The Morning Brew

Software

• Minh T. Nguyen’s Mandelbrot Explorer 1.0 in Silverlight 2.0 with source code – I’m a sucker for a nice Mandelbrot Set, and Minh T. Nguyen has created a nice Silverlight application for exploring them, and provides details of how the application was created and full source too.

Information

• The Fat Controller – Ian Cooper explores a bad code smell in MVC projects, the Fat Controller Class (no, nothing to do with Thomas the Tank Engine), looking at how you can end up with Fat Controllers, the side effects and what you can do about them
• .NET Development on Linux – Eric Bergman-Terrell walks through the steps of getting up and running with developing .NET in Linux using a Virtual machine, and introduces some of the tools from the Mono project in this Dr Dobbs article.
• What make a good unit test? – Mark Needham explores what he considers makes a good unit test.
• The Private Life of a Public API – Jeff Moser talks about API design, best practices, and my favourite book (Framework Design Guidelines)
• Tip #32: Did you know… How to easily create your own project templates? – A nice tip about creating your own project templates in Visual Studio – had I know it was this easy I think I would already have made a bunch of my own
• The Weekly Source Code 28 – ASP.NET MVC Beta Obscurity – ModelState.IsValid is False because ModelBinder pulls values from RouteData – Scott Hanselman sees some weird behaviour in ASP.NET MVC due to the DefaultValueProvider, and goes exploring the source to see what is going on.
• Known Installation Issues With ASP.NET MVC – Phil Haack highlights two know installation issues with ASP.NET MVC and explains a work around in each case.
• F# + TestDriven.NET + xUnit.net = WIN – Matthew Podwysocki talks about some tools that he has been finding very useful when combined for developing F#
• Synchronization in WinForms with Lambdas – Patrick Steele shows a nice example of lambda expressions really improving the clarity of the code to deal with updating UI from different threads in WinForms applications.
• Isolation frameworks – lessons from the wild – Roy Osherove talks about some real world reactions to mocking / isolation frameworks based on his collection of students at a TDD master class. Some very good points raised here
• Fluent NHibernate’s AutoPersistenceModel: I Love it! – Chris van de Steeg talks about Fluent NHibernate’s AutoPersistenceModel which takes the pain out of object relational mapping using NHibernate by generating the mappings for you based on common conventions – looks really useful for quick projects.

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Software

• Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1 – Miguel de Icaza announces the release of the first beta of Moonlight, the Mono Projects answer to Silverlight, and also talks about the Media capabilities of Moonlight
• TestDriven.NET 2.18 + NUnit 2.5 Beta – Jamie Cansdale announces an update for TestDriven.NET which adds support for NUnit 2.5 Beta
• Reflector Addin: LanguageWriterHelper – Jason Haley shares a reflector add-in which renders out an objects structure to (very detailed) XML. As Jason says in his post this might not be particularly interesting to most I think I can see some value in this, not least as a way to learn about writing reflector add-ins.

