The Morning Brew

Software

• CruiseControl.NET 1.4.2 Released – Thoughtworks announce the release of CuriseControl.Net 1.4.2 a bugfix release which contains fixes for a few subversion issues (and a couple of other fixes)

Information

• Cecil.Decompiler – Jean-Baptiste Evain announces his latest project, a reflector like tool for cecil, allowing you to decompile code and view the decompiled source. Its early days for this project but it looks like it has a lot of potential.
• Debugging OutOfMemoryExceptions in managed code using Windbg – Amol Ravande steps through a few steps showing how to debug memory problems using the Windbg debugger
• Measure Performance With Stopwatch – Alois Kraus discusses the problems with measuring performance of your code, and looks at a few techniques and ideas for measuring performance
• Processes in .NET Part 2 – Performing Actions on Files with Verbs – Rick Minerich continues his series on processes in .NET with a look at how you can start proceses from a file registered to that type, and how by using the verbs associated with that file type you can achieve impressive integration with the applications without having to do any specific work for that application.
• Java for .Net? Ja! – Greg Duncan highlights a project which aims to bring Java to the .NET platform as a first class language.
• Query Data with Parallel LINQ – Charlie Calvert explores PLINQ in the form of the Microsoft Parallel Extensions to .NET 3.5 pre-release in order to get the functionality now, and looks at how you can utilise it to improve your LINQ query performance.
• Extending the Visual-Studio Context-Menu – Adrian Aisemberg show how you can extend the Visual Studio IDE using the built in macro language to add some useful context menu additions in the solution explorer.
• Free ASP.NET to Silverlight 2 Book – Derek @ Ardent Dev highlights a possible mistake by a publisher which allows you to preview the whole of Jumping from ASP.NET To Silverlight 2 mini-book as sample chapters.
• Launched my personal Codeplex project: http://www.codeplex.com/mostlylucid – Scott Galloway announces his own CodePlex project, a forum application, and in this post sets out the plans for the technologies he is planning to use.
• The CLR, Performance and the unruly child – Allan da Costa Pinto highlights some interesting presentations over at the Microsoft XNA Developer Presentations section.
• The Live Framework: What is it and Why Should I Care? (PDF) – An interesting summary PDF from the Live Framework team which attempts to explain why you would want to use the Live Framework

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Software

• SQL Server 2005 SP3 is available! – Aaron Bertrand highlights the Release of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 3, which will take your database engine to version 9.00.4035.
• patterns & practices – Unity for Silverlight – ‘lchong’ announces the release of Unity 1.2 for Silverlight, a port of the Unity project to Silverlight 2.0
• IE8 Readiness and IETester – Sergio Pereira highlights a very useful utility that allows you to see the same page rendered sid by side in the last 4 majore Internet Explorer releases (5.5, 6,7, 8b2)

Information

• Silverlight 3 – What we Know So Far & What We Can Predict (Part 1 of 2) – Bart Czernicki looks towards the next release of Silverlight and explores the features that will be included (and have been announced) and muses on some others that he thinks will be included.
• Redirect Routes and other Fun With Routing And Lambdas – Phil Haack explores some of the interesting things you can do with delegates and lambdas in ASP.NET MVC Routing.
• Functional Programming Unit Testing – Part 3 – Matthew Podwysocki builds on the previous two parts of this series with a look at pulling QuickCheck and HUnit (and FSCheck and xUnit.net) together
• Loops, Conversions and Lambdas – Patrick Steele explores how conversion of types has become easier with each framework release.
• How to use a 32 bit DLL in ASP.net page which is hosted on 64 bit IIS – ‘Irfanahm’ taks about the different ways in which you can use 32bit dlls in a 64 bit environment. I have suffered this pain far too many times, so its good to have a reference of the different techniques available
• Introducing the ASP.NET MVC (Part 1) – The Model-View-Controller Pattern – Nick Berardi starts sharing the latest chapter from his book on ASP.NET MVC with a view to getting feedback on it
• XSS Follow Up: Search Suck – Rob Conery follows up on his post about XSS and Spamming with a discussion of just how dangerous this stuff can be with a look at a vulnerability in his own site.
• Improve your code: Regex creation is expensive – Corneliu talks about how you can use the fact that the regex class is thread safe to dramatically improve the performance of your code by avoiding paying the regular expression creation tax more than once.
• My Quick Take On Oxite – The recent release of Oxcite, an ASP.NET MVC based CMS has sparked a number of reactions suggesting its not quite ready for use. This one is Chad Myers view, and there are others out there including this one from Karl Seguin, and LazyCoder collects a number of them together here

