. The jQuery Team are looking for feedback and testing help with this so grab it,have a play, and if you find problems let them know.
• Microsoft Cloud Data Options – Scott Watermasysk reviews the two possibilities available for data storage on Windows Azure platform, SQL Data Services and Azure Storage.
• An attribute based approach to business object validation – Malisa Ncube explores the use of attributes and reflection to implement a validation framework for your business tier in this Code Project article.
• Calculating Mean, Median and Mode with SQL Server – ‘gmmastros’ shows set based methods to calculate the three standard averages in SQL Server
• new Repository<T>().DoMagic() – Karl Seguin looks at the purpose and reasons for the Repository pattern, how generics can make it even nicer, and shows how its use can improve your code via simple examples
• Editing a variable-length list of items in ASP.NET MVC – Steve Sanderson looks at one of those common UI problems, how to create an editable list of items in ASP.NET MVC explaining his favourite way of doing this.

Training

• Introducing Alt.NET courses at Skills Matter – Gojko Adzic announces Skill Matter’s plans to offer (commercial) training on the Alt.Net stack in the new year – this is great news (and some welcome diversity) in training in the UK.

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