Information

• ANTLR for C# Part 1: Installation – Mike Pagel starts a series on using ANTLR, a tool for generating lexers, parsers and abstract syntax trees from a grammar defined by you. This allows you to more easily implement your own languages, or parse and process existing languages. I started having a play with this stuff a while back, and this series may well encourage me to get back to it.
• Windows Vista Sp2 / Windows Server SP2 – As Microsoft step up the tempo on Vista SP2 / Windows Server SP2 with a Customer Preview Program, Neil Hutson gives some details of what is included in this update with some links to more information.
• Roadmap for WCSF – Blaine Wastell outlines what the plan for the future of the Web Client Software Factory is, with the next major release to be released in the Visual Studio 2010 timeframe,
• Do Not Litter Your Code With Null Checks – Davy Brion responds to one of the posts linked in yesterday’s edition of the Morning Brew about defensive programming and the throwing of exceptions
• Creating Temporary Passwords – Bring in da’ Func<T> – Tim Barcz gives a nice simple real world example of the .NET 3.5 feature Func<T> in use to generate passwords.
• Controlling HTML in ASP.NET WebForms – The Polymorphic Podcast has an interesting episode about more closely controlling your HTML output when working with WebForms, and to accompany the podcast posted this nice article.
• C# 3.0 + R# = Great Tests Readability – Sean Feldman goes to town with C# 3 features and Resharper features to make his test easier to read.
• Short n’ Sweet NHibernate Sample – Tobin Harris has one of the shortest NHibernate Examples I’ve seen, and a great way of introducing people to NHibernate without too much clutter and confusion.
• .NET Multicast Delegates – Cirilo Meggiolaro shows how you can combine delegates into multicast delegates and have a single event fire both events in sequence.
• Mapping LINQ to F# – jaredpar shows the equivalent operations in F# to those introduced for Enumerables in Linq.
• Catch the Security Flaw(s) #4 – Varun Sharma posts a nice concise illustration of a number of common security problems – try this one out on your colleagues to see if they get all 5.
• Dec 2nd Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET AJAX, ASP.NET MVC, Visual Studio, Silverlight/WPF – ScottGu puts together another of his all things Microsoft Web related link posts, containing a number of good resources.
• How Do You Deal With Common Infrastructure Code For Multiple Projects? – Davy Brion talks about project structures and where the infrastructure stuff best sits, canvassing the community for opinions leads to some good comments on this post.

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Software

• Spell checker update 2.2 – The Visual Web Developer Team Blog announce the release of Spell Checker 2.2, a Visual Studio Add-in for VS2008 SP1 which adds spell checking for HTML Comments, ASP.NET Comments, along with comments in your code behind.
• Create a Vista Gadget Using Visual Studio IDE (updated) – Alexey Prosyankin shares a Visual Studio Add-in and templates for creating Vista Gadgets more easily in Visual Studio. I’ve had a play with creating gadgets in the past, and this certainly looks a lot easier than the manual process.

Information

• Addicted To MEF – Part 2 – Justin Etheredge continues his series on the Microsoft Extensibility Framework with a look at the ability to point the framework at a folder and have it load in all exported items.
• Try/Catch Performance – Jeff Certain takes a look at the performance impact of using exceptions for defensive coding rather than implementing your checks using normal programming techniques
• Dealing With Rounding Errors in Numerical Unit Tests – Ade Miller looks at how xUnit allows you ro replace the equality comparison of Assert.Equals with your own method, and shows an implementation which allows for approximate numerical comparisons.
• 24 ways – 24Ways, the advent calendar for web devlopers, returns for its 4th year, with daily web development articles leading up to Christmas.
• Introduction to NHibernate, Part 1 – Ian Cooper starts an introductory series on NHibernate, in this first part he looks at the standard getting started topics, basic mapping, configuration and logging.
• First Look At NHibernate Profiler – Davy Brion takes a first look at Ayende’s NHibernate Profiler with a nice overview of the functionality and plenty of screenshots.
• T-SQL Anti-pattern of the day: comparing DATETIME field with date-only literal – arvindsh looks at one of the common problems of storing automaticly obtained dates from GetDate() when it comes to comparing them to plain dates, and shows a number of solutions to these problems.
• A quick look at MEF with F# – Luis Diego Fallas explores the Microsoft Extensibility Framework using F# as his programming language
• The UML Model Explorer – Skinner gives a screenshot based tour round the UML features of Visual Studio Team Systems 2010
• Upgrading from SQL 2000/2005 to 2008 – Chris Koenig highlights a 490 page white paper detailing all the best practices steps for upgrading from SQL Server 2000/2005 to SQL Server 2008
• Did you know… How to have user friendly URL using IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite module? – The Tips & Tricks for ASP.NET, IIS, and Visual Web Developer Blog walks us through using the IIS7 URL Rewrite module to create nicer URLs for your pages
• Who Called Me? – Guy Kolbis shows how you can access the stack trace and individual frames from code to get information about who called your method.

Humour

• mApple Genius: The Simpsons – Steve Clayton highlights a short video clip of the latest Simpsons episode parodying Apple.

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