Community

• MIX09 – Save 40% (Hurry) – Derek @ Ardent Dev highlights a good promotional offer for anyone planning on attending MIX 09

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Quite a few security related posts this weekend, maybe spured on by the two software (pre)releases from Microsoft.

Software

• Download details: Anti-XSS Library V3.0 Beta – Another Security related release from Microsoft, The Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library is a library which encodes input based upon you giving it a white list of characters, and the library encodes all other characters not included in this list
• Download details: CAT.NET V1 CTP – Microsoft release Microsoft Code Analysis Tool .NET CTP, a tool which plugs into Visual Studio and scans your code (in binary form) to identify possible security vulnerabilities such has SQL Injection, Cross Site Scripting and XPath injection.

Information

• Introduction to NHibernate, Part 2 – Ian Cooper continues his series on getting started with NHibernate, and in this part looks at the details of mapping classes to your database (or vice versa)
• The Academic Background of the .NET Community Leaders – Keyvan Nayyeri has been investigating the academic background of a number of the big names in the .NET space – I find it quite interesting that so many of the did actually study Computer Science (or something related) as I based on my experience a lot of talented developers tend to have studied something else.
• The Importance Of Releasing Your Components Through Windsor – Davy Brion talks about a memory leak problem he encountered with transient components from the Windsor container.
• NotImplementedException vs. NotSupportedException – Jared Parsons talks about the difference between two core exception types.
• WCAG 2.0 is now FINAL!!! – The Public Sector Developer Weblog highlights the finalisation of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, offering further guidance for all developers and content creators with regards to accessibility.
• The JavaScript language limitations that every programmer should learn – Brian Reindel talks about some of the key limitations of Javacript that a developer from another platform may take for granted.
• Making frameworks container-aware – Jimmy Bogard talks about his frustration when he encounters frameworks that make it difficult to extend when you want to rely on Inversion of control / Dependency injection containers
• My current architecture – Craig Bowes shares the details of his default architecture and how he came to the decisions to use these certain products and practices.
• Array, Collection, IEnumerable<T> Usage Guidelines – David Kean continues his series of guidelines posts, based on the style of the book Framework Design Guidelines, Dave shares his own ideas on collections
• "Hello World" TDD Style – Sean Feldman walks through the creation of a simple calculator class using test driven principles.
• My Scaling Hero – Jeff Atwood pays tribute to Markus Frind who runs the very popular Dating website ‘Plenty of Fish’ on what by many standards if next to no hardware at all. I agree with Jeff – this does give us all hope that scalability is more than possible.
• The Real Reason to Use a Dependency Injection Container Like Windsor – Rob Reynolds shows why he likes IOC and DI with this illustration of how it allows you to easily swap components without changing code in your application.
• It’s alive! And it tells me what to do! – Louis DeJardin shows off some screenshots of intelisense support for the Spark view engine in Visual Studio.
• The Perfect Storm Botnet – Rob Conery talks at length about the dangers of not encoding user input when you display it on a page, and how this can turn into Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities and worse still a BotNet running on your users PC.
• Learning about StructureMap – Jan Van Ryswyck talks about 5 compelling features of the StructureMap IOC Container.
• WPF Designer Removed From SharpDevelop 3.0 – The Sharp Develop Team talks about the forthcoming System.Xaml parser and how this leads to the removal of their WPF Designer from SharpDevelop 3

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