The Morning Brew

Software

• YUI Doc: A New Tool for Generating JavaScript API Documentation – The Yahoo! User Interface team announce the release of their new Javascript API Documentation tool – think Sandcastle for Javascript.
• Oxite – Lab – MIX Online – The Channel 9 guys have created a CMS based on ASP.NET MVC which they are using to run MIX Online. Both source and binary distributions are available
• OpenRasta – Mike Hadlow highlights the release of Sebastien Lambla’s OpenRasta REST framework.

Information

• Advices on partitioning code through .NET assemblies – Patrick Smacchia looks at the reasons (both good and bad) for separating your code into separate assemblies, and how having lots of assemblies is not always the best strategy
• How To Guarantee That Your Software Will Suck – Justin Etheredge looks at 10 factors that will help to ensure that your software is rubbish. Lots of discussion going on in the comments too on this one.
• Adding Conditional Get Support to the WCF REST Starter kit – Pablo M. Cibraro looks at extending the WebCache capability of the WCF REST Starter Kit to support conditional get.
• HOWTO: IIS 6 Request Processing Basics, Part 2 – Web Site, Virtual Directory, and Web Application – David Wang continues a series from a long time ago, with a further look at request processing in IIS6 looking at the differences between Virtual Directories with and without application
• IIS Request Processing – Pankaj Tahiliani shares a nice diagram showing the process that IIS goes through to process an incoming request.
• Embedding Google Earth in a C# Application – Joseph Armbruster looks at integrating Google Earth into your windows forms applications.
• Is Linq to SQL Dead? Yes, but.… – Stephen Forte considers the demise of Linq to Sql and gives some advice to both parties about what to do now regarding migration and support, along with some suggestions for Microsoft for making the process better
• ASP.NET MVC Northwind Demo Using the Spark View Engine – Phil Haack highlights an alternative ASP.NET MVC View engine called Spark. Spark is also available on MonoRail, and contains support gor multiple content areas, along with IronRuby and IronPython support.

Community

• UK MSDN Roadshow dates for Feb 2009 – and after the Birmingham event join Guy Smith-Ferrier and myself for an evening on Virtualisation at NxtGenUG – The dates for the UK MSDN Roadshow have been announced, and this post contains the registration link, along with an after show event suggestion.

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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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Software

• Silverlight on a Desktop – Azret Botash talks about getting Silverlight applications running on the desktop (a little like Adobe Air allows), and shares a work in progress called Project Fiji to allow just that

Information

• The Problem With Logging – Jeff Atwood talks about the dangers of logging too much, and shows how logging caused some threading issues with StackOverflow
• Stuff I do like – Jeremy D. Miller has been accused of being too negative, so lists some things he does like, and it turns out to be quite a nice list to use as a basis of things to investigate if you’re not already familiar with them.
• Sharing User Controls Between IIS Applications – The Asp.Net QA Team talk about how you can share your UserControls between web applications
• Using System.Web.Abstractions in Your WebForms Apps – Justin Etheredge investigates the System.Web.Abstractions namespace, and looks at how it allows you to mock key parts of the framework for web applications allowing you to test your components more easily.
• Codeplex.com\dlr is now setup to receive regular source updates – Sesh Pillailokam shares the news that the CodePlex site for the Dynamic Language Runtime is now getting periodic automatic updates from the main Microsoft development source branch.
• AJAX Script Patterns: Service Agent – Simon Ince talks about and shows an implementation of the Service Gateway pattern for Ajax applications calling web services, and asks why so few people implement this in Ajax when it is a common practice in development generally.
• The need for speed – Wendy Friedlander talks about the need for quick unit tests in TDD, and how you can go about ensuring that things are running and building as quickly as possible.
• Have you ever wondered why CodePlex is so slow? – Dave Ward looks at some of the failings of ASP.NET Ajax and update panels for performance, illustrating with a specific example based on CodePlex, along with a look at alternative ways of implementing this functionality.

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